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Nowhere has the trial brought more misery than in Dujail, a town of 84,000, most of them Shi'ites, in the middle of the Sunni triangle. Since the start of Saddam's trial, Dujail has been infiltrated by ex-Baathist hit squads. Residents believe they have been ordered by Saddam's former henchmen to take out the families of witnesses. A number of insurgent cells operating around Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, a mere 45-minute drive north of Dujail, have targeted relatives of witnesses, most of whom rarely leave the Green Zone. Abu Hamid, commander of a nationalist cell based north of Dujail, says if any of the witnesses in the Saddam trial leave the Green Zone to return home, "we will destroy all of Dujail. If the people of Dujail allow these villains to live in the town, they will get the same treatment."
The plight of the town reflects the broader collapse of order in the center of Iraq. Insurgents have destroyed the town's water and electricity facilities. Mayor al-Zubeidy says he needs at least 200 more people from the police or Iraqi National Guard to secure the entrances and exits of Dujail. He says he has been unable to persuade the Iraqi government to send reinforcements to the town. "We haven't gotten any support from any of the governments," he says. "There is almost a siege of Dujail, and we can't move out. If they catch you on the way to Baghdad and they find out you are from Dujail, you will be killed at once." The town has provided Ali with three police bodyguards, but he still feels vulnerable. "I'm hunted," he says. "The government is ignoring Dujail."
The killings in Dujail speak to a larger battle being waged in the Iraqi psyche. In Saddam's police state, there were navigable boundaries that made it possible to live. True, the executions by Saddam's regime in Dujail showed that those boundaries were a mirage: they could close in on you in less time than it takes a bullet to fly from the barrel of a gun. But life in Iraq has become so bloody and death so ever present, random and unpredictable that some Iraqis are nostalgic for Saddam's tyranny. When I told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad about the killings of witnesses' families in Dujail, he shook his head but said the current loss of life is "different than a government carrying on violence against its own citizens." Iraqis, he says, "have paid and are paying a high price to potentially head in a great direction that was not available under Saddam."
It is indicative of the scale of Saddam's brutality that there are some in Dujail who believe the current bloodshed is preferable to what preceded it. "Of course, now it is much better," says Ali, speaking by phone from Dujail. "Saddam's terrorism would go on forever if he were still in power." Ali's brother Ahmed, witness No. 1 in the Saddam trial, doesn't know when he will leave the Green Zone or what awaits him if he does. But after spending his high school years in prison and losing most of his brothers, he says he is willing to pay the ultimate price to see Saddam answer for his crimes: "I'll give up my own life and the lives of my family if it means I have helped send Saddam to the gallows." The sobering reality is that both may come true.