Black Wave

by Kim Ghattas

  His youngest prankster son, nicknamed Ayatollah Atari because he loved playing videogames, suddenly inherited the mantle, and found himself the leader of tens of thousands of Shias. Moqtada’s black turban had barely settled on his head. He had a mediocre rhetorical style and a limp handshake that belied the rage within him. But he had ambition and believed that he—not anyone else—deserved to lead the Shias of Iraq after the demise of Saddam. To achieve his goals, he would even betray his father’s nationalism and accept Iranian training and weapons. Before the fall of Baghdad, Moqtada had already begun organizing a militia that would become the feared and ruthless Mahdi army. They would kill American soldiers but also anyone in Iraq who did not submit to Moqtada. Those were his men shouting outside the office where Sayyed Abdulmajid was sitting on that April morning.

  A window was smashed. Shots were fired. Everyone had a gun—the mob outside but also the men inside. One of Abdulmajid’s bodyguards was mortally wounded, shot right below his bulletproof vest, and bled to death. Abdulmajid took off his turban, held it to his chest, and pleaded for calm and mercy. The shooting went on for ninety minutes. A grenade was thrown into the room and Abdulmajid was wounded. Soon, the men inside were out of ammunition and surrendered. The mob tied their hands and pushed them outside. “We are taking you to Moqtada al-Sadr for him to pass sentence,” one of the captors reportedly said. Outside, the prisoners were stabbed repeatedly, and one of them died. Abdulmajid was bleeding profusely. He was dragged to the outside of Moqtada’s home near the shrine. A message came from inside, from Moqtada: “Don’t let them sit in front of my door.” He was dragged down a street and shot again. In the eyes of Moqtada, Abdulmajid was a rival with real credentials who would show up his own intellectual weakness and his meager theological achievements. But the young hothead who had never left Iraq also resented those who had lived in exile, branding them as agents of the West and traitors to the nation, even the Khoeis, who had sacrificed so much for their country and their faith.

  In Qom, Jawad wept for his uncle, and relived the searing loss of his own father. One man killed by religious violence, the other killed by secular violence; one assassinated in the name of God, the other in the name of nationalism. Jawad had been planning to join his uncle in Iraq within days. Instead, he stayed in Qom, fearing for his country, free from one kind of horror only to sink into another. His mind wandered back to the events of 1991. He had been just a teenager but he remembered the thrill of hope, and the savagery that followed. Freedom had been so close; the uprising had almost succeeded.

  * * *

  In January 1991, the US-led war to dislodge Saddam from Kuwait began with a massive air campaign, and a few weeks later, on February 15, when it became clear that Saddam was a strawman in the face of American firepower, President George H. W Bush called on Iraqis to rise up against the dictator: “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations’ resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.”

  Within days, the Saudis invited exiled Iraqi politicians to Riyadh in the hope of assembling an Iraqi government-in-waiting. They were also talking to different groups of officers and former officers who were plotting to move against Saddam. But the Saudis were disorganized and sending mixed messages. Iraqi politicians described receiving one call from the Saudis and then never hearing from them again. The Saudi efforts amounted to nothing. The Iranians were also looking to seize the moment, and they had more success on the ground.

  One of the Iraqis in exile in Iran was Ayatollah Mohammad Baqr al-Hakim, who had fled Iraq in 1980 when his friend Mohammad Baqr al-Sadr, the founder of the Islamist Da’wa Party, was executed by Saddam. In Iran, al-Hakim set up the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a religious, political group with an armed wing: the Badr Brigades. Over time, the ranks of the Badr Brigades swelled to an estimated ten thousand Shias who defected from the Iraqi army ranks or were taken prisoner by Iran and pressed to join. From the start, the Badr Brigades operated under the supervision and control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, conducting small cross-border and sabotage operations. There is footage of its founding commander Hadi al-Amiri on the front lines talking about their operations against the Iraqi army and Saddam, the “crazy enemy.” When the 1991 uprising started, the Badr Brigades were on the move quickly, infiltrating Iraq from the south and connecting with underground cells in the country.

  The popular rebellion started spontaneously in late February with small acts of defiance and sabotage. From the Shia south to the Kurdish north, an oppressed people seized on a moment of weakness in the dictatorship. On the highway out of Kuwait, littered with burned tanks, a demoralized, humiliated army was rebelling against a leader who had yet again sent them into a losing battle. On March 3, an Iraqi tank commander fired a shell through a huge portrait of Saddam in the main square of the southern city of Basra. Onlookers and nearby soldiers applauded. The wall of fear crumbled, and courage spread like wildfire. By March 5, Karbala had risen up; in Najaf, a protest near the Imam Ali shrine turned into a gun battle. Five days later, Saddam’s regime seemed close to collapse: he had lost control of fifteen out of eighteen provinces. While the Shia leadership inside Iraq tried to organize the civilians and grand ayatollah al-Khoei called for a peaceful uprising, Ayatollah al-Hakim weighed in from Iran and appointed a representative in Basra to help establish an Islamic republic. Pictures of Khomeini appeared on the streets. As regime forces began to fight back, desperate men, women, and children sheltered in mosques. Makeshift surgery rooms were set up inside the Imam Ali shrine. The dead piled up. Cornered and fearful, the crowds chanted “Iran help us” and “There is no ruler other than Ali, we want a leader who is a Ja’afari (Shia).”

  Just as the uprising was starting, the Americans were discussing conditions for a cease-fire with the Iraqis. In a bizarre episode, the US commander of the military campaign, Norman Schwarzkopf, agreed to allow the Iraqis the use of helicopters to ferry military officials across the country, away from the front line, since the country’s infrastructure had been so heavily damaged. His Iraqi counterpart asked specifically whether helicopter gunships would be allowed to fly, since they would be used as transport helicopters. Schwarzkopf acquiesced, as long the helicopters did not fly over areas where American troops were located. “In the following weeks,” the general wrote in his memoirs, “we discovered what the son of a bitch really had in mind: using helicopter gunships to suppress the rebellion in Basra and other cities.” It’s hard to believe that the general did not anticipate this. Perhaps he did, but was unconcerned as long his troops were safe. But few Iraqis were aware that they were also victims of a treacherous moment of diplomacy: while Saddam’s troops shot fleeing refugees from the air and rounded up people in mass executions, the Saudi and Iranian foreign ministers were in Oman talking reconciliation. On March 22, the Saudis and the Iranians announced that they would resume diplomatic ties, broken off in 1987. Ayatollah al-Hakim’s Badr Brigades packed up and went back to Iran. America and Saudi Arabia had come to fear the breakup of Iraq in a chaotic civil war or—worse—the rise of a Shia theocracy loyal to Tehran. But the Islamic Republic of Iran, defenders of Shias everywhere, had abandoned Iraq’s Shias for the sake of realpolitik. On March 24, the Al-Hayat newspaper’s front-page headline screamed AMERICA DECIDES NOT TO CONFRONT IRAQ HELICOPTERS.

  The carnage in 1991 was unprecedented. Saddam’s rule had not been specifically sectarian before. Shias had been a target when they overtly opposed him. Now, he went after them with determination. The shrines in Karbala and Najaf were shelled in an act of arrogant, vengeful spite. Thousands disappeared. Two million people were on the move, in the south and the Kurdish north. Young Jawad saw his father and grandfather dragged out of the house and taken for a humiliating televised audience with Saddam in Baghdad, a forced show of reconci
liation. The Khoeis were under surveillance around the clock. Security guards stood outside the house, trailing them everywhere, even riding with them in the car. Fear permeated everything: people’s days, their dreams, the air they breathed. Sayyed Abdulmajid was on his way to London. Jawad was sent away. Soon his father would die, without a goodbye. Shia commemorations like Ashura were banned. Years went by and thousands more died, disappeared in the darkness of Saddam’s dungeons or swallowed in the misery of a country now under embargo and cut off from the rest of the world, a people punished for the madness of their leader.

  * * *

  In mid-March 2003, just days after the start of the US “shock and awe” bombing campaign that preceded the ground invasion, Saddam’s regime still found the time to arrest dozens of pilgrims as they tried to reach Karbala for Ashura. Then, suddenly, Saddam’s statues were being toppled and the dictator was on the run. By the end of April, hundreds of thousands of Shias were marching to Karbala from across Iraq to mark the Arba’een, the fortieth day of mourning for the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. They were celebrating the end of their own martyrdom. In Iraq, the land of Imam Hussein’s sacrifice, the rituals had always been more passionate than elsewhere in the Muslim world. Men, women, and children walked for days, and some crawled on their hands and knees to reach the shrine. They waved green or black flags, beat their chests slowly, rhythmically, flinging their right hand up and down—thump. Up and down—thump. Some whipped their backs with chains. The hypnotic ritual was simultaneously a renewed communion with faith and a Shia show of force in the new Iraq. Year after year, the pilgrimage to Karbala would attract more and more people, millions after millions, the human mass swelling to five times the size of that performing the yearly hajj to Mecca. Najaf and Karbala were now open to the world, at least to all those who dared make the journey into a country that was still occupied and slipping into violence. The first to come were Iraqis-in-exile and Iranians. The Iranians traveled with an assigned guide on each bus, driving across the border. The men were old enough to remember the Iran-Iraq War just fifteen years ago and the chant that had accompanied them on the buses to the front line.

  We’ll give our lives to conquer Karbala.

  Rise up brave warriors, take your homeland from the enemy.

  The road to victory passes through Karbala.

  Now, some Iraqi exiles returned to Karbala and their homeland not just to pray but to finish what they had hoped to achieve in the 1980s along with the Iranians. Ayatollah al-Hakim, leader of Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, was back in Najaf. So were his colleagues in fatigues Hadi al-Amiri and his Badr militants. Al-Hakim seemed to have moderated his views: he had acquiesced to cooperation with the Americans and counseled patience with the occupation. After all, his triumphant return would not have been possible without the Americans. He called for unity.

  * * *

  Just after he led midday prayers on Friday, August 29, 2003, Ayatollah al-Hakim walked out of the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf and onto the street through the courtyard’s southern portico. In his black cloak and black turban, he walked to his car. Suddenly, day turned into night. People went momentarily deaf. The sky rained blood, sandals, dried fruits, body parts, candy, and brick debris.

  “The Sayyed is dead. They killed the Sayyed,” one man screamed.

  The car bomb had been so powerful and so close to al-Hakim that people said his body had been totally vaporized. There was a three-foot crater in the ground. The mosque was damaged. A two-story mall nearby was leveled. Ninety-five people were killed, almost five hundred injured. The closest hospital was a scene of utter chaos as relatives crammed the lobby and the hallways. A group of young men in pressed shirts, carrying shiny new AK-47 rifles and walkie-talkies, showed up and began to bring order to the crush of people. Their leader stood out: in his fifties, wearing gray trousers and a white button-down shirt. He asked the nurses if they needed supplies, he comforted doctors who broke down. He acted like an Iraqi government official but he wasn’t. He spoke Arabic, but with a very distinct accent: he was Iranian, and his men, young Iraqis in pressed shirts, were Badr militants. Some of their colleagues were among the wounded, probably bodyguards of al-Hakim. The Iranian was their commander, most likely a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He was consoling an Iraqi doctor, who was repeatedly asking why anyone would do this.

  “Don’t you see?” the Iranian responded. “They have declared war on us.”

  He seemed to sense or know that this killing was the work not of Moqtada or other fellow Shias but of Sunnis. Not a Sunni state exercising oppression through extra-judicial executions, no—this was the work of Sunni militants, sectarian killers, Shia haters … This was war. It was also the first time in the Arab world that Sunni fighters had specifically set out to kill Shias since the 1801 Wahhabi raid against Karbala. In Pakistan, sectarian killings had begun under Zia with the massacre in 1987 on the border with Afghanistan, when the Pakistani dictator had let Sunni militants loose on Shia villages. From Peshawar all the way to Iraq, hate and sectarian violence had mutated into ever more violent iterations, inhabiting men who each wanted to outdo their mentors.

  * * *

  The attack that had killed Ayatollah al-Hakim was the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a protégé of Abu Muhammad al-Maqdissi, the Jordanian ideologue who had spent time in Peshawar and written the anti-Saudi pamphlets that inspired the first bombings in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the nom de guerre of Ahmad Fadeel al-Khalayleh, a Jordanian high school dropout, bootlegger, and bully from the Jordanian town of Zarqa who had found his raison d’être on the battlefield of Afghanistan at the tail end of the war against the Soviets. Thrown in jail in Jordan 1992, he had met Maqdissi and matured under his mentorship into a leader and recruiter. Out of jail, he had gone back to Afghanistan in 1999, where he set up his own camp of fighters thanks to start-up money from al-Qaeda. The rebellious Zarqawi had first refused to pledge allegiance to Bin Laden, but al-Qaeda saw him as a potentially useful conduit into certain countries. After 9/11 and the US bombing campaign to bring down the Taliban in Afghanistan, Zarqawi fled through Iran to northeast Iraq where he arrived in the summer of 2002 and set up a camp for his group, Ansar al-Islam, Supporters of Islam. Outside a small circle of jihadists, no one had heard of Zarqawi. On February 5, 2003, he was catapulted to world fame.

  The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, was speaking at the UN to make the case for removing Saddam. The US administration was using all the excuses and all the tools it could to justify the march to war—Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the need for democracy in the Middle East, and now Saddam’s alleged ties with al-Qaeda. “Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants,” said Powell. Zarqawi’s bearded face appeared on a large screen. Powell alleged that al-Qaeda and Saddam were cooperating through Zarqawi. In one speech, Powell mentioned Zarqawi’s name twenty-one times. Although it was not beyond an avowed secular dictator like Saddam to use religion or cooperate with Islamists if it helped his agenda, there were no formal links between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi regime. Zarqawi was there not to assist Saddam but to further his own jihadist ambitions. And the Americans had just removed all the obstacles on the way to Baghdad for him.

  As the US-led military campaign got under way, young men lined up in front of the Iraqi embassy in Damascus, just a few blocks from the US embassy. They came from Algeria, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia for a chance to participate in what they hoped would be a repeat of the Afghan jihad or Chechnya, except this time it would be war against the greatest infidels—the Americans. Syrians joined too. At the Iraqi embassy, they were all issued fake Iraqi passports to facilitate border crossings. They boarded buses and crossed into Iraq, ready to fight and die. Syrian officials, including the grand mufti, were openly encouraging this jihad, hoping the Americans would sink into a quagmire that would keep them too busy to plan
the toppling of other dictatorships. Iraq was fertile ground for a Sunni insurgency, more so than even Zarqawi had ever anticipated.

  * * *

  Under embargo throughout the 1990s, Iraq had been mostly shut off from the world and turned inward. The land of biblical Eden and cradle of civilization that had given the world one of its seven wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Bablyon; the Arab country with the first woman cabinet minister in 1959 and where women were given equal rights in the constitution of 1970; the birthplace of the renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid; the nation where artists at the Fine Arts academy painted nudes and masterpieces—that Iraq was no more. Food shortages, decaying infrastructure, growing infant mortality, thousands leaving for exile—the 1990s had hollowed out the country. Despair drives people to faith, and in Iraq they were flocking to the mosques as more and more women were putting on the veil.

  Saddam both encouraged and controlled the trends. A cigar smoker whose favorite drink was said to be Mateus rosé wine, he tried various tactics to brandish his credentials as a devout Muslim. During the 1980s, to fend off Iran’s accusations that he was an infidel, he had hosted the Popular Islamic Conference (PICO) with Saudi help. During and after the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam tried to rebrand himself as a believer president fighting the infidel West. But Saddam was worried: he had begun to recognize and fear the growing influence of Salafists, some of whom had direct links to Saudi Arabia, his new enemy. Iraqi intelligence had documented attempts by Saudi clerics to smuggle Wahhabi religious propaganda into Iraq. In 1993, in an attempt to mollify the masses but also to counter the spread of Wahhabism in Iraq, he launched his very own Faith Campaign to promote state-sanctioned Islam.