shot up a Shiite mosque; several days after that a Sunni cleric was killed in a drive-by shooting while walking to his mosque for the evening prayer. Hundreds attended his funeral, which was guarded by a phalange of very anxious armed men. Surrounded by his bodyguards, Sheikh Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai of the Association of Muslim Scholars spoke at the funeral, calling on the youth to protect their religious leaders. It was like calling for the creation of self-defense militias. Following the murder of another Sunni sheikh, Dhamer al-Dhari, Samarai blamed the Americans for paying mercenaries to commit murders and cause sectarian strife. At the same time, he blamed the Americans for favoring the Shiites and discriminating against the Sunnis, and criticized them for not disarming the Kurdish and Shiite militias. Samarai also called for uniting Sunnis to prevent other militias from taking over, and blamed the occupiers and the Zionists for playing with Iraq’s factions. No one seemed to be talking about Sunni- Shiite unity anymore.
Two nights after the Ashura bombings, the Qiba Mosque—a Sunni mosque in a Shiite stronghold in Baghdad’s Shaab district—was attacked. I had befriended a young man my age called Firas from the neighborhood; he called to tip me off about this, adding that the mosque was for “Wahhabis.” I asked the hotel where I was staying for its taxi driver, but I didn’t explain why I was going to Shaab. Not a single car was out as we drove for twenty minutes from the city center to the mosque. The streets of Shaab were misty and unlit. The road before the mosque was blocked by a truck and about twenty men holding Kalashnikovs.
They surrounded the taxi, and young men in shabby civilian clothes pointed their barrels in through our windows. They demanded to know who we were and what we wanted. They were very tense. I asked the one on my side who he was, but he ordered me out of the car. The taxi driver explained that I was not an Iraqi. “He’s a foreigner!” they shouted to one another, and all the men came to the car. We tried to explain that I was a journalist, but they had never seen an American passport or a press ID before. Why was I here? What did I want? It was clear from the fear in their eyes and the anger in their voices that they wanted to find somebody to kill. They used none of the polite expressions that color even hostile Arabic conversation. They only gave orders, as if we were their prisoners, their voices echoing against the empty city’s buildings.
The man with the slurred voice pointed his Kalashnikov at me and ordered me out of the car in a drunken rage. The driver and I protested that I was just a journalist, here to investigate an attack. Not knowing if they were Sunni or Shiite, I recited the names of every Iraqi Sunni and Shiite leader I could think of and said they were all my friends. I won over two men and they began struggling with the drunk man, who still wanted to shoot me. An argument broke out over whether or not they should kill me. The drunk man would not move the barrel down as they tried to push it, and I moved away from its swaying range. The others were undecided and nervously eyed me. One man rushed me into the mosque for safety. More armed guards stood inside. I tried to remember how to speak Arabic and felt ashamed that my knees were very weak. It was the first time I had ever been confronted with death. They confirmed that after the last prayer that night, as the devout were emptying onto the street, a car had driven by and opened fire. “Praise God, nobody was wounded,” they said, pointing to the white gashes in the wall where the bullets had torn chunks of plaster off. They added that only a few months ago, the same thing had happened. More men holding their Kalashnikovs in a ready-for-fire position came out.
The next morning I returned. Shaab’s streets were busy with children playing amid garbage and sewage pools. Donkeys pulled carts carrying gas for stoves, and boys banged on the containers to let the neighborhood know they were passing. Before the war many forbidden Shiite books were printed illegally in Shaab, and it was known as the “Little Hawza.” American soldiers manned a checkpoint along with fresh Iraqi recruits, searching suspicious cars. A house near the mosque was riddled with bullets and burned. It belonged to a Wahhabi Muslim who had been killed in the summer of 2003 by local Shiites.
Sheikh Walid Al-Dulaimi, the leader of the Qiba Mosque, was well liked in the neighborhood for being a friend to the Shiites, and locals said he even had problems with the previous regime because of this. Abu Hasan, the mosque caretaker, was busy fixing the generator, his hands and
The mosque was first attacked in August of the previous year, he said, and three people had been wounded. After last night’s attack the police shot a man in the leg in a case of mistaken identity. Sayyid Nasr of the Sayyid Haidar Husseiniya—a
He explained that the Wahhabi who had been killed the previous summer and whose house had been burned the night before was called Muhamad. On the day of Hakim’s murder in August 2003, Muhamad had gone to a nearby square that had a painting of the late Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Ali al-Sistani. “Muhamad spit and threw stones at the paintings, and then shot at them with his Kalashnikov,” Nasr said. “He killed one Shiite and wounded another. After that the men from the neighborhood shot him and burned his house. The Americans came to take his body and found many weapons in his house as well as pictures of bin Laden.” Muhamad was from the Dulaimi tribe, and in order to make peace the Dulaimis gave monetary compensation to the family of the murdered Shiite. “After this Sunnis and Shiites prayed together in the Qiba Mosque, and tomorrow we will do so again.” Nasr also mentioned that fifty-two Sunnis had perished in the Baghdad explosions. When I went to find the leader of the Qiba mosque, he did not unlock his door; instead, he suspiciously peered out, and even after being reassured that I was only a journalist, he did not remove the Kalashnikov strapped around his torso for a moment, afraid of everybody.
The Cleansing of Amriya
In the summer of 2003 I met two young Sunni clerics in the Sunni stronghold of Amriya, who I would come across many times over the next few years. Sheikh Hussein Abu Mustafa, a round dark man with a round black beard and white turban, and Sheikh Walid were old friends. They had graduated together from the Baghdad Islamic Institute. I met them both in Sheikh Walid’s Tikriti Mosque, which had been built in 1999 by the head of intelligence. What happened to them over the next few years in many ways symbolized the topsy-turvy experience of many influential anti-occupation Sunnis. They were the first Sunni clerics I had met who seemed to be offering strong support to the Iraqi resistance. “We are very happy with the resistance of the Iraqi people to the American occupation, but we don’t support killing civilians and innocent people and taking impulsive actions,” they said.
When I revisited Amriya and saw Sheikh Hussein in March 2004, mosque security was higher than ever. Amriya had been home to former Iraq military bases as well as former officers in the army and intelligence services. The sounds of gunfire and explosions reverberated through the neighborhood’s walls, ignored by the children playing in the street until a particularly loud explosion sent them scurrying inside. Neighbors spoke of the nightly attacks and raids. Just last night, they said, U.S. soldiers had raided a house, and when the suspect was not found they took his younger brother. Nearby was the house of a former intelligence officer. When the U.S. soldiers came for him, his family said he was not home and he escaped, wisely trading his conspicuous SUV for a smaller, older wreck of a car. And also last night, they said, from this very street—”We saw them,” they laughed—a car pulled over and shot three artillery rounds at the nearby base where U.S. soldiers trained the new Iraqi Security Forces. One round
