by Kanan Makiya
“Who?”
“The Great Imposter, the Antichrist. Our Sayyid’s father, Sayyid Sadiq, predicted it.”
—
It was young men, boys really, with thoughts like these in their heads who were the shock troops for the killing done in the summer and fall of 2006. The Sheikh of our neighborhood, the one who had told me about Grandfather’s Communist past, counseled me that it is not always wise to reason with such men.
“If you question everything, my son, if you demand a rational explanation for everything, you will drive yourself mad.”
“But I must know what I believe in; I must be able to explain it to myself. My whole life has been one of asking questions that I never find answers to.”
“Like what?”
“Like knowing the full story behind my father’s disappearance. I just found out, for example, that my father was a very good friend of Sayyid Majid’s; they were almost brothers, it turns out. That complicates everything all over again. Did you know about their friendship, my Sheikh?”
“Of course I did. Two good men, your father and Sayyid Majid, are now dead. They were friends. What of it? Why torture yourself looking into worlds of darkness that are forever closed to us?”
“I don’t know, my Sheikh,” I replied, looking at the ground, my eyes beginning to moisten. “I don’t know. Perhaps I still live in that darkness and ask questions to find a way past the demons that nightly visit in my dreams.”
We were eating in an orchard of palm trees on the outskirts of Najaf. I was trying to bring the turmoil I was feeling under control, and looked up at the tree fronds above so as not to embarrass myself further; the ghostly crescent of the early evening moon was filtering light through them.
“Does our Sayyid believe he is the Awaited One come to bring everlasting Justice to earth?” I blurted out.
“He does not,” replied the Sheikh, beginning to sense what was going on. He took the first bite out of the wrap of bread and cheese he had brought with him, and motioned with his eyes for me to do the same.
“Why doesn’t he say so loud and clear then?” I asked, relaxing through the act of slowly chewing at the bread and cheese.
“He has to be discreet; in learned circles he refutes the claim of his more enthusiastic supporters.”
“He is discreet because of the short term?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t that a bit opportunistic?”
“Look at that palm tree above your head. It is not just a tree. It is a symbol of rest and hospitality; God tells us such trees have been privileged to adorn Paradise, and in the next life the Dome of the Rock will stand on a tree just like that one, issuing from one of the rivers of Paradise. The Prophet covered his home with palm fronds, and raised the first mosque as merely a roof placed atop palm trees. See how many meanings are in such a simple thing as a palm tree. Do not underestimate a symbol’s power. Symbols are what lead volunteers to join our army in the belief that they will form the vanguard upon which the Imam will rely when he reappears. To electrify the masses, to make their hearts burst with faith, not just understand something through reason, our movement must always return to the power latent in the idea of the Awaited Imam.”
“Will we ever achieve our goals?”
“Do not confuse us with the other militias; we are an army of ideas that give structure and moral purpose to the dispossessed. Man’s need for general ideas to justify himself and his causes is one of the noblest qualities God has endowed him with.”
“So we will never disband?”
“Not until Absolute Justice rules the land; to do otherwise is to admit failure. Our mission is a historical one; it goes beyond the mundane interests of even our own Shiʻa selves. It is a divinely commanded mission of purification that must not be soiled by compromises and half measures. The House of Hakim will disband their militia once they have merged with the state’s security apparatus. But not us. Never us. We await the Rightly Guided One; we are His soldiers, no one else’s. It is a beautiful thing if you dwell on it.”
“Still, you say…there is politics?”
“Always there is politics. But we are uncompromising when it comes to resistance to injustice, as was our beloved Imam Hussein.”
“So wherein lies the politics?”
“In winning, pure and simple. Your uncle is the master of that. You want to win, right?”
“Of course…but I did not think power for its own sake was a cherished value of ours.”
“It is not; Absolute Justice is. And winning is.”
“And what are the long-term dangers in believing the Sayyid is divine?”
“Consider what would happen if, God forbid, the Sayyid were to die, which you and I know he must one day. The simpleminded among his supporters will be devastated; they won’t be able to accept it. We face a huge problem because our supporters lack education. That is where the handful of exceptional men like you come into the picture.”
“You honor me too much, my Sheikh. I think I see your point, but—”
“What is the source of your Sayyid’s strength, my son?” he interrupted. And then he went on to answer his own question.
“The idea of the Imam’s return, His Coming, holds the promise of the people’s revenge against the rich and the unjust; it is the earthly promise the Awaited One makes to the dispossessed. Through Him they will be redeemed. Even though our Sayyid is not the actual Imam, he is nonetheless the herald of His reemergence.”
“Have we not returned to where we started from?”
“Not if you think with your heart, my son. Let your head rest.”
“You said revenge…I thought we were speaking of justice?”
“You cannot, alas, have the one without the other.”
Names of Things
Although we were the first militia to appear after the Tyrant’s fall, many armed groups followed us. So many, I took to keeping a notebook to track all the names, at first because it was in the nature of my work to know what was going on—Uncle expected it—but later because my own curiosity propelled me to understand what was happening.
—
I begin for no good reason with my own Army of the Awaited One, known by some of our detractors as the Pink Army, because of the pink pills, said to be amphetamines, steadily supplied by Iran to our soldiers since 2006. Splinter groups from our army have gone on to operate independently. Most important among these is the Party of Virtue, a Basra-based group whose members claim to have no links with Iran or any of the formerly exiled opposition groups. Also one must include the Army of the Chosen One, about which I know very little; a women’s organization known as Daughters of Grace, which owes allegiance, or so they claim, to the House of Sadr; and the League of Truth, which is almost totally Iranian funded and trained (the salaries of their fighters are consistently higher than ours).
The Soldiers of Heaven were a group convinced the End of the World was imminent; it may or may not be deemed a splinter group from our Sadrist movement, but that is moot today, as the whole organization was wiped out in air strikes conducted by the American army in coordination with units of the New Iraqi Army on the ground shortly after the Tyrant was hanged in 2006. A great mystery surrounds this operation, but it later transpired that the Americans were acting on false information supplied by the House of Hakim. Uncle believed the villain was Abu Haider; he had fabricated a claim, backed by his friend the governor of Najaf, a man also from the House of Hakim, that the Soldiers of Heaven were a Shiʻa offshoot of al-Qaeda; and the credulous Americans believed him, even though everyone else in Najaf knew this was nonsense. Why the Occupier did not know these things, and was so wasteful of his own military resources, is a mystery known only to God. Mercifully, Haider, who was in the habit of relaxing and unwinding in their company, was not visiting the camp at the time of the air strikes. Several hundred harmless innocents were killed in a matter of hours—men, women, and children. Afterward, everyone—the Americans, the House of Hakim, a
nd the government—colluded to cover up the outrage. Only Abu Haider was pleased, having finally gotten his revenge for the murder of Najmaldin.
In working up the list, I started with the following distinctions: Shiʻi or Sunni; Islamic or Patriotic; Arab or Iraqi or Kurdish; Political or Criminal. But that was too general to be useful. So I added ideological criteria for classification, using known or knowable political inclinations based on proclamations and public statements. That was also unsatisfactory. In yet a third system of classification, I tried to organize armed groups by type of operation: car bombing, armed attack, secret assassinations, personal vendetta, suicide bombing, and so forth. In a fourth I used targets: attacks on a street, in a mosque, in a hospital or public building; attacks on pilgrims versus those on employees, or officials (including police), and so on.
For all of these lists, irrespective of how they were classified, I discovered I needed a column for the completely random violent event, about which no reasonable inference from place or purpose, stated or unstated, could be made. Often nothing about such incidents could be correlated to intent. Once I realized that “random” and “unknown” and “unidentified” and “miscellaneous” were outstripping in numbers all the other categories, I gave up altogether trying to classify the armed groups waging violent operations in the land.
—
To continue with the list of names: two small organizations about which very little is known are the Movement of God’s Revenge and the Party of God–Iraq Branch (more than one organization with such a name exists in southern Iraq, not to be confused with the Lebanese organization that carries the same name).
Then there is the oldest Shiʻa armed group in Iraq, which emerged like ourselves and the Party of Virtue from the House of Sadr, and has provided two prime ministers since 2003: the Party of the Call, by which is meant the Call to True Shiʻa Belief. The Party of the Call is not one group but many, all claiming the same name, as the old guard and collective leadership were shunted aside once the party took office in 2005 and a new Party of the Call, based on government patronage and largesse dominated by the prime minister, came into being (itself possibly two or three organizations, all sharing that name). The oldest militia belonging to the original Party of the Call is the Forces of the Martyr Sadr. I have often wondered if the rapidity with which the Tyrant had to be hung in December did not have something to do with the fallout inside the Party of the Call at the time, with the prime minister’s faction seeking to gain credibility for itself because it executed Saddam Hussein. God alone knows.
Aside from the policing and military institutions of the state, which the Party of the Call in government controls, it is in the process of forming many separate well-funded militias, each linked to the prime minister, and operating clandestinely. These are known to run secret prisons and torture centers.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was formed in 1982 in Tehran to extend the Iranian Revolution into Iraq. The House of Hakim founded it, in contrast with the previous Shiʻa militias, all of which in one way or another pay allegiance to the House of Sadr. Later the Council changed its name to the Islamic Council, removing both “Supreme” and “Revolution” in order to show its democratic nature (no longer “Supreme”) and to distance itself from Iran (no longer promoting a “Revolution”); it is not an easy thing to change people’s perceptions by changing one’s name, but a necessary one in Iraq, given how unpopular the Iranian connection makes anyone who tries to flaunt it. In 2005, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq nominally agreed to demobilize its armed militia and turn it into an “Organization for Development and Reconstruction,” but no one took that very seriously, not even the Occupier, whom they were trying to make happy with all these name changes.
The Brigades of the Full Moon are an independent and formidable militia controlled by the House of Hakim. Abu Haider served as one of its senior commanders. This is the militia that killed Muntassir in 2003, when our Sayyid tried to wrest control of the Shrine in Karbala from them, and that provided the Occupation forces with false information that led to the decimation of their fellow Shiʻa organization the Soldiers of Heaven. The Brigades fought the Iraqi Army during the Iraq-Iran War, and may very well have been on the wrong side of the front lines in Fao while my father was defending his country against Iranian aggression; they have a reputation, unproven as far as I know, of having executed Iraqi prisoners of war who did not transfer their allegiance to them after having surrendered. After 2003 the Brigades of the Full Moon specialized in carrying out revenge killings against Baʻthis, former regime officials and army officers, taking care to never fire a single shot at the forces of the Occupier.
I must not forget two special cases of fully Iranian-operated militias: the first is the Iraqi extension of the Party of God in Lebanon, headed by Sheikh Nasrallah and funded by Iran. The second is the militia known as the Jerusalem Force: technically it is an extension of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard specializing in overseas operations and working semi-clandestinely inside Iraq, in close cooperation with the Brigades of the Full Moon; in practice, however, it functions on the ground as its own much-feared militia, recruiting fighters and conducting operations as though it were an all-Iraqi organization. It is also in the business of training a whole host of smaller Shiʻa militias, approved, funded, and run from Tehran. Starting in 2004 the Jerusalem Force started flooding the country with lethal roadside bombs; these fire a molten copper slug able to penetrate American armor, and wreaked havoc on the Occupier.
—
Turning now to the Sunni militias, I begin with the Council of Iraqi Religious Scholars, which is run by a former Baʻthi, Harith al-Dharri. They claim not to have a militia, their name chosen to convey academic overtones, but I saw several hundred heavily armed men patrolling the Mother of All Villages Mosque (formerly Mother of All Battles Mosque) when I visited it with Uncle in June 2003. Moreover, they are the only so-to-speak meta-Sunni organization, providing ideological guidance to all and sundry fighting the Occupier or its puppet government. The Base-Iraq was run by a Jordanian, Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, until the Americans killed him in 2006. Now someone runs it under a different name from the city of Samarra in Iraq.
Lesser known but equally deadly Sunni militias go under the names the Army of Muhammad; the United Islamic Front for the Liberation of Iraq; the Victorious Ones; the Front of the Victorious Ones; the Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi Way (a Sufi-based order run nowadays by Izzat al-Douri, the former Iraqi vice president under Saddam); the Soldiers of Islam; the Islamic Army in Iraq; the Islamic State for Iraq and Syria, otherwise known by the acronym ISIS; Partisans of Islamic Law; the Islamic Party; the High One; the Army of the Tribes; the Army of Pride and Dignity; the Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet (whose claim to fame was blowing up a Shiʻi mosque in Saydiyya); the Council of Jihadis; the Islamic Emirate of Iraq; the Supporters of Islam; the Soldiers of God; the Army of Abu Bakr (the first Caliph of Islam, who ruled after the death of the Prophet); the Lions of al-Bara‘a Son of Malik Suicide Brigade; the Thunder Brigades; Supporters of the People of the Sunna; the Islamic Unity Brigade of the Sword of Truth; the Supporters of Suicide Brigade; the Mother of Believers Brigade; the Islamic Rage Brigade; the Umar Son of Khattab Brigade; the Muslim Youth Brigade; the Assassination Brigade of Supporters of the Sunna; the Lions for Islamic Unity. I have excluded the remnants of the Baʻth Party, like the Martyrs of Saddam, due to their growing insignificance or transformation into organizations with other names, some of which I have identified.
Often organizations from both sects have multiple brigades attached to them, which go under different names. Sometimes a given brigade will change its name, say, when an operation goes wrong and the brigade does not want to acknowledge responsibility for it. I have excluded these duplicates, but I can no more claim perfect accuracy than I can count the blades of grass in a field.
Many armed groups exist, or existed at some point in time, about whom I kno
w nothing except their names: the Trustees of the Awakening, the Sons of Islam, the Supporters of Jihad in Iraq, the Supporters of the Sunna, the Supporters of Ibn Taymiyya, the Organization of Unity and Jihad, the Forces of His Truth Set Forth, the Brigades of His Just Retribution, the Party of Enthusiasm for God.
This list is incomplete. There are other groups about which I know nothing, not even their names.
The Importance of Being Umar
A good man I befriended in Baghdad in 2006 was named Umar—a name hated by the Shiʻa—even though his father was named ‘Ali and his uncle Abbas, both names venerated by us Shiʻa. This was the cause of many problems. His father and uncle had no trouble walking the streets of Baghdad that we controlled in 2006, but poor Umar was kept at home out of fear that he would be killed simply because of his name. In other words, Umar was apparently not who he really was; it was who he was mistaken for being. When a soldier in our army saw this name, Umar, say on a random inspection at one of the hundreds of checkpoints we set up across Baghdad, a real human being was not there; certainly not my friend. Only his name, which belonged originally to the Second Caliph after the Prophet, God Bless His Name, whom this soldier’s Sheikh had taught him to hate and curse as many times as he could in a day, for the higher the number of times he cursed the name Umar, the greater blessings there were to be found.
And so it seems that once a name has fixed itself in our minds, every other thing or person that bears the name, no matter how beautiful and God-fearing, is seen as conforming to the original type. There is no justice in this, as is attested by the case of poor Umar, who would have holes drilled into him were he to be caught at one of our checkpoints, or showered with endless cups of tea if he were inspected at one of theirs; all this is simply a testament to the importance of how things are named.