Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Sheikh Safaa stood in the courtyard by his destroyed home, pacing back and forth while talking on his mobile phone. When he got off, Firas and several other young men surrounded him to consult as I waited. I recognized another one of them, a young man also wearing a black suit and black shirt with no tie, and black leather shoes. He worked for the state de-Baathification committee but was close to the Sadrists and passed information about Baathists along to the Mahdi Army.

Sheikh Safaa spoke to me inside the prayer room. It had a green carpet and a shiny model of the shrine in Najaf. On its walls were verses from the Koran about Judgment Day and a picture of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Muqtada. Sheikh Safaa looked extremely young; his stylistically groomed beard was still not fully mature. He was very thin, with a long narrow nose. He wore modern wire-framed glasses and had a white imama (turban) balanced on his ears. As we spoke he held his mobile phone and prayer beads in one hand, gesticulating with the other.

He confirmed that the husseiniya belonged to the Office of the Martyr Sadr, which had permitted the Dawa Party to use some rooms as an office. “They are old people, and they are even not capable of carrying a weapon,” he said. “The American forces denied that they attacked the husseiniya . They said they just attacked the Dawa office, but it was a lie. The truth is, they entered both the Dawa office and the Mustafa Husseiniya, and they killed in a very barbaric way . . . and nobody expected the Americans would do that, especially those who saw films about freedom, about America.”

The young Sheikh Safaa also thought the raid was meant to send a political message. “After the Samarra bombing,” he explained, “the Americans started escalating political pressure against Jaafari and other Shiites to prevent Jaafari from being the prime minister, because he doesn’t look after their interests. They think that Jaafari is the closest man to the Sadr Current, and they don’t like the Sadr Current to have a friend in the prime minister’s position.”

Sheikh Safaa warned that his people were irate. “I have seen the feelings of the people in the last few days,” he said. “They were very upset from the presence of the occupation. One of the demands put forth by the Sadr Current was that the occupation forces apologize and compensate the families of the victims. America should not kill and compensate. We don’t want your compensation; just stop killing. Why do you kill and then compensate? People from different ages and backgrounds were killed in this mosque. Not everyone was a soldier in the Mahdi Army. There were old people from the Dawa Party and visitors to the Dawa Party and people praying. That’s why the people in Shaab City are very angry. So the condition was not to let America go inside Shaab City again. We witnessed an American aggression, and maybe with the hands of Iraqis who work with the occupation forces.”

The sheikh had been present for the raid. “We were surprised at six o’clock, which is half an hour before the prayer, by a large number of Humvees and another kind of wheeled armored vehicle,” he said. “Their entrance was silent. They surrounded the husseiniya from everywhere. They started firing random heavy shots. It didn’t have the sound of a Kalashnikov and classic light weapons. The major sound was the dushka and a heavy belt-fed machine gun. They also used bombs and grenades to attack the husseiniya .” I was impressed by his detailed knowledge of weapons. “They came in a very ugly and barbaric way, and they were very quick,” he continued. “People tried to run away and go out of the building. Because I am the imam of the mosque I have a family in my house, so I was busy taking my family outside. I have four children, and they were very scared. Until now the condition of the children is not stable. My mother is still not stable. We took her from the hospital yesterday, because of the heavy sound of the bullets and bombs.”

On the evening of the raid, he said, “many infantry soldiers entered the building. They started shooting. A lot of the brothers were injured. They took them to a single place and grouped them together and executed them. One of them had a black band on his forehead because he was a sayyid. He was the one who got the most number of bullets in his body. He lost all of his brain outside his head, and I think you have already seen his brain. They went inside the shrine with a grenade, which injured a lot of people who were praying at that time. The mosque should be a place for people who want to feel safe and secure. When the occupier came to this country, we lost the security, and security is one of the most important favors that God gives to us. It’s true that there was a strong oppression on Iraqis from the former regime. America came to Iraq proclaiming its liberation, and freedom and democracy and pluralism, but America proclaimed one thing and we saw something else. We saw freedom, but it is the freedom of tanks and democracy of Hummers, and instead of multiparties we saw multiple killings of people in a variety of ugly ways.”

But the Americans did not just kill people at the husseiniya ; they also tortured the men and looted the area. “One was injured with bullets and killed with knives,” Sheikh Safaa said. “More than one body was tortured, his eyes were taken out, and we saw them naked after death. Some of them were very old men. The Americans stole all the light weapons: one pistol and two or three guns. Also they stole money and the two computers. They destroyed everything, broke glass, and the religious school for women. Then they blew up the cars and there was more heavy shooting.”

After I left Sheikh Safaa asked Firas if I was “clean”—meaning, was I to be trusted—so that he could be sure of protecting me in the event someone tried to intercept me as I made my way home. His assistant, Abu Hassan, asked Safaa the same thing about me.

That Thursday, March 30, after I visited Humineya, Army Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, spokesman for Multinational Forces-Iraq, gave his weekly press briefing in the Coalition Press Information Center. He stood before American and Iraqi flags wearing pressed fatigues with two stars on his collars. His face remained without expression or emotion, and he spoke in a clipped, rapid-fire style, not in sentences. As he listed his ideas, which he kept simple and repeated, his hands sliced the air to emphasize points in rhythm with his words.

“Our operations continue across Iraq towards the identified end state,” Lynch said. “An Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors and is an ally in the war on terrorism, that has a representative government and respects the human rights of all Iraqis, that has security forces that can maintain domestic order and deny Iraq as a safe haven for terrorists. Now we’re making progress there every day.” He explained that attacks against the coalition forces were concentrated in three provinces: Baghdad, Anbar, and Salah Al-Din. He didn’t say that these areas were where U.S. troops were concentrated and where some of the biggest cities were located. “The enemy,” he said, “specifically the terrorists and foreign fighters, specifically Al Qaeda in Iraq, the face of which is Zarqawi, is now specifically targeting Iraqi security force members and Iraqi police. In fact, the number of attacks against Iraqi Security Forces has increased 35 percent in the last four weeks compared with the previous six months.” General Lynch told the story of Sunni recruits who joined the army even after some recruits had been killed in a suicide bombing. “If that’s not a testimony to the courage and conviction of the Iraqi people, I don’t know what is. They’re united against Zarqawi. As we’ve talked about before, counterinsurgency operations average nine years. The people who will win this counterinsurgency battle against Zarqawi and Al Qaeda in Iraq are the Iraqi people. And indications like that show their courage and their convictions and their commitment to a democratic future. Amazing story.”