.On the Ground in Iraq
The Americans came for Sabah one Friday night in September. His house in Radwaniya, on the western outskirts of Baghdad, stood in a dry, yellow field surrounded by brick walls. Three cars were parked in front the day I came to visit, two weeks after Americans had shot him. It was the month of Ramadan, and our mouths were as dry as his yard. The resistance was active in Radwaniya, and we drove through fields and dry canals to avoid any checkpoints that might reveal to locals that I was a foreigner. Journalists were targets now too.
The Americans had come maybe 20 times before to search for weapons in the house were Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein, their wives, and their six children. They knew where to look for the single Kalashnikov rifle the family was permitted to own. They had always been polite. “This day they didn’t act normal,” Hussein told me. “They were running from all sides of the house. They kicked open the doors. They didn’t wait for us.” With Iraqi National Guardsmen standing outside, the Americans hit the brothers with their rifle butts. Five soldiers were on each man. Sabah’s nose was broken; Walid lay on the floor with a rifle barrel in his mouth. The Shia translator told them to kill Walid, but they ripped the gun out of his mouth instead, tearing his cheek. The rest of the family was ordered out. The translator asked the brothers where “the others” were and cursed them, threatening to rape their sisters.
As the terrified family waited outside on the road, they heard three shots and what sounded to them like a scuffle inside. The Iraqi National Guardsmen tried to enter the house, but the translator cursed them, too, and shouted, “Who told you to come in?” Thirty minutes later Walid was dragged into the street. The translator emerged with a picture of Sabah and asked for Sabah’s wife. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her. He tore the picture before her face. Several soldiers came out of the house laughing.
Inside, the family found Sabah dead. Blood marked his shirt where three bullets had entered his chest; two came out his back and lodged in the wall behind him. American-made bullet casings were on the floor. The house had been ransacked. Sofas and beds were overturned and torn apart; tables, closets, vases with plastic flowers were broken. Sabah’s pictures had been torn up and his identification card confiscated. Elsewhere in the house one picture remained untouched—Sabah with his three brothers and their father, smiling in happier times. When Sabah was buried the next day his body was not washed—martyrs are buried as they died.
Hussein told me that three days before Sabah was killed, an American patrol had stopped in front of Radwaniya’s shops and the Shia translator had loudly taunted the locals, cursing and threatening them for being Sunnis. Sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia had been escalating throughout the year, and the Americans had done little to diffuse them.
Hussein’s neighbor, Haidar, lived in a smaller house surrounded by dry, overgrown plants. Although it was Ramadan, we all drank tea. Haidar was 23 years old and an officer in the intelligence section of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s marawir, the SWAT team. He had completed the military academy before the war and after the war was asked to join the intelligence service. With Iraq’s history of army-led coups, a conscious decision was made after the war to establish a small and weak army and to give the police a paramilitary capacity, placing the onus of the counterinsurgency on them. To me, Haidar seemed too thin and his mannerism too gentle for a police officer, especially one responsible for counterterrorism.
Haidar was concerned about the presence of foreign fighters in the resistance and its growing sectarian violence. He told me that members of his intelligence unit had infiltrated resistance groups, praying with them and participating in their planning. “Some of the resistance are organized gangs like mafias,” he said. “They use religion and claim they are the resistance. Some of the resistance has good goals. The real resistance won’t kill Iraqis. They attack the occupier, and they attack them in remote places and don’t use civilians as cover.” He explained that the real resistance just wanted the Americans to stay in their bases and not enter houses or cities. “If they get inside my house, what is left for me?” he asked in the voice of the Iraqi resistance. “I can’t even protect my own house.”
But—possibly because of the influence of foreigners—Sunnis were killing Shia civilians, and Shia, often under official cover, were retaliating. I asked Haidar if the rumors I’d heard were true—that the Ministry of Interior had been infiltrated and dominated by the Badr Organization Militia, the military forces of the radical Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI. Yes, he said, and added that Ministry of Interior members affiliated with Badr were assassinating Sunnis throughout Iraq. Sunni officers were being removed and replaced by unknown Shias.
With the December parliamentary elections only a few weeks away, Haidar, a Sunni himself, warned against Sunni politicians like Adnan Duleymi and Saleh al Mutlaq, who had begun speaking in sectarian terms. “They are not speaking for Iraq. We need somebody who speaks for all Iraqis,” But, as Haidar must have sensed, sectarian voters would win the day in the December elections. “The Americans should stay for two years,” he told me. “If they leave there will be a civil war.” In my judgment the civil war had started at least a year and a half before.
* * *
Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis. Yet Shias showed restraint amid daily attacks meant to provoke a civil war; they knew the numbers were on their side.
The attacks against Shia civilians did nothing to weaken their increasing power in Iraq, validated by the January 2005 elections. With many Sunni leaders boycotting the elections in protest of the occupation, the new government and the constitutional committee emerged with a large Shia majority. Throughout the region, sectarian tensions began to increase, and Sunnis in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were feeling threatened by the Shia renaissance in Iraq.
In December 2004, Jordan’s King Abdallah warned of a “Shia crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shias had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq to commit atrocities against Shia civilians. In September 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran. In response, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr called the Saudi foreign minister a “Bedouin riding a camel” and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship. Jabr, who had commanded the Badr corps, also condemned Saudi human-rights abuses—particularly the repression of Saudi Arabia’s approximately two million Shias—and he mocked Saudi Arabia’s treatment of its women.
In Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabi Islam, Shias are known as rafida, which means “rejectionists.” A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shias are outside Islam, and to Shias it is the equivalent of being called “nigger.” This is the same word Sunni radicals in Iraq and the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, use to describe Shias. Saudi Arabia’s two million Shias have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals, and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shia “rafida” collaborators.
When I returned to Baghdad in October 2005 after an absence of many months, a regional sectarian war was being fought in Iraq, with Jordan and Saudi Arabia providing support for Sunni violence that would give Iraq’s Sunnis more political leverage. Iran was of course supporting its client SCIRI—perhaps still funding it as well—as SCIRI waged war against Sunnis who went too far.
* * *
A few minutes after I drove out of the airport upon my return I heard two bursts of Kalashnikov fire. It continued intermittently all day, and every day I was in Baghdad, along with the constant rumble of helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. On the walls of an overpass I noticed new graffiti: “We have 1000 katrina for USA.” Shortly before I arrived someone had nihilistically blown up the landmark statue of Abu Jafa al Mansur, the builder of Baghdad and the second Abbasid caliph. The large bust of the handsome man in a turban, looking down at the city from a roundabout, could have been destroyed by Shias, Sunnis, or Kurds. Mansur had laid the first stone for Baghdad in 762. Now much of the city was being turned to rubble.
“It’s not like in the past,” an Iraqi friend warned me. “Now it’s all gangs and mafias. Everything is very, very bad,” he told me. The killings continued, ten on one day, 100 the next. My Iraqi friends ordered me to avoid anything that was shash, slang for something that attracts attention.
Sunni attitudes had begun to change in early spring 2005. Some Sunni leaders who had boycotted the January 2005 elections began to realize that they might be locking themselves out of Iraq’s future. The question, though, was how to begin to re-enter politics. In the first months after the war, Sunnis and Shias formed united committees, held joint prayers, and rejected sectarianism; by 2004 it was apparent that civil war was on its way. Sunni newspapers waged a war of words against Shias, hinting ominously about the millions of Iranians who had infiltrated Iraq, claiming to be Iraqi Shias, intent on changing the demographic balance. Would Sunni politicians struggling to regain power now claim to represent the disenfranchised Sunnis, or would they claim the good of Iraq as their platform? The slide into sectarian language wasn’t instant, but even those politicians who chose the latter often spoke with implicit attacks on Shias.
In late March 2005 Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Abd al Ghafour al Samarai, the director general of the Sunni Endowment and a former top official in the neo-Baathist clerical organization the Association of Muslim Scholars, encouraged Iraqi Sunnis to join the Iraqi military and police as long as they supported their nation and not the occupiers of Iraq. If the “honest and loyal elements” of Iraq (meaning its Sunnis) did not participate, then those who sought to harm the security of the nation (meaning Shias) would dominate the security forces. He later explained that the “real resistance” understood his call because they did not want militias (Shia and Kurdish militias) ruling Iraq. Sixty-four other high-ranking Sunni clerics from throughout Iraq signed onto al Samarai’s fatwa.
When the Jordanian al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi boldly declared war on Shias in a speech, Iraq’s radical Sunni leadership reacted quickly to condemn it. The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq’s Shias were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans’ blessings and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allows one to seek revenge on an innocent person, they said, and accused Zarqawi of supporting the Americans’ hope to create civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile five resistance groups—the Army of Muhamad, the al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen and the Salehdin Brigades—also condemned Zarqawi’s statements as a “fire burning the Iraqi people” and explained that the resistance only attacked the occupiers and those who assisted them and did not base their attacks on sectarian or ethnic criteria.
Later in 2005 there was also increasing debate among Iraq’s Sunni resistance about the need to negotiate with the Americans. Sheikh Muayad, of Iraq’s most important Sunni mosque, who had vehemently condemned the Americans from his pulpit, announced his membership in the Islamic Party and his support for the new Iraqi constitution. He became a wanted man. Viewed as a traitor by the resistance and his community, he left his mosque and home under the protection of the Iraqi National Guard.
Most Sunni leaders did not go as far as Muayad, but their increasing discussion about the need to negotiate with Americans worried Shias. The Shia resistance, led by the radical young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Army of the Mahdi, had to surrender its weapons before negotiating. They viewed Sunni attempts to enter the
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The Americans had come maybe 20 times before to search for weapons in the house were Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein, their wives, and their six children. They knew where to look for the single Kalashnikov rifle the family was permitted to own. They had always been polite. “This day they didn’t act normal,” Hussein told me. “They were running from all sides of the house. They kicked open the doors. They didn’t wait for us.” With Iraqi National Guardsmen standing outside, the Americans hit the brothers with their rifle butts. Five soldiers were on each man. Sabah’s nose was broken; Walid lay on the floor with a rifle barrel in his mouth. The Shia translator told them to kill Walid, but they ripped the gun out of his mouth instead, tearing his cheek. The rest of the family was ordered out. The translator asked the brothers where “the others” were and cursed them, threatening to rape their sisters.
As the terrified family waited outside on the road, they heard three shots and what sounded to them like a scuffle inside. The Iraqi National Guardsmen tried to enter the house, but the translator cursed them, too, and shouted, “Who told you to come in?” Thirty minutes later Walid was dragged into the street. The translator emerged with a picture of Sabah and asked for Sabah’s wife. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her. He tore the picture before her face. Several soldiers came out of the house laughing.
Inside, the family found Sabah dead. Blood marked his shirt where three bullets had entered his chest; two came out his back and lodged in the wall behind him. American-made bullet casings were on the floor. The house had been ransacked. Sofas and beds were overturned and torn apart; tables, closets, vases with plastic flowers were broken. Sabah’s pictures had been torn up and his identification card confiscated. Elsewhere in the house one picture remained untouched—Sabah with his three brothers and their father, smiling in happier times. When Sabah was buried the next day his body was not washed—martyrs are buried as they died.
Hussein told me that three days before Sabah was killed, an American patrol had stopped in front of Radwaniya’s shops and the Shia translator had loudly taunted the locals, cursing and threatening them for being Sunnis. Sectarian tensions between Sunnis and Shia had been escalating throughout the year, and the Americans had done little to diffuse them.
Hussein’s neighbor, Haidar, lived in a smaller house surrounded by dry, overgrown plants. Although it was Ramadan, we all drank tea. Haidar was 23 years old and an officer in the intelligence section of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s marawir, the SWAT team. He had completed the military academy before the war and after the war was asked to join the intelligence service. With Iraq’s history of army-led coups, a conscious decision was made after the war to establish a small and weak army and to give the police a paramilitary capacity, placing the onus of the counterinsurgency on them. To me, Haidar seemed too thin and his mannerism too gentle for a police officer, especially one responsible for counterterrorism.
Haidar was concerned about the presence of foreign fighters in the resistance and its growing sectarian violence. He told me that members of his intelligence unit had infiltrated resistance groups, praying with them and participating in their planning. “Some of the resistance are organized gangs like mafias,” he said. “They use religion and claim they are the resistance. Some of the resistance has good goals. The real resistance won’t kill Iraqis. They attack the occupier, and they attack them in remote places and don’t use civilians as cover.” He explained that the real resistance just wanted the Americans to stay in their bases and not enter houses or cities. “If they get inside my house, what is left for me?” he asked in the voice of the Iraqi resistance. “I can’t even protect my own house.”
But—possibly because of the influence of foreigners—Sunnis were killing Shia civilians, and Shia, often under official cover, were retaliating. I asked Haidar if the rumors I’d heard were true—that the Ministry of Interior had been infiltrated and dominated by the Badr Organization Militia, the military forces of the radical Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI. Yes, he said, and added that Ministry of Interior members affiliated with Badr were assassinating Sunnis throughout Iraq. Sunni officers were being removed and replaced by unknown Shias.
With the December parliamentary elections only a few weeks away, Haidar, a Sunni himself, warned against Sunni politicians like Adnan Duleymi and Saleh al Mutlaq, who had begun speaking in sectarian terms. “They are not speaking for Iraq. We need somebody who speaks for all Iraqis,” But, as Haidar must have sensed, sectarian voters would win the day in the December elections. “The Americans should stay for two years,” he told me. “If they leave there will be a civil war.” In my judgment the civil war had started at least a year and a half before.
* * *
Political parties didn’t overtly begin to speak in the name of sectarian groups until 2005. For Shias, it wasn’t necessary: after the war Iraq’s Shia triumphalism was shared by all Shia parties; Iraq was now theirs and could not be taken away except by the Americans. There was no threat of Sunnis retaking the country because they had never taken it before: they had been given it, first by the Ottomans and then by the British. Iraq’s Sunnis, unsurprisingly, felt intimidated, and they increasingly came to view Shias as Iranians or Persians, refusing to recognize that Shias were the majority or that Shias had been singled out for persecution under Saddam. Sunnis were the primary victims of American military aggression and viewed Shias as collaborators. As Shias became the primary victims of radical Sunni terror attacks against Iraqi civilians, they came to view Sunnis as Baathists, Saddamists, or Wahhabis. Yet Shias showed restraint amid daily attacks meant to provoke a civil war; they knew the numbers were on their side.
The attacks against Shia civilians did nothing to weaken their increasing power in Iraq, validated by the January 2005 elections. With many Sunni leaders boycotting the elections in protest of the occupation, the new government and the constitutional committee emerged with a large Shia majority. Throughout the region, sectarian tensions began to increase, and Sunnis in Jordan and Saudi Arabia were feeling threatened by the Shia renaissance in Iraq.
In December 2004, Jordan’s King Abdallah warned of a “Shia crescent” from Lebanon to Iraq to Iran that would destabilize the entire region. Iraq’s Shias had demonstrated against Jordan in the past, condemning the country for its steady trickle of suicide bombers who crossed into Iraq to commit atrocities against Shia civilians. In September 2005, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned that a civil war in Iraq would destabilize the entire region and complained that the Americans had handed Iraq over to Iran. In response, Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr called the Saudi foreign minister a “Bedouin riding a camel” and described Saudi Arabia as a one-family dictatorship. Jabr, who had commanded the Badr corps, also condemned Saudi human-rights abuses—particularly the repression of Saudi Arabia’s approximately two million Shias—and he mocked Saudi Arabia’s treatment of its women.
In Saudi Arabia, the home of Wahhabi Islam, Shias are known as rafida, which means “rejectionists.” A highly pejorative term, it implies that Shias are outside Islam, and to Shias it is the equivalent of being called “nigger.” This is the same word Sunni radicals in Iraq and the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, use to describe Shias. Saudi Arabia’s two million Shias have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals, and occasionally threatened with extermination. Saudi Arabia is also the main exporter of foreign fighters to the Iraqi jihad to fight both the Americans and the Shia “rafida” collaborators.
When I returned to Baghdad in October 2005 after an absence of many months, a regional sectarian war was being fought in Iraq, with Jordan and Saudi Arabia providing support for Sunni violence that would give Iraq’s Sunnis more political leverage. Iran was of course supporting its client SCIRI—perhaps still funding it as well—as SCIRI waged war against Sunnis who went too far.
* * *
A few minutes after I drove out of the airport upon my return I heard two bursts of Kalashnikov fire. It continued intermittently all day, and every day I was in Baghdad, along with the constant rumble of helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers. On the walls of an overpass I noticed new graffiti: “We have 1000 katrina for USA.” Shortly before I arrived someone had nihilistically blown up the landmark statue of Abu Jafa al Mansur, the builder of Baghdad and the second Abbasid caliph. The large bust of the handsome man in a turban, looking down at the city from a roundabout, could have been destroyed by Shias, Sunnis, or Kurds. Mansur had laid the first stone for Baghdad in 762. Now much of the city was being turned to rubble.
“It’s not like in the past,” an Iraqi friend warned me. “Now it’s all gangs and mafias. Everything is very, very bad,” he told me. The killings continued, ten on one day, 100 the next. My Iraqi friends ordered me to avoid anything that was shash, slang for something that attracts attention.
Sunni attitudes had begun to change in early spring 2005. Some Sunni leaders who had boycotted the January 2005 elections began to realize that they might be locking themselves out of Iraq’s future. The question, though, was how to begin to re-enter politics. In the first months after the war, Sunnis and Shias formed united committees, held joint prayers, and rejected sectarianism; by 2004 it was apparent that civil war was on its way. Sunni newspapers waged a war of words against Shias, hinting ominously about the millions of Iranians who had infiltrated Iraq, claiming to be Iraqi Shias, intent on changing the demographic balance. Would Sunni politicians struggling to regain power now claim to represent the disenfranchised Sunnis, or would they claim the good of Iraq as their platform? The slide into sectarian language wasn’t instant, but even those politicians who chose the latter often spoke with implicit attacks on Shias.
In late March 2005 Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Abd al Ghafour al Samarai, the director general of the Sunni Endowment and a former top official in the neo-Baathist clerical organization the Association of Muslim Scholars, encouraged Iraqi Sunnis to join the Iraqi military and police as long as they supported their nation and not the occupiers of Iraq. If the “honest and loyal elements” of Iraq (meaning its Sunnis) did not participate, then those who sought to harm the security of the nation (meaning Shias) would dominate the security forces. He later explained that the “real resistance” understood his call because they did not want militias (Shia and Kurdish militias) ruling Iraq. Sixty-four other high-ranking Sunni clerics from throughout Iraq signed onto al Samarai’s fatwa.
When the Jordanian al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi boldly declared war on Shias in a speech, Iraq’s radical Sunni leadership reacted quickly to condemn it. The Association of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq’s Shias were not responsible for the crimes the government was committing with the Americans’ blessings and that they were innocent of the attacks against Sunnis carried out by the Americans. No religious principle allows one to seek revenge on an innocent person, they said, and accused Zarqawi of supporting the Americans’ hope to create civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile five resistance groups—the Army of Muhamad, the al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen and the Salehdin Brigades—also condemned Zarqawi’s statements as a “fire burning the Iraqi people” and explained that the resistance only attacked the occupiers and those who assisted them and did not base their attacks on sectarian or ethnic criteria.
Later in 2005 there was also increasing debate among Iraq’s Sunni resistance about the need to negotiate with the Americans. Sheikh Muayad, of Iraq’s most important Sunni mosque, who had vehemently condemned the Americans from his pulpit, announced his membership in the Islamic Party and his support for the new Iraqi constitution. He became a wanted man. Viewed as a traitor by the resistance and his community, he left his mosque and home under the protection of the Iraqi National Guard.
Most Sunni leaders did not go as far as Muayad, but their increasing discussion about the need to negotiate with Americans worried Shias. The Shia resistance, led by the radical young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Army of the Mahdi, had to surrender its weapons before negotiating. They viewed Sunni attempts to enter the
Boston Review
Article posted by request
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