Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who got his start in politics as an assassin and who never lost that brutal approach as he led Iraq for more than 30 years, was led to the gallows by a group of burly men in balaclavas and executed early Saturday morning.

Hussein was executed for the only crime for which he's been convicted: the 1982 murder of more than 200 people from the village of Dujail. Many Iraqis, though, particularly the Shiites and Kurds who lost hundreds of thousands to his bloody regime, saw his death as justice for the broader crimes of his rule.

Yet peace is unlikely to follow, analysts say. Hussein still has the power to arouse fierce passions among Iraqis. His death was cheered by millions of Iraqis, setting off wild celebrations in the Shiite quarters of Baghdad and other cities. Many Sunnis, however, saw it as a national humiliation - a proud Arab leader put to death at the hands of a government the United States helped to install - and were angered by the fact that the execution took place on Eid al-Adha, Islam's most important holiday.

Still, the demise of the man who led bloody wars against Iran and the United States, and whose police state was famously called the "republic of fear" by one dissident, may now be oddly irrelevant to Iraq's future, as the country's broad sectarian violence has moved far beyond camps of Hussein supporters and opponents.

While the US once believed Hussein's fall would help stabilize Iraq - his capture in a dim spider hole three years ago set off celebrations in US military command centers "akin to VE day," one US military intelligence officer recalls - that is no longer the case. What was once described as an insurgency largely made up of Baathist holdouts and some Sunni Islamist fighters, is now seen as a battle for power among Iraq's major sects.

President Bush reflected that view when he cautioned against too much optimism on Saturday.

"Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq," Mr. Bush said in a statement. "But it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy."

Since Hussein's capture and trial, tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in the deepening civil conflict, and sectarian militias have mushroomed throughout the country. Shiite death squads allied to some of Iraq's major political parties have been particularly active in Baghdad and Basra, the country's second largest city, and have used torture techniques to rival those of Hussein's feared secret police.

Last Monday, for instance, British forces raided and then destroyed the serious crimes unit in Basra, which they said was a base of operations for a Shiite militia. They found more than 100 prisoners there, many of whom had been tortured with electric shocks, burned with cigarettes, or shot in the knees.

Before Hussein's execution, US and Iraqi forces braced for a possible surge in violence. About 70 people were killed around Iraq following his death, most by two suicide car bombs, one in the Shiite town of Kufa, the other in Baghdad, a level of violence that has been fairly common in recent months.

The move to execute Hussein was swift. He was on trial facing charges of genocide against Iraq's Kurds, and at least four other trials were expected to follow. While US advisers to the court had said that they expected that the execution would be delayed to allow the justice process to go forward for his other crimes, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite Islamist whose popularity has flagged as Iraq's violence has deepened and unemployment has surged, grew determined to see Hussein killed without further delay.

Ahead of the execution, Mr. Maliki said the swift carrying out of the sentence underscored his government's commitment to protecting "human rights."

Michael Scharf, a legal scholar at Case Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, and expert in war-crimes tribunals who has provided legal advice to the judges who tried Hussein, former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, and other dictators, says that he is "saddened" that Hussein won't face further charges.

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