Anatomy of a Civil War
Iraq’s descent into chaos
Nir Rosen
8 On April 7, 2006, the third anniversary of the U.S. occupation
of Iraq, I drove south with Shia pilgrims from Baghdad to the
shrine city of Najaf. The day before, on the same route, a minibus
like ours had taken machine-gun fire in the Sunni town of Iskandariyah.
Five pilgrims were killed.
My companions—a young man named Ahmed, his mother, and
their friend Iskander, a driver—came from Sadr City, the
Shia bastion in Baghdad named for Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, a popular
and politically ambitious Shia cleric slain in 1999. They wanted
to hear a sermon by Sadr’s son, Muqtada, who after the war
had become the single most important person in Iraq and the only
one capable of sustaining the fragile alliance between Shias and
Sunnis. His power had only grown, although hopes for that alliance
were now gone.
It was Friday, and like my companions, I was going to the Friday
prayers. I had been following this practice since I arrived in
Iraq in April 2003, when it became clear that clerics were filling
the power vacuum created by the war. After the fall of Saddam
and his Baath Party, looting and anarchy gave way to forces of
more organized violence: men with guns, some wearing the turbans
of clerics, some the scarves of the resistance, and many belonging
to criminal gangs. Despite American intentions to create a secular,
democratic Iraq, clerics were quickly replacing Baathists, and
in the absence of anything else the mosque would become Iraq’s
most influential institution.
This should not have come as a surprise. Many complex factors
influence life in the Muslim world, most of them secular and mundane,
but the mosque plays a central role in the community, in religious,
social, and political life. The call to prayer five times a day
echoes through neighborhoods, regulating time and the cycles of
life. At the mosque men meet to pray, learn, talk, and organize.
The Friday sermon, or khutba, is often a call to action, in which
the imam lectures his flock about issues affecting the community.
In authoritarian states, the pulpit is a rare source of alternative
authority. The mosque unites communities. It has also at times
been a provider of welfare and a weapons depot, a source of news
and a rallying point.
After the 2003 invasion, the country’s majority Shia, radicalized
by three decades of persecution and poverty under Saddam and suspicious
of the American occupiers, responded quickly to the clerics’
incitements. Followers of Muqtada al Sadr capitalized on his father’s
network of mosques and clerics to seize control of Shia Baghdad
and much of the southern part of Iraq. They occupied hospitals,
Baath Party headquarters, and government warehouses and gave themselves
state power. The same pattern repeated itself in much of Iraq.
When Baghdad fell, on April 9, 2003, and widespread violence
erupted, the primary victims were Iraq’s Sunnis. For Shias,
this was justice. “It is the beginning of the separation,”
one Shia cleric told me with a smile in the spring of 2003. Saddam
had used Sunni Islam to legitimize his power, building one large
Sunni mosque in each Shia city in the south; these mosques were
seized by Shias immediately after the regime collapsed. During
the 1990s Saddam also used the donations that Shia pilgrims make
to the shrines they visit—totaling millions of dollars a
month—to finance his Faith Campaign, which spread Sunni
practices in Iraq and even declared official tolerance of Wahhabis
for the first time, perhaps because of their deep hatred of Shias.
Wahhabism is an austere form of Sunni Islam, dominant in Saudi
Arabia, that rejects all other interpretations and views Shias
as apostates. Wahhabis had traveled up from Arabia in centuries
past and sacked Shia shrines. Now Shias were terrified of a Wahhabi
threat. They feared that Wahhabis would poison the food distributed
to pilgrims. According to a cleric in Najaf, Sheikh Heidar al
Mimar, “There were no Sunnis in Najaf before the 1991 intifada,
but Saddam brought Wahhabis to the Shia provinces in order to
control the Shia. These Wahhabis were very bad with us, and all
Shia were afraid of them.” Again and again I heard Iraq’s
Shias refer to all Sunnis as Wahhabis.
The Shia wave that swept Iraq in the wake of the American attack
overthrew the Sunni-led order imposed on Iraq for centuries—by
the Ottomans and by the British. The uprising was guided largely
by Shia leaders who under Saddam had been pushed underground or
into exile and whose sectarian identity had been strengthened
as a result. On April 7 Ayatollah Sayyid Kadhim al Haeri, a cleric
from Karbala who had been in exile in Iran since 1973, sent a
letter to Najaf appointing Muqtada as his deputy and representative
in Iraq. Haeri also urged Iraqis to kill all Baathists to prevent
them from taking over again. On April 18, in the southern city
of Kut, Abdel Aziz al Hakim, brother of the Shia opposition leader
Muhammad Bakr al Hakim and leader of the 10,000-strong Iran-supported
Badr Brigade militia, proclaimed that Iraq’s majority Shia
hoped for an Islamic government. That same day, Muqtada’s
deputy for Baghdad warned that Shias would not accept a democracy
that would obstruct their sovereignty.
Later that month Shias descended in the millions upon Karbala
for a massive celebration on Arbain al Hussein, the day marking
the end of the 40-day mourning period for the prophet Muhammad’s
grandson, Hussein ibn Ali, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized
the division between Sunni and Shia Islam. An important and distinctively
Shia holiday traditionally observed with mourning processions,
public flagellation, and crying, its ceremonies had been severely
restricted under Saddam.
The first Arbain after the war was marked more by Shia triumphalism
than mourning. While Shias could not remember a time when they
expressed pride in their identity so openly, Sunnis watched with
concern and some disdain at the celebrations, which they rejected
as un-Islamic or primitive. The Shias who made their way to Karbala
were united in one message: the Hawza—the Shia theological
seminary and seat of the Ayatollahs—was supreme. Banners,
songs, and statements demanded that the Hawza should lead Iraq.
These sentiments hardly assuaged Sunni fears, nor were they consistent
with the words of such Shia exiles as Ahmad Chalabi, who had closely
advised the United States before the invasion and who had promised
that Iraq’s Shias were secular and sought democracy.
Some realignment of power was inevitable after Saddam’s
removal, and perhaps not even shared opposition to the American
occupation could have united Sunnis and Shias. As it happened,
the occupation divided Iraqis between those seen as anti-occupation
and those seen as pro-occupation. The Shias I spoke with proudly
pointed to the attacks of Muqtada’s militia on Americans
in the spring and summer of 2004 as proof that they were as anti-occupation
as the Sunnis. Nevertheless, Sunnis viewed Shias as the primary
beneficiaries of the American occupation. And they were right:
the Sunnis had been pushed to the side, dismissed from the security
forces and the government, replaced in the government by Shias
and Kurds, and treated as the enemy by the American military,
which punished them collectively first for Saddam’s crimes
and then for the insurgency.
After Saddam’s fall, the Sunnis were vulnerable. They had
no leader; Saddam had gotten rid of the competition. Sunni clerics
formed the Association of Muslim Scholars to protect Sunni interests
and unite their leadership under the command of Baathists-turned-clerics.
These clerics would soon call for boycotts of the Iraqi elections
and would eventually control much of the insurgency, harboring
the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, and other
foreign fighters who targeted not only Shia civilians in markets,
buses, and mosques but Iraq’s new security forces, which
were filled with young Shia men.
Three years later, Shia religious parties such as the Iran-supported
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (its name a
sufficient statement of its intentions), or SCIRI, controlled
the country, and Shia militias had become the Iraqi police and
the Iraqi army, running their own secret prisons, arresting, torturing,
and executing Sunnis in what was clearly a civil war. And the
Americans were merely one more militia among the many, watching,
occasionally intervening, and in the end only making things worse.
Iraqis’ hopes for a better future after Saddam had been
betrayed.
* * *
Iraqi National Guard and police checkpoints slowed our progress
to Najaf. Officers would peer through the driver’s window
and ask where we were going. “We’re a family from
Sadr City,” we would say, or simply, “We’re
from the city.” This was enough to convey the fact that
we were Shia pilgrims. We would be waved along with a smile. “Go
in peace.”
We drove past brick factories and palm groves. As we approached
Najaf we were stopped more and more often, our minibus searched,
our bodies patted down. When all roads were closed off by Iraqi
National Guard pickup trucks fitted with machine guns, we parked
on a sandy lot filled with hundreds of cars, some with coffins
lashed to their roofs. Mourners were bringing their dead to be
buried in The City of Peace, the vast cemetery for Shias in Najaf,
close to the shrine of Imam Ali, the prophet Muhammad’s
cousin and son-in-law. As we continued on foot, we saw men waiting
with pushcarts to carry the feeble, shrouded women and the coffins.
Iraqi National Guardsmen in blue fatigues surrounded the charred
wreckage of three minibuses and urged the pilgrims who stopped
to stare, “Please, brothers, move on.”
Not far away was the cemetery set aside for the martyrs of Muqtada’s
militia, Jaish al Imam al Mahdi, or the Mahdi Army. The Mahdi
was a ninth-century Shia leader who is said to have disappeared
into an occult realm when he descended into a hole in Samarra
to escape assassins. Shias see him as a messiah and believe that
when he returns he will restore justice. Many view his return
as imminent. Among Muqtada’s followers it is common to hear
that the American army has come to kill the Mahdi. In a September
2006 sermon in Kufa, Muqtada told his followers that the Pentagon
had a large file on the Mahdi and would greet his return with
their military. But I was often assured that the Mahdi would kill
all the Americans, and all the Jews, too, for good measure.
Muqtada formed the Mahdi Army in the summer of 2003. Thousands
battled American and British troops in Najaf and Kufa in the spring
and summer of 2004 in what Muqtada’s followers call their
two intifadas. Many members of the Mahdi Army were former members
of the Fedayeen Saddam, a paramilitary militia. Its Sunni members
would constitute the core of the resistance. (It is a misconception
that all Baathists and soldiers in Saddam’s army were Sunnis.)
Ahmed, himself a Mahdi Army fighter, regaled his mother with
tales of their daring fight against the Americans. We stopped
so that Ahmed could visit the tombs of his friends.
As we approached the Kufa mosque just outside Najaf, we were
searched by Mahdi Army militiamen. Latmiya, or mourning songs,
echoed through the stalls of the market outside, describing in
rhythmic beats the death of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet,
and professing loyalty to him. The mosque’s thick walls
looked fortified and indeed had been used as a base for the Mahdi
Army during the 2004 intifadas. Here they had lined up to receive
food and weapons training. Small groups had learned how to use
grenades and grenade launchers. Crates full of weapons were stored
here, as well as in Muqtada’s office in Najaf. There had
even been a unit of female fighters, called the Bint al Huda Brigade,
allegedly with its own suicide squad.
The Kufa mosque also holds a mystical importance to Iraqi Shias.
Some believe it to be the oldest mosque in the world. Imam Hussein’s
cousin Muslim bin Aqil was buried there after being slain by the
same traitors who would kill Hussein. And many Shias believe that
the Mahdi will return there, descending from heaven onto its dome.
It was at Kufa in 1998, after Saddam relaxed restrictions on
Shia clerics, that Muqtada’s father delivered 47 famous
sermons. Saddam had promoted Sadr at first, hoping that as an
Iraqi nationalist he could be used as a tool against Shia leaders
of Iranian or Pakistani descent, and against Iran itself. But
Sadr did not show sufficient loyalty; his last sermons criticized
Saddam himself. In 1999 Sadr and two of his sons were shot by
unknown assailants. The government accused rival Shias of the
murder and executed the suspects, but Sadr’s followers blamed
Saddam and rioted. Many were killed in Sadr City, then known as
Saddam City. After the war Muqtada took over the Kufa mosque,
and it was to this mosque that he retreated in April of 2004,
urging his fighters to “make your enemy afraid” and
assuring them that he would not abandon them.
The market outside the mosque offered key chains with pictures
of Muqtada and his father and books by Shia thinkers including
Sadr and his uncle Muhammad Bakr al Sadr, the most important Shia
theologian of the 20th century, whose Dawa Party called for an
Islamic state in the 1970s. When he was executed by Saddam in
1980 along with his sister, Bint al Huda, he became known as the
first martyr. Sadiq al Sadr, Muqtada’s father, was known
as the second martyr. One stand sold films of Muqtada’s
sermons as well as panegyrics to Muqtada and films depicting his
men battling the Americans. A large group stood around watching
them.
Before the noon prayer a crowd assembled to receive copies of
Muqtada’s latest bayan, or statement, with rulings on certain
questions and the cleric’s seal at the bottom. This week’s
bayan was formulated in a typical way, with a real or hypothetical
question posed, followed by Muqtada’s response.
“Sayyiduna al mufadda,” began the question, “Our
sayyid for whom we sacrifice ourselves, in the Iraqi streets these
days there is a lot of talk . . . about militias. And as your
eminence knows, some politicians classify Jaish al Imam al Mahdi
(God speed his appearance) under this title. Do you classify the
army under this title like the brothers in the Badr organization
and the Kurdish peshmerga or do you classify it under another
one?” The question was signed by a “group of members
of the Mahdi Army.”
In his answer Muqtada explained that the Mahdi Army was only
an outlaw to oppressive governments. As long as the government
was legitimate and not associated with the people’s enemies,
the Mahdi Army was with the government “in a single trench.”
He was affirming his nationalism, a consistent theme in his public
pronouncements and the reason many Sunnis once viewed him as “the
good Shia.” He was also trying to distinguish the Mahdi
Army from other militias: his position was that the Mahdi Army
was not a militia at all but a spiritual army, and therefore did
not deserve the label of sectarian armies that merely control
fiefdoms through violence. “The Mahdi Army,” he continued,
“is not a party, and it is not an organization. There is
no salary, no headquarters, there is no special organization,
there is no arming, and every weapon is a personal weapon.”
Muqtada said that the ones who had provoked these questions were
the American occupiers, the Saddamists, and the takfiris—radical
Sunnis who believe Shias to be infidels, although this was a veiled
reference to all Sunnis. The Mahdi Army, he said, belongs to the
Shia leadership in the Hawza, and the Shia leadership belongs
to the Mahdi.
The crowds marched into the mosque, and I marched with them,
past more security. Many men carried umsalayas, prayer rugs, on
their shoulders, setting them down in the concrete courtyard.
Next to each marble column stood grim-faced men in dark suit jackets,
their arms pressed down to hide their guns and keep them within
reach. They had once openly carried Kalashnikovs, but this was
now considered undignified.
Over 10,000 people filled the mosque. Unlike Sunnis, who go to
whatever mosque is nearest to their home, Shias take buses to
attend Friday prayers in one of several key mosques. Many women
were there, sitting in a separate section. And I had never seen
so many children at a mosque: Muqtada was the “cool”
cleric, a fighter who defied authority, and he reached out to
children, offering them stickers for their notebooks. As the call
to prayer ended, the crowd chanted and sang songs they all knew
by heart.
A murmur and a frisson spread through the crowd to the back as
Muqtada waddled in with his head down, surrounded by assistants
and bodyguards. People had been expecting one of his deputies
to speak for him that day. “Ali wiyak Ali!” they thundered,
waving their fists. “Ali is with you!” Muqtada was
flanked by his two closest friends and advisers. On his left stood
the young and very thin Ayatollah Ali al Baghdadi, originally
from Sadr City. On his right stood his more rotund brother-in-law,
Riyadh al Nuri, the usual imam of the Kufa mosque. Nuri lived
with Muqtada and had cared for Muqtada’s mentally handicapped
brother, who died in 2004. As a leader of Muqtada’s Islamic
courts, Nuri also had a militia at his disposal, which he would
dispatch to arrest and torture people for suspected infractions
ranging from homosexuality and the sale of pornography to theft
and slander against Muqtada.
Nuri raised his hand to quiet the crowd as Muqtada began to speak.
* * *
I first met Muqtada in May of 2003, when his quick rise as a
Shia leader was beginning to outrage the Hawza. Each marja, or
cleric who has been deemed “a source for emulation,”
had his own office and received a tithe from his followers. Muqtada
appeared with no experience or education and almost immediately
won the loyalty of thousands of young men. He spoke in the name
of his father and the mustadafin—the dispossessed masses—and
he spoke their dialect and its slang, much as his father had.
He alone was known by his first name because Iraq’s Shias
felt a personal bond with him. While the Iranian-born Ayatollah
Ali al Sistani was the most respected religious authority for
Iraq’s Shias, Muqtada spoke for them and led them politically
and spiritually. Tens of thousands would die for him. Chubby with
an unkempt beard, he was awkward and unsure of himself then, coming
across more like a street punk than a religious leader among Najaf’s
refined and somewhat snobbish clerical aristocracy. He seemed
to speak with a slight lisp.
It would be nearly a year before his militia would fight Americans
openly, but already he warned that the time would come. His men
had taken over much of Shia Iraq, providing social services and
security and imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on
women and more liberal Muslims. His network of clerics coordinated
their sermons, and his bayans were posted on mosque walls throughout
the country.
On June 23, 2003, he returned from Iran, where he had met with
his father’s exiled student and intellectual heir, Ayatollah
Kadhim al Haeri, and commemorated the death of Ayatollah Khomeini
with government officials. It was Muqtada’s first visit
to Baghdad since his father’s death four years earlier.
In Sadr City tens of thousands greeted him with Iraqi and Shia
tribal flags. A speaker read the victory verse from the Quran:
“If you receive God’s victory and you witness a great
many people joining Islam, thank your God and ask him to forgive
you, for God is very merciful.” People chanted, “Muqtada,
don’t worry, we will sacrifice our blood for the Hawza!”
They sang a song written in praise to Saddam with new lyrics praising
Muqtada. When a speaker asked the crowd to make room for Muqtada
to take the stage, they would not move, everyone wanting a chance
to be close to him. Muqtada cried, or pretended to, addressing
the crowd: “I visited this city when my father was alive,
and I will visit this city on this day every year.” Muqtada
spoke of the memory of the martyrs and promised that businesses
would return to Iraq and that the unemployment problem would soon
be solved. He also promised to establish a humanitarian office
in Sadr City. He spoke for seven minutes, and the crowds of adulators
would again not move to let him leave.
That month, when Muqtada’s name was proposed as a possible
member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, other members
of the council rejected the idea. Muqtada and his constituency
were radicalized by the exclusion, and he took on the role of
a spoiler. He temporarily grew closer to Haeri. Though Muqtada’s
politics were at the time inchoate, lacking ideology and seeking
only inclusion and power, Haeri was a rigid Khomeinist, with a
clearly defined political program aimed at establishing a theocracy
in Iraq, just as Khomeini had established one in Iran 25 years
ago.
On July 20, Muqtada publicly claimed that American soldiers had
surrounded his home and were planning to arrest him. Thousands
of protestors descended upon Najaf. Demonstrators chanted, “No
Americans after today,” echoing Saddam’s storm troopers,
who in 1991 ransacked southern Iraq warning that there would be
“no Shias after today.” Some carried swords and flags.
A message from Ayatollah Haeri was read to the crowd condemning
the “American agents” of the Iraqi Governing Council
and calling on the clerics to rule Iraq. From the shrine of Ali,
protestors walked past Najaf’s cemetery in rows and columns
like soldiers to the American base in Najaf, where the protest
leaders handed a list of demands—including an immediate
withdrawal from the city—to the American colonel.
On August 13 an American helicopter hovered over a Sadr City
radio tower flying the black Mahdi flag. Soldiers tried to knock
it down. Thousands of protestors clashed with U.S. troops; at
least one Iraqi was killed and several others wounded. For Iraq’s
insecure Shias, accustomed to victimization and reared on myths
of martyrdom, it was the spark they had been waiting for: the
Americans had declared war on Islam. In spite of an official apology,
Friday prayers two days later in Sadr City were inflammatory.
Sheikh Abdul Hadi al Daraji, a Sadr spokesman, warned that Iraqis
would exact revenge for attacks against their sacred symbols.
“Yesterday Saddam the infidel attacked our holy sites and
the people of this holy city,” Daraji cried, “and
now the Americans do the same thing. So what is the difference
between Saddam and America?” He warned that people would
seek revenge against the Americans, but the army of the Mahdi
would channel that anger and control it.
For the next nine months Muqtada continued to test the limits
of American tolerance, sometimes virtually declaring war on them,
then retreating and welcoming them as friends. In a sermon he
praised the September 11 attacks and condemned the Interim Governing
Council and all its actions. In March 2004 the Americans closed
his newspaper, al Hawza, which they accused of calling for violence,
arrested an influential associate of his, and issued an arrest
warrant for him as well. To the Americans Muqtada was an annoyance
and a religious radical, but they had been led to believe that
he had no constituency and could be forced to retreat. But American
pressure on Muqtada only increased his following among Shias.
At the same time, the revelations of American abuse of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib and the attack on Fallujah allowed Muqtada to capitalize
on growing anti-American feeling.
Following the success of Shia parties in the January 2005 elections,
Muqtada’s representatives in the Iraqi National Assembly
demanded a timetable for U.S. withdrawal, a demand also made by
Sunni rejectionists, who refused to participate in the new government
or rein in the resistance until the Americans committed to leaving
Iraq. The vote on the initiative fell short of the needed majority,
but Muqtada’s championing of a nationalist and anti-American
agenda shared by Sunni leaders suggested a fragile alliance. Muqtada
also joined Sunnis in condemning the draft constitution. Like
them, he opposed giving the Kurds local political control of their
region in the north and also opposed the Shia SCIRI leader Abdel
Aziz al Hakim’s goal of establishing autonomous Shia regions
in the south. Muqtada’s followers demonstrated against the
constitution, sometimes marching with Sunnis. In the summer of
2005 militiamen loyal to Muqtada clashed with SCIRI militiamen
in several Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, Nasriya, Najaf, and
Amara. The two Shia movements had a historic rivalry dating back
to the time when competing clerics sought to succeed the first
martyr. But Muqtada and his followers also resented SCIRI for
living in exile and for returning on the backs of American tanks.
They suspected SCIRI of being controlled by Iran, while accusing
it publicly of collaborating with the United States. Most importantly,
this was a turf war: each faction hoped to establish power among
the Shias.
Despite the tensions between Muqtada’s followers, also
known as the Sadrists, and SCIRI, Muqtada was invited by SCIRI
and Dawa to join the United Iraqi Alliance, the dominant Shia
coalition that would be competing in the elections for the National
Assembly in December 2005. They needed the numbers, and he could
provide them. The Sadrists were granted equal status with the
two other parties, giving them the opportunity to win as many
as 30 seats in the National Assembly. Muqtada was legitimate now,
no longer on the outside.
Later that year he visited Saudi Arabia on the hajj pilgrimage
as an official guest of the Saudi king; then he visited Iran,
Syria, and Lebanon, practicing his diplomatic skills and establishing
a close relationship with the Syrian leader Bashar al Assad and
Lebanese Shias.
By this time, the United States understood Muqtada’s power.
When the Americans realized they had to work to encourage Sunni
participation in the December election, they condemned Shia militias
and pressured Shia Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari to step down
in favor of a candidate Sunnis would find less aligned with Muqtada,
and therefore more acceptable.
By the time I saw Muqtada in the spring of 2006, he was no longer
meeting with the media for security reasons. While the rhetoric
of nationalism still pervaded his sermons, so did thinly veiled
references to Sunnis as infidels. All hope of an alliance between
Sunnis and Shias was gone.
* * *
Muqtada read a verse from the Quran and then switched into Iraqi
dialect. Like his father, Muqtada spoke in a quiet monotone, without
the emotion many clerics invest in their speeches. He was not
a talented speaker. He kept his eyes down most of the time, reading
from his notes and only glancing up occasionally.
“This is the time when right becomes wrong and wrong becomes
right,” he said. “When women become corrupt. Occupation
has become liberation, and resistance has become terrorism. The
occupation has joined the nawasib—those who do not accept
the Shia imams and hate the family of the prophet.” To Muqtada’s
followers this meant the Sunnis. “Look at them,” he
said, “the occupation and the nawasib. And look at their
values.” He called for Muslims to be united. “Which
Muslims?” he asked. “The ones who say we are good
Muslims. The ones who follow the family of the prophet. In the
past God punished people by sending frogs, locusts, lice. Now
he punishes them by sending earthquakes, mad-cow disease, hurricanes,
floods, bird flu, the diseases in Africa, and globalization, armies,
politics, solar and lunar eclipses.”
Muqtada sat down for a minute, and somebody in the crowd shouted
a hossa, a responsive slogan. “For the love of the oppressed,
the two martyrs, the Sadrs, pray for Muhammad and the family of
Muhammad!” he shouted. Thousands of people bellowed, “Our
God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.” They
waved their fists. “And speed the Mahdi’s return!
And damn his enemies!”‚
Muqtada stood up once again. In spite of his veiled attack on
Sunnis he expressed the hope that political struggles would not
cause sectarian strife, and he blamed what strife there had been
so far on the Americans. He gave his condolences to his followers
for a joint American and Iraqi army raid on one of his movement’s
offices in the Mustafa Husseiniya—a northern Baghdad Shia
religious center—two weeks before. “That attack was
not the first carried out by the occupation forces,” he
said. “It is part of a series. . . . The occupation has
attacked a lot of people among us. It has started killing civilians
in the streets and in public areas. They are killing us randomly.
They drag cars with their tanks. And they torture prisoners in
Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr and other hidden prisons in Iraq. They
made our neighbors our enemies.
“We did not have a country under Saddam, and now that Saddam
is gone, why can we not have a country? . . . Even though we and
our neighbors have one religion and one fate, the United States
has succeeded in making us enemies. Instead of reconstructing
the shrine of the two imams in Samarra”‚ an important
Shia shrine whose bombing in February 2006 fed the civil war—‚
the occupation is building prisons.” Muqtada switched to
Iraqi dialect again to quip, “preparing them for the Iraqi
people.”‚
“When the press insults the prophet Muhammad, they say
this is the freedom of the press. And when our press writes something
true against America, they say it incites terrorism. So this is
all proof that the small Satan has gone and the big Satan has
come.
“So be patient, my brothers,” he said. “They
are trying to plant a civil war. Do not let them drag you into
it. We know that they are going to assassinate our clerics and
our leaders to make a sectarian and civil war. So be careful.
We will never be oppressed. Do everything to resist the American
idea called democracy.”
Muqtada asked the nationalist forces in Iraq to help him pressure
the Americans to schedule their withdrawal. He called for the
United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic
Conference to cooperate in what he called “the national
project for scheduling the withdrawal of the occupation of Iraq.”
And he outlined his plan: the withdrawal would begin in Iraq’s
stable areas such as the south, some of the middle (the Shia areas),
and the north. Security would be turned over to Iraqis, and Iraqi
airspace would not be used by military planes without the permission
of the parliament and the governorates. The Iraqi security forces
would be trained, but not by the Americans, and all the members
of government would refrain from associating with the Americans
as well.
When Muqtada withdrew and the prayer leader took over, thousands
of men rushed the windows and fences in the hope of seeing Muqtada
one last time. “Ali is with you!” they shouted as
he walked by. The crowd slowly made its way out of the mosque.
One man shouted, “Curse America and Israel and pray for
Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” Thousands joined in.
In Baghdad that day, the important Shia Buratha mosque was attacked,
leaving nearly 100 dead and more than 100 wounded. It was the
second postwar attack on this mosque, and it would not be the
last; another suicide bomber would strike in June. The mosque’s
imam, the SCIRI politician Jalal al Din al Saghir, blamed two
Sunni newspapers for falsely claiming that the mosque was a secret
prison and the site of a mass grave for Sunnis.
On the road back to Baghdad, Ahmed called his friends on his
mobile phone to tell them that he had seen Muqtada speak. He told
me repeatedly how lucky I was.
* * *
Ten days earlier, on March 27, 2006, I had driven into the al
Shaab district of northern Baghdad with a long convoy of Mahdi
Army pickup trucks and minibuses. Several hundred fighters were
waving flags and machine guns. Blue and white Iraqi police trucks
drove along with them.
It was one day after the incident that Muqtada had mentioned
in his sermon: a still little-understood American raid on the
Mustafa Husseiniya that had inflamed Shia rage against Americans
but had secretly satisfied many Sunnis. A statement issued later
that day by the U.S. military said, “Iraqi special-operations
forces conducted a twilight raid today in the Adhamiyah neighborhood
in northeast Baghdad to disrupt a terrorist cell responsible for
attacks on Iraqi security and coalition forces and kidnapping
Iraqi civilians in the local area.” It added that “no
mosques were entered or damaged” and that the operation
was conducted at dusk to “ensure no civilians were in the
area and to minimize the possibility of collateral damage.”
It also claimed that U.S. forces were merely present as advisers;
only Iraqi soldiers were involved.
The American statement was at best confused. The raid had targeted
the husseiniya, which strictly speaking was not a mosque but which
had the same function. Before the war it had been a Baath Party
office. Like other Baath Party buildings seized by Muqtada’s
followers, the Mustafa Husseiniya now had a minaret clearly protruding
above its walls, with loudspeakers on top to broadcast the calls
to prayer. Several rooms had been given to the Dawa Party for
its offices. Furthermore, the husseiniya was not in the Adhamiya
neighborhood. Adhamiya is a Sunni bastion, not far from Shaab
but worlds apart. Could the Americans have confused the most Sunni
neighborhood in Baghdad with a Shia stronghold? Could they have
confused Muqtada’s militia with a terrorist cell?
I had arranged to meet a journalist I knew from Shaab who was
also a close confidant of Sheikh Safaa, the imam of the husseiniya
and Muqtada’s deputy in Shaab. When we spoke on the side
of the road, far from the husseiniya, he warned me that he would
act as if he did not know me when we met later at the mosque;
it would be dangerous for him if people knew he associated with
foreigners. He wore a black suit, a dark shirt with no tie, and
leather shoes—Madhi Army dress. He told me that Sheikh Safaa
was expecting me and that he had asked the sheikh to guarantee
my safety.
The journalist was an informal intelligence gatherer in the neighborhood.
Three years earlier I had found thousands of Baathist security
files in an abandoned and looted General Security Service office
that documented the day-to-day operations of the dictatorship,
including orders for executions, arrests, spreading rumors, and
countering rumors, as well as lists of snitches and collaborators,
and careful records of mosque sermons. They revealed the names
of Baathists and those who cooperated secretly with them and the
fates of missing men imprisoned under Saddam. At the time I felt
that they were Iraqi patrimony and should be handed over to an
Iraqi movement. The journalist was associated with the Dawa Party
and asked to borrow them. I agreed. I never got them back. I now
believe that they were used to compile hit lists for Shia militias
in Shaab who targeted former Baathists. The journalist was involved
in this.
A large sign in front of the husseiniya bore the faces of Muqtada’s
father and local Mahdi Army martyrs. Black banners hung on the
wall with Arabic letters in white, red, green, and yellow: “The
massacre of the Mustafa Husseiniya was done by the Wahhabis with
the help of the Americans.” Another said that the massacre
was committed by “the forces of darkness with the help of
the forces of occupation.”
The husseiniya was blocked off by concrete barriers, and in the
lot in front of it stood a large black chadir, a round tent erected
for mourning. Rows of plastic chairs lined its sides, and several
turbaned clerics sat talking. It is customary for visitors to
enter on the right side, shaking the hands of all present, wishing
peace upon them one by one. Each then sits down and asks God to
have mercy on the one who reads the fatiha, the first verse of
the Quran. Everyone recites the fatiha seated except for the relatives
of the deceased, who stand. Following the recital, the men wipe
their hands down their faces.
In front of the husseiniya was a small stand where a pot of tea
was boiling. I was offered a small glass of the very sweet and
strong tea popular in Iraq, always poured into glasses that taper
inward gracefully. The young men guarding the mosque welcomed
me and gave me a tour of the wreckage. The journalist was there,
too, and he introduced himself as promised. The men pointed to
a pile of rubble that had been the imam’s home. A missile
fired from an American Apache helicopter had apparently destroyed
it. As proof, the men had collected all the shrapnel, along with
numerous shell casings from American M-16s, not the Kalashnikovs
used by Iraqis. Three blackened cars sat inside the courtyard.
These, the men explained, had belonged to people praying in the
mosque and had been parked outside, but the Americans had burned
them and dragged them in. “By God, I don’t know why
the Americans came,” said one of my guides. “They
killed people praying, innocent people.”
Brownish-red stains still marked the courtyard. “One of
the people praying was shot here”he pointed—and dragged
all the way here. And one was shot here.” He showed me dried
pools of blood in the next room and pointed to the ceiling, where
blood and pieces of flesh had splattered. “They brought
four here; one of them was 14.” He gestured toward a doorway.
“There were five martyrs in that room.”
To the left of the husseiniya were several rooms that had been
given to the Dawa Party. This was not Prime Minister Ibrahim al
Jaafari’s party but a rival Dawa Party branch (there are
three) that had been exiled in Iran. Inside the offices, blood
covered plastic chairs and parts of the floor. Political posters
on the walls featured the first and second Sadr martyrs. “Here
they killed one,” my guides told me, pointing to more blood.
We were interrupted by a guide’s mobile phone; its ring
tone was an angry Shia sermon.
In one of the Dawa Party’s rooms they showed me a vast
pool of blood with white pieces of brain stuck in it. I glanced
at a Sunni doctor who was my interlocutor to get confirmation.
It looked real to him. The men pointed to more blood. “Torture,
you understand? Torture?” one said. A book written by Muhammad
Sadiq al Sadr was bloodied. A poster of Prime Minister Jaafari
had black ink scribbled on his face. In the room where the ceremonial
drums and chains were stored, drums had been torn.
Outside, Sheikh Safaa paced back and forth in the courtyard by
his destroyed home, talking on his mobile phone. The journalist
and several other young men surrounded him to consult as I waited.
I recognized another one of them, also wearing a black suit and
shirt with no tie and leather shoes. He worked for the Iraqi government’s
de-Baathification committee but passed information about Baathists
along to the Mahdi Army.
Sheikh Safaa agreed to meet me inside the prayer room itself.
Its green carpet and shiny model of the Najaf shrine were still
intact. On its walls hung verses from the Quran about judgment
day, a picture of Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr, and one of Muqtada.
Sheikh Safaa looked extremely young, and his stylishly groomed
beard was still not fully mature. He was thin, with a long, narrow
nose. He wore modern wire-frame glasses and had a white imama,
or turban, balanced on his ears. As we spoke he held his mobile
phone and prayer beads in one hand, gesticulating with the other.
He confirmed that the mosque belonged to the Sadrists. He explained
that they had permitted the Dawa Party to use some of their rooms
as an office. “They are old people, and they are even not
capable of carrying a weapon,” he said. “They didn’t
even have a guard in their office. The American forces denied
that they attacked the husseiniya—they said they just attacked
the Dawa office—but it was a lie. . . . The truth is they
entered both the Dawa office and the Mustafa Husseiniya and they
killed in a very barbaric way. . . . And nobody expected the Americans
would do that, especially those who saw films about freedom in
America. No one expected this.
“We were surprised at six o’clock, half an hour before
the prayer, by a large number of Humvees and another armored vehicles.
They surrounded the husseiniya and started firing randomly. It
didn’t sound like Kalashnikovs or classic light weapons
but like Dushkas and heavy belt-fed machine guns. They also used
bombs and grenades.” I was surprised by his knowledge of
weapons.
“There were low-flying planes and helicopters. I don’t
know if they were F-16s or B-52s. Infantry soldiers came in shooting.
They took the brothers to a single place and grouped them together
and executed them. One of them had a black band on his forehead
because he was a sayyid. He was the one who got the most bullets.
You have already seen his brains. They went inside the shrine
with a grenade. People were praying. They went inside the mihrab
[which only the imam enters]. The mosque should be a safe place.
. . . I have four children, and they were very scared. They still
are not stable. I went today to visit my mother, an old woman.
She was in shock and couldn’t recognize me.”
Sheikh Safaa blamed the political pressure on Jafaari for the
raid. “Americans think that Jaafari is the closest man to
the Sadrists, and they don’t like the Sadrists to have a
friend in the prime minister’s position in Iraq. They allowed
the Sadrists to participate in the elections, but the election
results were not what the Americans wanted, so they are putting
political pressure to prevent things from going in the direction
they dislike.”
Sheikh Safaa warned of his people’s anger. Over the last
few days, he said, the people of Shaab “were very upset
by the presence of the occupation. Muqtada demanded that the occupation
forces apologize and compensate the families of the victims. America
should not kill and compensate. Just stop killing. When the occupier
came to this country we lost our security, and security is one
of the most important favors that God gives to us. It is true
that there was a strong oppression of Iraqis by the former regime.
America came to Iraq proclaiming its liberation and freedom and
democracy and pluralism, but America proclaimed one thing and
we saw something else. We saw freedom, but it was the freedom
of tanks and the democracy of Humvees, and instead of multiple
parties we saw multiple killings of people in ugly ways.”
That Thursday, March 30, I attended the weekly press briefing
of Major General Rick Lynch, the U.S. military spokesperson, in
the Combined Press Information Center. I expected some mention
of the raid, since prominent Shias had issued angry statements.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al Jaafari said that the dead had indeed
been inside a mosque. Nuri al Maliki, who would soon succeed Jaafari
as prime minister, said on Iraqi state television, “This
was a hostile attack looking to destroy the political process
and provoke a civil war.” He blamed the American military
and the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Lynch wore pressed fatigues with two stars on his shoulder straps.
He stood before American and Iraqi flags and throughout the conference
remained expressionless. His hands sliced the air to emphasize
points, in rhythm with his words.
“Our operations continue across Iraq towards the identified
end state,” he said, “an Iraq that is at peace with
its neighbors and that is an ally in the war on terrorism, that
has a representative government and that respects the human rights
of all Iraqis, that has a security force that can maintain domestic
order and deny Iraq as a safe haven for terror. And now we’re
making progress there every day.” He explained that attacks
against the coalition forces were concentrated in three provinces:
Baghdad, al Anbar, and Salah ad Din. He neglected to mention that
this was also where U.S. troops were concentrated and where some
of the biggest cities—Baghdad, Tikrit, Samarra, and Ramadi,
among others—were located.
“The enemy,” he said, “specifically the terrorists
and foreign fighters, specifically al Qaeda in Iraq, the face
of which is Zarqawi, is now specifically targeting Iraqi security-force
members and Iraqi civilians. In fact, the number of attacks against
Iraqi security-force members has increased 35 percent in the last
four weeks compared with the previous six months.” General
Lynch told the story of Sunni Arab recruits to the army who joined
even after some other recruits had been killed in a suicide bombing.
“If that’s not a testimony to the courage and conviction
of the Iraqi people, I don’t know what is. They’re
uniting against Zarqawi. As we’ve talked about before, counterinsurgency
operations average nine years. The people that are going to win
this counterinsurgency battle against Zarqawi and al Qaeda in
Iraq are the Iraqi people, and indications like that show their
courage, their conviction, and their commitment to a democratic
future. Amazing story.” General Lynch insisted on talking
as if the insurgency were limited to al Qaeda.
“We are making great progress to our end state here inside
Iraq,” General Lynch said. He switched slides to a satellite
image of Ur and Shaab showing the Mustafa Husseiniya. It was labeled
“Tgt Complex.” Several blocks away was a building
described, falsely, as the Ibrahim al Khalil Mosque, and even
farther away was a building described, again falsely, as the Al
Mustafa Mosque.
“Last Sunday,” he said, “Iraqi special-operations
forces had indications that a kidnapping cell was working out
of this target complex. . . . This was led, planned, and executed
by the Iraqi special-operations forces, based on detailed intelligence
that a kidnapping cell was occupying this complex. The operation
consisted of about 50 members of Iraqi special operations forces
and about 25 U.S. advisers. But the U.S. advisers were there purely
in an advisory role. They did none of the fighting; there wasn’t
a shot fired from a U.S. service member during the conduct of
this operation. They surveyed the battlefield in advance, looking
for sensitive areas, and they said, Okay, there are mosques in
the area, but the nearest mosque is about six blocks from the
target-point complex, so a decision was made to do the operation.
. . .
“All told, 16 insurgents were killed, 18 were detained.
We found over 32 weapons, and we found the hostage, the innocent
Iraqi, who just 12 hours before was walking the streets of Baghdad.
He was walking the streets of Baghdad en route to a hospital to
visit his brother who had gunshot wounds. He was kidnapped and
beaten in the car en route to this complex. When he got there,
they emptied his pockets, they took out his wallet, and in the
wallet was a picture of his daughter, and he asked for one thing:
he said, ‘Please, before you kill me, allow me to kiss the
picture of my daughter. That’s all I ask.’ The kidnappers
told him, ‘Hey, we got you, and if we don’t get $20,000
sometime soon, you’re dead.’ And they showed him the
bare electrical wires that they were going to use to torture him
and then kill him. And they said, ‘We’re going to
go away and do some drugs, and when we come back, we’re
going to kill you.’
“He was beaten. He was tortured. He was tortured with an
electrical drill. Twelve hours after he was kidnapped, he was
rescued. . . . He is indeed most grateful. He is most grateful
to be alive, and he is most grateful to the Iraqi special-operations
forces. . . . The closest mosque was six blocks away. When they
got close to the compound, they took fire, and they returned fire.
When they got inside the room, a room in this compound, they realized
this could have been a husseiniya, a prayer room. They saw a prayer
rug. They saw a minaret. They didn’t know about that in
advance, but from that room and from that compound, they were
taking fire. In that room and in that compound, the enemy was
holding a hostage and torturing a hostage, and in that room and
in that compound, they were storing weapons, munitions, and IED
explosive devices. Very, very effective operation, planned and
executed by Iraqi special-operations forces.”
When asked who the enemy might have been, Lynch responded, “Extremists,
terrorists, and criminals, and it’s all intertwined. We
have reason to believe and evidence to support that the terrorists
and foreign fighters are indeed using kidnapping as a way to finance
their operations. And the story that I told about Sunday night’s
kidnapping can be told many more times.”
I remembered my visit three days earlier. There had been no signs
inside or outside the husseiniya of a gun battle or any fire coming
from inside, no random bullet holes in the husseiniya or the buildings
around it, no Kalashnikov shells (although those could have been
removed). The entire affair had seemed one-sided, and General
Lynch’s account of the kidnappers was pretty implausible.
If the Americans had committed extrajudicial killings there, they
were lying about the incident and even its location. They may
have stumbled on a Shia assassination squad targeting Sunnis,
but they seemed to have no idea.
* * *
In fact, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s Sheikh Safaa was at the
center of an organized campaign against Sunnis in Shaab, which
was one of the first parts of Baghdad where Sunnis were the victims
of assassinations and cleansing by Shia militias. Here, in the
Baghdad neighborhood with the second-largest Mahdi Army presence,
the civil war began in earnest in early 2005.
But it all started in the last months of 2004. Shias had fought
alongside Sunnis in April in the first battle of Fallujah, but
by November, when a second battle between Americans and insurgents
destroyed the Sunni city of Fallujah, some Shias were beginning
to think that the Fallujans got what they deserved for harboring
Zarqawi and his killing force. The near-daily insurgent attacks
against Iraqi policemen and soldiers had taken on a sectarian
tone, because these forces were mostly composed of poor Shia men;
Sunnis avoided joining. And as Shias grew indifferent to Fallujans’
suffering, Sunnis became resentful, and some turned murderous.
Sunni militias started targeting Shias as Shias, not as forces
of the occupation.
As Sunni refugees from the bombed-out Fallujah settled in west
Baghdad, the cleansing of Shias began. The neighborhoods there
were Sunni strongholds, with a formidable presence of both insurgents
and Salafis, people who practice a strict, reactionary form of
Sunni Islam that in its most extreme form even sanctions the killing
of all who disagree with its tenets. Shia families started getting
threats urging them to leave. If they ignored the threats, their
homes were attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias (women
were rarely targeted).
It was in the al Amriya neighborhood of Baghdad in the last months
of 2004 that violence by Sunnis against Shias became widespread.
Hundreds of families were brutally forced out. Vacated homes were
seized by Sunni refugees. Not only insurgents but relatives of
refugees who merely needed housing conducted attacks. In the months
leading up to the January 2005 elections, Amriya’s streets
were littered with leaflets, and walls were covered with graffiti
calling for “death for those who betray what they have promised
God,” meaning death for those who participate in the election.
Jafar’s family was one of four Shia families on their street
in Amriya. They were the third to flee. Two others had left a
month before: one after their son, a translator for the U.S. Army,
was assassinated in the gate of his home and the other after receiving
a threat—their son worked in the Iraqi police forces.
Jafar is a Shia originally from Nassiriya. His family moved to
Baghdad in 1940, but maintained the connection with their tribe
in the south. Jafar lived in Amriya in a big house with his 70-year-old
mother, his brothers, and a large extended family. The family
was known for practicing the Shia tradition of cooking food and
giving it away to poor people on Ashura (the anniversary of Imam
Hussein’s martyrdom), even in the final years of Baath rule.
On September 4, 2005, they found a letter in their garage: “In
the name of God, do not think God is unaware of what the oppressors
are doing. We are watching your movements step after step, and
we know that you have betrayed God and his messenger; for that
we give you 48 hours to leave Amriya forever, and you should thank
God that you are still alive. And there will be no excuse after
this warning.”
The writer did not seem well versed in the Quran, and there was
no heading or signature to reveal the letter’s origins.
It seemed more a personal threat than a Jihadist operation. Nonetheless,
the family did not take a chance. They fled. The brothers split
up because they could not find a place that could take them all.
Jafar moved in with his wife’s parents in a Shia neighborhood;
the rest of the family moved into their aunt’s house in
the al Binok district. They had to leave much of their property
behind: there was no time to pack, and there would be much less
space in their new home.
In Dora, another majority Sunni neighborhood of west Baghdad,
the cleansing of Shias was even more brutal. Once one of Baghdad’s
nicest and most expensive neighborhoods, terrorism had brought
housing values down to a third of their pre-war price. Fleeing
Shia families would sell them cheaply, or abandon them; and poor
Sunnis would move in and live among other Sunnis. The cleansing
had been carried out largely by local insurgents who lived in
the farms of Dora (Arab Jiboor and Hor Rijab), but criminals had
also contributed, demanding money for kidnapped members of rich
families. When no hostage was taken, which was most often the
case, it was a sectarian attack.
Solaf was a 33-year-old Shia carpenter who had lived in Dora
since 1974, the youngest brother of five from the poor Abu Muhammad
family. His oldest brother, Muhammad, joined the police in mid-2004;
in May 2005 he was threatened and told to quit. But Muhammad needed
work, so he kept his job. He moved out of his parents’ house
and rented a small house in Shaab, a safer place for Shias. The
other brothers did not feel safe and tried to sell their house.
In mid-July they accepted an offer, but there was a delay in
signing the contract. Days later, as Solaf sat at the gate of
his home chatting with a friend, a white Hyundai stopped a few
meters away. A gunman with neither uniform nor mask emerged and
started shooting, killing Solaf and his friend. Solaf’s
family buried him the next day. On the second day of the funeral,
they received another threat and left Dora forever.
One week after Solaf’s murder, his mother heard that the
family of Solaf’s dead friend, who are Sunnis, had received
jizya, or blood money, of two million Iraqi dinars and an apology
from the mujahideen. Two Sunni families now live in Solaf’s
old house.
In the Shia stronghold of Shaab, Shias began retaliating against
Sunnis for the killings of their brothers, in a tit-for-tat that
foreshadowed what was to come. The Mahdi Army, having battled
coalition forces in April 2004, had formed new hierarchies and
accumulated guns and vehicles. Shia attacks on Sunnis would become
better organized after January 2005, when Sheikh Haitham al Ansari
was assassinated.
Sheikh Haitham was Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr’s representative
in the Friday prayers. He fled to Syria in 1999 and returned to
Iraq only after Saddam’s fall. At the time he was an ally
of Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, and he immediately
gained political importance, grouping different Shia factions
together around him. Most importantly, he enjoyed wide popularity
among Mahdi Army soldiers. His murder on January 2, 2005, a few
months after he joined the United Iraqi Alliance as the Sadrist
representative, infuriated young Mahdi Army soldiers and other
loyalists. Further inflaming passions was the attempted assassination
of another prominent Shia, the so-called Prince of the Marshes,
Haj Abdul-Karim Mahood al Muhammadawi of Iraqi Hizbullah, as he
left Haitham’s funeral.
Soon after, organized campaigns against Sunnis in Shaab began.
Sheikh Safaa decided to avenge Haitham’s murder. He established
a special assassination squad under his command. All his soldiers
belonged to the Mahdi Army, and all targets belonged to the Salafi
movement. A room inside the Mustafa Husseiniya was used for torturing
suspects. Prisoners’ confessions to attacks against Shias
or civilians were filmed, with the interrogator’s voice
in the background, asking questions calmly in a southern Iraqi
accent (the same one common in Sadr City). One film captured the
group that confessed to the murder of Sheikh Haitham al Ansari.
The films were kept in the Sheikh’s possession and were
not distributed, only saved as evidence that people who deserved
it were executed. Sometimes the executions were filmed too.
Sheikh Safaa armed his death squad with grenades, grenade launchers,
and Kalashnikovs. He hand-picked the soldiers for their strength
and prowess and supplied them with vehicles donated by supporters
in Shaab. Having Mahdi Army friends in the vehicle-registration
department helped the group replace license plates. Sheikh Safaa
gave final approval of all targets, who would then be tracked
for a couple of days before their murder. There was no need for
the sheikh’s permission to follow a target merely to gather
intelligence. When they conducted operations and raids, members
of the group usually wore all black or military uniforms. Sometimes
they coordinated their operations with the Iraqi army. When raiding
a target’s house at night, the group operated quickly, dragging
him from bed, taking him to the mosque for interrogation, executing
him, and then disposing of his body by dumping it in the outskirts
of Sadr City locally known as al Sadda.
The killings of Shias by Sunnis and Sunnis by Shias escalated
into systematic sectarian cleansing in certain Baghdad neighborhoods.
Local Shia and Sunni militias were running death squads, sometimes
targeting their neighbors, even secular Iraqis, who would in the
end have no choice but to embrace the militias who might protect
them. This grinding daily violence had little to do with resistance
against the occupation, despite the clerics’ rhetoric. It
would make a project of national reconciliation very hard indeed.
Al Maalif, a poor, majority-Shia neighborhood of Baghdad lying
in the southern part of the Seidiya district, is a case study
in the cycle of violence. It was established in the late 1980s
when the government moved tribes from villages north of Baghdad
to build a factory and military camp in their place. The families
moved from village to city but preserved their tribal habits and
traditions. The neighborhood consists of a few large tribes and
other poor people (both Sunnis and Shias) who moved to the city
in the 1990s for cheaper living, but Shias are the vast majority
there, unlike in Seidiya in general, which is evenly split.
On June 13, 2005, the Shia Shuhada al Taf mosque was attacked
with a car bomb. Angry relatives of victims attacked Sunnis in
the area. That night Shias wrote “Death to Saddam and death
to Zarqawi” on the wall of the local Sunni Ali al Sajjad
mosque. Sunnis left “Death to Saddam” but removed
Zarqawi’s name, which only angered Shias more.
Hussein, a butcher from the Tual tribe who owned five shops in
Seidiya, and his partner, Ahmed al Mulla, also from the Tual,
formed a death squad targeting Sunnis. After two of Ahmed’s
brothers returned from exile in Iran where they had been soldiers
in the Badr Brigade, Hussein and Ahmed hung portraits of Ayatollahs
Sistani and Khomeini over their shops walls. They too joined the
Badr Brigade. Shia locals who had raided the Baath Party office
and transformed it into a Shia mosque gave them records with the
names, addresses, and personal information of party members in
Seidiya. The records even included the types of weapons they owned
and the serial number for each weapon. Hussein and Ahmed scanned
the records and interviewed about ten former regime loyalists
a day in an interrogation room they set up in one of Hussein’s
shops. They would knock on their doors and inform them: “You
were a Baath Party member and you need to come visit us in our
office in the Elam Market to clarify a few issues concerning you.”
Their “office” was a desk with two chairs and a long
bench. They would ask the Baathist to sit on the bench and sign
a statement: “I condemn all the former regime’s activities
against the Iraqi people, and I regret everything I have done
with that regime, and I promise to never help the Baath Party
again.” The Baathists would then be asked to turn over their
weapons. Ahmed and Hussein would check the serial number against
the records. They did not let any Baathist retain his weapons.
Assassinations of local Baathists in Seidiya intensified one
month after the office opened. They started fleeing the district.
Hussein and Ahmed tried to obtain a fatwa to give them legitimate
cover for their militia, but no respected cleric would give them
one. Even their dear friend and neighbor Sheikh Dhafer al Qeisi,
the Sistani representative for southern Baghdad, refused; he did,
however, support them secretly.
Hussein and Ahmed’s militia operated very professionally;
its many young members moved quickly, driving fast German Opels.
Ahmed spoke proudly about his operations in public and often said
that he would exceed 100 dead “Saddamists” before
2005 ended. Since most of the former Baathists in his neighborhood
were Sunni, all Sunnis in the neighborhood began to fear Ahmed,
worrying that they might be the next target. In late 2004 Sunnis
from the Omar Mosque in Elam formed their own assassination group.
Their main targets were Ahmed and Hussein.
One evening in March of 2005, Ahmed al Mullah was attacked in
his shop. A member of his group, Kadhum, died immediately; Ahmed
was seriously wounded. One week after he left the hospital, while
visiting the shop again, he was assassinated. His group ceased
operations. They had killed more than 50. In October, Hussein
was shot while driving home. Another brother, locking up the shop
the next day, found a warning: “In the name of God, we did
not oppress them, but they oppressed themselves, those who killed
the sons of Sunnis and Baathists, killed the men, made the children
orphans, and made the wives widows. They are cursed for what their
hands have done. We will beat them like they beat us, and we will
kill them everywhere.”
The end of the militia didn’t make al Maalif any safer
for Sunnis. On December 25, 2005, 13 Sunni families were threatened
and ordered to leave their homes. Two left the next day. In other
families the men hid or left. A Sunni woman in al Maalif whose
son had left the city reported his words: “There is a conspiracy
to force Sunnis out of Baghdad. We are limited in where we can
move; we cannot move to Shulaa, Hurriya, Dolaie, Shaab, Baghdad
al Jadida, or al Amien, where we face the same threats. We can
only move to Sunni neighborhoods dominated by the resistance—Dora
and Amriya. But it is not safe to live there either. We cannot
avoid attacks by writing on the walls that we are Sunnis. We might
be attacked by the army since we live next to terrorists.”
In late 2006 a Shia friend of mine from Maalif updated me about
his neighborhood. “There are no more Sunnis,” he said.
“Maalif for Sunnis is much worse than Fallujah for Shias.”
A few months earlier the body of his 16-year-old Sunni neighbor
had been found decapitated. The Mahdi Army had continued cleansing
the neighborhood, and after a mortar attack by insurgents that
killed more than 50 civilians, war was declared on the neighborhood’s
Sunnis. Sunnis with friends in Shia neighborhoods began exchanging
homes with them. While battling Sunnis, the Mahdi Army routinely
took over houses, using their rooftops for firing positions and
sometimes terrorizing the inhabitants.
The civil war was spreading. Violence between Sunnis and Shias
took on a life of its own, operating outside the reaches of the
occupation and its forces. Sectarian violence even extended to
the American prisons in Iraq, and prisoners segregated themselves.
Sheikh Muayad al Khazaraji, a Shia who had been imprisoned by
Americans for stockpiling weapons in his mosque, told another
Sadrist cleric, “After I was in the jail I knew who is my
enemy and who is not. The Americans are not my enemy. The Americans
have interests, and anybody who wants to block the way of Americans
from obtaining those interests becomes their enemy and they destroy
him. Be away from their road and they will not touch you. Our
enemies are the Wahhabis.”
* * *
I returned to the Mustafa Husseiniya for the Friday prayers five
days after the attack, and much of the neighborhood was shut down.
Roads were blocked with tree trunks, trucks, or motorcycles. Mahdi
Army militiamen sat on chairs on the main road east to the husseiniya
asking for IDs as men walked slowly in the sun to the noon prayer.
The soldiers of the Mahdi Army were mostly in their 20s and 30s,
sporting carefully groomed clipped beards, shaved under the chin
and neck, and wearing all black, sometimes with cotton shirts
that said “Mahdi Army” and their unit’s name.
Many carried Iraqi police–issue Glock pistols and handcuffs
at their sides. They were off-duty policemen. The Mahdi Army had
become the police, and the police were the Madhi Army.
As the call to prayer ended, a man stood up to yell a hossa.
“Damn Wahhabism and takfirism and Saddamism and Judaism,
and pray for Muhammad!” The crowd yelled back, “Our
God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” Then
they shook their fists. “And speed the Mahdi’s return!
And damn his enemies!” Wearing a white turban and white
shroud to show he was prepared for martyrdom, Sheikh Hussein al
Assadi, the lead Sadrist cleric for the entire eastern half of
Baghdad, stood up behind the pulpit. The sermon would be inflammatory.
It would again blame the occupation for sectarian violence. But
like the sermons of other Sadrist clerics since early 2005, its
message would be implicitly sectarian—it would treat Sunnis
as infidels and urge, indirectly but using encoded language the
audience would understand, that they be subjugated and even killed.
“All this martyrdom was done by international Zionism and
world imperialism and the American occupation.” Sheikh al
Assadi’s angry voice echoed against the city’s walls.
Some filmed the sermon with their mobile phones. Sheikh al Assadi
prayed against the enemies of Islam, asking God to divide them
and make them hungry, to make them fight each other, to kill them,
to make them cowards, to push them from victory, to stop their
tongues, to make them run away, to make them always losers, to
make them examples for future generations, to make them infertile,
to make their livestock infertile, to stop the rain from them,
to kill their plants, and to unite Muslims. He reminded his listeners
that nothing could replace Islam because man’s laws, like
man, were imperfect, and therefore people must follow a constitution
written by God.
Sheikh al Assadi blamed the Americans for opening Iraq’s
borders to the takfiris, and he blamed the Americans for killing
Sunnis and claimed that they had thrown bodies in the Sadda area,
near Sadr City, to ruin the reputation of Sadr City and to frame
it for the crimes. He called the American government an occupying,
criminal, Zionist, infidel administration, a criminal against
humanity. He said that the Americans planted agents around the
world, including the Baath Party founder Michel Aflaq, who was
buried in hell, and Saddam, and the American ambassador to Iraq,
Zalmay Khalilzad, “the husband of the Jew who was accepted
by the Mossad.” He explained that “the American monkey
Bush” had admitted to collaborating with Israel. He said
that George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice were well-known Protestant
Christians and that such people were “Zionist Christians
who do not even believe in the Christian prophet, and so they
gave the green light to attack targets in Palestine and Lebanon.”
For good measure he called United Nations Secretary General Kofi
Annan an “idiot friend of Saddam.” He warned that
the UN has infiltrated in the north to help the Kurds under the
guise of humanitarian, charity, and health organizations and that
it openly occupies northern Iraq.
He condemned the “rotten spy” and “loyalists
of the criminal Saddam and some leaders in the infidel American
army” who declared that Mustafa Husseiniya was not a mosque
and said they wanted to return it to its previous use as a Baath
Party office “for slaughtering people.” He asked the
crowd of thousands to shout, “We will never be oppressed!”
and they thundered in response. Invoking the custom of tribal
vengeance that mandates that no funeral ceremonies be observed
for a murdered relative until his killers are themselves killed,
he said, “We promised ourselves not to cry for the martyrs
until we kill their killers in a worse way and the government
should not put their hands in the hands of those who killed us
and we want them to prove their Iraqi identity and Islamic identity
and we want them to release our prisoners or an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth.”
After the sermon, the streets of Hai Ur and Shaab filled with
men strolling home in the heat or heading for minibuses and trucks.
Prayer was also ending across town in the western Sunni neighborhood
of Ghazaliya; there, several hundred Sunni men were heading home
from the Um al Qura mosque. In Sunni mosques, too, clerics had
long since stopped appeals for unity.
Ghazaliya was built in the 1980s for Baath Party members and
Iraqi army offices. It was largely Sunni, although it had its
own Shia slums. Saddam didn’t allow Shia mosques to be built
there, so all 12 of Ghaziliya’s mosques are Sunni. Um al
Qura is the largest. Its name, which means “mother of villages,”
is a reference to Mecca. Built by Saddam as a symbol of his turn
to Sunni Islam at a cost of $7.5 million, the mosque (whose original
name was Um al Maarik, “mother of all battles”) commemorated
his battle against the United States and its allies in the 1991
Gulf War. Its tall minarets and sharp tapering dome, taller than
most in Iraq, are visible from far away. Four of the minarets
are shaped like Kalashnikovs and four like Scud missiles. A large
fence and a moat shaped like the Arab homeland surrounds it. Inside,
bright white marble and natural light streaming in from high up
gives more an impression of a cathedral than a mosque. The imam’s
voice echoes like a Gregorian chant. On the mosque’s cream-colored
walls hang green and gold decorations and gruesome posters of
murdered members of the Association of Muslim Scholars, allegedly
killed by Shia militias or the ministry of the interior’s
forces. The mosque’s huge parking lot has not been full
since the heady days of spring 2004.
Sunni mosques in Iraq rarely attract the same large crowds as
their Shia counterparts, since Sunnis generally go to the closest
mosque in their neighborhood. People tend to sit alone and pray
quietly. There are no group chants or social activities, no songs.
Men do not converse with each other. Some lean against the columns
in solitary thought.
About 500 men were present in Um al Qura the day Sheikh Sumaidai
made his way up the steps wearing a tightly wound white turban
and immaculate white robes. His beard was shaved so close it was
barely visible. He wore thin wire-frame glasses. Before microphones
from the full panoply of Iraqi and Arab television stations, he
began in a slow chant, eventually picking up, screaming, and waving
his hands as his emotion mounted, then began all over again, his
voice once more subdued until it built up to a frenzy—the
standard form.
The Prophet Muhammad’s birthday was coming up, and Sheikh
Sumaidai reminded his audience that Muslims had “felt like
kings in time of Muhammad and now they feel oppressed.”
He cut the air with his fists and asked, “What kind of life
are we living now? Is this a life? People have abandoned their
religion, abandoned their Islam! These days remind us of the days
before Muhammad’s birth. Where are the Muslims?”
Sheikh Sumaidai urged people not to abandon Islam, not to abandon
God’s word “and start chasing the slogans of the West
like democracy.” He compared the American occupation to
the attempted assassination of the prophet Muhammad. “They
want to assassinate Islam,” he said. “The invasion
does not want Muslims to be Christians; it wants them to be cattle,
and to disconnect the communication between them and God. . .
. Today all the Muslim countries, including our patient country,
are suffering enormous disasters. Muslims are confused: should
they follow the politics of the West, or the politics of the parties,
or the politics of sectarianism? There is no way except religion.
That is the only asylum from this strife. We should return to
Islam that taught brotherhood and mercy.”
“Islam tells us that if we want to preserve our country
we have to defend it,” he said. “We should stop crying
about our country; we should act to keep it.”
It was a far more subdued message than ones I had heard in the
past from the mosque’s pulpit. For months before the war
Baath Party clerics had called the Americans pigs and apes and
preached in support of Saddam’s regime. On July 18, 2003,
a day after the anniversary of the Baath coup, over a thousand
men with white skullcaps had gathered for the Friday prayer and
sermon. The mosque’s original name still hung there, and
an adjoining museum displayed a Quran allegedly written with Saddam’s
donated blood.
That day, Dr. Muthana Harith al Dhari, the head of the Association
of Muslim Scholars, warned that the Americans should think of
leaving Iraq to spare them and the Iraqis time, blood, and money.
Dhari was the grandson of Sheikh Suleiman al Dhari, who led the
1920 rebellion against British occupation and killed Colonel Gerard
Leachman, a British colonial officer. Dhari proudly kept his grandfather’s
gun. “It is the right of occupied people to resist the occupiers
. . . The Iraqis will resist.” Dhari recalled the recent
American July Fourth celebrations, commemorating America’s
own independence from the British. Did the Arabs not have the
same right to resist occupation and expel the occupiers that other
nations had? Dhari commended the resistance, calling it “an
honest opposition” of which Iraqis could be proud.
Dhari condemned the new Iraqi Governing Council, “established
by dishonest parties,” for dividing Iraq along sectarian
lines, and warned that it would provoke hostilities among the
Iraqi people. He was infuriated by the council’s declaration
making April 9, the day Baghdad fell in 2003, a national holiday,
a day he described as “the downfall and surrender of Baghdad,”
which should be remembered with sorrow and pain. Dhari’s
anti-Shiism came across only obliquely, when he condemned as the
council’s greatest evil its acceptance of one community
(the Shias) unjustly dominating the others (he rejected the statistics
that said that Shias were in the majority). Dhari also implicitly
condemned opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi, as well as his colleagues,
who he said came on the backs of U.S. tanks and called for the
killing of former Baathists. Up to half of the country’s
population were former Baathists, he said, and all were pious
and well-intentioned. In private, Dhari spoke of Muslims and Shias
as if they were two different things.
Even so, like most Sunni clerics in the spring of 2003, Dhari
made some effort to embrace national unity publicly and to join
with Shias in resisting the occupation. His voice building to
a shrill cry, Dhari screamed out that the Americans were committing
crimes—breaking into homes, searching women. “Do you
agree with this?” he demanded. “No!” the crowd
shouted back. Dhari said that the Iraqis knew how to resist occupation,
recalling the 1920 revolution against the British, when Sunnis
and Shias fought together. As prayers ended and the men streamed
out of the mosque, they shouted, “No to colonialism! No
to the occupiers!”
The crowd chanted rhyming slogans calling for the extermination
of the infidel army and for the American head of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, to follow Nuri al Said, the
British-protected Iraqi prime minister who was killed by mobs
in 1958. Leaflets distributed during the demonstration contained
a statement from the Iraqi branch of the Islamic Liberation Party.
It called on Muslims around the world to come to their aid.
On August 11, 2003, the Association of Muslim Scholars issued
a statement condemning the American violation of mosques, which
they said even the Mongols had not done. Thanking the Shia Ayatollah
Sistani for his own statements defending Sunni mosques, it blamed
the Americans for giving Shias too much power, including control
over the ministry of religious endowments, or Awqaf. Awqaf did
not protest the arrests of 30 clerics or the American violation
of holy places, the association said.
In early April 2004, Dhari called for national unity and a three-day
general strike to protest the U.S. siege of Fallujah. He announced
that the Sunni council had declared it against Islam to purchase
American or British goods, since the money would support the military
operations against Iraqis, Arabs, and the Muslim world. Dhari
also asked his audience to help in providing medical supplies
for Fallujans, as well as gas and generators.
“Come to Jihad!” he shouted, calling Fallujah a historic
battle of the Iraqi nation in which their loved ones were fighting,
welcoming death and martyrdom. Dhari called on God to support
the holy warriors who were fighting to liberate their country
and religion and to kill the occupiers. “Do not spare any
of them!”
Two years later, there was no more talk of unity. Sunni clerics
were trying to demonstrate to the public and to the media that
innocent Sunnis were being slaughtered by Shia militias and to
rally Sunnis around the common threat. On April 4, 2006, I stood
waiting in the sun for the second day in a row after a friend
who moonlighted for the Association of Muslim Scholars told me
that the bodies of Sunnis slain in sectarian violence would be
brought in from the morgue, a standard show. Ghazaliya had long
been one of Baghdad’s many no-go zones for foreigners, journalists,
and even many Iraqis. Sunni militias openly patrolled its streets
when American or Iraqi army or police forces were not looking,
and they stopped cars at their checkpoints to look for suspicious
outsiders. Shias living in Ghazaliya had been receiving death
threats, if they were lucky, warning them to leave the neighborhood.
As I stood in the parking lot with a few Iraqi cameramen, I could
hear exchanges of fire in the distance.
Finally we heard wailing coming from the mosque’s gate
as two trucks approached, accompanied by men on foot. The men
were crying and beating themselves, stopping to collapse on the
ground or raise their arms in desperation, then shouting, “There
is no god
