The American and Iraqi surge, along with Charge of the Knights, emboldened Iraqis to resist militias. While Captain Salim attributed the improved situation in Washash to his efforts, and not the Americans’, Abu Karar, a leader in the Khazali tribe, also claimed responsibility. When I met Abu Karar he had big Shiite rings on his fingers. He was a large, grave man with dark reddish skin and a stain on his forehead from praying. He worked as an accountant in the Housing Ministry.
Before 2006 there was no displacement in Washash, Abu Karar told me, and no explosions. Until that year the Mahdi Army was an army of principles and creed that fought the occupation. “They did a good job, and everybody liked them,” he said. “They improved Shiite areas. Before Samarra, I supported them. But after the Samarra explosion, their way of thinking changed. They became gangs, they took money from people, and each house in Washash paid five thousand dinars a month. If you didn’t pay, they blew up your house. Only Mahdi Army families didn’t have to pay. When militias took over, displacement started, and all the Sunnis left. Shiites came here from Ghazaliya, Dora, Jamia. Some stayed in empty Sunni houses, some paid rent. The pious IDPs paid rent to the Sunni owners, while militias also charged IDPs rent for the houses they were squatting in. There were no Sunnis left and they started to kill Shiites.”
On August 14, 2008, Abu Karar led a “revolution” in Washash, he told me. As he describes it, his tribe coordinated with the Iraqi and American armies and carried weapons with their permission. They attacked the Mahdi Army at 6 a.m. “We had an intifada,” he said. “We knew where they stayed, and we arrested sixteen of them. I arrested [Mahdi Army leader] Ihab al-Tawil with my own hands. After the arrests, we found twenty-seven bodies, and twenty-five were Shiites.” I suggested this sounded like the way the Awakening groups started, and he bristled. “We don’t believe that,” he said, dismissing the Sunni resistance. “Most Sunnis supported Al Qaeda and turned on them because of pressure from the government.” To him the Awakening was made up of former Al Qaeda men, but he was not a former member of the Mahdi Army. “When did Ramadi start to resist?” he asked me, answering that it was when the governing council gave Shiites more seats than Sunnis.
Soon after his uprising against the Mahdi Army, Abu Karar was elected to head the local tribal council. “My service to the area caused me to be elected,” he said. In the eight months since Charge of the Knights began, nobody was killed in Washash, he bragged. Five days into the campaign, Abu Karar met with the representatives of forty Sunni families from Washash in the nearby Arabi neighborhood. “It was my personal effort and my tribe’s effort,” he said. “I told them, ‘We want your return to be peaceful, without vengeance. Use the law or come to me to do it the tribal way, and anybody carrying weapons will be expelled again.’” The forty families returned. But Sunni areas were still dangerous, he said. “Sunnis are safe coming back to Shiite areas. But Shiites are not safe to come back to Sunni areas. Shiite IDPs have not left Washash to return to their homes. Some Sunnis can’t come back to Washash; they are wanted for crimes. We have four or five wanted families. They killed more than thirteen people from my tribe, and we will avenge them.”
Hassan Abdel Karim and his brother Fadhil Abdel Karim were cousins of Abu Karar who also lived in Washash and were popular in the area. Both were thick and muscular. Hassan was a boxer. “Militias wanted us to work with them and carry weapons, but we rejected it,” he told me. “My wife is Sunni. My neighbor is Sunni.” One evening Mahdi Army men knocked on his door and asked him to go knock on his Sunni neighbor’s door; his neighbor trusted Hassan and would open it. But Hassan refused. He warned his Sunni neighbors, who were from the Zowbaei tribe, that they were in danger. He told them he too would be leaving. But they insisted on staying. Three brothers from that family were killed. He also warned neighbors from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe, and they fled. After this, Mahdi Army men shot at his house and accused him and his brothers of being spies. He fled with his brother, his wife, and daughters to Syria, where they lived in Damascus’s Seyida Zeinab area. After they had fled, Mahdi Army men opened fire on their home, damaging it with hundreds of rounds and later charging the family for the expended bullets.
Hassan remained in Syria for two years and nine months. In 2008, after Charge of the Knights, his cousins called him and asked him to return. “Let’s fight the Mahdi Army,” they told him. “They are killing Sunnis and Shiites. The people are strong but scared, and you are popular here, so they will follow you.” Hassan returned and initially joined an Awakening group in the Mansour district. After the Mahdi Army threw a grenade at his cousins’ house, Hassan and his brother captured Ihab al-Tawil, he told me. “The neighborhood was with us,” he said. “We gave Ihab to Captain Salim. We had an intifada against them in Washash.” A Mahdi Army member called him up angrily, demanding to know why he did this and why he was letting Sunnis return to Washash. “We began to uncover bodies and weapons,” he told me.
“Mahdi Army members called me up to tell me because they didn’t want the army to raid their homes and get their families in trouble.” The Badr militia of the Supreme Council asked him to join them, he said, but he refused. “We rejected to carry weapons,” he told me.
IN DECEMBER 2008 I flew Royal Jordanian from Amman to Basra. Most passengers were Iraqis. Because of the Muslim holiday Eid, embassies were closed; we did not have time to get visas, but a contact in the British military promised to obtain them upon arrival. The Iraqi customs officials did not take kindly to the violation of procedure and were offended by the British presumption, but a letter from the British commander persuaded them to relent. The Iraqi officials made it clear they were doing us and the British military a favor. Five Iraqi policemen stood at the exit examining all luggage. My colleague had a copy of Patrick Cockburn’s excellent book on Muqtada, and when they saw Muqtada’s glaring visage on the cover, they turned giddy. They were amazed that a foreigner would have a book in English all about their beloved cleric. One of them kissed the cover and asked if he could keep it. My friend agreed. I was surprised, not by the sentiment but by the comfort in which the men publicly expressed it.
The Iraqi translator accompanying the Royal Marine who met us at the airport dismissed Muqtada’s supporters as merely poor and uneducated. It was the same mistake the occupiers had made from their arrival but was equally typical of middle- and upper-class Iraqis. After years of war and devastating sanctions imposed on Iraq, most Iraqis were poor and uneducated. But so what? Did this delegitimize the Sadrists or in any way reduce their popularity? On the contrary. Unfortunately, the man expressing it this time was the personal translator and adviser to the British commander in Basra, and sequestered as he was in Basra’s airport, he was getting scant information about Basra’s realities. The British commander had never heard of Thar Allah, one of the most lethal Iranian-backed militias in Basra. And when I asked him about the Mahdi Army, he was confused; he knew them only by their American-designated acronym, JAM.
I found a city largely under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces, with little sign of the British presence except for the occasional patrol. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. A trickle of Sunnis had returned. Over and over again, when I spoke to civilians they told me the same thing: “Now sectarianism is finished in Basra.” I spoke to officials of the once- formidable Communist Party. They blamed the Americans and British for introducing chaos into Basra. “Any foreign army is not good,” one official told me. “The British army is less violent than Americans, but they let militias rule and made deals with them.” The Communists also backed the prime minister. “Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist,” they told me. “He went from being a man of a party to a man of state. He said only the state can have weapons.” They agreed with me that the Sadrists were still the most popular movement among Shiites and worried that the Mahdi Army had sleeper cells. “The sectarian project failed in Iraq,” one of them told me. People in Basra spoke of “before March” and “after March” to describe their lives, and in the city’s middle-class areas, the Charge of the Knights campaign won only praise.
I attended a conference in a large auditorium at the local chamber of commerce that had been planned by local officials to explain how they spent the hundred million dollars Maliki had given them after Charge of the Knights. There were no foreign soldiers there, and I was the only foreigner. Representatives of local businesses, civil society, and the local media attended. The conference was a hosted by a woman and started with a prayer and recitation of the Koran. The national anthem was played, and everybody stood up. The host and others read poems. The conference had a decidedly Shiite tone: every time the host asked the crowd to pray for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, as was the Shiite way, the crowd responded loudly. Grandiloquent speeches about Basra and Iraq followed. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a postoccupation Iraq.
I met with Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic Party in Basra. The party’s previous headquarters was destroyed after Samarra with the help of local police, and it was now based in an unmarked building across from police headquarters. The Islamic Party had sixty-eight martyrs in Basra, he told me. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. Sunnis began returning after Charge of the Knights, he said. Although the
