In liberated Iraqi towns, former ruling party nervous

President Saddam Hussein's portraits in this eastern Iraqi city are smeared with mud, pockmarked with bullet holes, defaced by graffiti. The local headquarters of the once-ruling Baath Party is a smoldering, deserted hulk. Kurdish and American soldiers occupy the streets.

But some Iraqis - both those who were oppressed by and those who supported Mr. Hussein's regime - are afraid.

"Please," he says one Iraqi here, looking with alarm at a reporter's notebook, where his name has just been written down. "Cross it out."

The man is paying a return visit to the detention room of the Khanaqin police station, where he says he was held and beaten late last year. The cement room has two tiny windows, so high on the wall that one can only see the sky. The walls are covered with the scrawlings of prisoners. "My life is torture," reads one.

It is a warm, sunny day outside. "I am shivering," says the man, who alternates between expressing the fear that the Baath regime will somehow return and a hope for something better. "I only have one wish," he says, "that God will protect [President] Bush for us. I will hang ten of his pictures in my house if Saddam is no longer there."

At least two kinds of anxiety belie the jubilation on display throughout Iraq. One is this man's fear - that somehow all the evidence of Hussein's downfall shouldn't be trusted. The other is the worry of those associated with the regime about what their future might hold.

In one neighborhood of Khanaqin, residents say that the local headman has fled because he is a Baathist. But he has not. Azzad Ahmed is in his house, insisting that his feelings are the same as everyone else's. And what are those? "Joy and gladness and a feeling of liberation," he says, his face grim, two Kalashnikov rifles propped up against the wall of his sitting room.

Mr. Ahmed's salvation may be that he is a Kurd, and so can claim by virtue of his ethnicity to have been as oppressed as any of the Baath's victims. Membership in the party was a matter of circumstance, he explains. "I am not in a liberated place - the conditions forced me to do this."

The atmosphere in Khanaqin and its surrounding villages - "liberated" yesterday by Kurdish troops and some US Special Forces who filled the vacuum left by fleeing Iraqi soldiers and officials - was a mixture of celebration and lawlessness. In the city, busloads of revelers roared through the largely shuttered bazaar, honking horns and waving flags. In the surrounding countryside, looters picked through military camps, making off with everything from weaponry to construction materials.

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