“HAPPY Perth Day” reads the defiant graffiti scrawled across a wall in the town where Saddam Hussein was born. “Fak You Bush and Blear,” says another. “Bush, Son of Bitch”, they read, and “Saddam Lion.”

Such sentiments are rare in postwar Iraq, but they are endorsed warmly in the town of Auja, where the dictator was born into a peasant family 66 years ago today. He sold watermelons at the railway station in nearby Tikrit.

“The city is very sad for Saddam Hussein,” Nejla Ibrahim, a primary schoolteacher, said. “We are his relatives, he is our father and he is the father of all Iraqi people. He never slept trying to make all Iraqis comfortable.”

Normally by now Auja would be into its eighth day of birthday celebrations, with sherbet, music and slaughtered lambs in honour of the region’s most famous son since Saladin, Kurdish conqueror of the Crusaders. Now, however, the town — a featureless collection of sandstone and breezeblock buildings 100 miles north of Baghdad — is a sulky, sandy wilderness. American troops have banned bunting and street demonstrations and have imposed a night curfew. Camouflaged Humvees patrol the near-deserted streets and Chinooks throb overhead. Here, the coalition’s battle for hearts and minds is the most lost of causes.

“From April 20 each year every road, every street make a party. We made cakes, and orange juice and sweets,” Ms Ibrahim beamed, leaning from her army officer husband’s battered car. “I will tomorrow also make a birthday celebration for him in my house.”

Locals say that nothing remains of the original house where Saddam was born, but his palace still stands, albeit badly bombed and looted. American troops have tried to remove pro-Saddam graffiti from the surrounding streets, where Saddam portraits and murals remain proudly undefaced. But the sprayed-over slogans have been replaced just as quickly.

Asked why Saddam remains so popular, seven youths crammed into a pick-up truck explained. “Did the Americans provide protection for us like Saddam? Can any Iraqi bring his mother or daughter to the hospital at 1am now, as we did before. No. So what kind of liberation have they brought us?”

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