by Nir Rosen
Saddam smiled and said something mocking about Muqtada. “Muqtada! It is this . . . ” but the rest was blocked by the voices of officials saying, “Ila jahanam ” (go to hell). Saddam looked down disdainfully and said, “Is this your manhood?” As the rope was put around Saddam’s neck, somebody shouted, “Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr!” (Executed by Saddam in 1980, Sadr was still venerated by all three major Shiite movements in Iraq: the Dawa, the Sadrists, and the Supreme Council.) Others insulted Saddam. “Please all stop,” one man pleaded. Saddam then said the Shahada, or testimony, that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. When he tried to say it again the trapdoor opened, and he fell through. One man then shouted, “The tyranny has ended!” Others called out triumphal Shiite chants. Somebody wanted to remove the rope from his neck but was told to wait eight minutes.
The Sunni Islamo-nationalist website Islam Memo claimed that the Safavids burned Saddam’s Koran after they killed him, though there was no evidence of this. Similarly, the site made other unsubstantiated claims: that Saddam exchanged insults with the witnesses to his execution and cursed one of them, saying, “God damn you, Persian midget”; that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani blessed Saddam’s execution; that the Iraqi government refused to provide Saddam with a Sunni cleric to pray for him before the execution; that Saddam said, “Palestine is Arab” and then recited the Shahada before he was executed; that following his death his body was abused. Although the Shiite-dominated official Iraqi media claimed Saddam was terrified before his execution and that he fought with his hangmen, Saddam’s onscreen visage was one of aplomb, for he was conscious of the image he was displaying and wanted to go down as the grand historic leader he believed himself to be.
Predictably, there were celebrations in Shiite areas, and the civil war continued. Following the execution three car bombs exploded in Baghdad’s Shiite district of Hurriya, killing and injuring dozens. Another one went off in Baghdad’s Seidiya district, near its amusement park, killing at least two civilians and two policemen. A roadside bomb exploded near a children’s hospital in the majority-Shiite area of Iskan, killing two and injuring several others. In the southern town of Kufa, dominated by supporters of Muqtada, a car bomb exploded near a market, killing and injuring dozens. In the northern town of Tal Afar, a man wearing a suicide belt exploded himself in a market, killing at least five and injuring several others. It was also claimed that Sistani’s representative was killed and his office was burned. In the town of Saqlawiya, in Anbar province, there was a big demonstration against Saddam’s execution at which marchers carried large portraits of the former leader. Immediately after the execution five mortars were fired in Falluja, targeting the southern checkpoint to that city, known as the Numaniya checkpoint. In Tikrit, site of another large demonstration, Saddam’s tribe officially requested that the Iraqi government allow his body to be buried near his parents in Owja, the town where he was born.
I asked a Kurdish Iraqi friend how he felt after seeing the video of Saddam’s execution. “It is sad to see someone who knows he is going to die in a minute,” he told me, “but I am happy that he died that way and not, as the so-called human rights groups want, to be in a jail where they want to make sure he has access to TV, newspaper, and good health.” He agreed with me that the images of Saddam could potentially cause some people to sympathize with him but added, “If anyone who could live the life of an Iraqi for only one day—they would want worse than that to happen to Saddam. Last night, all of a sudden I remembered all the agonies my family went through in their life. We had to leave our home twenty times and walk to the borders and leave everything we had and buy new stuff every few years. He never had the feeling you and I have now for him when he was ordering Ali Hassan Majid and the henchmen to bury people with their kids in the deserts, so why should I now feel sorry for him? But I hope I see one day when the current Saddamlets are hanged too, like Talabani, Ayad Allawi.”
One thing was clear: the death of Saddam did not bring closure or peace to Iraq. Sunnis gathered at Saddam’s grave, demonstrators showed his iconic image, and revenge was threatened. President George Bush declared his nemesis’s death “a milestone.” To many in Iraq and the Muslim world, it was a clear message that there would be no mercy for Sunnis in a Shiite-dominated Iraq.
Part Two
THE IRAQIFICATION OF THE MIDDLE EAST
CHAPTER FOUR
Among the Jihadis
REMARKABLY, THERE WERE NO ATTEMPTS TO ATTACK THE UNITED States in retaliation for its occupation of Iraq, not by American Muslims or by foreigners. But the jihad in Iraq did lead to a regional blowback, and its neighbor Jordan was the first to suffer.
On February 16, 2006, Mohammad Zaki Amawi, Marwan Othman El-Hindi, and Wassim I. Mazloum were indicted by a U.S. district court in Ohio. The three were accused of conspiring to wage jihad against U.S. forces in Iraq, training in firearms and martial arts, collecting funds to support their mission, studying jihad training manuals on the Internet, meeting to plan how best to assist the Iraqi insurgency, studying how to build IEDs, and threatening the life of President Bush. Amawi flew to Jordan in August 2005 carrying laptops he wanted to donate to the mujahideen in Iraq. The indictment added that Amawi “unsuccessfully attempted to enter Iraq to wage violent Jihad, or ‘holy war,’ against the United States and coalition forces.”
Amawi and El-Hindi were Jordanian-born naturalized citizens of the United States. Mazloum was from Lebanon. It was the first time such charges had been made against U.S. residents, but the charges were very similar to ones in numerous court cases in Jordan since the beginning of the Iraq War. These trials were held in the Marka military court, a squat white building across the road from a military airbase that is planted atop a hill in eastern Amman, the somnolent capital of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Apart from dealing with wayward soldiers, the court also handles security and terrorism cases. Relatives of prisoners stand on line on the curb outside, most dressed in traditional gowns, deep lines on their unshaven faces, waiting to be searched and allowed in. The winter winds blow hard on Amman’s hilltops and muffle the approaching sirens of a police sedan, which is followed by a dark blue van, windowless except for some bars on the back that show only blackness inside. The van is always followed by a pickup truck, with two masked counterterror agents manning a heavy mounted gun on the bed.
On Wednesday, December 28, 2005, the van entered Marka through the main gate and circled around the back of the courthouse. Ten shackled prisoners were taken out and led into a cage in the courtroom. Their lawyers chatted jovially in a smoke-filled waiting room; then made their way past the numerous police officers, security officers, and soldiers bustling back and forth in search of something to do; and headed into the small courtroom, lit with bright fluorescent lights, lined with old wooden benches, and full of blue uniformed Amn al-Am, or General Security, officers.
Muhamad Ibrahim al-Ghawi, twenty-five years old; Faris Sayid Hassan Shoter, thirty-two; Muhamad Jamil al-Titi, twenty-two; Rauf Aballah Abu Mayha, twenty-two; Muhamad Mahmud al-Sharman, twenty-nine; Basil Muhamad al-Ramah, twenty-nine; Monaem Ibrahim Hasan, thirty-one; Raed Ahmed Kaywan, thirty-three; Muhamad Qasim Sulaiman Ramah, thirty-five; and Majdi Khalid Hassan al-Fawar, twenty-one: all stood in the cage, chatting in good spirits, smiling and waving at the few relatives who sat in the back. The cage had a chain-link fence around it, an innovation imposed after one prisoner called Azmi al-Jayusi, a friend of Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, threw his shoe at the judge while on trial for attempting to bomb the Jordanian security headquarters. Other prisoners had been known to sing songs in honor of Zarqawi during trial.
All ten prisoners in the cage wore dark blue denim prison suits, wool caps, and slippers. Their beards were shaggy, as was their hair, which curled out of their caps over their ears and the backs of their necks. They were hard to distinguish from one another. Some had a dark stain sunk in above their brows in the center of the forehead. It was a sima, a
sign of intense piety, acquired by kneeling and bowing forward, placing the forehead on the floor in prayer. Their long beards and hair were a sign of their beliefs. These men were Salafis.
Salafi ideologues dominated Jordan’s mosques, and young men filled their ranks. Salafism found a home in Jordan beginning in the 1970s, when a Syrian cleric called Muhamad Nasir al-Din Albani began teaching in Jordan at the invitation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Eventually he settled in the Jordanian city of Zarqa to avoid persecution by the secular Syrian Baathists and began preaching about the need to purify Islam. Hundreds came to hear him speak, and he influenced the ranks and hierarchy of Jordan’s clergy. The regime was threatened by the crowds he drew, and he was prohibited from speaking in public. Unable to operate openly, Salafism became an informal underground movement. The late 1970s were a crucial period, as the leftist, secular, and nationalist projects in the Arab world appeared to be failing. Saudi radicals rose up against their regime, temporarily taking the mosque in Mecca; the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan; and the Iranian Revolution was both a model for political Islamists and a threat to Sunni regimes. By the early 1980s Arab regimes had decided to dispose of their excess radicals by dispatching them to the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
Jordan was a ripe environment for political Islam. Since the British invented it in 1924, the kingdom had been ruled by the Hashemites, or Albu Hashem, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad who gained their legitimacy by belonging to Ahl al-Beit, the family of the Prophet. In 1970, when King Hussein fought an uprising of nationalist Palestinians—some of whom promulgated the slogan “The liberation of Jerusalem begins in Amman”—the Muslim Brotherhood, previously disenfranchised, supported King Hussein. The King rewarded them by granting them control over the Ministry of Education, allowing them to inculcate generations of Jordanians. Founded by Egyptian Hassan al-Banna in 1928, it sought to establish a Muslim state through nonviolent cultural revolution.
Radical Islam had received a needed fillip from the Afghan jihad, which began in 1979. But it was following the Gulf War of 1991 that jihadism became an international ideology. The Saudi government’s dependence on the American infidels to protect it from Saddam, and the U.S. presence in the holiest Muslim land, coincided with Muslims’ increasing resentment of their own governments. Arabs who had fought in the Afghan jihad began returning home and were disillusioned with what they encountered, so they sought to bring the jihad home too. The Israeli peace process was but one more betrayal for them. Also following the Gulf War, the Kuwaitis expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom settled in Jordan. Returning Jordanian jihadis were repelled by the ostentation that accompanied the arrival of wealthy Palestinians to their poor country. One such jihadi was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would lead the Tawhid and Jihad organization of Iraq, later known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. Other Palestinians brought with them a radical jihadist Salafi ideology. Two of them were Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, the most important ideologue for modern jihad and Zarqawi’s former mentor, and Abu Anas al-Shami, who went on to become Zarqawi’s key cleric and religious adviser in Iraq. Maqdisi’s writings influenced the jihadis who carried out the 1995 bombings in Saudi Arabia that targeted Americans as well as the September 11 attackers. Zarqawi, Maqdisi, and Shami were heroes for young Jordanians such as those on trial in Marka.
Bordered by Palestine and Iraq, Jordan was caught between the two most important struggles in the Muslim world, at once both anticolonial wars and jihads. On November 9, 2005, Zarqawi brought the terror back home to Jordan when he dispatched four Iraqi suicide bombers to Amman, three of whom succeeded in detonating their deadly vests in three different hotels, killing sixty and injuring one hundred. It was Zarqawi’s third successful attack in Jordan. Each time he had used non-Jordanians to avoid infiltration by Jordan’s mukhabarat (intelligence service). In 2005 the mukhabarat had arrested thirteen terrorist cells, and in 2004 it had arrested eleven, one of which was in direct contact with Zarqawi. It was not a good time to go on trial for terrorism if you were a Salafi.
All of the prisoners held in Marka in 2005 were from Irbid, a northern city by the Syrian border. Six of the ten were originally Palestinians, their parents or grandparents having been expelled from their homes west of the border in 1948 or 1967. One of them paced back and forth in the cage, chanting lines from the Koran. Others joked with their relatives. One leaned forward in conversation with his lawyer, complaining that “the verdict was already decided before the trial. This is just a formality.”
The charges against the ten stated that there were five other suspects who had escaped. According to the prosecution, they had met in the Qaqa’a Mosque in the Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood, which they visited frequently. The charges mentioned that the men engaged in theological discussions about calling common people, rulers, and scholars infidels. They had agreed it was necessary to fight the Americans in Iraq and planned how they could recruit others, collect money to go to Iraq via Syria, and attack the Americans and the Iraqi Security Forces. In late July 2005 they pooled money to purchase a Kalashnikov and bullets. At different times they snuck into Syria, some of them ferried by a friend who owned a school bus. In Syria one of them met with a Tunisian who took him to an apartment where a Libyan and Saudi were staying. They discussed what operations he could execute and urged him to drive a car bomb, but the charges stated that he refused to become “suicidal.” He tired of waiting in Syria and returned to Jordan, where his friends gave him a hard time for turning back. (Another one was invited to become a suicide bomber, but he too refused and returned to Jordan, where he was arrested.) Others later snuck into Syria and discussed joining the ranks of the mujahideen fighters in Iraq. Still others snuck into Syria with a Kalashnikov and four magazines full of bullets. In Syria they argued, and two of them decided to return to Jordan, where they too were arrested.
All the officials in the court had mustaches. Three military judges in olive uniforms sat behind a long wooden bench. Behind them were framed pictures of former King Hussein and current King Abdullah. Two young soldiers with red sashes from their waists to their shoulders stood against the wall. The chief judge sat in the center. As he prepared to read the charges, one of the prisoners shouted, “Say God is great!” The prisoners erupted in unison, yelling fiercely, “God is great! The way of God is jihad!” Perhaps they were imitating one of their role models, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, who made a similar show during his trial in Egypt for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. The judge waited for them to finish shouting as if he was used to it and read the four charges, which were possession of an automatic weapon with intention to use it in illegal activity, initiation of illegal activities that could harm Jordan’s relations with a foreign country, sneaking and helping to sneak from and to Jordan with an automatic weapon, and helping to sneak into Jordan illegally. When the judge got to the part about “a foreign country,” he was interrupted by an angry prisoner, who shouted, “Infidel countries, not foreign countries!” The judge looked bored and tapped his pen on the table for silence, asking the prisoner to stop interrupting.
One by one the judge read the prisoners’ names, asking if they pleaded guilty or not. He was interrupted by the same prisoner once more, who shouted, “This is a play. When is it going to end? We know that the verdicts have been decided and written in the files!” The judge tapped his pencil impatiently. “I am not guilty, you are guilty!” snapped some of the prisoners. “Jihad is not guilt!” shouted one prisoner. “Is jihad in the way of God guilt? Fighting the Americans and Jews and infidels is now guilt? We are protecting the honor of our sisters in Iraq. Is that guilt? God is our master and you have no master. Your regime is rotten and it stinks. You and your regime and your ranks, you are all guilty!” The judge tapped his pen and told the prisoners to answer without comments. “He who opens alcoholic bars is guilty!” said one prisoner.
The judge lost his temper and angrily told the guards to take the loudest prisoner out of the
cage and back to the van, and the prisoner quieted down. Then, as punishment for the prisoners’ recalcitrance, the judge ordered their families to leave the court. The military prosecutor, also in uniform and sporting a thick mustache, informed the judge that he had no witnesses, and the trial was postponed for one week. “God is our master and you have no master!” the prisoners shouted in unison. “He is the best master and the best supporter. America is your master and you have the worst master. God is great!”
Following the trial I met with Hussein al-Masri, lawyer for the accused ten. Masri, dressed in an ill-fitting brown jacket with green pants, a red shirt, and a brown tie, told me, “Now the law permits accusing people who only think or talk about terrorism. It is not required to commit the act of terrorism; only thinking or speaking is enough. The prosecution accused the defendants of already going to Syria and meeting and arranging terrorist activities, but they didn’t do it.”
The following Friday I drove up to Irbid’s Hnina neighborhood to the Qaqa’a Mosque, hoping to learn more about what might have motivated the young prisoners in their failed and almost comical attempt to join the jihad in Iraq. As I drove up, my taxi driver recounted how his cousin had suddenly picked up and left for Iraq in March 2003. Many young men from his town, Zarqa, who were not even overtly religious, had poured over the border to fight the Americans. An hour and a half later we drove through Irbid’s rolling hills, the elevation making the air cleaner than in Amman. We were a mere thirty kilometers from the Syrian border. Friday is a slow day in the Muslim world, and Irbid’s streets were nearly empty. In the Hnina neighborhood, two boys sat on a curb sharing a bag of potato chips. A small group of men and women lined up in front of the Jowharat al-Zein bakery to purchase piles of large flat bread for lunch, which was always a more important occasion on Fridays. Children played in the street, and the few women walking by were not conservatively dressed.