Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  The articles that the Sunnis were reading in their newspapers, as well as the statements of prominent Sunni leaders however, made it clear that the alliance with Muqtada’s militant Shiites was a temporary measure to battle a common foe. One article in Basair, (The Mind’s Eye), a newspaper published by the Association of Muslim Scholars, condemned the (Shiite) police for killing Sunnis “for the benefit of groups for whom the police work [the Americans],” and supported the (Sunni) resistance’s attacks on the police. “Iraqis know about the conspiracy to cause sectarian strife among them,” an article began, quoting accusations made by Naseer Chadarchi, a Sunni member of the Iraqi Governing Council, that “thousands of Iranians [Shiites] are sneaking into Iraq.” “They should not get citizenship, as already happened in Amara, where 10,000 Iranians received Iraqi citizenship.” The article, voicing typical Sunni paranoia that all Shiites were in fact illegal Iranians, suggested that “many groups are sneaking into Iraq to get passports” and hinted at the Sunni fear of a democracy that would result in the Shiite majority determining the shape of the new country. “This is why some people [meaning Shiites] want direct elections and a census that will benefit them,” the article continued.

  Another article expanded on this theme, describing the “dangerous demographic changes in Iraq after the war” and referring again to an imagined influx of Iranians who created a Shiite majority. “Occupation forces will change the demography of Iraq for their benefit,” the article warned, “using the huge capabilities of the occupation forces, their intelligence and experience in this field. These new demographic changes are worse than Saddam’s because they [Americans] are using migrations, economic rules and killing to increase the population of certain sects such as Iranians, Kurds and Turks. We want to say that the reaction [meaning violent attacks] of Arabs [meaning Sunnis] in the west and south is a reaction to these changes. Jordan and Saudi Arabia are also part of Iraq, so there are more Arabs [Sunnis] but borders separate them. America is the cause of these changes.”

  The article attributed the secret plot to “the Jewish and Zionist strategy in the Middle East and the security of Israel in the future.” The author warned that “these demographic changes and their direct effects on future elections and the type of government will lead to a civil war to divide Iraq, and we will have a racist government that will oppress most nationalities and minorities.” The author explained that “Iranians want to increase the ratio of Persians among the [Arab] Shiites, which will increase the ratio of Shiites in Iraq and Baghdad in hidden and declared ways.”

  Dora—First Outbreaks of Civil War

  Dora, in southern Baghdad, was one of the first areas where the civil war began. Although mixed, it was majority Sunni. The cleansing of Dora’s Shiites was mostly carried out by local insurgents who lived in the adjoining rural areas of Arab Jubur and Hor Rajab, but some of it was conducted by crooks who kidnapped members of rich families and demanded money for their release.

  Solaf was a thirty-three-year-old carpenter working out of his large house in Dora. He was the youngest of five brothers and one sister from the poor Abu Mohammed family, which had lived in Dora since 1974. Mohammed, the eldest brother, joined the police in mid-2004, and in May 2005 he was told he would be killed if he did not quit. Mohammed moved out of his parents’ house and rented a small house in eastern Baghdad’s majority-Shiite Shaab district, but because he had no other profession to turn to, he kept his job as a policeman.

  It took Solaf ’s family more than a month to find a good offer on their house. In mid-July 2005 they finally agreed to sell, though there was a delay in signing the contract. Solaf ’s street was full of children every evening, and he would spend many nights sitting at the gate of his home chatting with friends. On July 28 he was sitting there as usual with one of his Sunni friends when a white Hyundai stopped a few meters away from them. An unmasked gunman emerged wearing civilian clothes and started shooting, killing Solaf and his friend. Solaf ’s brothers and his relatives gathered the next day and buried his body. On the second day of Solaf ’s funeral, the family received another letter warning them to leave the city. The family ended the funeral and left Dora forever.

  A week after Solaf’s murder, his mother phoned several of her old neighbors and bitterly complained about Sunnis and her family’s new but much smaller house in the majority-Shiite neighborhood of Shuula. She said she had received a call from the mother of Solaf ’s Sunni friend. The Sunni man’s mother told her that her family had received jizia (blood money) of two million Iraqi dinars and an apology from the mujahideen for killing her son, because Solaf had been the only target. Solaf had been targeted because his brother was in the police. The mujahideen who killed him were from the Jubur tribe, which dominated the insurgency in Dora and was the main Sunni tribe in Baghdad. Two Sunni families moved into Solaf’s old house; among them was a twenty-four-year-old man named Mustafa, who was a member of the insurgency.

  Haji E’nad was a Shiite who owned a shop on the corner just down the road from Solaf ’s house. At the end of September 2005, three unmasked gunmen raided his shop and killed his son Rashid. They walked away; they did not even use a car. Haji E’nad’s family fled Dora the next day. They did not have a funeral, nor did they tell any of the neighbors where they were going. They simply locked the doors and moved out, leaving their property, and nobody in Dora heard from them again. Families were afraid to tell anybody that they had been threatened so as not to further antagonize those who had threatened them.

  More followed suit. Abu Ali, a Shiite whose family had been neighbors of Solaf and who also said he had been threatened, sold his property and moved to Hilla province in mid-December 2005. One week later his neighbor Iyad, whose shop was about 100 meters away from Solaf’s house, closed it and fled Dora, too. Iyad moved some of his most important property out, left the rest in one room, and locked the house. He phoned some neighbors two days later and asked them to watch the house and report any attack. He explained that he was afraid because he was Shiite and had a brother who had been executed by the former regime for allegedly belonging to the Dawa Party. “Dora is not for Shiites any more, and only Sunnis can live there,” Iyad said. “Sunnis are attacking Shiites to force them to leave and sell their houses for cheap prices. I am not going to give my house to Sunnis for free.” Although sectarianism was the primary motive, some Sunnis did derive economic benefit from the removal of Dora’s Shiites. Soon poor Sunnis could purchase a good house in Dora and live among other Sunnis for much less than what they would normally have paid before.

  The Brothers Mulla Murder Gang

  Shiites had militias of their own, which were prepared to avenge the deaths in their community and sometimes to profit from the violence too. Maalif is a majority-Shiite neighborhood in Seidiya, which is in southwestern Baghdad. It was established in the late 1980s when the government decided to transfer tribes from villages in the Taji area north of Baghdad so that it could build a factory and a military camp where they had been living. The families preserved their tribal habits and traditions in the city. Maalif was divided among a few large tribes and a collection of other poor people (Sunnis and Shiites) who moved to the city in the 1990s for cheap living, but its population was overwhelmingly Shiite, unlike Seidiya, which is nearly evenly split. Being a poor neighborhood, Maalif tended to see higher rates of violence, criminality, and religiosity among its residents.

  In Maalif people from the same tribe often enter the same profession and cause problems for outsiders seeking to compete. The Dilfi tribe had buses for transportation, the Chaab had pickups for transportation, and the Tual were all butchers. Hussein was a butcher from the Tual tribe who had about five butcher shops in Seidiya. His partner, a man called Ahmed al-Mulla, was also from his tribe. Hussein and Ahmed had many contracts with the former regime to provide meat for the army. This had enriched them and sealed their friendship.

  After the Americans overthrew Saddam, two of the Mulla brothers returned home from exi
le in Iran, where they had been soldiers in the Badr Brigade. Ahmed and Hussein became religious and hung portraits of Shiite leaders like Sistani and Khomeini all over their shops’ walls. They joined the Badr Brigade and formed an assassination group, transforming one of Hussein’s shops in the Elam neighborhood into an office for interrogating former regime loyalists, whom Hussein called Saddamists. Hussein and Ahmed obtained Baath Party records with the names, addresses, and details of members in Seidiya—they even included the types and serial numbers of weapons owned by the men. The records were a gift to Ahmed from Shiite locals who had raided the Baath Party office in their neighborhood and transformed it into a Shiite mosque after the fall of Baghdad. Hussein and Ahmed scanned the records and interviewed about ten former Baath Party members a day. They would knock on their doors and inform the Baathists: “You were a Baath Party member, and you need to come visit us in our office in the Elam Market to clarify a few issues.” Then they would leave.

  They opened their office in May 2003. It had a desk with two chairs for Ahmed and Hussein as well as a long bench and portraits of Sistani and Khomeini. The Baathist would enter their office, sit on the bench, and sign a statement that he was innocent and not involved in any of the Baath Party crimes. The statement said: “I condemn all the former regime’s activities against the Iraqi people and I regret everything I have done with that regime and I promise to never help the Baath Party again.” Then they would be asked to hand over their weapons, and Ahmed and Hussein would compare the serial numbers with those on record.

  Local Baathists were frightened of this organization and started fleeing Seidiya. Ahmed and Hussein were careful not to let any Baathist retain his weapons. The murder of Baathists in Seidiya intensified one month after the office opened. Hussein and Ahmed sought to obtain a fatwa that would give them legitimate cover for their militia, but they failed to find a respected cleric to provide one. Even their dearest friend and neighbor Sheikh Dhafer al-Qeisi, Sistani’s representative for southern Baghdad, refused to acquiesce, although he backed their activities.

  Their group was very professional, driving fast Opel cars with many young members who moved quickly. They assassinated more than fifty alleged “Saddamists.” Ahmed spoke proudly about his operations in public and often said that he would exceed 100 dead Saddamists by the end of 2005. He was also known to kill Salafis from the Sunni mosque next to the Elam Market. Sunnis in Elam began to fear Ahmed, worrying that they might be targeted next, since most of the former Baathists in his neighborhood were Sunni. In late 2004 Sunnis from the Omar Mosque in Elam formed an assassination squad; their main targets were Ahmed and Hussein.

  One evening in March 2005, Kadhim, a member of Ahmed and Hussein’s group, was hanging out in a shop with Ahmed when they were attacked. Kadhim died immediately. Ahmed was seriously wounded and remained in the hospital for one month to recover from his injuries. One week after he left the hospital, while he was visiting his shop again, he was assassinated. His sixteen-year-old assistant died with him. After Ahmed’s death the group ceased conducting operations, and Hussein received letters in his shops threatening him with death if he did not leave the neighborhood. Hussein was shot in October 2005 with his brother Mohammed while they were driving their truck home one evening. Hussein died immediately but Mohammed remained conscious long enough to make a phone call. He was seriously wounded, but he survived.

  The day after Hussein’s murder, his eldest brother was locking up his shop when he found another letter: “In the name of God, we did not oppress them but they were oppressing themselves, those who killed the sons of Sunnis and Baathists, they killed the men, made the children orphans, and made the wives widows, they are cursed for what their hands have done. We will beat them like they beat us, and we will kill them everywhere.”

  Hussein had lived in a big house with his brothers and cousins and was surrounded by fellow tribesmen. His area had a robust Shiite majority and was full of Mahdi Army men, but his family did not feel safe enough to stay in Maalif. They left their houses and shops to return to the south, from where they had come thirty years earlier.

  A few months later, on December 25, 2005, thirteen Sunni families were threatened and ordered to leave their homes in Maalif. Two families responded immediately, leaving the next day. The men in other families hid or left the area, leaving only the women. (Militias typically did not target women.) A Sunni woman in Maalif who hid her son at home explained the dilemma that many experienced: “There is a conspiracy to force Sunnis out of Baghdad. We are limited in the cities we can move to. We cannot move to Shula, Hurriya, Dolaie, Shaab, New Baghdad, or Al Amin, because we might face the same threats there. We can only move to Sunni neighborhoods dominated by the resistance, such as Dora and Amriya, but it is not even safe to live there. We cannot write on the walls that we are Sunnis to avoid attacks. And we might be attacked by the army by accident, since we live next to terrorists.”

  Maalif was a neighborhood in the larger Bayaa district. The Bayaa Mosque, located off of the highway, had belonged to followers of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada’s father. It was led by Sheikh Muayad al-Khazraji, a former student of Sadr’s who had been jailed by Saddam following Sadr’s assassination in 1999. On Friday, April 25, 2003, Sheikh Muayad warned his flock that if he learned of any Iraqi woman sleeping with American soldiers, he would inform her tribe and call for her death. As well as worrying about how Iraqi women comported themselves, Sheikh Muayad hid many weapons in his mosque. Eventually the Americans arrested him for this, provoking massive protests by Shiite supporters. But the civil war seemed to extend itself to prison, where Sheikh Muayad’s life was constantly threatened by Salafis. Upon his release, Sheikh Muayad paid a visit to another Sadrist cleric, Sheikh Haitham al-Ansari, and told him that his experiences in jail had changed his view of the Americans. “After I was in the jail, I knew who is my enemy and who is not,” Sheikh Muayad said. “The Americans are not my enemy. The Americans have interests, and anybody who wants to block Americans from obtaining those interests becomes their enemy, and they destroy him. Stay away from their road and they will not touch you. Our enemies are the Wahhabis. They used to attack us in the jail many times, they wanted to assassinate me more than once, and one of their main goals is to damage Ali’s tomb in Najaf.”

  Sunnis perceived the post-Baathist state as the enemy because state organs, along with the Americans, had been treating Sunnis as the enemy since 2003. Even before the elections of 2005, the government felt pressured to show Shiite masses that something was being done about the daily car bombs slaughtering them in the streets. Iraqi television began showing a highly sectarian program titled Terror in the Hands of Justice, on which alleged Sunni insurgents were shown confessing to crimes such as rape and sodomy. On one episode an interrogator accused prominent Sunni tribes such as the Jubur, Janabi, and Dulaimi of being terrorists. The show increased Sunni fears that the Shiite-dominated security forces were targeting them en masse.

  When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the brutal leader of the jihadist group that morphed into Al Qaeda in Iraq after Zarqawi pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden—declared war on Shiites in a speech on September 14, 2005, Iraq’s radical Sunni leadership were quick to condemn it. The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq’s Shiites were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans’ blessings, and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allowed one to seek revenge on an innocent person, they said, and accused Zarqawi of colluding in the Americans’ plan to create civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile, five resistance groups, the Army of Muhammad, the Al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen, and the Salahuddin Brigades, condemned Zarqawi’s statements as well, calling them a “fire burning the Iraqi people” and explaining that they only attacked the occupiers and those who assisted them, and did not base their attacks on sectarian or ethnic criteria.

  But these
Sunni condemnations did not suffice for Muqtada al-Sadr. In late 2005 he sent a letter to various Sunni leaders stating that Zarqawi had labeled all Shiites infidels and that he and all Shiites were being targeted by Zarqawi’s deadly attacks. Muqtada demanded that Sunni leaders label Zarqawi an infidel and condemn him. No Sunni leader acceded to his demands. Some explained that it was too dangerous for them to do so, but Muqtada refused to accept their apologies and did not grant their fear of Zarqawi any merit. In addition, the Association for Muslim Scholars didn’t just fail to heed Muqtada’s call to condemn Al Qaeda; one of its spokesmen, Muhammad Bashar al-Faidih, dismissed the letter with sarcasm. And its leader, Harith al-Dhari, allegedly said, “We are from Al Qaeda and they are from us.” This must have been especially galling for Muqtada, because in the early period of the occupation the young Shiite cleric referred to Dhari respectfully as “al Ab al-Mujahid,” the Mujahid Father. The Mahdi Army in Karbala had always been different from the one in Baghdad. It was less sectarian, less criminal, focused more on providing services. But even their language started to change after the AMS rejected Muqtada’s condemnation of Zarqawi.