By Claudia Parsons BAGHDAD, Dec 26 (Reuters) - The gallows loom for Saddam Hussein, the belligerent Middle East strongman toppled in 2003 by the United States, after an appeals court on Tuesday confirmed his death sentence for crimes against humanity. Saddam's power crumbled when U.S. tanks swept into Baghdad. Fleeing in early April 2003, he was captured in December that year by American soldiers who found him hiding in a hole near his hometown of Tikrit. The man who vowed to go down fighting, as his sons had done some months before, gave up without firing a shot, they said. Iraqis who lived for years under the gaze of proud Saddam statues and posters saw humiliating images of him in custody, mouth held open by a probing medic, an unfamiliar beard streaked grey and dishevelled after months on the run. But when his trial opened in October 2005, he was back in a neat suit and defiant from the start, insisting "I am the president of Iraq" and denouncing the U.S.-backed court. Saddam, 69, was found guilty of mass killing in the deaths of 148 Shi'ite men from the village of Dujail. Many were killed after an assassination attempt on Saddam by Shi'ite militants in the village in 1982. Others were executed after a trial. Playing to a televised gallery and for his place in history, he told the court in July in a typically bravura performance that as a military officer he deserved to be shot, not hanged. Saddam, meaning "one who confronts" in Arabic, returned to court in August in a separate trial to face charges of genocide for a military campaign against ethnic Kurds in 1988. That trial is still in progress and Kurds will want to see a verdict for the sake of history before Saddam is executed. Under the statute governing the Iraqi High Tribunal, the death sentence must be carried out within 30 days of a final decision on the appeal. CATHARSIS Though U.S. officials presented the trial as a catharsis for Iraqis, many now pay scant attention amid sectarian and ethnic bloodshed that is pushing Iraq into civil war. Saddam's ruthless rule largely kept the lid on simmering tensions between Arabs and Kurds and between majority Shi'ite Muslims and the strongman's dominant fellow Sunnis. But in the security vacuum that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003, Sunni insurgents and sectarian militias have killed thousands. Saddam, who has called on Iraqis to stop fighting each other and focus on killing Americans, always understood the importance of projecting the right image to cement his leadership of a country formed by European colonial rulers from a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities. As president, he appealed variously to Arab nationalism, Islam and Iraqi patriotism and would appear in the traditional clothes of an Iraqi peasant, military uniform or Western suits. In court appearances he projects the image of a pious Muslim, tieless in a sober suit and clutching a Koran. His lawyers and co-accused respectfully call him "Mr. President". He took that formal post in 1979 after using his skills as a street fighter and conspirator to get his Baath party into power in a 1968 coup. Surrounding himself with relatives from his hometown of Tikrit, he maintained an iron grip on Iraq despite bloody wars, uprisings, coup plots and assassination attempts. Once an ally of the United States, which aided him in his eight-year war against Iran, he was demonised by Western leaders after his army invaded Washington's ally Kuwait in 1990. For some years, U.S. policy was to contain Saddam but after the Sept. 11 attacks President George W. Bush chose Iraq as the next target in his "war on terror" after Afghanistan. Once a hero to some Arabs for his defiance of the United States and Israel, Saddam disappointed his admirers by failing to mount a serious defence of Baghdad in the 2003 war.
