Rain over Baghdad: A Novel of Iraq (46 page)

I looked at him for a while before answering him. I was amazed at the profound change that had come over Basyuni. He seemed to have grown mature during the hell fire of the war he had gone through. I said, “Yes, Basyuni. I’ve felt that Iraqi grief was now more
profound, that they no longer try to hide it like before. It is now bigger than them.”

I noticed in his eyes the beginnings of a suppressed tear that wanted to come out without his permission. I went on to say, “Yes, we got the news in detail, but the killing of Sadat consumed all international media and so the news of that defeat and its massive casualties did not get the attention it deserved, even though there was no deliberate attempt to conceal it. In less than an hour I am going to meet some Iraqi army commanders and I am going to ask them the same question that I wanted your opinion about: Why did Iraq change its military strategy from offense to defense? We were all surprised by Iraq’s political initiatives to withdraw from Iran’s territories to the international borders. Do you have an answer for that? How do the Iraqis around you explain this position? Or are they afraid to talk?”

He said, “You know that Iraqis don’t talk until they are totally reassured that you are not a government spy. That’s what the Arabs are like. You can imagine how it would be with the Kurds. They are doubly afraid. And yet when either the Arab Iraqis or the Kurds get drunk they lose control over their feelings and their words, so they say whatever they like. According to rumors, there have been many detentions because of words said at the bar.”

He paused, so I asked him, “Yes, and then what?”

He looked at me long before speaking. I looked behind me. One of the Iraqi women organizers, actually a friend of mine, was on her way to where we were sitting. I heard her saying, “Am I interrupting anything? Is your friend an Egyptian?”

I said, “Khuloud, this is my friend Basyuni who works here in Basra.”

She said, “It’s time to get ready. The bus will be leaving for the front in fifteen minutes.”

I said, “I’ll catch up with you whenever you’re ready.”

She went over to the other tables to alert the other delegates.

Basyuni said, “She will immediately report this meeting of ours. I am going back to Egypt, I promise you, Abla. I heard that the change
in strategy from offense to defense came about after the Iraqis realized that the war had gone on longer than expected—two whole years, during which the Iraqis lost a lot of money and men. It also came about after the realization that a soldier fighting to defend his own land was a better fighter, especially after the great loss in the battle of Taheri. This point of view became known after leaks picked up by soldiers from conversations among the officers in dining halls at officers’ quarters. As for ordinary people, they had grown tired of the whole war. But Iran doesn’t believe that and doesn’t trust Iraqis’ intentions. So their mobilization continues. We even heard that they are now mobilizing fifteen-and sixteen-year-old boys.”

I said, “This explains the big brouhaha accompanying this conference of ours and all this talk about Iraq’s desire for peace and return to the international borders. This is all so unusual and new, at least to me, especially after the earlier noise they made about regaining Shatt al-Arab.”

I heard movements in the tables around us and I realized that members of the delegations were getting up and moving toward the door. I got up to say goodbye to Basyuni and told him in the Iraqi dialect, “For your mother’s sake, please put an end to this story and go back home before you get injured in a war that, the way I see it, you are not convinced about. If you were to tell me that you are fighting so that Iraq would regain its land, I would just leave without asking you to go back. Please listen to reason and put an end to this.”

He gave me a big hug and kissed me on the cheek, holding my shoulders so hard it hurt my muscles. Tears rushed to my eyes and I felt dispirited. I was afraid for Basyuni as if he were my younger brother, even though I had met him only once before. I prayed to God, as the bus was moving and as he waved to me, that he would go back safely to his family, for he was not even twenty years old yet. So young, I thought, but also, so rash.

A number of high-ranking officers welcomed us warmly and they escorted us to very large pavilion-like tents with large posters
condemning Iran’s aggression against Iraq and declaring the right of Iraqis to their occupied territories. They pointed out to us that that was the furthest we could go for fear for our safety. We found a chart showing where the forces stood on both sides. They explained to us details about the deployment of the Iranian forces and the positions they occupied. The commander of the forces in the region told us that the Iranians left behind bodies of twelve-yearold boys who had undertaken suicide missions. The officers kept using the words “Persian” and “Persians” in almost every sentence. I knew that the roots of the enmity went back a long time over the history of the battles between the Arabs and the Persians up to the triumph of the Muslims against the Magi Iranians and their conversion to Shism. I remembered the visit Hatim and I made to Iwan Kisra in Salman Pak, so close to Baghdad, and saw how ancient and modern history intermingled. I thought of the enigma of the ordeal of Barmakids, when Harun al-Rashid summarily got rid of his Persian allies and his grand vizir, Jaafar the Barmakid. He had just formally married his sister Abbasa to Jaafar, so she could attend their literary gatherings with both of them—her brother and her “husband”; but when the two lovers, Jaafar and Abbasa, consummated the marriage, Harun al-Rashid flew into a rage. The love story was still reverberating everywhere and the river of blood was still flowing underground, and whenever its waters dried up, they flowed again somehow. It was a long history of merging and separating, an eternal neighborliness, quiet at times, then erupting again with conflict over power.

I came to as the Iraqi officer was saying, “Even though Basra, thank God, is not occupied, yet one half of it is, unfortunately, within range of Iranian artillery. We want peace and our position is clear in our goodwill initiatives for ceasefire and conciliation and a return to the international borders.”

I said to myself, “What international borders?” I got dejected and prayed that Basyuni would not do anything stupid! A refreshing breeze gently stroked my hair.

I remembered what happened in Baghdad when the Iranian revolution broke out. Saddam Hussein was still vice president. He took over five months later, during the July celebrations. He announced the resignation of President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, for health reasons. Then he executed two-thirds of the regional command of the Ba‘th Party after aiming a blow at the left and finished off the Iraqi Communist Party. He now held sole power in Iraq. Did he bet on playing the region’s strongman in the absence of the shah? It was a foolish move. He didn’t give Iran its full due. He began applying pressure to regain half of Shatt al-Arab. He sent a message to the new regime in which he said something to the effect: “You are an Islamic government that knows the true meaning of fairness. We were forced to sign the Algiers Treaty because of the role that the shah had played in supporting the Kurdish insurgency in our country.” The Iranian government replied, “These are international agreements. We have inherited the shah’s regime for better or worse. International logic dictates that what the shah had taken was now gone. We are obligated to pay his debts.” The slogan for regaining Muhammara and Ahwaz was raised and displayed all over Iraq. Then there began a wave of attacks against Iraqi political Islam, and the fear that Iran would export the revolution grew stronger. That threw a monkey wrench into the workings of all branches of the Iraqi government. We began hearing of the Organization of Islamic Action and al-Da‘wa Party, whose president and founder, Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, had considerable charisma and great popularity. Oh, how I need your opinion now, Ustaz Hilmi!

An old memory jumped to the surface of my mind. I remembered asking Hilmi Amin, “Why do Arab governments make carbon copies of their fascist experiences in dealing with the opposition rather than their good experiences in democracy, if they have any? Don’t they understand that by aiming their blows against the communist party and the left in general they allow political Islam to expand and take over the vacuum like a mindless cancer, that it will turn against them one day? Is that so hard to understand?”

Hilmi Amin said, “It is not hard to understand at all, but there are two reasons for that to be so. First, hubris, in that a dictatorial power believes in its ability to control that cancerous expansion since it has the key to power and the key to prisons; second is its real desire to support that tendency for some unknown reason, perhaps because of external support or orders from abroad. In all cases the West benefits.”

I said, “The journalist Hadya al-Jaafari has asked me to buy her books in Cairo that deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It is obvious that fundamentalists are a cause for concern to experts everywhere.”

He said, “I want you to go to
al-Thawra
newspaper and spend two hours there every day gathering all the material you can get from the archives about the relationship of the Ba‘th Party with Islamist movements in Iraq since 1970–71, that is, since the execution of Sheikh Abd al-Aziz al-Badri, one of the leaders of the Islamist party, and since the beginning of the liquidation of political Islam. I’d like for you also to look into and gather information about the death sentences handed down in the years 1977–79 and, of course, any information about the demonstrations that Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr tried to organize last year; as you know, those demonstrations were aborted and he was placed under house arrest. We’ve written about this. Go back to our stories and study the file closely, then write me a detailed report that I could use should any further developments occur. I will personally review your report.”

I said, “I need books that analyze the relationship between the Ba‘th Party and Islamist parties in earlier eras so as to develop a deeper understanding of the experience. Would I find anything in the bookstores?”

“I don’t think so. You’ll find nothing, Umm Yasir.”

I gathered the material, feeling that I was under surveillance that whole time. I would tell laggards that we, in
al-Zahra
magazine, depended on scientific reference books in compiling our information so that our journalistic reports would be correct and
well documented. In practical terms we used most of the material we had gathered as background material rather than directly in our features. It helped us understand the publicly declared Iraqi political position, for Hilmi Amin was extra careful in maintaining a working relationship with the state agencies, which used extreme caution when dealing with Arab or foreign correspondents. Then there was a huge surprise right before the war with Iran. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, the man who was loved and revered by all the Shia, was executed. The Iraqi government within the previous few months had clamped down hard on Shi‘i organizations that had clear appeal in the Iraqi street. We also found out from numerous sources that Iraqi security had been sending warning signals to Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, cautioning him to stay away from politics, especially since he had issued a fatwa at the time of the Iranian revolution, forbidding, on religious grounds, joining the Ba‘th Party. They sent someone to interrogate him and, being a religious man, he did not lie. They asked him, “Are you the one who issued the fatwa declaring it to be religiously forbidden to join the Ba‘th Party?”

He said, “Yes, because the Ba‘th Party is antithetical to religions and to people of faith.”

They tried to persuade him to retract the fatwa or deny that he issued it. But he refused. They tried again several times to no avail. So, getting nowhere with him, they ordered that he and his sister be executed on April 9, 1980 after long and unimaginably horrific torture whose reverberations echoed with the Shia, tormenting them and igniting revolt in their hearts while they did not dare to speak out.

How romantic and revolutionary and truthful that man was! Why was Iraq destined to pay all of that! Oh, my God! I felt tears gathering up in my throat. I inhaled deeply to keep them from appearing on my face and calmly wiped the ones that got away. The officer was now telling the members of the conference delegations sitting in front of him in the pavilion on the Basra front, “We are a peaceloving country. We don’t want war. We want to liberate our land.”

I said to myself, “What peace?” I wanted to raise my voice and ask the officer, “Have you looked at the eyes of those around you? Have you observed all this Iraqi sadness? Do you need hundreds of years of waiting, slapping of faces and self-mutilation and bloodshed, to realize that what is happening now is foolish?” I was suddenly aware of the sadness in his eyes. I realized that he was not that far from the sadness around him.

I remembered my neighbor Umm Samira telling me in whispers, “You know something? I can assure you that the troubles in the north between Mullah Barzani and the government are the result of preventing us from performing our religious rites. God is great! Why don’t they let people do what they want? God be my witness! It is all because of God’s anger. My beloved al-Husayn!” She spoke looking around in fear.

When I came to Baghdad for the first time in 1975 an order had already been issued banning the performing of Ashura rituals, during which Shia went out on the streets practicing self-flagellation and shedding bitter tears for the killing of al-Husayn, in a violent spectacle in which they beat their backs with iron chains. Some of them would strike their own heads with long sharp knives that looked like machetes and that they called qamas. And despite the police’s strict enforcement of the ban in Kazim and even in Najaf and Karbala, the Shi‘i strongholds, Shi‘i resentment was strongly simmering. I bought some cassette tapes recording recitations of the bloody epic of al-Husayn’s killing. I wept as I listened to the folk epic verses retelling the battle of al-Taff and realized that the sadness around me had deep roots that could not be ignored, even among the educated, who realized that self-flagellation would never bring back what was gone and would not acquit them of killing al-Husayn or of not defending him.