Deaths of Hussein’s Sons Elicit Skepticism

The shopkeeper leaned over the counter, almost chortling with excitement Wednesday as he talked about the killings of Saddam Hussein’s two sons by American soldiers. Then he paused, a look of doubt passing over his face.

“I would like to make sure 100% that they are dead,” said Majid Rasheed, 40, the owner of a small shoe store in Baghdad’s affluent Mansour neighborhood. His shop is just a few feet from the spot where a failed 1996 assassination attempt had left the former Iraqi leader’s oldest son, Uday, dependent on a cane.

“I would like to see the bodies, even if they are dismembered into 100 pieces,” Rasheed said.

He stopped again. That was not quite it.

“I know I am contradicting myself because I just said I wanted to see their bodies, but really I would have preferred if they had been arrested and tried in court,” he said. “There are so many things hidden that the Iraqi people would like to know. So much knowledge of what happened here has vanished with their death.”

Rasheed’s conflicted feelings were repeated in a number of interviews with Iraqis on Wednesday as they tried to digest the news that the Americans had killed Hussein’s infamous sons, and as they raised questions about why the pair had been killed rather than captured.

Uday Hussein, 39, and his 37-year-old brother Qusai occupy a place almost as large and nightmarish in the minds of most Iraqis as does their father. Almost everyone interviewed expressed deep regret that the two will never be called to account publicly for their crimes and own up to what they did.

The Iraqis, regardless of their views on Saddam Hussein’s rule, almost unanimously expressed a desire for a court proceeding to help them learn the truth about the regime they had lived under.

“If they could have been tried in court, it would have offered people evidence of the crimes they had committed. People would finally know,” said Fazah Ghazi, 42, who was shopping for blouses in a Mansour boutique with three friends. “Without knowing these things for certain, people are doubtful: Did they do this? Did they do that?”

One friend nodded in concurrence, but the other two said they were not yet convinced that the people killed were Uday and Qusai Hussein.

Most Iraqis had not yet heard the lengthy briefing that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander of ground forces in Iraq, gave to the Baghdad media on Wednesday afternoon in which he detailed the methods used to identify the bodies.

In addition to dental records and X-rays of Uday Hussein’s legs, which had permanent injuries from the 1996 assassination attempt, U.S. forces brought in four “senior former regime members to do a visual identification of the bodies,” Sanchez said.

“Four individuals independently verified that we had both of Saddam Hussein’s sons,” he said. “Autopsies will follow, but we have no doubt that we have the bodies of Uday and Qusai.”

In the light of skepticism among Iraqis, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told reporters Wednesday during a visit to Capitol Hill that the U.S. would release photographs of the corpses, which would contradict a long-held practice of the U.S. military to not show photos of captive or dead enemies.

In a statement, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said: “We are going to make sure the Iraqi people believe this at the end of the day, and there are a lot of ways to do that.”

Even if Iraqis here become convinced that the Hussein brothers are dead, that could only heighten their sense of having been cheated of the chance to bring the two to justice.

Rasheed, the shopkeeper, was skeptical that the Americans had to go in with guns blazing.

“How can it be that the Americans, who have so much force at their disposal -- who have so many different kinds of arms, who have stun guns, who entered Baghdad so quickly -- how can it be that it is impossible for them to take just four people alive?” he asked. “I don’t understand it.”

A well-known local radio journalist had similar sentiments in an evening broadcast.

“Surely it was possible for a very sophisticated army like the U.S. military to use any kind of weapons, such as tear gas, to catch them,” said the journalist, who goes by the name Al Mukh- tar.

Sanchez defended the military’s decision to fire rockets into the house where the two sons were staying and pepper it with machine-gun fire. “We did make an attempt with the interpreter and with bullhorns to try to attempt to get a surrender,” he said. “And what we got back was return fire.”

However, Sanchez avoided directly answering the question of why the military decided against surrounding the house and waiting out those inside.

“The commanders on the ground made the decisions to go ahead and execute and accomplish their mission of finding, fixing, killing or capturing” top officials of the former regime, he said.

Whatever the military reasons, they will be of little comfort to Iraqis who believe that the U.S. sacrificed critical intelligence information as well as the visceral satisfaction of seeing an enemy alive but in a place where he can no longer do any damage.

“We had hoped that Uday when he was captured would reveal many things -- there are so many fathers of girls he raped,” said a rug seller who gave his name as Abu Ali, 53. “To hear about the past is painful, but still we have to hear it.”

There are many questions about some of the more gruesome chapters in the former regime’s history that now may never be answered, said Rasheed, who is an ethnic Kurd.

“If they had been detained we would have been able to ask them about the mass graves, about the wealth they have taken from Iraq, about the 182,000 Kurds that were murdered,” he said.

“Those two created so much violence that even though they are not among us now, we are not feeling comfortable,” he said of the Hussein brothers. “You feel as if they are still alive -- you feel as if there is a devil in the shape of a man beside you.”

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Times staff writers David Zucchino in Baghdad and Esther Schrader and Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.