Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“After the war I started to feel the Iranian influence,” Abu Omar told me. “Before there were no problems between Sunnis and Shiites, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or Shiites.” Like many former military officers, Abu Omar was actively involved in the Iraqi resistance. “As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers,” he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable. When talking of the resistance, he slipped and said, “we” instead of “they.”

Shiite militias associated with the Iraqi government obtained lists of former military officers and their personal information, he told me. “Every day we heard names of officers killed,” he said, estimating that he knew at least one hundred people who had been killed since the Americans overthrew Saddam. He was threatened twice in front of his house, and then his partner was assassinated. “After they killed his partner he told me that we must leave in five days,” Ghada told me. She started crying. “They have stolen my house, my furniture. I left everything. Even now I hope to go back. Here we have many troubles. We have no money. It’s very difficult. There you feel that you can die every day. Here I am dying every day. Every day you hear bad news. There is no hope. I lost everything. I was a queen in my house before. I had a home, furniture, a BMW. Now I live in a dirty area. What did I do? What did my children do?” Ghada sold most of her jewelry to help support the family. They had been in Cairo since 2005 and had managed to pay for their children’s school the first year but could no longer afford to.

Ghada told me that Iraq’s sectarianism had followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children’s school. Iraqi Shiite boys beat their son Omar, she said. “He hates Shiites so much,” she said, adding that many fights had occurred between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi children. Her son’s fight had been provoked by Saddam Hussein’s execution, which they watched on television. “We had hoped that Saddam would return to lead Iraq. It was like they ripped my heart out,” he told me. “After I saw the images I stayed up all night.” Ghada told me that Egyptian customers had cried with her and consoled her after Saddam’s execution, and they had recited a prayer together. “The ones that Saddam killed,” she said, meaning Shiites, “I would go back and kill more of them. I hate Shiites.”

Abu Omar still held out some hope that peace could be restored. “If America comes down from her pride and negotiates with resistance, then maybe there can be a solution. The resistance is very strong and has the best officers.” He was not as sectarian as his wife, explaining to me that “there are real Iraqi Shiites, and they have the same feelings we have. It is the Shiites of Iran who are the cause of the problems.” Abu Omar often referred to the resistance as “the patriots,” explaining that “there are Sunni and Shiite patriots. The patriots can defeat the Iranian Shiites.”

Many former Baathists and Iraqi Army officers had settled in Egypt following the war. Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Sunni Association of Muslim Scholars, frequently visited Cairo, where he met with Egyptian leaders, including his friend Mahdi Akef, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Association of Muslim Scholars controlled some militias that fought in the resistance. More resistance leaders based themselves across the border from Iraq’s Anbar province, in Amman and Damascus, however. Nearly three years into their war against the occupation, many were growing introspective—much like the tribal leader Sheikh Saad, whom I met in Amman in late 2006.

In Damascus in February 2007 I met one of the leaders of the Anbar resistance that Sheikh Saad referred to when he told me they had all fled. Sheikh Yassin was a weathered and frail man with a thick white scarf over his head. He fingered black beads as we spoke. He led a mosque in Hit but had fled a month before we met and left it with his sons. Hit had become deserted, he told me. “The situation there has become disastrous,” he said. “They hit my son’s house in an airstrike and destroyed his house and killed my grandson. The people of Hit are caught between Americans on one side and Al Qaeda on the other side. And the police and army do not treat people properly.”

He too recognized the strategic Sunni error made at the beginning of the American occupation. “That is the origin of the problem: they boycotted. If they had participated with all their weight, they would not have let the Shiite militias take over the government of Iraq.” He blamed the Iraqi Sunni leadership for denouncing elections and threatening those who participated. “They made the wrong interpretation,” he said. “Shiites wanted to prevent Sunnis from voting, and jihadists did as well. The jihadists fight the Americans on one side and on the other side they destroy the community.” Sheikh Yassin had not fled Shiite militias, but rather Al Qaeda. “Sunnis must choose between death or seeking refuge in the Anbar, Syria, or Jordan,” he said.

Another opponent of Al Qaeda was Sheikh Mudhir al-Khirbit of Ramadi, a former leader of the Confederation of Iraqi Tribes. The Khirbits had been favored by the former regime, and in March 2003 an American airstrike on their home had killed eighteen family members, reason enough for them to seek vengeance. Sheikh Mudhir had sought shelter in Damascus but made frequent trips to Lebanon for medical treatment. The Iraqi government placed him on its new list of forty-one most wanted, and in January 2007, on a medical trip to Lebanon, he was arrested by that country’s Internal Security Forces. His affairs were now being handled by his oldest son, Sattam, who was only eighteen years old but who, according to one Western diplomat, had his father’s trust and went on missions for him. I found Sattam in an apartment in Damascus, dressed in a gray suit, wearing pointy leather shoes, and taking business calls from sheikhs well into the night.

In 2004, when he was only fifteen, Sattam and an uncle were arrested in an American military raid on their home. “Every tribal sheikh has weapons, machine guns, missiles, Kalashnikovs,” he told me. Sattam was jailed for one month and interrogated about his father’s activities. “They treated me badly,” he said. “We were tied up for two days, and it was really cold.” His uncle was held for three months and was later imprisoned again for one year. Iraq had grown too dangerous for the family’s leadership. “In Ramadi you can’t drive in a car,” he told me. “You don’t know if the Americans or Al Qaeda will kill you. Not only Shiites are slaughtering Sunnis; Sunnis are slaughtering Sunnis.”

Iraq’s Sunnis were beleaguered, he said. He called the initial Sunni boycott of Iraqi politics “a big mistake,” one that opened the door to Shiite domination. “Now it’s too late,” he said. “People here and in Amman feel like they lost.” The only way to protect Sunnis, in his view, was to establish a Sunni state that would include the Anbar province, Mosul, and Tikrit. Radical Sunnis in groups like Al Qaeda were now in control of Anbar, and the resistance was taking on Al Qaeda as well as the Americans. “Al Qaeda kills Sunnis the most, and you don’t know what they want,” he said. His priority was to deal with Al Qaeda in Anbar first, then reconcile with the Shiites, and then work to end the occupation. “When Sunnis in Baghdad get arrested by the Americans, they feel good because it’s better than being arrested by Shiite militias.” Despite this, he did not bear hostility toward the Shiites. “My father doesn’t differentiate between Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians,” he said. “We don’t have anything against Shiites. Shiites didn’t kill eighteen people from our family—the Americans did.”