Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

Three days before my visit to Adhamiya, Saleh al Mutlaq’s local office had been bombed. “This is because the Awakening is less,” Abu Omar told me; it was not able to control the street. He recommended I visit Adhamiya’s Kam neighborhood but explained it was too dangerous for him to go there with me. In Kam I found an entire building taken over by squatters. The displaced families had been assigned apartments by members of the resistance and Awakening.

  One woman, called Kifah Hadi Majid, had been expelled from Haifa Street by the Mahdi Army after they killed her son three years earlier. Her son Mutlab, who wore an Iraqi army uniform, was in the local Awakening group. A gang had killed his wife for jewelry. “The Awakening were given jobs with the Baghdad sanitation, and we fought the terrorists,” he said. “It was better before. We controlled the street. Nobody could talk to us—not the army, nobody. We communicated directly with the Americans. Now nobody respects us, and payment is a problem.” They hadn’t been paid in fifty-eight days.

  I told an Iraqi army intelligence officer that Awakening men were complaining about the lousy jobs they were given. “What education do the Awakening men have?” he asked. “If you don’t have an education, of course you will be a cleaner.” He had arrested three Awakening men whom the army had warrants against for working with Al Qaeda. He didn’t think Abu Omar was a bad man, he told me, just corrupt.

  In Washash Abu Karar was still in charge of the tribal council. But one of its members, Sheikh Amer Asaedi, had fled the area after someone blew up his car. I met up again with Abu Karar’s cousins Hassan and Fadhil Abdel Karim, who helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army in Washash. They told me their nemesis, Ihab al-Tawil, had recently been released from prison. A few months before I met them, their brother Ali was shot and killed in his home nearby, his wife wounded. Ali’s killers came around 7 p.m. and announced, “We are the Mahdi Army!” The children, who saw their parents shot in front of them, were still in shock.

  “We became victims,” Hassan told me. “We get threatening calls warning us we will be killed.” I asked him why he didn’t leave. “If we leave, then the whole neighborhood will leave,” he said. “We cleaned the mosques that militias used, we made Sunnis pray together with Shiites. Now I can’t go out. I stay home in my brother’s house in the back room.”

  Friday prayers were less important, no longer a symbol of defiance. How could Sadrists defy the state when they were represented so well in ministries and Parliament? How could they be anti-establishment when they were part of the establishment? Friday prayers at the main Sadrist office in Sadr City were tamer than I had ever seen; the only hint of politics was a prayer for the release of prisoners. In Ur I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya, once a Mahdi Army hub. “People don’t come here anymore,” said the young man who guarded it. “They are scared since all the arrests.” Abul Hassan, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s former caretaker, who had been my guide in the area, was still in prison, and his assistant Haidar had absconded. Sheikh Safaa, its former Imam, was still safe in Qom, Iran.

  In Amriya I visited Um Omar’s NGO again. Several days earlier Sheikh Muhamad, of the nearby Hassanein Mosque—with whom Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile claimed he had worked closely—had been killed. “He was our friend,” she told me. “The killers were teenagers.” Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque and his old friend Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque had absconded, fearing both the government and Al Qaeda. Thirty-five Sunni sheikhs had been killed in Baghdad in the past month. “Al Qaeda is killing all the sheikhs who stood against them,” she said. Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid of the Amriya Council—who was seen by both Gentile and his successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, as a decisive figure in defeating Al Qaeda in the area—had been jailed in October of 2009. He was accused of terrorism, a deliberately vague charge, but he was said to have had a role in bombings against Shiite areas in 2006. He was also alleged to have belonged to the Islamic Army of Iraq.

  Most local Awakening leaders were either dead or arrested, Um Omar said, and the Awakening was now very weak. Abul Abed’s successor, Muhamad, had survived several assassination attempts. “The Awakening project was a lie, an American lie,” she said. “They said, ‘Come in, throw your weapons, join the Awakening, fight Al Qaeda,’ to discover the identity of the resistance.” The Americans came around now only when there was an arrest to be made.

  Six days before my visit, all of Amriya had been closed off as American and Iraqi Special Forces raided the area. Three local children were kidnapped for ransom. There were also assassinations with silencers. Um Omar’s brother-in-law had been killed in 2009; he had been head of the Amriya Neighborhood Advisory Council.

  Sheikh Khalid was a bad man, Um Omar insisted; he used to provide the fatwas for Abul Abed to kill people, and he had his own court for killing people. Sheikh Walid was like Sheikh Khalid too. But Sheikh Hussein was good, she said; he never killed people.

  “In the time of displacement,” as she called it, five thousand families fled to Amriya, while 1,800 families fled from Amriya. Since violence had subsided, 559 families had returned. But ten months earlier the returning Iraqis had stopped coming because of intimidation. In January a bomb was placed under one Shiite returnee’s car. Most returnees were Shiites, but only about one-third of them returned to stay. The rest sold their homes.

  Al Qaeda men in Abu Ghraib had recently threatened Um Omar’s local office there, accusing it of being a “Jewish organization.” Um Omar was forced to close her local school as well as her vocational training for women in tailoring. A year earlier she had gone to Abu Ghraib with her husband and some engineers. She called the resistance and told them she was coming, but as soon as she arrived armed men with masks put guns to their heads. She started shouting at them angrily, “I’m Um Omar!” and her husband told her to relax. They were taken to a destroyed house in a remote area, separated, and interrogated. She was accused of being Shiite. The men from the resistance made phone calls and then released the couple once they established their identity and apologized to the mayor.

  Um Omar still had 225 needy children in her school, and she also ran a successful program finding husbands for the many widows while continuing to assist IDPs. Amriya was now so crowded that displaced families would share houses. Government schools had more than sixty children in each class. I met Um Ala, who was displaced from the Jihad district. Um Omar had found a widow to marry one of Um Ala’s sons. Her family fled to Amriya with three others, and now they shared a house. Um Ala’s husband was “killed in the sectarianism,” she told me, and her sister was also a widow. They had owned their house in Jihad but were too scared to go back. Now a Shiite family lived in it and paid a nominal rent. In Amriya one of her sons and a nephew had been killed by Al Qaeda. “Things can’t go back to how they were before,” her son said about Iraq. “There was blood, vengeance.” They heard a Sunni from the Mashhadani tribe was killed after he tried to return to Hurriya. “Every Sunni who returns to a Shiite area and gets killed,” her son said, “they say he was a terrorist or Baathist.” I asked if the relations between Sunnis and Shiites could ever go back to the way they were. “Impossible,” they all said. “Every displaced person says it’s impossible,” Um Omar said with disapproval. “I don’t think it’s impossible.”

  After listening to thousands of traumatized Iraqis, I had become inured to the stories of heartbreak that I had heard. But when Um Omar took me to Amriya’s squatter settlement, on a sandy lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood, it was as if I was twenty-five years old again and taking my first footsteps in Iraq.

  Behind the squatter settlement, a large wall divided Amriya from an American military base. Guard posts with tinted windows and rotating sensors towered above the shacks. Most of the squatter families here were from Amil, and as we explored the settlement Um Omar was visibly uncomfortable and warned me not to speak English. She worried about Al Qaeda supporters among the displaced who came in, she said, and tricked poor people who wanted to be mujahideen. Sixty-eight families lived in makeshi
ft shacks, and in one of them I found a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a cold room, bare except for a mattress Um Omar had provided. She had rented a home with her daughters in the Amil district. “When the Sunni and Shiite started,” she said, Shiite militiamen told her to leave or they would take her daughters. She started crying as she told me this, and I was suddenly reminded of my mother, whom she resembled, and I got tearful. As I left, I tried to fix the corrugated iron shield that was protecting her hovel from the cold, howling wind, but the wind kept knocking it down.

  “THE SITUATION CANNOT go back to how it was,” said Captain Salim, the Iraqi army intelligence officer I had known in Washash. “We have a strong government; you can use the law.” I had joined him and his Sunni lieutenant for lunch at their base in Baghdad—a Saddam-era palace in Adhamiya. Both men insisted that the era of sectarian division within the armed forces and the police was over. “The army was not built on a sectarian basis,” the captain said. “It was built by the Americans to serve Iraqis, and it was strong in the fight against Al Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army.”

  The Mahdi Army was finished now, Salim continued, though it was still killing Iraqi army officers in a campaign of targeted assassinations; more than five officers who had taken part in the operation to crush the Mahdi Army in Sadr City had been killed in Baghdad in the past two months. In the past, they said, armed groups could easily attack police and army checkpoints; they had the firepower and the quiet support of the civilian population. “Before people would say that they didn’t see anything after an attack,” the Sunni lieutenant said. “Now they call us before anything happens.” Anonymous tips, he added, were leading to numerous arrests. “We can’t work without the people’s help, and the calls help a lot.”

  Salim told me that he had detained “bad” Awakening leaders and that he was waiting until after the elections to arrest even more, in order to avoid any destabilizing effects. His main challenge was obtaining arrest warrants. “The judge asks for more evidence,” he said. “The prisons are full of innocent people, so they want more evidence. They don’t want random arrests like in the past.” Though Salim had once feared his police counterparts for their associations with Shiite militias, now, he said, the police were good, and Iraqi Security Forces were continuing to arrest Mahdi Army men.

  Neither man thought it possible that the civil war could resume. “The people understand now,” Salim said. “Before Shiites loved the Mahdi Army, but the Mahdi Army worked for its own interests, for the interests of Iran. The Sunnis supported Al Qaeda because they didn’t trust the government, but then the Awakenings were established.” In the army, they said, most officers supported Maliki or the secular former Baathist Ayad Allawi—and Salim said he worried only about the Shiite Alliance leader, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom many blamed for the intensification of the civil war that occurred under his watch. “Only he can bring sectarianism back,” Salim said.

  Salim was confident the Americans would not leave Iraq because of their conflict with Iran and because of their continued support and training of the Iraqi army. Although the Americans had saved the Iraqi Security Forces from humiliation during the battles with Shiite militias in 2008, “Now we have engineers, intelligence, armor, 120-millimeter mortars, helicopters, good logistics,” he boasted.

  I asked if the army was stronger now than it was before the overthrow of Saddam. As a fighting force it was, he said, “but before, when you fought, you had trust that the government had your back. Now, you don’t know. If Sadrists win the elections, they will find a way to fire us. The army has no relation with the government. We weren’t Saddam’s army either.”

  Ironically, for all Salim’s talk about the improving security situation and the strength of the state, like many of his colleagues, he had moved his family to Suleimaniya, a Kurdish city in the north, for safekeeping. The Iraqi Security Forces were more confident and less sectarian, it seemed, but still vulnerable. Having their wives up north also freed the men to attend parties with liquor and prostitutes, called gaada.

  After lunch Salim invited me to join him for shooting practice—which I did. He also invited me to join him and other officers for a gaada—which I did not. We descended to their shooting range by the river. Saddam’s initials were etched in the tiles on the walls. Some of his men were shooting fish in the river with shotguns. I observed that Salim had lost weight since I had last seen him. He smiled and told me that he had stopped eating rice and started running. Salim gave me his American M4, which had a laser scope. I went through several magazines firing it.

  In Diyala, a majority-Sunni province northeast of Baghdad, I met with Dhari Muhamad Abed, head of the government’s Returnee Assistance Center. “Now sectarianism is completely over,” he said. “Security is good.” Indeed, as we drove through villages in Diyala where numerous atrocities had taken place, we found that Iraqi police and soldiers were pervasive, as was the case almost everywhere I traveled in Iraq, no matter how rural or remote. The security forces were no longer hiding their identities to avoid being killed by Al Qaeda, and they were no longer acting as death squads, though arbitrary detention of suspects remains the norm. Human rights abuses persist in Iraq, but they can no longer be described as sectarian; the state has achieved security in part by returning to its authoritarian roots.

  More than thirty-seven thousand families had been displaced in Diyala—about 25 percent of the province’s total population—and eighty-five villages were destroyed during the civil war. Only one-third of the refugees have returned. With the end of the civil war and the establishment of a security infrastructure, the refugee crisis remains Iraq’s most serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are homeless and landless, squatting on government property. A senior United Nations official put the figure at half a million, calling it “an acute humanitarian crisis.”

  In Baquba, the provincial capital, seven hundred Sunni families are squatting at Saad camp, on the grounds of an army base on the outskirts of the city. They were driven from their homes shortly after the American invasion in 2003 by Kurdish militias eager to seize territory in the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam.

  I asked one man if he would like to return to his home. “Who will protect us if we go back?” he asked. The police regularly raided their camp, arresting men and telling the people they would have to leave. “Where will we go?” one old man asked me.

  Similar scenes can be found across the country. In the Abu Dshir district of Baghdad, an immense and sprawling squatter camp houses thousands of Shiites who fled rural areas around the capital; they live in tents and makeshift shelters built from scrap metal and mud. The enormous Sadrein camp, in Baghdad’s Sadr City, contains more than 1,500 families, who live on a rubbish dump with the choking stench of sewage clotting the air. Most of the men I met were unemployed. Children played in mountains of rubbish. Like most poor Iraqis, the squatters depended on the state rations, known as the Public Distribution System, for survival. “If they decide to remove the squatters, there will be an uprising and chaos,” said the leader of one compound in Hurriya where hundreds of families were living. “No one can remove the squatters,” Captain Salim told me. “We have to solve the problem first, give them land. The government only builds housing for its workers, not the poor citizens.”

  SUNNIS LARGELY did not take part in the January 2005 parliamentary elections. They voted in the October 2005 constitutional referendum but resoundingly opposed the majority’s support for the Constitution. The December 2005 parliamentary elections enshrined the new sectarian order and empowered a Shiite-dominated government, leading to the civil war.

  But the January 2009 provincial election results showed that Iraqis were tiring of the overtly sectarian parties: they repudiated incumbents throughout the country, punishing them for their failure to perform. The results signaled that the civil war was over. People felt secure enough to look for new representatives and to begin to demand the provision of services and proper gove
rnance. The January 2009 votes by Arab and other non-Kurdish Iraqis were in favor of a strong centralized government that was not openly sectarian. In 2009 explicitly sectarian and religious parties were rejected, but Shiites still voted for Shiite parties and Sunnis voted for Sunni parties, and it seemed Iraq’s elections had crystallized internal differences, entrenching sectarianism.

  Between August 2009 and January 2010 Baghdad suffered four major coordinated terrorist attacks. The August 2009 bombings were spectacular and devastating. At the foreign ministry three hundred people were killed or wounded from a local staff of five hundred. Maliki blamed Syria and created a diplomatic scandal. Iran offered to intervene and act as intermediary, but Iraq chose Turkey as the intermediary instead. The Iraqi government failed to convince anybody that Syria had played a role, but the effort was seen as an example of the government strategy of deliberately picking fights with neighbors. Despite these violent attacks, the political arena was the main front for disputes. And despite the sectarian competition for power, there were other divides and cross-sectarian alliances, especially in Parliament.

  Maliki, for instance, had a particularly acrimonious relationship with the Parliament, which was the strongest one in Iraqi history, able to check the power of the executive. In 2009 Parliament charged Abdul Falah al-Sudani, the trade minister, who came from Maliki’s Dawa Party, with corruption. The Integrity Committee subjected him to fierce questioning, which was broadcast on television. Interestingly, the head of the Integrity Committee was from the Shiite Fadhila Party, which showed that politics in Iraq didn’t necessarily rotate on a Shiite-Sunni axis. Parliament also cut funding for Maliki’s Tribal Support Councils.

  Maliki’s Dawa was still an elitist party without grassroots support and with no ability to mobilize the street. Despite relative improvements in security, Maliki had failed to deliver notable improvements in services. In both the 2009 and 2010 elections, Iran tried and failed to unite Maliki with the Sadrists and the Supreme Council, but Maliki spurned them because with them he had no guarantee of occupying the prime minister’s position. Maliki tried and failed to reach a nonsectarian alliance with Allawi and Mutlaq in the months leading up to the 2010 elections.