The Assassins' Gate (48 page)

The first terror bombing hit the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad on August 7, 2003, and was soon followed by the devastation of the UN mission. In October, as violence surged across Iraq with the start of the Ramadan Offensive, the Red Cross and several police stations in Baghdad were blown up on a single bloody morning. In November, a suicide bomber drove his car into the Italian base at Nasiriya and killed nineteen Italians. In January, more than two dozen people were blown to pieces while waiting to enter the Assassins' Gate. These bombings were widely believed to be the work of foreign fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda and led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had migrated to Iraq after al-Qaeda was routed in Afghanistan. The strategy was clear and largely successful: Isolate the American occupiers in Iraq by driving other foreigners out of the country and intimidating any Iraqis who cooperated with them. No one knew how many jihadis were slipping across Iraq's unguarded borders; the American military put the number in the hundreds. They introduced forms of violence that the Baathist and Sunni nationalist insurgencies, as brutal as they were, stopped short of, but their tactics advanced goals that were shared by the local fighters. Eventually, the jihadis began targeting Iraqi civilians with massive explosions simply for being Shia or Kurds, as in the Ashura bombings. The Shia were considered non-Muslims by Sunni extremists and were feared by larger numbers of Sunnis as Iraq's democratic majority; the Kurds were regarded as agents of the Americans and the Jews. Zarqawi appealed for the blessing and help of Osama bin Laden in a letter that was intercepted and made public by the U.S. military. It revealed a strategy of fomenting ethnic civil war in order to prevent the emergence of a democratic government. The foreign jihadis came to be intensely hated in Iraq—even in Falluja, where they assumed more and more control leading up to the April violence—but they also served a useful purpose, for both Iraqis and Americans. If it was Sudanese, Algerians, Egyptians, Syrians, Saudis, and other Arabs who were turning thousands of Iraqis into scattered bits of flesh, then the country was enduring international terrorism, not the civil war that everyone dreaded. Even after some terrorists were positively identified as Iraqis, local people continued to insist that no Iraqi would do such things. The terrorists had to be foreigners—either Arab jihadis or American agents seeking to perpetuate the occupation.

Among young Iraqis who now had access to new media, a morbid interest arose in DVDs and Web sites that featured footage of attacks on American soldiers, beheadings, outtakes from Baath-era crimes, and other grotesque entertainments, in what was becoming a subculture of death. The atmosphere was so brutal that the news of mass murders became numbingly routine. Personal anecdotes that came my way somehow hit harder. They suggested an epidemic of violence that was going largely unreported. My driver's sister, a gerontologist at a public clinic, told me that a woman had come in the day before with severe shock: Her husband, a translator at an American base, had been shot dead before her eyes. One of my translators, also a doctor, had a friend from medical school, a Shiite, who had gone to work at a clinic near Ramadi in order to be with his fiancée. Local people immediately suspected him of being a spy—why else would a Shiite want to work in a wild place like Anbar province?—and the doctor and his fiancée were beheaded. A factory owner in Mosul appeared in a documentary film saying that the fall of the regime had improved his business. The film was shown several times on Arab satellite TV, and soon afterward the factory owner's uncle was kidnapped; when the family ransomed his release, he was returned without eyes or hands. And there was this leaflet that an Iraqi-American woman working with the CPA picked up in Kadhimiya and showed me:

IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MERCIFUL. THIS IS A FINAL WARNING.

To the spies at the local council, to all the translators and coordinators who work with the occupation forces: we are warning you that you should go back to your God and to the people. Otherwise your fate is known ahead of time and your punishment will be just, because you are informing on our sons and our brothers and they are being arrested now, and if they are exposed to any danger we will take justice into our own hands in order to defend our people who reject the traitor even more than the occupier. If you don't stop after this warning we will tell your families that you are spies and your families should disown you because you are traitors and have sold out our land and our honor. We will tell your families to kick you out of your homes publicly, otherwise they will be like you and they will also be responsible.

GOD IS GREAT. MAY BELOVED IRAQ LIVE LONG WITH HONOR AND DIGNITY. MAY THE CURSE OF GOD BE ON ALL WHO EXTEND A HELPING HAND TO THE AGGRESSORS.

The Sunni insurgency never articulated a political vision that could win over Iraqis in large numbers. Its rhetoric was nationalist and Islamist; its strategy was increasingly sectarian. But what it really excelled at was fear.

*   *   *

THE SHIITE INSURGENCY
was fundamentally different. It began on April 10, 2003, in Shiism's holiest shrine, the tomb of Imam Ali in Najaf. Ayatollah Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, the son of a grand ayatollah who had been Sistani's predecessor as Iraq's leading Shiite cleric until his death in 1992, returned to Iraq from exile with American support in early April and entered his hometown of Najaf. Khoei had run a human-rights foundation in London, and he wanted to guide Iraq's Shiite majority in a democratic direction. His appearance in the holy city was taken as a direct challenge by Moqtada al-Sadr, himself the son of a late and revered ayatollah, but far more radical than Khoei in the theocratic mold, with Iranian backing. On the morning of April 10, Khoei went to the shrine to make a conciliatory gesture toward its Baathist
kilidar,
or keeper. A mob of Sadr followers gathered outside and besieged the mosque office. The keeper was murdered on the spot; Khoei, who fired a gun in self-defense, was bound, beaten, and dragged by the mob to the door of Sadr's headquarters. I spoke with the young judge, Raed Juhi, who investigated the case (he would later read charges to Saddam Hussein at his first court appearance). Eyewitnesses told Judge Juhi's investigation that when Sadr appeared at the door, he was asked by the mob what should be done with Khoei. The witnesses reported Sadr answering, “Take this person away from here and kill him.”

The investigation was conducted two months after the murder, and in order for there to be an autopsy on Khoei, who was buried inside the gates of the shrine, the police, having secured the permission of the victim's family for this most un-Islamic deed, exhumed his body in the middle of the night. The severed finger, lacerations, stab wounds, and bone fractures confirmed the witnesses' testimony about the manner of Khoei's death (the corpse was returned for reinterment several nights later under cover of new burials). Juhi issued arrest warrants against Sadr and two dozen others. But rather than executing all of the warrants, the CPA placed Sadr's under seal.

The murder of Khoei was an ill omen of the political violence to come. In Kuwait, Jay Garner's inner circle received the news without concern. “Oh, it's just them killing each other,” one of the retired generals said. But Sadr had struck an audacious early blow in what was essentially an internal Shiite power struggle, and the Americans' refusal to confront him only emboldened Sadr to push harder. Shortly after the murder of Khoei, his followers even surrounded the small rented house of Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, but armed tribesmen from the region drove them away. Sadr's main rivals were the other leading clerical families—the Khoeis and the Hakims—who were vying for leadership and who were more willing to play by the CPA's rules. Sadr was around thirty (his exact age remained a mystery—some said he was still in his twenties), with a cleric's black turban and bushy black beard, but without the scholarly credentials; his slightly cross-eyed scowl and demagogic outbursts left most observers unimpressed. Some Iraqis thought Sadr mentally ill, and one called him a “Mongolian,” by which he meant Mongoloid. But Sadr had two weapons that made it unwise to underestimate him: his father's mantle, and his father's following among young, poor, dispossessed Shiite men, the generation created by Saddam, whom Sadr's aides organized and armed as the Mahdi Army. They took over schools and hospitals, intimidated the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issued death sentences, repeatedly tried to seize control of the holy shrines, ran criminal gangs, firebombed liquor stores, and were often drunk themselves. They made themselves extremely unpopular among the middle classes of Najaf, Karbala, Basra, and Baghdad. Their tactics were those of fascist bullies; Sadr's father had at one time been Saddam's handpicked Shiite leader, and many of the men around the younger Sadr were former Baathists. In March 2004, they wiped a village of gypsies in southern Iraq off the map. But the fragile Iraqi police were unable or unwilling to constrain them (the Basra police chief and many of his officers were Sadrists themselves), and the occupation authority allowed Sadr's strength to grow unchecked while providing him with a rhetorical target that was a far better recruiting tool than his attacks on other Shia. In October 2003, Sadr briefly declared himself the government of Iraq.

The CPA didn't know what to do with young Sadr. If he was arrested, there would be a backlash; if he was ignored, he would continue his campaign of intimidation. Sadr had been left off the Governing Council, but now he was, in Lyndon Johnson's phrase, outside the tent pissing in, and the CPA had no channel to his movement, making or failing to make decisions, as so often, without enough information. Ambassador Hume Horan, Bremer's liaison to the Shia, said of Sadr, “His father would be so distressed if he'd seen his son. How can you do an Erik Erikson on Moqtada al-Sadr? Here's this unchurched son of one of the great churchmen who fills the role without any of the qualifications. What is he lashing out at? Is it his own sense of inadequacy that is being projected out?” Horan, who committed suicide in 2004 while suffering from cancer, was an elder of the Presbyterian church and a bookishly eccentric retired diplomat who was reading a ten-volume French historical novel at the palace. His assignment in Iraq was to get to know the more moderate senior Shiite clergy—“these shaggy fellows,” he called them. “I feel like a paleontologist. It's like a new frontier for an Arabist, to talk to Shia clergy. They've not been poisoned by these anti-Semitic currents that have been washing around much of the Sunni world. I think their otherworldliness has given them some protection against the distemper. I wish them well. Innocence deserves a break now and again.” I asked Horan what the chances were of an Iranian-style theocracy being imposed by the Shiite majority on Iraq. “Absolutely zero,” he said. “Not a chance in the world.”

Paul Bremer finally decided to have Sadr arrested, and at least twice, Horan said, the CPA issued a general lockdown order to its personnel in advance of a move. “But the water receded without ever going over the sea wall.” The brake was applied in Washington, several CPA advisers told me, where the fear of immediate violence overrode the long-term gain of enforcing the law and neutralizing a growing danger. It was just one of the many cases where domestic political calculations by the Bush administration undermined what its emissaries were trying to do in Iraq. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Tony Blair's envoy in Baghdad from September 2003 to March 2004, told me that Bremer “was actually quite carefully constrained by an overambitious Washington from making his own decisions on the ground.” But even as knowledgeable a diplomat as Greenstock had little sense of the extent of Sadr's following. “Tiny. And with no political impact,” he told me in the last week of March, a few days before the April uprising.

So Sadr remained free, and the warrant stayed under seal. Cash poured in from Iranian backers, and his militia acquired heavy weapons. The Americans had turned over control of the south-central region to a multinational division under Polish command, but the mix of Poles, Spaniards, Salvadorans, Bulgarians, and Ukrainians was more useful as evidence of a coalition in Iraq than as a security force. A power vacuum emerged, and the Americans lacked the troops and the will to disarm the militias that were competing to fill it—not just Sadr's, but also those of his rivals in the more mainstream Shiite parties. The strategy was essentially to hope for the best.

On April 1, a CPA adviser on democracy, Larry Diamond of Stanford University, came back to the palace in Baghdad from a trip to Hilla, where he had learned that security across the Shiite center and south was deteriorating rapidly. He requested a private meeting with Bremer in his office. Diamond warned Bremer that the situation was dangerous, and he urged that five thousand Marines from the force that had just arrived in Anbar province be diverted to the south-central region immediately to do what the multinational division manifestly couldn't.

It was evening, and Bremer was eating a dinner that had gone cold on his tray. He had been in Iraq for almost eleven months, soldiering through crisis after crisis with unflappable determination, and he looked worn-out. When an aide once saw him remove his shirt to put on a bulletproof vest, Bremer's chest was skin and bones. “I don't know if you've noticed,” he told Diamond testily, “but there is a war going on in the west.” No Marines could be spared from Anbar. When Diamond pointed out what had always been obvious—that there weren't enough troops in Iraq, and everyone knew it—Bremer implied that it wasn't politically possible to get more. Diamond pressed again: At least send twenty Marines and two Humvees down south to protect CPA officials who had little in the way of security. “We don't
have
any more troops,” Bremer shot back. If someone felt unsafe, he should go home. There was nothing more to be said.