Aftermath
Page 8
When I revisited Amriya and saw Sheikh Hussein in March 2004, mosque security was higher than ever. Amriya had been home to former Iraq military bases as well as former officers in the army and intelligence services. The sounds of gunfire and explosions reverberated through the neighborhood’s walls, ignored by the children playing in the street until a particularly loud explosion sent them scurrying inside. Neighbors spoke of the nightly attacks and raids. Just last night, they said, U.S. soldiers had raided a house, and when the suspect was not found they took his younger brother. Nearby was the house of a former intelligence officer. When the U.S. soldiers came for him, his family said he was not home and he escaped, wisely trading his conspicuous SUV for a smaller, older wreck of a car. And also last night, they said, from this very street—”We saw them,” they laughed—a car pulled over and shot three artillery rounds at the nearby base where U.S. soldiers trained the new Iraqi Security Forces. One round landed in a small mosque by the walls of the base, damaging its tower; one went over and past the base; and one landed somewhere inside.
The walls of the Maluki Mosque were covered in pro-Saddam graffiti that had been unsuccessfully crossed out. Neighborhood boys surrounded it at prayer time, wielding Kalashnikovs unconvincingly. As the men strolled in for the Friday prayer, they were searched for concealed weapons. Slowly several hundred of the neighborhood men entered, greeting one another and gossiping in the courtyard and then removing their shoes and entering. As the muezzin finished his call to prayer, Sheikh Hussein carefully stepped between the closely seated worshipers, making his way to the podium and climbing up the steps. He began with blessings and reminded the people who their God and Prophet was, his voice low, slow, and gentle, his arms still; then he picked up the pace, arms waving faster, voice getting higher as he got more excited, until his voice cracked and he was nearly crying, chopping the air in a frenzy; and then he placed both hands out in supplication, his voice exasperated, slowing down as he answered his own questions, only to begin the cycle again, from low raspy rumble to the screaming crescendo that woke up those whose heads had sunk lower and lower into their chest in drowsiness.
Sheikh Hussein began by discussing Ali, whom Sunnis consider the fourth caliph, who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad in leadership of the umma (Muslim nation). Ali is also revered by Shiites as the only caliph who should have followed Muhammad, since he was the Prophet’s relative. “Ali was the first feday [fighter willing to sacrifice his life] in Islam,” Sheikh Hussein lectured. “He taught the nation how to sacrifice oneself. Be like Ali and sacrifice yourself for Islam. Be like Hassan, who tried to unify the people and who compromised with Muawiya for the sake of unity so the Muslim world would not be weak like our situation now.” This was interesting. Hassan was the son of Ali, who expected to succeed his father as caliph but was turned down for Muawiya, a man from a family that rivaled the Prophet’s Hashem tribe. At first Hassan disputed Muawiya’s claim to leadership, but he ultimately compromised. Shiekh Hussein’s reference to this episode could only be directed at Iraq’s Shiites, the descendants of those who had wanted Muhammad’s family, starting with Ali, to lead Muslims. He was asking them to compromise and let Muawiya’s descendants, the Sunnis, maintain power.
“Muhammad prophesied when Hassan was a child,” Sheikh Hussein explained, “that ‘my grandson will one day reconcile between two sects of Islam.’ Be like Hassan so we will be strong.” It seemed Sheikh Hussein might avoid mentioning Hassan’s more recalcitrant brother, Hussein, who chose to dispute the claim of Muawiya’s family after Muawiya and Hassan both died and Yazid, Muawiya’s son, was appointed caliph. “We condemn the attacks in Karbala and Baghdad,” he declared. “The first goal of the enemies of Islam is to make this country weak. They have a plan to make this country weak by causing a sectarian war so people will be busy fighting each other and they can control it, and our enemy the occupier will remain seated on our chests. So we condemn these attacks that are designed to provoke a sectarian war in this country.” Sheikh Hussein also condemned an earlier attack in Baghdad that had killed a young Shiite cleric. Then he continued, with a surprise, “We have to unify and be like Hussein, the martyr of Karbala, because he sacrificed himself for this country where many warriors were born. Hussein came to Iraq to fight a tyrant because he said, ‘I will not allow a tyrant to rule,’ and he did not want oppression. So he came to teach the people that any Muslim should sacrifice himself to prevent the creation of tyranny, and Hussein defined the path of martyrdom for the people who followed him and told them to follow it.” This is something you rarely hear from a Sunni. The divide between Hussein and Yazid split the Muslim world into Sunnis and Shiites and led to centuries of fitna between the two communities, with Shiites revering Hussein and hating Yazid and Muawiya, and Sunnis defending them and disparaging Hussein and his followers. “We are sorry, Hussein,” the sheikh cried out. “We are ashamed to meet you in the next life, because Baghdad has fallen.” By the end of the sermon, Sheikh Hussein had lost his voice and was too exhausted to talk to me.
After prayer was over Sheikh Hussein shook hands with many of his flock, and they embraced and kissed in the way Sunnis of western Iraq do. (Sheikh Hussein is from the Dulaimi tribe, whose stronghold is the western Anbar province.) He then retreated to his house inside the mosque, where he feasted with his guests from the nearby town of Abu Ghraib as his horde of little boys sat in the corners. American helicopters flew low overhead, shaking the room while Sheikh Hussein and his guests discussed the latest killings of sheikhs and attacks on mosques, and grumbled about the Americans.
In late 2003 at least four people were killed and seven injured when a drive-by shooting targeted the Hassanein Mosque in Amriya after the evening prayers. Sheikh Adnan, the cleric, explained that Shiite militiamen had attacked former regime intelligence men who were praying there. Some locals complained that Sunnis were complacent while attacks were perpetrated against them with impunity. Sheikh Adnan warned that this would lead to worse trouble for Shiites and Sunnis. He also complained that when Sunni clerics went to pay their condolences after the killing of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim of the Supreme Council, they were called “Jewish Wahhabis.”
THE MOOD WAS COARSENING in Amriya. Wall advertisements that featured photos of women were painted black to remove the female faces. Amriya is a wealthy neighborhood too; it has many English-speaking citizens, some of whom worked as translators with the American military. Many of them were killed; many others had to flee Amriya for safer neighborhoods. In the months leading up to the first election for a provisional national assembly in January 2005, Amriya’s streets were full of leaflets and walls calling for “death for those who disappoint what they had promised God,” meaning death for those participating in the election. Some insurgent groups patrolled the streets at night and launched their mortars toward the airport. Hundreds of Shiite families were brutally cleansed from the area; they would find sanctuary in areas under the control of the Sadrists.
Jafar was a Shiite originally from the predominantly Shiite town of Nasiriya in southeast Iraq. His family moved to Baghdad in 1940 but maintained connections with their tribe in the south. Jafar lived in Amriya in a big house with his seventy-year-old mother, two of his brothers, and their wives. Each brother had three or four children. The family was known in Amriya for practicing the Shiite tradition of cooking food and giving it away to poor people on Ashura; they did this even under the former regime, when it was permitted in the last two years of Baath rule.
Mueisar, Jafar’s third brother, was a soldier in the Iraqi army and was captured at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War in 1982. He had been a soldier with the Badr Brigade—who were stationed in Iran as an armed exile group—but he was too physically weak to be a soldier, so he left it in 2001. Mueisar returned home to Amriya after the U.S. invasion, accompanied by his Iranian wife and three children. He was the only member of his Iranian family who spoke Arabic. When he returned to Amriya Mueisar registered his children in
the local school so that they could learn Arabic and mix with other Arab children.
A few days after the second battle of Falluja started in late 2004, a new family belonging to the biggest Sunni tribe, the Dulaimi, moved to Amriya to live with their relatives, the Abu Khalel family, who were Jafar’s neighbors. Just like many displaced families who fled Falluja, they were too poor to rent a house, so they were hosted by relatives. Because Amriya’s houses are often large enough to host large families, many displaced decided to go there. A few days later some Shiite families received threats demanding that they leave their houses. After one Shiite family vacated their house, which stood next to the one Abu Khalel owned, his relatives took it over.
Jafar’s family had been trying to sell their house since 2003, because each brother wanted to have his own house near his work. But it was very old, and they did not get the price they wanted. Jafar and his brothers were shocked on September 4, 2005, when they found an envelope in their garage containing a letter with printed script threatening their lives if they did not leave their home within forty-eight hours. The text said: “In the name of God, do not think God is unaware of what the oppressors are doing. To Anwar, Shubbar, Mueisar, and Jafar: We are watching your movements step after step, and we know that you have betrayed God and his messenger, for that we give you forty-eight hours to leave Amriya forever, and you should thank God that you are still alive. And there will be no excuse after this warning.”
The writer was not very well versed in the Koran. The letter had no header or signature to reveal its origins, and there was no hint suggesting which jihadi group had issued it. It seemed more like a threat from somebody angry at the family than from someone involved in jihadist activities. Despite this, the family did not want to risk ignoring the letter.
Jafar’s family was one of four Shiite families living on a street that had twelve Sunni homes, but his became the third Shiite family on that street to flee Amriya within a month. One of the families had a son working as a translator with the U.S. Army; they fled the area after he was murdered at the gate of his home. The other had a son working in the Iraqi police; they also fled after receiving a threat. Jafar’s family took their threat seriously and started calling relatives and seeking help to find another house to live in before the forty-eight-hour deadline ran out. They also rushed to tell all the neighbors that they were leaving in order to send the message to whoever had made the threat.
More refugees from the siege of Falluja settled in western Baghdad neighborhoods such as Ghazaliya, Amriya, and Khadra, as well as in the villages just west of Baghdad such as Abu Ghraib. These were majority-Sunni strongholds where both insurgents and Salafis had a formidable presence. Soon after, more Shiite families in Amriya received threats urging them to leave. Those who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias. Shiites began to take these threats more seriously, and the process of sectarian cleansing began. Homes vacated by Shiites were seized by displaced Sunnis. These operations were conducted by insurgents as well as relatives of the displaced who wanted to house them somewhere. Shiites, in turn, fled to areas controlled by Muqtada al-Sadr’s supporters.
“And speed the appearance of the Mahdi, and damn his enemies and make victorious his son Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!”
In Baghdad’s Kadhim Mosque, in the northern district of Kadhimiya, in the spring of 2004, the Shiite faithful began the traditional chorus of “Our God prays for Muhammad and Muhammad’s family.” But they continued with a strange innovation: “And speed the appearance of the Mahdi, and damn his enemies and make victorious his son Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” This had never been heard before, but Turkmen Shiites were shouting it at demonstrations in front of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters and repeating it in their daily prayers. Thousands of Muqtada’s followers, including two thousand members of his militia, demonstrated at a February 27 show of force in Kirkuk.
I first met Muqtada al-Sadr in May 2003, when he was just beginning to outrage the Shiite establishment embodied in the hawza. Each marja (cleric) had his own office and received a tithe from his followers. Muqtada came out of nowhere, with no experience or education, but he commanded thousands of young men almost immediately. He spoke in the name of his revered father and of the mustad’afin (the poor and downtrodden masses), and he spoke in their language, Iraqi dialect and its slang, much as his father had. He alone was known by his first name, because Iraq’s Shiite masses felt a personal bond with him. While Iranian-born Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was the most respected religious authority for Iraq’s Shiites, Muqtada represented them, he spoke for them, he led them politically and spiritually. Tens of thousands would die for him. He was the most important person in Iraq after the war, and his power has only grown. Chubby, with an unkempt beard, he was awkward and unsure of himself back then, coming across more like an arrogant street punk with a lisp than a religious leader among Najaf ’s refined and somewhat snobbish clerical aristocracy.
He rejected all other Shiite clerics and scoffed at America, but it would be nearly a year before his men would openly fight the occupation. Still, he warned that the time would come. His men had already taken over much of Shiite Iraq, providing social services and security and imposing their strict interpretation of Islam on women and more liberal Muslims. His network of clerics coordinated their sermons, and his bayanat (statements) were posted on mosque walls throughout Iraq.
On June 23, 2003, Muqtada, having just returned from a trip to Iran—where he had met with government officials and Ayatollah Haeri, his father’s official successor and intellectual heir, and commemorated the death of Ayatollah Khomeini—visited Baghdad for the first time since his father’s death in 1999. He visited the neighborhoods of Kadhimiya and Shula before arriving in Sadr City, where tens of thousands greeted him with Iraqi flags as well as flags from the Bahadal, Msaare, Al Jazair, and Fawawda tribes. Before Muqtada took the stage, a speaker read the victory verse from the Koran: “If you receive God’s victory and you witness people joining Islam in great numbers, thank your God and ask him to forgive you, for God is very merciful.” People chanted: “Muqtada, don’t worry! We will sacrifice our blood for the hawza!” A melody for a song that had once praised Saddam now carried a song praising Muqtada. There was a lot of clapping, and a speaker asked the people to make way for Muqtada, but they would not move, each wanting to get closer to their revered leader. “I visited this city when my father was alive, and I will visit this city on this day every year,” Muqtada cried. “People should join the hawza and the marjas and support them . . . do not believe in rumors, verify them with the hawza first . . . a humanitarian office will be established for Sadr City.” Muqtada spoke of the memory of the martyrs and promised the Iraqi people that the unemployment problem would soon be solved because companies would return to Iraq. He spoke for seven minutes, after which the crowds of adulators would not let him leave.
That month the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council proposed including Muqtada as a member, but other Shiite members on the council rejected the idea. Muqtada and his constituency were radicalized by the exclusion, and he was pushed further into the arms of Haeri, who was living in exile in Iran. Though Muqtada’s politics were inchoate, lacking ideology and seeking only inclusion and power, Haeri was a rigid Khomeinist, with a clearly defined political program aimed at establishing a theocracy in Iraq, just as Khomeini had established his in Iran twenty-five years ago when he ousted the monarch.
The next month, on July 20, Muqtada claimed that American soldiers had surrounded his home and were planning to arrest him. Thousands of protesters descended upon Najaf, heeding their leader’s call. Many were bused or trucked in from Baghdad or Basra. Some even came in ambulances. They confronted American soldiers and marines. Demonstrators chanted, “No Americans after today,” echoing the motto of Saddam’s storm troopers in the 1991 intifada, who had ransacked southern Iraq warning that there would be “no Shiites after today.” Demon
strators also chanted against America, colonialism, tyranny, and the devil. Some carried swords and flags. Clerics bellowed condemnations of the Americans, comparing them to Saddam. Their protest in Najaf opened with a message from Haeri, read aloud to the crowd. Haeri condemned the “American agents” of the Iraqi Governing Council and called on the clerics to rule Iraq. Meeting outside the shrine of Ali, they walked past Najaf ’s cemetery in rows and columns, like soldiers. Marching to the American base in Najaf, Sheikh Aws al-Khafaji spoke out against the Americans and the IGC, accusing them of spreading corruption and defiling the holy city of Najaf. The leaders of the protest handed a list of demands to an American colonel, demanding that Americans leave Najaf immediately.
Muqtada continued to test the limits of Americans’ tolerance, sometimes virtually declaring war on them, then retreating and welcoming them as friends. In March 2004 the Americans closed his newspaper, Al Hawza, accusing it of calling for violence, and arrested an influential associate of his. This further alienated his followers from the American-led project in Iraq and increased his prestige and following among Shiites, whose sect is preoccupied with martyrdom and resisting oppression.
Following the January 2005 elections, Muqtada’s representatives in the National Assembly demanded a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, a demand also made by Sunni rejectionists. The initiative had the support of 120 of the 275 Assembly members. Muqtada joined these Sunni rejectionists in condemning the draft constitution—especially its federalism—warning that it would lead to the break up of Iraq. Like Sunni Arabs in Iraq, Muqtada opposed federalism for the Kurds as well as the move by Supreme Council leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim to establish autonomous Shiite regions in the south on the model of the northern Kurdish Regional Government. Muqtada’s followers demonstrated against the Constitution, marching with Sunnis in some cases. In the summer of 2005, militiamen loyal to Muqtada clashed with Supreme Council militiamen in several Iraqi cities, including Baghdad, Nasiriya, Najaf, and Amara. Despite the tensions between Supreme Council and the Sadrists, Muqtada was invited by Supreme Council and Dawa to join the United Iraqi Alliance, the dominant Shiite list competing in the December 15 elections for the National Assembly. They needed the numbers he could provide. Muqtada was granted equal status with the two other parties and potentially more than thirty seats in the Assembly. He was legitimate now, it seemed, no longer on the outside. Later that year he visited Saudi Arabia on the hajj pilgrimage as an official guest of the Saudi king, and then he visited Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, practicing his diplomatic skills but also establishing a close relationship with Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and with Lebanese Shiites. Muqtada would be the protector of newly targeted Shiites, and their avenger.