by Nir Rosen
Rather than remaking the Middle East, the Iraq War was tearing it apart. Kurdish independence could provoke Turkish intervention. At a minimum it would push the Turks closer to the Iranians and Syrians, who would have the same concerns of Kurdish irredentism. Sunnis throughout the region, who already had so many reasons to hate the United States—Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Palestine, Guantánamo—would now have one more, for the Americans had handed Iraq to the Shiites. As we shall see in the next chapter, Salafi jihadis could pour in to fight the hateful Shiites. Shiites might attempt to push Sunnis out of Iraq, for until they could control the key highways in the Anbar province leading to Syria and Jordan, their economy would be threatened. Arab Sunni countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia would support Sunni militias and perhaps intervene directly. Sunni retaliation against Shiites or Alawites in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan could provoke sectarian clashes throughout the Muslim world. At some point Iran would intervene, and if it threatened the waters of the Persian Gulf, the entire world’s economy could be threatened. It seemed as though we were seeing the death throes, and not the birth pangs, of a new Middle East.
Soon after the war, black and colorful flags appeared on rooftops throughout Iraq. Some Shiites even covered their houses with big sheets of black cloth. Each referred to parts of the story of the martyr Imam Hussein. Under Saddam such public displays of Shiite identity could have been met with punishment. Now more and more areas in Baghdad were full of Shiite symbolism. During the civil war, as more and more territory came safely into Shiite hands, the black flags and pictures of Hussein became ever more pervasive. Shiites were no longer afraid; the city was theirs.
It was soon very clear that sectarian Islamist Shiite militias and parties had won the civil war, empowered as they were by their numerical superiority, their control of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the fact that the Americans were targeting the Sunni population of Iraq. Sunni leaders realized this too.
In late 2006 Sheikh Saad Mushhan Naif al-Hardan strode into a hotel lobby in Amman, Jordan, accompanied by two stern-faced companions. He wore a tailored suit and was more svelte than I remembered him from when I first met him more than two years earlier in his village of Albu Aitha, a collection of family compounds nearly hidden by the thick verdant fauna kept fertile by the wide still waters. One hundred miles west of Baghdad, past Ramadi and Falluja, a left turn off the highway led to dirt roads passing through fecund fields fed by the nearby Euphrates. Sheep and cows drank from the river bank in the shade of towering date palm plantations.
Back then the sheikh had been draped in black and gray robes, his face partially concealed by a white head scarf, crowned with a black rope. His small keen eyes, thick arching brows, and mustache lay still, waiting for an emotion to animate them. He had been joined by his three cousins: a lawyer, a history professor, and a history teacher. Since 1995 the sheikh had led the Sunni Aithawi tribe, the largest subtribe (he claimed) of the Dulaimi tribe, one of Iraq’s largest tribes (every sheikh in Iraq, it should be noted, claims his tribe is the largest). Sheikh Saad refused to enumerate his tribe’s manpower; it was the tribal equivalent of classified information. The enemy could not know the potential force his tribe could wield. In this case the enemy was the Americans. The Dulaimi tribe, whose lands reached from the Saudi border to the Syrian border and up to the outskirts of Baghdad in Abu Ghraib, was just as recalcitrant in the face of American occupation as it was nearly a century ago, during the 1920 uprising against the British occupation. Sheikh Saad’s grandfather Hardan Hamid, head of the Aithawi branch of the Dulaimi tribe, had ridden south to Kut with his five brothers and all the fighting men his tribe could muster to face the invading British army. “The British had more advanced weapons and better tactics,” Sheikh Saad said. His relatives were still buried near Kut. Sheikh Hardan had retreated to his tribal lands, fighting all the way. “When the British reached Anbar,” he continued, “we told them that the only way Anbar would fall and they could occupy us was if they killed or arrested at least two of our sheikhs.” The British took the advice of the Anbar leaders, killing Sheikh Sabar of the Albu Nimer tribe and arresting Sheikh Hardan, who was imprisoned in India for six years. “Then the British occupied the Anbar,” Sheikh Saad concluded, adding with pride that it had been the last province to fall to the Americans (though the fact that it did not have a Jordanian or Saudi or Syrian front may have been a factor). “The British occupiers befriended the tribal leaders,” he said. “This is the key to winning the people. They understood our traditions, unlike the Americans now. The British did not surround homes and break into them. They consulted sheikhs and respected them, and after they occupied all of Iraq, there was no more resistance.” The Americans occupiers, Sheikh Saad maintained, “push people to the ground and step on their heads. They arrest the relatives and wives of wanted men and hold them hostage. They are holding one hundred thousand Iraqis in their prisons. Iraqis have lost their dignity, and for this reason the resistance grows.”
Iraqis were incandescent over rumors that their women were being held prisoner by Americans. Sheikh Saad told of three women imprisoned as hostages by the Americans in Khaldiya because their husbands were wanted by the Americans. “I went to speak with the American commander in Falluja, who called the commander in Khaldiya. I told the commander, ‘If you don’t release these women, you should arrest all the men in Anbar, because there will be an uprising.’” Sheikh Saad said that three hours later the women were released, and added, “The British never arrested women.” The sheikh himself was a resistance leader, and his men were fighting the Americans. “For us as the people of Anbar, revenge is an important tradition,” he said, “if they kill one of our men we have to kill at least one of their soldiers.”
At seven in the morning on July 20, 2003, Sheikh Saad was arrested with eighty-five of his men in an operation that took one hour and included, he claimed, more than 120 vehicles and helicopters. Sheikh Saad scoffed, “like it was a real battle, but they met no resistance from us. They accused me of belonging to an organized group called Nur Muhammad (Light of Muhammad) that is leading the resistance with the support and financing of Saddam and bringing in mujahideen from Syria, and they said 60 percent of the attacks in this area originate in Albu Aitha, so I must know about them, but none of it was true. Their method is to arrest many people and hope to at least find something. Until now they have no accurate information about the resistance” (though it seemed he did). Sheikh Saad was held for twelve days, but the rest of his men were held for a month, and five were still being held in the Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr prisons. “If Americans had not behaved the way they did there would be no resistance,” he said. “Their behavior and broken promises increase the resistance.”
The sheikh paused to contemplate, looking to the side. “Under the previous regime we all had equality,” he said. “We could all study in the university and succeed depending on the degree we achieved. The one exception was the security forces, which went to certain tribes. But I don’t want to talk about the previous regime. What’s gone is gone. Saddam disliked the Dulaimi tribe, and we had nobody in high positions in his government, because Saddam feared we would overthrow him. The Americans told me that I am the only sheikh in Anbar who did not visit their bases and work with them. They want me to help them against my people? This won’t happen. And this is why they make problems for me.”
The lawyer leaned forward, his face long and gaunt, unlike his better-fed relatives, and asserted, “Iraq is the cemetery of all its occupiers.” He rejected the possibility of a civil war but warned that “they [the Americans] want a civil war. Before the war we didn’t use words like “Sunni” or “Shiite.” We are one nation and drink from the same two rivers. There won’t be a civil war, but there might be problems.” The sheikh and his cousins were convinced that “they will never allow elections,” and so he smiled proudly, lifting his head. “We are an independent tribe. We don’t h
ave relations with other parties or the Iraqi Governing Council.”
A lot had changed since those days. There was a civil war, and Sheikh Saad had actually joined the Iraqi government for a while, serving as a minister for provincial affairs. When I met him in late 2006, it was too dangerous for me to attempt such a trip to the Anbar province in a taxi, as I did in 2003. The sheikh and his companions still had thick mustaches, but now they wore the long black leather trench coats that had been popular with intelligence officers in the former regime. Sheikh Saad had brought his wife and children to Amman, where they lived in opulence. “All the leaders of the Anbar are outside of Iraq,” he told me. “In the Anbar America is killing and Al Qaeda is killing.”
I was stunned to learn that the recalcitrant sheikh had joined the government, and I asked him why. “Our country needs people like us who are well-known, especially in Anbar and its tribes. They wanted me.” Although he had received various threats for joining the government, he explained that he did not care. “Any Iraqi who becomes part of the political process is threatened.” I wondered if he still supported the resistance. “We all support the muqawama sharifa,” he said, referring to the “honorable resistance” (a distinction from those groups that attacked civilians), and added, “and I am part of it.” When he saw my eyebrows go up at the admission he added, “with words.” I asked him if there was still an honorable resistance given the civil war that Sunni and Shiite militias were engaged in. “It still exists,” he said. “You don’t see how many Americans are killed in the Anbar?” He explained that “the ones who use the name of the resistance but kill innocent people, loot, kidnap, and have contacts outside the border who gave them an agenda and weapons” are not the real resistance.
Sheikh Saad admitted that there was a civil war in Iraq, “but it’s not announced or declared yet.” America was responsible for this, he told me. “If they want to calm the situation, they can tomorrow” by telling Syria and Iran to stop sending weapons into Iraq. “Why are the Americans fighting in the Anbar but not the militias?” he asked, referring to the Shiite militias. “Why don’t they fight Badr and the Mahdi Army?” He answered his own question: “The Americans are part of them.” Then he asked, “Why don’t they make a balance in the political process between Shiites and Sunnis? They are making Iraq like Iran.”
The sheikh was no longer part of the government. “I’m resting now,” he said. The minister who had replaced him, Saad al-Hashimi, was loyal to Muqtada, and he had changed the ministry’s staff, imposing, Sheikh Saad explained, “the agenda of his party and militia,” which in practice meant firing all Sunnis and ideologically disloyal Shiites.
I was shocked when Sheikh Saad admitted that the problems in Iraq were not the fault of the current Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. “The Sunnis left the political process,” he said. “This is our fault. Sunni scholars led by Harith al-Dhari forbade political participation.” I had never heard an Iraqi Sunni admit such an error. Sheikh Saad added that even though he had realized his mistake, “Harith didn’t change his mind.”
The men who had accompanied Sheikh Saad were two former generals in Saddam’s military intelligence, one of whom had also served as deputy chief of police for the Anbar province during the American occupation. He explained that for this he had survived numerous assassination attempts but had also faced difficulties working with the Americans. The head of his office had been arrested by the Americans and was still in jail, he said, accused of cooperating with the resistance. “The Americans only use force in the Anbar province,” he said. “I had many problems with the Americans. We advised them that their behavior is wrong in the Anbar, raiding, putting feet on heads, this is worse than killing.” He also blamed the Americans for the sectarianism. “They brought in the militias,” he said. “The militias belong to Iran, not Iraq or America. Since the invasion until now they are fighting the Sunnis. There is a new dictatorship now, a religious one.” For his trouble, he said, Al Qaeda had blown up his house. “Al Qaeda is not cooperating with the Iraqi resistance,” he said. “The real Iraqi resistance considers Al Qaeda an enemy.”
IN THOSE DAYS it felt as if the Americans had withdrawn from Baghdad. They were devolving their authority willingly, abandoning their attempt at rebuilding the Iraqi state. It resembled Britain’s “colonialism on the cheap.” They no longer had the interest or money to micromanage Iraq. Iraq now felt as if it was occupied by Iraqi Security Forces and militias running amok, shooting into the air, shouting out of loudspeakers. Nowhere in Baghdad was safe from the militias. Even hospitals and universities were part of the battlefield. Whereas in the past Muqtada’s followers had conducted joint prayers with radical Sunnis to demonstrate their solidarity, by 2006 mosques were no longer sacred. On Friday, December 22, 2006, Mahdi Army militiamen raided the Abdullah Bin Omar Mosque in the Binook area near Shaab. The raid occurred during the important noon prayer, when a large congregation gathers to hear a sermon. Sunnis claimed that fifty Mahdi Army militiamen raided the mosque while the sheikh was giving his sermon; all but four of the prayergoers managed to escape, but the sheikh and the muezzin were taken prisoner. The Shiite version of the story is that the Mahdi Army entered the mosque ten minutes before prayer time. They claim they ordered the Sunni prayergoers not to move and told them they had come only for the sheikh. One of the men praying had brought his pistol with him. He ran behind the pulpit and opened fire. There was an exchange of fire that lasted until the Mahdi Army men ran out of bullets. The Mahdi Army men then captured him, the sheikh, and the muezzin. Their corpses were later found with signs of torture, and it was revealed that the third man who opened fire during the raid was the sheikh’s son.
In late 2006 Baghdad’s walls and streets were covered with calls for students and professors to stay home. The radical Sunni movement Ansar al-Sunna had declared a “campaign for halting the assassinations of students and academics in Baghdad universities.” According to one banner hung in a majority-Sunni part of Baghdad, “In order to protect the lives of our dearest academics and students from the assassinations of Maliki’s government and the death squads of Maliki’s government, we decided to stop the universities and all academic institutes including the private ones for this academic year 2006-2007.” The banner stressed that this applied only to Baghdad. “It is strictly forbidden to attend universities in order to cleanse them from death squads that use the universities as centers to launch their attacks from,” the banner said. Such threats, warnings, and announcements are typically distributed to the Iraqi people through leaflets or by hanging banners on walls.
Ansar al-Sunna was the successor to the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam, the Al Qaeda-inspired group that had been based in northern Iraq’s autonomous region before the war. The group was remaking itself as the defender of Iraq’s Sunnis. While there were signs of clashes between the Sunni resistance and Al Qaeda, the move by Ansar al-Sunna was a sign of how the civil war was uniting the disparate Sunni militias and how Iraq’s Sunnis would have to depend on them for protection, sometimes whether they wanted to or not, in the absence of reliable security forces loyal to the state. Some Sunni politicians defended the ban on university attendance. Asma al-Dulaimi, a female Iraqi Parliament member belonging to the Iraqi Accord Front, headed by the Islamic Party’s Tariq al-Hashimi, explained that she was sure the army of Ansar al-Sunna knew of threats to students and academics and that its call to halt university attendance was made out of a desire to protect the students. Meisoon al-Damalouji, a Sunni member of Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiya Party, condemned Dulaimi’s statements as unacceptable. A banner was hung up in Baghdad Mustansiriya University on Palestine Street announcing, “We will not surrender to terrorism, and that is our response.” Prime Minister Maliki himself responded to the warnings by threatening to fire all professors who did not show up to work and to expel students who did not attend classes. This move was seen by Sunnis as an attack by the Shiite-dominated government against them, since it was Sunni students and profes
sors who had been warned not to attend.
On December 7 Muhamad Haidar Suleiman, a professor at a sports education college in Mosul, was assassinated, and Harith Abdul Hamid, director of Baghdad University’s Psychology Center, was also murdered on his way to work. In early December a girl’s high school in Jadida, or New Baghdad, the majority-Christian area of the city, was closed down by order of the school’s headmaster after militants left posters on the walls threatening to kill the female students. In Zayuna, a majority-Sunni area, leaflets were scattered in two schools, one of which was called the Tariq bin Ziyad school, cursing Shiites as bastards and threatening them.
In fact, professors and administrators who had belonged to the Baath Party had been targeted ever since the fall of the regime. Student unions were dominated by sectarian and fundamentalist militias, and in Baghdad these militias often belonged to Shiite movements such as the Sadrists, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaqoubi’s Fadhila, and the Supreme Council. Religious strictures began to be imposed as well. Hundreds of professors were assassinated and hundreds fled. Incredibly, in November the Ministry of Higher Education was attacked by Interior Ministry forces.
University attendance declined drastically because of the violence. Leaflets threatening students and professors at the University of Technology forced the school to shut down. In the Adhamiya and Yarmuk districts, both majority-Sunni areas of Baghdad, leaflets were distributed banning university students from attending their schools. In Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, leaflets threatened students who attended the agriculture college. In the Zafraniya district students of the Technical Institute were threatened by gunmen.