The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  Most of the rumors originated in poor neighborhoods. In a sense, they were a normal expression of the experience of people undergoing the extreme stress of awaiting war and fearing their rulers—of coping with powerlessness amid constant violence. Many of the rumors were actually planted by the Baath Party, so that Saddam, having turned Iraq into a nation of spies, was tracking the progress of germs he himself had introduced into the body politic. He and his countrymen were joined in a closed system, a circle of paranoia. Survival depended on believing that anything was possible—the more unlikely, the more likely. To try to live outside the circle was a risky, even fatal, effort, and only the extraordinary were able. “Every Iraqi is a Baathist,” Saddam liked to say, and even after he was gone from the scene, many of them acknowledged that he continued to inhabit their souls. The Iraqi who showed me the rumors, a sophisticated, artistic-minded woman whose whole family had gone into exile while she stayed behind with her husband and children, kept muttering oaths and trying to pull the volumes away. “I’m sorry, George, I hate government documents,” she said. “Imagine living like this for thirty years. Surviving.”

  I had been in Iraq less than two weeks when Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a safehouse in Mosul after an extended fire-fight with American soldiers. Uday in particular had been possessed of a psychotically cruel temperament. One of his former bodyguards, a bluff, good-natured man named Emad Hamadi, told me a story to illustrate what it was like working for him. Uday was frolicking in a swimming pool one day with a group of young women. He summoned Emad, who was wading nearby in his swimsuit, to bring him a whiskey. As soon as Emad handed over the glass, Uday forced his head under water and pinned it between his knees. Emad knew that if he struggled at all it would be the end of his life, but the game went on and on, for half a minute, a minute, until he felt he was about to die anyway. Emad resigned himself to his fate, but as he started to lose consciousness his arm instinctively moved from side to side to indicate that he couldn’t endure any more. He felt himself released, and when he came to the surface, Uday was laughing along with his consorts. “You’re a good man,” said the heir apparent, and he insisted that Emad have a whiskey as well. Uday was probably the most despised man in Iraq—even more than his father, who at least had climbed on his own to the pinnacle of power and kept himself there with impressive mastery.

  The night of the firefight in Mosul, there was so much celebratory gunfire in Baghdad that an American foot patrol I was accompanying near the river had to call off the mission and return to base—the rounds were falling dangerously close. But in the days that followed, Iraqis began to wonder if Uday and Qusay were really dead. The corpses presented to the media had been cosmetically repaired in a way that looked waxen and unreal. I heard various theories from a range of Iraqis. A woman who held a high position in the America-Iraq Friendship Federation told me that she didn’t believe it. “People haven’t seen any evidence that they are they,” she said. “DNA, dental—can these really identify them? Pictures can be manipulated. I heard a story that the house where the sons were killed belonged to an anti-Saddam sheikh. Why would he receive them?” And then there was the father’s mysterious silence. “If someone killed your two sons—I’m sorry, would you sit back and say ‘Okay, no problem’? So why hasn’t Saddam Hussein done something?” Her colleague suggested that Bush was trying to secure his reelection. My driver had heard that Uday escaped to Spain after the fall of Baghdad. Uday’s jeweler, whom I met at a party a couple of nights later, didn’t believe it, either. He had set hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds in rings, and if he’d been short .000001 carat in his work he would have been killed. He accepted the fact of all of Saddam’s and Uday’s crimes. Still, if Uday now came to him for help, the jeweler said that he wouldn’t turn him away. Uday had his positive qualities: He was straightforward—if he didn’t like you he killed you, if he liked you he treated you well. Uday had never personally wronged the jeweler, and it was a code of honor not to turn him in. His refusal to believe the news seemed like the expression of a wish: It would be humiliating if the Americans killed Uday and Qusay that way. In others it reflected fear: The young monsters were bound to return and inflict more pain. And in everyone it was the natural skepticism of people who had known only an official culture of lies. One old man, having seen Tony Blair discuss the event on television, became convinced that it was true, for Blair was smiling in a way that couldn’t be faked; the old man had learned to read the truth from facial expressions after spending the years of the Iran-Iraq War watching Saddam on TV.

  Over time, when Uday and Qusay did not reappear, and their deaths became accepted facts, the disbelievers turned into believers, without ever pausing to recalibrate their sense of their own ability to judge.

  * * *

  “THEY LACK THE POWER to experience freedom”: The phrase, from Dr. Butti’s proposal for the Gilgamesh Center for Creative Thinking, captured a truth about Iraqis in the months following April 9. It helped to explain one of the great mysteries after the fall of the statue: why the moment of good feeling was so short. The thousands of foreign soldiers, officials, contractors, and humanitarians who had poured into Iraq to rebuild the country found themselves in the position of the American sea captain in Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” who exclaims to the Spaniard he’s rescued from a slave mutiny, “You are saved, you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” Iraqis were told they were free, they expected to be free, they had been waiting for years to be free—but they still didn’t feel free. And so a reaction set in almost at once. Aqila al-Hashemi, a former diplomat who in July became one of three women appointed to the interim Governing Council, told me, “We are still under the shock, we are still afraid. We are still living the same—I was fifteen in ’68, now I’m fifty. You see? You can imagine—can I change in two days, in two months, in two years? We need to be re-educated, rehabilitated.” Iraqis who longed for freedom, she said, “were happy after the fall of the regime. But then there was an act of sabotage against this joy, against this happiness. It’s not accomplished, you see. This feeling you have—ah, yes!—but then it’s not accomplished. This is frustrating.”

  The “act of sabotage” was many acts: the outbreak of chaos, the return of Baathist violence, the reality of occupation—but also the ingrained sense of powerlessness. With it came an outsized expectation of what the superpower could achieve, and the disturbance in Iraqis’ minds was only heightened by the performance of the Americans. If Saddam could restore the country’s utilities within a couple of months of the end of the Gulf War, with all the destruction done by allied bombing, why was the power grid still deteriorating after four months, when they had left the infrastructure intact this time? One month before the war, President Bush had declared in a visionary speech at the American Enterprise Institute that Iraq would become a democratic model for the Middle East. Iraqis heard him, and as an unemployed electrician named Tariq Talib told me, “We expected the Americans would make the country an example, a second Europe. That’s why we didn’t fight back. And we are shocked, as if we’ve gone back a hundred years.”

  Rumors spread that the American forces were cutting electrical lines to punish Iraqis for staging attacks, and that they had brought Kuwaitis up with the invasion force to instigate the looting in revenge for the Iraqi occupation in 1990. “Our people don’t understand what’s going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos,” Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. He himself didn’t know what to think. “We don’t want to believe it’s not intentional—the greatest power on earth can start a nuclear war.” The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn’t believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate
sabotage made more sense.

  Dr. Butti introduced me to several of his old classmates from the Jesuit-run Baghdad College. They were trying to set up an organization with a vague idea of improving social knowledge in Iraq by making contact with counterparts in America. We sat in a sweltering living room in Karada, the middle-class and commercial district on the eastern bank of the Tigris: There was a urologist named Nimat Kamal, who looked like Ed Asner when he scowled, and a fire safety engineer with a softer manner named Mohamed Abbas. Dr. Kamal was livid at his treatment by Americans. There were three tanks positioned outside his hospital, and every day soldiers searched him and his car—every day, even though they knew him. “They don’t distinguish between a doctor and a terrorist.” One of his distant relatives and his neighbor’s twelve-year-old boy had been shot to pieces recently when they inadvertently drove into a street that soldiers had cordoned off. At the same time, the urologist wanted more security from the Americans.

  Abbas, the engineer, compared their situation to that of the Palestinians. “Same soldiers, same Apaches, same way of apprehending people. Iraqis are becoming more aggressive, because they make the connection.”

  “It needs time for things to be settled, we know that,” Dr. Kamal said. “We are unlucky to be living in this boiling period. But people like us are in a layer of society that is very conservative. We have an unconscious fear of politics—we don’t like to get involved. The Americans won’t protect us.” Educated, professional Iraqis were lying low while others—the poor, the religious, the armed—took to the streets.

  “I had conflicting feelings during the war,” Abbas said. “I wanted both sides to lose. I don’t like American occupation, and I don’t like to live under Saddam’s rule.”

  I asked whether they would share information about insurgent activity with the American military if they had it. None of them would, and not only for fear of reprisal.

  “It is also my conflict over the American presence,” Abbas admitted. “To be very objective.”

  Dr. Butti, who had brought us together, suddenly looked at me with concern and apologized. He hoped that I wouldn’t take it personally. I pointed out that all of them were still trying to make connections with Americans.

  “There’s no love that doesn’t come after a quarrel,” Dr. Kamal said, finally smiling. “Maybe we will learn to love each other.”

  * * *

  “THE HUMAN COMMITTEE FOR PRISONNERS AND LOSSNERS INTERNATIONAL” said the sign on a side street, not far from the bombed-out headquarters of military intelligence in Kadhimiya, an old neighborhood in the city’s north with a famous market of goldsmith shops and one of the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam. The sign indicated a two-story building that was office and home to Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi.

  The chaos following liberation that had upended so many lives also created opportunities. There was, in fact, a kind of revolutionary situation in Iraq. Those who reacted first and fastest were the country’s long-oppressed Shiite clerics: They filled the vacuum with energy and organization, taking over hospitals and schools, providing social services to the poor, and imposing their Islamic code on daily life, while more secular Iraqis, doctors and engineers and artists, moved about in a daze. The sheikh had spent almost ten years in Saddam’s prisons, where he formed a clandestine prisoners’ group. Now that Saddam was gone, he was becoming an important man.

  On April 12, word reached the sheikh that the central market building in the expensive Mansour district was on fire. Before the war, the security police had stowed millions of prisoner files in the building’s basement for safekeeping. Now the Baathists were trying to destroy them, and the sheikh and a handful of associates, armed with knives and stakes, raced across town to salvage the evidence of Saddam’s largely successful attempt to turn all of Iraq into a prison. Other groups were already on the scene, fighting for possession of the records, including members of Ahmad Chalabi’s militia. The INC seized millions of documents around Baghdad, but the sheikh’s group managed to carry away carloads of files and microfilm to Kadhimiya, along with a partially melted Canon microfilm reader. The sheikh understood that these documents in soft pink and green folders represented not just the past but also the future.

  They now filled old metal filing drawers stacked to the high ceiling of his office, they sat in nylon grain sacks under the banana tree in his yard, they baked on his rooftop under the sun. More were arriving from various locations every week. And they were a tiny fraction of the full record of imprisonment and execution left behind by the old regime. American soldiers hauled off nineteen truckloads for central storage. In the offices of a rival prisoners’ association set up by former members of Hezbollah (the two groups traded accusations of file theft), I stood in a large room heaped waist-deep with loose documents and felt sick at the sheer anonymous quantity of it. Other regimes have created instruments of internal control as elaborate and meticulously documented, but even the files of the East German Stasi don’t tell such unhappy tales as Iraq’s Mukhabarat.

  File: Saleh Issa Ali

  Sentenced to Death

  Serial #580392669

  Republic of Iraq, Ministry of Justice, Prosecution

  Department: Secret Pen

  Date: 16-1-90

  It is sent to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Its theme is execution. Following the telegraph sent by the Presidential Board #368 on 8-1-90, we send you the order of execution of the following convicted persons:

  1. Karim Issa Ali

  2. Saleh Issa Ali

  3. Khaled Abdul-Rahman Ismail

  They should be hanged until death.

  With best regards,

  Minister of Justice Akram Abdul-Khader Ali

  The exterior walls of the sheikh’s building were papered with photocopies of old black-and-white snapshots of young men, most of them wearing the hairstyles of the 1970s and ’80s. Men and women came from all over the country to the office and combed through the files that the sheikh’s followers had alphabetized, hoping to discover the fate of a lost son or a cousin who disappeared two decades ago. One afternoon, a doctor arrived from Baquba, a town about an hour northeast of Baghdad. His name was Yousef Ibrahim and he was an otorhinolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat specialist—with the highest postgraduate degree in his field. One night in 1995, local Baath Party officials came to his house with orders for the doctor to go to the hospital and perform an emergency operation. Dr. Ibrahim was to cut off the ear of a young army deserter. “I told them it is not probable to do this at night, and I am not ready for this psychologically. They told me, ‘You must cut it even if you are cutting it with your teeth—or we will cut your ear.’” The idea was Uday’s, and in the months during which it was implemented, before Uday turned to other ideas, the doctor severed forty-seven ears. “I felt a feeling of nonexistence, a feeling of guilt,” Dr. Ibrahim explained, “but I am trying to satisfy myself that I had no choice.” He had come to the sheikh’s office looking for information about his brother, an emotionally disturbed man who was arrested in 1992 for cursing Saddam. “I think he was still alive until last year.” The doctor left without finding his brother’s file.

  On the same day, one of the sheikh’s best friends from prison had come for a visit. He was also a doctor, with hooded eyes and a calm, weary manner, named Saad Baghdadi, and when I told him about the ear doctor, he said, “If for me, I will not do it. What if he ordered you to kill these forty-seven? Will you do it?” Saddam had not been so savagely brutal from the beginning, Dr. Baghdadi said. “But when he found they obeyed him, Saddam increased his cruelty gradually. I’m very sorry, but if from the beginning no one obeyed him … in jail I and others disobeyed him in many things.”

  The sheikh said, “I used to read seventeen hours a day—do you know what it means to read seventeen hours a day?—and I couldn’t find anyone, a king or a sultan, who hurt people like Saddam.”

  The sheikh was in his forties, short, round bellied, dark complexioned.
He always wore a black cloak, white vest and pantaloons, pointed slippers, and the white turban that signifies a Shiite not descended directly from Mohamed. Though he kept his wife strictly hidden away and his forehead bore the dark bruise of fervent prayer, and in his inner office there was a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, the sheikh was a worldly man, a bit of a sensualist, a lover of impish jokes. The bushy beard, the full lips, the bug eyes behind thick black-rimmed glasses, and the sonorous voice put me in mind of Ayatollah Allen Ginsberg. He often dropped hints that he wasn’t a rigid interpreter of his faith. Once, when we were talking about dogs, he said that under Islam two kinds of dogs were sanctioned: guard dogs and hunting dogs. I said that my dog was a pug with no skills whatsoever other than companionship. Was this halal (lawful) or haram (sinful)? He thought for a moment. “It is neither halal nor haram,” he said. “It is allowed.”

  The sheikh received me on several occasions in his pale-green sitting room, where we were served vast lunches and tea lasting hours. “I am one of the regime’s victims,” he would begin—whereupon the power failed, his fan died, and the sheikh continued, “and one of the facts of the new regime is that the electricity has gone off.” He sat with his legs drawn up in a vinyl swivel chair, sweat now pouring from under his turban, and I felt compelled to apologize on behalf of the Americans for the terrible state of Iraq’s utilities.

  The sheikh was born near the south-central town of Hilla into a family of tribal chiefs, and he grew up studying religion with the Hawza, the Shiite school of theology in Najaf. His intellectual pursuits were broad—Catholic doctrine, the writings of Nostradamus, Arabic poetry, Greek philosophy (he taught Plato and Aristotle to his religion students every morning)—and there was a streak of mysticism in his brand of Islamic thought. But in Najaf he also met and admired Khomeini during the ayatollah’s exile in the 1970s. It was the beginning of widespread Shiite political activism in Iraq, much of it inspired by Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, and in 1977 the sheikh was arrested at a demonstration in the holy city of Karbala. After a year he escaped prison and fled to Kuwait, then to the Shiite-dominated part of Saudi Arabia, where he had friends and supporters. But the Saudi government betrayed him to Iraqi intelligence. He was drugged and sent back in a box to Baghdad, where he endured a year of interrogation at General Security Headquarters before trial. His own court-appointed lawyer recommended the death penalty, but the sheikh was sentenced to life. Before being sent to Abu Ghraib prison, he was beaten with cables for three days. “They wanted to make me taste torture, to give me an idea about torture, so that I would know this is a terrorist jail.”