Saddam Trial Resumes Amid Sectarian Violence

By Aseel Kami and Waleed Ibrahim

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – A bomb badly damaged the tomb of Saddam Hussein’s father at dawn on Tuesday, hours before the ousted leader was due back in court for the first time since a week of sectarian violence pitched Iraq toward civil war.

A Sunni mosque in Baghdad was also damaged by a bomb, police said, and police discovered nine bodies near the religiously mixed city of Baquba, scene of several sectarian attacks since a suspected al Qaeda bomb destroyed a Shi’ite shrine on Wednesday.

Activity on Baghdad’s streets was fairly normal on the second day since the lifting of a three-day curfew imposed to try to stem violence that has killed more than 200 people; a Saddam-era, Soviet-built Iraqi tank guarded a Sunni mosque in west Baghdad and Iraqi and U.S. military units were on patrol.

The dome of the shrine Saddam had erected over his father’s originally modest grave in his Sunni home town of Tikrit was damaged, local residents said, and windows and doors blown out. Police and local government officials said explosives planted at the tomb in the cemetery went off around 6 a.m. (0300 GMT).

The former president, who has ended a hunger strike staged in protest at trial conditions, is due in court after a two-week adjournment; given to making speeches from the dock, he could well expound on the sectarian bloodshed that has swept Iraq since the destruction of the Shi’ites’ Golden Mosque in Samarra.

Saddam has justified some of the oppressive policies of his Sunni-dominated rule over three decades as necessary to holding Iraq together amid tensions between the Sunnis and majority Shi’ite Arabs as well as the ethnic Kurds in the north.

He and seven others are being tried for crimes against humanity in the killings of 148 Shi’ite villagers in 1982; his defense team, two of whom were killed after the trial began in October, accuse the Shi’ite- and Kurdish-led government of running a political show trial supported by the United States.

U.S. SOLDIER

A U.S. soldier shot dead west of Baghdad was among more than 20 people killed on Monday.

The acting director of Baghdad morgue said his unit alone had received 240 bodies since Wednesday, nearly all victims of violence; Abdelrazzak al-Obeidi’s data, including a figure of 10,080 bodies in Baghdad in 2005, indicated violent deaths in the city were 70 percent above average for six days.

Iraqi and U.S. officials disputed police tallies of more than 200 killed in five days and said on Saturday only 119 had died across Iraq by then. Morgue officials dismissed a report that more than 1,000 were killed.

U.S. ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, closely engaged in efforts to forge a unity government, said on Monday Iraqis "came to the brink of civil war" after Wednesday’s suspected al Qaeda bombing of a Shi’ite shrine but said: "Things are getting better."

The Sunni minority’s main political bloc, however, said it was not ready to end the boycott of coalition talks which it announced in protest at reprisals against Sunni mosques.

Still fearful of reprisals, some families on both sides of Baghdad’s religious divide abandoned homes where they felt threatened by neighbors — or threw barricades up in streets.

But national leaders and many ordinary Iraqis insisted they believed in each other’s goodwill; state television broadcast images of Shi’ites and Sunnis praying together in Baghdad.

Overnight curfews remain in force across Iraq.

CIVIL WAR

Washington hopes for stability to let it start bringing home 136,000 U.S. troops now caught in the middle and trying to keep order. It has been pressing Shi’ite leaders to accept minority Sunnis in a national unity government since the Sunnis took part in U.S.-backed elections in December for the first time.

Leaders have spoken more clearly than ever of the risk of civil war, which would pose the gravest threat to Iraq’s survival as a unitary state since the U.S. invasion of 2003 and provoke new tensions across the entire Middle East.

The sectarian crisis may be followed by dramatic court room scenes when Saddam returns to his trial.

"I hate to see any Iraqi shed a single drop of blood," the former leader was quoted as saying by a lawyer who visited him to prepare his defense. Saddam says oppressive policies by his Sunni-dominated regime for three decades prevented civil war.

The 68-year-old former president ended an 11-day hunger strike for "health reasons," lawyers said, and his defense team also planned to end a boycott and appear in court on Tuesday.

The hunger strike and lawyers’ walkout were in protest at proceedings, which have also been marred by the resignation of the chief judge and the killing of two defense attorneys.

The first chief judge quit alleging government interference and the defense has said the new judge, like his predecessor a Kurd, is biased; Raouf Adbel Rahman cracked down on speeches by the defendants, barring some of them court on occasion.

A member of the defense team, Saleh al-Armouty, told Arabiya television from Jordan that Saddam’s lawyers were still demanding the judge’s removal: "This court is illegitimate … We’ve made a request to remove the judge and the court is obliged to drop this case until our request is looked into."

"How can we take part if we think that the judge is biased?"

(Additional reporting by Lutfi Abu Oun, Michael Georgy, Alastair Macdonald and Nick Olivari in Baghdad, Ghazan al-Jibouri in Tikrit and Faris al-Mehdawi in Baquba)