http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061230/NEWS99/612300387
Dearborn crowd celebrates for justice
Former Iraqis say ousted dictator deserved execution
December 30, 2006
Dancing to the beat of Arabic drums, throwing candy in the air and joyously waving Iraqi flags, hundreds of Iraqi Americans spilled onto the street outside a Dearborn mosque Friday to cheer the death of Saddam Hussein.
"No more Saddam! No more Saddam!" the crowd near the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center at Warren near Greenfield cheered, as people danced Iraqi jigs and snapped photos of the celebration with cell phones.
"I can't believe it," said 20-year-old Waleed Al-Biraihy. "I think I'm dreaming."
Like many in the crowd, Al-Biraihy of Dearborn lost relatives to the Iraqi dictator's regime -- in his case, two uncles.
"We're so happy," said Muhanad Hassan, 24, of Dearborn, who said the Hussein regime killed his uncle in 1991. "It's revenge for the death of all the innocent Iraqis."
In Dearborn, the heart of metro Detroit's large Arab-American community, Iraqis had been coming together all evening Friday in anticipation of Hussein's death. Across the community, there are hundreds of Iraqi Americans -- Muslim and Christian -- who tell of abuse, torture and murder of loved ones by his government. Ali Al-Nassiri, 50, of Dearborn had two of his brothers killed by Hussein's regime, one in 1980, the other in 1991. Family members were never able to get back their dead bodies.
Nabil Roumayah, head of the of Southfield-based Iraqi Democratic Union, has been working for decades against Saddam Hussein.
"There is no celebration in death and the taking a human life is not a pleasant thing, but that guy was not really human," Roumayah said. "He was a butcher, a dictator, an animal."
Dearborn and surrounding communities are home to a sizable number of Shi'ite Muslims who were brutally repressed by Hussein. After Hussein's government crushed a 1991 uprising by Shi'ite Muslims in Iraq, many of them came to Michigan. There also are victims in metro Detroit's Iraqi Christian, or Chaldean, communities.
"Justice was served," said Jacoub Mansour, an Iraqi-born West Bloomfield physician. "Saddam deserved it for ruling Iraq with an iron fist and killing so many people."
For Ralph Ayar, 55, of West Bloomfield, the execution brought back memories of the hanging of his own father in 1963. In that year, Ayar's father, Hanna Ayar, was killed in the town square of Tel Keif, Iraq, by members of Hussein's Baath Party.
"I remember it as if it happened now," Ayar said. "Since he was captured, this man did not deserve to live."
Ayar said he hopes that Hussein's death will bring new hope for a country racked by violence.
"In the long run, it will help," Ayar said. "Things will settle down."
Still, said Roumayah, Hussein won't be easily forgotten, "because of the terrible price the people paid under his rule."
"He will be cursed for the rest of eternity," he said.
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