Happiness and sorrow rose together on Friday from this desolate border village, where some of the first Iraqis in towns captured by American and British troops found the joy of their deliverance muted by the memories of what they had endured.
As hundreds of coalition troops swept in here just after dawn, the heartache of a town that felt the hardest edges of Saddam Hussein's rule seemed to burst forth, with villagers running into the streets to celebrate in a kind of grim ecstasy, laughing and weeping in long guttural cries.
"Oooooo, peace be upon you, peace be upon you, peace you, oooooo," Zahra Khafi, a 68-year-old mother of five, cried to a group of American and British visitors who came to the town shortly after Saddam's army had appeared to melt away. "I'm not afraid of Saddam anymore."
Two years ago, Khafi said, her 26-year son, Masood, was killed by Saddam's men, for devotion to a branch of Islam out of official favor. As Khafi told her story, her joy gave way to gloom, and she began to weep, and then to moan, and finally she pleaded with her visitors to stay and protect her.
"Should I be afraid?" Khafi said, mumbling and wiping her eyes. "Is Saddam coming back?"
Saddam, of course, is not gone, but his shadow loomed less large here on Friday. All through the day, as American and British tanks and troop carriers rumbled through the town on their drive on the nearby city of Basra, the town of Safwan seemed to celebrate the collapse of Saddam's local rule with a glance over its shoulder.
With trepidation still strong among the Iraqis, much of the celebrating was performed by Marines, who tore down every larger-than-life image of Saddam that decorated the town. They pried one loose by tying it to the bumper of a troop carrier, and another by cutting it up with his K-Bar fighting knife.
"Feels good," Oscar Guerrero, a Marine from San Antonio, Texas, said as he ran his blade through the canvas likeness of the Iraqi leader. "I wish he were here in person."
Only hours before, the local Iraqis said, the Mukhabarat, Saddam's security force, had held Safwan in a state of near-permanent terror. Even now, the villagers said, Saddam's agents were still among them, waiting, as they did 12 years ago at the time of the first Gulf War, for their moment to return.
"There, there are Saddam's men, and if you leave me, they will kill me right now," said a trembling Najah Neema, an Iraqi soldier, who said he had torn off his uniform, thrown down his gun and run away as the American Army approached at dawn.
Like many townspeople here, Neema feared that the Americans would lose their will, as they did in 1991, when an American-encouraged uprising across southern Iraq fell before a withering assault by Saddam's forces that drew no American riposte.
One of those people whom Neema pointed to with such fear was Tawfik Muhammad, a well-dressed man who stood a few yards away. Muhammad laughed at the suggestion that he had ever worked for Saddam's government. He was headmaster of the local school, he said, and a respectable man.
"God willing, the Mukabarhat will return," Muhammad said with a wave, and he walked away. A crowd that had gathered round him gave a nervous laugh.
Some of the Iraqis looked on as if in a daze. Others seemed to be resisting the temptation to cheer. A few, perhaps recalling Saddam's many comebacks, worked themselves up into an angry lather.
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