Saddam village puts sons on a pedestal

‘‘They appeared as though they were alive,’’ said Ahmad Saab, a school administrator, describing a sort of miracle that he asserts had occurred with their remains. ‘‘Their smell was very nice, like perfume, even though it has been 10 days since they were kept.’’ ‘‘I opened the coffin of Mustafa. The smell of his body was like that of a rose,’’ agreed Salam Faris, a 41-year-old unemployed civil servant.

The US-led occupation authority agreed to relinquish bodies to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society for burial. The holding of the bodies for so long was seen by many people as a violation of Islamic customs — which call for a corpse to be buried as soon as possible. On Sunday, the cemetery in Al Auja was empty except for three men. A squad of US soldiers, armed with heavy machine guns, guarded the gate. The three men at the cemetery said that they were cousins of the deceased. One claimed that ‘‘thousands of people’’ would like to come and see the graves.

On Sunday, an Iraqi flag covered Mustafa’s grave, but those of Uday and Qusay were unmarked mounds of dirt. At the burial, all three were covered in flags. At a small farmhouse outside the cemetery’s fence, several men gathered in the afternoon and talked of Uday and Qusay. ‘‘Why did they kill them? It would have been very easy to capture them alive,’’ said Saab, the school administrator. ‘‘They deserved to have a trial. If they had done anything wrong, at least we would have known.’’

The consensus in Al Auja seemed to be that Uday and Qusay were innocent and were persecuted by US. Faris said the two gained stature because they died fighting US forces. ‘‘In other countries, rulers escape to another country,’’ Faris said. The sons have earned the title of martyrs no matter what they did while alive, Faris and Saab agreed. ‘‘Of course they are in paradise,’’ Faris said. (LAT-WP)