Phone video of execution boosts Sunni-Shiite split

BAGHDAD, Iraq — For Sunni Arabs here, the brutal reality of the new Iraq seemed to crystallize in a two-minute clip of Saddam Hussein's hanging, filmed surreptitiously on a cell phone.

The video featured excited taunting of Saddam by hooded Shiite guards, both before and after his death. Passed around from cell phone to cell phone on Sunday, the clip had echoes of the videos Sunni militants take of beheadings.

"Yes, he was a dictator, but he was killed by a death squad," said a Sunni Arab woman in western Baghdad who was too afraid to give her name. "What's the difference between him and them?"

There was, of course, a difference. Saddam was a brutal dictator, while the Shiite organizers of the execution are members of the popularly elected Iraqi government that the United States helped put in place as part of an effort to install a democracy here.

The hanging was hasty. Laws governing its timing were bypassed, and the guards charged with keeping order in the execution chamber instead disrupted it, shouting Shiite militia slogans.

It was a degrading end for a vicious leader and an ominous beginning for the new Iraq. The Bush administration has already scaled back its hopes for building a democracy here. But as the Iraqi government has become ever more set on protecting its constituency, often at the exclusion of the Sunni minority, the goal of stopping a sectarian war seems to be slipping out of reach.

"We speak about the crimes of Saddam Hussein, but now here we are behaving in the same way," said Alaa Makky, a prominent moderate Sunni politician. "We fear that nothing has been changed. On the contrary, we feel it is going in a worse direction."

After the invasion, Sunni Arabs, bitter at losing their place, refused to take part in Iraq's first elections, allowing Shiites and Kurds to sweep to power. Americans here spent the following months persuading the Shiites to let them back in. But as the Shiites gain the upper hand, they also seem to be abandoning any willingness to compromise. The video, Sunnis said, was a startling symbol of that.