by Kim Ghattas
Iran had initially kept its involvement in the war in Syria quiet. Men were dying but there was no official death toll. By 2017, the deaths were in the hundreds and discontent was bubbling. The timing of Hojaji’s gruesome death was fortuitous for the regime: it transfixed and briefly united Iran, rallying everyone around the flag. His beheading in a desert landscape with smoke billowing in the background provided striking imagery for posters embellished with Shia iconography. Qassem Suleimani of the IRGC’s al-Quds force made no secret of how Hojaji’s execution served the cause. “In order to glorify the significance of an issue, sometimes God creates an incident,” he said after the funeral. “Martyr Hojaji’s death was meant to provide further meaning and glory to the struggle for the defense of the [holy Shia] shrines.”
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Six thousand miles away in Virginia, Mohsen Sazegara cried for Hojaji—yet another senseless death. He cried for his country too, but mostly he agonized over Syria. Mohsen, the young activist who had flown from Paris to Iran with Khomeini and helped found the Revolutionary Guards, was now in exile, just like Masih and so many others. His had been a long and painful journey out of the Islamic Republic, with a harrowing detour through its jails. Mohsen had so many regrets that they kept him up at night. The revolution had been a huge mistake, and his generation had so much to atone for—could the younger generations ever forgive what had happened in 1979? Could Syrians ever forgive what Iran was doing to their country? Iran’s hands were soaked in Syrian blood. Iran had saved Assad, and was just as responsible as the Syrian dictator for the horrors that had unfolded: more than half a million dead, more than five million refugees, more than six million displaced within Syria, hundreds of thousands disappeared in jails. Mohsen could not understand how Iran, which had suffered so much during the war with Iraq, could now help inflict such devastating pain on another country. And for what—shrines?
After leaving the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen had spent the 1980s in various government offices. He knew about the ruthless killings and hangings of leftists in the immediate aftermath of the revolution but dismissed them as the passing excesses of a revolutionary moment. He had heard about the torture taking place in prisons, but dismissed that too as the abuse of power by a few. But in 1984, he was arrested, wrongly accused of participating in the assassination of a prime minister. Jailed for twenty-four hours at Evin, he heard the torture with his own ears coming from nearby cells. When he got out, he went to see Khomeini to tell him what he thought the Supreme Leader did not know: his subordinates and acolytes were betraying the values of the revolution. The warden of Evin was removed and Mohsen felt vindicated. He had been right; these were just isolated incidents by bad individuals. He was jailed again in 1986 for no clear reason and spent two months in prison, with forty-nine days in solitary confinement.
In the following years, the more he looked around him, the more he saw evidence that it was the revolution that was rotten. He quit his government job and moved closer to the reformists’ circle, joining the Kiyan group with Soroush. He started his own newspaper. He reread all of Khomeini’s statements, but this time he read between the lines; he thought back to that one word, hichi, nothing, that Khomeini had uttered on the plane back to Tehran. He studied other revolutions and understood what he had not been able to see when he was an eager young revolutionary: the seeds of dictatorship had been there from the beginning, with the elevation of Khomeini as the sole leader.
In 2003, while Khatami was president and Soroush had already gone into exile, Mohsen called for a change in the system and was jailed again. He spent almost four months in prison and went on a hunger strike for seventy-nine days. His son was arrested. The hardship of prison and the hunger strike damaged his eyes and he was given permission to leave the country for surgery abroad. While he was abroad, he was sentenced in absentia to more jail time. His family had already left the country, so Mohsen decided not to return. He settled in the US and tried from afar to bring down the system he helped create. With frequent interviews on television and his own YouTube channel, he appealed to his fellow Iranians to oppose the government with nonviolent means, to erode support for the regime. But from the violent clampdown of protests in 1999 and 2009 to the war in Syria, the regime never shied away from using force to silence dissent and expand its power. When Mohsen had helped found the Revolutionary Guards, he never once considered that the paramilitary group would have a role outside Iran’s borders.
Hojaji’s death in Syria in 2017 briefly helped Iran make the case that it was on America’s side in the war against ISIS. Iran would point to Saudi Arabia as the source of all Sunni extremism, constantly reminding the world that fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 had been Saudi. The Saudis would throw a fit and point back to Iran’s support for groups like Hezbollah and the Shia militias in Iraq, who had killed more than six hundred American soldiers since 2003.
When Baghdadi’s men swept through Iraq and Syria in the summer of 2014, Iran did indeed come to the rescue. The Obama administration was still weighing whether to send jets to strike ISIS targets while Iraq begged for quicker delivery of the Apache helicopters and F-16s it had ordered from the US. But within hours of the fall of Mosul, Suleimani arrived in Baghdad to lead the counterattack. He coordinated the defense and called on Shias around the country to join militias to fight ISIS. Thousands volunteered. The ranks of the Mahdi army swelled with loyalists of the firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Others joined the Badr Brigades, run by Iran’s erstwhile friend Hadi al-Amiri. Various splinter factions attracted other fighters; more factions emerged. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who had already made use of such ruthless paramilitary groups to maintain his grip on power, legitimized them with a decree, branding them as the Popular Mobilization Force. The PMF’s role should have been to support Iraq’s floundering armed forces. That’s what Ayatollah Ali Sistani had in mind when he issued a fatwa calling on all Iraqis, Shias and Sunni, to join the fight against ISIS. Instead, a parallel Shia army had emerged with anywhere between 60,000 and 140,000 men who mostly answered to Suleimani.
The “living martyr,” also known as the shadow commander, was now in the limelight, posing as the hero of the war against ISIS. Pictures and video footage of him touring the front lines of the war against ISIS began to circulate on social media. At first, they were amateurish snapshots taken by his fans in the militias. Then professional photographers began to take shots of him on the battlefield, posing with fighters, a sign of how keen Iran was to advertise its role as the rampart against ISIS. When US air strikes against ISIS finally started in the fall of 2014, America and Iran were in the trenches together—or rather, the Iranians and their proxies were in the trenches, while the Americans provided air cover. In this bizarre alignment of interests, Saudi and Emirati fighter jets were also briefly in the sky as the kingdom vaunted its own role in fighting ISIS, trying hard to shake any comparisons to the zealots who had taken so many pages out of the kingdom’s book. One of the pilots was Prince Khaled bin Salman, son of the man who was then still crown prince but would become King Salman within a few months, in January 2015.
The paradox wouldn’t last. Iran and Saudi Arabia both feared ISIS, but they hated each other more. Secretly, many Arabs cheered ISIS on, hoping it would bring Tehran to its knees and put an end to Iranian dreams of hegemony in the region. And as Iran took the lead in fighting ISIS on the ground, it looked like Shias were out to kill any Sunnis, the latest brutal, sectarian mutation of the Saudi-Iran rivalry. Which came first: Iran’s imperial sectarianism or the Sunni sense of exceptionalism? By now the dynamic was hard to unpack, but it was about to intensify with the rise of King Salman and his favorite son, prince Mohammad bin Salman. While Obama dismissed Iran’s “destabilizing activity” as a “low-tech, low-cost activity,” Saudi Arabia watched with alarm as Iran poured thousands of men and an estimated $35 billion into Syria to prop up Assad. Suleimani was turning into the king of Iraq. As the US-Iran nuclear negotiations inched closer to a
deal in the spring of 2015, the Saudis grew unnerved by the prospect of cash flowing into Iran’s coffers after the lifting of sanctions. They seethed as US secretary of state John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif exchanged pleasantries and smiled for the cameras during the negotiations.
In neighboring Yemen, the Houthi rebel group had seized the capital Sana’a in September 2014 and brought down the internationally recognized government. The Saudis accused the Iranians and Hezbollah of supporting and arming the Houthi rebel group whose fighters belonged to a Shia subsect known as Zaidi. When Sana’a fell, Prince Salman was defense minister and his son Mohammad was his aide. The young prince was incensed by what he perceived as the weakness of King Abdallah in dealing with the Houthis and Iran. Some Iranian politicians declared smugly that Iran now controlled four Arab capitals: San’aa, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Worse, Iran’s sphere of influence had extended to Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Soon, the Houthi rebels would start lobbing rockets into the kingdom.
On January 23, 2015, King Abdallah died and Salman became king. He appointed his son as defense minister. The duo and the coterie around them wanted to push back against Iran and step into the vacuum that America was creating. The Saudis wanted to beat their chests, restore Sunni pride, and bolster their leadership of the Muslim world. And so, for the first time in its recent history, on March 25, 2015, the kingdom went to war. The Saudi military operation, launched with barely a warning to the Obama administration, was called Decisive Storm. Within hours, bombastic Saudi analysts went on television claiming the campaign would be so successful it would be studied in history books. Airplanes from Saudi allies joined in, at least initially. The Sunni world watched the Saudi air strikes against the Houthi rebels and felt their pride restored. And Prince Mohammad bin Salman, two months into his job as defense minister, was certain this would make him king of the Middle East chessboard, a mastermind who could rival Suleimani. The days of King Abdallah’s consensus politics were over, his penchant for compromise not part of Bin Salman’s repertoire.
The military campaign would be anything but decisive. The Saudis had never fought a war in such a way; they had never deployed troops. They couldn’t do precision strikes with their fancy fighter jets. They were now facing a guerrilla force in rugged, hilly terrain. The conflict would drag on for years; tens of thousands of civilians would die by 2019, in air raids by the Saudi-led coalition and ground fighting, but the worst impact would be the starvation and diseases. Ten million people were on the brink of famine because of the blockade the Saudis and the United Nations had imposed, and the country was battling a dangerous outbreak of cholera. Almost ninety thousand children died. It was the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, almost on par with Syria.
And so the Saudi rulers now also had the death of a country on their conscience. But neither they nor the Iranians seemed able to step back from their fight to the death—they were unable to reflect on how their quest for supremacy had been unmaking the region over decades, culminating in the destruction of Syria and Yemen. And the Saudis were not done. In January 2016, they executed a number of Sunni al-Qaeda militants as well as a Shia cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. He had been sentenced to death for his role in antigovernment protests in the Eastern Province in 2011, when the winds of the Arab uprisings had reached the kingdom. Nimr was accused of having Iranian support. In its self-ascribed role as protector of all Shias, Iran warned the kingdom against carrying out the sentence. King Salman could have pardoned Nimr or delayed the execution indefinitely, but this was a new, assertive Saudi Arabia eager to show that it tolerated neither internal dissent nor outside criticism. Nimr’s beheading provoked instant protests in Tehran, where a mob ransacked the Saudi embassy and set it on fire, while the Revolutionary Guards warned that “harsh revenge” would topple “this pro-terrorist, anti-Islamic regime.” Ambassadors were recalled and diplomatic relations severed for the first time since 1987.
Beyond the mobs, many Iranians were tiring of the attention to causes that were not their own. The nuclear deal had not delivered tangible benefits for people, their lives had not improved, their pockets were still empty. But the regime was still spending blood and money in Iraq and Syria. In December 2017, protests erupted and spread quickly across the country. Thousands of Iranians chanted: “not Gaza, not Lebanon, my life is devoted to Iran.” They called for the removal of the Supreme Leader. The response was, again, brutal. The protests were quelled within a month.
Meanwhile, the campaign against the mandatory veil accelerated. The women became more daring. One of them stood on a utility box, her veil hanging from a stick. She was arrested and later sentenced to a year in jail. Dozens more were arrested, but the women were not deterred. Increasing numbers protested across the country, in cities and villages, individual acts of resistance that were harder to contain than a crowd of protesters. Masih received dozens of videos every day from inside Iran of women walking without the veil, baring their face to the cameras, confronting the religious police and even clerics. Their husbands, fathers, and sons also joined in, helping with the filming or recording their own messages of support. This was not a minority movement: President Rouhani’s own office had conducted a poll that found that half of Iranians opposed the mandatory veil. On the women-only section of the Tehran metro, on International Women’s Day, March 8, 2018, three young women removed their veils. They had short hair—one of them was bottle-blond, another wore big silver earrings. They held hands and sang like they were marching.
From the bruises on my body, I bloom,
I’m wounded but I bloom by my very being
For I am a woman, a woman, a woman.
If we sing all along, shoulder to shoulder, if we walk
Hand in hand and strong, we’ll be freed from this wrong.
The song had been written and first sung in 2007, during a country-wide campaign to repeal discriminatory laws, including the mandatory veil. The campaign failed, and many of its members, men and women, were arrested. Now the women were singing the hymn again. Masih wished she was there, in Iran, on the streets, removing her veil, taunting the morality police, and helping to organize more protests. Still, she could do more from the United States to publicize the protests, thanks to social media and the freedom to speak without fear of arrest. But exile was not where she wanted to spend the rest of her life. Exile was also not where Mohsen thought he’d end up, but exile seemed to be the fate of any Iranian who didn’t believe in the system anymore, any Iranian who wanted to breathe, remove the veil, or seek better opportunities. Mostly, it was the choice of those who could afford to leave and could find a way out. Ever since thousands of Iranians had rushed to get on a plane to escape the country that Khomeini was taking over, millions of Iranians have built or rebuilt their lives around the world, from Los Angeles to Paris to Istanbul. Despite all the ways that Iran and Saudi Arabia mirrored each other or competed with each other during the last four decades, exile has remained an Iranian experience (with few exceptions). Despite the kingdom’s many shortcomings, the rulers showed magnanimity for their subjects. The absolute monarchy was suffocating, especially to its women, but still somewhat benevolent. But this, too, was changing. Exile was becoming a refuge for Saudis.
19
MURDER ON THE BOSPORUS
TURKEY, SAUDI ARABIA
2015–19
When you dare ask a question about the deteriorating situation
They silence you with slogans about all the conspiracies
They brand you a traitor like sheep, every time you demand change for the nation
They drive you to despair, so you sell your freedoms to save the nation.
—Mashrou’ Leila, lyrics from “Lil Watan” (For the Nation) (2013)
Exile was not something that the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi had ever contemplated. He had never considered it could be a location, a real place. To him, it was a word, an intangible idea. Even after he left his home in Jeddah with two s
uitcases and landed in the United States in the summer of 2017, he still pronounced the word with a disbelieving smile. Jamal’s decision to leave the kingdom had been difficult, not only because it was destroying his family life but because he had always thought of himself as a loyal citizen, a subject of the king. Jamal had changed since his days as a student in Indiana in 1979. He had once embraced the idea of Islam as a political system, although he had never fully adhered to a political group like the Muslim Brotherhood. He now fervently believed in democracy and pluralism, the separation of religion and state. He admired Turkey as an example of how Islam and democracy could coexist—though his friend President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was increasingly authoritarian.
Jamal cringed with deep shame when he thought back to how he had contributed to the spread of Surur’s hateful book on Shias, and could not understand how he had once given away his own music LPs. He knew these acts could be partly explained away as the excesses of youth, the naive embrace of ideals that eventually fail you. He also understood that he was the product of a specific era and a country where he had embraced the culture around him. But he had moved on, where others had not.
He had traveled, moved between countries and continents, and now, in his late fifties, Jamal loved to reminisce about covering the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He still believed the kingdom had been politically and morally correct to support the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Then Saudi Arabia and America had both failed, each in its own way, to contain the consequences. Though he was loath to dull the shine of those heady days, he recognized that the war effort had been corrupted from the start by the arrogance of Salafist jihadists who imposed their puritanism everywhere they went, not to mention the funding that Saudi Arabia channeled only to specific groups. After his days as a reporter in the field, Jamal remained a truth teller as the editor of a newspaper and then as a columnist. He constantly bumped up against the boundaries of what was permissible in the kingdom, criticizing the ultraconservative Saudi clerical establishment, offering a mea culpa after 9/11, or calling for social reforms and openness in a stifling country.