by Nir Rosen
Sheikh Ahmad al-Taha, the son-in-law of Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai and the deputy of Harith al-Dhari from the Association of Muslim Scholars, was now the imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque. “All bad things come from this mosque,” he said, pointing to it. Al Qaeda used to keep prisoners inside it, he said, and one day five IEDs were placed next to the mosque on the street. He did not believe they could have been placed without the cognizance of people in the mosque. The mosque graveyard was an IED factory, he claimed, and his men had found RPGs and explosives in the mosque.
At first Abu Omar’s men clashed with the Iraqi army, and he once waged a three-hour gun battle with them. “We don’t accept the Iraqi police here,” he told me. “They can only come with the army. We don’t like them—they’re all militias.” He too was apprehensive about an American withdrawal, telling me that the civil war would resume. A friend of his called Abu Karar, who was a member of Iraqi intelligence, had joined us at the table. “I disagree with you, Abu Omar,” he said. “Nothing would happen if the Americans left.” I asked Abu Omar why he did not unite with other Awakening leaders to form a stronger front. “We tried in 2008,” he told me. “Awakening leaders couldn’t join together because they couldn’t agree among themselves.”
This failure to unite would become painfully obvious on March 28, 2009, when clashes erupted in Baghdad’s Fadhil district after the Iraqi army arrested Adil al-Mashhadani, the head of the local Awakening group. Mashhadani’s men staged a two-day uprising, and the U.S. Army ended up rescuing its Iraqi counterparts. The clashes provoked speculation that the surge in American troops, to which the dominant narrative attributed the drop in violence, was unraveling or that the civil war might restart. I had been hearing about Mashhadani from Shiites since 2007. Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, in particular, were upset that someone like Mashhadani—who, they believed, used to slaughter Shiite civilians—had been empowered by the Americans. One U.S. national security official told me that the Americans had held information on Mashhadani for years but considered him one of the first insurgents to see which way the wind was blowing. They had wanted him arrested at one point, but the Iraqi army was not ready yet. The official had been concerned that other Awakening groups would rise up; he was relieved to see that none did.
In fact, the ill-fated uprising in Fadhil was best seen as confirmation that the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites was over and could not begin again—not because of any reconciliation process or political settlement, neither of which had happened, but because the Shiite victory was definitive and the Sunni militias were crushed. The cleansing of Sunnis from much of Baghdad left Sunni insurgents with no sea of people to swim among. Shiites had numerical superiority and the growing strength of the state and its security forces, which they dominated, along with the support of the world’s only superpower.
Following the clashes between the Supreme Council and the Mahdi Army, and then Prime Minister Maliki’s assault on Shiite militias, there was no longer a unified Shiite bloc but instead a central government confident in its victory and eager to assert its full authority. One Iraq expert from the U.S. Army who worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when Shiites realized they had won and Sunnis realized they had lost. Both sides had now come to those realizations. Advocates of the surge hoped that following the drop in violence a political settlement could be reached between Iraq’s warring factions. But this wouldn’t happen, and it wasn’t necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki, could simply continue to expand its power. The more Maliki became a new Saddam, the more popular he became among Iraqis. But he actually had to earn support and provide services, because he answered to the Shiite majority. And his power was checked by other factions and by an energetic Parliament that controlled the purse strings.
In November 2008 the Americans handed authority over nearly one hundred thousand Awakening group fighters to the Iraqi government. But few were hired. Although in 2008 the Iraqi government agreed to integrate these men into the security forces or government ministries by the end of 2009, it had to push that back until mid-2010. But in April 2010 the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction reported that only 37,041 had been integrated, even though the Iraqi government claimed the number was fifty thousand. But the Iraqi government declares an Awakening man integrated once he has been offered a job, regardless of whether he accepts it.
Senior Awakening leaders and many of their men were systematically arrested. Others were simply removed from their posts and told to go home. It was a quiet and slow process, but one that continued to emasculate the last groups that could compete with the state for authority. There was nothing the Awakening groups could do. As guerrillas and insurgents, they had been effective only when they operated covertly, underground, blending in with a Sunni population that was crushed in a brutal Shiite-led counterinsurgency campaign, which depopulated Sunni areas. Now the former resistance fighters were publicly known paid guards—their names, addresses, and biometric data possessed by the Americans and Iraqis. They could not return to an underground that had been cleared, so they were cornered. They had failed to unite, and many were on the run. Some had left the country, and others were being tried in court for killing the very Al Qaeda men the Americans had originally wanted them to kill.
The failed uprising in Fadhil was a symptom of the Sunni inability to unite. Although the Awakening groups were a formidable force when they were established, in retrospect it seemed that many of the former insurgent leaders had miscalculated. For the most part they had not been incorporated into the political system or the security forces. They were hated or mocked by members of the Iraqi Security Forces, who had their own nicknames for the men of the Awakening, or Sahwa, in Arabic: they called them Sakhla, meaning “sheep,” or Shahwa, meaning “horniness.”
“The Sahwa were always going to get screwed,” Major Gottlieb told me. “In the fall of 2007, the Interior Ministry began demanding their names, addresses, family members, employment history, etc. from the Americans. To their credit, the units in our sector dragged their feet on providing the information. I suspect that the various, purposefully unsuccessful drives to vet Sahwa for Interior Ministry employment were designed to gather this information. Everyone turned in forms, but no one ever seemed to get hired.”
In truth, the Awakening men were not the only ones who found it difficult to get jobs. Everybody in Iraq had this problem. Nobody could get a job with the security forces unless they were affiliated with a political party, which often also required a family connection. The alternative was to pay a bribe that amounted to several months’ salary. But former Shiite militiamen had much less trouble integrating into the security forces than their Sunni counterparts.
A new, Shiite-dominated order was being established in Iraq. The cleansing of Sunnis had sufficiently weakened enemies of the Shiite state, and Sunni civilians needed not fear as long as they accepted the new order. Shiites had nearly succeeded in clearing Sunni areas from future threats. The occasional Al Qaeda-inspired suicide attack could kill masses of civilians, but it had no strategic impact. The drop in violence was complex and primarily a symptom of Iraqi dynamics, though the concrete walls built by the Americans and the increased American presence in neighborhoods at a time when the Americans were less aggressive and considered by Iraqis to be the least of all evils were also essential.
The surge strengthened Maliki and his security forces: it neutered the Sunni militias and allowed Maliki to weaken the Shiite militias. These Shiite militias were the initial storm troopers of the civil war, the ones who cleansed Sunnis from Baghdad and paved the way for the Shiite victory, but following that they only stood in the way of Maliki as he consolidated his control. There were still many battles left to be fought in Iraq, and when the Americans departed a new phase of violence and factional fighting would likely begin, but the war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites appeared to be over.
DESPITE THEIR MANY GRIE
VANCES, the Sunni militias were holding their fire. I was curious to discover if the Sadrist militias were similarly conflicted, having been thrashed by Maliki, with American help, in the spring of 2008, during Operation Charge of the Knights. I met up with Muhamad, who worked in the Sadr Current’s social affairs group in Shaab. Abul Hassan of the Mustafa Husseiniya, whom I had spent time with in previous years, had been arrested by the Americans with three other men one night in late 2008. Sayyid Jalil now worked in the main Sadrist office in Sadr City. The Shurufi Mosque had shut down after weapons were discovered inside it. Prayer was forbidden. Instead, about five hundred men sat on mats on the street beside it. Iraqi National Police were posted around the men, watching lazily. Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Saedi of the Suwaed tribe from Amara stood before them on a podium. Most of his audience was young. I spoke with Muhamad as the sheikh discussed religion. Muhamad’s brother was killed by the Americans in May 2008. Many civilians were killed in Charge of the Knights, he said, and the Americans were still arresting people. Muhamad told me that Maliki was negotiating with Sadrists: if they joined his coalition he would release Mahdi Army prisoners.
Someone stood up and shouted a hossa. “We will keep the Friday prayers that Muhammad Sadr started regardless of what America and Israel or Britain say!” For Sadrists the Friday prayers had once been identified with defying oppression. Now the grievances were more mundane. Sheikh Abdel Karim’s sermon was a litany of complaints about inflation, money laundering, immorality, homosexuality, alcohol, lack of food, lack of housing, and corruption. Now that security had improved, where were the service improvements? He complained. Where was the large budget people had been promised?
Although I paid little attention to his comment on homosexuality at the time, soon after, Sadrist militiamen began brutally slaughtering men suspected of homosexuality. One staff member in Sadr City’s Chuwader hospital said he saw four corpses of suspected homosexuals brought in. One of the bodies was found in a garbage dump while the others were on the streets. Two of them were found with superglue clogging their anuses. This happened to many others. He said the victims were tortured to death in the area’s garages. In some cases the victims’ tribes were said to be complicit in the murders. Sadrist sermons were said to call for the “disciplining” of homosexuals. The Mahdi Army’s militia activity was frowned upon, but in conservative areas like Sadr City nobody would condemn them for killing homosexuals. Women with “bad reputations” were also killed, their bodies thrown in garbage dumps.
After Friday prayers ended a man took me to his neighbor’s home. The Americans had raided it the night before. The door had been blown up with plastic explosives. All the glass on the doors and windows was broken. All the furniture was overturned, closets were dumped, items seemed gratuitously broken. Five brothers were arrested. Their relatives complained that the Americans came with a Sudanese translator and an Iraqi informer who wore a mask. The Americans often searched homes in the area, they said, but they had never done this before. This time they ransacked the house and took the family’s gold, forty thousand dollars (the brother had just sold his house), cellphones, and the computer’s hard drive, and smashed the computer screen.
The next day I went to the Qiba Mosque in Shaab, which I had first visited in March 2004 after the twin Ashura bombings, when I encountered a nascent militia that nearly killed me (see Chapter Two). This time Iraqi soldiers stood guard outside and in the mosque’s courtyard. There was a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr’s father on the gate. Two brothers, Abu Ali and Abu Riyadh, took care of the mosque and cleaned it. They told me that Sheikh Walid had fled north to Salahaddin. His house was now occupied by IDPs from Diyala, who said they would leave when Sheikh Walid returned. Not far away men were fixing the Sunni Al Haq Mosque as well. Sayyid Nasr of the Sayyid Haidar Husseiniya, along with the head of the local Shiite Awakening group, had told them eight months earlier to open the Qiba Mosque. Now the Sunni endowment was helping to fix the mosque. The day before about sixty people had attended the Friday prayers, they told me. As I left with my friends I saw that many young men from the area had gathered around the mosque and were looking at us ominously.
The next week I attended Friday prayers in Sadr City. Driving to Martyrs’ Square, I saw boys playing billiards and table soccer (Foosball) on the side of road. Men worked in their garages, traffic was heavy—it was not like Friday prayers of the past, when Sadr City’s streets were deserted. We drove past a poster honoring Hizballah’s slain hero Imad Mughniyeh. I was searched by young men from the Sadrist office who wore badges with the image of Lebanon’s Imam Musa Sadr on them, something I had never seen before in Iraq. I walked past an animal market: chickens in cages, sheep being slaughtered, pools of blood collecting by the curb. A large mural of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr stood in the center of a large traffic circle. Thousands of mostly young men sat on mats or even cardboard. The cleric spoke from a podium next to the Sadrist headquarters. The sermon, on Shiite eschatology, had little to do with politics. The imam spoke about Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr’s twenty-five predictions about the arrival of the Mahdi. Infidels would gather against Muslims, the cleric warned. But then he turned to the Status of Forces Agreement. It was permissible to make peace with infidels, he said, but the SOFA took more from Iraq than it gave, and it was more about protecting the Americans than helping the Iraqis. At the end of the sermon he led the crowds in chants of “Go out, Americans,” “Yes, Muqtada,” and “Yes, hawza,” but the chants seemed tepid, almost indifferent, lacking the passion of the past.
A local tribal sheikh called Karim al-Muhamadawi told me the thousands of men praying were inactive Mahdi Army members. After prayers we went to his house for a lunch of rotisserie chicken. He had a thick mustache and wore a black dishdasha. The Americans had put Sheikh Karim in charge of one sector of Sadr City and asked him to provide fifty men, who would each get three hundred dollars a month. “We don’t call it Awakening here in the City,” he said, referring to Sadr City in the abbreviated way its residents do. Instead they called the men night guards. Nine sectors of Sadr City were firmly under government control, with concrete walls surrounding them—together they were known as the Golden Square.
Sheikh Karim’s family came to Baghdad from Amara in 1951. In 1961 Abdul Karim Qasim, the prime minister of Iraq, built this area for government employees, Karim told me. He remembered when the fedayeen and different state security bodies stormed into Sadr City in 1999 and killed demonstrators, following the death of Muqtada’s father. When the Mahdi Army took control of Sadr City, the area became off-limits to other parties. The Sadrists destroyed the Communist Party headquarters and then the Supreme Council headquarters, and because they didn’t let other parties into the area, anything bad that happened there was blamed on the Sadrists. After Charge of the Knights, though, other parties such as Dawa had become active in Sadr City, and the Sadrists lost popularity, Karim told me. But the Sadrists were still the most popular movement in Sadr City.
“Muqtada was popular because of his father, and he was the only one opposed to the Americans,” Karim said. “In the beginning the Sadr Current was just and helped the poor,” he continued. “Then gangs infiltrated and even Muqtada didn’t know. When they heard people were doing bad things in their name, the Sadrists punished them. But the Mahdi Army was not organized; it was a mess. The City is big, and Muqtada was in Najaf and couldn’t control it.” The men who controlled gas stations and extorted from shops were far from the Mahdi Army, he said. “They were gangs.”
The Mahdi Army was still in Sadr City, but it was moribund. After the Iraqi and American armies entered the area, services improved. The gangs were sidelined, and the prices of benzene and cooking gas went down. The Americans built solar-powered street lights, increased electricity, and improved water and sewage. Many people were hired to clear garbage. The Americans handed control of the services to the Iraqi government. “Even Sadrists here voted for Maliki,” Karim told me. “People like going out
at night without being bothered.”
Washash, in western Baghdad, had also improved greatly in the year since I had visited. The concrete walls were still up, but cars could now drive into the market, and the Mahdi Army had been expelled. I met again with Abu Karar, head of the Washash Tribal Council, who had helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army. I asked him if the government was now active in Washash. “We don’t have a state,” he said. “It was all autonomous, unilateral. We depend on ourselves and our sons.” He proudly lifted up his arm and squeezed his own bicep. “If we see anything, we call the army or police, because the state can’t enter every area. They protect the entrance and exits. The American army stopped entering Washash.” Abu Karar told me that he expected the militias to try to make a comeback. “We want the walls still up. The walls are 60 or 70 percent responsible for the success of the security. Why did we find twenty-seven bodies in Washash? Because they couldn’t go out? Now the market is good because there is security. This whole story in Washash is over. The state didn’t thank me. They never asked how I pay or feed those eighty young men protecting the streets. Militias call me and threaten me.”
Some of the fiercest battles in the civil war occurred in southwestern Baghdad, in areas like Seidiya and Bayaa. The area was now under the control of the local police and the national police. I drove down a road formerly known as the “Street of Death.” An Al Qaeda sniper had targeted everyone on this road—women, children, even cats. The Omar Mosque on the main road was one of the only ones that had reopened. Its location made it relatively safe, but it was still guarded by police—and there was a police station next to it, just in case. Some Sunnis were praying there as we passed. Nearby was a destroyed house that had belonged to a Shiite family who were all killed when Al Qaeda blew it up. The Sunni Hamza Mosque in Turath had been converted into an INP station. In Maalif, I drove alongside garbage dumps and sewage canals. Maalif, possibly the poorest neighborhood in the area, had attracted many IDPs from Abu Ghraib, Haswa, Mahmudiya, Radwaniya, and Amriya. There were so many new students in the local elementary school that caravans were being used as classrooms. Many IDPs squatted in empty lots alongside vast piles of sewage and trash. Flies swarmed around my face when I stopped to talk to several young men. One of them, Safa Hussein Jumaa, was displaced from Haswa in April 2006 after Al Qaeda attacked his family, he explained. They chose Maalif because it was a cheap area and they had relatives there. They owned their house in Haswa but dared not go back, even to sell it. “We heard people go back and their house gets blown up,” he said. Large groups of jobless young men loitered on the sides of Maalif’s unpaved roads. Immense piles of garbage separated homes, with lakes and canals of sewage around them. The Neighborhood Advisory Council estimated that Maalif had grown from fifty thousand people in 2004 to one hundred and fifty thousand in 2009. The Sunni Ali Assajad and Mustafa mosques had both been converted into INP stations. I drove by a garbage dump where some enterprising IDPs had built a home entirely of disposed air-conditioning units. Dozens of them were piled atop one another and in rows to form walls covered by a tarp.