by Kanan Makiya
Minarets and Kalashnikovs
As we drove to Baghdad in a ten-year-old tan-colored Toyota sedan, Uncle at the wheel and two Kalashnikov-wielding guards in the backseat, the car would every so often have to veer off the tarmac onto rubble shoulders a few feet wide. The pink-faced soldiers on the end vehicle of a convoy of huge American army trucks were still not as trigger-happy as they would become, and happily waved Uncle on to their left if the coast was clear; the problem was, no one could really see what was barreling down at one hundred kilometers per hour in the opposite direction.
“Sons of whores,” Uncle would mumble to himself every so often as he flattened the accelerator, driving past them, one set of wheels on the tarmac and the other on the soft shoulder.
The sun was harsh by late morning, the land barren, relieved every now and then by clumps of barely clad children and scrawny dogs, staring in amazement as cars whizzed by. No trees or bushes, and if you passed one, it was never green—its leaves would have turned brown from the dust and ceaseless punishment endured at the hands of the sun. Two materials defined the human contribution to the landscape—concrete block and corrugated iron—along with the transfiguring consequences of a quarter of a century of war with all its attendant debris. It would be an exaggeration to call the structures by the road buildings; more like shacks or crude half-finished built events, with perhaps a piece of canvas stretched over uneven and irregular walls held in place by a concrete block or two. No design. No landscaping. No fields. We drove past scattered groupings of such structures, stopping once for sweet black tea; it was a refreshingly clean place, decked out with a few tables and chairs and pleasantly cool, having just been hosed down.
—
I was accompanying Uncle to search for my father’s file, which we were hoping to find in a former intelligence compound in Baghdad built on a bend in the river Tigris—and the very same location in which the Tyrant would be executed three years later.
Before driving to the compound, however, Uncle had an important and confidential assignment from the Sayyid—to meet and discuss strategy with a senior cleric, head of the Islamic Scholars Association, a man deemed by the Americans to be a formerly high-ranking Baʻthi, currently leading the insurgency against them, and the spiritual head of its militantly Sunni Iraqi wing. The meeting was to explore avenues of military cooperation against the Occupier, should it come to that.
The Islamic Scholars Association had taken over a mosque built by Saddam after the 1991 Gulf War called the Mother of All Battles Mosque, renamed after the 2003 war the Mother of All Villages Mosque—a reference to Mecca, the Mother of All Cities. We entered Baghdad from the south, driving past the nondescript townships of Mahmoodiya, Latifiya, and Yusufiya—later to become the sites of heavy fighting and community cleansing campaigns—and ending up on the highway north, which took us uninterruptedly to our destination sandwiched between two Sunni suburbs of Baghdad, also sites of much killing after 2005. But in November 2003 there was not a hint of the cleansing campaigns to come, and we arrived uneventfully at what was my first introduction to Baghdad, the fabled city of the Abbasid Caliphs, where Hallaj preached and had been crucified, the City of Peace, as the politicians loved to remind us.
I still think of the building as the Mother of All Battles Mosque, perhaps because of its design, and the memories of its being built as an act of defiance toward the armies that left the Tyrant in power. There had been much fanfare surrounding the construction, coinciding with the years of my childhood, years of sanctions and privation. I had never seen anything so lavish before. Money was not spared; the whole was clad in gleaming white limestone of the finest quality, enriched here and there with blue mosaic. The Tyrant, it is said, had personally overseen every detail. All this would have been enough to impress anyone, but here is the odd thing: the outer four minarets, each the height of a ten-story building, were built in the shape of barrels of Kalashnikov rifles aimed at the sky; the inner four, only slightly lower, were built to look like the Scud missiles that the Tyrant had fired at Israel in 1991, during the Mother of All Battles—none of which hit their mark (and one of which fell on a Palestinian neighborhood). The red, white, and black flag from the Tyrant’s era still fluttered from the peaks of these minarets, and a reflecting pool in the shape of a map of the Arab world encircled the mosque. In the blue water was an island in blue mosaic in the shape of the Tyrant’s thumb. Perhaps this is why it is hard to think of this mosque as anything other than the Mother of All Battles Mosque.
—
A sumptuous lunch rich in meat and rice followed Uncle’s meeting, and we took the road again to the intelligence headquarters complex in Kadhimain, the oldest Shiʻa district in the heart of Baghdad, where another of our twelve Imams is buried.
The afternoon had turned hot and windless by the time we got out of the car, the heat made worse by asphalt, concrete, and the packed crowds of people on foot. I remember pushing through the throngs gathered outside the gates of the compound, following slowly in Uncle’s wake, a big man barreling through as though it was his God-given right.
Suddenly I came face-to-face with an old woman cloaked in black, whose expression I shall not forget to my dying day. She pressed a photo of her missing son into my hands at the gates of the compound, just as Uncle had successfully broken through the crowds. She was not being allowed in; Uncle, on the other hand, was the Sayyid’s man, which was as good as if he owned the place.
I looked at her son’s photo and saw that the face was blank, like those white oval images of the Prophet in an illustrated book in my father’s library. The silver on the old woman’s photo had been wiped off from years of touching and stroking. I turned my eyes from his non-face to her wrinkled anxiousness, not able to say anything. A young man accompanying her spoke instead:
“Ignore her. She comes every day.” And then he made a gesture with his hand to indicate she was not right in the head.
How I hated the Tyrant at that moment—more even than I hated him for killing my father.
Mother’s passing had released me. I could now come all the way from Najaf to search this battered collection of filth-encrusted buildings for a file, my father’s file, in the hope that it would tell me what had happened to him and where he was buried. I searched in a frenzy, under obligation to no one, a man possessed, allowing himself to be consumed with anger, oblivious to everything and everyone around him, throwing chairs and smashing tables without rhyme or reason, even though they belonged to Iraq, no longer to the Tyrant.
I looked in every broken room of every decrepit building in the compound. But there were no files, no paperwork of any sort; if there had been, they were now gone, looted by professionals in the first days after the Tyrant’s fall, perhaps by the Americans, but more likely by one of the militias that had slipped in the moment the slow-witted Occupier had cleared all obstacles from their way.
Painful Slap
Following our return to Najaf, I joined the Army of the Awaited One, serving the Sayyid, whose father and two brothers had been murdered by Saddam in 1999, and who is the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a leading Shiʻa scholar of the 1970s and founder of our movement, whom we called “the First Martyr” after he was tortured and killed by the Tyrant in 1980.
“You will not be a soldier,” my mother had said in a tone that brooked no discussion. Uncle had not contradicted her. In the months following the Sayyid’s call to arms, Uncle broached the subject again, saying she would think differently now that she was in heaven with Father at her side; they would both smile down on me, he said, serving my country the way Father had done. Truth be told, I didn’t need him to say anything; I longed to be swept up in the storms of change rolling up young men like me all over Iraq.
I was standing in line outside a local recruitment center when the news of the Tyrant’s capture in a hideout fifteen kilometers south of Tikrit was announced. There was jubilation in the streets, with men dancing and firing into the air. In
front of me, waiting in line to register his membership, was a man a few years older than myself, also following through on the Sayyid’s call to arms. He had a peculiar name, al-Muntassir, the Victorious One, which was one of the things that drew him to my attention, because he asked the registering officer to change it to Muntassir, or Victorious. Men like him had been pouring into recruitment centers during the last few weeks in such numbers that many had to be turned away. But Muntassir, as he preferred to be called, had received the blessings of the Sheikh of his local mosque—whose name as a sponsor was recorded in a big ledger, alongside his.
My recommendation had come from Uncle, whose name triggered so much deferential treatment that it embarrassed me before the other recruits. There was no question of the center’s head asking me questions. Haider and I had finished our military training with the army’s First Battalion in Basra three weeks earlier, and our unit had been sent back to Najaf, where I was to be stationed. Training in those days consisted of rising before dawn for early morning prayers followed by a breakfast of dried dates. The next few hours were spent learning to use, dismantle, and reassemble weapons, such as the Chinese version of the Russian Kalashnikov. Lunch, a single piece of flat bread and chickpeas, was followed by two hours of live-fire training on the empty hillside. Occasionally we practiced throwing live hand grenades, more often painted stones the size and weight of a hand grenade. The standard day ended with ball games and wrestling followed by dinner. This went on for two weeks. A few recruits were then chosen for more intensive training, including learning how to wire explosives and blow up buildings and bridges. Our registration in Najaf was a pure formality.
Muntassir had come to the Sayyid’s center in Najaf to complete the registration procedure, which in his case included answering questions confirming his commitment to the cause. What distinguished this scrawny young man in a dirty dishdasha from everyone else in the line that day were his black leather boots; they were worn down at an angle on both heels, with a very badly scuffed right toe. Muntassir didn’t seem to realize how inappropriate his footwear was, given the rest of his attire; he was expecting a uniform but did not get it. He had worn his boots so as to be prepared for the soldier’s uniform he was expecting. His face beamed pride in his life’s new mission; at least he still had a soldier’s attendant footwear, even though the boots were not the right size and were laced up wrongly, having their tongues pulled out of the bottom lace and hanging forward, as though lapping at the leather.
The registering officer was a white-turbaned Sheikh, the black turban being restricted to Sayyids who are descendants of the Prophet. He was doubling up as cleric and head of the recruitment center located in a neighborhood of the Old City adjoining ours. The Sheikh looked Muntassir up and down carefully, and then advised him that he had to answer all questions put to him truthfully on pain of committing a grave sin that the Sayyid would not forgive.
Muntassir nodded his assent vigorously.
“Who are your parents?”
“They run a stand on the Najaf-Karbala road selling soft drinks and candy,” Muntassir replied.
“Do you pray regularly?”
“Of course, my Sheikh. I have never once missed a prayer.”
“Never? It is a terrible sin to lie to the Sayyid.”
“Never. Never. I swear it.”
“And do you fast at the prescribed times?”
“Yes, most certainly, my Sayyid. Every Ramadan. I have never missed once.”
“Why did you want to join our army?”
“I wanted to be a fighter on the first day of the Occupation, after I heard the Sayyid say, ‘The smaller devil has gone, but the bigger devil has come.’ ”
“And what did you understand these words to mean?”
“I realized that the Sayyid’s love of Iraq was very great, and I wanted to fight for my homeland against the Occupier.”
“Yes, but who is the smaller devil?”
“Saddam.”
“Are you happy he was caught?”
“Of course. I only wish we had gotten to him before the Occupier.”
The Sheikh nodded in approval, then looked up at Muntassir and said, “And the bigger devil. Who is he?”
“The American Occupier, who was dealt a painful slap by the destruction of the World Trade Center.”
“A painful slap?”
“Yes.”
“Both painful and a slap?”
“Of course, because it has not destroyed America, not yet, but America was hurt, and the cowboys who rule it seek revenge by stealing our oil.”
That was all it took for Muntassir to become a member of the Army of the Awaited One.
Black Boots
Shortly after he had completed his two-week training course, Muntassir’s unit, on orders from our Sayyid, was assigned to occupy the Shrine of the Imam Husain in Karbala. This meant wresting control of it by force from the House of Hakim, in favor of the House of Sadr. We were going to humiliate them; that was the idea behind this opening shot in the war between our two Houses, the first in a succession of such wars that would go on for the next three years.
Muntassir and his unit were ill prepared for the fight, meeting fierce resistance from experienced fighters, among them veterans of the Great War holed up inside who had just returned from Iran and were much better equipped and trained. The attack was easily repulsed, leaving dozens of our comrades dead and wounded. The repercussions of our failure spread to Najaf, and our newly formed army was in no time being denounced by traditionalist clerics and the Shiʻa militias allied to Iran.
One circular posted by militiamen of the House of Hakim on a wall near my house the next day read, “The Army of the Awaited One is composed of suspicious elements, including elements from the extinct regime. Its security officers are Baʻth Party members who have wrapped their heads with white and black rags to mislead people into believing that they are men of religion when in truth they are emissaries of the devil. We, the people of Najaf, do not need this false army, which they have slanderously called the Army of the Awaited One. Our Awaited Imam is in no need of an army made up of thieves, robbers, and perverts under the leadership of a one-eyed charlatan.”
Uncle thought it wise that Haider and I disappear for a while. So I decided to stay with Muntassir, who had been wounded in the fighting and taken for treatment to a mosque outside the city, loyal to our Sayyid.
Muntassir was in much worse shape than I had been led to believe; his left side had been shredded by shrapnel from a grenade, and the thigh had become infected; there were no medications to relieve the pain or deal with the infection. A young man in a white coat, probably a medical student, was examining him and cracking sunflower seeds between his teeth at the same time. Muntassir’s hoarse breathing was all that there was to shoo the flies away from his mouth; otherwise they were all over him. Still, he managed a smile when he saw me; I could see he was dying.
The student stood up, saying to me in a loud voice, “There is nothing anyone can do for the man, and therefore no point in my going on with this examination.” I glowered at him, hoping he would choke on his sunflower seeds, until he hurriedly pocketed his stethoscope and went away, leaving behind what remained of the seeds.
Settling down beside Muntassir, with a bowl of cold water, some cloth, a piece of cardboard to shoo away the flies, and a plastic cup of pomegranate juice that I had bought on the way in to cheer him up, I started wiping the sweat from his brow, squeezing drops of water into his mouth, and generally trying to create small talk that might help get him through the ordeal.
“What’s with the pomegranate juice?” he asked, taking a sip for my sake even though swallowing was clearly painful.
“All good things come from the sweetness of pomegranate juice, my mother used to say. The fruit is blessed, being mentioned in all the Holy Books numerous times. Drink up; it will do you good.” And he obliged.
Men who are most in need of compassion from others, especially those wh
o think they are deserving of it, whose own lives have been filled with suffering, are often least able to extend the same outward. It is as if we human beings are endowed with a fixed amount of compassion, and if we use it all up feeling sorry for ourselves, there is nothing left to share with other people.
Not so with Muntassir. All my friend wanted to do in the last hours of his life was inquire about those of his comrades who had been hurt, and would I please send them his greetings, his wishes for their speedy recovery, even though none of them was wounded as grievously as he. He asked me to distribute among them the paltry one hundred dollars in salary that was due to him. Meanwhile, he kept on sipping his pomegranate juice to please me, even though the effort of it clearly pained him. I took the cup away from him after a while.
Muntassir told me what had happened in Karbala: He and two comrades found themselves trapped behind a corner stump of a wall, while a group of militiamen from the opposing side were lobbing hand grenades at them. After the first grenade went wide, he decided their situation was hopeless and that the next grenade, or the one after that, was bound to land on target. So he made a mad rush to a wall on the side to try to get around the enemy, and succeeded. But when he raised his head to unload a magazine clip into the group lobbing grenades, barely ten meters away, he found himself staring at the face of a man younger than himself, with scared black eyes that were looking right at him; Muntassir was paralyzed by the fear he saw in his enemy’s eyes, and hesitated, just enough to give the other fellow time to toss the grenade right at him, not missing this time. That was all he remembered until he found himself here.
I asked if he had any regrets.
“What future did I have selling soft drinks on the road to Karbala? My dream was to be a part of something bigger, to serve Muslims as poor as my parents. My father was a soldier in the war with Iran; those are his boots. I wore them on the day of the battle,” he said, pointing limply but with pride at them sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, neatly placed side by side.