I can not really say it was very wise to go to Tikrit with foreigners two days after the death of Uday and Qusay was confirmed. They are not very friendly up there in Saddam’s home town at the best of times, and now they border on the hostile. I am now Salam "the spy" Pax in Aujah.

That village is the weirdest of places, it is like a ghost town. I had never been there before and although they tell you it is a village, there is nothing village-y about it. The streets are better than the streets of downtown Baghdad and the houses are huge. Did you know that Aujah in Arabic means "the twisted one"? That was the unspoken joke: how is he going to straighten up his act when he comes from a place called Twisted?

His actual birthplace is a small mud hut. It had fallen down and Saddam had it rebuilt in brick, then covered with mud. The funny thing is that there is an American army base right beside it and they had no idea what that "tool shed" was. They just told us that they have been here for a long time and nobody gave them that piece of information. Well, I bet there is a lot they are not telling you about.

The question in Aujah now is how the family is going to get the bodies back "to bury them properly". Someone in Baghdad later told me that proper burial for these two is to dig a hole somewhere in the desert and have the family look for them for years. How can they expect a proper burial for people who have denied it for hundreds of thousands? I know, we need to start dropping the hate and concentrating on our future.