by Nir Rosen
This inside source also blamed the Jordanian government’s tolerance of Salafism. “This is an appeasement from the security services. The church got them to ban The Da Vinci Code, but in Abdali you can buy Salafi books. Since the ’70s they are turning a blind eye.” He added that the requirements for studying Islamic law at the University of Jordan were lower than for any other subject. “Sharia students are the ones who get the worst scores and can’t get into other schools, the ones with no critical thinking skills. The Sharia school in the university accepts the dumbest students. They tell them, ‘All other majors are closed to you. Become a preacher.’” There are more than three thousand mosques in Jordan, he told me, but one-tenth of them lack a regular imam, which means that “anyone can stand up and do the Friday sermon.” In addition, he said, “1,450 imams earn less than one hundred dinars a month, so you can buy them easily. So the quality of the preachers is low.”
A Jordanian woman who ran youth empower ment and education programs throughout the Middle East worried that recruits were drawn to Salafism because “they are discouraged and depressed. Across the whole region youth lack dreams because they have been repressed by the system. It’s not just poverty. Wealthy individuals are joining the jihad. There is a lack of hope and dreams. The youth feel they are of no value to society and become a burden, so of course they are attracted to these extreme ideologies.”
Muhammad Abu Rumman, a Jordanian journalist specializing in Islamic movements and a former Muslim Brother himself, attributed the attraction of Salafism to hopelessness. “The political environment and conditions make them feel bad,” he told me. “They have no hope for the future with the political system here, so they try by themselves to do what the government cannot do. They are victims of conditions in Jordan and the Arab world. Political consciousness is born in bad political, economic, social conditions. There is no religious reform. Religious understanding is not supporting democracy and human rights. It always says all the bad things are because we are far from Islam and we don’t obey Allah so the U.S. invaded Iraq.” He explained that the Muslim Brotherhood, which was Jordan’s only opposition movement but refrained from questioning the government’s legitimacy, “represents the middle class and shares in the system and government, but in their religious speech they use the same language as Salafis. These youth do what people say and don’t do. We all speak of Iraq. The preachers speak of Iraq, and of jihad in Iraq and Palestine. The king would be in danger if he tried to stop this. All of the society speaks the same language.”
Hassan Abu Haniyeh, a Jordanian researcher specializing in Salafism and a former reformist Salafi, agreed: “The main motivation for terrorists is unemployment and poverty. The people are between the hammer of the Americans and the anvil of exclusion from participating. If you open an office for volunteers for the jihad in Iraq here you would take a million, and from the rest of the Arab world you would take millions.” Abu Haniyeh complained that the American project of reform in the Arab world had given democracy a bad name. “The U.S. terminated us, the reformers,” he said, “because now the word ‘reform’ is a bad word, an American word. If people hear the word ‘reform, ’ they think of Iraq, which became a model of violence. And now the reform and the reformers are isolated from people, people don’t like them. Now the reform project became empty from the inside because the replacement of our regimes is very terrifying, so there is nothing left, only extremist talk.”
Yasar Qartarneh was a sharp, raucous, slightly overweight man who jokingly called himself an Islamist and liked to provoke. Qatarneh worked for Jordan’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, a think tank within the Jordanian government funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “Terrorism is linked to events on both sides of the border,” he said. “For fifty years Islamist activists and politicians were the regime’s main source of legitimacy.” Now the chickens had come home to roost. He was concerned that just as America had given reform a bad name, so had Zarqawi tarnished resistance. “We have to draw a line which Zarqawi, Goddamn him, blurred. It was very legitimate to fight occupation. Zarqawi blurred the line, and now you can’t distinguish if what he does is terrorism or freedom fighting.”
The solution, according to Abu Rumman, was in Iraq. “If Sunnis played a political role in Iraq, Zarqawi would disappear, because who will support him?” Jordan was in a difficult position, watching its neighbor to the east nervously. In December 2004, King Abdullah warned of a “Shiite crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shiites had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq and committed atrocities against Shiite civilians. In September 2005 Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran for no reason. From the Jordanian and Saudi perspective, indirectly supporting Sunni violence in Iraq was advantageous, because it would give Iraq’s Sunnis greater political leverage. Jordan was dependent on the Saudis. In 2007, when the Jordanian state was bankrupt, the Saudis paid Jordanian civil servants’ salaries. Compounding these difficulties, Jordan’s fragile authoritarian regime and precarious balance of Jordanian and Palestinian was being tested by the massive influx of refugees from Iraq.
CHAPTER FIVE
Exiles
“YOU HAVE NOW ENTERED IRAQ,” MY TAXI DRIVER JOKED. WE HAD, in fact, just entered Seyida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus built around the eponymous shrine to Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad. This shrine city, long a destination for Shiite pilgrims, had become home to many Shiites among the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had sought refuge in Syria from the hell their home had become in Iraq. “Everybody is Iraqi,” one taxi driver joked after he stopped to ask several people on the street for directions to a mosque and they replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. “There are more Iraqis than Syrians.” Another, after complaining that the Iraqi refugees had driven up prices and insisting that there were four million of them in his city, explained, “Anybody who has a war comes to us: Sudan, Somalia.”
It was early 2006, the seventh day of the Muslim month of Muharram, and Shiites around the world were preparing for its tenth day, known as Ashura, in which they commemorate the martyrdom of Hussein, brother of Zeinab, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized the division between Sunni and Shiite Islam. A vast commercial district had grown around the shrine. Built at first to house and care for the pilgrims and seminary students, the district had become home to so many Iraqis that walking through its streets I was transported back to Baghdad—to Kadhimiya, the Shiite commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. “It’s like they froze Iraq in 2003 and put it in a museum,” exclaimed photojournalist Ghaith Abdul Ahad, who accompanied me. And indeed, we were both struck by the feeling of being in a safe Baghdad. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had started to fear Iraqi men; all strangers were potential kidnappers.
All around us the streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed “Iraqi Street.” The walls were festooned with posters from Iraqi elections past. Inside a bakery I saw a poster of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, father of populist cleric Muqtada. There was a mobile phone shop named after the Euphrates River and barbershops called Karbala and Son of Iraq. Ali Hamid, a Sunni barber from Baghdad’s Shiite district of Shaab, had been working in the same shop since 2003; he explained to me that many barbers had fled Iraq to Syria because Islamic radicals had forced them to close their shops. “In Iraq there is a sectarian war,” he told me. “Here we all get along.” He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities. “Praise God, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners. You live in a different country, n
ot your country, you have to respect their rules.” He added that Iraqi refugees feared the Syrian regime anyway. They had fled to Syria looking for a place to live and were tired of problems. In 2006 Ali began seeing large numbers of Iraqis coming. He noticed many more tea stands springing up and more pedestrians crowding the district.
In one alley, not far away, I found the famous Baghdad restaurant Patchi al-Hati. Patchi is sheep’s head, the meal I have dreaded most in my years in Iraq. The restaurant’s owner had left Iraq four months earlier, “because of the terrorism and looting,” the chef explained over an immense steaming pot boiling with the pungent smell. Anybody with money in Iraq was a target for kidnappers and extortionists. “They heard we were a famous restaurant and thought we were millionaires,” he told me.
In another alley I walked past the field office for Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, guarded by plainclothes Syrian security officials. Haeri had been a student of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr during his exile in Iran. Following the overthrow of Saddam’s regime, Haeri had urged his followers to kill Baathists. He had once been close to Muqtada, but the two had fallen out. Further down the street I found the office of Muqtada’s representative, also guarded by Syrian security officials, who were friendly with the Sadr officials and zealous in demanding I provide official permission before entering. That evening I attended the recitation of Hussein’s story. Dozens of shoes were piled on the stairway and in a wooden shelf outside a room where men clad in customary Mahdi Army garb—black shirts with black head scarves or headbands—sat listening to Sheikh Ali wail the story of Hussein’s bravery and betrayal, ending with the slaughter of his family and finally his martyrdom. The men began to sob, burying their heads in their hands or between their knees. For Sheikh Ali, the story of perfidy and resistance to tyranny was a parable for his community’s current oppression, as he saw it at the hands of Americans and Sunnis. “They are doing the same thing with the poor children and people on the streets,” he cried out. He concluded by asking God to end the Americans’ occupation, free their hostages in Baghdad, and bless the Mahdi Army.
Sheikh Raed al-Kadhimi was Muqtada’s representative in Syria. He blamed the American occupiers, along with “people who operate in Iraq under the umbrella of the Americans and former Baathists who aim to destabilize Iraq” and takfiris, for the refugee flow into Syria. “They do killings and kidnappings,” he said, “and now attacks happen with mortar shells from both sides, so people resort to a safe place and they come to Syria.” Sheikh Raed was proud of his leader Muqtada, who he claimed “began the revolt against the Americans and fought them. He made it difficult for the American army.” On the eve of the tenth of Muharram a procession organized by Sheikh Raed’s office gathered. Dressed in black, they were led by youths wielding immense wooden flagpoles with different colored flags that they struggled to wave from side to side. Others carried framed pictures of Muqtada and his father. It was a latmiya procession, in which the men chanted songs lamenting Hussein’s martyrdom and vowing fealty to him. “We have chosen our destiny,” they sang, “we are the sons of Sadr, soldiers for the Mahdi.” The thousands of onlookers waited until dawn for the culmination of the events. By four in the morning hundreds of men dressed in white robes had assembled in tents. They carried short swords, which they cleaned in buckets of soap. They patted their heads for several minutes, perhaps to numb the surface or steel their nerves. After performing the dawn prayer, they lined up and, led by trumpeters and drummers, began a march through alleys lined with shrouded women looking on. The drums and trumpets rang out a martial beat and were followed by chants of “Haidar!” another name for Ali, father of Hussein and Zeinab. The men, and many boys, swung their swords rhythmically, hitting their foreheads and drawing blood, which soon drenched their faces and robes. As onlookers filmed the scene on their phones and the sun rose above them, the men danced in bloody ecstasy. When they reached the shrine the event ended suddenly, and people returned to their homes or hotel rooms. In the Iraqi shrine city of Karbala and Baghdad’s Kadhimiya district, I had seen these events end in explosions and terror attacks. In Damascus it felt almost anticlimactic.
The Displaced
As the violence in Iraq caused its population to hemorrhage, Iraqis fled to wherever they could. Millions were displaced, some seeking shelter in Kurdistan, others in safer neighborhoods, cleansed of minorities, or safer provinces. Others fled to Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Denmark, and anywhere else they could. During the civil war between one thousand and three thousand Iraqis entered Syria through the border at Al Tanf, passing through the volatile Anbar province, risking death at the hands of militias and the American military.
“It’s the largest refugee crisis in the Middle East since 1948,” said Kristele Younes of the Washington-based Refugees International. “Not only is it a regional crisis but it can become international, since Iraqis want to be resettled,” she said. “What’s especially shocking to me is the level of extreme and indiscriminate violence. Every civilian is at risk. This crisis is growing at almost unprecedented numbers. Fifty thousand are displaced a month, and tens of thousands are leaving. The international response to the refugee crisis was extremely weak until recently. They had not acknowledged the crisis. The only agency that had responded was [the United Nations High Commission for Refugees], and they were doing so with extremely meager resources. One reason why the response has been so weak is because the international community was waiting for U.S. leadership. The U.S. sparked the conflict and should be answering for the humanitarian consequences of the war as well as the political ones.”
Those who survived the perilous journey were met by surprisingly friendly Syrian officials led by a captain overwhelmed by the desperate refugees. A thin, energetic man with an air of desperation, the captain politely listened to the stories of hundreds of Iraqis every day, asking for exceptions to be made, for their expired or potentially forged passports to be accepted, and protested. “Wallahi ma fini,” he would say, “By God, I can’t.” “Ma fini, ma fini, ma fini,” until finally he would break and let in the despairing Iraqis. He explained that often his border post was overwhelmed because American convoys or military operations would close down the road in the Anbar province, and when it was reopened huge numbers of Iraqis would descend upon them at once. Dusty and dazed Iraqi families gathered inside and outside his small, drab concrete building, filling out the applications, waiting for their names to be called.
One man waiting for his name to be called, Abu Ibrahim, told me he had left because of the violence. “There isn’t an Iraqi here who wants to enter and hasn’t lost a brother or father or received a threat,” he told me. A Sunni from Seidiya, he complained that the Americans did nothing. “In my neighborhood, the head of the city council was killed just three meters away from one of their checkpoints. His family went to the checkpoint and said, ‘How come he was killed just three meters from you?’ And they said, ‘It is not our duty to go and check why he was killed.’ We don’t want Iraq anymore—neither itself, not its oil or gas. Let the whole world know that we Iraqis want nothing from Iraq. All we want is to be left alone. The Iraqi leaders go to neighboring countries and ask them to repatriate us to Iraq. Why? So that they will rule and slaughter us.” He was called Omar, a common Sunni name that was dangerous to possess. “Omar is not allowed to enter Baghdad,” he said. “There is no government in Iraq,” just “theft and killing.”
Sitting in a column of minivans and trucks piled with suitcases, I found one old woman waiting for her family to return with their passports. She was from Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad. She did not require much prompting to vent her fury. “Is this democracy, to tell people kill and displace people? Walking in the street with fear? Our situation in Iraq is miserable, worse than miserable. Why is the world silent about Iraq? I don’t know. What have we gained from the oil? Nothing. Even in winter we have no kerosene to put in the stove. There is no gas, no security. There is only killing and explosions. We ran from
explosions in the streets. The children do not go to school. Even the university students don’t go to school. All stay at home.” It was her second trip to Syria. She had returned to Baghdad to bring more of her family, which would now reach around thirty people. She began to cry as I parted with her. “Please get our voices to the world,” she begged as her voice broke. “What did the United Nations do for us? What did America do for us? Why all of this?”
Past the fortunate Iraqis who had made it out was the no man’s land between the Iraqi and Syrian borders, a desolate moonscape stretching several kilometers. Off an escarpment the cold wind battered a collection of neatly ordered tents. Three hundred and fifty Palestinian refugees were marooned here, facing extermination in Iraq but unable to enter Syria. They were refugees for the second time. Most of Iraq’s Palestinians had come from three villages—Ijzim, Jaba, and Ein Ghazal, together known as the Little Triangle—which were near Haifa in northern Palestine. As part of the plan to cleanse Israel of its Palestinians, Israeli soldiers bombarded the villages from the air, killing hundreds of civilians. Ground forces then attacked the villages and killed hundreds more civilians. The Little Triangle was defended by a motley group of farmers armed with Ottoman rifles. In July 1948 they were defeated. Many men were summarily executed, while the other inhabitants were expelled to Jenin after the Israeli soldiers relieved them of their money and jewelry and looted their villages. Other Iraqi Palestinians had come from the nearby village of Tira. In one incident, twenty-eight of Tira’s civilians were burned alive when they asked their captors for water and were doused in gasoline instead. Others had come from Ayn Hawd, which was also attacked and cleansed under orders of the Israeli leadership in 1948. Iraqi troops fighting as part of a small contingent of Arab volunteers who had come to defend the Palestinians bused them from Jenin to Iraq. By 1949 up to five thousand Palestinian refugees had been granted asylum in Iraq. A minority of Iraq’s Palestinians had lived in Kuwait from the time of their expulsion and moved to Iraq following the Gulf War, when Kuwait evicted them. By 2003 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that there were up to thirty-four thousand Palestinians in Iraq. Today there are only an estimated twelve thousand left. Thousands fled using forged Iraqi passports. In at least one case, a Palestinian from Iraq landed in Cairo’s airport using an Iraqi passport. Because his body bore the scars of his torture at the hands of Iraqi militias, he was resettled with the help of UN officials in a third country.