Saddam Hussein shouts in defiance and is restrained
by a bailiff as the death penalty is handed down against him. Photograph: David Furst/AP

 

Being named after Saddam Hussein may have been a badge of honour for some Iraqis during his 30 years of rule but it later turned into a sentence of death for two of them, the war logs suggest.

In a previously unreported incident the logs recount that three corpses were found shot in the head near Baghdad five days after Saddam was executed by hanging on 30 December 2006. They carried notes saying the victims should have left Iraq. The dead were two brothers, Hussein Saddam Hussein and Mustafa Saddam Hussein, as well as their mother, Sadiya Juweid.

 

Their killings apart, the only violence that followed Saddam's execution targeted Shias. The Iraqi government that appointed the executioners who administered the death penalty was dominated by Shia politicians, and Shia guards were captured on a mobile phone camera during the hanging jeering at the dictator just before he died.

 

In apparent revenge a person drove a van with a hidden bomb into a crowd at a market in Kufa, a Shia city in south-eastern Iraq. The explosion killed 31 people and injured 44. The man suspected of driving the van to the site was a Sunni called Mustafa Mohamed Ali Samarrai. An intelligence report says he was set upon by a lynch mob. Iraqi police pulled him away but "he died in custody before arriving at the hospital".

 

The war logs show that US and British forces were on high alert after Saddam's hanging. They used drones to monitor protest demonstrations by Sunnis but almost all passed off peacefully and with only small numbers of people in attendance. In Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, a Hunter drone watched 100 people emerge from the Saddam mosque and march down the road. They dispersed quietly after a couple of hours.

 

In Jawanah village in Nineveh province between 60 and 70 Saddam mourners gathered, some armed. Iraqi troops arrived on the scene and reported shots. They returned fire, killing two men and wounding five others, the logs say.

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