With their coffins wrapped in the Iraqi flag but guarded by troops of their mortal enemy, the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein were laid to rest on Saturday in a dusty cemetery in the village where their father was born.
Nearly two weeks after Saddam's sons were killed when US troops raided their hideout in the northern town of Mosul, around 150 tribesmen and relatives gathered in Awja, on the edge of the town of Tikrit, to dig graves in the sun-baked ground and pile earth and stones on the coffins.
Mahmoud al-Nada, an elder of the Beijat tribal group that includes Saddam Hussein's family, led the mourners in prayer at the graveside as wind whipped clouds of dust into the air and a large force of American troops stood guard at the cemetery gate.
Qusay's 14-year-old son, Mustafa, was buried alongside his father and uncle. He was killed with them during a six-hour gun battle when more than 200 US troops supported by helicopter gunships raided the house where they were hiding on 22 July.
The American-led Coalition Provisional Authority now running Iraq hopes the brothers' burial will end a controversy over the bodies.
Uday and Qusay were among the most cruel and feared men in Iraq, but officials had feared that their funeral might be a focus for anti-coalition protests and the graves a shrine for the deposed regime.
However, there was no large-scale protest and the burials in the old regime's stronghold passed off peacefully, with one military official describing the ceremony as quiet and uneventful.
The bullet-riddled bodies, which had been kept in a refrigerated morgue at Baghdad airport, were delivered to the Iraqi Red Crescent yesterday morning to be driven to Tikrit in an ambulance.
The deposed dictator's family was said to be angered by the way American mortuary attendants prepared the dead: Muslim tradition calls for bodies not to be embalmed or retouched and to be buried before sundown on the day of death.
The brothers' faces, however, were heavily made up using cosmetic putty before officials allowed them to be filmed by journalists in an attempt to persuade a sceptical Iraqi public they really were dead.
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