AUJA, Iraq : Iraqi People remeber the peace of Sadam Hussain Era when they say there were peace and their children have better education and they walked fearless in the streets. Now a day they start to visit the Mausoleum of Saddam Hussein, who lies in the middle of a marble octagon, under a giant twinkling chandelier and purple, orange and blue blinking lights. His grave is covered with Iraqi flags, candies thrown by children and bundles of plastic flowers.
It has been four years since the former Iraqi leader was executed, and over that period it has been rare to see any more than a trickle of Iraqis show up to pay tribute in the village where he was born, just outside Tikrit.
“He was the lion of the Middle East; he was stronger than all of the other Arab leaders. Look at them, they are falling now like flies,” said Abu Hanza al-Khazraji, a Shiite who this week spent a morning driving to Hussein’s grave with a carload of elders from the village of Dujail.
“Maybe the only one like him was [Libyan leader Moammar] Gaddafi, and now Americans are targeting him,” said the man’s brother, Abu Ali al-Khazraji.
“Everything was better,” one Sunni said.
“He was a dictator, but he was one dictator; now we have many,” said another.
The spectacle is clearly the kind of thing the U.S. government sought to avoid when it chose to bury Osama bin Laden at sea, rather than in a grave that might attract the faithful.
In what was once a community center, the visitors shuffle past dozens of photos of Hussein, many of him posing with rifles or side by side with his sons, who were killed by U.S. strikes and whose bodies are buried nearby.
