Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  When I spoke to him, he denied that the reduction in violence was the result of the Mahdi Army freeze. “That might mean that the Mahdi Army was the cause for the violence, and that’s not true,” he said. “The political situation is not in the hands of the government, it’s in the hands of the Americans. The American forces needed some security. They can increase the violence or decrease it. The Mahdi Army froze because of rumors that it is the source of violence and the Mahdi Army is the reason for the sectarian fighting and the fighting between Shiites, especially after the Karbala incident. That’s why Muqtada saw that it is necessary to re-educate the army and keep them away from the field, and despite this the violence is still occurring and the fighting between Shiites is still occurring. After the Mahdi Army freeze it appeared that they were not responsible for the war among people, so now we see that the Mahdi Army is working on education and leadership. Muqtada ordered his people to pray, to worship, to read, and to preach to general education so that they will show the real picture of the Mahdi Army.” He stressed that the Sadrists opposed injustice and were nationalists. In truth, however, the significant decrease in violence immediately following the Mahdi Army cease-fire belied his assertion and proved just how responsible the Sadrists were for the fighting.

  Inside the mosque was painted light green. About five hundred men sat on straw mats. Fluorescent lights and fans hung down from the ceiling. There was a curtained-off section for women. The dome of the mosque was still damaged from a 2006 car bomb attack. The first hossa (slogan) that was shouted asked the men in the crowd to pray for Muqtada, for the release of prisoners, and for death to the Americans and their agents. Another one asked God to grant victory to Muqtada and the Mahdi Army. “Death is an honor to us, arrest is honor to us, resisting the Americans is an honor to us!” went another. Most of the sermon dealt with religious matters and the upcoming month of pilgrimage to Mecca. Sayyid Jalil asked his followers to “pray for other Muslim people in Palestine, Afghanistan, and in all the world, and curse the occupier and the Israelis, and grant victory to all Muslims, to get rid of the Americans, of dictatorships and secularism.” He asked the people to raise their hands in prayer “for victory for all mujahideen in the world” and for freedom.

  After the sermon and the prayer that followed, lunch was brought for Sayyid Jalil and other mosque staff. Firas and I were offered food by a famous Mahdi Army IED maker. As Sayyid Jalil walked to his office, men came in and said that an American patrol was in the area and he was ushered away. As we left several young men in the courtyard asked us to join them for lunch. After my friend returned me to Mansour, his friends from the Mahdi Army asked him suspiciously if I was a foreigner and a friend of his. He said I was. They asked him if I drank alcohol, and he said I did not. They asked him if I slept with Iraqi women, and he said I did not. Apparently, they wanted to kidnap me and were looking for a proper pretext to justify it.

  We ended up having lunch that day at Mustafa Husseiniya in Ur. Its imam, Sheikh Safa, had fled to Iran to avoid arrest and had not returned. I sat with the caretaker, Abul Hassan, and his assistant, Haidar, in Abul Hassan’s home. (Haidar had been expelled by Sunni militias from the town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. His brother was killed working as a policeman.)

  Born in Sadr City in 1972, Abul Hassan, whose real name was Adil, was a muscular and voluble man. He had a raspy voice, permanent stubble. He was jocular and warm and spoke in colloquial Iraqi Arabic because he lacked education. His grandfather had moved to Baghdad from the south when Abul Hassan’s father was still a child, and President Abdul Karim Qasim gave the family land in Thawra (Revolution) City, which would become Saddam City and later Sadr City. Abul Hassan did not attend high school, and after his military service he worked a number of odd jobs, like driving a taxi and small trade. He had always been a Sadrist, he said with a smile, and had followed Muqtada’s father. Following the elder Sadr’s murder, Abul Hassan and his friends established a small underground armed resistance cell but failed to engage in any successful operations. After the war he and Sheikh Safa took over the Baath Party office and were the ones who converted it into a husseiniya. Now Abul Hassan informally led the Ur district.

  The Mustafa Husseiniya, which had been demolished after the previous year’s raid, was now being rebuilt. Abul Hassan maintained his office in an adjacent one-room structure, where he sat on the floor behind a desk and received guests and supplicants. The mosque still provided help to poor families and IDPs. “Only Sadrists help the displaced,” he said. They also helped families of martyrs and other needy people, giving them bags with basic requirements such as milk, oil, rice, sugar, and similar items. “The government doesn’t do it,” he said.

  The Mahdi Army in the area assisted the families of one thousand martyrs and three thousand prisoners with stipends, the size determined by whether they were married, Abul Hassan said. The family of an unmarried Mahdi Army martyr received seventy five thousand dinars a month (about sixty dollars), as did the family of an arrested man; and the family of a married Mahdi Army martyr received twice as much. Most of the displaced families they helped lived in other people’s homes, he said, but many still lived in tents in the nearby Shishan (Chechen) neighborhood, thus named because Iraqis thought Chechnya was very poor.

  Haidar brought lunch in: mushy cooked tomatoes with kabob and bread. As we ate, two women in abayas came in and asked for bags of supplies and children’s clothes. Haidar went to fetch them.

  Already in December 2007, before the March 2008 clashes, Abul Hassan was comparing the Supreme Council, which dominated the government, with Saddam Hussein. “Why did Saddam kill Shiites?” he asked. “He was also afraid of Shiite masses. The Supreme Council wants a secular Islam; they don’t reject occupation or even talk about it.” Under Saddam supporters of Muqtada’s father walked to Karbala for pilgrimages. Abul Hassan complained that people walking to Karbala were still targeted because they were viewed as Sadrists. “The Sadr Current represents 75 percent of Iraqi Shiites and is a popular movement,” he said. “Only the Sadr Current helps the poor and represents them.”

  Some materials and labor were donated to help with the mosque’s reconstruction, but the government-run Shiite religious endowment was controlled by the Supreme Council. “We always have problems with the Supreme Council,” he complained. “They always instigate it. The Supreme Council are untrustworthy and just want power.” Abul Hassan was suspicious of the Sunni Awakening militias. “There is an Awakening group in the Fadhil neighborhood,” he said. “There is a man called Adel al-Mashhadani, he killed hundreds of Shiites, he beheaded many Shiites. He is well-known by people for his terrible crimes. Later they put him as head of the Awakening in that neighborhood. He is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. This is not logical.”

  Since members of the Mahdi Army had committed to the freeze, he observed, they had been arrested, their families displaced and their savings stolen. “Now the freeze is ongoing and the arrests continue. I think it’s better to lift this freeze,” he said. “With things happening like the night raids, I don’t think the freeze will continue. The followers of the Supreme Council displace the families of arrested Mahdi Army members in the city of Diwaniya.”

  I told Abul Hassan that Sunnis accused Sadrists of being Iranians. “This is nonsense,” he said. “We are Iraqis. Did you see Iranians or hear us talking the Iranian language? We are the followers of the first and the second martyred sayyids.”

  The War Inside the Mahdi Army

  The Golden Group—Golden JAM, in U.S. military parlance—was established, composed of trusted Mahdi Army men led by Abbas al-Kufi. The group was tasked with cleaning up the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and killing rogue militiamen. Shiite militias called assassins sakak, the equivalent of “ice men,” maybe because corpses were put on ice. Sak meant to “get iced.” (“Ahmed sak Hassan” means “Ahmed iced Hassan”—or, if he was in New York, “Ahmed whacked Hassan.”) While the ice men were doing their job, it was not clear if Muq
tada had miscalculated with his freeze, allowing his Shiite and American rivals to gain the momentum. On the other hand, he may not have had a choice but to flee to Iran, as he did in 2007. “We would have killed or arrested him if he had stayed,” one National Security Council Iraq expert told me.

  But the cease-fire was allowing the Mahdi Army to reorganize. In Baghdad it was split into two commands: eastern and western Baghdad. Eastern Baghdad had three subcommands: north, east, and Sadr City. They were further divided into sub-subcommands, each consisting of about three hundred men. At the top of this chain of command was a council in the southern town of Kufa, near Najaf, which Muqtada chaired. In Shaab there were about three thousand Mahdi Army fighters, led by a man called Adil al-Hasnawi. They were required to be devout, lest they be expelled. They did not receive a salary or training; instead they manned checkpoints, attended Friday prayers, protected pilgrims traveling to holy cities such as Karbala, cleaned the streets, and guarded mosques.

  Nominally the Mahdi Army responded to Muqtada or his designated representatives. But there were highly criminalized elements that were displaced from Sunni areas and occupied Sunni houses in Hurriya; these elements resorted to a protection racket in order to support themselves and their families. “This was done at the behest of the community civil leadership and clerical leadership to protect against Sunni incursion and attacks,” noted a major who served with the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Airborne Division. But then, according to the major, there was the Mahdi Army sent from Najaf—the so-called Golden JAM—to clean up the criminalized elements and bring them in line with Muqtada’s office. At the same time the Iraqi Security Forces leadership either worked in conjunction with the Mahdi Army or independently to conduct offensive actions against coalition forces and sectarian cleansing of Sunnis. The ISF was an “institutional sanctuary” for Mahdi Army members; the Shiite-majority police and national police in that area were actively targeting the Sunni population. Furthermore, the major said, the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr conducted its own census by collecting ration cards, effectively forcing Sunni displacement by preventing Sunnis from receiving goods and services within Hurriya and sending displaced Shiites into evacuated Sunni houses. The Office and Mahdi Army elements funded operations by intercepting propane shipments and conducting their own delivery operations, raising the price of propane and preventing delivery to Sunnis. At the same time, clerical and tribal leadership meddling into socioeconomic affairs allowed the Mahdi Army to become criminalized and terrorize the Sunni and Shiite population. “Most of the Sunni population had been displaced to the district south of the Hurriya DMZ [demilitarized zone], so to speak, when my company arrived in Hurriya,” the major told me.

  “There were some Sunnis who lived there, but were mostly women without husbands and lived pretty low-key. My southern border was lined with bullet-riddled and burned houses that distinguished the line between Shiite Hurriya and the Sunni district south of Hurriya.”

  The major told me about Operation Seventh Veil, which was aimed at targeting the Shiite militias, no matter the political risk. Dagger Brigade initiated an operation to investigate, track, and detain “radical or criminal ISF leadership to disrupt this longstanding government sanctuary.” Many were confronted with evidence of their criminal links and warned to behave. A major coup resulting from this operation was the arrest of Ghazaliya’s police chief as well as officers from the Iraqi army.

  By June 2007 Golden JAM had killed or captured rogue Mahdi Army elements, and the major’s battalion had disrupted the militia’s lines of communications, resources, and leadership, denying them sanctuary and killing “high-value individuals.”

  In Dora, the main headquarters for the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army was the Kadhimayn Mosque in Abu Dshir. Its loudspeakers were within listening reach of Falcon FOB, where the 2-2 SCR was based. According to that unit’s senior intelligence officer, Captain Dehart, “We are actively targeting rogue elements of Shiite extremists that have not complied with Muqtada’s cease-fire and the remnants of Al Qaeda.” When Dehart first came into this area, it was Al Qaeda’s top stronghold in Iraq; but after successful clearing operations the leadership fled and the ones left were low-level thugs, young Sunni males with nothing better to do than to call themselves Al Qaeda, string together fellow thugs from the neighborhood, and try their hand at extortion and murder.

  On a map Dehart showed me Saha and Mahala 828, or Kifaat, in northern Saha. He pointed to southern Saha, the majority-Shiite area ruled by Abu Jaafar, General Karim’s ally. It had large government-built apartment complexes. The north had villas he said had belonged to mostly Sunni government officials. “In the last few months Shiite militias moved up. Now the north is largely abandoned; it has a 10 percent occupancy rate. That’s where the fault line was. We called it ‘the arena.’ Sunnis from Mahala 830, or Hadhir, would come across and Shiites would come up and fire mortars into Sunni Mahalas 822 and 824 and randomly kill people. We have been able to cut that a lot. I can’t even say we—the surge, as Iraqi institutions have started to stand up and get more efficient. And it comes down to the people too, tired of the violence. We’ve had only one indirect fire incident in the last two weeks, directed at the FOB. It’s been a month and a half since we’ve had anything shot neighborhood to neighborhood. When we first got here it was several times a week. We specifically targeted that, and captured or killed mortar teams on both sides.”

  First Lieut. Adam Sperry was Dehart’s tactical intelligence officer. Walking back from the chow hall to the tactical operations center one night, we heard celebratory gunfire and a speech blasting from the Kadhimayn Mosque’s loudspeakers, which he called “the propaganda phone.” Sperry said it was for the death of the Ninth Imam.

  A week before my visit three Shiite NAC members who led three mahalas in Abu Dshir had been kidnapped just as ISV recruiting was set to begin in the area. They were taken to the Kadhimayn Mosque and released within twenty-four hours. The mosque’s previous imam, Sheikh Majid, had been arrested a year earlier but was later released. I asked why he was arrested. “Because he was a scumbag,” Sperry said. “The mosque was raided eight months ago. Weapons and a torture chamber were found. We should have raided that mosque a month ago.”

  Sperry described Ziyad al-Shamari as the bane of his existence. “He’s the rogue special groups commander of Abu Dshir, responsible for EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] that have killed lots of our soldiers. This guy is not, nor was he ever, a Sadrist. He is funded entirely by Iran.” Sperry explained that Shiite militias did not attack the Americans in Abu Dshir, because it was their command-and-control location. “They don’t want to fight there or draw attention to themselves,” he said. Instead, they placed EFPs in other parts of Dora.

  “Abu Dshir is stable,” Sperry said. “We don’t want to disturb that by breaking down doors. The guys we target in Abu Dshir are transiting there.” (The night before 2-2 SCR had gone on a raid to pick up two Mahdi Army suspects. When they showed up, one man drank a few gulps of motor oil and the other swallowed three pills of Viagra and passed out.) Thanks to the cease-fire and reconciliation, Sperry was having a hard time doing his job. “It’s impossible to determine who is good or who is bad,” he said, explaining that the only men the 2-2 SCR targeted were those who attacked the Americans after the cease-fire. “We can’t target anyone based on any evidence before that date.”

  In December 2007, on my first Friday with the 2-2 SCR, an imam called Sayyid Abbas spoke at the Kadhimayn Mosque. He condemned killings and expulsions of people. “We are all brothers,” he said, and explained that Muqtada had imposed a cease-fire on his men “to correct all the mistakes and remove the bad members who joined the Mahdi Army without knowledge or religion. “They are just killers and thieves,” he said, “so if you know of somebody from the Mahdi Army trying to do something bad in the name of the Mahdi Army, please tell the mosque. We will take care of him by reporting his name to Kufa, and we wil
l let the government know.” The government would arrest the renegade men, he said, granting the Iraqi Security Forces the Mahdi Army’s approval. The American forces were infidel forces, he said; they were trying to provoke a civil war, and Iraqis had to fight that. “We can’t kill our own brothers and our own people just because they are Sunni and Shiite,” he said. Not long after that, the Americans and Iraqi National Police raided the mosque again and found IEDs, mortars, and rockets.

  Mahdi Army leaders were livid about the attempts to recruit Shiites for the Awakening and used the mosque to conduct investigations. They posted a “final warning” on the walls addressed to “the good people of Abu Dshir” and in “honor of the blood of our noble martyrs,” asking people to protect the souls of their sons and not join “the conspiracy known as the Awakening.” Abu Dshir’s main street, known as Rashid al-Tijari (the Americans called it Market Street), was lined with signs on light poles that bore pictures of Muqtada, his father, and various Mahdi Army “martyrs.” A slogan said that not all men were real men, which implied that these really were. A faded poster on one light pole said, “Bush and Saddam, two faces on same coin” in English. Graffiti on the walls warned takfiris that the Mahdi Army would declare them infidels deserving of death.

  Sunni militias from the nearby Arab Jubur area had fired mortars at the Shiites of Abu Dshir. Walking through the neighborhood I found a man called Hisham working on his house. He had lost two brothers to the violence. Mortars from Arab Jubur had also landed on his neighbor’s house. “If it wasn’t for the police and the Americans, Al Qaeda would have destroyed us,” he said. “We are poor people, we just go to work and come back. We had no problems with our Sunni neighbors—it was all Al Qaeda.” People expelled from Arab Jubur and the Furat district had settled in the area. Muqtada’s local office and the Kadhimayn Mosque were providing assistance to them, including homes (emptied of Sunnis) and a stipend. Locals complained that the Mahdi Army freeze had hurt them. The militia had guarded the neighborhood and provided propane and kerosene, which they had trouble getting now. I asked who was protecting the area. “Its people,” I was told. “People sit in front of their homes.”