Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Since then, the nightmare has returned to Dujail. Ahmed believes that Saddam's throat-slitting gesture, made while television cameras were rolling, was a message to loyalists to kill Ahmed's family. Two of his cousins were kidnapped in July and haven't been heard from since. On Aug. 6, his brother Ali Hassan Mohammed al-Dujaili, another witness, was attacked in the middle of Dujail. Ahmed's nephew Husam was killed while protecting Ali. When Ahmed's younger brother Jaafer came to collect Husam's body, a sniper lying in wait put several bullets in Jaafer's legs. Jaafer...
...five-judge panel will deliver a verdict on whether Saddam and his regime carried out the original 148 killings in Dujail. If convicted, he will face the death penalty. That trial, as well as a second one focused on the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in 1988, has been taking place inside the heavily secured Green Zone, where a succession of judges have given the former dictator the kind of hearing he never afforded his victims. But for many others associated with the trials, there has been no refuge from assassins who take justice--and revenge--into their own hands...
Nowhere has the trial brought more misery than in Dujail, a town of 84,000, most of them Shi'ites, in the middle of the Sunni triangle. Since the start of Saddam's trial, Dujail has been infiltrated by ex-Baathist hit squads. Residents believe they have been ordered by Saddam's former henchmen to take out the families of witnesses. A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a mere 45-minute drive north of Dujail, have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the Green Zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist...
...killings in Dujail speak to a larger battle being waged in the Iraqi psyche. In Saddam's police state, there were navigable boundaries that made it possible to live. True, the executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about...
...indicative of the scale of Saddam's brutality that there are some in Dujail who believe the current bloodshed is preferable to what preceded it. "Of course, now it is much better," says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail. "Saddam's terrorism would go on forever if he were still in power." Ali's brother Ahmed, witness No. 1 in the Saddam trial, doesn't know when he will leave the Green Zone or what awaits him if he does. But after spending his high school years in prison and losing most of his brothers, he says he is willing...