Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  In majority-Sunni western Baghdad, banners signed by Ansar al-Sunna’s Department for the Protection of Professors asked students and lecturers to abstain from attending government universities, academic institutes, and private colleges because they were dominated by the government’s Shiite militias. Ansar al-Sunna was planning on clearing the universities of the Shiite militias and killing them. As a result they announced that the school year was over.

  “To our respected professors and our dear students in the universities and colleges of Baghdad,” began one leaflet titled “Final Warning”: “In an attempt to protect your lives from the wrongdoings of the Maliki government and its death squads, including the killings, kidnappings, and violations against the scientific talents, and especially the Sunni students, which led to Sunni talents in Baghdad universities becoming a market for the death squads, and to these colleges becoming safe houses for these squads to launch their killings and kidnappings against Sunni students and professors. . . . From these universities the learned and the mujahideen graduated . . . and in these same universities they are being killed today.” The group warned it was abolishing the 2006-07 school year for Baghdad university students. The letter was signed by Ansar al-Sunna’s “campaign for the aid of the learned and the students in the universities of Baghdad.”

  As the civil war in Iraq intensified, Sunni militias appeared to be uniting to combat the more powerful Shiite militias as well as the police and army. In mid-October 2006 an alliance was announced between Sunni militias who called themselves Al Mutaibeen. The alliance included the Mujahideen Shura Council, Jeish al-Fatihin, Jund al-Sahaba, Ansar al-Tawhid wa al-Sunna, and some tribal leaders. Its name came from the word “tib” (perfume) and referred to the pre-Islamic custom of putting on perfume. (Before Islam was founded, some notable Meccan leaders agreed to help the needy and defend the weak; they sealed their agreement by putting their hands in perfume.) The members of the Mutaibeen Alliance announced that their goals were to fight the Americans and protect the poor Sunnis from the Shiites.

  The Sunni front was not restricted to Iraq. On December 7, thirty-eight Saudi clerics and university professors signed a global fatwa calling on all Sunnis in the world to unify their efforts and fight the Shiites to protect the Sunnis of Iraq. This fatwa was likely to increase the support Iraq’s Sunni militias received from abroad and the number of foreign volunteers attempting to enter Iraq. Sifr al-Hawali, an important Saudi cleric who often took a harder line than the Saudi regime, was one of the signatories. Other prominent Saudi Wahhabi thinkers who signed the letter were Abdul Rahman bin Nasser al-Barrak, Sheikh Nasser bin Suleiman al-Omar, and Sheikh Abdullah al-Tuweijiri. “What has been taken by force can only be got back by force,” the letter said. Just two days before, Saudi papers announced that their government had intercepted a cell of fourteen people in the city of Hael who were promoting takfiri and jihadist ideology on the Internet and were involved in sending volunteers to fight in Iraq.

  The Saudis also hosted Harith al-Dhari, head of the powerful Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, in an official visit. The Association was closely linked to some Sunni Islamo-nationalist militias, and Dhari had recently defended Al Qaeda in Iraq against criticism. Some veterans of the Afghan jihad viewed the Association as the ideal place to funnel money from wealthy Persian Gulf sponsors. Saudis and other Gulf Arabs were a significant source of funding for Sunni militias in Iraq. Saudi Arabia and Jordan were apprehensive of a Shiite-dominated Iraq, which they viewed as an Iranian proxy. Nawaf Obaid, a close adviser to the Saudi government on security issues, wrote in the Washington Post that if the Americans withdrew from Iraq, the Saudis would increase their support for Iraq’s Sunnis to undermine Iran’s influence. This was viewed less as an analysis and more as a warning by some elements in the Saudi regime.

  In November 2006 Jordan’s King Abdullah warmly received Harith al-Dhari despite Dhari’s public support for Al Qaeda and the fact that the Iraqi government wanted him for inciting sectarianism and supporting terrorists. In January 2007 Dhari was in Saudi Arabia speaking at private gatherings, praising Al Qaeda’s Islamic State of Iraq, and raising money for the resistance. He was accompanied by his movement’s spokesman, Sheikh Abdul Salam al-Kubeisi, who warned that the fall of Baghdad to the Safavids would lead to the fall of Mecca and Medina. A cleric from Baquba also spoke in support of the resistance.

  Meanwhile, by the end of 2006, there were signs that Muqtada al-Sadr, who had been reviled in a sensationalist Newsweek cover as the most dangerous man in Iraq, was barely in control of his organization. Muqtada seemed more and more like a mere figurehead for an army with no real leadership or hierarchy. He had gone through many deputies, firing close allies. In a video of an internal debate among his men that was released without his approval, a different Muqtada was seen, one who jealously guarded his power but seemed to have little control over his men. Speaking in poor Arabic, all slang, Muqtada revealed his jealousy and insecurity as well, criticizing a deputy for praising Supreme Council leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

  Earlier, in the spring of 2006, Iraqis were as excited about the World Cup as other soccer-crazy countries. They hung flags for their favorite teams. Some who did received visits from Sadrists urging them to remove the flags and hang up Iraqi flags or pictures of clerics. Those who did not were threatened. Even though many of Iraq’s top soccer players hailed from Sadr City, that spring Muqtada issued a fatwa about soccer, warning that he and his father viewed it as a distraction from worship. It had been created by the West to prevent Muslims from perfecting themselves, he argued. The Israelis and the West kept Muslims distracted with soccer—as with singing and smoking—while they focused on science. The Mahdi Army tried to prevent women from going to the market in Karbala, causing businesses to suffer. Muqtada was desperately attempting to impose moral order on his followers at the same time as they were getting caught up in a maelstrom of violence.

  Although politically motivated violence, the occupation, and the resistance all affected and destroyed the lives of civilians, simple, criminally motivated kidnapping also devastated countless Iraqi families. I heard many horror stories—many of them regaled to me by my friend Ali. He told me about his father-in-law, a Sunni, who was once a prominent Palestinian resistance fighter in the 1960s and ’70s. “He has a small shop in an area that is controlled by the Shiite militias,” Ali said. “About a month ago, there was a roadside bomb just in front of his shop. He survived the explosion, but many people were killed and injured. The police came and took him without asking how a sixty-year-old man could risk his life and put a bomb just in front of his source of living. His family, including myself, now live outside of Iraq, so he had no one in Baghdad with him. His sister-in-law used to call him every day, and at night someone else answered his phone. The man told my aunt that her brother-in-law was in the ‘Ministry of Interior’ and hung up. She called us, and I contacted everyone I know. I sent my friends to the police station nearest to his shop. They told me they found my father-in-law’s car, but the police denied they had him. I am a Shiite, but I had never tried to establish any connections with the militias simply because I despise them. But seeing my family in that condition pushed me to contact some people who know some leaders in the militias. Someone called someone who called someone, and finally they found his trace. He had been taken to a house outside the police station for ‘investigation. ’ Anyway, my contacts were able to set him free the next day, but his head was covered with blood. They beat him on his head with the gun.

  “About two months ago, three men remotely related to my wife were kidnapped from their shop in Al Shourja [the economic center of Baghdad]. They had been merchants in the area for more than thirty years. They were taken by the police special force [Maghawir al-Dakhiliya]. Two days after that, someone called their families and asked for ninety thousand dollars ransom. The families were forced to listen to the sounds of torture on the mobile. The families were ‘convinced,’ and they provided the
money for the kidnappers. One of the kidnappers, a policeman, was related to the families by marriage, but it seems he had a grudge against them. The day after they paid the ransom, the kidnapped men’s bodies were found in the morgue. They had been tortured to death, and there were marks of electric drills all over their bodies (one of them was eighty years old). When their families went to the morgue, the person in charge there told them he couldn’t give them the bodies ‘because the bodies belong to the Mahdi Army.’ Anyway, they managed to contact some people who had contacts with the militias, and they got the bodies. Their relative, who was one of the kidnappers, confessed he participated in the crime and threatened the families not to say anything. He also looted the shops of the victims two days after they had been killed.

  “A Sunni friend of mine was kidnapped near his house in western Baghdad. The kidnappers took him to a place where he saw many people being tortured. They asked him where he was from, and he mentioned the name of his tribe. They said, ‘So, you are one of our people, Saddam Hussein’s people,’ and my friend replied, ‘I hope God saves our leader,’ and they all replied, ‘Amen!’ Anyway, the kidnappers apologized to my friend and told him they needed to kidnap people to finance jihad. They called his family on a Friday and told them they would decide his fate after the Friday prayers. A couple of hours later they called the family (who don’t even own a house) and asked for fifty thousand dollars.

  “His poor family sold everything they had and gathered ten thousand dollars for his ransom. The kidnappers called them and told them the money was not enough and they might sell him to mujahideen in Latifiya for a bigger amount. The family was forced to ask their friends for loans, including me. They were able to provide another ten thousand dollars, and the kidnappers agreed to release him.”

  Like all Iraqis Ali’s friend Rasha also had numerous stories of kidnappings and crime. Perhaps none were as chilling as her young Shiite cousin’s tale.

  “She was in love with her classmate Ahmed from their time together at the university. They could not get married, however, because Ahmed was young and from a poor family. He was his mother’s only son, and his father had died before the war. He is Sunni and lived in Tarmiya, an area north of Baghdad dominated by Sunni militias. Ahmed himself belonged to the resistance. My cousin’s family were not rich either, and they could no longer work in Iraq, so they left for Syria. Ahmed borrowed money to buy a car and worked as a taxi driver. In one year he had saved enough to afford to get married. He contacted my cousin in Syria, and she agreed to return to Baghdad to marry him. One night, a few days before their wedding, they were on the phone when he told her, ‘I hear someone knocking on the door. I’ll be back in a second.’ She heard shooting and was so frightened that she hung up the phone and ran to her mother. Her mother redialed Ahmed’s number and a man answered the phone. ‘He is a traitor,’ said the voice. ‘He was going to marry a Shiite woman, so we killed him.’”

  As more and more Iraqis were disappearing, their desperate relatives were not merely hanging up signs on walls but turning to the Internet. The home page of Iraqi Rabita, a pro-Baathist Sunni website, often posted photos of missing people with the request “Please help us find these people—lost.” At first only Sunnis were posting on the site, hoping to locate family members kidnapped by Shiite militias. The site succeeded in finding some of the missing people, but it did not explain how it did so. So Christians and Shiites whose sons had been kidnapped by Sunni militias began posting photos of their relatives on the site, calling for help in locating them. One day in late 2006, the home page had nineteen photos of missing people. Four were Christians, five were Sunnis, and ten were Shiites.

  IN LATE 2006 Adnan al-Dulaimi showed his true colors as Iraq’s most sectarian politician. Dulaimi had taught at the University of Zarqa in Jordan while he was in exile before the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. Zarqa’s most famous son is Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Dulaimi returned to Iraq a week after the fall of Baghdad. He was appointed head of the Sunni Religious Endowment but was removed for what he claimed were political reasons because he was “defending the Sunnis,” which could also refer to his staunch sectarianism. He formed the Conference of Iraqi Sunnis to unite Sunnis under what he described as “one umbrella” and to encourage their political participation, and he was appointed religious adviser to President Jalal Talabani.

  In late 2006 Dulaimi spoke at a major regional conference in Istanbul, hoping to raise funds for the resistance. He told the audience they should have named the gathering “The Conference for Supporting Sunnis in Iraq” and mocked the organizers’ fear of being called sectarian. Iraq is worth nothing without Sunnis, he said, because Sunnis owned it and built it. “Yes, we are sectarian,” he said. If they did not awaken, then Iraq would be lost and the Sunnis would be exterminated by the Shiites. He demanded support from Muslims around the world for Iraq’s Sunnis. He spoke of the Sunni mosques and neighborhoods that were being destroyed. “Iraq is going to be Shiite, and this will expand to the lands surrounding Iraq. Then you will all regret it, but your regret will be worth nothing because it will be too late. Where is Saudi Arabia? Where is Kuwait? Where is Jordan? Where is Pakistan? And where are the Muslims? Sleep and keep sleeping while Iraq is destroying. You sleep while Sunni mosques in Iraq are being destroyed. Sleep while Sunni mosques in Iraq are burning. Sleep and keep sleeping, but the fire of Iraq will expand to you. What is happening in Iraq has been planned for over fifty years in order to convert the region into Shiism and create the Persian Empire under a Shiite cover.”

  In a December 22, 2006, interview with the American-sponsored Radio Sawa, the interviewer pressed Dulaimi on why he avoided criticizing Al Qaeda in Iraq but regularly criticized the Mahdi Army. “Is Al Qaeda a terrorist organization or not?” demanded the interviewer. “I will not and will never answer this question,” said Dulaimi, “and if you ask me again I will hang up the phone.” The interviewer persisted, and Dulaimi hung up.

  The Death of Saddam

  The year 2006 culminated with one last insult to the Sunnis of Iraq and the region when Saddam Hussein became the first modern Arab dictator to die violently since Egypt’s Anwar Sadat in 1981. Saddam’s hanging at the hands of chubby Iraqi men wearing ski masks was likely to be perceived by many as an American execution and as part of a trend of American missteps contributing to sectarian tensions in Iraq and the region. Others viewed it as a lynching by reveling Shiite militiamen. The trial of Saddam was viewed by detractors as an event stage-managed by the Americans. According to Human Rights Watch, the Iraqi judges and lawyers involved in prosecuting Saddam were ill prepared and relied on their American advisers. American minders shut off the microphones and ordered the translators to halt whenever they disapproved of what was being said by the defendants. Saddam was being executed for the massacre in Dujail. It was the least of his crimes, but it had targeted Shiites and the Dawa Party, and they wanted revenge for his crimes against the Kurds—others could even be judged.

  For Sunnis the important Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha began on Saturday, December 30; for Shiites it began on Sunday. According to tradition in Mecca, battles were suspended during the hajj period so that pilgrims could safely march to Mecca. This practice even predated Islam; Muslims had preserved it, calling this period Al Ashur al-Hurm, the months of truce. By hanging Saddam on the Sunni Eid, the Americans and the Iraqi government were in effect saying that only the Shiite Eid had legitimacy. Sunnis were irate that Shiite traditions were given primacy (as was increasingly the case in Iraq) and that Shiites had disrespected the tradition and killed Saddam on this day. Because the Iraqi Constitution prohibits executions from being carried out on Eid, the Iraqi government had to declare that Eid did not begin until Sunday. It was a striking decision, virtually declaring that Iraq was a Shiite state. Eid was the festival of the sacrifice of the sheep. But Saddam quickly became known as “the Martyr of the Sacrifice.”

  Saddam had been in American custody and was handed over to Iraqis just befo
re his execution. It was therefore hard to dismiss the perception that the Americans could have waited, because in the end it was they who had the final say over such events. Iraqi officials consistently complained that they had no authority and that the Americans controlled the Iraqi police and the army. So it was unusual that Iraqis would suddenly regain sovereignty for this important event. For many Sunnis and Arabs in the region, this appeared to be one president ordering the death of another. It was possibly a message to Sunnis, a warning. The Americans often equated Saddam with the Sunni resistance. By killing Saddam they were killing what they believed was the symbol of the Sunni resistance, expecting its members to realize that their cause was hopeless. But Saddam’s death also liberated the Sunni resistance from association with Saddam and the Baathists. They could more plausibly claim that they were fighting for national liberation and not out of support for the former regime, as their American and Iraqi government opponents often claimed. At the same time, the execution created a new symbol for those opposed to the occupation. Saddam was not given a hood, though prisoners normally do not have a choice about wearing one. The execution and the photo of the executed Saddam had the hallmark of the U.S. psy-ops tactics, similar to the deaths of Saddam’s sons in 2003. Even the U.S. plane that flew him to his final resting spot indicated U.S. management.

  The unofficial video of the execution, filmed on the mobile phone of one of the officials present, further inflamed sectarianism. It was clear from the film that sectarian Shiites were executing Saddam. Men could be heard talking; one of them was called Ali. As the executioners argue over how to best position the rope on his neck, Saddam called out to God, saying, “Ya Allah.” Referring to Shiites, one official said, “Those who pray for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad have won!” Others triumphantly responded in the Shiite chant: “Our God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.” Others then added the part chanted by supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr: “And speed his [the Mahdi’s] return! And damn his enemies! And make his son victorious! Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!”