Saddam’s Sons Buried; U.S. Soldier Killed

The sons of Saddam Hussein, Odai and Qusai, were buried in the family cemetery in their hometown of Tikrit Saturday morning, the Iraqi Red Crescent Society and the U.S. military said.

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 since President Bush 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.

Buried with Odai and Qusai 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 funeral ceremony at the family cemetery 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.

The Arab satellite television broadcaster Al-Jazeera reported that one U.S. soldier also died Saturday morning in an attack north of the capital, but the military said it had no details on the incident.

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 were being held in refrigeration at the U.S. base at Baghdad International Airport where they were prepared for burial according to western – not Muslim – custom by military morticians.

The handling of the bodies, including autopsies conducted by the military, had set up a controversy throughout Iraq. 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.

The brothers faces were heavily restored by the U.S. military morticians and western reporters were allowed to view them and take still pictures and videotape. Those images were flashed across the Arab world by satellite broadcasters. The U.S. military obviously was trying to convince skeptical Iraqis the men were dead. Still pictures of the brothers released shortly after their deaths had raised doubts that Odai and Qusai were the men in the pictures.

The Tigris River city of Tikrit remains one of the least pacified areas in the country, sitting 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 Friday, had killed a woman who was standing near where attackers dropped an explosive from an overpass onto the U.S. convoy below.