Nir Rosen - Aftermath

One woman, called Kifah Hadi Majid, had been expelled from Haifa Street by the Mahdi Army after they killed her son three years earlier. Her son Mutlab, who wore an Iraqi army uniform, was in the local Awakening group. A gang had killed his wife for jewelry. “The Awakening were given jobs with the Baghdad sanitation, and we fought the terrorists,” he said. “It was better before. We controlled the street. Nobody could talk to us—not the army, nobody. We communicated directly with the Americans. Now nobody respects us, and payment is a problem.” They hadn’t been paid in fifty-eight days.

I told an Iraqi army intelligence officer that Awakening men were complaining about the lousy jobs they were given. “What education do the Awakening men have?” he asked. “If you don’t have an education, of course you will be a cleaner.” He had arrested three Awakening men whom the army had warrants against for working with Al Qaeda. He didn’t think Abu Omar was a bad man, he told me, just corrupt.

In Washash Abu Karar was still in charge of the tribal council. But one of its members, Sheikh Amer Asaedi, had fled the area after someone blew up his car. I met up again with Abu Karar’s cousins Hassan and Fadhil Abdel Karim, who helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army in Washash. They told me their nemesis, Ihab al-Tawil, had recently been released from prison. A few months before I met them, their brother Ali was shot and killed in his home nearby, his wife wounded. Ali’s killers came around 7 p.m. and announced, “We are the Mahdi Army!” The children, who saw their parents shot in front of them, were still in shock.

“We became victims,” Hassan told me. “We get threatening calls warning us we will be killed.” I asked him why he didn’t leave. “If we leave, then the whole neighborhood will leave,” he said. “We cleaned the mosques that militias used, we made Sunnis pray together with Shiites. Now I can’t go out. I stay home in my brother’s house in the back room.”

Friday prayers were less important, no longer a symbol of defiance. How could Sadrists defy the state when they were represented so well in ministries and Parliament? How could they be anti-establishment when they were part of the establishment? Friday prayers at the main Sadrist office in Sadr City were tamer than I had ever seen; the only hint of politics was a prayer for the release of prisoners. In Ur I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya, once a Mahdi Army hub. “People don’t come here anymore,” said the young man who guarded it. “They are scared since all the arrests.” Abul Hassan, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s former caretaker, who had been my guide in the area, was still in prison, and his assistant Haidar had absconded. Sheikh Safaa, its former Imam, was still safe in Qom, Iran.

In Amriya I visited Um Omar’s NGO again. Several days earlier Sheikh Muhamad, of the nearby Hassanein Mosque—with whom Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile claimed he had worked closely—had been killed. “He was our friend,” she told me. “The killers were teenagers.” Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque and his old friend Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque had absconded, fearing both the government and Al Qaeda. Thirty-five Sunni sheikhs had been killed in Baghdad in the past month. “Al Qaeda is killing all the sheikhs who stood against them,” she said. Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid of the Amriya Council—who was seen by both Gentile and his successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, as a decisive figure in defeating Al Qaeda in the area—had been jailed in October of 2009. He was accused of terrorism, a deliberately vague charge, but he was said to have had a role in bombings against Shiite areas in 2006. He was also alleged to have belonged to the Islamic Army of Iraq.

Most local Awakening leaders were either dead or arrested, Um Omar said, and the Awakening was now very weak. Abul Abed’s successor, Muhamad, had survived several assassination attempts. “The Awakening project was a lie, an American lie,” she said. “They said, ‘Come in, throw your weapons, join the Awakening, fight Al Qaeda,’ to discover the identity of the resistance.” The Americans came around now only when there was an arrest to be made.

Six days before my visit, all of Amriya had been closed off as American and Iraqi Special Forces raided the area. Three local children were kidnapped for ransom. There were also assassinations with silencers. Um Omar’s brother-in-law had been killed in 2009; he had been head of the Amriya Neighborhood Advisory Council.

Sheikh Khalid was a bad man, Um Omar insisted; he used to provide the fatwas for Abul Abed to kill people, and he had his own court for killing people. Sheikh Walid was like Sheikh Khalid too. But Sheikh Hussein was good, she said; he never killed people.

“In the time of displacement,” as she called it, five thousand families fled to Amriya, while 1,800 families fled from Amriya. Since violence had subsided, 559 families had returned. But ten months earlier the returning Iraqis had stopped coming because of intimidation. In January a bomb was placed under one Shiite returnee’s car. Most returnees were Shiites, but only about one-third of them returned to stay. The rest sold their homes.

Al Qaeda men in Abu Ghraib had recently threatened Um Omar’s local office there, accusing it of being a “Jewish organization.” Um Omar was forced to close her local school as well as her vocational training for women in tailoring. A year earlier she had gone to Abu Ghraib with her husband and some engineers. She called the resistance and told them she was coming, but as soon as she arrived armed men with masks put guns to their heads. She started shouting at them angrily, “I’m Um Omar!” and her husband told her to relax. They were taken to a destroyed house in a remote area, separated, and interrogated. She was accused of being Shiite. The men from the resistance made phone calls and then released the couple once they established their identity and apologized to the mayor.

Um Omar still had 225 needy children in her school, and she also ran a successful program finding husbands for the many widows while continuing to assist IDPs. Amriya was now so crowded that displaced families would share houses. Government schools had more than sixty children in each class. I met Um Ala, who was displaced from the Jihad district. Um Omar had found a widow to marry one of Um Ala’s sons. Her family fled to Amriya with three others, and now they shared a house. Um Ala’s husband was “killed in the sectarianism,” she told me, and her sister was also a widow. They had owned their house in Jihad but were too scared to go back. Now a Shiite family lived in it and paid a nominal rent. In Amriya one of her sons and a nephew had been killed by Al Qaeda. “Things can’t go back to how they were before,” her son said about Iraq. “There was blood, vengeance.” They heard a Sunni from the Mashhadani tribe was killed after he tried to return to Hurriya. “Every Sunni who returns to a Shiite area and gets killed,” her son said, “they say he was a terrorist or Baathist.” I asked if the relations between Sunnis and Shiites could ever go back to the way they were. “Impossible,” they all said. “Every displaced person says it’s impossible,” Um Omar said with disapproval. “I don’t think it’s impossible.”

After listening to thousands of traumatized Iraqis, I had become inured to the stories of heartbreak that I had heard. But when Um Omar took me to Amriya’s squatter settlement, on a sandy lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood, it was as if I was twenty-five years old again and taking my first footsteps in Iraq.

Behind the squatter settlement, a large wall divided Amriya from an American military base. Guard posts with tinted windows and rotating sensors towered above the shacks. Most of the squatter families here were from Amil, and as we explored the settlement Um Omar was visibly uncomfortable and warned me not to speak English. She worried about Al Qaeda supporters among the displaced who came in, she said, and tricked poor people who wanted to be mujahideen. Sixty-eight families lived in makeshift shacks, and in one of them I found a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a cold room, bare except for a mattress Um Omar had provided. She had rented a home with her daughters in the Amil district. “When the Sunni and Shiite started,” she said, Shiite militiamen told her to leave or they would take her daughters. She started crying as she told me this, and I was suddenly reminded of my mother, whom she resembled, and I got tearful. As I left, I tried to fix the corrugated iron shield that was protecting her hovel from the cold, howling wind, but the wind kept knocking it down.