Dora-First Outbreaks of Civil War.
Dora, in southern Baghdad, was one of the first areas where the civil war began. Although mixed, it was majority Sunni. The cleansing of Dora"s Shiites was mostly carried out by local insurgents who lived in the adjoining rural areas of Arab Jubur and Hor Rajab, but some of it was conducted by crooks who kidnapped members of rich families and demanded money for their release.
Solaf was a thirty-three-year-old carpenter working out of his large house in Dora. He was the youngest of five brothers and one sister from the poor Abu Mohammed family, which had lived in Dora since 1974. Mohammed, the eldest brother, joined the police in mid-2004, and in May 2005 he was told he would be killed if he did not quit. Mohammed moved out of his parents" house and rented a small house in eastern Baghdad"s majority-Shiite Shaab district, but because he had no other profession to turn to, he kept his job as a policeman.
It took Solaf "s family more than a month to find a good offer on their house. In mid-July 2005 they finally agreed to sell, though there was a delay in signing the contract. Solaf "s street was full of children every evening, and he would spend many nights sitting at the gate of his home chatting with friends. On July 28 he was sitting there as usual with one of his Sunni friends when a white Hyundai stopped a few meters away from them. An unmasked gunman emerged wearing civilian clothes and started shooting, killing Solaf and his friend. Solaf "s brothers and his relatives gathered the next day and buried his body. On the second day of Solaf "s funeral, the family received another letter warning them to leave the city. The family ended the funeral and left Dora forever.
A week after Solaf"s murder, his mother phoned several of her old neighbors and bitterly complained about Sunnis and her family"s new but much smaller house in the majority-Shiite neighborhood of Shuula. She said she had received a call from the mother of Solaf "s Sunni friend. The Sunni man"s mother told her that her family had received jizia (blood money) of two million Iraqi dinars and an apology from the mujahideen for killing her son, because Solaf had been the only target. Solaf had been targeted because his brother was in the police. The mujahideen who killed him were from the Jubur tribe, which dominated the insurgency in Dora and was the main Sunni tribe in Baghdad. Two Sunni families moved into Solaf"s old house; among them was a twenty-four-year-old man named Mustafa, who was a member of the insurgency.
Haji E"nad was a Shiite who owned a shop on the corner just down the road from Solaf "s house. At the end of September 2005, three unmasked gunmen raided his shop and killed his son Rashid. They walked away; they did not even use a car. Haji E"nad"s family fled Dora the next day. They did not have a funeral, nor did they tell any of the neighbors where they were going. They simply locked the doors and moved out, leaving their property, and n.o.body in Dora heard from them again. Families were afraid to tell anybody that they had been threatened so as not to further antagonize those who had threatened them.
More followed suit. Abu Ali, a Shiite whose family had been neighbors of Solaf and who also said he had been threatened, sold his property and moved to Hilla province in mid-December 2005. One week later his neighbor Iyad, whose shop was about 100 meters away from Solaf"s house, closed it and fled Dora, too. Iyad moved some of his most important property out, left the rest in one room, and locked the house. He phoned some neighbors two days later and asked them to watch the house and report any attack. He explained that he was afraid because he was Shiite and had a brother who had been executed by the former regime for allegedly belonging to the Dawa Party. "Dora is not for Shiites any more, and only Sunnis can live there," Iyad said. "Sunnis are attacking Shiites to force them to leave and sell their houses for cheap prices. I am not going to give my house to Sunnis for free." Although sectarianism was the primary motive, some Sunnis did derive economic benefit from the removal of Dora"s Shiites. Soon poor Sunnis could purchase a good house in Dora and live among other Sunnis for much less than what they would normally have paid before.
The Brothers Mulla Murder Gang.
Shiites had militias of their own, which were prepared to avenge the deaths in their community and sometimes to profit from the violence too. Maalif is a majority-Shiite neighborhood in Seidiya, which is in southwestern Baghdad. It was established in the late 1980s when the government decided to transfer tribes from villages in the Taji area north of Baghdad so that it could build a factory and a military camp where they had been living. The families preserved their tribal habits and traditions in the city. Maalif was divided among a few large tribes and a collection of other poor people (Sunnis and Shiites) who moved to the city in the 1990s for cheap living, but its population was overwhelmingly Shiite, unlike Seidiya, which is nearly evenly split. Being a poor neighborhood, Maalif tended to see higher rates of violence, criminality, and religiosity among its residents.
In Maalif people from the same tribe often enter the same profession and cause problems for outsiders seeking to compete. The Dilfi tribe had buses for transportation, the Chaab had pickups for transportation, and the Tual were all butchers. Hussein was a butcher from the Tual tribe who had about five butcher shops in Seidiya. His partner, a man called Ahmed al-Mulla, was also from his tribe. Hussein and Ahmed had many contracts with the former regime to provide meat for the army. This had enriched them and sealed their friendship.
After the Americans overthrew Saddam, two of the Mulla brothers returned home from exile in Iran, where they had been soldiers in the Badr Brigade. Ahmed and Hussein became religious and hung portraits of Shiite leaders like Sistani and Khomeini all over their shops" walls. They joined the Badr Brigade and formed an a.s.sa.s.sination group, transforming one of Hussein"s shops in the Elam neighborhood into an office for interrogating former regime loyalists, whom Hussein called Saddamists. Hussein and Ahmed obtained Baath Party records with the names, addresses, and details of members in Seidiya-they even included the types and serial numbers of weapons owned by the men. The records were a gift to Ahmed from Shiite locals who had raided the Baath Party office in their neighborhood and transformed it into a Shiite mosque after the fall of Baghdad. Hussein and Ahmed scanned the records and interviewed about ten former Baath Party members a day. They would knock on their doors and inform the Baathists: "You were a Baath Party member, and you need to come visit us in our office in the Elam Market to clarify a few issues." Then they would leave.
They opened their office in May 2003. It had a desk with two chairs for Ahmed and Hussein as well as a long bench and portraits of Sistani and Khomeini. The Baathist would enter their office, sit on the bench, and sign a statement that he was innocent and not involved in any of the Baath Party crimes. The statement said: "I condemn all the former regime"s activities against the Iraqi people and I regret everything I have done with that regime and I promise to never help the Baath Party again." Then they would be asked to hand over their weapons, and Ahmed and Hussein would compare the serial numbers with those on record.
Local Baathists were frightened of this organization and started fleeing Seidiya. Ahmed and Hussein were careful not to let any Baathist retain his weapons. The murder of Baathists in Seidiya intensified one month after the office opened. Hussein and Ahmed sought to obtain a fatwa that would give them legitimate cover for their militia, but they failed to find a respected cleric to provide one. Even their dearest friend and neighbor Sheikh Dhafer al-Qeisi, Sistani"s representative for southern Baghdad, refused to acquiesce, although he backed their activities.
Their group was very professional, driving fast Opel cars with many young members who moved quickly. They a.s.sa.s.sinated more than fifty alleged "Saddamists." Ahmed spoke proudly about his operations in public and often said that he would exceed 100 dead Saddamists by the end of 2005. He was also known to kill Salafis from the Sunni mosque next to the Elam Market. Sunnis in Elam began to fear Ahmed, worrying that they might be targeted next, since most of the former Baathists in his neighborhood were Sunni. In late 2004 Sunnis from the Omar Mosque in Elam formed an a.s.sa.s.sination squad; their main targets were Ahmed and Hussein.
One evening in March 2005, Kadhim, a member of Ahmed and Hussein"s group, was hanging out in a shop with Ahmed when they were attacked. Kadhim died immediately. Ahmed was seriously wounded and remained in the hospital for one month to recover from his injuries. One week after he left the hospital, while he was visiting his shop again, he was a.s.sa.s.sinated. His sixteen-year-old a.s.sistant died with him. After Ahmed"s death the group ceased conducting operations, and Hussein received letters in his shops threatening him with death if he did not leave the neighborhood. Hussein was shot in October 2005 with his brother Mohammed while they were driving their truck home one evening. Hussein died immediately but Mohammed remained conscious long enough to make a phone call. He was seriously wounded, but he survived.
The day after Hussein"s murder, his eldest brother was locking up his shop when he found another letter: "In the name of G.o.d, we did not oppress them but they were oppressing themselves, those who killed the sons of Sunnis and Baathists, they killed the men, made the children orphans, and made the wives widows, they are cursed for what their hands have done. We will beat them like they beat us, and we will kill them everywhere."
Hussein had lived in a big house with his brothers and cousins and was surrounded by fellow tribesmen. His area had a robust Shiite majority and was full of Mahdi Army men, but his family did not feel safe enough to stay in Maalif. They left their houses and shops to return to the south, from where they had come thirty years earlier.
A few months later, on December 25, 2005, thirteen Sunni families were threatened and ordered to leave their homes in Maalif. Two families responded immediately, leaving the next day. The men in other families hid or left the area, leaving only the women. (Militias typically did not target women.) A Sunni woman in Maalif who hid her son at home explained the dilemma that many experienced: "There is a conspiracy to force Sunnis out of Baghdad. We are limited in the cities we can move to. We cannot move to Shula, Hurriya, Dolaie, Shaab, New Baghdad, or Al Amin, because we might face the same threats there. We can only move to Sunni neighborhoods dominated by the resistance, such as Dora and Amriya, but it is not even safe to live there. We cannot write on the walls that we are Sunnis to avoid attacks. And we might be attacked by the army by accident, since we live next to terrorists."
Maalif was a neighborhood in the larger Bayaa district. The Bayaa Mosque, located off of the highway, had belonged to followers of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, Muqtada"s father. It was led by Sheikh Muayad al-Khazraji, a former student of Sadr"s who had been jailed by Saddam following Sadr"s a.s.sa.s.sination in 1999. On Friday, April 25, 2003, Sheikh Muayad warned his flock that if he learned of any Iraqi woman sleeping with American soldiers, he would inform her tribe and call for her death. As well as worrying about how Iraqi women comported themselves, Sheikh Muayad hid many weapons in his mosque. Eventually the Americans arrested him for this, provoking ma.s.sive protests by Shiite supporters. But the civil war seemed to extend itself to prison, where Sheikh Muayad"s life was constantly threatened by Salafis. Upon his release, Sheikh Muayad paid a visit to another Sadrist cleric, Sheikh Haitham al-Ansari, and told him that his experiences in jail had changed his view of the Americans. "After I was in the jail, I knew who is my enemy and who is not," Sheikh Muayad said. "The Americans are not my enemy. The Americans have interests, and anybody who wants to block Americans from obtaining those interests becomes their enemy, and they destroy him. Stay away from their road and they will not touch you. Our enemies are the Wahhabis. They used to attack us in the jail many times, they wanted to a.s.sa.s.sinate me more than once, and one of their main goals is to damage Ali"s tomb in Najaf."
Sunnis perceived the post-Baathist state as the enemy because state organs, along with the Americans, had been treating Sunnis as the enemy since 2003. Even before the elections of 2005, the government felt pressured to show Shiite ma.s.ses that something was being done about the daily car bombs slaughtering them in the streets. Iraqi television began showing a highly sectarian program t.i.tled Terror in the Hands of Justice, on which alleged Sunni insurgents were shown confessing to crimes such as rape and sodomy. On one episode an interrogator accused prominent Sunni tribes such as the Jubur, Janabi, and Dulaimi of being terrorists. The show increased Sunni fears that the Shiite-dominated security forces were targeting them en ma.s.se.
When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi-the brutal leader of the jihadist group that morphed into Al Qaeda in Iraq after Zarqawi pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden-declared war on Shiites in a speech on September 14, 2005, Iraq"s radical Sunni leadership were quick to condemn it. The a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars announced that Iraq"s Shiites 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 allowed one to seek revenge on an innocent person, they said, and accused Zarqawi of colluding in the Americans" plan to create civil war in Iraq. Meanwhile, five resistance groups, the Army of Muhammad, the Al Qaqa Battalions, the Islamic Army of Iraq, the Army of Mujahideen, and the Salahuddin Brigades, condemned Zarqawi"s statements as well, calling them a "fire burning the Iraqi people" and explaining that they only attacked the occupiers and those who a.s.sisted them, and did not base their attacks on sectarian or ethnic criteria.
But these Sunni condemnations did not suffice for Muqtada al-Sadr. In late 2005 he sent a letter to various Sunni leaders stating that Zarqawi had labeled all Shiites infidels and that he and all Shiites were being targeted by Zarqawi"s deadly attacks. Muqtada demanded that Sunni leaders label Zarqawi an infidel and condemn him. No Sunni leader acceded to his demands. Some explained that it was too dangerous for them to do so, but Muqtada refused to accept their apologies and did not grant their fear of Zarqawi any merit. In addition, the a.s.sociation for Muslim Scholars didn"t just fail to heed Muqtada"s call to condemn Al Qaeda; one of its spokesmen, Muhammad Bashar al-Faidih, dismissed the letter with sarcasm. And its leader, Harith al-Dhari, allegedly said, "We are from Al Qaeda and they are from us." This must have been especially galling for Muqtada, because in the early period of the occupation the young Shiite cleric referred to Dhari respectfully as "al Ab al-Mujahid," the Mujahid Father. The Mahdi Army in Karbala had always been different from the one in Baghdad. It was less sectarian, less criminal, focused more on providing services. But even their language started to change after the AMS rejected Muqtada"s condemnation of Zarqawi.
This was a key moment for the Sadr movement and for sectarian relations in Iraq. Sadr decided to join the United Iraqi Alliance, the dominant Shiite coalition list in the December 2005 elections. For the first time one could see Mahdi Army soldiers sitting with Sistani followers and discussing politics amicably, whereas in the past it had been difficult even to have them in the same room without arguments occurring. Mahdi Army fighters complained bitterly about their betrayal by the Sunnis.
In March 2005 Sheikh Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai, director general of the Sunni Endowment and a former top official in the a.s.sociation for Muslim Scholars, gave a sermon in the Um Al Qura Mosque calling on 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 partic.i.p.ate, then those who sought to harm the security of the nation, meaning Shiites, would dominate the security forces. Samarai later explained that the "real resistance" understood the importance of such a move because they did not want militias, meaning Shiite and Kurdish militias, ruling Iraq. Sixty-four other high-ranking Sunni clerics from throughout Iraq signed on to Samarai"s fatwa.
The Balance of Power Shifts.
The balance of power shifted that year, and Shiite militias, led by the Mahdi Army, took the offensive. Bayan Jabr Solagh took over as interior minister after the 2005 elections. A Shiite of Turkoman origin, he had been the Supreme Council representative in Damascus in the 1990s. At the Interior Ministry he inherited more than one hundred thousand armed men. Along with Badr Brigade leader Hadi al-Amiri and others, he turned commando units such as the Hawk, Volcano, Wolf, and Two Rivers brigades into death squads. (In late 2005 the American military uncovered secret prisons these death squads were running, which were full of Sunnis. Bayan Jabr was not surprised by the revelations, a minister at the time told me. He didn"t question them; he just wanted to minimize the fallout, like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioning how cameras got into Abu Ghraib.) The Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq, or MNSTCI (p.r.o.nounced "minstikee"), run by Gen. David Petraeus, was in charge of rebuilding the Iraqi Security Forces. The Americans were focused on building inst.i.tutions, but they neglected the training of individuals, leading to huge numbers of inexperienced and poorly trained police being pushed out into the provinces without supervision. They were easily co-opted by sectarian forces. In late 2004 MNSTCI was planning on working with the Interior Ministry to create a riot police force. When MNSTCI decided to create the riot police, they ordered batons, plastic shields, and the other appropriate gear, but the security situation was so desperate that the Iraqis decided to turn it into a light infantry battalion under the Interior Ministry"s control.
Americans at MNSTCI heard that an Iraqi battalion had established itself in an old Republican Guard palace outside the Green Zone. Several hundred Iraqis served under the nominal command of a self-appointed Iraqi brigadier general, who was a Shiite former Republican Guard and had been imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. Most of his senior officers were ex-prisoners he knew from Abu Ghraib. It didn"t hurt that Bayan Jabr was his nephew. Money flowed to the unit. After the elections in January 2005, another battalion was added to it: the Iraqi police commandos.
The Americans wanted to create a "special police" and already had two battalions of those, so there were four battalions of infantry-essentially, a mini army under the Interior Ministry. At the time the Americans had just realized that the Iraqi army had to be pulled off the line and trained again, so for a while the only units fighting were the police commandos. "It was the era of the pop-up unit," one senior American official from MNSTCI told me. "You had a unit in the Iraqi army that was a militia called the Boys of East Baghdad. There were a lot of self-organized units. Right from the outset we were concerned about Shiite sectarianism, but even the concept of setting up comprehensive basic training [fifteen weeks of training in a centralized depot] was alien."
The Americans had firm control over the Defense Ministry because they destroyed the army and recreated it from scratch, attaching many advisers to it. But they never dismantled or took over the Interior Ministry. The few American intelligence officers at Interior were cooperating with the Iraqis to get information on Sunni armed groups. They couldn"t tell the difference between the Supreme Council, the Badr militia, and the Mahdi Army. The Americans hadn"t even translated the Iraqi laws into English.
Soon after Petraeus departed, the deputy minister of interior for finance explained to the outgoing commander of the Civilian Police a.s.sistance Training Team (CPATT), General Fils, that none of the weapons they distributed were accounted for because they were distributed directly to the police stations. One of those weapons was traced to a murder in Turkey. Many ended up in the hands of militias or the resistance. I would find them in Lebanon as well.
The way MNSTCI and CPATT were handled led to many of the troubles Iraq would later face, such as weapons in the hands of insurgents, the expansion of Shiite militias into security services, and difficulty a.s.sessing Iraqi police capabilities. Petraeus was spared approbation because he left before the impact of these problems became clear and returned when some corrections had already been made.
The road to Kut in the south was the site for many attacks on military and logistical convoys for the Americans and the Iraqi state, as well as ordinary Shiite civilians. To counter this, Interior Ministry forces arrested many men living in homes along the road. The security forces were made up of Shiites; the men they arrested were Sunnis. Operations such as this were a result of the increasingly aggressive and Shiite-dominated Iraqi Security Forces. Some of this was inevitable because Sunnis had avoided joining these new forces but the Interior Ministry had been given to Shiites, and poor young Shiite men were the ones most likely to fill the ranks of these forces. Most poor young Shiite men supported Muqtada, so it followed that the security forces fell under the control of Sadrists and their Mahdi Army.
Iran wanted to weaken the Sunni grip on power in Iraq, and the Badr militia was its spearhead, a former minister close to Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari told me. "Iran had a role," he said. "They forced people to confront what was happening and use resources under their control to organize a fighting force. Iran did that with its direct and indirect agents in Iraq." Parliament member Jamal Jaafir Mohammed Ali, known as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, was involved in discussions with the loose network of Shiites who had leadership cells on how to take on Sunnis: "How many people from Badr and the Mahdi Army to get into the police, how to do these extrajudicial killings, how to control mixed neighborhoods, how to target Baath Party operatives, they were networked, not following a central command."
Americans working at the Interior Ministry said it was a mess: one floor was full of Mahdi Army personnel, another was full of Badr. During the civil war, Land Cruiser SUVs from the Interior Ministry struck terror in people. They were nicknamed "Monikas" by Iraqis because of their wide ends, which reminded them of Monica Lewinski. The Mahdi Army used government Monikas, and people suspected that Jaafari gave Monikas to the militias.
The battles in the historic town of Madain-once the site of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, two of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia-in 2005 were another turning point, where the t.i.t-for-tat killing so familiar to urban Baghdad transformed into an open war between sectarian militias. Although the town had Shiites as well as Christians and members of the rare Sabean sect, which combines elements of Judaism and Christianity, it was a majority-Sunni town. Problems arose when about 150 Shiite families belonging to the southern Abu al-Aita tribe migrated north to the town, encamping in former military bases. These impoverished families were accused of looting, stealing, and wreaking havoc on the roads with their highway robbery. Resistance and insurgent groups that were trying to establish themselves as the local authorities soon clashed with the new Shiites. The insurgent groups also needed the roads un.o.bstructed so that they could conduct their own attacks on coalition and Iraqi Security Forces. Among these insurgents were members of Zarqawi"s Tawhid and Jihad groups, who brought with them foreign fighters. When the area fell under their control, unemployed youths swarmed to the insurgents. Salafi fighters started driving around the area in their pickup trucks, ordering all Shiites to leave the city.
But in response the Interior Ministry"s Wolf Brigade took over a school and based themselves there, fighting with the insurgents and making ma.s.s arrests of Sunnis. The Wolf Brigade was later replaced by the Karar Brigade, a unit that was based in the Wasit province in the Shiite south. Because Madain was part of Baghdad province, locals viewed with suspicion these Interior Ministry forces from a different province. The name Karar refers to Imam Ali, whom the Shiites revere, and it was not chosen coincidentally. The Karar Brigade rounded up hundreds of Sunni men, and for the first time the new Iraqi Security Forces established a reign of terror ominously resembling Saddam"s methods. Some of the Sunnis arrested were shown on the popular Shiite show Terror in the Hands of Justice. When an elderly Sabean (and therefore non-Muslim) man was shown on that program confessing to raping and killing a young Shiite girl, Shiites attacked the home of his wife, Um Rasha, and threatened to rape her daughters.
South of Baghdad, in Latifiya, similar battles were taking place. Although Latifiya was a quiet city in the year following the American invasion, its reputation took a turn for the worse after the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Ahmad Chalabi and the kidnapping of French journalists there in 2004. Latifiya was seized by Salafi extremists because it connected Baghdad to Falluja through hidden roads and dirt paths and because it allowed command of a crucial highway. The Mahdi Army, in response, commandeered police vehicles to attack suspected insurgents and Baathists, but these attacks expanded to include Salafis as well and even Sunnis merely suspected of being Salafis. Consequently Shiite families became victims of reprisals. The Albu Amir, or Al Amiri tribe, was one Shiite tribe well represented in Latifiya. Its most famous son was Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Brigade. A group of Sunni jihadis attacked a Shiite police officer from the tribe, killing him and his family, including his children. (The jihadis justified killing the children with a quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, calling for pulling the evil out by the roots. Since the jihadis viewed all Shiites as anti-Islam, they viewed their children as future enemies of Islam.) Members from the Al Amiri tribe responded immediately, attacking Sunnis they suspected were responsible, killing them and defiling their corpses, and burning some of them. The Sunni dead were members of several tribes, which retaliated by launching mortars at random Shiite houses. These battles lasted for more than a week, until the Sunni and Shiite tribes met for a reconciliation at which the Shiites settled the dispute by paying blood money to the Sunnis. Latifiya subsequently fell under the control of the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars. When a Shiite contractor from Baghdad who worked with the Americans was a.s.signed a project in Latifiya, he and his partners met with a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars leader Harith al-Dhari. They paid him tens of thousands of dollars to guarantee their security. As a result they were able to complete their contract in the otherwise dangerous region without attack.
In August 2005 rumors of a bomb caused a panic stampede among Shiite pilgrims on the bridge linking Adhamiya and Kadhimiya. Up to one thousand people drowned or were crushed to death. Leading Supreme Council cleric Jalaluddin al-Saghir mourned the dead in his sermon the next Friday, calling them "beloved" and condemning the sort of jihad that targets innocent women and children engaged in worship. He also singled out the defense minister, Saadoun al-Dulaimi, a Sunni, for allegedly letting criminals and Wahhabis infiltrate his ministry. Saghir said that the Interior Ministry-which was in the Shiite hands of the Supreme Council-should have been responsible for providing security for the area. Saghir did praise the people of neighboring majority-Sunni Adhamiya, however, for risking their lives to help save some of the drowning pilgrims. Leading Sunni cleric Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai, of the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, speaking in Ghazaliya"s Um Al Qura Mosque, echoed Saghir"s praise for the bravery of Adhamiya"s Sunnis. But without naming sects, because that would have been bad form, he implicitly condemned the Shiite security forces for their "state terrorism" and execution of Sunnis while complaining that Sunnis were unfairly blamed for the Kadhimiya tragedy. He was followed by another cleric, who condemned the Supreme Council and Dawa for killing innocent people and pushing Iraq to civil war out of fear for their waning support on the Shiite street.
By 2005 sectarian attacks and cleansing were increasing elsewhere in Iraq, too. Eleven Shiites from Najaf who worked as fishermen in Haditha were killed in mid-2005. More and more Shiites heading south to visit shrines were attacked, and pa.s.sing through Latifiya was a nightmare for Shiite pilgrims. In December 2005 government troops intervened, attacking Sunnis and securing the road, but Shiites continued their exodus out of that troubled area, feeling threatened. The same trends were evident throughout much of Iraq, especially in Baghdad. Former high-ranking military officers, especially pilots, who fought in the eight-year war against Iran, were systematically a.s.sa.s.sinated. In August 2005 the Interior Ministry"s Volcano Brigade arrested several dozen Sunni men from the majority-Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Hurriya. Days later their tortured bodies were found far away, by the Iranian border. In September 2005 five Shiite schoolteachers and their driver were executed in Malha, a village next to Iskandariya. Their killers wore police uniforms. In October Mahdi Army men fought alongside the Interior Ministry in an attack on a Sunni town where some Shiites were being held.
"Human rights departments" of various political parties produced tendentious and one-sided accounts of their victimization, and Iraqi and Arab satellite media magnified their effects. Sunnis despised the Supreme Council"s Badr Brigade because it had been based in Iran, but it was the more homegrown Mahdi Army that was primarily responsible for attacks against Sunnis. A Mahdi Army soldier confided, "We kill more Wahhabis than Badr does, and we throw their bodies in our city, but accusation"s finger points to Badr anyway." Although the Interior Ministry was controlled by the Supreme Council, the police were outside the ministry"s control. With a small number of police cars, they could operate at night-past curfew, when only official cars were permitted-and enter Sunni neighborhoods with impunity to arrest or kill anyone they wanted. In Baghdad and much of Iraq, the police and the Mahdi Army were one and the same-as were the Iraqi army forces posted throughout the country. Iraqi police stations and army bases were decorated with Muqtada al-Sadr"s daunting visage, as were their vehicles. Even in the all-Sunni Anbar province, the Iraqi army was composed of Shiite supporters of Muqtada. In the spring of 2006, when Sunni soldiers from Anbar graduated as new members of the Iraqi army and were told they would serve among Shiites outside their home province, they rioted and tore off their uniforms. The Americans had established police forces in Anbar, composed of local Sunni men selected by their tribes. When I visited these police in the spring of 2006, they had not been paid in months because the Interior Ministry was not sending the money.
The Mahdi Army"s sudden prowess was attributed to its recent cooperation with Lebanese Hizballah. Muqtada, who was modeling his army on Hizballah, had sent his senior men to Lebanon to make this possible. Mahdi Army men told me that the Lebanese trainers had come to them as well. To the Mahdi Army, the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars were merely Salafis and Baathists in the attire of normal Sunni clerics; they presumptuously claimed that "they are not representing our Sunni brothers." This gave them carte blanche to kill any Sunni they wanted. The Mahdi Army knew that the Sunni insurgency had coalesced, and Iraqi nationalist groups, including the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, began supporting Zarqawi"s attacks and providing his men with shelter. Zarqawi himself was said to have visited Harith al-Dhari"s village of Zawba several times.
In late 2005 I returned to Amriya with my friend Ha.s.san to break the Ramadan fast. We were joined by Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. The conversation quickly turned to the deteriorating security situation, particularly for Sunnis. Gangs of Shiite killers, targeting radical Sunni clerics or former Baathists suspected of supporting the resistance, were penetrating Amriya. Sheikh Hussein, a Salafi with clear links to the resistance that dominated Amriya, had nearly been a.s.sa.s.sinated by Badr militiamen belonging to the Interior Ministry, who had arrived at his home in a police car. He had hidden in his home, and they missed him. He had only recently emerged from hiding. Noticing that his significant girth had increased, I asked him, "How did you hide? You"re not small." He smiled and said, "We are all targets today." Sheikh Hussein supported Sunni partic.i.p.ation in the upcoming elections and agreed with the Sheikh Samarai"s fatwa urging them to join the security forces. He expressed concern that the "Arabs," meaning foreign fighters, who wanted to fight until judgment day, would refuse to accept negotiations with the government and an eventual ceasefire.
Escalation.
The December 2005 elections were hailed as a milestone for the Bush administration, but they further enshrined sectarianism in Iraq. Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, was the secular nationalist candidate. He fared even worse in these elections than he had the previous January. Other nonsectarian parties failed even to obtain one seat. Sunni partic.i.p.ation proved that the resistance was disciplined and controlled by Iraqis: not only did members of the resistance refrain from attacking Sunni voters; in some cases they protected them, since they too viewed a large Sunni turnout as a key element in their struggle to obtain a larger Sunni role in the new Iraq.
Fighting between Sunni militias and the Mahdi Army escalated, but war was never formally declared. One Mahdi Army soldier explained that "Wahhabis know we are killing them, otherwise they would not attack us back, but they have not declared war on us, because then all the Shiites of Iraq would be against them and they would lose." In private conversations, Sunni insurgents and their leaders were seething about Muqtada and his Mahdi Army, claiming they were fighting to protect Iran and not out of Iraqi nationalism. But in public they hid their hostility to the Mahdi Army and instead accused the Badr Brigade of a.s.sa.s.sinating Sunnis.
During the battles against coalition forces that began in April 2004, the Mahdi Army began forming into divisions and became more organized and hierarchical. Shaab was the neighborhood in Baghdad with the second-largest number of Mahdi Army fighters. When the fighting subsided, the Mahdi Army maintained its divisions and kept many of its guns and vehicles. Many Shiites were a.s.sa.s.sinated by Sunnis in Shaab, and Shiites retaliated in a t.i.t-for-tat that foreshadowed what was to come. Although Shiites were the majority in Shaab, their operations targeting Sunnis were not well organized or coordinated, and were not launched by one specific group.
Before the war, Shaab-and in particular its Ur neighborhood-had been dominated by anti-regime Sadrists. In the 1990s an Iranian agent called Abu Haidar al-Kheiqani had formed a secret armed opposition group along with a former Communist called Muayad al-Mundher. The two lived in Ur. They recruited a young friend called Haitham al-Khazraji, who would become known as Haitham al-Ansari. Haitham had a brother who was a low-level security officer in what was then known as Saddam City (later Sadr City). Haitham"s brother was known as Ali Mustache because of his big mustache and was in charge of arrests there.
Abu Haidar asked Haitham to join the Sadrists in the hawza to act as a spotter and recruiter. Haitham joined and became a cleric, and helped build the Shurufi Mosque in Shaab. (My close friend Firas in Shaab would become Haitham"s a.s.sistant, driver, and bodyguard.) He issued fatwas in support of low-level acts of resistance. He would permit a car to be stolen if it was used against the regime. He would permit a woman to take off her hijab and sit in a car with a man who wasn"t her husband if it helped an anti-regime operation. One time, a female operative sat in a car with a male operative who pretended to be drunk; they got into a fake accident, ramming into an intelligence officer. In the fight that ensued, the officer was shot to death.
Abu Haidar"s group is also said to have killed Haji Falah, the head of intelligence in Saddam City, and it was tied to the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Saddam"s son Uday. Haitham was said to be personally secular, but he saw religion as the only means to combat Saddam"s regime. In about 1998 the Baathists banned Friday prayers in Shurufi Mosque. A riot broke out, and two people were arrested. Others threw stones at security cars.
In about 1998 Abu Haidar, Muayad, and Haitham were all arrested. Abu Haidar and Muayad were executed. Haitham convinced his interrogator, a Sunni from the Dulaimi tribe, that he was just a friend of the other two; he was released after he agreed to work for Iraqi security. But he fled to Jordan, where he became the caretaker for the Jaafar Al Tayar shrine in Karak, the main Shiite shrine in that country. He also sold trinkets on the street and was the only Shiite cleric in Jordan.
In Jordan Haitham was recruited by Ahmad Chalabi"s Iraqi National Congress. Haitham"s role for the INC was to recruit Sadrists. He told the INC that he would not engage in military operations for them, but he secretly involved himself in small-scale acts of sabotage, using the money the INC gave him, which in those three years was not more than thirty thousand dollars. He met officials from the American Defense Intelligence Agency, who sent Thoraya satellite phones to his network in Iraq in exchange for intelligence about the Iraqi Security Forces. Right before the war, Iraqi security realized that Haitham was running spies in Iraq and arrested and tortured some of his people. Nonetheless, Haitham had strong ambitions in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. He proposed moving his operations to western Iraq-princ.i.p.ally the Anbar province-but CIA officials rejected this plan, because they had authorized that area for their own man, Ayad Allawi. On April 11, 2003, two days after Baghdad fell, Haitham returned to Ur, linking up with survivors of his network and the renascent Sadrist movement.
Haitham didn"t respect Muqtada and the old guard, and at first he joined the ranks of Muqtada"s rival, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaqoubi. But he was quickly disenchanted and soon rejoined Muqtada. All the while he was also collaborating with Chalabi"s INC. Haitham was friends with two other low-level Sadrists from Ur, Ali al-Lami and Jawad al-Bolani; he introduced them to Chalabi, giving their careers a huge boost.
After the war Haitham set up the Tawhid (Unity) a.s.sociation in Ur. In its building Bolani and Lami had offices, as did a former anti-Saddam activist from the southern marshes named Karim Mahud al-Muhammadawi, known as Abu Hatem, or the prince of the marshes, who would go on to lead Iraqi Hizballah. The Tawhid a.s.sociation became an important center. Shiite politicians would visit it; even the American military came. People returned stolen goods to Tawhid, and it had a religious school for women.
After I went over several hundred of the many thousands of doc.u.ments I found in the looted security station in Baghdad (see chapter one), I gave them to my friend Firas, and he, in turn, gave them to the Tawhid. Firas drove Haitham to his weekly meetings with Chalabi in Mansour. Falah Ha.s.san Shanshal, who would go on to head the Sadrist bloc of Parliament, would also come to the meetings. Haitham brokered a meeting in a Sadr City mosque between Muhammadawi, Lami, and Bolani. Muhammadawi was seeking local Baghdad representatives and had appointed Bolani and Lami as his local first and second deputies. When Chalabi asked his old friend Haitham to introduce him to local Shiite politicians who could reach into Shiite communities, Haitham introduced him to Lami and Bolani. Together they established an umbrella political group, the Shiite House. The Shiite House became the Shiite Political Council and eventually the Iraqi National Alliance, the main Shiite list in the elections. In late summer 2004, when the Iranians started working with the Sadrists, Haitham was invited to Iran. But the meeting was postponed, and he never made it.
After the war, Sadrists took over a Baath Party office in Ur and turned it into a husseiniya (Shiite place of worship). It was originally controlled by Ayatollah Yaqoubi"s Fadhila organization. Haitham helped oversee the Mustafa Husseiniya, and when he fell out with Yaqoubi he transferred it to Muqtada"s followers. In the summer of 2004, Haitham helped establish a local death squad in the Mustafa Husseiniya. Its men targeted Wahhabis and "terrorists."
When the IGC set up its de-Baathification office, Muhammadawi appointed Lami the managing director of the archives department, which housed all the doc.u.ments that contained background information on Baath Party suspects. (Bolani and Lami apparently despised each other and parted company.) When Chalabi suffered total defeat in the 2005 elections, he grew closer with Lami and grew to depend on him. Chalabi used Lami"s bodyguards because they had a fearsome reputation for their skill, and their special privileges allowed them to arrest anybody they accused of being a former Baathist.
Chalabi and Lami visited Iran together often. Both men were sectarian and felt that Shiites had been deprived of their rights in the past. This time they would make sure Shiites took over. Lami became known as Ali Faisal and would run de-Baathification. He hated Baathists and bore a grudge against Sunnis because of his past as a poor Shiite from the slums of Ur. He had lists of Baathists he wanted to dismiss and was determined to purge the Shiite ex-Baathists who had been rehabilitated by the Supreme Council and were protected by it. Meanwhile, Bolani was working with Muhammadawi but looking for other jobs. For a man who would go on to accrue huge political power at the Interior Ministry, he didn"t seem to be picky then. He applied for a job as a flour mill manager, but Chalabi adopted Bolani and took him to Washington in 2004, thus giving him his international profile.
On December 31, 2004, Haitham was killed near his house by a local Shaab terrorist group. Pa.s.sions were further inflamed with the attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of Muhammadawi, whose car was shot at as he left the funeral.
Muqtada"s deputy Sheikh Safaa al-Tamimi decided to avenge Haitham"s a.s.sa.s.sination and established a special a.s.sa.s.sination squad under his command. All his men belonged to the Mahdi Army, and all their targets belonged to the Salafi movement. A room inside the Mustafa Husseiniya was used for torturing suspects until they confessed. Confessions were filmed, and some included executions of prisoners who admitted to attacking Shiites or civilians. Only the prisoner was shown in the film, with the interrogator in the background calmly asking questions in a southern Iraqi accent (the same one common in Sadr City). Some films showed groups of prisoners sitting together. One such film showed the group that confessed to the murder of Haitham. These snuff films were kept in Sheikh Safaa"s possession and were not reproduced, saved as evidence that only people who deserved it were executed.
Sheikh Safaa"s death squad was well armed, with grenades, grenade launchers, and Kalashnikovs. The soldiers of the group were selected by the sheikh for their physical strength or martial prowess. The group was supplied with many vehicles by supporters in Shaab. Having Mahdi Army friends in the Vehicle Registration Department made it easy for the group to replace their license plates. Their a.s.sa.s.sination campaign led to a ma.s.sive clearance of Sunnis from Shaab, part of a deliberate strategy to cleanse the area of Mahdi Army enemies following two years of clashes with Salafis.
Sheikh Safaa had final approval of all targets, who would then be tracked for a couple of days before their murder. When his men conducted operations and raids, they usually wore either all black or military uniforms. Sometimes they coordinated their operations with the Iraqi army. The group typically raided a target"s house at night, dragging him from bed, taking him to the mosque for interrogation, executing him, and then dumping the body on the outskirts of Sadr City in a place locally known as Al Sadda (The Dam), where there was a sand berm. Before these Shiite revenge attacks, radical Salafis had imposed their rule on much of Shaab, even killing barbers to prevent local citizens from having their beards shaved. In January 2006, one Mahdi Army soldier said, "We cleaned our city from all Wahhabis," adding, "now we can live peacefully in Shaab."
At around the same time, Muqtada"s spokesman in Kadhimiya, Hazim al-Araji, condemned "terrorists" (his euphemism for Sunnis), but he also a.s.serted that the American occupiers were allied with these "terrorists" against Shiites.
BRUTAL AS THE American occupation was, it was also incompetent. The Americans never controlled much in Iraq. They could destroy, but they had trouble building. They allowed militias to take over Iraq and allowed the police, who should have been protecting civilians from the predations of militias, to become involved in the conflict as one of the main sectarian militias. And they either ignored it for the sake of expediency, as they did when they dealt with warlords in post-Taliban Afghanistan, or they were simply unaware. But there were exceptions, intelligent and sensitive officers who sensed what was happening and could see the sectarian catastrophe that the American invasion had unleashed.
Phil Carter"s experience as a captain in the U.S. Army is a disturbing example of what was happening across Iraq. Carter served in Baquba, in the Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, between October 2005 and September 2006. As part of a team training and supervising the Iraqi police, he saw firsthand the results of that initial failure to build a professional culture within the Interior Ministry, which had become rife with cronyism and Shiite chauvinism. Thanks in part to the Sunni boycott of the elections, Shiites were overrepresented in Diyala, and the Supreme Council was very powerful. Carter"s team advised Diyala"s chief of police, Maj. Gen. Gha.s.san Adnan al-Bawi, who was an official with the Supreme Council"s Badr militia, and they operated closely with the governor, who was also a Badr official.
"Al-Bawi was running Badr death-squad ops, even targeting other Shiites they had political beefs with," Carter told me. "Badr death squads were doing targeted killings in houses and businesses. Good Shiite officers were sidelined. If they tried to take an initiative they would get fired or moved or, on a couple of occasions, killed." The chief of the major crimes unit, Colonel Ali, was nicknamed "Cable Ali" by the Americans. "He was running a torture chamber. We found them, and we pushed to get him charged by the Ministry of Interior, and he was eventually arrested. But he was sprung by the police chief. We had gotten him fired a couple of times, but he was always reinstated. The rumor was that he was a CIA guy and a CIA source on intelligence." When Carter first arrived, his predecessors told him that they had made a bargain with their colleagues from Diyala: ""They"re thugs, but they"re our thugs. They keep order, just don"t ask questions." These guys were running their own little organized crime ent.i.ty, selling fuel on the black market," Carter observed. "There was graft of police funds, extortion. Sectarianism showed in who they picked for leaders and what neighborhoods they would neglect." Even when they had evidence of misconduct, Carter and his men often felt powerless. "Iraqi detainees were tortured by Iraqi officers with power drills," Carter said. They had cigarette burns and bruises on their backs. Every indicator was that they were picked up on a sweep and had done nothing wrong, just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and were Sunni. Carter wanted to make an example of one Iraqi army officer, but the Military Transition Team [MTT, p.r.o.nounced "mitt"] with him was obstructive. They thought he was effective.
In November 2005, Carter"s team got 200 reports of police abuse from families visiting detained relatives. Carter took the complaints to Bawi, the police chief. He said he would launch an investigation, promising to look into people who were obviously innocent. But what about guilty people? Carter retorted. They got what they deserved. Bawi said. He cited Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib: ""I only do what you do. You don"t understand, Captain Carter. You just got here.""
Between January and March 2006, just as IED attacks and ambushes were increasing in the wake of the Samarra bombings, the U.S. battalion in charge of Baquba decided to close the base in Baquba and move it to Camp Warhorse, on the edge of the city. "It was the height of strategic folly," Carter complained. "At the moment things are getting worse, we pull back."
This pattern was repeated throughout Iraq as the Americans ceded territory to militias and the civil war intensified. Americans realized too late that their presence was provoking hostility, and removed their soldiers from the streets. But by then the occupation was second to the civil war.
ON FEBRUARY 22, 2006, the Shiite Askari Shrine in Samarra was blown up. In the days that followed, more than 1,300 bodies were found in Baghdad, most of them Sunni. Once these figures were revealed, the Interior Ministry-whose forces were probably responsible for a large number of the killings-asked the Shiite-controlled Ministry of Health to cover them up. Shiites took over dozens of Sunni mosques and renamed them after the Samarra shrine. Shiite militias targeted the Abu Hanifa Mosque in Adhamiya with numerous mortars. Muqtada was said to have announced that "we have the legitimate cover to kill al-Nawasib," a pejorative term for Sunnis.
Sunni-controlled television stations in Iraq-such as Baghdad TV, controlled by the Iraqi Islamic Party-showed only Sunni victims of the retaliatory attacks. Shiite stations such as Al Furat and Al Iraqiya focused on the damaged shrine and Shiite victims. Al Furat was even more aggressive, encouraging Shiites to "stand up for their rights."
Following the attack Sunni militias faced the increased wrath of the Mahdi Army. Throughout Iraq Mahdi Army cadres flooded the streets, marching and chanting in unison. Sunni militias understand that the only militia in Iraq capable of defeating the Supreme Council"s Badr was the Mahdi Army, which is why they initially courted Muqtada and his men, who opposed Iranian intervention. This is also why Sunni militias hoped to establish a united front with the Mahdi Army against the Americans.
Two days after the Samarra attack, Sheikh Ya.s.ser, a young Shiite sheikh in the Shuhada Al Taf Mosque, was pa.s.sing by the Sunni Al Sajjad Mosque in the Maalif neighborhood. His car was stopped and searched by armed guards working for the mosque. The sheikh later informed the Mahdi Army, who controlled a mosque elsewhere in the neighborhood. Mahdi Army soldiers surrounded the Sajjad Mosque and searched it for explosives. Sunnis informed the media, and local stations claimed that the Mahdi Army had taken over the mosque. On the following Friday Sunnis asked for U.S. Army protection against possible Mahdi Army attacks during their Friday prayers. The Sajjad Mosque belonged to the extremist Ansar Sunnah group: it had celebrated two funerals for Iraqi Palestinian suicide bombers who were killed in late 2004 during operations against coalition forces, and it occasionally celebrated the graduation of children who memorized the Koran in ceremonies named after Al Qaeda videos such as Winds of Victory.
Shortly after the Samarra attacks I spoke to a Shiite friend from Maalif. "The Mahdi Army is cleansing my neighborhood," he said, "and they issued threats to many Sunni families forcing them to leave. They also killed many Sunnis. It started after the death of more than fifty civilians in the neighborhood in one day [mortar attacks from Gartan] and another sequence of explosions including two car bombs and several IEDs. The Sunnis in the neighborhood were about 40 percent, and now they are about 20 percent. Only Sunnis who are not involved in the insurgency or were not from the former regime did not receive threats, and so they did not leave the city. Rent prices for houses went down. Sunnis who have Shiite friends in other neighborhoods started switching their houses. Shiite families move to majority-Shiite neighborhoods, and Sunni families move to majority-Sunni neighborhoods. They exchange houses for free but with trust that they will get their houses back. This leads to changing the demography of every neighborhood."
Every morning in 2006 the streets of Baghdad were littered with dozens of bodies, bruised, torn, mutilated, executed only because they were Sunni or Shiite. Power drills were an especially popular torture device. In the spring of 2006 I spent six weeks in Iraq and went through three different drivers. At various times each had to take a day off because a neighbor or relative had been killed. One morning fourteen bodies were found, all with ID cards in their front pockets, all called Omar. Omar is an exclusively Sunni name. It was a message. In Baghdad those days n.o.body was more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands overlapping on their abdomens, right hand above left, the way Sunnis pray. It was a simple message: if you are Sunni, we will kill you. Sunnis and Shiites were obtaining false papers with neutral names. Sunni militias were stopping buses and demanding the jinsiya, or ID cards, of all pa.s.sengers. Those belonging to Shiite tribes were executed.
Following the January 2005 elections the Health and Transportation ministries were given to Sadr loyalists, who immediately started cleansing them of Sunnis and ideologically unsound Shiites. Sadrists inst.i.tuted a program they called "cleaning the ministry from Saddamists." Although not all Sunnis were targeted, many Sunnis felt that all Sunnis were being labeled Saddamists.
In the Health Ministry pictures of Muqtada and his father were everywhere. Black banners for Shiite traditions were all over the walls, and Shiite traditional music played inside the ministry. Only people who supported the Sadr movement could join the ministry now. Doctors and ministry employees referred to the minister of health as imami, or "my imam," as though he were a cleric. What Sunnis were left in the ministry worked only in Sunni areas where Shiites were afraid to visit. The Transportation Ministry was also controlled by clerics. Its walls were adorned with Shiite posters and banners as well as those supporting Muqtada specifically. Sunni engineers and staff were pushed out. As in the Health and Interior ministries, Shiites with no experience filled the ranks, the only qualification being an ideological one. In one case a Sunni chief engineer was fired and replaced with an unqualified Shiite who wore a cleric"s turban to work. This has led to a dramatic drop in efficiency, with ministries barely functioning. Kurdish-controlled offices also avoided hiring Sunni Arabs.
Attacks increased throughout the country. In Kirkuk the Ahl Al Bayt Huseiniya was attacked by Sunni militiamen who blocked off the street with cars and killed at least two civilians. In the nearby village of Bashir, they attacked the Shiite Imam Ridha shrine. Officially, Muqtada opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he had unleashed his fighters on Sunnis. Sectarian and ethnic cleansing continued apace, with mixed neighborhoods being purified. In Amriya, dead bodies were being found on the main street at the rate of three a day. People were afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, because they would be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya, and other mixed neighborhoods, Shiites were being forced to leave. In Maalif Sunnis were being targeted. In its statements the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars referred to the police as "government police," not the Iraqi police, because it viewed them as illegitimate, and it called the Mahdi Army the "black sectarians" because of their uniforms, or the "new sectarians." Iraq was a divided country, even in its media. New channels such as Al Furat, which was controlled by the Supreme Council, and Sharqiya, which was controlled by former Baathist Saad Bazzaz, continued the wars fought on the street, inflaming people"s fears and hatreds. If Sunni and Shiite militias could not a.s.sa.s.sinate political figures, they often targeted the close relatives of judges, governors, ministers, and members of the national a.s.sembly.
Shiite families fled Abu Ghraib, Al Taji, and Al Mashahada, moving into Shiite strongholds in Baghdad, such as Shuula, where Muqtada"s representatives took care of them. Shiites were still angry. "Destroying all Sunni mosques is still not equivalent to bombing the Askari shrine" was the dominant Shiite att.i.tude in Baghdad. Hundreds of Shiite families from Sunni towns settled in Red Crescent-run refugee camps near Kut. The United States constantly shifted its support back and forth between Sunnis and Shiites, calling on Shiites to rein in their militias, a key Sunni demand, while conducting ma.s.sive and lethal raids on the Sunni population-alienating everyone in Iraq but the Kurds.
In February 2006 the National Accord Front-the largest Sunni coalition, with forty-four seats in the new Parliament-threatened to begin civil disobedience if attacks and arrests targeting Sunnis were not halted. In areas where Shiites were the minority, they feared the mulathamin (masked ones), referring to the Sunni militias who covered their faces with their head scarves. Sunnis, in turn, feared "interior," a reference to the Interior Ministry, or "the black sectarians" of the Mahdi Army.
THE CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ was a victory of the slum over the city, or the periphery over the center. The Kurds, the Shiites, and even the Sunnis of the center were marginalized or killed. For the Sunnis, for example, it was the Anbar Sunni-more rural, more tribal-who briefly rose to prominence in 2007. In Kurdistan, the pesh merga and the Kurds of the mountains have prevailed. Under Saddam there were many pro-regime, Arabic-speaking, Iraqified Kurds living in Baghdad and Mosul. They have been pushed into Kurdistan.
For those who resisted having to choose a sectarian ident.i.ty, there were few choices except exile. The integrated Iraqis had been Saddam"s citizens; they were his middle cla.s.s, his urban dream, and they lived in the heart of the state. Many were state employees under the direct control of the state. They were of the state"s making, and they have died with the state. Millions of Iraqis have left Iraq. More than two million Iraqis had fled before the war, in the 1990s, when the UN-imposed sanctions destroyed Saddam"s allies and his urban middle-cla.s.s technocrats. Millions more have fled their homes since the war began, most of them from the mixed areas of Iraq. Many have been expelled from their urban homes by the sectarian militias who descended from the mountains, the desert, the marshes, the slums.
CHAPTER THREE.
Slaughterhouse.
ON MARCH 26, 2006, AMERICAN AND IRAQI FORCES RAIDED THE Mustafa Husseiniya, the small but locally well-known Shiite gathering place and place of worship in eastern Baghdad"s Ur neighborhood, adjoining the larger Shaab district. Sixteen to eighteen people were killed in the raid. A U.S. military statement issued later that day claimed that "Iraqi Special Operations Forces conducted a twilight raid in the Adhamiyah neighborhood in northeast Baghdad to disrupt a terrorist cell responsible for conducting attacks on Iraqi security and coalition forces and kidnapping Iraqi civilians," adding that "no mosques were entered or damaged," that the operation was conducted at dusk to "ensure no civilians were in the area and to minimize the possibility of collateral damage," and that U.S. forces were only advising the Iraqi soldiers who conducted the raid. Some accounts claimed that American and Iraqi soldiers had been pursuing a suspect who fled to the mosque. They were fired upon and returned fire, killing sixteen "insurgents" and arresting fifteen others. It was also claimed they rescued a hostage. Former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Dawa Party angrily complained that the sixteen dead had been inside a mosque. Nuri al-Maliki, who had succeeded Jaafari as prime minister, was interviewed on Iraqi state television. "This was a hostile attack intended to destroy the political process and provoke a civil war," he said. He blamed the American military and American amba.s.sador Zalmay Khalilzad.
I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya the day after the raid. I arranged to meet an old friend Firas from Shaab who was a friend of Sheikh Safaa al-Tamimi of the Mustafa Husseiniya. We drove into Shaab and into a long convoy of Mahdi Army pickup trucks and minibuses waving flags and machine guns. Shaab had deteriorated since my previous trip a few months earlier. After the recent Samarra explosions, three Sunni mosques in Shaab had been burned. The siege there was palpable. There were several hundred Mahdi Army fighters, and among the convoy were also blue-and-white Iraqi police pickup trucks. After we pa.s.sed a police checkpoint, a white civilian car began to follow us. My driver gestured with his head at the rearview mirror to let me know. Suddenly he made a U-turn and squeezed into traffic going in the opposite direction, losing them. We met Firas on the side of the road far from the husseiniya. He would act as if he did not know me when we met at the mosque because it could be dangerous for him if people in Shaab knew he had foreign friends. He was himself a journalist and a close confidant of Sheikh Safaa, and had asked the sheikh to guarantee my safety. He wore a black suit and dark shirt with no tie and leather shoes. He had an informal intelligence-gathering capacity in the neighborhood.
Three years earlier I had shared with Firas the thousands of Baathist security files I found in the abandoned and looted general security office. These files contained the day-to-day operations of Saddam"s dictatorship and revealed the names of Baathist collaborators and spies. I felt that they were Iraqi patrimony and that I should hand them over to some Iraqi movement. Firas gave them all to the Tawhid a.s.sociation, and I never got them back. I now know from other friends that my files were used to compile hit lists by Shiite militias in Shaab and that Firas was involved in this. I never asked him directly. He had told Sheikh Safaa about me, and the sheikh was expecting me, but Firas warned me once more to pretend I didn"t know him.