by Kanan Makiya
Haider had not actually witnessed Najmaldin kill someone, he reluctantly admitted, “because at the very last moment he always managed to give me the slip.” On the other hand, the killings Abbas and his friends had tracked were all done furtively with revolvers at close quarters, proof, Haider said, that Najmaldin (and others like him) were behind them.
My friend’s imagination had then leapt to wild accusations regarding Najmaldin’s killings of “Iraqi patriots,” as he now took to calling the victims. I tried different ways of reasoning with him, pointing out that he needed proof before taking any kind of irreversible action.
“What if the killings had nothing to do with Iraqi patriotism,” I said to him, “or serving in the Great War with Iran, but were motivated by past activity and membership in the Baʻth Party? These men, who just happened to be officers, were being killed for being former Baʻthis.”
“Nonsense!” Haider shouted. “Why would your uncle have signed on and protected Abbas if he had been a Baʻthi? He had him checked out, didn’t he! Nobody is as thorough in these matters as your uncle.”
Accounts were being settled all over Iraq. The Tyrant had killed dozens of people from the Hakim family, just as he had done from the Sadr family. It was certain the surviving family members would seek revenge. Perhaps that is what was going on, in which case an Iranian vendetta against Iraq, focusing on former officers, was most unlikely, and Haider should not feel compelled to precipitate action.
But such arguments did not impress Haider. Nothing I could say would convince him otherwise. He had grown so self-absorbed, and estranged from his father, that he even turned irritable toward his mother, whose concerns for the deteriorating state of her son now exceeded her anger at Abu Haider’s marital infidelities, a fact that incensed Haider even further.
Sensing all this, I asked my friend what was on his mind. Why had he called this meeting?
“I want you to interrogate Najmaldin.”
“What!” I exclaimed in shock. “What do you expect me to ask him? Why would he even want to talk to me?”
“He is waiting for us not far from here,” Haider said. “You are better with words than I am and can approach the subject indirectly. Just get him to confess that he is working for Iran. I have a little tape recorder we can use to record his confession…Here, see,” he said, pulling the small device out of the plastic bag he was carrying.
“You say he is waiting for us?”
“Yes, hurry,” my friend replied, grabbing me by the arm and leading me out of the teahouse. After a convoluted fifteen-minute walk, we came to an abandoned, partially destroyed building. Climbing over the rubble and through what used to be a courtyard, Haider led me into the last remaining intact room, newly boarded up, where I found Najmaldin. He had been shackled to some pipes coming out of the concrete, his face beaten to a pulp, both eyes swollen shut. I looked for a pulse in his neck; there was none, although the body was warm.
“He is gone, dead. Oh, Haider, what have you done!”
“I left him alive…I swear it…I just knocked him around a bit…He admitted everything…and then I went for the tape recorder…I had to find someone to borrow it from…and then I came looking for you.”
The Meeting
Najmaldin’s body took several weeks to locate and identify, during which Haider was nowhere to be found. I searched all over Najaf and Sadr City in Baghdad looking for him, but to no avail. In the meantime, the House of Hakim was once again ascendant in the city, its offices mushrooming, eclipsing ours, and its Brigades, not our army, deployed to protect the Holy Shrine.
Shortly after the first elected Shiʻa-led government took office in the spring, Uncle received a request from a very highly placed cleric in the House of Hakim suggesting that it would be in “the common interest”—by which was meant the interest of the Shiʻa alone—for Uncle and Abu Haider to have a meeting attended by a neutral “higher” authority trusted by both. The intermediary was an aide of considerable standing in the Grand Ayatollah’s office. At this time Uncle did not know the fate of Najmaldin, and I did not know his body had been found in the abandoned building where I had last seen it.
We Arabs have a saying, “My cousin and I against the stranger; my brother and I against my cousin.” Haider was like a brother to me. And so I did not breathe a word about Najmaldin, complicit in what my brother had done, all the time hoping that the affair would just go away, with everyone thinking that Najmaldin had decided to return to where he had come from in Tehran.
Uncle simply assumed the meeting had been called to discuss the new strategy of the Sadrist movement, described by our Sayyid as “political resistance,” designed to replace the old one of “armed resistance” that had culminated in last August’s showdown in Najaf. Our army had taken a terrible punishment during the fighting without disintegrating. Uncle thought the House of Hakim was calculating that although our fortunes in Najaf were in decline, now was not the time to strike a deathblow, because our standing in the country at large was soaring, especially in Baghdad. So there was room for maneuver, Uncle must have thought, and he welcomed the visit, which he insisted take place at his house.
A war of wits was about to commence, and its first move was where to meet; when all parties unhesitatingly agreed to meet at Uncle’s house, he thought he had won the first round. In the meantime, our movement’s rhetoric against Iran had softened, and to Uncle’s great consternation, Iranian military aid, which he had taken in 2004 with head held high, as though he were doing them a favor, was now flooding into our movement at our request and coming in the shape of better weapons, communication systems, and, worst of all from Uncle’s point of view, “advisors” attached to our Army of the Awaited One. All this was happening around the time of the meeting—another reason, Uncle surmised, why the House of Hakim, which was even more heavily indebted to Iran, might have called it.
Uncle was at the forefront of those senior leaders of our movement who opposed the new orientation toward Iran, and it is said our Sayyid sided with him—his father having held Iranian-born clerics in contempt. But the lure of Iranian money, Iranian guns, Iranian personnel, and Iranian mines specially designed to penetrate American armor lulled our Sayyid, Uncle said, into accepting the devil in our midst. Our priority was now the tidal wave of suicide-bombing attacks by Sunni haters of the family of the Prophet, followers of the austere eighteenth-century preacher Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, targeting our Shiʻa community in their neighborhoods, mosques, markets, and sites of pilgrimage. As these precursors to the all-out war that was about to erupt increased in number and ferocity, the opportunity for Sunni-Shiʻa collaboration, something Uncle and our Sayyid always stood for, narrowed sharply.
—
The delegation arrived at Uncle’s house in the late afternoon of the first Thursday in July. The intermediary was a black-turbaned cleric of impeccable credentials about Uncle’s age; a younger white-turbaned man, who I gathered was an assistant of some kind, accompanied him. Abu Haider was in his black robes, a sign of mourning. The two men with him were also wearing black.
Uncle was dressed informally in his favorite white silk gown, freshly pressed and cleaned; in a deliberate provocation, he had chosen to invite the Sheikh of our local mosque, the gossip whom Haider and I had shared sugared almonds with, and who had brought such grief to Abu Haider’s household; the Sheikh looked even smarter than Uncle in his all-white flowing robes, which matched nicely with his carefully arranged white turban. Grandfather, looking no different than he always did in a white dishdasha that should have gone to the laundry, was also in attendance, which was unusual. He seated himself next to Uncle, which was even more unusual. I was there bringing up the rear, and sat in the least conspicuous place I could find.
The party of black sat on one side of the room, and two empty seats away, on the other side, our very own party of white. Uncle’s heavy frame sprawled on the plushest armchair in the house; everyone else was seated on a sofa (the room had been rearr
anged for the occasion). The three Sheikhs, two in black, one in white, were leaning forward like boxers getting ready to jump up at the sound of the bell. Abu Haider, stiff and bolt upright, exuded calm. Only Grandfather was his usual devil-may-care self, moving his body around his seat until it reached the desired level of comfort, not giving a damn about anyone else in the room.
The first hour of such meetings is always a waste of time. This one was no different, with talk about the rampant corruption in Baghdad, differing evaluations of the new crop of ministers in the first elected government of the Shiʻa, the threat to our community posed by al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies, the poor state of Najaf’s infrastructure, and so on. Glasses of cold water and tea, followed by biscuits and Arabic coffee, followed by towering platters of every kind of fruit imaginable, were served by a young boy who was brought in for the occasion. My aunt never appeared; she organized it all cloistered in her kitchen quarters.
Finally, when the high-ranking intermediary chose to break the ice, as was his prerogative, it took the highly surprising form of addressing Uncle by praising me for my erudition, my outstanding reputation for integrity in the community, and finally my loyalty to my friends.
You could have knocked me down with a feather; something was afoot. Even Uncle was taken aback. Everyone realized the preliminaries were over, and the business at hand was about to commence. The intermediary concluded this peroration suddenly, with a question to Uncle:
“We were wondering if your esteemed nephew could shed any light on the fate of poor Najmaldin.”
“Najmaldin?” asked my Uncle. “I am afraid I don’t know whom you are referring to.”
“My brother-in-law,” Abu Haider interjected.
Najmaldin was the brother of Abu Haider’s second wife! Did Haider know all along? Or had Abu Haider hidden the fact from his family in Najaf, even after the disclosure of his second marriage, not wanting to complicate his life in Najaf further, adding insult to injury by revealing the identity of his assistant?
“We are all brothers,” Abu Haider continued, looking straight into Uncle’s eyes without blinking, as though there were no one else in the room. Both men kept marking time fingering their worry beads. “Why, my very own son is like one of your own, committed to the cause of your Sayyid and your House of Sadr,” he said, speaking clearly, softly, enunciating every word slowly, in a room that had gone deathly silent apart from the beads clinking into place like a metronome.
“Please understand, I respect my son for such independence of mind,” he continued, “and hold no grudges. But he is young and brash, inclined to act before thinking, unlike your nephew, news of whose abiding friendship and wise counsel to my son reached me even in Tehran during the difficult years of my exile. For this I am most grateful.”
“Thanks are due only to God,” said my Uncle politely, still puzzled and biding his time until he could fathom what this wall of praise was intended to entrap.
“Thanks be to God,” replied Abu Haider, nodding his head gently. Everyone fingered his worry beads faster now. A few moments later, he went on. “Yes, my son was blessed by the bonds of friendship that the pair of them have enjoyed since childhood. I only hope he proves worthy of them.”
Pausing again, looking at Uncle, he continued, “My son has dropped out of sight and taken to not visiting his family, including his poor mother, who is beside herself with worry. We need to save him from himself. Najmaldin was last seen in Haider’s company, heading from my house toward the market. An hour or two later your nephew,” he said, looking in my direction, gently smiling in acknowledgment, “was seen with him in a teahouse in the vicinity of the market. Najmaldin was not there, but customers sitting nearby say Haider appeared agitated, and your nephew was reasoning with him, trying to calm him down, apparently to no avail.”
Abu Haider stopped here, indicating he had come to the end of what he had to say for the time being by reaching out for his tea and taking a long and very noisy slurp—the custom in Najaf to indicate appreciation for the hospitality on offer. He had not stated the main point; it was all by way of inference.
Uncle was now obliged to indicate that he understood what needed to be done. He began by singing the praises of Haider, speaking eloquently of Haider’s “dedication to Islam and commitment to service,” especially toward his fellow Shiʻa coreligionists; he spoke of our long friendship, during the “most formative” years—an indirect jibe pointing at Abu Haider’s absence—during which he had tried to the best of his “limited abilities” to be a “father” to both boys, both of whom had been robbed of their biological fathers by the “cruelty of the Tyrant.”
Uncle concluded by praising Haider’s “excellence in sports and bravery and prowess as a soldier on the battlefield of Najaf the previous August” (which would have stung Abu Haider deeply, because his men had fought alongside the government and might have been engaged by Haider directly), contrasting these with my “excellence in academic pursuits,” and speaking of how the pair of us so perfectly complemented one another. “Theirs is a most remarkable and unusual friendship, like magnets bonded to one another through their opposing polarities.” On that high note of superfluous elegance, he ended his paean of praise by turning to me.
“Did you see Haider in the teahouse on the day of his disappearance?”
“I did, Uncle,” I replied.
“Have you seen him since?”
“I have not.”
“Go on then, son, don’t dawdle. Tell his father what he needs to hear. I want the truth, and nothing but a full and comprehensive account. This is not a time—”
At that moment Grandfather interjected, clearly disapproving of Uncle’s gentle rebuke, which he did not realize was not intended as a rebuke but as a signal to the intermediaries that Uncle took seriously the possibility, however remote, that his nephew might be involved in Najmaldin’s terrible fate.
“Leave the boy alone!” he said sharply to his son. “He is the model of rectitude and honesty. Everyone knows that!”
I appreciated his interruption, which gave me the moments I needed to shape my response. I turned my head slowly and looked at Abu Haider, whose eyes were now fixed on me. “He was, sir, as you say, very anxious and unhappy. Deeply unsettled. I was doing my best to calm him down.”
“What was he unhappy about?” Abu Haider asked in a low voice, feeling compelled to ask because I was not being forthcoming enough. Realizing my mistake, I went into a little peroration of my own.
“Everything, sir. He had recently met this preacher, a student of Sayyid Sadiq, and was reading his book, a biography called Judge of Heaven. He visited the small community that the preacher established in an orchard just north of Najaf. Haider, I know, stayed there and was taken by the simple communal life these families live, awaiting the End of Time, which they believe is around the corner. Haider, I could see, was deeply moved by the gentle ways and manners that prevail in that community, in such stark contrast with the tumult and turmoil going on everywhere else in the country. We talked about that. The real problem was the claims of their preacher, who sees himself as having a direct link to the Absent and Awaited Imam, on the basis of which he claims His Coming is also imminent. His followers have put themselves on hold, as it were, waiting in this beautiful orchard for his arrival—”
“Did he say anything about Najmaldin?” Abu Haider interrupted.
“Haider was very confused, agitated, looking to settle his turbulent mind. Najmaldin’s presence, the fact that his bedroom was closer to yours than his own, bothered him. I tried to tell him it didn’t matter, that his room was after all so much nicer…but Haider is stubborn, as I am sure you know, sir. When he gets something stuck in his mind, it takes time to dislodge. Deep down all he really desires, although he does not know how to say it, is your respect and to be taken into your confidence.”
“Did he mention being with my brother-in-law when the two of you were at the teahouse, the last day he was seen alive?”
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br /> “No, sir.”
“Are you sure, son? This is very important.”
“I am absolutely sure.”
“Would you swear on the Quran to that?”
“I would, sir.”
“Thank you…Do you know where my son is?”
“I don’t, sir, as God is my witness.” This time I could take refuge in God’s name up front without having to be pressured into it, because I had no idea where Haider was.
“I have searched high and low for him for days to no avail,” I continued. “I was told he had been seen in Baghdad, and traveled there, staying overnight. But nobody had heard from him. I cannot even vouch for the witness who claimed to have seen him.”
“Do you think he was capable in his state of mind that day of killing Najmaldin?”
“Shame on you, Abu Haider!” shouted Grandfather from his couch. “How can you ask his best friend a question like that? Are you asking him to betray a man he loves, your son no less?”
Abu Haider contained his fury, but his contempt for Grandfather was hardly concealed in the protracted withering glare he directed at him, before turning finally to me, expecting an answer as though Grandfather had not even spoken.
“No, sir. Absolutely not,” I lied. “Your son is not capable of such a reprehensible deed.”
Aftermath
So I lied. I had to. How simple it was; so authentic and natural, I almost believed in it myself. It seemed to me at the time there was more shame in telling the truth. I would not abandon my friend; I would not betray him. I lied not only because the consequences of telling the truth were so grave for Haider, but also because my honor as his brother in arms, and in life, was at stake. Grandfather understood, which is why he intervened, incurring Abu Haider’s wrath. Perhaps that is why he insisted on being there. This was a new side of Grandfather, one I did not then understand. He, after all, had lost his best friend, Haider’s grandfather, over a political dispute—how trifling in retrospect! That was Grandfather’s irredeemable moment, all those decades of hate and bitterness Saddam brought upon two best friends, both sworn enemies of the Baʻth. Perhaps it bothered him, and he did not wish it upon Haider and myself.