DIE-HARD supporters of Saddam Hussein’s outlawed Baath Party have ordered guerrillas in Iraq to launch a wave of attacks on US and Iraqi forces today as the former dictator makes his first court appearance on charges of ordering mass murder.

The call to arms, posted on the internet, came as Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Iraq’s Shia interim Prime Minister, criticised the length of time that it has taken to bring the tyrant to court.

“Salute the leader once he makes a public appearance at the trial by firing bullets and mortars of death at the occupier, its men, equipment and bases, as well as agents in the army and the symbols of treason,” exhorted a statement addressed to the “Baathist resistance”, “resistance fighters” and the “Fedayeen Saddam”, the former President’s irregular militia.

“This illegal trial will turn a new page for the jihad of the Iraqi armed resistance . . . which was organised, launched and prepared for the long run by our companion and leader Saddam Hussein,” it added. “The occupier and its agents in power will never be able to make any political or security benefit from this trial.”

Security was being ramped up yesterday around the sprawling central Baghdad fortress known as the green zone, where Saddam will face charges of mass reprisal killings in the Shia village of Dujail, scene of an assassination attempt in 1982.

Extra Iraqi troops in gun lorries were posted at junctions across the city centre, while US soldiers in armoured Humvees took up positions outside the compound’s concrete walls to prevent militants trying to storm the fortifications.

The Baathist statement promised that Saddam would turn the “illegitimate trial . . . into a battle of Iraqis, Arabs, all humans”, adding that the televised proceedings would also “open a new distinctive jihadist page in the actions of the armed Iraqi resistance”.

But even as Saddam’s desperate supporters planned to attack the tribunal for daring to try the former President, Mr al-Jaafari said that the court had been dragging its feet in what he saw as an open-and-shut case against the man accused of ordering the deaths of at least 300,000 people.

“I don’t think there are any more clear-cut crimes in the world than those committed by Saddam,” said Mr al-Jafari, who lost a brother and four cousins in Saddam’s crackdown on Shia religious parties. “Everything in Iraq has a case against Saddam.”

He said that research to catalogue decades of oppression would take too long. “It will take a century to complete. The Dujail case took enough time. Any more delay will bring Iraq, the judiciary and the Government into question. It’s the right of every Iraqi citizen to ask why it took so long to prepare the Dujail case.”

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