In a country where only 0.1 per cent of the population has access to the Web, there are 4.6 million land lines and mobile phones in Iraq. That makes mobile phones the informal news medium of choice for Iraqis  when it comes to stuff like ... oh, hanging videos. :)

Some excerpts from the BBC story:

The phone camera footage of Saddam Hussein's execution may prove to be the most controversial media disclosure from Iraq since snapshots of US guards abusing prisoners inside Abu Ghraib were published in 2004.

While those pictures were revealed in the US media, the Saddam video appears to have been a purely Iraqi affair.

As foreign news organisations downloaded it from the internet, it was already being swapped among ordinary Iraqis on their mobile phones.

The Iraqi government's own, edited version, was undermined by the ugly audio of the shouted sectarian Shia slogans.

The mobile phone, that symbol of freedom and independence, had come into its own in Iraq in the most dramatic way.

For many outsiders, one of the most graphic horrors of the Iraqi conflict has been the posting of beheading videos on the internet but, within the country, interactive communications rest on the phone, not the web.

Just 0.1% of a population of nearly 27 million has web access, according to a 2006 estimate published by Internet World Stats. By contrast, neighbouring Iran has about 100 times as many, it says. ...

Phones are what Iraqis now have in relative abundance: since the 2003 invasion, the number of handsets has gone from 1.2m land lines to 4.6m land and mobile lines, according to the US government.

"The new handsets are reliable and widely affordable," Amer al-Harky, a 25-year-old doctor in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Irbil, told the BBC News website.

After the February 2006 attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra, staff at the BBC bureau in Baghdad noted a surge in gory video of the conflict being swapped between mobile phones.

One clip, for instance, showed what appeared to be Shia gunmen killing a Sunni man.
 
On the day after Saddam's hanging, a trader in a Shia part of Baghdad told AFP news agency that his mobile phone shop was selling the gallows phone camera footage for 500 dinars (40 US cents) a time.

And for those without a mobile, video of Iraq's death squads and their victims is available to buy on DVD.