SADDAM HUSSEIN met his death on the scaffold in Baghdad yesterday with fortitude and calm. It was an extraordinary, melodramatic end to a life of confrontation and defiance — a final performance to launch himself as a martyr.

Having reported on Saddam for more than 25 years, I last saw him on the day he was sentenced to death. He had been expecting it, of course, and he played the scene with great toughness and spirit, condemning the American invasion and challenging the Iraqi government and the judges.

At the end, as he was taken out of the courtroom, he passed within a couple of feet of me. I could see a little smile of triumph on his lips. He must have known then that he had begun to create the legend of Saddam the martyr.

His last moments, face to face with death, were part of that same strategy. He knew Iraqis very well, and he knew what they liked in their leaders. The Saddam legend is only just beginning.

For now, though, the Iraqi government with its strong Shi’ ite majority has done itself a lot of good with its own supporters. After months of being accused of ineffectiveness, it has acted swiftly and with courage in executing Saddam.

Shi’ites in Baghdad described how they stayed up all night waiting for the news, then went out and fired their guns in the air for joy. But that does not help in the wider Islamic world, where Saddam’s death is already being seen as Shi’ite or Kurdish justice — not as national justice.

After the execution I went to see Munir Haddad, the Kurdish appeal court judge who had been part of the panel that upheld the verdict against Saddam. Haddad then had the task of reading out the death sentence to Saddam in the last minutes before watching him hang.

Haddad had interrogated Saddam immediately after his capture, when he was still disoriented and deeply depressed. Now, he said, he expected Saddam to break down and perhaps plead for mercy when facing death. But nothing of the sort happened.

Instead, when one of the executioners shouted out “Long live Moqtada al-Sadr” — referring to the fiery young Shi’ite cleric who controls large parts of southern Iraq — Saddam replied with a contemptuous snort. As he was taken to the execution chamber he was chanting “God is great”.

Few expected the execution to take place so soon. His lawyers put in their appeal on the second to last day possible, and even some of the closest advisers of Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, expected the appeal court judges to take much longer to issue their verdict. Yet Maliki himself said in a BBC interview shortly after the death sentence was passed, on November 5, that Saddam would be dead before the end of the year.

Now he is gone. The Iraqi government hopes to enter 2007 with the slate clean to draw more Sunni politicians into government and more Sunni leaders of the uprising into peace talks. But Saddam’s behaviour on the scaffold, as he hoped, will now become part of the legend of resistance. His people are unlikely to forget him.

Every important step he took was a disaster, from the attack on Iran in 1980 which started a hugely debilitating war that lasted for eight years, to the foolish invasion of Kuwait which brought him into open conflict with his former friends, the Americans. Yet he knew how to appeal to ordinary people across the world. He was hated by most of his own people, but loved by the poor and disinherited of the rest of the Arab world.

He ruled Iraq by relying on the Sunni minority. His ministers were mostly Sunnis and so were most senior officers in his army and police force. Tens of thousands of Sunnis died as a result of his repression and his wars, but since his overthrow by the British and Americans in 2003, Sunnis have tended to identify more closely with him.

At first, after his surrender in the hole where he was hiding beside the Tigris in December 2003, even Sunni Iraqis had little but contempt for him. His statement, “I am Saddam Hus-sein, president of Iraq, and I wish to negotiate”, was mocked in Baghdad as a sign of his failure to come to terms with reality.

However, when he challenged the invasion’s legality during his trial, opinion among Sunnis began to swing. Soon they saw him as their champion and he used to address them from the dock, telling them not to despair.

As he stood on the trap door with the noose around his neck, waiting to plunge to his death, perhaps like all martyrs he was reflecting that immediate pain would be followed by an everlasting triumph. In political terms he may well turn out to be right.

John Simpson’s reports from Baghdad can be seen on BBC News and BBC News 24

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