Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  I had been told by his associates that he was not meeting with the media now for security reasons, so the closest I could get to him was sitting before him as he delivered his sermon. “We demand the reconstruction of the shrine in Samarra and protection for it,” Muqtada said. “We condemn the malicious hands that exploded the shrines.” Muqtada read a verse from the Koran and then switched into Iraqi dialect, as was his style. He kept his eyes down most of the time, reading from his notes and only glancing up occasionally. He spoke of doing the right and preventing the wrong. “This is the time when the right becomes wrong and the wrong becomes right,” he said, “when women become corrupt. Occupation became liberation and resistance became terrorism.” The occupation had joined the Nawasib, which to Muqtada’s followers meant all Sunnis. “Look at both of them,” he said, “the occupation and the Nawasib, and look at their values.” He called for Muslims to be united. “Which Muslims?” he asked. “The ones who follow the family of the Prophet,” meaning Shiites. “In the past God punished people by sending frogs, locusts, lice,” Muqtada explained. “Now he punishes them by sending earthquakes, mad cow disease, hurricanes, floods, bird flu, the diseases in Africa, and globalization, armies, politics, solar and lunar eclipses.”

  Muqtada sat down for a minute, and somebody in the crowd shouted a hossa. “For the love of the oppressed, the two martyrs, the Sadrs, pray for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” Thousands of people bellowed, “Our God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.” Then they waved their fists and continued, “And speed the Mahdi’s return! And damn his enemies!” In the past they had continued with “and make his son succeed. Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” But this had recently been taken out of the chant, and Muqtada’s hundreds of thousands of followers in the country had dutifully followed.

  Muqtada stood up once again. “On the anniversary of the Iraqi occupation,” he said, “I want to discuss some issues such as a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation.” He expressed his condolences to all the followers of the family of the Prophet for the raid on the Mustafa Husseiniya two weeks earlier. “That attack was not the first done by the occupation forces,” he said. “It is part of a series of bad attacks that attack the civilian and the armed, the police and the army. The occupation started attacking everybody: civilians, army, police, even the Iraqi ministers, the minister of interior and the minister of transportation, and some of the Parliament members and others. It started killing civilians in the streets and in public areas. They are killing us randomly. They drag the cars using their tanks. And they torture the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr and other hidden prisons in Iraq. In addition to causing civil strife and civil war, they made our neighbors our enemies, accusing some of them of sending armed people and others with hosting armed people and another with sowing terrorism.”

  “We did not have a country under Saddam, and now that Saddam is gone, why can we not have a country?” He added that the occupiers could not prove anything they had accused Iraq’s neighbors of doing. “Even though we and our neighbors have one religion and we have one fate, the United States succeeded in dividing us and making us enemies. Instead of reconstructing the shrine of the two imams in Samarra, the occupation is building prisons,” Muqtada said, then switched to Iraqi dialect to quip, “preparing them for the Iraqi people.”

  He returned to classical Arabic and continued. “They steal Iraqi resources to torture Iraqis. They arrest a lot of people from any force in Iraq that is against the occupation.” Iraqis had gotten used to these attacks, Muqtada said, adding that his father’s followers had gone from oppression under “Haddam” (playing on the former dictator’s name and replacing it with “the destroyer”) to oppression and torture under the occupation. “So be patient, my brothers,” he said. “They are trying to plant a civil war. Do not let them drag you into the war. We know that they are going to assassinate our clerics and our leaders to make a sectarian and civil war. We will never be oppressed. So do everything not to apply the American idea called democracy.” America said it sought democracy for Iraq, but it had changed its mind, Muqtada claimed. It now wanted to grant power to the terrorists, he said, referring to recent American attempts to include Sunnis in the government. “So the American interference in Iraqi politics is very clear,” he said, “because you see the American ambassador appear in all the Iraqi conferences, meeting with Iraqi politicians, which we consider a terrible assault on us. . . . We all know that for every minister there is a foreign adviser assigned by the occupation. This is against the religion. Even the press, when they insult the Prophet Muhammad, they say this is the freedom of the press. And when our press writes something which is a fact but is against America, they say it is calling for terrorism. So this is all proof that the small Satan has gone and the big Satan has come. Everyone knows that we have demanded a timetable for the American withdrawal. They refused our demand because they said scheduling the withdrawal of the occupation is a victory for the terrorists, and that is a bad justification.”

  Muqtada asked all the nationalist forces in Iraq to help him pressure the occupying forces to schedule their withdrawal. He called for the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to cooperate with him in what he called “the national project for scheduling the withdrawal of the occupation of Iraq.” He explained that the withdrawal should begin in Iraq’s stable areas, such as the south, some of the middle (the Shiite areas), and the north. He demanded a phased withdrawal, beginning in the cities, “but in a real way.” He insisted that security be handed to Iraqis, and that Iraqi airspace be used by military planes only with the permission of the Parliament and the governorates. He wanted the Iraqi Security Forces to be trained without the occupiers and all government members to refrain from associating with the occupiers. “The Iraqi Parliament should be able to schedule the withdrawal of the occupation from Iraq,” he said, “but the withdrawal should be scheduled in steps. Every place the Americans leave, Iraqi forces that are fully trained and fully supplied should replace them. The hot areas—and of course they are on fire—they should be controlled by the national battalions composed of the army, the police and national security forces, and other people’s forces, and should be supervised by the Iraqi Parliament. And there should be an operations center to design a good plan to make it stable, and the Iraqi leaders should take some of the responsibility in controlling that.”

  Muqtada withdrew, and the prayer leader led the mosque in prayer. After prayers ended thousands of excited men rushed the windows and fences along the passageway from which Muqtada and his entourage would depart, hoping to see him one last time. “Ali is with you!” they shouted over and over again as he quickly walked by. The crowd slowly made its way out of the mosque as more hossas were shouted. “Curse America and Israel, and pray for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” shouted one man, and thousands of departing faithful shouted with him. Then they sang a song known to them all. “Oh Mahdi, oh awaited one, return him safely, this is the son of Sadr.”

  IN BAGHDAD that same day the important Shiite Buratha Mosque was attacked, leaving nearly one hundred dead and more than one hundred wounded. It was the second postwar attack on this mosque (it had a long history of being attacked), and it would not be the last, for another suicide bomber struck in June. Shiite politician Jalaluddin al-Saghir of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq was the imam. He angrily placed responsibility on Sunnis, accusing two Sunni newspapers—Al Basa’ir, the voice of the Association of Muslim Scholars, and Al I’tisam, the voice of Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi—of causing the attacks by falsely accusing the Buratha Mosque of being used as a secret prison for Sunnis and of being the site of mass graves for them.

  On the road back to Baghdad my companions could not hide their excitement at having seen Muqtada speak. Ahmed called all his friends on his mobile phone. He repeatedly let me know how lucky I was. It was a quiet ride until we arrived in the southern Baghdad are
a of Dora. The road was blocked by Iraqi police cars, and we heard gunfights in the distance as we sat in traffic. Dora was a mixed neighborhood, but it was majority-Sunni, and Sunni militias were very strong there. It was once one of Baghdad’s nicest neighborhoods, with many expensive homes, but terrorism had brought the prices down, as it had in other unsafe neighborhoods.

  IN APRIL 2006 the Mahdi Army attacked a number of high-ranking insurgents, including prominent former Baathists in Baghdad’s Adhamiya neighborhood. They captured the suspects and left with them. Irate locals began shooting at members of the Iraqi National Guard (ING), and they accused both the Badr Organization and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards of being involved. In fact, it was a Mahdi Army operation. In the days that followed, Iraqi police fired randomly into Adhamiya. They also shot at generators and cut power cables to punish the residents. Residents could not leave their homes for days in a row. It was more evidence to Sunnis that the state was at war with them.

  Following the battles, the Association of Muslim Scholars released a statement accusing the Interior Ministry’s Special Forces and the Shiite militias of attacking Adhamiya. “The people of Adhamiya defended their city with honor,” the statement said, “and they lost seven martyrs and nineteen injured. We have realized that satellite channels like Hurra and Al Arabiya have changed the truth, and they have shown the Interior commandos and its militias as the helpers who helped the people of Adhamiya from an attack being done by other armed people despite the fact that these forces were the ones who attacked the city. And we saw that the ING leader who is responsible for protecting the city was just watching and doing nothing.”

  On April 21, 2006, I returned to Adhamiya’s Abu Hanifa Mosque—which I had first visited three years earlier, almost to the day—on the Friday following the clashes between local fighters and Iraqi Security Forces. The mosque’s security men were so stunned to see a foreigner that they could come up with no objections to my presence. Iraqi National Guardsmen stood watch outside. Following the February 22 Samarra attack, mortars had been fired on Abu Hanifa. It was the most important Sunni symbol that Shiite militias hoped to attack. The clock tower, which had been damaged by American missiles three years earlier, was been repaired. Outside hung banners different from the ones I first saw in April 2003. Now they were white banners for martyrs from the recent clashes. One gave condolences to Sunni politician Saleh al-Mutlaq from the families of Adhamiya for the murder of his kidnapped brother Taha. Another had a photo of a young man called Muhamad Fawad Latufi Annadawi pasted on it. The banner said he had been martyred “in the battle of Adhamiya on the morning of Monday, April 17, 2006. Another banner was for Latif Yawar Alyas, who was also martyred in the battle of Adhamiya. A black banner notified residents of the death of a woman.

  Loudspeakers echoed the call to prayer and the reading of the Koran as locals made their way in, their slippers susurrating on the street. They stopped to be patted down by the mosque’s militia. The walls inside were intricately detailed, inlaid with geometric carvings, honeycombed in its dome. About five hundred men prayed quietly. Ibrahim al-Naama, an aged cleric wearing a white hat with a red top, took out his glasses, donned them, and stood up. He spoke in a raspy and high-pitched voice. As was custom, he began by discussing Islam. “We want to talk about how the Prophet Muhammad was and how his friends were, so we can be like them in these difficult days.” He made reference to the writings of Ibn Taimiya, and thanked God that he was a Muslim and a Sunni. This kind of explicit sectarian pride would have been shocking a year before, but now it was commonplace.

  Moving on to the specific matter of “the ugly attack on Adhamiya,” he questioned whether the attackers were Muslims and warned that “anyone who kills Muslims on purpose will be in hell forever, and God will prepare a very hard punishment for him.” He demanded that the Defense Ministry prevent “other forces,” meaning the Interior Ministry, police, and militias, from entering Adhamiya, and that it alone control security. “Do not let other forces interfere in the security issues of Adhamiya,” he said.

  Iraqis were looking forward to the establishment of the new government, he said, because they hoped it could prevent Iraqi bloodshed. “Therefore any obstacle put in the way of forming the government will increase the bloodshed, and those who are causing it will be responsible before God.” He was referring to the obstinacy of Shiite parties that were refusing to accommodate Sunni demands for inclusion and sufficient influence. “Who could have imagined that the blood of Iraqis will be the cheapest blood?” he demanded. “This is how the occupiers want to divide the Iraqi people. This is how they want to plant sectarian division. This is how the occupiers succeed in their mission.” The Americans hated Iraqis’ refusal to be defeatist, as did their “tails,” he said, referring to the Shiite parties such as Dawa and the Supreme Council with a term Iraqis were sure to recognize (Saddam had often called Israel and Britain the “tails of America”).

  After the sermon there was more silent prayer, ending with each man turning to his left and to his right while still kneeling, and wishing his neighbors peace as well as the mercy and blessings of God. Men stood up and shook hands, making their way out of the mosque into the blinding sun. Neighbors stopped to greet one another and chat, smiling. A bulletin board by the mosque’s door had two papers stuck on it with pictures of middle-aged martyrs, both wearing Iraqi military uniforms. Men paused to read the signs. Past the heavily armed guards, there were no more radical books being sold, only a vegetable stand and a mendicant woman in black rocking back and forth with her baby on her lap as people walked by. I went to eat lunch in Adhamiya’s famous kabob and shawarma restaurant. That afternoon I interviewed a doctor in the neighborhood; he paused every so often when the sound of firefights interrupted our conversation. He was most shocked that even the sanctity of the hospital was no more, as militias were entering to capture people.

  FOLLOWING THE DECEMBER 2005 elections and the victory of the United Iraqi Alliance, as the main Shiite list was known, U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad immediately began working with American favorite Ayad Allawi as well as with the Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani and various Sunni parliamentary leaders to sideline the Shiites and ensure that Prime Minister Jaafari did not remain in office. Jaafari was seen as weak, ineffective, and implicated in Iraq’s descent into civil war. Shiites already distrusted Khalilzad because he was a Sunni Muslim who was determined to give Sunnis a greater role in the state. The Shiites got nervous; the Sadrists, who were strong supporters of Jaafari, were galvanized.

  Within the Shiite camp the contest was between the Supreme Council’s Adil Abdel Mahdi and the Dawa Party’s Jaafari. But the Supreme Council was seen as too close to Iran, and there were worries that Abdel Mahdi would not be independent, having to answer to Supreme Council leader Hak im. Khalilzad let it be known that he didn’t support Abdel Mahdi.

  Khalilzad was a “rogue ambassador,” an American intelligence official told me. “He was contravening U.S. policy. He unilaterally blocked Adil. It was U.S. policy to reject Jaafari but not Adil, but [Khalilzad] just personally did not like the Supreme Council, while the White House and Meghan O’Sullivan of the NSC wanted the Supreme Council to be the strategic partner.”

  The process of forming a government dragged on for four months. Jaafari wouldn’t budge. The Iranians backed him. Sistani didn’t want to get involved. The Americans felt as though they were losing the Shiites and hard-liners were taking over. “Hard-core Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda were ascendant, and moderate Shiites were getting weak,” a senior American observer told me. “A self-sustaining cycle of violence was developing.”

  U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw went to Baghdad and told Jaafari that he did not have anybody’s support and could not form a government, implying that he should give up. But Jaafari was still insisting he had support. The decision to remove him came from within his own political bloc in the government, particularly the Dawa Party.

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bsp; In 2003 the Dawa Party was very weak. It was a party of Islamist intellectuals with no serious popular base that couldn’t challenge Sadr or Hakim. During the Saddam era, many of its leaders were exiled, its local activists executed. The first United Iraqi Alliance, formed in the run-up to the January 2005 election, had been completely shaped by Ayatollah Sistani. But subsequently Hakim, Dawa, and the Supreme Council grew stronger, and in the next elections Sistani had a much smaller role.

  Among the governing parties, the modernist, middle-class Dawa was viewed as insignificant. It had never called for clerical rule, unlike the Supreme Council. It gained only ten seats in the first Parliament. The other Shiite parties thought they could control Dawa, especially when they anointed Dawa leader Jaafari as premier in April 2005. But because Dawa now had access to money and the Iraqi security forces, it didn’t need its former sponsors. Dawa leaders became arbiters and brokers of power.