Nir Rosen - Aftermath

The failed uprising in Fadhil was a symptom of the Sunni inability to unite. Although the Awakening groups were a formidable force when they were established, in retrospect it seemed that many of the former insurgent leaders had miscalculated. For the most part they had not been incorporated into the political system or the security forces. They were hated or mocked by members of the Iraqi Security Forces, who had their own nicknames for the men of the Awakening, or Sahwa, in Arabic: they called them Sakhla, meaning “sheep,” or Shahwa, meaning “horniness.”

“The Sahwa were always going to get screwed,” Major Gottlieb told me. “In the fall of 2007, the Interior Ministry began demanding their names, addresses, family members, employment history, etc. from the Americans. To their credit, the units in our sector dragged their feet on providing the information. I suspect that the various, purposefully unsuccessful drives to vet Sahwa for Interior Ministry employment were designed to gather this information. Everyone turned in forms, but no one ever seemed to get hired.”

In truth, the Awakening men were not the only ones who found it difficult to get jobs. Everybody in Iraq had this problem. Nobody could get a job with the security forces unless they were affiliated with a political party, which often also required a family connection. The alternative was to pay a bribe that amounted to several months’ salary. But former Shiite militiamen had much less trouble integrating into the security forces than their Sunni counterparts.

A new, Shiite-dominated order was being established in Iraq. The cleansing of Sunnis had sufficiently weakened enemies of the Shiite state, and Sunni civilians needed not fear as long as they accepted the new order. Shiites had nearly succeeded in clearing Sunni areas from future threats. The occasional Al Qaeda-inspired suicide attack could kill masses of civilians, but it had no strategic impact. The drop in violence was complex and primarily a symptom of Iraqi dynamics, though the concrete walls built by the Americans and the increased American presence in neighborhoods at a time when the Americans were less aggressive and considered by Iraqis to be the least of all evils were also essential.

The surge strengthened Maliki and his security forces: it neutered the Sunni militias and allowed Maliki to weaken the Shiite militias. These Shiite militias were the initial storm troopers of the civil war, the ones who cleansed Sunnis from Baghdad and paved the way for the Shiite victory, but following that they only stood in the way of Maliki as he consolidated his control. There were still many battles left to be fought in Iraq, and when the Americans departed a new phase of violence and factional fighting would likely begin, but the war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites appeared to be over.

DESPITE THEIR MANY GRIEVANCES, the Sunni militias were holding their fire. I was curious to discover if the Sadrist militias were similarly conflicted, having been thrashed by Maliki, with American help, in the spring of 2008, during Operation Charge of the Knights. I met up with Muhamad, who worked in the Sadr Current’s social affairs group in Shaab. Abul Hassan of the Mustafa Husseiniya, whom I had spent time with in previous years, had been arrested by the Americans with three other men one night in late 2008. Sayyid Jalil now worked in the main Sadrist office in Sadr City. The Shurufi Mosque had shut down after weapons were discovered inside it. Prayer was forbidden. Instead, about five hundred men sat on mats on the street beside it. Iraqi National Police were posted around the men, watching lazily. Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Saedi of the Suwaed tribe from Amara stood before them on a podium. Most of his audience was young. I spoke with Muhamad as the sheikh discussed religion. Muhamad’s brother was killed by the Americans in May 2008. Many civilians were killed in Charge of the Knights, he said, and the Americans were still arresting people. Muhamad told me that Maliki was negotiating with Sadrists: if they joined his coalition he would release Mahdi Army prisoners.

Someone stood up and shouted a hossa . “We will keep the Friday prayers that Muhammad Sadr started regardless of what America and Israel or Britain say!” For Sadrists the Friday prayers had once been identified with defying oppression. Now the grievances were more mundane. Sheikh Abdel Karim’s sermon was a litany of complaints about inflation, money laundering, immorality, homosexuality, alcohol, lack of food, lack of housing, and corruption. Now that security had improved, where were the service improvements? He complained. Where was the large budget people had been promised?

Although I paid little attention to his comment on homosexuality at the time, soon after, Sadrist militiamen began brutally slaughtering men suspected of homosexuality. One staff member in Sadr City’s Chuwader hospital said he saw four corpses of suspected homosexuals brought in. One of the bodies was found in a garbage dump while the others were on the streets. Two of them were found with superglue clogging their anuses. This happened to many others. He said the victims were tortured to death in the area’s garages. In some cases the victims’ tribes were said to be complicit in the murders. Sadrist sermons were said to call for the “disciplining” of homosexuals. The Mahdi Army’s militia activity was frowned upon, but in conservative areas like Sadr City nobody would condemn them for killing homosexuals. Women with “bad reputations” were also killed, their bodies thrown in garbage dumps.

After Friday prayers ended a man took me to his neighbor’s home. The Americans had raided it the night before. The door had been blown up with plastic explosives. All the glass on the doors and windows was broken. All the furniture was overturned, closets were dumped, items seemed gratuitously broken. Five brothers were arrested. Their relatives complained that the Americans came with a Sudanese translator and an Iraqi informer who wore a mask. The Americans often searched homes in the area, they said, but they had never done this before. This time they ransacked the house and took the family’s gold, forty thousand dollars (the brother had just sold his house), cellphones, and the computer’s hard drive, and smashed the computer screen.

The next day I went to the Qiba Mosque in Shaab, which I had first visited in March 2004 after the twin Ashura bombings, when I encountered a nascent militia that nearly killed me (see Chapter Two). This time Iraqi soldiers stood guard outside and in the mosque’s courtyard. There was a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr’s father on the gate. Two brothers, Abu Ali and Abu Riyadh, took care of the mosque and cleaned it. They told me that Sheikh Walid had fled north to Salahaddin. His house was now occupied by IDPs from Diyala, who said they would leave when Sheikh Walid returned. Not far away men were fixing the Sunni Al Haq Mosque as well. Sayyid Nasr of the Sayyid Haidar Husseiniya, along with the head of the local Shiite Awakening group, had told them eight months earlier to open the Qiba Mosque. Now the Sunni endowment was helping to fix the mosque. The day before about sixty people had attended the Friday prayers, they told me. As I left with my friends I saw that many young men from the area had gathered around the mosque and were looking at us ominously.

The next week I attended Friday prayers in Sadr City. Driving to Martyrs’ Square, I saw boys playing billiards and table soccer (Foosball) on the side of road. Men worked in their garages, traffic was heavy—it was not like Friday prayers of the past, when Sadr City’s streets were deserted. We drove past a poster honoring Hizballah’s slain hero Imad Mughniyeh. I was searched by young men from the Sadrist office who wore badges with the image of Lebanon’s Imam Musa Sadr on them, something I had never seen before in Iraq. I walked past an animal market: chickens in cages, sheep being slaughtered, pools of blood collecting by the curb. A large mural of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr stood in the center of a large traffic circle. Thousands of mostly young men sat on mats or even cardboard. The cleric spoke from a podium next to the Sadrist headquarters. The sermon, on Shiite eschatology, had little to do with politics. The imam spoke about Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr’s twenty-five predictions about the arrival of the Mahdi. Infidels would gather against Muslims, the cleric warned. But then he turned to the Status of Forces Agreement. It was permissible to make peace with infidels, he said, but the SOFA took more from Iraq than it gave, and it was more about protecting the Americans than helping the Iraqis. At the end of the sermon he led the crowds in chants of “Go out, Americans,” “Yes, Muqtada,” and “Yes, hawza , ” but the chants seemed tepid, almost indifferent, lacking the passion of the past.