PARIS, Aug 22: “We are all sons of Saddam,” insists Usam Hamid, a longtime resident of Tikrit, in referring to Uday and Qusay, the two sons of the former Iraqi head of state.

Usam’s remark, as reported from Tikrit in the daily Le Figaro, tends to summarize the spirit that the paper’s reporter says she found in a city which she affirms has not said its last word with regard to the end of the resistance to the US occupation.

She also reports that the Baathist party that controlled the country under Saddam is hardly impotent, as the US forces claim.

“Indeed,” she notes, “the party bigwigs have simply deserted their marble mansions in the village of Owdja,” the city where Saddam was born, “to seek refuge in neighbouring villages, and better organize the anti-American resistance.”

According to the reporter, such feelings can be attributed to the fact that the US military has been rather awkward in its ways, with many citizens of Tikrit and other Sunni strongholds located in the triangle formed by Tikrit, Kirkul and Mosul, referring to the US forces as “who shoot upon us at random, killing innocents, the very kind of behaviour that Islam cannot tolerate.”