‘President Bush sends his regards’

SADDAM Hussein, the longtime strongman of Iraq, was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha in late December 2006 at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base in Kadhimiya, a neighbourhood of Baghdad.

His brutal regime had assured him power from 1979.

But his world crashed when, in a livid post-9/11 atmosphere, the US led the invasion of Iraqi in late March 2003. Three weeks later, the Iraqi government and military collapsed. However, it was months before Saddam himself was tracked down.

The following report gives a graphic account of the event.

December 16, 2003 Saddam just missed death

Saddam Hussein narrowly missed being blown up by a US grenade before he peered out from his dirt hole hideout and announced in English: “I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate,” US army officers said in Ad Dawr, Iraq, yesterday.

“God Bless our Home,” reads a poster hung in a tiny yard outside the adjacent squalid ramshackle mud hut in which the deposed tyrant apparently lived his last days of freedom.

It was a “rat hole” Saddam apparently left in the nick of time, raising his arms out to surrender just as US soldiers were considering hurling hand grenades into it, officers said.

“He was wise not to wait too long,” said Colonel James Hickey, head of the 4th Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade.

“We were about to clear that ugf (underground facility) in a military sort of way,” he said, adding that normally, “things like that are cleared with hand grenades, small arms, things like that. We were sent here to kill or capture.”

But, “two hands appeared and the individual clearly wanted to surrender. That individual was removed from the hole”.

At that moment Saddam ended eight months on the run from US troops and a tramp’s life amid garbage and rotting food strewn about his ramshackle hut, in a jumble of old clothes.

Christian images of the Last Supper and the Virgin Mary were on the walls.

Inside, beyond the makeshift kitchen in a tiny bedroom, hung a 2003 calendar showing