Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

Dawa Party insiders described Jaafari to me as indecisive, weak, and guilty of neglect, but not evil. He may have wanted a confrontation with Sunnis, but he did not lead it or organize the formal military response to increased attacks by Sunnis. He lacked the resolve. “Jaafari was incompetent and had no oversight over the Ministry of Interior,” an American intelligence official told me. According to another senior Dawa official, “Jaafari was weak, ineffective. He didn’t endorse the civil war, he was genuinely nonsectarian. He didn’t hate Sunnis, he didn’t believe in the exclusive power of Shiites, but he lacked control.” There were no books or computers in his office. He read Arabic poetry and drank tea all day long. In meetings with senior American officials, he would quote poetry and talk about how the Iraqi people were like flowers. They dreaded meeting with him. “Iran had a role,” one former minister close to Jaafari told me. “They forced people to confront what was happening and use resources under their control to organize a fighting force. Iran did that with its direct and indirect agents in Iraq.”

  Despite the calls for Jaafari’s removal, he would not leave until the marajiya, or hawza leadership in Najaf, withdrew its support for him. There was an air of desperation among members of the Shiite parties, who felt they were being outmaneuvered by the Americans and their Iraqi rivals. A Dawa insider who was present in senior Dawa leadership circles told me, “In the last days of Jaafari, a number of people convinced the Supreme Council that he would agree to withdraw his candidacy if the premiership stayed with Dawa. His condition was that Adil [Abdel Mahdi of the Supreme Council] would not become prime minister.”

  Ali al-Adib was the Dawa Party candidate most likely to replace Jaafari. The American and British ambassadors went to see Adib to confirm that they were not opposed to him, and he was, in fact, prime minister for one day. But in a Dawa Party gathering to confirm Adib’s nomination, Nuri al-Maliki confronted him with the issue of his father, known as Zandi, who was an Iranian immigrant to Iraq. Maliki asked Adib if he would be able to withstand scrutiny and people saying that Iran was taking over. Not being confrontational, Adib lost heart, and Maliki pounced. This putsch had been organized by Adnan al-Kadhimi, Jaafari’s senior adviser, who ran his office and worked in the party’s political bureau. Jaafari felt betrayed by Kadhimi and still expected to call the shots within the party and the government. Maliki then turned on Kadhimi. “Maliki is a very vindictive man, and has a dangerous streak,” the Dawa insider explained. Kadhimi knew too much. Maliki arrested him on trumped-up charges of theft, and allowed his prearranged escape.

  Maliki was a “gruff doer,” said his former friend, “a very angry person, angry about his conditions. He had deep hatred of the Americans. He thought they were responsible for keeping Saddam in power. He was full-square against the Americans, avoided opposition conferences. He was the typical Iraqi dishdasha type, least affected by foreign non-Iraqi habits. In Syria he was known to be a nonpolished street warrior in the ’90s. He had no power compared to Jaafari in those days. Jaafari was the party then, though many people resented it because he lectures people and talks nonsense a lot. Maliki felt aggrieved by the intellectuality of the Dawa Party leadership. The Dawa thought of itself as a vanguard party. Jaafari presented himself as a great theoretician. Maliki wasn’t a real leader. He was doing intelligence and jihadi operations in Iraq, out of Damascus: killings of officers at the border, throwing a grenade here, overseeing the militants. Low-level resistance work, so you have to report to Syrian intelligence, and he was resentful of that.”

  Maliki became premier with the understanding that Jaafari would be the éminence grise, a first among equals. He didn’t think much of Maliki. “Jaafari belittled these people,” the insider said. “He thought of himself like Lenin, that he had all the makings of a historic leader.” This showed when Jaafari ran for Parliament in the 2010 election campaign, especially when he slightly modified a quote of Imam Hussein as he set off to fight Yazid and used it to compare himself to the great Shiite leader. “In April 2006 Maliki came in as prime minister and looked bumbling and foolish,” the insider said, “but he is a clever street fighter and surrounded himself with cronies, equally aggrieved people, many from Nasiriya.” Maliki has a complex relationship with Iran, the insider explained. “He has some Arab dislike of Iran, he dislikes Iranian arrogance and haughtiness, but he has the Arab Shiite problem: Iran can do without you, but you can’t do without them. Maliki has a deep hatred of Syria from his time there. Syrian intelligence thought of these people as disposable blaggards. They abused and humiliated them. You would have to report every day to some jerk and live in great material discomfort. If you’re going to be an agent, better to be a Saudi agent.”

  The United States hardly knew anything about Maliki. The CIA did not have a biography of Maliki prepared when he was chosen to be Prime Minister, but their leadership analysts had many. The White House and National Security Council were surprised when his name came up, but Kurdish President Jalal Talabani, Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, and other Iraqis said they could work with him, so American concerns about the unknown Maliki were allayed.

  While the Americans didn’t select Maliki, they didn’t reject him either—which they could have done. “Maliki is cut from a different material than Jaafari,” a Dawa insider who worked with him told me. “He is more rural or tribal, not urban. He’s from the Hashmiya district outside Karbala. It was a Dawa hotbed. His upbringing was rural, a son of the tribes, urbi [with Arab traditions] with certain ethical codes, sacrifice your self-interest for your code. The urbanized are different; self-interest comes first. He is tribal in a general way. He doesn’t have ideological or theological issues with Sunnis, just practical ones: if they attack us, we will attack them. Maliki has more political appeal; he is what Iraqis need. Saddam was urbi too, so he could mobilize tribal Arabs against Iran. If you ignore ideology and just look at what he did, it’s like Saddam, but he is not as smart as Saddam. Saddam had the same social origins. Maliki within the Dawa Party was a very powerful person. He was a hardliner, doubtful of everything foreign, clinging by instinct to people he knows.”

  At first Maliki was diffident, quiet, nervous. He was concerned about security and the loyalty of his forces. He didn’t know anything about the government he was inheriting, nor how its forces were arrayed, nor how the U.S. military worked. It was like Iraq 101. In conversations with the Americans, he made it clear his priorities were getting their help to secure Baghdad and protect the infrastructure. Maliki was suspicious; he saw a Baathist behind every bush. He didn’t trust his own army. American Gen. George Casey thought the Iraqi Security Forces were strong and would be loyal to Maliki.

  Jaafari’s men switched to Maliki once he took over, but he didn’t trust them and hired his own people. He set up his office with a close-knit circle of Dawa advisers. It was not a national unity government. The Kurds got suspicious. They thought it was dangerous that nobody saw how decisions were made. The prime minister’s office was full of Dawa people nobody knew. It obviously wasn’t a national unity government that was forming but rather a patchwork of spoils. Maliki was under pressure from all sides. The U.S. military and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were pressuring him, and Baghdad was disintegrating. Maliki had to deal with internal United Iraqi Alliance politics and competing Shiite factions. He had been thrust into the worst job in the world.

  Maliki was committed to preserving the new Shiite-dominated order and soon threatened to use “maximum force” against the “terrorists.” Even if he was committed to the creation of a national unity government and nonsectarian security forces, and even if the Americans tried to reverse the sectarian trend in Iraq, it seemed too late. Muqtada’s supporters would not voluntarily relinquish control of the army or police, and having fought the Americans in the past and established their nationalist bona fides, many were eager to rid themselves of the occupiers they felt they no longer needed. Who would replace them? There was no nonsectarian movement, there was no nonsectarian mi
litia, and no social space for those rejecting sectarianism. Even secular Sunnis and Shiites were being pushed into the embrace of sectarian militias because nobody else could protect them. The tens of thousands of cleansed Iraqis, the relatives of those killed by the death squads, the sectarian supporters and militias firmly ensconced in the government and its ministries, the Shiite refusal to relinquish their long-awaited control of Iraq, the Kurdish commitment to secession, the Sunni harboring of Salafi jihadists—all militated against anything but full-scale civil war.

  I WAITED AND WATCHED, wondering if Sunnis would be removed from Baghdad slowly; or as the result of a Sarajevo-like incident; or one such as the 1975 Ayn al-Rummanah bus attack in Lebanon, which sparked that country’s civil war; or another attack such as the one on the Samarra shrine; or perhaps the assassination of an important Shiite cleric or leader. The Sunnis would be totally cleansed from Baghdad, and Shiites would wage an all-out war against Sunnis. The Kurds, having waited for this opportunity, would be able to secede and tell the world they tried to have good faith and go the federalist route, but those crazy Arabs down south were killing one another, and who would want to belong to a country like that? The Iraqi nation-state would cease to be relevant. Would Sunnis throughout the region tolerate a Shiite Iraq and the killing of Sunnis by Shiites? Iraq’s Sunni tribes extended into Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Their tribal kinsmen might come to their aid, sending reinforcements of men and matériel across the porous borders. Iraq’s civil war would become a regional war.

  As the summer heat peaked in Iraq, so too did the violence. North of Baghdad Shiite villagers attacked Sunnis in retaliation for a bombing that killed at least twenty-five Shiites. The Shiite attackers were joined by Iraqi police and Americans. Following a massive bomb targeting Shiites in Sadr City, several mortars were fired at the Abu Hanifa Mosque. Locals then clashed with Iraqi Security Forces. Sunni parliamentarian Taysir Najah al-Mashhadani from the Islamic Party was kidnapped by alleged Shiite militias as her convoy drove through the Shaab neighborhood, prompting the main Sunni coalition to boycott the government. A reconciliation proposal offered by Maliki was rejected by Shiites like Muqtada for being too soft on Baathists and Sunnis, and it was rejected by Sunnis such as Harith al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars for not going far enough with its offer of amnesty and inclusion.

  Iraqis were breaking the final taboo, asking one another if they were Sunni or Shiite. Sometimes this was done obliquely, the petitioner inquiring about one’s name, or one’s neighborhood, or one’s tribe, to try to figure it out, and sometimes it was explicit. Officially, Iraqis tried to stress that they were nonsectarian. On one television channel a poetry contest featured poets chanting that Iraq was unified, but those sorts of protests typically were a desperate attempt to avoid the fact that Iraq was breaking apart.

  By 2005 Sunnis and Shiites were using derogatory terms to refer to one another. To Shiites, Sunnis were “Saddamists” and “Nawasib.” “Saddamists” referred to Baathists and former regime loyalists, but many Shiites, especially the poor and uneducated, used it as a blanket term for all Sunnis. Shiite leaders, including Ayatollah Sistani, Ayatollah Yaqoubi, and Muqtada, used the term in their speeches to refer specifically to Salafis. Many Shiites have taken to calling all Sunnis Wahhabis, the strict brand of Islam associated with Saudi Arabia.

  Extreme Sunnis believed Shiites were “rafidha” or “turs.” “Rafidha” is technically the opposite of “Nawasib”: it means “rejectionists” and referred to those who do not recognize the Islamic caliphs and want a caliphate from the descendant of Imam Ali. It was used initially by Salafis and Wahhabis to pronounce Shiites as outside Islam, and it has become a pejorative term used the way American racists spit out the word “nigger.” “Turs” is the word for “shield” and refers to human shields used by the enemy infidels. It is permitted to kill these shields according to some interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence. Iraqi Salafis referred to the Iraqi Muslims they killed (such as members of the Iraqi police and army) as turs to justify killing people who were nominal Muslims but were shielding the Americans. Salafis and jihadis believed that Shiite religious leaders were supplying shields by encouraging their followers to join the Iraqi police and army.

  The Arab world has always been dominated by Sunnis, who make up 85 percent of the world’s Muslims. The new Shiite Iraq was aggressive and confident, overturning the Ottoman and colonialist legacies that entrenched Sunnis. It threatened the status quo throughout the Arab world. In Syria, already viewed as dominated by the Shiite-like Alawite minority that is hated by many in the Sunni majority, the Iranians built a mosque commemorating a battle that Imam Ali lost. The unpopular Sunni regimes of Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, the so-called moderate Arabs, seeing their power wane, could no longer be anti-American or anti-Israeli, having sold out on those issues and backed the Americans. Instead they were playing the sectarian card to regain the respect they lost from their population and galvanize them against a new threat. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak accused Shiites of being fifth columnists, loyal to Iran. In Lebanon during the 2006 demonstrations that followed the publication of the Danish cartoons, Sunni clerics condemned Shiites and supported Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (one cleric called him “my sheikh, my emir”), perhaps hoping they could appropriate the so-called “sheikh of the slaughterers” as their own to gain more leverage against the powerful Shiite Hizballah. More ominous, in April 2006 Hizballah accused nine men of attempting to assassinate its general secretary, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. Hizballah said the culprits had been motivated by a desire to avenge killings of Sunnis in Iraq. In his last statement before his death, Zarqawi specifically condemned Lebanese Hizballah, making arguments that presented a Lebanese Sunni point of view.

  After Zarqawi’s Death

  The death of Zarqawi in an American strike in June 2006 was hailed by the Bush administration as a turning point, but the civil war had its own cruel logic and did not need Zarqawi. Instead, a new Zarqawi emerged. Sunnis began speaking of the “Shiite Zarqawi.” In the summer of 2006, rumors began spreading throughout Baghdad of a shadowy Shiite killer known as Abu Dira, a nickname meaning the Armor Bearer. In the Shiite uprisings of 2004, he was said to have held off the Americans in southern Sadr City. He earned his name either by destroying American armored vehicles or after killing an American soldier and stealing his body armor. Some rumors claimed he wore this armor at all times. Hailed by Shiites as a hero who defended them, he was also known by Sunnis as the Rusafa Butcher, a reference to the eastern half of Baghdad, where he was said to live. Another story claimed that a Sunni prison guard under Saddam called Abu Dira was notorious among Shiites for his brutality. The vengeful Shiite known as Abu Dira might have taken his nickname out of irony. All information about him was based on rumors, but he was said to be a man in his thirties called either Salim or Ismail, who lived in Sadr City but was born in the southern Shiite town of Amara. Some said he was a member of the Mahdi Army and commanded hundreds of fighters, but other sources claimed he was a renegade militiaman, out of Muqtada’s control. Some said he was a bodyguard in the former regime who had deserted and fled to Iran; others thought he had been a guard who tortured prisoners in one of Saddam’s prisons. One website claimed that he controlled the Interior Ministry’s Falcon Brigade, which kidnapped Sunnis from Baghdad’s Zafraniya district.

  It was said that every time there was a terror attack against Shiites he counted the dead and killed an equal number of Sunnis, although by other accounts he killed a higher ratio of Sunnis when he extracted vengeance. He was said to kill dozens of Sunnis every day in a remote part of Sadr City called Sadda, and he was also said to have threatened to fill the craters left from car bombs in Sadr City with the bodies of Sunnis. Some Sunni sources believed he was obeying the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri in Iran, who was Muqtada’s erstwhile backer, urging Shiites to kill Sunnis and former Baathists in particular. One Sunni websi
te claimed he had taken an oath to slaughter a camel and feed the poor people of Sadr City after he had killed Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi. A popular radical Sunni line is, “Our dead are in paradise and your dead are in the hell.” Abu Dira changed that, telling Sunnis, “Our dead are in paradise and your dead are in Sadda,” Sadda being the dam in eastern Baghdad where Shiite gangs dumped Sunni corpses. Although some Shiites in Baghdad cheered this legend as much as Sunnis feared him, Muqtada and the Mahdi Army denied that he even existed and claimed he had been invented by Sunnis to falsely accuse Shiites of crimes. An American operation in Sadr City in July targeted a funeral for one of Abu Dira’s relatives but failed to lead to his arrest.

  Muqtada’s control over his militia was tenuous. He issued statements such as “We are the enemies of the Saddamists,” which were interpreted by his followers as a license to kill all Sunnis. The Mahdi Army was not strictly hierarchical, and Muqtada was unaware of most of its local commanders and activities. The Mahdi Army’s cells were loosely organized; many of them were composed of friends who were on local soccer teams. Sayyid Hassan Naji al-Musawi, an important Mahdi Army commander in Sadr City, had been a well-known local soccer star before the war. Different leaders of the Mahdi Army disliked one another. There were jealousies and rivalries. There was nothing stopping a group of Shiite youths from declaring that they were a Mahdi Army unit, collecting weapons, and interpreting Muqtada’s statements as they saw fit. Mahdi Army leaders could be imams, sheikhs, or local toughs called shaqis. Before the war shaqis might have been neighborhood gang leaders, but with the formation of Sunni and Shiite militias and resistance groups, they took the lead. In Baghdad and majority-Shiite towns, most of the police were Mahdi Army as well. The reasons were simple. Most poor Shiite men supported Muqtada and claimed to belong to his militia, and most Iraqi police were poor Shiite men, so they were one and the same. Sunnis came to view the state as their enemy. As early as 2005, I realized that the once-confident and aggressive Sunnis were intimidated and uncertain about their fate. They worried about losing.