EVERETT – Iraqis proudly waved their country’s flag and danced to Arabic music as they celebrated the news that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein could be put to death.
Some measure of justice will be had after Hussein’s date with the gallows, many of the expatriate Iraqis said.
“This is the best day we have ever seen,” said Salima Hadi of Everett, who left Iraq 10 years ago. “We have been waiting too long to see this day.”
Everett is home to the state’s most concentrated Iraqi population, refugee and immigrant officials said.
Hadi and others were up late Saturday, “waiting all night for the court’s verdict,” she said. Phone calls shot around the world to share the news and the celebration.
She said many Iraqis like her have lost someone to Hussein’s cruel regime. Many died, some just disappeared forever.
“We want him to be killed,” she said. “We don’t want him to just see the jail, or the court. He doesn’t know how the people feel. We want Saddam to see how the people are happy.”
After nine months, the court convicted and sentenced Hussein and six subordinates for the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town after an attempt on his life there.
The verdict closed a decades-long chapter of intense pain for the Iraqi people who suffered under Hussein.
Jassim al Buhaleg of Everett heard the news at 2 a.m.
“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t believe it,” al Buhaleg said. “All that time. All these years.”
Tears were commonplace among happy laughter, he said. In the morning, he said he and others celebrated by waving their country’s flag as they drove to a park on Everett’s Casino Road. They danced to music at the park.
Jassim al Buhaleg was 6 years old when he answered the door to find two undercover Iraqi policemen. They came to their house in the southern city of Al Mathunna looking for the boy’s father, Atiya al Buhaleg.
As planned, the boy told them his father was not at home.
The men tricked the boy, saying “No, it’s OK. Go tell him we’re his friends.” He did, and the men took his father away.
That was 1986.
“In 20 years, there’s not a night I didn’t cry about him,” al Buhaleg said. “I went back to find out if he is alive or dead. Some say he is alive. Some say he is dead.”
The family moved here in 1994. A picture of Atiya al Buhaleg hangs in the family’s north Everett living room.
“There’s nothing that can be done to bring anybody back,” said al Buhaleg, 26, a father of two who builds planes at Boeing.
“Torturing Saddam is not enough. Hanging him is not enough. Even killing him is not enough.
“I want him to feel the pain I did when I was a kid. It hurts real bad inside,” he said.
He traveled to Iraq in March to search for his father. He was twice robbed at gunpoint by masked “suicide bombers, terrorists, whatever you want to call them.”
He plans to return to Iraq with his mother next month.
“If Saddam is gone, Iraq will be safe,” he said.
Reporter Jeff Switzer: 425-339-3452 or jswitzer@heraldnet.com.
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