by Kanan Makiya
As for Uncle, sphinxlike, impenetrable, and ever so frustrating to deal with though he remained, I grew closer to him in the months that followed. But I no longer shared with him my every thought as I used to do. I learned caution, sensing that in this business of the death of Sayyid Majid lurked dangers and pitfalls that I had only barely begun to discern. I agonized in private, not even drawing dear Haider into my confidence.
—
Betrayal matters. It casts a dark pall of suspicion and mistrust inside a community. Because it matters the Cabal of Thirteen kept the letter they had signed a secret, agreeing to participate in a cover-up and wash their hands of responsibility for their friend’s spilled blood, on the condition that no one, not even their American friends, got hold of the proof of it. They lifted the letter up in the air so that the American political advisor meeting with them could read it and report to his superiors that he had seen it, and then each member of the Thirteen tucked his copy safely away to use against his fellow Shiʻa members of the Cabal in the event that he too was one day betrayed.
That letter is their mark of shame, just as the Tyrant’s rope is mine.
The “suspension” of the arrest warrant was engineered to give the Occupier a face-saving way out of the corner we had boxed him into by occupying the Holy Shrine. The Thirteen had no intention of reopening an investigation into the murder once they came to power; Uncle received assurances to that effect, which he followed up on, looking each man in the eye to hold him to his word. One by one they promised they would make the whole affair go away after they took power, legally of course, by way of fair and free elections, only not now while they were still so beholden to the Occupier.
In April 2005, after a Shiʻa-led government took office in Iraq, the first in Arab history, the original file of investigation into the murder of Sayyid Majid disappeared. Two followers of our Sayyid who had confessed and were convicted of the crime were released. The original file was replaced with a new one, and new witnesses came crawling out of the woodwork, the old ones not being found, or having left the country, or disappeared, or worse.
No one believed in the new file, not even the new prime minister who had commissioned it—he of the slippery tongue and interminable sermons. I didn’t believe in the new file either, not for a second. Not a soul believed in the new file, assuming, of course, they knew it existed, which the government tried to ensure they didn’t. Anyway, what kind of a file is it in which everybody says, “I saw nothing” or “I don’t remember” or “I was not there”? Nothing was specific in the new file. Everything was shrouded in ambiguity. All understood it was a sham. But the case could now be closed, and everyone’s complicity covered up.
The new file held no one responsible. Sayyid Majid was cut down in plain sight of a few hundred people, and no one was responsible. Because no one was responsible, it followed that no one could be held accountable. The Thirteen had turned the world upside down: because it did not suit them to hold anyone accountable, therefore no one was responsible.
The new file went a step further: it blamed Sayyid Majid for having inflamed the crowd with an inappropriate speech in the Great Courtyard of the Shrine. The worshippers, being poor, simple, God-fearing folk, who were only there to cry over the Imam and give alms, were upset. One thing led to another, as it so often does in life—this is how the new file read—and a mob jumped upon him, doubly offended by the words he spoke and the bullets his entourage had ostensibly started firing into their midst for no apparent reason. Or so the file claimed…And the knives just started slipping in and out of his belly and back and sides, by themselves, as it were; it was all the fault of the Sayyid’s poor choice of words.
The 2005 duly elected Shiʻa government, untainted by the Occupier, now turned on the hapless judge who had caused the problem in the first place by opening a case without authority—unless it was the Tyrant’s authority.
They launched a witch hunt into his original appointment, using their array of commissions—the De-Baʻthification Commission, the Ethics and Integrity Commission—to hound him out of office and declare him incompetent. Sayyid Majid’s friends in the Cabal of Thirteen controlled both commissions. That is the kind of friends they were. The judge was a closet Baʻthi, the two commissions concluded. He must have been working for the Tyrant, even though the Tyrant was on the run at the time. And still the judge continued to be hounded across the length and breadth of the country, until finally the Kurds put a stop to it.
“This man is under my protection. Back off!” said the Kurdish president of the republic, or words to that effect. Only then did the new prime minister desist, at least on the surface.
Still, they had gotten away with rewriting the official version of events. We were supposed to forget about Sayyid Majid’s murder, but not forget the terrible things the Tyrant had done. We couldn’t afford to let Sunni Arabs off the hook. The Thirteen were not responsible for anything…only Saddam was responsible…even when he wasn’t. Let bygones be bygones, they said, when it was their excesses that were being covered up—this was the spirit of the first big lie with which the first duly elected Shiʻa government in the history of our country began its first term of office.
—
“Betrayal” is an ugly word. Abandonment is the core event behind all types of betrayal. We hate the heretic but tolerate the Unbeliever and the skeptic. Why? Because the heretic abandoned God after believing in Him, while the Unbeliever who was always an Unbeliever did not abandon anybody; he can be bound to a community by oath, truce, or pledge of allegiance; abandonment doesn’t even arise as an issue. But it does in the case of the heretic or the traitor to the nation, both of whom accept and then abandon their community; we punish them harshly because they are the archetypal betrayers, the Princes of Betrayal, so to speak.
In their defense the Cabal of Thirteen will say they were driven to betrayal, forced into it against their wishes by a “higher” sense of mission that filled their hearts, an obligation to the community of all the Shiʻa that demanded sacrificing the justice due to their friend Sayyid Majid in order to save the lives of thousands in the city of Najaf during the August 2004 war, along with countless millions in the country at large, had the fighting extended into the Holy Shrine itself. He was, after all, only one man, they will say, and they had millions to save. What their enemies describe as betrayal, they see as loyalty; they are the saviors of the Shiʻa, not the betrayers of Sayyid Majid. Who am I to say otherwise? Can they be both things at once?
In the world that the Tyrant built in Iraq, everyone betrayed someone, sometime. In such a world, betrayal of friends and neighbors, or of other members of your own sect, was the norm. Was that the norm that the Cabal of Thirteen were still obeying, as though out of habit, the Tyrant’s henchmen having long since disappeared? Did they remain locked into the imperatives of the Tyrant’s world, not the new world they claimed they were building in Iraq?
I want to believe that the members of the Cabal of Thirteen are honorable people. I want to take them at their word and give them the benefit of the doubt. Many Shiʻa lives, Haider’s and mine included, were saved from a battle over Najaf. Perhaps the secret letter, and the betrayal of Sayyid Majid, who was after all dead, was a small price to pay for the saving so many Shiʻa lives.
Suppose this is so. I ask: How many lives need to be saved to justify the sacrifice of one man? And who in the end really saved us: the shameless Thirteen, or the old man rising from his sickbed to do what he hated doing, what he knew was wrong in principle for him to have to do, but knew he was obligated before God and his conscience to do?
An Intimate Killing
On a Friday, one cold winter’s day in 2005, Haider showed up at my house in a frightful state. His speech was barely coherent and his thoughts surfaced in scrambled fragments, spat out into the air staccato-like.
“I must speak to you…dear friend…I need you…I need you now…Terrible things are happening,” he said in a shrill, near hysterica
l voice. “Terrible…beyond belief…terrible, I tell you! You won’t believe me, I know…They are killing good men…Come with me. You must meet him.”
“Calm yourself, my friend. You are not making any sense. What on earth are you talking about?”
“They are killing Iraqi Air Force pilots and officers! Secretly assassinating them in the dark,” he said, his voice rising to a shout. “It is outrageous! We must do something.”
“Slow down. Take a deep breath. Who is ‘they’?”
“Iranians, secret agents in our midst…”
“I don’t follow you. Who is this person you want me to meet?”
“His name is Abbas; he is waiting for us in a teahouse only a few minutes away. Come…come…let’s go now. I promised him you would come. He asked for you…specifically. I want you to witness what he has to say.”
On the way, I tried to lighten Haider’s heightened anxiety with what I thought was a joke. “Why would MiG-25 Foxbat planes buried in the sand need fighter pilots and officers?” I said with a slight laugh, reminding him of the time we had watched Americans dig out Iraqi fighter planes buried by the Tyrant in the desert outside Najaf less than two years ago. “I doubt there are any fighter pilots around for Iranian agents to want to assassinate.”
But he took it seriously: “Former pilots and air force officers. Former…not current. They are hunting them down…picking them off one by one…”
“But why?”
“To settle accounts…to rid this country of its talent…How should I know why?”
“That’s crazy! Those kinds of men would be too old and out of practice, unable to fly anything today; not that we have anything left in the army that flies.”
But my friend was not listening. His world was coming apart, and there seemed to be nothing that I could do to stem the bitterness mounting within him. Once the cease-fire in Najaf set in, relations between him and his father broke down completely, aggravated by the fighting because the two were on opposite sides. He had overreacted to what his father had done when he abandoned one family in Najaf for another in Tehran. His delight at his father’s return, his pride in his father’s exploits in exile, turned into anger at the underlying deceit. It was not so much the infidelity toward his mother as the duplicity toward him, the shame before his friends, that undid him. Red lines were drawn inside the family, as they had been in the city. From mother to family to city, the hatred expanded outward like ripples in a pond to embrace family, sect, country, and nation.
In Haider’s eyes, his father was now a traitor to the idea of Iraq, as well as its Shiʻa community. I heard him say that his father’s infidelity, if that is what it was, turned him into a betrayer of the family of the Prophet. The more vigorously Abu Haider tried to defend himself, on the grounds of his God-given Muslim right to marry over his wife, the more unreasonable grew his son’s sense of betrayal.
A particular source of aggravation at home was a young attendant in his twenties named Najmaldin. He had returned with Abu Haider from Iran. Najmaldin’s Arabic was thickly laced with shades of Farsi and figures of speech not used by us. Still, he claimed to be a full-blooded Iraqi Arab from the city of Karbala. Haider naturally made inquiries, but no one could track down the man’s family, and he decided Najmaldin was lying. Moreover, Najmaldin slept in a spare room near Abu Haider, closer to him than his own son, even though Haider’s room was much nicer, a fact I was at pains to console Haider with. But the strange thing, which neither Haider nor his mother could tolerate, was Najmaldin’s disappearances, often for days on end.
No one knew the reasons for Najmaldin’s comings and goings, or what the precise nature of his job was. Abu Haider called him an “assistant,” assigned to him because of the importance of his work in the local Najaf office of the House of Hakim. Every so often Najmaldin and Abu Haider would closet themselves in a room and talk for hours in Farsi, a language neither Haider nor his mother spoke. It was usually after such meetings that Najmaldin would disappear, to return who knows when.
—
Arriving at the teahouse, Haider pointed to the farthest corner, where a man sat with his back to the wall supposedly reading a newspaper. I could see his eyes upon us the moment we came into view.
Abbas was a stocky man in his middle to late forties with short, cropped hair and a thin, neatly trimmed mustache; he was wearing pants and a white shirt, signs of a middle-class professional. An untouched glass of tea sat on the table in front of him. Pleasantries were exchanged; I ordered tea; Haider was too worked up to drink anything. “Tell him what you told me,” he said breathlessly, “tell him, tell him”; the words could not tumble out of his mouth fast enough.
“I want to join the Sayyid’s army and serve his movement,” said Abbas in a calm and collected tone of voice, suddenly cognizant of the fact that his cause might no longer be well served by anything Haider had to say. “I was hoping you could vouch for me with your uncle. I have technical skills and can be of great service. I was told you are the man to talk to.”
“Respectfully, my brother Abbas, I hardly know you. What are these skills you talk about?”
“I served in the Iraqi Air Force all through the 1980s, flying emergency search and rescue missions on the front lines; there is nothing mechanical that moves or flies which I cannot repair or improvise upon when spare parts are nowhere to be found—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” interrupted Haider, “but tell him why you want to join our movement. That is what is important.”
I looked directly into Abbas’s face, my quizzical expression reiterating Haider’s interjection.
“I need protection,” he said, returning my gaze.
“From whom?”
“It is not for me to make accusations. I only know that friends and colleagues of mine, who served with me during the Great War with Iran, are being found in alleys, shot through the head, usually at night or when no one is around. The killings are professional executions, with no witnesses, signs of torture, or vindictiveness of any kind showing on the corpse. All means of identification are removed, and the body is often concealed and covered with trash so as to delay its discovery and complicate the task of identifying the assassins.”
“Professional!…You heard that, my dear friend…he said ‘professional,’ ” interjected Haider, beside himself with outrage. “This is organized; only a state intelligence organization can pull it off…and who would that be but the Iranian Revolutionary Guard! No Iraqi lone gunman would work like that.”
“But why would the Iranian Revolutionary Guard want to indulge in such senseless killings?” I exclaimed, turning to look at Abbas: “What do you think?”
“There is no obvious explanation, but there is a pattern; they are targeting former officers in the air force. We have formed a network of our own retired servicemen to keep one another informed, and provide protection if the circumstances allow it. We also investigate the facts after each killing, the extent to which they conform to a pattern, and so on. From all of this information it is clear to us that the killer or killers are working to a set modus operandi. If not an openly political agenda, the only other motive is revenge.”
I liked his methodical way of reasoning. “Go on,” I said.
“From here onward it is pure speculation. Memories of the Great War run very deep here and in Iran; they lost three men, often young boys, for every one of ours, suffering casualties of a million people. The war ended only sixteen years ago. That is not long enough to erase the wounds of those eight years of bloodletting. Whether the killings are state-organized or run by vigilante groups and veteran organizations in Iran—which exist; we have checked up on that—I do not know. Revenge is the only explanation I can think of. The Sayyid and his movement are patriots and lovers of the idea of Iraq, as am I. That is why I come to you.”
“Do these mystery killings target both Shiʻa officers and Sunni ones?”
“They do not discriminate. Two of the men killed, a pilot and a maintenance m
an, were close friends of mine, both Shiʻa from the city of Kut, where I was born. The people behind this appear to hate all things Iraqi and don’t care what sect or nationality their victims belong to.”
“So why target only the air force? Why not officers in general?”
“Perhaps they do. I only know that my friends and comrades who were in the air force are being cut down. I cannot speak for the other services.”
I told Abbas that I would speak to Uncle, and that Haider and I looked favorably on his joining our movement. We shook hands and parted company. Uncle took an inordinate interest in the case and met privately with Abbas, who became a bona fide member of our army within the week. The word then went out to the House of Hakim—deemed closest to Iran in those days: Abbas was now under the protection of the House of Sadr, and if anything untoward were to happen to him, there would be an account with us to settle.
—
But Haider would not let the matter rest there. A few weeks after Abbas’s safety had been secured, Haider approached me again. We met in the same teahouse. I gathered he had become a stranger to his house, to the great consternation of his mother, renting a hovel of some kind close to the latrines of a larger adjoining house, a far cry from the immaculately tidy room, smelling of orange blossoms, that his mother always kept ready for him.
Haider was unshaven and looked disheveled, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep; they darted from table to table seeking out dangers that he saw lurking around. The upshot of our meeting was that he wanted me to embark on a most senseless and dangerous undertaking.
He had taken to tailing Najmaldin, following him twice to Sadr City in Baghdad for several days at a time, and once to Karbala. He was convinced that Najmaldin was an Iranian hit man, attached to his father, who engaged in the kind of killings described by Abbas. He had rifled his room and found a revolver, an unusual weapon for an Iraqi male to possess, whose weapon of choice was invariably a Kalashnikov because these had been distributed freely by the Tyrant to every household during the 1990s, and had been widely available ever since.