In Auja, birthplace of the toppled leader, a distant cousin of Hussein declared: "This is not right!" She was among groups of women who gathered in darkened houses to watch the proceedings and pray for Hussein. She broke into tears. "What kind of conspiracy plotted to put this knight in a cage like this?"
In Auja and Tikrit, the city claimed by Hussein as his ancestral base, demonstrators took to the streets with framed portraits, tapestries and anything else that bore a picture of Hussein, revealing images often secreted away for fear of confiscation by Iraqi or U.S. troops.
Waving Hussein's photos, the demonstrators chanted amid the honking horns of cars that weaved through the crowd. Men and boys joined by high school girls released from class called out, "Saddam, your name struck America."
At the barbershop in Adhamiya, the loyalist Hussein neighborhood where he made one of his last public appearances in early April 2003 as U.S. troops closed in on Baghdad, customer Ahmed Najim covered his eyes when the TV broadcast revealed that the head judge to try Hussein was Kurdish.
"As if the Arabs are a minority now, and the Kurds are the majority," Najim muttered.
The Sunnis in the barbershop denounced the court as American-made. They rejected the charges of state-run mass killings of opponents in the 1980s. "There were enemies that should be fought," Yousif said, referring to whole families and villages of Kurds and Shiites who were wiped out.
"The women and children who were killed were wives and children of these enemies. When the resistance fought in Fallujah, didn't the Americans destroy the whole the city?"
Special correspondents Naseer Nouri in Dujail and Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and Auja contributed to this report.
Saddam Trial Begins
