Some members of Tikrit’s Sunni population feel they still unjustly bear the legacy of dictator’s brutal reign
erched on a cliff above the Tigris River, Saddam Hussein’s half-destroyed palaces loom over his home town of Tikrit, the deserted grounds bearing the traces of invaders come and gone. American soldiers etched the date of their 2003 arrival into the sand-coloured walls. A decade later, Islamic State dug mass graves in the hilly soil and blew up part of the complex.
Meanwhile, Saddam’s tribe, the Albu Nasir, live on the margins of society. On a recent winter evening, some gathered on the outskirts of Tikrit, hesitantly sharing stories of what they see as collective punishment for their links with old regime and, more recently, their alleged support for IS and fiercely disputed role in a massacre of Shia cadets. They struggle to run in elections, obtain government positions and return to their lands.
The severely damaged tomb of the late Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the village of al-Awja, on the outskirts of Tikrit.After the 2003 US-led invasion, the new Shia-led government embarked on a de-Ba’athification process to cleanse Iraq’s institutions of regime loyalists. Saddam and some of his close lieutenants were tried and executed. Hundreds of thousands of government employees who were members of the Ba’ath party were dismissed or forced into early retirement.
Earlier this year, dozens of employees at Tikrit University were ordered to retire as part of the latest purge. “Everyone sees it as an injustice, but nobody can talk about it,” said one former university employee who was forced out in 2020 because he had served as a receptionist in one of Saddam’s feared security agencies. Some of his colleagues have reportedly managed to buy their jobs back.
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