The 9/11 Wars (109 page)

  
46
.
The rest of the city, on coalition maps, was not secure and thus ‘the Red Zone’.

  
47
.
See Chandreshekan,
Imperial Life in the Emerald City
, for a vivid and perceptive view of life in the Green Zone. See also George Packer,
The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.

  
48
.
Many State Department officials spent only ninety days in the country. Some spent even less. See US Office of the Inspector General Oversight and Review Division, December 2008 report titled
An Investigation of Overtime Payments to
FBI and Other Department of Justice Employees Deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan
, p. 18, which suggests ninety-day deployments were standard, but many served much less: ‘The FBI trainers generally stayed in Iraq for the duration of the courses (typically a few weeks) rather than for 90 days.’

  
49
.
Description based on the author’s reporting, 2003–4.

  
50
.
Author interview, Bath, July 2004.

  
51
.
Author interview, Tikrit, April 2004.

  
52
.
Rory McCarthy of the
Guardian
was the reporter.

  
53
.
Author interview, June 2004.

  
54
.
Author interview, Tikrit, 2004.

  
55
.
Author interview with Rory Stewart, Kabul, March 2009.

  
56
.
Benon V. Sevan (Executive Director of the Iraq Programme) statement: ‘Phasing down and termination of the Programme pursuant to Security Council resolution 1483 (2003)’, Office of the Iraq Programme, Oil-for-Food, November 19, 2003.

  
57
.
The corruption was only the extension of that spreading throughout Iraqi society – $100 could avoid a delay of twelve days and a lot of queuing for new passports; joining the new Iraqi chamber of commerce cost nothing, except the $250 backhander.

  
58
.
Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction Quarterly and Semi Annual Report to Congress
, January 30, 2006, pp. 17 and 33.

  
59
.
Author interviews, Dr Adel Mirza Ghadban, Baghdad, July 2003. See Jason Burke, ‘Iraq: an audit of war’,
Observer
, July 6, 2003.

  
60
.
George Packer, ‘War after the War’,
New Yorker
, November 24, 2003.

  
61
.
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, Introduction, p. 1. Cited in Dodge, ‘The Ideological Roots of Failure’.

  
62
.
Twenty-three per cent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 per cent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 per cent say Syria, 7 per cent say Egypt and 37 per cent say ‘none of the above’. John Zogby, ‘How the poll results on Iraq were manipulated’,
Arab News
, October 23, 2003. Only 38 per cent said they thought democracy would work, while discussion groups held by Thomas Melia, director of research at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, in July 2003 revealed a deep unease about indecency and licentiousness that was associated with Western democracies especially during conversation about the role of women, daughters and family. VOA, ‘Poll shows Iraqis wary about Western-style democracy’, VOA, December 11, 2003.

  
63
.
‘We are thinking in terms of one or two years,’ Deputy Ambassador John Wilkes told the author.

  
64
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 359.

  
65
.
The Mahdi is a divinely guided redeemer of Muslims, associated with the ‘occulted’ or hidden twelfth imam in the Shia tradition but recognized by many Sunnis though not by the most orthodox. The Mahdi’s anticipated rule will be just and will see both the religious purity and political power of Islam restored. It will also, in the eschatological tradition, herald the end of time. The Jaysh al-Mahdi should be properly translated as the militia of the messiah rather than the al-Mahdi Army. However, the conventional usage has been preferred here, not least because of the complex theological implications of the word messiah.

  
66
.
Ayatollah is a sign of senior rank among the Shia clergy, denoting, among other things. a high degree of scholastic authority and learning.

  
67
.
See Fred Halliday,
Two Hours That Shook the World
, Saqi Books, 2002.

  
68
.
In 1968, al-Sadr I had created the Dawa party, a clandestine Islamist organization, with a rhetoric and cell structure that drew heavily on that of the Communists and the atheistic, quasi-Fascist Ba’athists who took power in Iraq in the same year. The type of organization had been introduced to the region by the Communist Third International from the 1920s and also through Fascist and Nazi channels before being adopted through the late 1920s and 30s by a range of different currents – Communists in Syria, Egypt and Iraq and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The Leninist model proved its superiority over the politics of notables, which was centred on elite figures and saloon gatherings with no root organization. It overwhelmed the imagination of some young Islamic-minded Najafi lay groups. These young men observed with admiration and awe the appeal of the Marxist utopia and the efficiency of the clandestine communist organization in Najaf which even competed with them in organzing ashura rituals. They were eager to command such powerful instruments of recruitment and mobilization. Young clerics also shared this fascination. (Faleh A. Jabar,
The Shi’ite Movement in Iraq
, Saqi Books, 2003, pp. 78–9)

The new thinkers even went as far as to claim that it was the duty of clerics, as interpreters of religious law and scholars, to govern too.

  
69
.
Around 5,000 were detained and at least 250 were tortured to death.

  
70
.
Nicolas Pelham,
A New Muslim Order: The Shia and the Middle East Sectarian Crisis
, I. B. Tauris, 2008, p. 16. Between 1982 and 1985 some Shia communities in the south of Iraq even organized their own resistance to Iran’s advance independent of state direction.

  
71
.
International Crisis Group,
Iraq’s Muqtada Al-Sadr: Spoiler or Stabiliser?
, July 11, 2006, p. 4.

  
72
.
Al-Sadr was born on August 12, 1973.

  
73
.
Author telephone interview with Hilary Synnott, October 2009.

  
74
.
Author interview with David Richmond, Baghdad, March 2004.

  
75
.
Author interview, Tikrit, March 2004.

  
76
.
The episode is related vividly by Rory Stewart, British diplomat and CPA official at the time, in his
Occupational Hazards
, pp. 391–3.

  
77
.
Patrick Cockburn,
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq
, Faber and Faber, 2008, p. 171.

  
78
.
Ibrahim al-Marashi, ‘Boycotts, Coalitions and the Threat of Violence: The Run-Up to the January 2005, Iraqi Elections’,
The Middle East Review of International Affairs
, January 2005.

  
79
.
This was certainly the view of British intelligence specialists in Iraq at the time. Author interview with MI6 official, Kabul, May 2011. See International Crisis Group,
Iran in Iraq
, March 2005, pp. 10–13. Edward T. Pound, ‘The Iran Connection’,
US News and World Report
, November 22, 2004. A useful analysis can be found in Mark Urban,
Task Force Black
, Little, Brown, 2010, p. 111.

  
80
.
This account is largely based on the author’s reporting in Najaf during the fighting of August 2004.

  
81
.
Interview on al-Arabiya, 13 January 2006. Cockburn,
Muqtada al-Sadr
, p. 205.

  
82
.
Sistani had been born in Mashad, Iran.

  
83
.
International Crisis Group,
Iraq’s Muqtada al-Sadr
, p. 14.

CHAPTER 7: AL-QAEDA AND THE 9/11 WARS

    
1
.
918 to be precise, according to
Iraqbodycount.org
. Iraq Body Count’s totals, compiled from reliable media reporting, can be considered a guaranteed minimum. The true figures are likely to be higher.

    
2
.
See Bernard Lewis,
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
, Random House, 2004, for a useful discussion.

    
3
.
Pew Global Attitudes Project: How Global Publics View: War in Iraq, Democracy, Islam and Governance and Globalization
, June 2003, pp. 3, 46.

    
4
.
Throughout this chapter, as in the rest of the book, I refer to Setmariam as al-Suri. The latter is, of course, a nickname, simply meaning the Syrian, and it would be better to use his family name. However, al-Suri, like al-Zarqawi, has entered popular usage, and I have thus followed that custom.

    
5
.
It is possible he may subsequently have travelled again, conceivably even to Iraq.

    
6
.
Alison Pargeter,
The New Frontiers of Jihad
, I. B. Tauris, 2008, pp. 1–4. Murad Batal Al-shishani, ‘Abu Mus’ab al-Suri and the Third Generation of Salafi-Jihadists’, August 15, 2005,
Terrorism Monitor
, vol. 3, no. 16, August 15, 2005. The ruling family in Syria is from the minority Allawite sect of Shia Islam though the majority of the Syrian population is Sunni.

    
7
.
Abu Musab al-Suri, ‘Da’wat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya al-Alamiyya’, pp. 710–11, quoted in Tawil,
Brothers in Arms
, p. 29.

    
8
.
Probably the best single work on al-Suri is Brynjar Lia,
Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri
, Columbia University Press, 2008.

    
9
.
See Paul Cruickshank and Mohammad Hage Ali, ‘Abu Musab al-Suri: Architect of the New al-Qaeda’,
Studies in Conflict and Terrorism
, 30, 2007, pp. 1–14.