Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Reassured that they could all belong to Muqtada’s militia because Muqtada had said so, his followers marched into the mosque, past more security, who asked me to turn on my camera and confirm that it was harmless. Many of the men carried their prayer rugs on their shoulders and set them down on the concrete courtyard. The mosque was being restored, and scaffolding lined some of its walls. It had shiny marble columns and new wooden rafters on its ceiling. Next to each column were grim-faced men wearing dark suit jackets. Beneath the jackets were guns, and they had their arms pressed down both to hide the guns and to reach them quicker. They looked like cruder versions of the Hizballah security men who protected Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah in Lebanon when he spoke in public. In the past they had openly carried Kalashnikovs, but this was considered undignified. More than ten thousand people were in attendance, many of them women, who sat in a separate section. There were more children than I had ever seen at a mosque, for Muqtada was the “cool” cleric, a fighter who defied authority, and he specifically reached out to children, offering them notebooks and stickers for their schoolbooks. As the call to prayer ended, the crowd chanted and sang songs they all knew by heart. For Shiites, praying at a mosque is very much a communal activity. Unlike Sunnis, who go to whatever mosque is nearest to their home, Shiites take buses to attend the Friday prayers at several key mosques, leading to crowds in the tens of thousands and to expressions of communal pride and solidarity.

Muqtada waddled with his head down as he always did, surrounded by his assistants and bodyguards. A murmur and then a frisson went through the crowd spreading out to the back, and people stood up to glimpse him. They had not been expecting him to speak that day, but rather one of his deputies. “ Ali wiyak! ” they thundered, waving their fists, meaning “Ali is with you!” Muqtada was flanked by his two closest friends and advisers. On his left stood the young and very thin Ayatollah Ali al-Baghdadi, originally from Sadr City. On his right stood his more rotund brother-in-law, Riyadh Nuri. Nuri was normally the imam of the Kufa Mosque and had also led Muqtada’s Islamic courts, which arrested and tortured people for suspected infractions ranging from homosexuality, selling pornography, and theft to insulting Muqtada. Nuri lived with Muqtada in the same house and had often taken care of Muqtada’s mentally handicapped brother, who died in 2004. He also commanded Mahdi Army fighters, whom he would dispatch to arrest people. Nuri raised his hand to quiet the excited crowd as Muqtada began by reading the normal blessings before the sermon. Like his father, Muqtada spoke quietly, without the emotion many clerics invest in their speeches. Not a talented speaker, he almost seemed to mumble in a gruff monotone.

I had been told by his associates that he was not meeting with the media now for security reasons, so the closest I could get to him was sitting before him as he delivered his sermon. “We demand the reconstruction of the shrine in Samarra and protection for it,” Muqtada said. “We condemn the malicious hands that exploded the shrines.” Muqtada read a verse from the Koran and then switched into Iraqi dialect, as was his style. He kept his eyes down most of the time, reading from his notes and only glancing up occasionally. He spoke of doing the right and preventing the wrong. “This is the time when the right becomes wrong and the wrong becomes right,” he said, “when women become corrupt. Occupation became liberation and resistance became terrorism.” The occupation had joined the Nawasib, which to Muqtada’s followers meant all Sunnis. “Look at both of them,” he said, “the occupation and the Nawasib, and look at their values.” He called for Muslims to be united. “Which Muslims?” he asked. “The ones who follow the family of the Prophet,” meaning Shiites. “In the past God punished people by sending frogs, locusts, lice,” Muqtada explained. “Now he punishes them by sending earthquakes, mad cow disease, hurricanes, floods, bird flu, the diseases in Africa, and globalization, armies, politics, solar and lunar eclipses.”

Muqtada sat down for a minute, and somebody in the crowd shouted a hossa . “For the love of the oppressed, the two martyrs, the Sadrs, pray for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” Thousands of people bellowed, “Our God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.” Then they waved their fists and continued, “And speed the Mahdi’s return! And damn his enemies!” In the past they had continued with “and make his son succeed. Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!” But this had recently been taken out of the chant, and Muqtada’s hundreds of thousands of followers in the country had dutifully followed.

Muqtada stood up once again. “On the anniversary of the Iraqi occupation,” he said, “I want to discuss some issues such as a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation.” He expressed his condolences to all the followers of the family of the Prophet for the raid on the Mustafa Husseiniya two weeks earlier. “That attack was not the first done by the occupation forces,” he said. “It is part of a series of bad attacks that attack the civilian and the armed, the police and the army. The occupation started attacking everybody: civilians, army, police, even the Iraqi ministers, the minister of interior and the minister of transportation, and some of the Parliament members and others. It started killing civilians in the streets and in public areas. They are killing us randomly. They drag the cars using their tanks. And they torture the prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr and other hidden prisons in Iraq. In addition to causing civil strife and civil war, they made our neighbors our enemies, accusing some of them of sending armed people and others with hosting armed people and another with sowing terrorism.”

“We did not have a country under Saddam, and now that Saddam is gone, why can we not have a country?” He added that the occupiers could not prove anything they had accused Iraq’s neighbors of doing. “Even though we and our neighbors have one religion and we have one fate, the United States succeeded in dividing us and making us enemies. Instead of reconstructing the shrine of the two imams in Samarra, the occupation is building prisons,” Muqtada said, then switched to Iraqi dialect to quip, “preparing them for the Iraqi people.”

He returned to classical Arabic and continued. “They steal Iraqi resources to torture Iraqis. They arrest a lot of people from any force in Iraq that is against the occupation.” Iraqis had gotten used to these attacks, Muqtada said, adding that his father’s followers had gone from oppression under “Haddam” (playing on the former dictator’s name and replacing it with “the destroyer”) to oppression and torture under the occupation. “So be patient, my brothers,” he said. “They are trying to plant a civil war. Do not let them drag you into the war. We know that they are going to assassinate our clerics and our leaders to make a sectarian and civil war. We will never be oppressed. So do everything not to apply the American idea called democracy.” America said it sought democracy for Iraq, but it had changed its mind, Muqtada claimed. It now wanted to grant power to the terrorists, he said, referring to recent American attempts to include Sunnis in the government. “So the American interference in Iraqi politics is very clear,” he said, “because you see the American ambassador appear in all the Iraqi conferences, meeting with Iraqi politicians, which we consider a terrible assault on us. . . . We all know that for every minister there is a foreign adviser assigned by the occupation. This is against the religion. Even the press, when they insult the Prophet Muhammad, they say this is the freedom of the press. And when our press writes something which is a fact but is against America, they say it is calling for terrorism. So this is all proof that the small Satan has gone and the big Satan has come. Everyone knows that we have demanded a timetable for the American withdrawal. They refused our demand because they said scheduling the withdrawal of the occupation is a victory for the terrorists, and that is a bad justification.”