http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/world/middleeast/03saddam.html?_r=1&hp&oref=sloginAt Hussein Grave, Legend Lives as Fury Simmers The scant flow of visitors reflects, too, the chaos that has supplanted the tyranny Iraq endured under Mr. Hussein. Awja, 100 miles north of Baghdad, is in the middle of a fiercely contested war zone, where American troops passing on Iraq’s main north-south highway, flanking the village, are regularly ambushed and bombed by insurgents. Along with that, there is continuing fury among Mr. Hussein’s loyalists at his overthrow, trial and hanging, a mood that simmers so strongly at Awja that outsiders — indeed, any but Mr. Hussein’s established loyalists — have generally stayed away.
The grave site, humble as it is, reflects something more than a hometown’s determination to honor a fallen son, something that seems irreducible in the politics of Iraq: the refusal of the Sunni minority, who ruled Iraq for centuries until Mr. Hussein’s overthrow, to reconcile themselves to the assumption of power by the Shiite majority who won elections godfathered by the American occupation authority.