The 9/11 Wars (27 page)

Another element that al-Sadr was able to exploit was a resurgent revivalist Shia identity which overlapped both with Islamism and nationalism, reinforcing and amplifying both to create a potent vision of a conservative, Islamist, Shia-dominated Iraq. Though part of the broader surge in such identities through the 1990s across much of the Islamic (and indeed non-Islamic) world, the new piety and identification of the Shia in Iraq can be explained also by the way in which long Shia traditions of martyrdom and suffering, of passive resistance to tyranny and of internal spiritual renewal and questioning were perfectly adapted to the poverty, frustration, anger and brutal repression experienced by the community under Saddam Hussein. The strong social revolutionary strand within Shia thought, traditionally if somewhat simplistically seen as a faith of the underdogs and of the poor, also lent longstanding religious and historic myths an immediate relevance that they might not otherwise have had. By the late 1990s, in homes across Iraq, the garish pictures of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed assassinated in
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661, and his son Hussein, killed in battle fighting against overwhelming odds by forces loyal to the dictatorial caliph Yazid, went back up on the walls of Shia households. Immediately after the invasion, millions took part in ritual pilgrimages that had been banned for many decades.
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Finally there was a very specific social and economic dynamic too. Muqtada al-Sadr was not able to garner support among the broad masses of Shia society – most people remained loyal to the revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the college of clerics, the
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, that he led – but was able to make significant inroads among the young unemployed urban working-class men from the seething slums of cities like Baghdad, Basra, Nasariyah, Kut and others. Beyond the broad structural trends, such men joined the movement for a typical range of more immediate factors. It was here where there was some overlap with the young men flowing into the networks of Sunni insurgents. Years of anti-Western propaganda, the lived experience of the consequences of United-Nations-sponsored and American-backed sanctions and the rhetoric both of resurgent Islamic extremism and of the mainstream Arabic-language media, all encouraged a profound antipathy to the invaders and made the idea of taking up arms more attractive too. The Shia community too was affected by the looting that followed the invasion or the insecurity that it brought. Though initially many services improved for Iraq’s Shias as Saddam’s discriminatory policies were reversed by the new rulers, they soon deteriorated. So the continuing failure to provide power, sanitation, medical services and jobs also fuelled discontent.

Nor was the fact that these young men, often only a decade younger than Muqtada al-Sadr himself, were also joining a revolt against the traditional Shia authorities, the
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, insignificant. If they rejected the automatic authority accorded to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, it was not just in a spirit of adolescent rebellion but also because his quietist message matched neither their aspirations nor their instincts. Angry young men in desperate times demanded desperate and angry measures. That said, most joined not for ideological or religious reasons but through personal associations, because in the microcommunities that structured life in the overcrowded slums where most lived, joining the al-Mahdi Army was encouraged or was simply what most of their peers were doing. The al-Mahdi Army offered adventure, comradeship, social mobility and a clear, certain, lucid dogma that made sense of a world turned upside down. Most of the young activists of the al-Mahdi Army had nothing else to do and understandably preferred carrying weapons, enforcing local order or simply contributing to the various social activities that Muqtada al-Sadr’s office sponsored to hanging around on street corners watching American patrols go by.

Muqtada al-Sadr, thirty years old in 2003, was also helped by the way in which coalition leaders, political advisers and military intelligence officers consistently underestimated him in the way that they underestimated so many opponents in the early years of the 9/11 Wars.
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Few in the West had ever heard of al-Sadr before the invasion – he did not feature in any of the cursory briefings received by Hilary Synnott, the British diplomat sent to Basra to be the CPA representative in the south, before leaving the UK in July 2003 – and no one anticipated his extraordinarily rapid rise from unknown junior cleric to major powerbroker.
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Though he admitted that the self-styled ‘Sadr III’ represented a genuine popular constituency, David Richmond, the British special representative in Iraq, professed ‘reasonable confidence’ in March 2004 that al-Sadr would be ‘wound down and put back in his box’ without too much trouble.
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For Brigadier Kimmitt, chief US military spokesman, al-Sadr led an ‘illegal mob’. One US intelligence officer described the cleric to the author in March 2004 as ‘a fucking punk, an opportunistic little bastard’.
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A week later the al-Mahdi Army launched an armed insurrection against occupation forces which plunged much of Iraq into chaos and would take six months to suppress.

The spring fighting saw the ragged and untrained teenagers of the al-Mahdi Army fighting coalition troops, attacking CPA offices and attempting to eliminate rivals within the Shia community. Many of the major routes to the capital – such as the huge supply lines the Americans had constructed across the desert or through remote villages and farmland so they could avoid the main arteries – were rapidly rendered unusable. Others were made extremely dangerous by the breakdown in law and order that was a consequence of the fighting. Driving to Karbala to cover the fighting, a car carrying other journalists only a few minutes ahead of the author’s own vehicle was ambushed and its occupants shot dead, their corpses spread in the dirt by the side of the road. Civilian traffic from Jordan and Kuwait was cut off. The CPA even started drawing up plans for rationing in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Across a swathe of southern Iraq, in towns such as Amarah, Kut and Nasariyah, the half-trained teenagers from urban slums brushed aside Western troops whose political leaders and generals had never anticipated their soldiers participating in real fighting. In Nasariyah an Italian contingent lost control of the city, refusing to engage the mortars set up by the al-Mahdi Army that were bombarding the CPA’s offices. In Kut, the Ukrainians, who had a reputation locally for taking bribes at their checkpoints, tried to run away.
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In Najaf, Spanish troops refused to leave their base.

Al-Sadr’s initial success did not last, however, and as more American troops entered the fight, it had rapidly become clear that the al-Mahdi Army’s undoubted zeal was no match for a modern professional military, especially one with the firepower the US army could muster. In Sadr City, support for the militia had remained relatively solid. But the commercial and educated classes of the Shia community were contemptuous and fearful of al-Sadr’s predominantly working-class fighters, and any backing outside the tougher suburbs of Baghdad or the southern cities rapidly fell away as the fighting continued. In the holy city of Najaf, leaflets had denounced the al-Mahdi Army as ‘thieves, robbers and perverts under the command of a one-eyed charlatan’.
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Nor had al-Sadr himself mapped out a broader political strategy to take advantage of his military gains. By the end of May, much of the south had been retaken by coalition troops, and the
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had made their disapproval of al-Sadr very clear. Al-Sadr called off the fight, the CPA dropped demands for the dissolution of his militia and, like the Sunnis in Falluja, everyone began to prepare for round two. Al-Sadr had much to show for his efforts, however. He had emerged as a player in the new post-invasion Iraqi politics – aided in no little way by the largely uncritical saturation coverage he had received from al-Jazeera and other Arabic-language satellite channels. Polls showed the impact the fighting had had on al-Sadr’s profile. When asked in February 2004, ‘Which national leader do you trust the most?’ only 1.5 per cent of respondents had mentioned al-Sadr’s name. Four months later that figure was 7.4 per cent, still low in overall terms but the highest jump in popularity for any Iraqi political figure.
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Over the summer, as the political situation more generally in the country evolved rapidly, al-Sadr embedded his organization still further in his bastion of Baghdad’s Sadr City. There his office set up judges, unofficial police forces, organized food distribution – in short did everything that the government could not or would not do. The social movement began to evolve into a genuine social force as al-Sadr attempted to organize and discipline his followers. There is also some evidence of contacts at this point with elements within the Iranian government. The Iranians may have supplied weapons or at least training and technical advice to parts of the still fairly fragmented al-Mahdi Army, but their aid was probably less substantial than alleged by many at the time.
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The militia’s leaders had learned from experience, and by August, when al-Sadr moved again to take control of Najaf and the vast wealth its pilgrim trade generated, the force was more than the collection of carloads of young gunmen that it had been earlier in the year and easily occupied the key religious sites there and in nearby Kerbala, once again forcing government forces and those loyal to the traditional clerical authorities into flight or hiding. A force of newly arrived US Marines decided to deal immediately and aggressively with the new threat and attacked.

Again the fighting was intense, particularly in Najaf. Over ten days the American troops forced the militia back through the vast cemeteries around the city to positions around the main shrine itself. The scene in Najaf’s centre was one of devastation. Whole blocks of homes, shops, hotels and restaurants had been reduced to a mass of rubble, twisted iron and hanging wires. Helicopters circled overhead, air strikes were called in, tanks inched their way down the narrow lanes with infantry crouching in the dust behind. American snipers had ringed the city and picked off anyone bringing supplies in to the centre, shooting the donkeys that carried them. Al-Sadr’s men had turned their office in the city into a torture centre, and its courtyard was filled with dozens of rotting bodies, opponents who had been executed over previous weeks. The wounded were dragged in sheets to a makeshift dressing station inside the shrine, where scores of young men from Baghdad, Nasariyah, Basra and elsewhere lay moaning on tiling slick with blood. ‘We are here to defend our leader, our country and Islam against the invaders,’ Haider Abbas, an unemployed nineteen-year-old from Sadr City who had been in Najaf for months, told the author. ‘Our weapon is faith. They have tried to kill us with everything but not suceeded,’ said Khalid Hada, twenty-three, who had been a soldier in Saddam’s army until it was demobilized. The young men spoke of death, of angels, of how the bodies of martyrs smelt of musk, all images and ideas common to their counterparts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere. With the militia entrenched in the houses around the main shrine, difficult to dislodge, the Americans were unwilling to risk an all-out attack. Iraqi troops were neither sufficiently well armed nor trained nor motivated to fight their way in alone, and there appeared no obvious way of rapidly ending the violence. Al-Sadr remained defiant. Those local people who had stayed were resigned to the destruction of their town and livelihood. Salah Alawi Jassm, fifty-eight, had remained in his home for fear of looters. Down a side street strewn with debris, paper, spent ammunition, wire, dead dogs and all the other detritus of battle, the house had largely escaped damage. Over the hammering of automatic weapons a few hundred metres away and the screech of shells he told the author that the people of Najaf had two enemies: ‘the Americans and the Mahdi militia’. At the city’s main hospital, tired doctors did what they could for children suffering from dehydration or diarrhoea. In lulls in the fighting, civilians picked their way through the rubble and the rubbish to get water. The scenes that had so gripped Iraq and the Islamic world more generally five months earlier in Falluja were being repeated.

Eventually it was not the Marines but Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani who broke the deadlock by telling his followers to march peacefully on Najaf and reclaim the shrine. It was a powerful demonstration of his continuing authority over Iraq’s 14 million Shias. With elections now looming in January, the
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did not want their political strategy derailed by the young radical al-Sadr though they recognized his new appeal as a figurehead for resistance for significant parts of their community. For his part, al-Sadr could not confront al-Sistani, even if some of his followers rejected the authority of the ageing scholar and even if the wealth of Najaf was at stake. At dawn on a Friday morning, with the low sun glinting off the golden dome of the shrine, the pilgrims marched along the pocked roads through the ruined city centre and to the shrine. Al-Sadr’s men loaded their weapons on to carts and slipped away.
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In the vast cemetery where much of the fiercest fighting had taken place over previous weeks, exhausted US soldiers, their uniforms stained with sweat, hollow-eyed and pale with fatigue, sat or lay in the shade of the tombs with their weapons beside them. Many were sleeping for the first time in days, one officer said. A sergeant questioned passing journalists on events elsewhere. He was pleased to hear that the country was now mostly quiet. ‘Do you think we are going to have to do this all over again?’ he asked.