Jihadist Reactions to the Execution of Saddam Hussein

by Daniel Kimmage
February 20th, 2007

The execution of Saddam Hussein, though badly botched as an impartial exercise of state power, could not have been more perfectly contrived to pose a thorny dilemma for jihadists. Before his fall, Saddam had been for them the very image of an apostate Arab tyrant, an unbelieving nationalist who cut down Islamists and ruled without regard for Qur'anic injunctions. Yet he died at the hands of the jihadists' greatest foes -- captured by "crusader" American soldiers and hanged by jeering "heretical" Shiites -- and, in shaky images caught by a mobile phone and broadcast around the world, he faced death with dignity and apparent piety, his steady-voiced recitation of the Muslim profession of faith cut short only when the trap door swung open and the noose snapped his neck.

Initial reactions on jihadist forums grappled with this dilemma. One polemic on December 30, the day of the execution, began, "Death is the true end of all creation, and the best death is preceded by the profession of faith, and the noblest death is at the hands of one's enemies, and God fated for both of these to be [Saddam's] fate, God willing..." A response countered, "This vile man Saddam is a Baathist who denies the Day of Resurrection. He will never be a Muslim." Another participant chimed in: "Shame on anyone who shared the joy of the rejectionists [a term of abuse for Shiites popular among jihadists], Christians, and Jews at Saddam's execution. Yes, we differ with Saddam and the Arab rulers, who are no less terrible than he was. But he was better than they in his war against the rejectionists." Yet another participant contended that the “holy warrior imam Usama Bin Laden has said that [Saddam] abandoned Islam. The leaders of the jihad and Islamic movements and organizations in Iraq are unanimous on the unbelief of Saddam Hussein".

As the debate progressed, three more or less clearly defined positions emerged: Saddam as repentant Muslim, steadfast symbol of resistance, and victim of Shifite villainy; Saddam as an apostate tyrant to the end; and Saddam -- repentant or defiant, hero or scoundrel -- as irrelevant to the current struggle.

No one within the jihadist community has ever denied that Saddam was an apostate tyrant during his years in power. Yet the circumstances of his death made it relatively simple to argue that he had returned to the faith at the bitter end. Here, a recorded utterance of the Prophet drew frequent citation. As one forum participant put it on December 31, "May God have mercy on Saddam. I was moved to pray for mercy on him after the two professions of faith were his last words. The Prophet said, 'Whoever utters 'There is no God but Allah' as his last words shall enter paradise.'"

More thoughtful reactions wrestled with the implicit contradiction between Saddam's life as an enemy of Islam and the possibility of his death as a Muslim hero, focusing on his steadfastness -- a central concept in the discourse of Arab resistance -- as proof of his heroism. A frequent forum contributor posted images from the execution with the comment, "History has recorded that Saddam was a hero." The writer went on to contrast Saddam's composure with the imagined comport of other Arab rulers on the gallows: "Forgive me. I know you'll say, 'Why ... are you calling for God to have mercy on a Baathist infidel?' No. I'm not responding either to emotion or to compassion. But by God I felt a bit of pride at Saddam's steadfastness in the final moment, when he chose to face death without a blindfold, holding steady and calm. I imagined ... one of the princes of the House of Saud ... or the House of Sabah, or [Yemeni President] Ali Abdallah Salih in Saddam's place on the gallows... their conduct would surely be different."

But such reflection was rare, as anti-Shiite fulmination predominated in the "Saddam as hero" camp, with contributors almost invariably referring to Shiites as "rawafidh," or "rejectionists," for their supposed rejection of the precepts of Islam, and "Safavids," for their presumed allegiance to Iran's neo-imperial ambitions. A response to the previously cited post was typical: "All of this goes to show the difference between us and those filthy, polytheist, Savafid, rejectionist Shiites, may God curse them." A participant who posted audio of the execution, replete with catcalls from Shiite partisans, wrote, "Click here to listen to the Safavid dogs barking the names of Al-Hakim and Al-Sadr during the hanging."

A minority flatly rejected Saddam's profession of the faith and pretensions to heroism. Shaykh Abd al-Rahman al-Barrak, a Saudi cleric who recently denounced Shiites as "infidels," issued a statement posted to one forum under the heading, "I don't feel bad for Saddam, he got what he had coming." Al-Barrak argued, "As for his apparent faith and his utterance of the two professions of faith, it's not enough. Many atheists who are considered Muslims utter the professions of faith..."

A January 2 post entitled "Saddam Hussein is not a hero" expressed relief that Saddam died with the profession of faith, and not nationalist slogans, on his lips, but stressed the overwhelming evils of his rule. The author concluded, "Saddam Hussein is not a hero and no one should raise him up as a hero because the man lived his life as an oppressive ruler and a murderous tyrant who fought against God and Islam and was one of the greatest proponents of 'Arab nationalism' and the 'Baath Party.' Only God knows how many Muslims and others he killed, and his prisons were full of the oppressed..."

An impassioned, self-critical post on January 6 mocked the tendency to lionize Saddam as symptomatic of a fickle community ruled by its emotions. The author wrote, "As for those who have been driven by emotional hatred of the infidels to make [Saddam Hussein] a martyr on a par with those who died in the path of God ... the problem is that we are riffraff who follow any braying ass. He invaded Kuwait and they said he was an infidel. His masters imprisoned him and they stopped. The rejectionists killed him and he became a martyr."

A number of responses looked beyond the vagaries of Saddam's faith, called for an end to divisive debate, and examined the political implications of Saddam's legacy. Abu Basir al-Tartusi, a Syrian salafist based in London, urged "Muslim young people" to avoid arguments about Saddam. Abu Basir had issued a ruling on Saddam's faith in November 2006 that found insufficient evidence to pronounce the former Iraqi president an apostate. In an early January statement posted to jihadist forums, Abu Basir noted that God made Saddam's last words the profession of the faith and that the onetime dictator "was hanged at the hands of aggressive crusader invaders and traitorous rejectionist Shiite collaborators." Saddam ended his life a Muslim, Abu Basir concluded, and the issue of his faith should not be the cause of discord among the believers.

In a similar vein, a short essay published by the Global Islamic Media Front, a frequent mouthpiece for Al-Qaeda statements, and signed by Bakr Bin Salim Bakir al-Kinani dismissed the issue of Saddam's faith or unbelief as petty compared to the travails of the Muslim community in Somalia and elsewhere. The author reached a conciliatory, if convoluted, conclusion: "The people who refrain from pronouncing him an apostate because of the possibility that he may have repented cannot demand of those who pronounced him an apostate that they call him a Muslim just because there is a possibility that he repented."

Those who delved into Saddam's legacy found little to celebrate. Setting the stage for this approach, one post argued, "[An earlier contributor] was right when he noted that we must look not at individuals, but rather at their ideas and intellectual schools. We need not make [Saddam Hussein] a symbol, for a symbol means a leader whose example and intellectual program we follow."

In this spirit, a seven-page booklet by jihadist webmaster Abu al-Harith al-Mihdar, published independently by Midad al-Suyuf and posted to forums, weighed Saddam's record and found it wanting. Al-Mihdar argued that when Saddam confronted the West, he "could easily have opened up a new Afghanistan on his territory ... and the entire Islamic world would have supported him." But Saddam failed to do this. The author continued, "This, I think, is the mistake that doomed Saddam Hussein. America accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. If, at the time, he had appeared on television and renounced his belief in the Baath Party and announced his support for Al-Qaeda, he would easily have reached the heart of every sincere Muslim. But until the moment he was captured in 2003, he did not take a single step in the direction of real Islamic jihad."

Al-Mihdar concluded that Saddam "was completely hoodwinked by the Americans and did not return to his faith until after he fell into their hands and saw their betrayal." Saddam's rejection of a 2003 proposal by then-United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Zayed Ben Sultan Al Nahayan that the Iraqi president step down showed that Saddam was "more courageous" than "the Arab traitors," but Saddam's "courage was mixed with political naiveté, which he did not realize until it was too late."

The debate over Saddam's execution points to the widening changes the conflict in Iraq has wrought within the jihadist movement. If at first, the "jihad" against the Americans in Iraq served as an unambiguous rallying cry, the increasingly sectarian nature of the strife in Iraq, exemplified by the bitter anti-Shiite polemics of the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has muddied the waters, obscuring the jihadists' erstwhile fixation on the Western "crusaders" with the new threat of an ascendant Iran.

A January 14 statement by the Kuwaiti scholar and jihadi theorist Hamid Bin Abdallah al-Ali, analyzed by Reuven Paz in PRISM Occasional Papers Vol.5 No.1 (www.e-prism.org), reflects the rising tide of anti-Shiite sentiment. Billed as "The Covenant of the Supreme Council of Jihad Groups," Al-Ali's statement portrays the Muslim community-- ummah -- as confronting two "bitter foes." The first of them is "the Safavid enemy," which seeks to "destroy the civilization of Islam and slaughter Muslims under false religious slogans." Second to this Shiite menace is the familiar alliance of Jews and crusaders.

Paz interprets Al-Ali's "covenant" as "an attempt to consolidate a united strategy for global Jihad in the near future," although he allows that it is unclear whether or not Al-Ali coordinated his statement with leading lights in Al-Qaeda. The divided jihadist reactions to the execution of Saddam Hussein suggest, however, that it may not be easy for them to implement a new strategy founded on a two-front assault against both Shiites and the more traditional Jewish-crusader enemy.

While forum reactions to the execution abounded in vitriolic denunciations of Shiites, a few posts pointed to the dangers of such an approach. Against a backdrop of conspiracy theories linking Iran and America, a January 2 contribution argued that the execution Saddam Hussein, timed to coincide with a Sunni Muslim holy day and carried out amid Shiite taunts, stemmed from an American need "to put a crack in the popularity of Iranian-backed Hizbullah." The author continued, "the execution of Saddam Hussein, and its timing, was the most convenient way of doing this, since it was well-known that those who carried out the execution of Saddam Hussein were Iraqi supporters of Iran, which backs Hizbullah in Lebanon!"

The writer concluded, "And here it seemed that Iran and its supporters, including Hizbullah in Lebanon, stood arm in arm with the Zionists in their stance on the execution of Saddam. This is the cause of the broad-based Arab and Islamic anger at Iran and its followers. This will undoubtedly come as a blow to the popularity of Iranian-backed Hizbullah in Lebanon." A response to this post drew the missing connection: "The holy warriors' current and future distraction with the rejectionists is the best way for the infidel louts to stop both the Safavid and the jihadist tides, giving them more time to lick their bleeding wounds in Iraq."

In this context, the latest statement by Al-Qaeda ideologist Ayman al-Zawahiri was noteworthy for its lack of anti-Shiite rhetoric. Entitled "The Correct Equation," the appeal, which was posted in text form to a number of jihadist forums in January, drew note in mainstream media for its mocking treatment of the planned plus-up of American troops in Iraq. Less prominent, but perhaps equally important, is Al-Zawahiri's plea for Muslim unity in the face of "crusader" aggression and divisive nationalism. He states, "Nationalist appeals have divided the Muslim community into Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Turks, Afghans, and others... Instead of uniting to fend off the imperialist campaign as it was united in the face of the crusader and Tatar campaigns, the community has split and fallen into internal strife."

More telling even than his neutral reference to "Persians," Al-Zawahiri appears to extend an implicit olive branch to Shiites in a passage comparing Arab supporters of UN resolution 1701, which brought international peacekeepers to Lebanon, to heroes from the glory days of Islam. He states, "What a difference there is between the position of those who accepted resolution 1701 and the position of Imam al-Husayn Bin Ali, who refused to surrender, saying, 'I will not extend my hand like one who has been humiliated, nor will I acceded like a slave.'"

The reference is to Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Killed at Karbala in 680 AD in the course of a power struggle over the leadership of the Muslim community, Husain is revered by Shiites as a martyr. Al-Zawahiri's mention of him in this context, taken in conjunction with al-Zawahiri’s pointedly ambiguous statement during the conflict between Hizbullah and Israel in 2006 (see Al-Qaeda Addresses The Jihad-Versus-Resistance Conflict), suggests that at least part of the Al-Qaeda leadership has significant reservations about making anti-Shiite fulmination a core element of the organization's program. The divided reactions of the virtual rank and file to the execution of Saddam Hussein only underscore the difficulties the jihadist movement is experiencing, and will likely continue to experience, as it strives to adapt its message to changing geopolitical circumstances and direct its seething hostility at a growing list of enemies.

Daniel Kimmage is a regional analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The views expressed here are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer.

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Copyright 2005 Center on Islam, Democracy and the Future of the Muslim World