Nir Rosen - Aftermath

After the prayers I spoke to Sayyid Jalil, the imam of the Shurufi Mosque, and asked him to explain the importance of Imam Hussein and the story of Ashura. “Hussein was the father of freedom and free people, who defended the rights of the working class and poor people,” Sayyid Jalil told me.

“Today’s Yazid is Bush and those who follow Bush,” he said. “They are all Yazid. There is a Hussein and Yazid for every era. Everyone who oppresses people, steals their freedom, and forcibly shuts their mouths is Yazid. Anyone who attacks people, occupies their land, and claims he came to free them is Yazid. Yazid’s wish was for everyone to kneel before him so he could keep his seat forever.” Muqtada had said no, Sayyid Jalil told me, which was exactly what Imam Hussein had said, “and also what our father and the father of all Muslims, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, had previously said—he said no to Saddam. This word came from Hussein when he said no to Yazid. This impressed people and attracted them to the leader.” Unfortunately, some politicians were supporting the occupation, he said, and therefore were supporting Yazid. “The leader,” as he called Muqtada, was popular because he opposed the occupation and supported Hussein’s revolution. I asked him how Muqtada could lead without the proper religious degree. Muqtada was a Hojatullah, he told me, a clerical rank that entitled him to lead “the biggest group in the Iraqi nation,” meaning the Sadrists. Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanese Hizballah was a great leader, but he didn’t have a high religious degree either, Sayyid Jalil told me. “A degree is not necessary to make a leader,” he said. “Many leaders don’t have degrees, and that doesn’t make them unpopular.”

“We have not seen anything of this alleged democracy,” he continued. “We have seen destruction, we have seen pain. Now our young sons are living under the force of occupation, they are suffering the pain of prisons, not for any guilt they have but because they said, ‘Allah is our God.’ This is something that everyone should have the right to say. The occupation doesn’t want that. They don’t want anyone to say no to the Great Satan. If the occupation came for the sake of Iraq and Iraqis, we wouldn’t see these massacres that are carried out in the name of freedom, humanity, and democracy. In fact, we would have seen the opposite of that. We view Hussein’s revolution as a revolution for all humankind. It includes old people, children, and young people who are filled with passion and believe in their cause. Every honest man should believe in the revolution of Hussein if they oppose occupation, oppression, and slavery.”

FIVE YEARS AFTER a war launched allegedly to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American planes bombed Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and Basra while dispatching their weak Iraqi proxy forces in a failed attempt to crush the Sadrists. Curfews were imposed and American snipers killed Iraqi civilians. The fighting between Muqtada’s supporters and rival Shiite militias backed by Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa Party, as well as the large Iranian-created Badr Organization of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI), signaled the end of the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.

Until 2007 the Sadrists had tacitly cooperated with the Badr Organization to purge Sunnis from Baghdad and the Iraqi state. There had been exceptions, as the two groups were rivals and represented different classes among the Shiites. But during the civil war, the tacit alliance between the two Shiite factions was very effective, and that success was one of the main reasons violence was down in Iraq. There were fewer people dying because there were fewer people to kill; the cleansing had nearly been completed, with Sunnis and Shiites inhabiting separate walled enclaves run by warlords and their militias. The security gains American officials bragged about were largely the result of the expulsion of millions of Iraqis from their homes and the construction of walls to divide or imprison them. But the inter-Shiite fighting opened up the possibilities of cross-sectarian alliances between Shiite nationalists opposed to the occupation and federalism and Sunnis who had virtually the same goals. The one factor militating against such an alliance was the deep hatred many Sunnis felt for the Sadrists after two or three years in which the Mahdi Army slaughtered Sunni civilians without discrimination. At a minimum, Sunni militiamen could sit back and enjoy watching their Shiite opponents getting weaker. The peak of cross-sectarian unity was in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and Shiite militias collaborated in fighting the occupation in Falluja and the south. Tragically for them, sectarianism divided them and weakened resistance to the occupation, ending in a costly civil war that tore Iraq apart. In February 2008 leading Sadrists warned that the freeze would not be extended later that month, but Muqtada did extend the Mahdi Army freeze.

Between the winter of 2007 and the winter of 2008, Maliki’s premiership transformed. Maliki won the trust of many Sunnis by making a surprise move and targeting Shiite militias. The Mahdi Army had overextended itself; Muqtada was not in control, and many Shiite militias had become mere criminal gangs. Nowhere was this more true than in the southern port city of Basra. Not only is Basra Iraq’s second-largest city; it is also where most of the country’s oil is concentrated, and it is from there that most of the oil is exported as well. A variety of Shiite militias and gangs controlled it, imposing an extremist reign of terror and letting the city and its port fall into the hands of mafias as the British, who nominally occupied the city, did little. In late March 2008 Maliki launched Operation Sawlat al-Fursan, or Charge of the Knights, dispatching fifteen thousand soldiers to Basra. There they attacked Mahdi Army fighters in the Sadr City-like slums of Hayaniya, Gzeiza, Jubeila, and Jumhuria, hoping to arrest those they described as criminals. Similar operations occurred throughout the south. Maliki described the targets as outlaws, not mentioning the Mahdi Army by name. Muqtada did not lift his cease-fire, but he did not tell his men to disarm either, and fighting spread throughout Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraqi Security Forces were unable to defeat the various Shiite militias in Basra, and it seemed as if they might even be repelled by the well-armed fighters. American armored vehicles and airstrikes were necessary to rescue the beleaguered ISF. Maliki’s seventy-two-hour deadline for the Mahdi Army to disarm was extended by several days, and his government even announced a weapons buy-back program. Maliki himself flew down to oversee the operation. Curfews were imposed in Shiite towns throughout the country, and the security forces acted with brutality. Up to 1,500 members of the ISF refused to fight, while about one hundred surrendered their weapons to the Mahdi Army. Rockets and mortars fell on the Green Zone in Baghdad. Many Iraqi civilians were also killed in the American airstrikes in Basra and Baghdad. The fighting spread to Washash, where the Mahdi Army fought the ISF for five days before deciding to abandon the neighborhood. The next month a few Sunni families returned to the area.

Before the operation was initiated, Hassan Hashem, secretary to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, carried a personal message to Muqtada in Iran, telling him to evacuate his people because they were about to get hit. But Maliki’s decision to target unruly Shiite militias, regardless of his motivations, was one of the most important factors ensuring the civil war would end. Sunnis like my Awakening friend Osama in Dora suddenly changed their mind about the prime minister and started supporting him.

Maliki’s move was also a surprise for the Americans. A British general in Basra complained to me that the Iraqis had appropriated a British military plan for attacking the Shiite militias in the city, but he may have been looking to restore a wounded ego. “Charge of the Knights was a British-inspired plan,” he told me eight months later. “It caught everybody by surprise. We were going to do it later. Charge of the Knights was written by the Royal Marines, but it was predicated on the Iraqi military being where they are now.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus had only twelve to twenty-four hours’ notice of the offensive. “It is an open secret that it did not go well in the first few days and only turned around when the U.S. started to provide support, mostly intelligence, airpower, and planners,” a senior American military official working on Iraq told me. “But I think Maliki started to realize that if his security forces didn’t control the country, then he wasn’t really the leader. I think it was a purely institutional move to assert the primacy of the prime minister. How Maliki became a nationalist is a long story that I don’t totally understand myself. I think part of it was just growing into the job. I also think that there was a seminal moment in Basra when his personal bodyguard—and I understand the two were close—was killed by a Sadrist round.”