IRAQ

information clearinghouse: From joy to despair: Iraqis pay for Saddam's capture by Robert Fisk

27 December 2003: (The Independent) Ali Salman Ali was the first victim of Saddam's capture, but he died on Christmas Day. As his father Salman Ghazi, 71, tells it, Ali must have been among the first of Iraq's Shia Muslims to scream his delight in the street after the former dictator emerged from his hole in the ground.

"He shouted that the Americans had come to save us and liberated us from that terrible regime," Mr Ghazi said yesterday, his sun-blasted, lined face and dark eyes staring at my notebook.

Behind me, the 12 cousins of Ali Salman Ali were heaving his cheap wooden coffin from the Baghdad mortuary on to the back of a rusting white pick-up with a cracked windscreen and a toy rabbit swinging from a chain over the mirror.

The Baghdad morgue is a grim enough place at any hour, let alone on a grey, greasy, wet Boxing Day and - though Christmas would have had no place in the family's observances - there was a kind of weariness among the men in their damp tribal robes with frayed golden fringes standing in the mud yesterday.

It had taken Ali Salman Ali two weeks to die.