Nir Rosen - Aftermath

I found a city largely under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces, with little sign of the British presence except for the occasional patrol. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. A trickle of Sunnis had returned. Over and over again, when I spoke to civilians they told me the same thing: “Now sectarianism is finished in Basra.” I spoke to officials of the once-formidable Communist Party. They blamed the Americans and British for introducing chaos into Basra. “Any foreign army is not good,” one official told me. “The British army is less violent than Americans, but they let militias rule and made deals with them.” The Communists also backed the prime minister. “Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist,” they told me. “He went from being a man of a party to a man of state. He said only the state can have weapons.” They agreed with me that the Sadrists were still the most popular movement among Shiites and worried that the Mahdi Army had sleeper cells. “The sectarian project failed in Iraq,” one of them told me. People in Basra spoke of “before March” and “after March” to describe their lives, and in the city’s middle-class areas, the Charge of the Knights campaign won only praise.

I attended a conference in a large auditorium at the local chamber of commerce that had been planned by local officials to explain how they spent the hundred million dollars Maliki had given them after Charge of the Knights. There were no foreign soldiers there, and I was the only foreigner. Representatives of local businesses, civil society, and the local media attended. The conference was a hosted by a woman and started with a prayer and recitation of the Koran. The national anthem was played, and everybody stood up. The host and others read poems. The conference had a decidedly Shiite tone: every time the host asked the crowd to pray for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, as was the Shiite way, the crowd responded loudly. Grandiloquent speeches about Basra and Iraq followed. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a postoccupation Iraq.

I met with Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic Party in Basra. The party’s previous headquarters was destroyed after Samarra with the help of local police, and it was now based in an unmarked building across from police headquarters. The Islamic Party had sixty-eight martyrs in Basra, he told me. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. Sunnis began returning after Charge of the Knights, he said. Although the security forces in Basra had been closed to Sunnis, there were currently about four hundred Sunnis in the local police and army. “Now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra,” he said.

In stark contrast to downtown Basra were the slums of Hayaniya. They were far removed from the heart of the city, as if the population was segregated, and surrounded by sewage and garbage dumps. Streets were unpaved, and many houses were made of mud. An Iraqi army brigade surrounded them and had bases inside. The brigade, a mixed unit of Sunnis and Shiites that was headquartered in Ramadi and trained by the Americans, had arrived in Basra on April 13. I visited a school they were occupying in Hayaniya and met with two officers: one was a Sunni from Falluja, and the other was a Shiite from Baghdad’s Shaab district. They sat on beds in a room with no door. Their men played volleyball in the yard. “The enemy was anybody illegal,” they told me, “anybody carrying weapons.” They had clashed mostly with the Mahdi Army and Thar Allah, but now the city was quiet, they said, adding that “we don’t need help from the British.” Hayaniya had the most problems, they explained—it was like Sadr City. The officer from Falluja joked that in the upcoming elections, the Saddamists in his city would win because the Awakening groups backed them. Both officers praised the Awakening’s Abu Risha. “Petraeus is wrong,” the Sunni officer told me. “The Americans caused the problems. The army and the people and the Awakening brought peace.” His Shiite friend agreed. “We are the highest authority,” he said. Many locals complained that the Iraqi army’s occupation of schools and heavy presence in their neighborhood was oppressive and made them feel occupied.

One evening I met with four Mahdi Army men in the Gzeiza slum, adjacent to Hayaniya. One commanded one hundred fighters, one commanded forty fighters, and the other two were mere fighters. Their more senior commanders had fled to Iran. They had all taken part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam and a smaller one in 1999. They insisted that both uprisings had been influenced by the Sadrists. There were about 1,500 houses in Gzeiza, they told me. The Iraqi army occupied four schools, they said, complaining that soldiers mistreated children, wore shorts, and were inappropriately dressed in front of women. The army also stole from homes and harassed people, they said. They still supported Maliki despite his crackdown, but they insisted that Muqtada was popular throughout Basra. The Sadrist Current was under extreme pressure from the British forces, the Iraqi government, and the ISF, they said, but added that the Sadrists had no problem with the people or the government. They didn’t think that the Americans would leave Iraq. “The Mahdi Army is not weak,” one of them told me. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says we do, and he said, ‘Don’t fight the government.’ We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity. Before Charge of the Knights the Mahdi Army controlled Basra. We can be more than the army. We can get rid of them in two days. There is pressure from the government now. There are provocations, but we were ordered not to have arms on the street.”

The men conceded that killings were down, but they still complained about crime. “We are sitting on oil, and we don’t have electricity,” one of them said. “In the summer for an hour or two. Now it’s three hours on, three off.” The Mahdi Army was loyal only to Iraq, they told me, which was the same thing the two Iraqi army officers had said. The street in Iraq was Sadrist, they said, and the Mahdi Army was the muqawama (resistance). “The Mahdi Army made the government strong,” one said. “Baghdad had terrorism, but the Mahdi Army and the government got rid of it together. There is resistance of the pen and resistance of the gun. After the occupation the Mahdi Army will be cultural. The government is now arresting people randomly. Now all countries pursue their interests in Iraq.” Thar Allah had no links to the Mahdi Army, they said, but belonged to the Supreme Council, and the Supreme Council belonged to Iran. They blamed Thar Allah for the expulsion of Sunnis and Christians. Elections were coming up soon, and I asked whom they would vote for. “A week or two before the elections in the Friday prayers they will tell us who to vote for,” one of them told me.

On my last day in Basra, a British armored vehicle was stoned by a group of local men. One brave man climbed on top of it and was persuaded to go down only when a British soldier emerged and pointed his weapon at him. There was little sign after more than five years of occupation in Basra that the British had built or improved anything in the vast slums where most of the population lived. And when the British tried to encourage the local government to increase services in Hayaniya and similar areas, the local officials said that these poor Shiites didn’t belong in Basra anyway, since they were from Amara, from the marshes. British officers told me the provincial council had a condescending attitude toward the residents of Hayaniya and its neighboring areas, and that they were desperately trying to get services to these areas. Little had been learned after five years. The poor Shiite majority was still neglected, just as it was under Saddam. Only Muqtada carried their voice.