But the life of Saddam Hussein now rests upon past events in Dujail. The prosecution case against the ousted dictator, whose trial opens on Wednesday, focuses on a single sample crime: the retributive torture and execution of 150 Dujaili men in July 1982, said to have happened on Saddam’s orders after an attempt on his life as he went through the town.

Rather than feeling pride at their rediscovered fame, the hot July day 23 years ago sits like a dirty and divisive secret in the minds of the Dujailis.

“I feel like I wasted my time and efforts being part of this whole process,” Munim Salman, now in his mid-fifties, said. He was one of the failed assassins who survived imprisonment and torture. Others in the town were burnt with acid and suffered electric shocks and broken arms and legs.

He said: “I feel frustrated and disappointed by the people I served. I ended up jobless without a home. The security situation is really bad. I take diazepam and sleep with a gun at my side and tell my six sons to do the same. Those in power want to try Saddam for their political ends rather than to serve his victims. I haven’t even been asked to testify, though I was a central witness.”

The plan to kill Saddam was simple. Some sixty men were involved. Loyal to the Shia Dawa party, the political organisation that includes the present Prime Minister, Ibrahim Jafari, the gunmen were Dujailis who used weapons and cash supplied by Iran, plotters say.

On July 8, 1982, an eight-strong ambush group, led by Hussain al-Haidari and Karim Jaffar, shot at Saddam’s vehicle as it approached the town on a Ramadan tour of the district, while fifty other men took on his security detail.

Saddam had changed vehicles at the last minute. In the days that followed, his Republican Guardsmen encircled and seized Dujail. Farms were levelled. Four hundred families were arrested. Torture was routine and 150 people were killed.

Even at the time the assassination attempt split the town’s Shia populace. “Those who fired on Saddam should compensate us for the relatives we lost and the damage to our town that followed,” Hassan Azubaidi, a farmer in his forties, said. “They had only Kalashnikovs and pistols. How could they expect to kill Saddam?

“They must have known the chaos that would follow. Anyway, they were collaborating with another country, not representing Iraq’s interests.”

Abu Nawfal, a Dujaili tradesman, said: “Saddam was President, so what do you expect his reaction to be when he was fired upon? The Americans nowadays kill dozens of Iraqis just for approaching their convoys, let alone shooting at them. Those in power now should put themselves on trial before they go back into the past to try others.”

The fall of the Baathist regime in 2003 did little to alleviate resentment, bringing Dujail few benefits. Locals say there have been 16 kidnappings in the past month alone, and that internecine shootings and bombings are an almost daily event. Few now would dare to travel south through Sunni settlements to reach Baghdad.

Worse still, when the regime first fell, Dujailis were among the first to raid the Mukhabarat secret police HQ in Baghdad. In the Dujail files, they found that the evidence against the 150 men executed for the plot came not just from torture, but from the testimony of friends, relatives and neighbours in Dujail. The files were quickly sequestered by the local branch of the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a leading Shia party. Insiders say that, should their details be released, another massacre would take place between rival Shia factions in Dujail.

For a handful of Dujailis, however, death for Saddam cannot come quickly enough and is a simple matter of revenge rather than closure.

Jawad was 15 when his elder brother, Hussain, led the ambush. He was imprisoned with his parents and sisters for five years. His seven elder brothers, including Hussain, and 35 cousins were executed or tortured to death, some before his eyes.

In 2003 he brought a chainsaw with which to kill the ousted President, should the Dujailis have captured him. “I wanted to cut him into pieces,” Jawad said. “Now I know it won’t happen. But it’s not a wish that Saddam should be executed — it’s a must. My mother prays all the time for his death, day and night. She hopes they kill him in our very house.”

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