by Kanan Makiya
In 2006 Haider counted more than 1,500 checkpoints in Baghdad. “The men at these checkpoints supply us with information on decisions taken at the highest level,” he told me proudly. “And they depend on me. Do you know that at the entrance of the Hurriya neighborhood, police officers and soldiers often ask me what they should do in the event of a problem? They want to follow my orders, you see…I don’t even have to pay them. So I tell them to go inspect cars that look suspicious. They ask me, what is suspicious? I tell them whatever pops in my mind or whatever it is I want to know. The important thing is they should have confidence in my judgment. The soldiers of the prime minister’s New Army are more loyal to me than they are to their own commanders. Do you know how easy it would be for me to organize a coup?”
“What!” I exclaimed, horrified. “Why would you want to do that?”
“I don’t want to do it. I am simply telling you I can do it.”
“How?”
“It’s easy. I would lock everybody up in the Green Zone by placing a few gun trucks at each entry point, along with a tank or two; then I would deploy my men in the Parliament and buildings attached to the prime minister’s cabinet. Outside the Green Zone, I would encircle the Karrada neighborhood, where the House of Hakim have their forces; they, of course, would have to be fought to the finish.”
My own experience confirmed Haider’s boast; militias and security forces ruled the main roads. Driving a typical twenty-minute distance of a few kilometers along a central artery in a middle-class neighborhood, I had counted at least three checkpoints and nineteen different gun trucks, either on the road or parked along it. Shadowy characters bought the silence or acquiescence of soldiers and police officers for a few dollars and infiltrated these checkpoints, letting trucks loaded with explosives be escorted by “hired” police vehicles, a fact that prevented them from being searched at other checkpoints.
As I drove through the slums that supplied us with a steady flow of fighters—not on the main avenues and highways, but behind middle-class districts, through the side streets of places like Hurriya and Sadr City—scenes of utter desolation greeted the eye: half-finished houses made of bare concrete block, wrecks of cars looking like stripped skeletons crawling with squalid urchins in filthy rags, flies swarming around their faces. If I dared emerge from the car or roll down the window, they swooped on me like vultures, hands outstretched. The beggars I was used to in Najaf were harmless old people, whose resignation to fate I could pity and wish to ameliorate. They would sit in the shade of the gates of our local mosque, and I was always happy to share my lunch with them. But not these snarling, whining hooligans, who pushed each other about to get ahead, knocking down the weak or smacking the sickly with their yellowing, hollowed-out faces, shoving their faces into mine, not asking for money but demanding it, and turning vicious if they did not get it.
Slums like these are warehouses of cruelty that grind out whatever virtue is left in a heart. The borderlines between life and death to navigate there were different from anywhere else in Baghdad. I knew of no one, not even the brave and fearless Haider, who could navigate them at ease; he, like me, would not pass the test of getting out of a car without an armed escort in the heart of one of these slums—and yet our whole movement lived and fed upon them.
At night, the random violence of the day gave way to closed streets, dark corners, lurking shadows, absent electricity, no light of any kind unless it was a militiaman’s two-bar electrical heater at a checkpoint working on stolen electricity. Sometimes you would not hear a single pulse of life other than your own breathing, whose loudness made you anxious. Only a howling dog, a snarling cat, or a burst of gunfire in the distance relieved the deafening silence. The exceptions were the places where corrupt politicians and businessmen, or party leaders and Foreigner Iraqis, lived. These places may have had a late-night restaurant and a shop or two, but always they were filled with cronies and gray yes-men who hung on someone else’s every word in order to use it against him the next day. Always one could find supplicants lining up behind corrupt and trigger-happy policemen, and other colorless go-betweens, outdoing one another in the degree of their servility.
Haider had spread out on the floor of the armory, which doubled as his office, a huge map of Baghdad on which he had colored the various districts and routes of access. He had cardboard cutouts indicating a gun truck or a sniper’s position or a checkpoint—his own, those of the army and police, and those of the enemy; these he played with, moving them around the map to make a point about the wisdom of attacking here, not there, and with only so much strength because of what was needed in reserve and why. He studied the city like a military commander studies his battlefield; I learned much from him this way.
Our neighborhood, for example, he would say, pointing to it with his ruler, borders the Grand Army Canal Highway to its west. The Grand Army Canal Highway cuts Baghdad in a razor-sharp straight line from the southeast all the way up to the northwest; it is four lanes wide, and the only one of its kind in the city with a wide island in the middle, where the canal, more like a ditch these days, used to run.
The highway was built in the early 1960s at the same time as Sadr City, then called Revolution City, which borders it to the east. But the 1960s was a long time ago, when Baghdad was a city of one million people. Today it is six million and all those planning considerations no longer work as intended, Haider would explain. Originally a barrier to wall off the flood of Marsh Dweller migrants from the south because their sprawling slums were threatening to invade old Baghdad from the east (it was rumored the Baʻth had contingency plans to flood the ditch with oil and light it up in the event of an urban insurrection), today, Haider would point out with his ruler, the Grand Army Canal Highway “is the key to our victory in the war for Baghdad”; it provided gun trucks with rapid access to the whole sprawling eastern side of the river Tigris, including old Baghdad, and linked it to the Shiʻa south of the country. He showed me how rapidly his men could zip up and down the highway, dart in and out, striking adjoining Sunni neighborhoods to the west until one by one they fell, and we gained yet more bits of territory to extort, and from which to launch the next cycle of takeovers.
—
Living in Baghdad, you heard people ask themselves questions like: Which is worse, a car bomb or a suicide bomber? Each sound had an entirely strange and heightened significance, and had to be considered separately and cautiously, whereas in Najaf the sounds blended into one. Eyes behaved differently in Baghdad, constantly darting from left to right, suspecting everybody and everything. Odd forms of dress were viewed with suspicion. Previously women were not the objects of any kind of fear, but as soon as female suicide bombers made an appearance, the heavily veiled, all-black-cloaked females who had been ignored had to be shunned. Men took to doing the shopping; children were barred from the streets. The danger was abstract, but strangely, we tended to adapt to it.
At first the violence changed us Baghdadis in small molecular ways; then we woke up one day to notice everyone had changed and nothing was the same. You could see it grinding us down, pulverizing who we used to be, turning us into helpless atoms of pure solitude, be it my kind of solitude or Haider’s. Danger and the new habits that arose from it bequeathed to the people of Baghdad a city in which trust had long since passed the limits of anticipation, and distrust, a means of survival at first, had become the norm. In the abyss of this Baghdad, betrayal metamorphosed into a way of life.
The File
The judge worked out of a building housing the Special Tribunal of the Criminal Court, established by the Occupation Authority in 2003; he had been relocated from Najaf to Baghdad shortly after the Court was set up. His office was across the road from the tomb of Michel ʻAflaq, founder of the Baʻth Party, and was set apart from all the other office buildings in the city by the tall clock tower attached to it. But getting there was an obstacle course through the Green Zone, one that began by joining the throngs of people trying to pass
through the multilayered checkpoint and concrete barriers closest to the Bridge of the Republic.
Having failed to get a response from the judge by saying who Uncle was and what organization I belonged to, I tried a new approach on Haider’s advice, using my grandfather’s name, and explaining how devoted my father had been to Sayyid Majid, how he had died protecting him and facilitating his escape in 1991. This secured the appointment.
Haider had dropped me off in a smart civilian-looking sedan that the unit he commanded used for such purposes. The plan was that once I had penetrated the checkpoint, I would be picked up by a car from the office of the prime minister, which had already supplied me with the necessary paperwork. Looking like a smart civil servant, I was dressed in a clean pair of freshly pressed gray pants, a crisply starched white shirt, and a navy blue jacket. All I carried in my hands was a plastic bag containing six juicy, firm red pomegranates from Uncle’s tree, a whole box of which he had passed on to Haider and myself as a housewarming present upon hearing we were living together.
Haider thrust the plastic bag into my hands as we headed to the car, a gift to the judge, he insisted. He had taken the trouble early that morning of seeding one of the pomegranates, by cutting it in half, covering the cut with his cupped palm, and then thumping the hard skin with a wooden ladle to release the seeds into a container. He insisted on my sitting down and having tea while I watched him perform the procedure the way my mother used to. “No point in getting juice on your shirt today,” he laughed. And I laughed with him as he bustled about cleaning the container, sealing it in plastic, adding a plastic spoon, and throwing the lot into a plastic bag.
At the checkpoint, a mass of people—cooks, houseboys, gardeners, guards, translators, drivers, nondescript junior “advisors,” and employees—were piling up against the first set of obstacles, propelled by the conviction that the sooner they penetrated them the less likely they were to be blown away. As a consequence, they were all being crushed at the entrance and slowly disgorged like so many discarded plastic bottles at a sluice gate on the Tigris; this flotsam and jetsam of Baghdad, believe it or not, were envied because they had jobs when no one else did, but they also knew that so much envy brought danger, and so another reason they wanted to get through the barriers quickly was in order to remain anonymous; they had lied to their families about being employed in the Green Zone and didn’t want anyone in the crowd to recognize them and catch them out in the lie.
I jumped into the fray, shouting and elbowing my way through like everyone else until I could show my papers; unlike the others, however, once I had shown my papers, I, a prince of the Sayyid’s movement and Uncle’s protégé, was ushered in like royalty.
—
The beginning was awkward, but the pomegranates worked. I put the container and plastic spoon on the desk before the judge. He smiled, tossed a spoonful into his mouth, declared them excellent, as good as anything he had tasted from Karbala, from whence he hailed, and insisted we share the box of pomegranate seeds, miraculously ferreting out another plastic spoon from one of his drawers, which he passed on to me. Then he motioned to the armchair and sofa nearby, suggesting it would be more comfortable to talk and eat over there. The rest was smooth sailing.
“My father tells me he knew your father and grandfather well; he praised them both to the skies.”
“Thank you. I am deeply grateful to you for this meeting. I hope I am not inconveniencing you in any way?”
“Not at all,” the judge replied. “Our fathers endured difficult times. My condolences for the loss of your grandfather, by the way, belated though they are. So tell me, why are you so interested in this case?”
“Your Honor, I hardly knew my father growing up, but looked upon him as the beacon of my life. I have read the books he left behind many times over. I seek only to know him whom I admire so much. Four years ago, on her deathbed, Mother gave me a letter my father wrote to her, the last thing he did, which told how he and thousands like him were caught and treated and how they would die.”
“I am sorry…How she must have suffered.”
“Thank you, sir. Still there was no mention in the letter of his relationship with Sayyid Majid. He did not explain why Saddam’s forces sought him out and wanted him arrested. Perhaps he did not want to give unnecessary detail in case the letter was intercepted.”
“I understand.”
“And then, on the day of the Tyrant’s fall, April 10, 2003, I ran out of our house in Najaf to see what all the commotion in the Shrine was about, and just a few minutes away down an adjoining street I almost stumbled upon a corpse in the street. I had never seen a dead man before, but to see one killed like that left a big impression on me. I did not know whose body it was at first. There were a number of men milling about, some from the neighborhood, but I did not know if they were bystanders or what. For three years I did not connect that body with my father…until Grandfather began to tell me stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Stories about the Uprising in Najaf during 1991, how my father and Sayyid Majid grew up together, and how in the confusion of the Uprising they tried to carry out Sayyid Majid’s father’s, Ayatollah Khoei’s, rulings on bringing order to the city to stop the senseless killing, the leaving of corpses untended in the streets…It was toward the end of those tumultuous days, as the regime’s tanks were rolling into the city, that both men disappeared, my father forever and Sayyid Majid for a while before reappearing in London, where, I am told, he worked tirelessly for many years against the Tyrant.”
“So what do you want to know?”
“I want to see the file of your investigation into his murder.”
“There is nothing in the file about 1991 or your father. My investigation concerned the murder of Sayyid Majid on April 10, 2003.”
“I want to know who killed him and why.”
“There is a government-approved version of what happened, issued by the first elected Shiʻi prime minister, a friend and fellow exile of Sayyid Majid’s in London; it was adopted by the new government, and all the men we had investigated and put in jail in 2003 were found innocent and released in accordance with the new investigation. That is now the only official version of what happened. I was not in charge of that new investigation and had nothing to do with it. You should read that document, which, alas, I do not have a copy of.”
“I have read that file, Your Honor. I don’t trust its version of events. I want to compare it with the original file that you prepared.”
“I am sorry, son. Even if I had the file, which I don’t, I would not be able to show it to you. It would be unethical, not unlike a doctor sharing his patient’s notes with a stranger.”
“At least give me the background to your investigation. What made you take up the case in the first place?”
“That I can do. It happened by sheer accident, in the course of an entirely separate investigation I was conducting regarding corruption coming out of the governor’s office in Najaf.”
“You were conducting an investigation after the fall of Saddam?”
“I was. It started shortly after his flight from Baghdad. No one knew who was in charge and to whom to report. The police force was especially demoralized…and afraid. Men were afraid for their jobs, afraid of what they might be accused of, afraid of being held accountable for the past…afraid of their fellow citizens. In fact, ordinary citizens were stronger than policemen in those days. In this chaos, political parties no one had heard of before began to make an appearance, not real parties, but people who claimed to be in a party coming from abroad, and who claimed to be protected by the Americans…These people behaved very arrogantly, as though they owned the place and had nothing to fear. They were in fact stronger than the still-standing institutions of the city of Najaf, most of which had virtually collapsed. I began to receive complaints from citizens showing up at my office and saying that a new governor had been appointed, by whom nobody seemed to know, and he was arr
esting people indiscriminately, demanding protection money, ransom money, barging into people’s houses and taking their goods. He even set up a car-stealing ring, selling cars to Iran. And he did all this in a crude, all-too-obvious way, leaving a trail of evidence sometimes in his own handwriting! The man was a charlatan and stupid to boot! And somehow the police were going along with it, acting under his orders, all under the impression that the Americans had appointed him.”
“Had they?”
“No! In fact, they didn’t even know who he was! My first contact with an American was with a polite young man who described himself as a military liaison officer; he didn’t speak a word of Arabic and had been told he was responsible for the Holy City. I asked him through a translator whether they had appointed this new governor who was riding roughshod across the city. He said he didn’t know, and disappeared for a few days to go and check—I have no idea with whom. When he came back, he said the Americans had not appointed anybody and had no idea who the man was. In my capacity as a senior investigating judge, I officially opened an investigation. You have to understand, the situation was strange. This man whom no one had appointed, and whose thugs were now dressed up as police, and whom not a soul in the city knew but whom everybody was obeying because they thought the Americans had appointed him, was actually for a short while in control of the holiest city in Iraq. And this state of affairs went on for a couple of weeks! Bizarre! That is how things were in April and May 2003. At the time, there was no such thing as a Sadrist movement, or an Army of the Awaited One, or a Coalition Provisional Authority, or a Paul Bremer. Nothing of the sort.”
“So what did you do?”
“I said to myself, ‘You are a judge; you have a job; you are good at what you do; go investigate.’ After I compiled a preliminary case, I presented it, with all the supporting paperwork, to this young American liaison officer I mentioned. He took it away, God knows where or to whom, maybe all the way to George Bush in Washington and back—to this day I don’t know. At any rate, a decision from high up—Bremer was still not on the scene—came back agreeing that there was a case for serious corruption, and asking me for a recommendation. I said the man should be arrested. They agreed. This time the senior American military commander in charge of Najaf showed up at my office, and said he and his men were at my disposal. We went ahead and arrested the self-appointed governor, just like that. He claimed he was a member of a party that no one had even heard of! I think they came from the north; some people even said they were Kurds. They were crooks, not political; that much I am sure of. My investigation now became much easier; lots more witnesses were encouraged to appear, and for a week I was taking depositions all day long. One was from a man who during his deposition said something strange. He blurted out, ‘Your Honor, this man”—meaning the governor—“not only extorted money; he allowed the killers of Sayyid Majid to escape.’ I said, ‘Who is Sayyid Majid?’ ”