by Nir Rosen
Next door was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district. It was decorated in pink and red in honor of Valentine’s Day, and there was only a chair for one customer at a time. Its owner, Ghada, had taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar, a former colonel in the Iraqi Army, had retired in 1999. After retiring he had opened a stationery shop in the Nafaq al-Shurta district with a friend. The American military raided their home twice. “They said to me, ‘You look like an American woman,’” Ghada said, laughing with pride. The military asked permission to use their roof for surveillance, and Abu Omar agreed. “Could we have said no?” Ghada asked.
“After the war I started to feel the Iranian influence,” Abu Omar told me. “Before there were no problems between Sunnis and Shiites, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or Shiites.” Like many former military officers, Abu Omar was actively involved in the Iraqi resistance. “As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers,” he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable. When talking of the resistance, he slipped and said, “we” instead of “they.”
Shiite militias associated with the Iraqi government obtained lists of former military officers and their personal information, he told me. “Every day we heard names of officers killed,” he said, estimating that he knew at least one hundred people who had been killed since the Americans overthrew Saddam. He was threatened twice in front of his house, and then his partner was assassinated. “After they killed his partner he told me that we must leave in five days,” Ghada told me. She started crying. “They have stolen my house, my furniture. I left everything. Even now I hope to go back. Here we have many troubles. We have no money. It’s very difficult. There you feel that you can die every day. Here I am dying every day. Every day you hear bad news. There is no hope. I lost everything. I was a queen in my house before. I had a home, furniture, a BMW. Now I live in a dirty area. What did I do? What did my children do?” Ghada sold most of her jewelry to help support the family. They had been in Cairo since 2005 and had managed to pay for their children’s school the first year but could no longer afford to.
Ghada told me that Iraq’s sectarianism had followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children’s school. Iraqi Shiite boys beat their son Omar, she said. “He hates Shiites so much,” she said, adding that many fights had occurred between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi children. Her son’s fight had been provoked by Saddam Hussein’s execution, which they watched on television. “We had hoped that Saddam would return to lead Iraq. It was like they ripped my heart out,” he told me. “After I saw the images I stayed up all night.” Ghada told me that Egyptian customers had cried with her and consoled her after Saddam’s execution, and they had recited a prayer together. “The ones that Saddam killed,” she said, meaning Shiites, “I would go back and kill more of them. I hate Shiites.”
Abu Omar still held out some hope that peace could be restored. “If America comes down from her pride and negotiates with resistance, then maybe there can be a solution. The resistance is very strong and has the best officers.” He was not as sectarian as his wife, explaining to me that “there are real Iraqi Shiites, and they have the same feelings we have. It is the Shiites of Iran who are the cause of the problems.” Abu Omar often referred to the resistance as “the patriots,” explaining that “there are Sunni and Shiite patriots. The patriots can defeat the Iranian Shiites.”
Many former Baathists and Iraqi Army officers had settled in Egypt following the war. Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, frequently visited Cairo, where he met with Egyptian leaders, including his friend Mahdi Akef, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Association of Muslim Scholars controlled some militias that fought in the resistance. More resistance leaders based themselves across the border from Iraq’s Anbar province, in Amman and Damascus, however. Nearly three years into their war against the occupation, many were growing introspective—much like the tribal leader Sheikh Saad, whom I met in Amman in late 2006.
In Damascus in February 2007 I met one of the leaders of the Anbar resistance that Sheikh Saad referred to when he told me they had all fled. Sheikh Yassin was a weathered and frail man with a thick white scarf over his head. He fingered black beads as we spoke. He led a mosque in Hit but had fled a month before we met and left it with his sons. Hit had become deserted, he told me. “The situation there has become disastrous,” he said. “They hit my son’s house in an airstrike and destroyed his house and killed my grandson. The people of Hit are caught between Americans on one side and Al Qaeda on the other side. And the police and army do not treat people properly.”
He too recognized the strategic Sunni error made at the beginning of the American occupation. “That is the origin of the problem: they boycotted. If they had participated with all their weight, they would not have let the Shiite militias take over the government of Iraq.” He blamed the Iraqi Sunni leadership for denouncing elections and threatening those who participated. “They made the wrong interpretation,” he said. “Shiites wanted to prevent Sunnis from voting, and jihadists did as well. The jihadists fight the Americans on one side and on the other side they destroy the community.” Sheikh Yassin had not fled Shiite militias, but rather Al Qaeda. “Sunnis must choose between death or seeking refuge in the Anbar, Syria, or Jordan,” he said.
Another opponent of Al Qaeda was Sheikh Mudhir al-Khirbit of Ramadi, a former leader of the Confederation of Iraqi Tribes. The Khirbits had been favored by the former regime, and in March 2003 an American airstrike on their home had killed eighteen family members, reason enough for them to seek vengeance. Sheikh Mudhir had sought shelter in Damascus but made frequent trips to Lebanon for medical treatment. The Iraqi government placed him on its new list of forty-one most wanted, and in January 2007, on a medical trip to Lebanon, he was arrested by that country’s Internal Security Forces. His affairs were now being handled by his oldest son, Sattam, who was only eighteen years old but who, according to one Western diplomat, had his father’s trust and went on missions for him. I found Sattam in an apartment in Damascus, dressed in a gray suit, wearing pointy leather shoes, and taking business calls from sheikhs well into the night.
In 2004, when he was only fifteen, Sattam and an uncle were arrested in an American military raid on their home. “Every tribal sheikh has weapons, machine guns, missiles, Kalashnikovs,” he told me. Sattam was jailed for one month and interrogated about his father’s activities. “They treated me badly,” he said. “We were tied up for two days, and it was really cold.” His uncle was held for three months and was later imprisoned again for one year. Iraq had grown too dangerous for the family’s leadership. “In Ramadi you can’t drive in a car,” he told me. “You don’t know if the Americans or Al Qaeda will kill you. Not only Shiites are slaughtering Sunnis; Sunnis are slaughtering Sunnis.”
Iraq’s Sunnis were beleaguered, he said. He called the initial Sunni boycott of Iraqi politics “a big mistake,” one that opened the door to Shiite domination. “Now it’s too late,” he said. “People here and in Amman feel like they lost.” The only way to protect Sunnis, in his view, was to establish a Sunni state that would include the Anbar province, Mosul, and Tikrit. Radical Sunnis in groups like Al Qaeda were now in control of Anbar, and the resistance was taking on Al Qaeda as well as the Americans. “Al Qaeda kills Sunnis the most, and you don’t know what they want,” he said. His priority was to deal with Al Qaeda in Anbar first, then reconcile with the Shiites, and then work to end the occupation. “When Sunnis in Baghdad get arrested by the Americans, they feel good because it’s better than being arrested by Shiite militias.” Despite this, he did not bear hostility toward the Shiites. “My father doesn’t differentiate between Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians,” he said. “We don’t have anything against Shiites. Shiites didn’t kill eighteen people from our family—the Americans did.”<
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Another longtime resistance fighter was Abu Ali, commander of Jeish Nasr Salahedin (The Army of Salahedin’s Victory) in the Tikrit area. A short, stern man wearing a brown jacket, a sweater showing his shirt collar, and green pants, he had a small mustache atop his tight lips and spoke without expression in a low voice. He had arrived in Damascus with two comrades who were wounded and could not get treatment in Iraq. “Our people here said they could help them,” he told me. The Americans had raided his home, and he had not slept there for two years, stealing only occasional visits to see his family. I was told that Abu Ali had led a much-publicized attack on the American base in Tikrit on the day American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad attended a ceremony handing it over to the Iraqi army, and he confirmed this.
“They expressed democracy with bullets against demonstrators,” he said of the Americans. “I will keep fighting until the last American and Iranian leaves.” Abu Ali added that he anticipated a clash with Al Qaeda as well. Although there was no political leadership in the resistance, he said, “there are politicians, and we express our ideas to them.” He worried that the resistance was becoming too public, with many people appearing on television and claiming they led it. “The secret of the success of the resistance is that nobody knows who we are,” he said. “If we make it public, then we will be like Palestine, sixty years and no state.”
“Nothing positive has come from the Iraqis,” he said. “You can’t trust an Iraqi.”
The prospect of the Palestinian refugee crisis happening all over again is especially worrisome for Jordan. At least half its population of nearly six million people are Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 or 1967. Following the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom ended up in Jordan. Jordan has close and longstanding ties to Iraq, dating back to that country’s monarchy.
In a fast food restaurant in Amman I sat with a major from Jordan’s powerful General Intelligence Directorate. He insisted that there were more than one million Iraqis in Jordan, though in truth the number never exceeded more than a few hundred thousand. He denied that they were refugees because they had not been forced out of Iraq. When I asked him what he expected a Sunni living in Shiite militia-dominated Basra to do, he told me that the Sunni should merely move to a Sunni area of Iraq. “Nothing positive has come from the Iraqis,” he said. “You can’t trust an Iraqi.” Like most Jordanians he complained that the influx of Iraqis had tripled housing prices.
After Iraqis associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda movement struck two Jordanian hotels in November 2005, detonating suicide bombs in a wedding, Iraqis began facing interrogations at the border. Beginning in 2006 Jordan imposed strict restrictions on the entry of Iraqis. By the end of that year a sign on the Jordanian border proclaimed that men between eighteen and thirty-five years of age could not enter. Families entering with many suitcases or belongings were turned away as well. Many Iraqis entering Jordan at the border and airport reported being questioned about whether they were Sunni or Shiite. Shiites were more likely to be turned away. Once in Jordan, Iraqis could register with UNHCR for their temporary protection cards.
At first, Iraqis were given three-month tourist visas; but when they left Jordan to renew the visas, they could not return. As a result, many Iraqis chose not to leave and fell into illegal status. Underground, they were unable to work formally and often didn’t get paid for the work they did illegally. Many young Iraqi men left their families behind and came to Jordan seeking work. They lived in virtually empty apartments, the only furniture being mattresses on the floor. Their children did not have access to schools or medical care. In February 2006, there were officially fourteen thousand Iraqi children in Jordanian private schools.
Jordanian society was very sympathetic with the plight of Iraq’s Sunnis, but Shiites had a hard time there. A young Iraqi Shiite man working with an NGO in Jordan reported being regularly questioned about his identity. Major Jordanian newspapers like Al Rai often published anti-Shiite articles, he said. “In Jordan, if you want to work they might ask you if you are Shiite or Sunni, and if you are Shiite you can’t work,” he told me. “Taxi drivers ask me, ‘Are you Iraqi? Are you Sunni or Shiite?’” If he answered truthfully, they would ask him why he was helping the Americans. “After Saddam was executed, they asked me, ‘Why didn’t Iraqis make a revolution after his execution?’ They don’t believe Saddam committed crimes. I told one I am Iraqi and Shiite. He asked, ‘Are you supporting those Iranians killing Iraqis?’ I don’t argue, I don’t want trouble or to be taken to police station. I bought a bicycle to avoid the taxi drivers.”
Dr. Mouayad al-Windawi was a Shiite professor of political science who left the University of Baghdad in May 2005. “In my first lesson after the war, I said this will be a disaster and bring us nothing. We will live in chaos for a long time.” A member of the Baath Party until 2001, he explained to me that under Saddam there was some sectarianism, but it was not overt. A glass ceiling kept many Shiites from advancing too high. “I worked with the Iraqi government for the last forty years,” he said. “Not much attention was paid to who you are.” I asked him how sectarianism had increased after the war. “Ask Mr. Bremer,” he told me, referring to Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. “Bremer’s system for political parties was good for blocs, not parties. It was good for Kurds and [Supreme Council leader] Hakim. Nationalists boycotted the political process after 2003, but the hawza and Sistani told Shiites to wait and see, and Sunnis had no such guy to issue a fatwa. The Jaafari government forced Sunnis to see themselves as defending themselves and not the nation. Former Baathists and nationalists like me have no place. I realized there is no future. I told my family we have to stay ten years away from the country.”
Mouayad lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold in Baghdad. Members of Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad militia attacked his house. His brother, married to a Sunni woman, was kidnapped and released after a ransom of twenty-five thousand dollars was paid. He then fled to Damascus. “I realized that the country would have a civil war one way or another,” he told me. “I still believe the worst is coming, not only to Iraq but in the region. It’s the first stage of a conflict that might lead to a Sunni bloc against Shiites. There is no hope for the future.” A month before I met Mouayad, his house was occupied by a Sunni militia. Two days before we met, a relative of his was killed when mortars landed on his home.
In Jordan Mouayad was working as a consultant for the political advisory group to the United Nations ambassador to Iraq. “Jordanians were very cooperative until last summer,” he said, “but they realized the civil war might lead to new wave. Sixty-five percent of Iraqis in Jordan are Sunnis because Sunni areas in Iraq are under attack.” He did not expect the sectarianism to spread to Jordan. “In Jordan security is too strong, and Iraqis here don’t want to engage in sectarianism. But over time things might change.”
Many officers from the former regime in Iraq had chosen to settle in Jordan. I met two one rainy evening at the home of Maj. Gen. Walid Abdel Maliki, a former assistant to the minister of defense before the war. With him was Gen. Raed al-Hamdani, a former commander in the Republican Guard Corps. Both men, I was told, “had contacts” with the Iraqi resistance. As we sat down, Abdel Maliki’s young son burst into the living room. “This is the Mahdi Army,” Abdel Maliki told me as he kissed his son, “his behavior in the house.” The two former generals were nostalgic for the time before Iraq was overrun with sectarianism. “We never had this sort of fighting before between Sunnis and Shiites,” said Abdel Maliki. “Saddam didn’t believe in Sunnis or Shiites; he was tribal. Saddam didn’t put down the Shiite rebellion because they were Shiite but because it was an uprising. The soldiers who put down the Shiite uprising were Shiites. We never heard from our fathers and grandfathers such a thing as is happening now. The problem now is from Sunni and Shiite political leaders: Hakim, Dhari, and Adnan Dulaimi are playing the same game.” Abdel
Maliki blamed Iran for the problems in Iraq. “It’s a military idea, to move the battle from your land to the enemy’s land,” he said, and Iran sought to confront the U.S. in Iraq. “Iranian occupation is worse than American occupation. The only way is a military solution. Al Qaeda, the Shiite militias, the Iranian groups—they have their own agendas but don’t want to solve their problems. We have to attack Al Qaeda and the militias. Thousands of Iraqi officers can help Americans.”
General Hamdani, Abdel Maliki’s former superior officer, had fought and lost in six wars against Americans, Iranians, Kurds, and Israelis. He had been severely wounded in 1991. “The hardest loss was this last one. We were given the responsibility to defend our country. We lost the war and we lost our country.” Hamdani also resisted a sectarian approach to Iraq. “It is a mistake to think Sunnis ruled Shiites,” he said. “Most of the coup attempts against Saddam were Sunni. If we have a point of view on Iraq, it is as Iraqis, not as Sunnis. There are nationalists and those who are not nationalists.”
He did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been problematic. “Many Iraqi Sunnis participated in the government. What was the result? Nothing.” Although Hamdani thought the Iraqi resistance should continue its struggle, he too saw a larger threat. “These groups were established to fight the occupation, but now I think the danger from Iran is greater than from America. American national interests and the resistance’s interests are the same. The U.S. did itself harm by demonizing the Iraqi resistance and anyone who deals with it. They have prevented the emergence of moderates who can sit and negotiate, and you see now, four years after the invasion, the strongest factions are Al Qaeda and not the nationalists.”