The Rope

by Kanan Makiya

  My realization, in late 2004, that Iraq was sliding toward civil war was a turning point in my life. The whole edifice of hopes that had clung to that slim possibility of a different kind of transition from dictatorship crumbled. Self-doubt began to eat away at the optimism that had sustained me since 1991.

  Strangely, I recall precisely the moment when it began. I was having dinner in the summer of 2004 at a good friend’s house in an upscale district of Baghdad. Another friend, then a minister in government, was present. The three of us, all graduates of the same elite American university, spent the evening discussing politics. The host talked as if he had all along predicted a Shi‘i-Sunni breakdown. He spoke with a kind of certitude, and self-assurance, which I found troubling. We both began to raise our voices and lose our tempers, something that had never happened before. What bothered me was the feeling that he was looking forward to a final showdown with those “Sunnis,” who, he predicted, would be crushed. And Muqtada’s uprising, with his ragtag “Army of the Awaited One,” made up of deadbeats and thugs—I chose only the best to populate my story: Haider, Muntassir, and the narrator—had just proved they could fight the Americans in Najaf. Both friends were excited and upbeat about that fight, going so far as to see in Muqtada al-Sadr the leader of a second intifada (the first being in 1991). Here were the shock troops in the Armageddon against Sunni Arabs that was being prophesied. I experienced that evening something I had not seen in either of my friends before. Cynics say it was there all along. I don’t know. We all changed in 2003. Through the eyes of close Lebanese friends who had experienced the carnage of the Lebanese Civil War, I had seen how that kind of violence was the ultimate political evil that could descend upon a country, worse even than Saddam’s tyranny, and that the only point of anyone’s politics ought to be how to avoid going there.

  —

  With the exception of Saddam Hussein and Muqtada al-Sadr, I knew all the politicians alluded to in the book. Many of them I worked with in the course of meetings of the Iraqi opposition during the 1990s in Iraqi Kurdistan, London, or the United States. I knew the real people, I hasten to add, not the sculpted versions of them that appear in the novel. Among them was Sayyid Majid al-Khoei; he was in fact murdered on April 10, 2003. I did not make that up. I interviewed him at length in London in the early 1990s, shortly after his escape from Najaf. The interview appeared in my 1993 book Cruelty and Silence. Sayyid Majid requested at the time that I conceal his identity, because he risked being misunderstood, having saved the life of a wounded Baʻthi officer, slated to be killed just like poor Hasan al-Najafi, whose fate, a true story, is told by my narrator’s grandfather.

  The narrator and his grandfather, along with his mother, father, and uncle, bear no resemblance to any Iraqi living or dead. I know or met people like them and like Haider, Abu Haider, and Najmaldin, but they are composites. Colleagues at the Iraq Memory Foundation and I, for instance, helped one man who had been an Iraqi pilot flying search and rescue missions during the Iraq-Iran War and who became terrified at one point because, he believed, Iranian agents were hunting his fellow pilots and gunning them down at night, just as I describe in “An Intimate Killing.” I cannot confirm that the man’s fears were legitimate; I can only confirm that they, and similar apprehensions, abounded after 2003. There was much settling of accounts in the first year. Many people were killed silently outside of the political limelight. Eventually we arranged for our colleague at the Memory Foundation to work abroad for a year. If a deeper resemblance to real persons crosses the reader’s mind, it is purely accidental.

  The stories my fictional characters tell are by and large based on real events. The conditions in Radwaniyya Prison during 1991, as described in a letter the narrator’s father smuggles out to his wife, are taken almost verbatim from the testimony of Qassim Breysam of Basra, who was interviewed in 2005 by Mustafa al-Kazimi, then of the Iraq Memory Foundation (an interview, along with hundreds of others conducted by Mustafa, that was aired repeatedly on Iraqi television).

  The U.S. Army did wipe out a harmless group known as Soldiers of Heaven, Jund al-Samaa’, as described by Haider and my narrator, and as reported online in The Times of London on January 29, 2007. Separately, I had access to a detailed Iraqi police report written in the immediate aftermath of the attack, replete with pictures, smuggled to me by an Iraqi security officer who was one of the first to visit the devastated area after the event. I do not know if the Americans knew what they were doing, and I am inclined to agree with Iraqis on the ground who told me they were tricked into it by Shiʻa enemies of Jund al-Samaa’.

  Events in this work of fiction follow the real history of what happened (the murder of Sayyid Majid, the siege Muqtada imposed on Ayatollah Sistani’s house, the formation of the Governing Council, the wars between the Houses of Hakim and Sadr, the arrest of Saddam Hussein, the negotiations over the “suspension” of the arrest warrant for Sayyid Muqtada, the war in Najaf, the Sadrist alliance with jihadi Sunni groups,*1 the deal that Ayatollah Sistani brokered, the blowing up of the shrine in Samarra, the civil war across Baghdad, the hanging of Saddam Hussein).

  There was an arrest warrant for Muqtada al-Sadr for the murder of Sayyid Majid issued by the American Occupying Authority based on an original investigation by a judge from Najaf, an investigation neither instigated by the Americans nor conducted with any American involvement.*2 The warrant was “suspended” following a secret deal struck between the House of the Shiʻa (the literal translation of Al-Bayt al-Shiʻi, the name they gave themselves in 2003) and the occupying authorities. After the election of the first Shiʻa-led government in the history of Iraq in April 2005, the original investigation was annulled and replaced with a new, phony one that found no one guilty of the murder and released two previously convicted direct perpetrators of the crime who had been arrested and imprisoned on the basis of their own confessions. The prime minister at the time was Ibrahim al-Ja‘fari, a senior member of the Da’wa Party (the Party of the Call in the novel), and currently the minister of foreign affairs.

  The stories related in the chapter entitled “The Second Conversation” concerning Sayyid Majid’s role during the Uprising of 1991 accord with what eyewitnesses I interviewed in the early 1990s said, material I incorporated in Cruelty and Silence. There was a little boy of eight, Ahmed, whom Sayyid Majid saved just as one of my characters says he did. The Baʻthi officer whom Sayyid Majid rescued, a local man from Najaf, had asked for Sayyid Majid’s “protection” in exactly the same cultural sense that Sayyid Majid employed when he asked Sayyid Muqtada al-Sadr for his house’s “protection,” only to have it denied and his murder authorized, as the novel recounts.

  The contrast between the behavior of these two men, twelve years apart, the one who gave protection in 1991 and the other who denied it in 2003, both Sayyids from the most eminent religious families of the Shiʻa world, is another reason I chose fiction as the form in which to tell my story. This is a book about character in politics, as well as ideas. In his wartime writings, Camus makes the point that character is rare in politics, unlike intelligence, which can be found everywhere. The narrator’s uncle, an exceptionally intelligent man, exemplifies that insight. A lot of politics need have nothing or very little to do with character or the moral failings of individuals. But trust is a judgment made on the basis of character, and there are watershed moments in the lives of nations, such as 2003 in Iraq, when character, not intelligence, becomes all-determining, when one’s actions routinely turn into commitments, and when there is a heavy human price to be paid for virtually every choice that one makes.

  I observed innumerable instances of murky moral behavior among the returning community of Foreigner Iraqis, especially those who went on to occupy high positions in government, and who I saw steal and betray without batting an eye. The sheer scale of the corruption was a shock, far exceeding anything experienced under the Baʻth. Some of that was to be expected; perhaps, even, it was unavoidable at a time when Iraq had regre
ssed to a cash economy—no banks, no credit cards, just circulating bags of cash. Of course there was corruption. What even is corruption under circumstances such as those of Iraq immediately after the tyrant’s fall? And by what standards, and whose laws, dare we judge people? For these reasons, I can find it in my heart to excuse corruption, but not murder.

  Among the nonfiction works that inform this work of fiction, I must mention Ma’ad Fayadh’s firsthand account of the murder of Sayyid Majid, Dhaheera Saakhina Jidaan (A Very Heated Afternoon) (Beirut, 2007), published originally as a series of articles in Asharq al-Awsat shortly after the murder. Fayadh accompanied Sayyid Majid on his return to Najaf in 2003 and was with him in the shrine when the rabble-rousing started. He was captured and bound by Muqtada’s men along with Sayyid Majid, but later released. My account of the murder does not rely solely on Ma’ad Fayadh, however. After years of trying and digging, I managed to corroborate Fayadh’s account, add considerable detail, and carry the story forward by obtaining access to the original file that first the House of the Shiʻa in the Governing Council in 2004, then the Governing Council, then the Ja‘fari government of 2005, and finally the Maliki government of 2006–2014 worked hard to suppress and supplant with the whitewashed Sadrist version of events.

  The story of the cover-up of Sayyid Majid’s murder is in many ways more telling than the murder itself. All the members of the House of the Shiʻa, whom the narrator’s uncle refers to as the Cabal of Thirteen, were implicated. They either orchestrated the cover-up or knew about it and acquiesced. And most of them were personal friends of Sayyid Majid who worked with him closely during the 1990s.*3

  In fact, the secret concealed by the cover-up was not really a secret at all. I doubt there was anyone in the entire class of leading Shiʻa politicians of post-2003 Iraq—a class of several thousand people—who would not tell you in the privacy of their homes that they believed Sayyid Muqtada ordered Sayyid Majid’s murder. But they all thought that it was not in the interests of the Shiʻa as a community (or their own intra-Shiʻa alliances and political future) to admit to the fact; hence the enormous success of the cover-up.

  I, of course, think the exact opposite is true: the cover-up lies at the core of the Shiʻa elite’s failure after 2003. Hence Sayyid Majid al-Khoei’s murder is the intellectual and moral backbone of this book.

  A cover-up of this magnitude works only when many people are directly or indirectly implicated; Saddam knew this well, having mastered the art over thirty years, to the point of rewriting history and successfully telling Iraqis what, when, and how to think, on any subject under the sun. The public was never entirely unaware of what was going on, conferring bad character traits upon the whole class of returning exiles, unfairly in some cases, because of the trickery and deceit it now began to associate with the House of the Shiʻa and the governing class.

  Incidentally, the word “cabal,” which is used in the novel to describe the leading group of thirteen Shiʻa members of the Bremer-appointed Governing Council, the individuals most directly involved in the cover-up, captures the contempt that Muqtada himself, and the Sadrist movement generally—and, therefore, my narrator and his uncle—had for the House of the Shiʻa between 2003 and 2006. A strange psychological dynamic was at work, in that the more the Foreigner Iraqis, or the House of the Shiʻa, or more generally the stream of carpetbaggers and would-be politicians returning from exile after 2003, tried to curry favor with Sayyid Muqtada, the greater was the contempt he held them in during those crucial first years after 2003. That sentiment, of course, did not extend to Sayyid Majid, whom he did not hold in contempt as much as he hated and, probably rightly, feared.

  The original Iraqi government file that I rely upon in my novel was almost certainly destroyed by the April 2005 Ja‘fari government, around the time that two men who had confessed to the actual stabbing in the original investigation, Mustafa al-Ya’koubi and Riyadh al-Nouri, both senior followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, were pardoned and released from jail following the Shiʻa-led whitewash. Only the U.S. government retains copies of the original investigation, buried by now deep in the bowels of its National Security Archive.

  In December 2002, at the conference of the Iraqi opposition in London attended by around one thousand people, Sayyid Majid and I informally headed two competing groups of “independents” (Iraqis unaffiliated by choice with any of the traditional parties represented in the conference, all of whom ended up in the Governing Council the following year). The details are unimportant, but we were caucusing during a break in the main conference and the vote was going against me (we are both great talkers, but he had the better argument). At that point some of my so-called friends in the Iraqi National Congress pulled a trick to avoid a vote being taken. They came rushing in to announce the main conference was reconvening, and we all had to dash back into the main hall because an important vote was about to be taken. The meeting of the independents broke up, and my “friends” had a big laugh about it afterward. I was embarrassed, but they had thwarted Sayyid Majid, and that was the point. I think Sayyid Majid knew all along what was going on, but I was famously naive and didn’t guess right away.

  Two or three weeks after that episode, my father and I and a few other guests of Diwan al-Kufa in London were having lunch at an Iranian restaurant on Westbourne Grove.*4 There were several bottles of wine standing prominently on the table. When it came time to pay, the waiter indicated that another customer sitting by himself in the corner of the room, whom I had not noticed before, had already paid for the meal; it was Sayyid Majid, always the gentleman.

  —

  Sayyid Majid’s father was Grand Ayatollah Abu’l Qassim al-Khoei, widely considered to be the most respected “Source of Emulation” in the Shiʻa world since 1970, the year of the death of his predecessor, Sayyid Muhsin al-Hakim. The Ayatollah who replaced Sayyid Abu’l Qassim al-Khoei following his death in 1992 was his brightest student, Sayyid ‘Ali al-Sistani, a “quietist” cleric cast in the mold of his teacher and mentor. He was named successor in Khoei’s will and accepted as such by the entire clerical establishment of Najaf. Sistani remains until today the most respected source of religious authority in the Shiʻa world. I was granted the privilege of meeting him in 2004. Sistani, incidentally, unlike my fictional counterpart, disapproves of the title “Grand Ayatollah” (the first Ayatollah to do so) and has expressly requested on his website that his followers not use it any longer.

  Ayatollah Sistani hates getting involved in politics, and will do so only when the situation is dire because of the bungling of the governing Shiʻa elite, toward whom he feels responsible. It was he who stood up to Iran and would not have another Iranian stooge as prime minister, which is how Haider al-Abadi, the first decent Iraqi politician since 2003, came to replace Maliki. The odds against Abadi succeeding are enormous; sharks beholden to Iran surround him, and sectarian criteria determine whom he can appoint. How strange that Sistani, a ninety-year-old recluse born in Qum, should be the last Iraqi patriot standing with anything like genuine authority in today’s Iraq.

  The third of the “Three Houses” that have a role in this book, and the most important from the viewpoint of Sayyid Majid’s murder, is the House of Sadr. It owes its eminence in the second half of the twentieth century to Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, a leading Shiʻa scholar of the 1970s, also a student of Khoei’s, and a founding member of the Da’wa Party around 1960 (the exact date is disputed). Sayyid Mohammad Baqir, and his activist sister, Bint al-Huda, died gruesomely at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services in April 1980, five months before Saddam launched his war against Iran. The timing, no coincidence, only confirmed the regime’s fear of Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr as potentially Iraq’s future Khomeini. In any event, he was an implacable, charismatic, and exceptionally intelligent foe of the Baʻth who also had the scholarly credentials to succeed Khoei as Grand Ayatollah had he lived. Saddam knew that. In the novel, Saddam Hussein’s description of what he did to Sayyid Mohammad
Baqir and his sister in 1980, and why, is of course fiction, but not of the kind that any Sadrist or expert in the politics of the period would object to.

  Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr’s cousin Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (referred to in the novel as Sayyid Sadiq) was Muqtada’s father. He had spent much of the 1980s bitter and resentful, not of the Baʻth regime, which had killed his cousin, but of Ayatollah Khoei, Sayyid Majid’s father, and the clerical establishment he represented, for supposedly snubbing him and not giving him his rightful place in the clerical hierarchy of Najaf. In a famous interview known as the al-Hannana interview, Sadiq al-Sadr went on record claiming that Ayatollah Abu’l-Qassim al-Khoei collaborated with the regime of Saddam to keep him at bay.

  By the end of the Uprising of 1991, Najaf was a wasteland, with huge swathes of the city leveled, its great libraries burned, its clerical class, many thousands strong, either dead or in exile. The regime needed someone to oversee its reconstruction. They also wanted an Arab who was known for his hatred of Iran (Sayyid Sadiq’s feelings were not unconnected with the fact that Khoei and Sistani are of Iranian origin), and on this basis the Iraqi regime indirectly supported Sayyid Sadiq’s claim to be the Grand Ayatollah with money and the power to grant or deny residency permits to clerics from overseas—from Iran, Afghanistan, and India predominantly—who wanted to reside and study in Najaf. According to the International Crisis Group, which gained remarkable access to the Sadrist movement, conducting important interviews with Sadrists in Iraq during 2005 and 2006, the Baʻth regime exempted Sayyid Sadiq’s sons and a number of his students from military service, and authorized him in 1996 “to launch his own publication, Huda—a striking gesture in a country whose press was tightly controlled.”*5