The dictator blamed for dumping hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shia into unmarked graves was bound for burial in a secret location. The Iraqi High Tribunal had found him guilty of crimes against humanity for killing 148 Shia from the village of Dujail after a 1982 attempt on his life. It could not be lost on the former dictator that the Shia fundamentalist Dawa party, which had failed to kill him in Dujail, was now presiding over his hanging.

Landmarks of his regime were all around at his prison, Camp Cropper, inside the Baghdad airport complex.

Within the sprawling compound was Saddam’s Fao palace, overlooking a man-made lake that he had kept stocked with fish. US generals and officers were busy there, drafting battle plans. A Christmas tree and a menorah for the Jewish holiday of Chanukkah decorated the giant domed main room.

Even before his final journey, Saddam was a figure of the past. He would no longer recognise Baghdad, the city that he had ruled with an iron fist, now marred by the anarchy of militiamen.

The posters of him that stared from every corner have long been painted over and replaced with murals of the young Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his father, Mohammed Sadeq al-Sadr, whom Saddam had killed. In the Shia slum of Sadr City, once named Saddam City, the millions who had once been a thorn in Saddam’s side prepared to fire off Kalashnikovs and dance in joy upon hearing the news that he was dead.

In the Shia holy city of Najaf, where his security agents murdered ayatollahs, Friday prayers were filled with bloodthirsty cries for Saddam’s head and the proclamation that his death was “God’s gift” to Iraqis.

“Oh, God, you know what Saddam has done! He killed millions of Iraqis in prisons, in wars with neighbouring countries and he is responsible for mass graves. Oh God, we ask you to take revenge on Saddam,” said Sheikh Sadralddin al-Qubanji, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

On Thursday Saddam had received his two half-brothers in his cell and handed them his will, his lawyers said.

They had plotted to overthrow governments as young men; they had co-operated to preserve their power; now the time had come to say goodbye. Saddam had cheated death in the past, escaping Iraq with a gunshot wound to the leg after a failed assassination attempt against the late Iraqi leader Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1959. Maybe they had realised that a violent death was the fate of most Iraqi leaders.

All Saddam could do at the end was to appeal to history to forgive him. He postured in court last month in his first appearance after being sentenced to death, appealing for reconciliation among Iraqis. On Thursday his lawyers posted his final letter to the Iraqi people, urging them to love one another.

One could only ask whether he held himself responsible for the sectarianism that flooded Iraq after the fall of his Baathist regime.

Even if he did his calls for reconciliation fell on deaf ears in Iraq’s streets, where mutilated bodies dumped by Sunni and Shia death squads continue to pile up.

In the Sunni city of Fallujah, graffiti still praised the former President, most of it by Sunnis displaced from Baghdad calling on Americans to bring back the military men who enforced Saddam’s brand of secularism. Even a senior US Marine officer speculated on Saddam’s legacy. “Whatever Saddam’s faults, he prevented Islamic fundamentalism from sweeping the country,” he said.

Around the country, there were Kurds, Shia and Sunni alike who wondered how Iraq had unravelled after the fall of Saddam and how they now found themselves longing for the very man whom they had once despised.

Ibrahim Yassin, a 35-year-old unemployed man from the central city of Baquba, said: “Executing Saddam won’t solve the problems in Iraq. Most of us were hoping for his death, but the situation now is getting worse.”

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