Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Hamdani was involved in a new political party called Huquq, which was formed by Dr. Hassan Bazzaz in August 2006. Bazzaz was a professor of international relations who taught at the University of Baghdad. He left Iraq two months before I met him in February 2007. “I just ran away. I was afraid they will kill me,” he said, referring to the Shiite militias. Being a well-known professor was a sufficient reason to be targeted, he explained. When I entered his office he was on the phone with someone in Iraq. “Where did they find him?” he asked. “Who shot him? The Americans?”

  Bazzaz was also from Adhamiya. “Good fighters, good people,” he said of his former neighborhood. “It never fell.”

  The Americans had just initiated their new security plan for Iraq, and Bazzaz was trying to be optimistic. “Everything must come to an end, and I don’t think this will go on forever,” he said. “We are not the first nation to get occupied by a foreign power or the first nation to fight among itself. The Americans are doing it for their own benefit, and we, the Sunni people, can benefit from that.” Although he struggled to be optimistic, he still placed hopes in the resistance. “If things get worse, then we, the people who are talking politically, will take the military option,” he said. “The Sunni Arab neighbors will have to support us. The worst is coming.”

  In February 2007 I met Mishan al-Juburi of Al Zawra TV in the offices of a charter airline company in downtown Damascus he claimed belonged to his wife. Two heavy-set thuggish young men stood guard. As I sat down, he began complaining about a recent New York Times story about him. “It’s completely from a dream,” he said angrily. “All the story except my name is not correct.”

  Juburi told me his version of his life’s story. He claimed to have been a businessman in Baghdad’s Shorja market. “I knew Saddam personally,” he said, “and gave him my full support. Saddam tried to show he was a winner and he didn’t care about those who supported him. I lost my son in a car accident and criticized the health minister.” Juburi claims that this criticism provoked the ire of the regime. He told me his father had led the Juburi tribe but that since Mishan had an older brother, he was never expected to lead the tribe. “I like city,” he said. “I don’t want to be tribal.” He also claimed to have been involved in a coup attempt by the Juburi tribe. “I tried to kill Saddam, and he killed thirty-five people from my family: my brother, my cousins. I lost ninety-five people from my family to Saddam, but it’s indisputable that Saddam was better. I’m sorry I opposed him.”

  He had lived in Jordan, Turkey, Britain, and Syria, he told me, and had founded the Iraqi Homeland Party. Before the war he had taken part in an opposition conference in Salahaddin, in Kurdistan. Now he regretted his participation in this conference: “I trusted the American lie of building democracy in Iraq, and I found myself a part of the American destruction of Iraq.” He claimed he had come to this realization one month after the war ended, when Bremer declared the American presence in Iraq to be an occupation.

  Immediately following the war, Juburi and his militia went down to Mosul from Erbil, where he had been staying as a guest of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. “Barzani is my friend. I fully support an independent Kurdistan.” He claimed Barzani’s militia had helped him take Mosul. I asked him what had become of his militia, and Juburi told me, “I think they are resisting.”

  I expressed surprise at his support for an independent Kurdistan. “I believe it’s good for the Iraqi future,” he said, though he admitted that the Kurds were planning on cleansing the Arabs of Kirkuk. He told me he had remained in Mosul for one month and then arranged for an election. “I didn’t put my name or any name of my family” on the list of candidates, he said, somewhat implausibly. After the elections in Mosul, he left for Baghdad and eventually joined the Iraqi government and Parliament. His small party, he said, received 142,000 votes in the first Iraqi elections.

  Juburi was known for his sectarian attacks on Iraq’s Shiite leaders and militias, whom he called “Safawis,” the Arabic way of saying “Safavid,” the name of a Persian dynasty that ruled from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is a common epithet used to imply that Iraq’s Shiites are not Arabs but are part of an Iranian or Persian conspiracy to gain hegemony over them. “On April 18, 2005, I said the government is Safawi,” he said proudly. “I’m the first man to use the word ‘Safawi.’ Since then I haven’t gone to Parliament. The first Jaafari government was Safawi-Persian. We are not against Shiites; we are against Safawis. We fear Iran. The Americans will leave; first we are afraid of Iran.”

  In November 2005 he established Al Zawra TV. “From the first day we said we are going to say what no one else dares to say,” he told me. At first Al Zawra was known for its entertainment programs, but after Juburi’s immunity as a Parliament member was lifted following charges of corruption and aiding the resistance, the channel began broadcasting proresistance propaganda. Since most of Al Zawra’s target audience in the Middle East did not have access to the Internet, Juburi rebroadcast the propaganda videos that many had seen worldwide online. The videos consisted of members of the resistance preparing for or conducting operations against the Americans. Two commentators, a man in military attire and a veiled woman, occasionally provided news bulletins. Although his channel was praised by the resistance, many also expressed their skepticism about Juburi for being “opportunistic.”

  Al Zawra received widespread attention throughout the Arab world, and many Iraqi Sunnis in exile watched it as well. One newspaper in Jordan, Al Arab al-Yawm, wrote that only Al Zawra transmitted the reports of the resistance without focusing on suicide attacks that promoted sectarianism. The newspaper praised Al Zawra’s stance against the occupation and its call for the overthrow of the “puppet sectarian regime.” The channel was unique and important, the paper said, because there was otherwise a media blackout imposed on the resistance. The channel showed Arab children the real picture of Iraq, praising the “martyr leader Saddam Husayn.”

  In April 2006 Juburi absconded to northern Iraq and Erbil, where his friend Barzani provided him with safe haven. “If I stayed in Baghdad the government militias would kill me,” he said. “Maliki told me he would execute me if I opposed the government. I am against the Iranians in Iraq, so the authorities accuse me of certain things. Now the office in Baghdad is destroyed.” The Americans eventually closed down his station in Erbil too. He explained that he broadcasted from Anbar using mobile transmitters on taxis and other vehicles.

  When we met he was running his station from Damascus with the help of his son and publishing a pro-Sunni newspaper. He claimed that he alone funded the station. “I was one of the top-ten richest men in Iraq,” he said. Al Zawra was broadcast by the Egyptian satellite network Nilesat. Juburi expressed glee in the distress he was causing as a gadfly. “The Americans pushed me to be against them,” he said. “I know how much I give them a headache.” He would soon also be broadcast by Arabsat and Hot Bird, a European company.

  Juburi maintained that Zarqawi and other Salafis had hurt the Sunni cause. They had sought to provoke a civil war, he said, and they had succeeded. “That’s why Sunni society doesn’t support them,” he said. “There are clashes between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi resistance, which we consider ourselves to be a part of.” Al Zawra had become a symbol of the resistance everywhere, he told me. “The resistance are serving us; we have relations with all the resistance in Iraq except Al Qaeda,” he said. “We never show anything from them. Al Qaeda is a danger like America in the Middle East. We don’t want to make the mistake they made in Afghanistan.”

  Like many Sunnis, Juburi feared a potential genocide of the Sunnis of Iraq. He believed that Sunni children and women would leave the country. He did not think the Shiites had won yet. “If we are outside the city but Shiites cannot leave their homes, then you cannot say that there is a winner to the civil war,” he said. Unlike some Sunni leaders, he did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been a strategic error. “If you push people to joi
n the Iraqi police and army, it means you accept the American occupation.”

  Although Juburi was ready to criticize Iraq’s Shiites and what he saw as their Iranian sponsors, he refrained from criticizing Lebanese Hizballah, a successful Shiite resistance movement. Many Sunni Iraqis saw Hizballah as an Iranian proxy and were thus hostile to the movement. Juburi told me he did not want to talk about Hizballah, possibly because he was a guest of the Syrians, themselves supporters of the movement. He conceded that Hizballah’s general secretary was very charismatic and expressed his admiration for Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese cleric formerly associated with Hizballah. “I love Fadlallah especially,” Juburi told me. He agreed with me that it was ironic that in Lebanon the Sunnis supported American policy while the Shiites were opposed to the Americans.

  He predicted that Al Zawra would soon go live on the Internet. “We use the Internet the way photography was used in Vietnam,” he said. “We will cause Bush a real headache. We will show the reality of American soldiers. America must apologize for what it did to Iraq.”

  In January 2007 Juburi famously debated Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shiite Iraqi journalist, on Al Jazeera. Juburi came out swinging, asking Musawi to recite a prayer for the soul of “the martyred president Saddam Hussein.” Musawi refused, condemning Saddam instead. Juburi called Musawi a Persian, and Musawi responded that Juburi was a thief. Juburi claimed to have evidence that Musawi was an Iranian, and Musawi claimed that Juburi’s father had killed Kurds. Juburi called Musawi a “Persian shoe.” Musawi stormed off the set, and Juburi continued alone, praising the executed Saddam. Invoking sectarianism and the ancient split between Sunnis and Shiites, Juburi said that the people who killed Saddam were the same people who had killed the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab and who hated the caliph Abu Bakr and the other companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Musawi eventually returned to the set, his exchange with Juburi was no less acrimonious.

  In February 2007 Juburi made a speech condemning Al Qaeda for provoking Iraq’s Shiites while failing to protect Sunnis from Shiite retaliation, for imposing itself on other resistance groups, for killing Iraq’s Sunni leaders, for seeking to create a Taliban state in Iraq, and for killing a messenger sent by Juburi to negotiate with them. Juburi warned that Iraq’s Sunnis would fight Al Qaeda. Following his speech, many jihadist websites and forums condemned Juburi. Although the Egyptians had ignored threats from the ruling Shiites in Iraq, in February Nilesat finally pulled the plug on Juburi’s channel (other satellite networks continued to broadcast it). The Americans, who had long been pressuring the Egyptians to shut Al Zawra down, finally succeeded.

  Others I spoke to disputed Juburi’s account of himself. Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, an expert on Iraq’s tribes and its former regime, was one of them. According to Baram, who also advised the American government: “He is a middle-level sheikh of the Jubbur [tribe], originating from the vicinity of Tikrit. In the mid-1980s he was approached by Saddam to recruit young and uncouth Juburis that would go through a crash (and often crush) course of army officers and then sent to the front with Iran to lead troops in battle. Saddam believed that country tribal boys were tough, very Arab (no mix with Turkish or Persian genes or culture), and imbued with traditional tribal ideals—murua (manliness or nobleness), sharraf (honor)—and so they will fight the Iranians tooth and nail. Actually, they did prove themselves. Saddam promoted them at a neck-breaking speed in the war. Your man claims that he recruited fifty thousand such, but he is exaggerating. Still, he did a good job. Now, many Juburis were angry at Saddam for other reasons and planned a coup d’état in January 1990. Saddam exposed it and executed many Juburi army officers, imprisoned or just sacked others. It became dangerous to be a senior Juburi for a while. I don’t know whether your guy was or wasn’t part of the plot, but he felt that the soil was burning under his feet, and fled. He always tried to present himself as far more important than he really was. He returned to Baghdad in 2003 but was not successful in attracting meaningful Juburi support. He always had money, who knows where from. Assad? CIA? Saudis and Gulfies?”

  An Iraqi politician close to many Sunni leaders and the resistance who also lived in Syria provided me with another account. My source, who preferred anonymity, explained, “The resistance has doubts about him. They are using him, but they won’t give him their trust to speak in their name. When the occupation ends they will judge him for all that he did.” He was referring to charges the Iraqi government had made that Juburi had run off with millions of dollars he had been paid for contracts he never completed. He had allegedly used that money to launch his television station.

  My source explained that under Saddam’s regime Juburi had worked for the Jumhuriya newspaper. Juburi then met Saddam’s son Uday and fell into his good graces. Juburi came from a poor family, my source told me, but he had made deals with Uday during the sanctions era and had stolen money from Uday before fleeing to Jordan and Syria, taking advantage of the fact that Syria would not hand him over to Saddam. Juburi then pretended he was using money to overthrow the government. My source mocked Juburi for attending the Iraqi opposition conferences in London and Salahaddin before the war, legitimizing the American occupation. When the former regime learned of a coup being plotted by members of the Jubbur tribe, many members were executed, including Juburi’s brother, his wife’s brother, and many military officers from the tribe.

  “When the Americans invaded,” my source explained, “he came down with the Kurds to Mosul, and he participated in robbing banks and burning them. He tried to lead Mosul and gave a speech, and people threw shoes and vegetables at him. He bought a lot of votes and got three seats in Parliament. His tribe has rejected him because he came on the back of American tanks.” My source explained that Juburi received various building contracts but never built anything. He also received a contract to provide security for oil pipelines. “When he started clashing with the government, they opened his file, and the first file they opened was the pipelines,” my source said, adding that some Sunni Iraqi politicians had appealed to Juburi to stop promoting sectarianism. “We told him he serves the American agenda of dividing Iraqis,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Battle of Nahr al-Barid: Iraq Comes to Lebanon

  IT WASN’T ONLY IRAQI REFUGEES WHO WERE LEAVING THE COUNTRY. Al Qaeda in Iraq was searching for new sanctuaries as well. Most countries in the region were harsh dictatorships with strong security services that would never countenance an influx of the new “Arab Afghans,” veterans of the jihad in Iraq, the way they had after the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. But with its weak state, sectarian structure and divisions, foreign interventions, and extreme social inequalities, Lebanon was especially vulnerable to the destabilizing influences of the civil war in Iraq. Best of all, large swaths of it were ungoverned, and there was a Sunni community that felt increasingly insecure. Though there were many differences between the two countries, Lebanon showed a possible glimpse of what parts of Iraq might look like—especially if, as in Lebanon, there was never any process of justice, truth, or accountability to grapple with the civil war and the massacres.

  The wave of Sunni extremism and the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia were especially felt in Lebanon. Fighting in the northern Nahr al-Barid refugee camp near Tripoli and street clashes in January and May 2008 were a sign that the war in Iraq was spilling over into neighboring countries, with fighters, weapons, tactics, and sectarian tensions all making their way to Lebanon and elsewhere. The clashes were also a sign that America’s “New Middle East,” based on supporting U.S. client states at the expense of rival movements that had more popularity or legitimacy, was failing. America’s support for Sunni regimes that manipulated sectarianism was increasing radicalism in the region and threatening to provoke a larger regional conflict.

  While many analysts were promoting a theory of “Shiite revival” in the Middle East, recent events in Lebanon and the region pointed to a Sunni revival.
According to a Lebanese political scientist I spoke to, Amer Mohsen, the Shiite revival, spoken of with fear by Sunni dictators in the Middle East and with pride by supporters, was passé. It had happened in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini. “If by revival we designate a movement revolutionizing Shiite thought or the way Shiites think of themselves, this already happened in 1979 in much of the Middle East, and that movement reached its apex and is no longer in fashion,” he said. “Hizballah in Lebanon is gaining popularity not based on the notions of the Iranian Revolution but as a communitarian movement working in the context of identity politics, much like the other movements in Lebanon. And it is the same thing in Iraq, where Shiite movements have no clear ideological commitment. If by revival we mean increased power for Shiite groups within their countries, that would apply solely to Iraq, where the fall of Saddam supposedly catapulted Shiites to a position of power they had not had since the creation of the country. But this is also a local phenomenon, whose conclusion is still undecided. There is clearly (in the case of Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Lebanon) a phenomenon of Shiites identifying more openly with their sectarian affiliation and building political projects on that basis. But that is a case of the resurgence of identity politics throughout the Middle East in the last years, in which sense, there is a Shiite revival, a Sunni revival, a Druze revival, an Alawite revival, and a Kurdish revival all happening simultaneously.”

  Amal Saad Ghorayeb, an expert on Shiite movements I spoke to during my time in Lebanon, saw a Sunni revival in the region running on two parallel tracks: “one being the Al Qaeda paradigm, whose sectarianism is religiously, doctrinally, and ideologically based, and which aspires to represent a new resistance, a revolutionary and populist model for the region’s Sunnis. While it is not necessarily a reaction to the Shiite Hizballah-Iranian model, it does seek to compete with it. It is insurgent (on a national level) and a resistance or jihadi trend (on the global level). It is a transnational antisystem phenomenon or antiestablishment, anti-world order movement.