The Assassins' Gate (70 page)

Ideas like debaathification and demilitarization, Makiya said, weren't wrong. He still believed in them. But he had been living in Iraq now for the better part of two years, and the staff of the Memory Foundation at his house in Baghdad was scanning fifty or a hundred thousand Baath Party documents a month. Those two years and all those documents had shown Makiya the complexity of Iraq both under Saddam and since. Ideas required this deep human knowledge. Culpability was often gray and vague. People did things for the most complicated reasons, and politics was too narrow to explain and judge them all; true understanding required Makiya's real love, literature. He realized that he wasn't suited to politics, and he had pulled away from Iraq's, away from his old friend Ahmad Chalabi. Makiya was putting his energy into the Memory Foundation, to which the city of Baghdad had leased the one square kilometer at its heart where the crossed swords and parade ground displayed Saddam's vision in all its brutality. Makiya wanted in effect to turn the monument's meaning upside down, making it a memorial to Saddam's victims.

As we talked, Wallada laid her head on Makiya's shoulder. She was exhausted, and we walked back through the snow to their house. The plumbers had the water on in the new bathroom, and Makiya insisted with his characteristic excitement that Wallada and I watch as he turned on the shower. The shower head was sitting at an angle, and when the water came, it sprayed half the bathroom. Wallada laughed, saying, “Just like Kanan.”

She went to take a nap, and Makiya made a pot of Turkish coffee. Shortly, he would go pick up his young daughter for the weekend. As we stood in the kitchen, he was still thinking about his project for the crossed swords monument. He hoped that a new generation of Iraqis would visit the memorial when it was finished and learn what had been done in their country. He wanted them not to point the finger of blame, but to draw a human lesson and say, “My God, what happened here? Anybody in certain circumstances can do terrible things to other people. We should never let those circumstances happen in our country again.” Out of such recognitions, such self-scrutiny, a new Iraqi identity might be born.

The Turkish coffee was boiling over on the stove.

Makiya said, “I think it was Ahmad who once said of me that I embody the triumph of hope over experience.”

A
FTERWORD

In January 2006, near the end of the third year of the Iraq War, I arrived in Baghdad during Eid al-Adha, the feast that concludes the pilgrimage to Mecca. The city's streets were empty, except for long lines of cars at gas stations; Baghdad was in the grip of a fuel crisis, mainly due to attacks on refineries and pipelines, which in turn had worsened the electricity shortage that now cut power for eighteen or twenty hours a day across the capital. At night, whole neighborhoods went dark. There were fewer American patrols than I was used to seeing, and more Iraqi police and soldiers manning checkpoints. The Palestine Hotel, where, in the first year after the regime's fall, journalists and contractors had trouble getting rooms, was vacant except for four of its eighteen floors. In early December, a suicide bomber driving a cement truck packed with explosives had nearly brought the tower down, and a month later the lobby's blown-out windows were still covered in plastic, the wiring hanging down from blasted ceiling tiles. Most of the foreign press corps had gone home. A lonely manager sat behind his desk in the lobby as if expecting the clientele to return any moment. Outside, at a concession stand, a vendor announced to no one, “Jack Daniel's, beer, vodka, everything.” A boy of around ten walked past and asked me, in an aggressive Southern accent that would be some American soldier's lasting contribution to the transformation of Iraq, “You lookin' for somethin'?”

It felt as if the Americans had already abandoned Iraq to its underemployed hotel managers, its street kids, and its armed militiamen. One could almost imagine that, after three years of occupation, after tens of billions of dollars and thousands of lives and the feverish efforts of foreigners and Iraqis to lift the country out of its own history, the interlude of grand visions was over and Iraq was returning to its true nature, sectarian and sinister.

In fact, the Americans were still here—most of them now hidden away in high-walled compounds or out in the desert on remote bases that were like small cities. And Iraq was not becoming more like itself. It was entering a period that Iraqis had never known and deeply feared. Their leaders, elected in December 2005 in a nationwide vote that amounted to a census of the country's three major groups, were trying to form the first representative government in the country's history; meanwhile, street by street and village by village, Iraqis were killing Iraqis in terrible numbers.

The Sunni insurgency was as relentlessly brutal as ever. And now Shiite militias, some of them working under the guise of the official security forces that they had infiltrated, were raiding Sunni neighborhoods and rounding up young Sunni men, who disappeared into secret prisons or turned up bound, blindfolded, and dead on the street or in shallow graves, the corpses burned, full of drill holes, mutilated, shot in the head. After years of suicide bombings and mass killings of Shiite civilians by Sunni insurgents, Shiite militiamen had begun to ignore Ayatollah Sistani's counsel of restraint and were retaliating, creating widespread fear among Sunnis for the first time. In the cycle of revenge, Shia were being driven from the heavily Sunni neighborhoods of western Baghdad and the mixed towns surrounding the capital, while their longtime neighbors stood by and said nothing. The same was happening to Sunnis in the Shiite areas. Thousands of displaced families were gathering in camps and shelters around Baghdad. It amounted to a campaign of ethnic cleansing in a low-grade civil war.

Iraqis had always avoided the words “civil war” as if simply uttering them might release a malignant spirit into the air. Ethnic and sectarian identities, they insisted, were brought to Iraq after the invasion by the Americans and their allies, the exiles. Iraqis had been living together, in mixed marriages and mixed neighborhoods, for decades and centuries. To start a civil war would mean turning a single household, a single marriage chamber, against itself. It couldn't happen here, they said, meaning, “We don't want it to happen here,” and the subject was so unwelcome that even mentioning the words “Sunni” and “Shiite” was taken as the rudeness of a clumsy outsider. But after three years of politics and violence carried out along sectarian lines, the labels were now used openly, with fear and hatred.

Dora, a middle-class neighborhood of Sunnis, Shia, and Christians in southern Baghdad, had become ground zero of sectarian violence. It began with the killing of barbers, a businessman from Dora told me: Sunni extremists decided that shaving beards was against Islam, and then extended the ban to Western-style haircuts. “After the barbers, they went on to the real estate agents,” the businessman said. A fatwa was issued declaring that in the time of the Prophet there was no buying or selling of property. Then an ice vendor was shot dead on the street because ice wasn't sold in the seventh century. The targets became grocery shop owners, exchange shop owners, clothing shop owners. “At that time they were giving reasons, but then things developed and they started killing for no reason,” the businessman said. Every day in the heart of the district, around the Assyrian Market, a list of names of the next batch of intended victims—mostly merchants, and always Shia—circulated by word of mouth. Within a few days, those who didn't take precautions were shot to death in broad daylight by gunmen from outside Dora. Police at the local stations didn't get involved, and American soldiers rarely entered the district, though the businessman said that he went to sleep at night to the sound of gunfire, helicopters overhead, and bombs dropping, as if he lived on the front line of a battle. “Dora is out of the government's control,” the businessman said, and there were hardly any Shia left.

A senior Iraqi official with access to classified intelligence said that the campaign of killings in Dora was part of a strategic effort by Sunni insurgents to “shape the battlefield,” to clear the district of potential enemies and use it as a staging area for attacks in Baghdad. Dora had key infrastructure facilities—an oil refinery and a power plant—and it lay along the route from the Sunni-dominated tribal areas south of Baghdad into the heart of the city. The killings there were part of a trend, the official said, away from attacks on American and Iraqi units, which exposed insurgents to great risk, toward killings of individual officials and ordinary citizens, intended to undermine the public's confidence that the government could protect it. In January, he said, there were seven hundred of these cold-blooded murders, the highest number of the war up until that month. “So 2006 maybe will be the year of assassinations and infrastructure attacks,” the official said.

Whatever the strategic reasons for the killings, they created an atmosphere of sectarian hysteria that residents of Baghdad had never known before.

I met a butcher named Mohamed Kareem Jassim, who owned a small shop on a busy thoroughfare, the doorway obstructed by the hanging carcasses of skinned lambs. His brother was also a butcher, with a shop in Dora. One morning in January, the brother was cutting meat for two women customers when a man walked into the shop, asked the women to excuse him, came up to the counter, and said, “Good morning.” The brother looked up, said, “Good morning,” and was shot in the nose. His grown son rushed into the room, shouting, “Daddy, Daddy!” and he, too, was shot dead. A second brother, also a butcher, came running from an adjacent shop with a carving knife in his hand; he was also killed.

When I sat down ten days later to talk with the surviving brother, a stout, bearded man in his fifties, he was hyperventilating with rage. “Dirty fuckers, sons of bitches. They have no faith, no religious leaders, since the time of Omar and Abu Bakr until now,” he said, going straight back to the seventh century. “The only reason for this is because we are Shia and we love Imam Ali.” He expressed great bitterness that Sunni religious and political leaders rarely condemn the killings of Shia, and he despaired at being protected by American or Iraqi security forces. The butcher's shoulders heaved and he said, “If our religious leaders gave a fatwa, there would be no more Sunnis in Iraq anymore. The one who stayed would be killed—everyone else would have to leave. Because everybody now has a broken heart. I wish I could catch them with my hands and slaughter them. I could do it—I'm a butcher.”

Each group had its own story of victimhood, in fierce competition with the other. One day, I visited the headquarters in western Baghdad of the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni party, with roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. On the walls of its human rights office hung pictures of corpses bearing marks of torture, inflicted, according to a party official, by Interior Ministry forces. While I was in the office, an elderly couple arrived in a state of panic. A week before, at six in the morning, fifteen police commandos in black masks had broken into their house and taken their son from his conjugal bed. Since then the parents had been unable to get any information about him. The old woman described the commandos as members of the Badr Organization, the largest Shiite militia in Iraq. One of its leaders, Bayan Jabr, had been the minister of interior for the past year and was accused of allowing Shiite militias to infiltrate key offices of the ministry, creating rogue units within the police forces. Sunnis now routinely called Shiite politicians like Jabr Iranians; the mother used a Persian name for him. “Fifty-five years I'm alive and I never saw something like this,” she cried. “They are bringing it from Iran, from the Persian people—Iran, which is now trying to get the nuclear bomb to destroy the world.”

The party official, Omar Hechel al-Jabouri, told the old couple that he would contact the Interior Ministry about the case, to prevent their son from being killed during interrogation and torture. Every day, he said, a hundred people came to his office with complaints, so many that he had taken to sleeping on a cot in the corner of the room. “The main problem is our brothers the Shia are very smart in crying about their suffering,” he said. “We others are not as smart.”

Iraq was breaking apart—not cleanly into the three autonomous regions of some politicians' dreams, but neighborhood by neighborhood, in thousands of pieces. This was not true just of Baghdad and the areas around it, or of mixed cities like Mosul and Kirkuk, but of the south as well. The elections of January 2005, which had made Iraqis citizens for one triumphant day, brought to power Shiite groups that governed more like mafia organizations than national parties. A year later, Basra was full of militias—fragments of the Sadr and Badr organizations, along with shadowy Iranian-run gangs, each led by its own mullah. They amounted to death squads and had the run of the streets. An official I had met during the elections in Basra reported that, in one ten-day period, fifty people—doctors, teachers, officials, university students—were assassinated around the city. The death squads moved in pairs of cars known as Bata, or, in Arabic, “swan.” “The story of this car is horrible and anybody must avoid this kind of car—black window glass, four armed people, and always another car following and some invisible ghosts sit inside,” he wrote. One morning, as he drove to work, the official found himself trapped between two Batas, and when armed men calmly got out and approached, he thought that the death squads had come for him—only to witness the execution of a man in the car next to his. “Thousands of people are like me,” he wrote, “our hearts in Iraq are made of wood, our eyes full of sand, and we are like sheep under the shepherd's order, waiting for the knife of the butcher.”

*   *   *

The disintegration of the country had been underway for a long time; in a sense, it had begun years before the Americans crossed the Kuwaiti border in March 2003. But by 2006 it was happening with alarming speed, and with all the signs of being irreversible. Iraqis who had once said that Iraq would need one or two years to emerge from violence now spoke in terms of a decade or more: a generation of chaos following generations of tyranny.