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Saddam's Sons Buried; U.S. Soldier Killed
By JAMIE TARABAY, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - Leaders of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s tribe buried the ousted dictator's elder sons, Odai and Qusai, and a grandson Saturday, their bodies wrapped in Iraqi flags in a sign the family considered them to be martyrs.
Also Saturday, the military said a U.S. soldier was killed and three were
wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on their convoy east of Baghdad on
Friday.
The soldier was the 52nd to die in combat in Iraq (news
- web
sites) since President Bush (news
- web
sites) declared major fighting over on May 1. So far, 167 soldiers have died
in the Iraq War, 20 more than during the 1991 Gulf War (news
- web
sites).
The Arab satellite television broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported that another
U.S. soldier also died Saturday morning in an attack north of the capital, but
the military had no details on the incident.
Odai and Qusai — two of the most powerful and feared men in Saddam's regime,
after their father — were buried in the stony soil of a family cemetery in their
hometown of Tikrit, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and the U.S. military said.
Buried with them was 14-year-old Mustafa Hussein, Qusai's son, who also was
believed killed in a fierce gunbattle with U.S. troops July 22 in Mosul, the
northernmost Iraqi big city.
A military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the ceremony
was quiet and uneventful.
There were no outbursts of violence reported in the city. The U.S. military
had feared the gathering for the burial could get out of hand, with a huge
backlash against the big U.S. troop presence in and around the city.
Iraqi Red Crescent Society president Jamal al-Karboli said his organization
had taken the bodies of Odai and Qusai from the U.S. military in Tikrit. The
military said it had nothing to do with the transfer of the bodies to Tikrit.
Al-Karboli said Saddam relatives approached the Red Crescent four days ago,
asking it to act as an intermediary in recovering the bodies.
The bodies of the two men had been held in refrigeration at the U.S. base at
Baghdad International Airport where they were prepared for burial according to
Western — not Muslim — customs.
The autopsies triggered a controversy, as Muslim tradition calls for bodies
not to be embalmed or in any way retouched and for them to be buried before
sundown on the day of death.
U.S. military morticians had reconstructed the brothers' faces to look as
lifelike as possible, and allowed Western journalists to videotape and
photograph them, after Iraqi civilians were skeptical that Odai and Qusai were
really dead.
Images of the autopsied bodies were flashed across the Arab world by
satellite broadcasters, dispelling doubts raised by still photographs of the
brothers released shortly after their deaths in which their faces were obscured
by heavy beards, blood and gashes.
The Tigris River city of Tikrit remains one of the least pacified areas in
the country. It sits squarely in the so-called "Sunni Triangle" north and west
of Baghdad, where remnants of Saddam loyalists have conducted a guerrilla war
against American occupation forces.
The U.S. military also announced Saturday that U.S. soldiers firing in
self-defense had killed a woman Friday who was standing near where attackers
dropped an explosive from an overpass onto a U.S. convoy
below. The
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