Firas in Shaab would become Haitham’s assistant, driver, and bodyguard.) He issued
Abu Haidar’s group is also said to have killed Haji Falah, the head of intelligence in Saddam City, and it was tied to the attempted assassination of Saddam’s son Uday. Haitham was said to be personally secular, but he saw religion as the only means to combat Saddam’s regime. In about 1998 the Baathists banned Friday prayers in Shurufi Mosque. A riot broke out, and two people were arrested. Others threw stones at security cars.
In about 1998 Abu Haidar, Muayad, and Haitham were all arrested. Abu Haidar and Muayad were executed. Haitham convinced his interrogator, a Sunni from the Dulaimi tribe, that he was just a friend of the other two; he was released after he agreed to work for Iraqi security. But he fled to Jordan, where he became the caretaker for the Jaafar Al Tayar shrine in Karak, the main Shiite shrine in that country. He also sold trinkets on the street and was the only Shiite cleric in Jordan.
In Jordan Haitham was recruited by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Haitham’s role for the INC was to recruit Sadrists. He told the INC that he would not engage in military operations for them, but he secretly involved himself in small-scale acts of sabotage, using the money the INC gave him, which in those three years was not more than thirty thousand dollars. He met officials from the American Defense Intelligence Agency, who sent Thoraya satellite phones to his network in Iraq in exchange for intelligence about the Iraqi Security Forces. Right before the war, Iraqi security realized that Haitham was running spies in Iraq and arrested and tortured some of his people. Nonetheless, Haitham had strong ambitions in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. He proposed moving his operations to western Iraq—principally the Anbar province—but CIA officials rejected this plan, because they had authorized that area for their own man, Ayad Allawi. On April 11, 2003, two days after Baghdad fell, Haitham returned to Ur, linking up with survivors of his network and the renascent Sadrist movement.
Haitham didn’t respect Muqtada and the old guard, and at first he joined the ranks of Muqtada’s rival, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Yaqoubi. But he was quickly disenchanted and soon rejoined Muqtada. All the while he was also collaborating with Chalabi’s INC. Haitham was friends with two other low-level Sadrists from Ur, Ali al-Lami and Jawad al-Bolani; he introduced them to Chalabi, giving their careers a huge boost.
After the war Haitham set up the Tawhid (Unity) association in Ur. In its building Bolani and Lami had offices, as did a former anti-Saddam activist from the southern marshes named Karim Mahud al-Muhammadawi, known as Abu Hatem, or the prince of the marshes, who would go on to lead Iraqi Hizballah. The Tawhid association became an important center. Shiite politicians would visit it; even the American military came. People returned stolen goods to Tawhid, and it had a religious school for women.
After I went over several hundred of the many thousands of documents I found in the looted security station in Baghdad (see chapter one), I gave them to my friend Firas, and he, in turn, gave them to the Tawhid. Firas drove Haitham to his weekly meetings with Chalabi in Mansour. Falah Hassan Shanshal, who would go on to head the Sadrist bloc of Parliament, would also come to the meetings. Haitham brokered a meeting in a Sadr City mosque between Muhammadawi, Lami, and Bolani. Muhammadawi was seeking local Baghdad representatives and had appointed Bolani and Lami as his local first and second deputies. When Chalabi asked his old friend Haitham to introduce him to local Shiite politicians who could reach into Shiite communities, Haitham introduced him to Lami and Bolani. Together they established an umbrella political group, the Shiite House. The Shiite House became the Shiite Political Council and eventually the Iraqi National Alliance, the main Shiite list in the elections. In late summer 2004, when the Iranians started working with the Sadrists, Haitham was invited to Iran. But the meeting was postponed, and he never made it.
After the war, Sadrists took over a Baath Party office in Ur and turned it into a
When the IGC set up its de-Baathification office, Muhammadawi appointed Lami the managing director of the archives department, which housed all the documents that contained background information on Baath Party suspects. (Bolani and Lami apparently despised each other and parted company.) When Chalabi suffered total defeat in the 2005 elections, he grew closer with Lami and grew to depend on him. Chalabi used Lami’s bodyguards because they had a fearsome reputation for their skill, and their special privileges allowed them to arrest anybody they accused of being a former Baathist.
Chalabi and Lami visited Iran together often. Both men were sectarian and felt that Shiites had been deprived of their rights in the past. This time they would make sure Shiites took over. Lami became known as Ali Faisal and would run de-Baathification. He hated Baathists and bore a grudge against Sunnis because of his past as a poor Shiite from the slums of Ur. He had lists of Baathists he wanted to dismiss and was determined to purge the Shiite ex-Baathists who had been rehabilitated by the Supreme Council and were protected by it. Meanwhile, Bolani was working with Muhammadawi but looking for other jobs. For a man who would go on to accrue huge political power at the Interior Ministry, he didn’t seem to be picky then. He applied for a job as a flour mill manager, but Chalabi adopted Bolani and took him to Washington in 2004, thus giving him his international profile.
On December 31, 2004, Haitham was killed near his house by a local Shaab terrorist group. Passions were further inflamed with the attempted assassination of Muhammadawi, whose car was shot at as he left the funeral.
Muqtada’s deputy Sheikh Safaa al-Tamimi decided to avenge Haitham’s assassination and established a special assassination squad under his command. All his men belonged to the Mahdi Army, and all their targets belonged to the Salafi movement. A room inside the Mustafa Husseiniya was used for torturing suspects until they confessed. Confessions were filmed, and some included executions of prisoners who admitted to attacking Shiites or civilians. Only the prisoner was shown in the film, with the interrogator in the background calmly asking questions in a southern Iraqi accent (the same one common in Sadr City). Some films showed groups of prisoners sitting together. One such film showed the group that confessed to the murder of Haitham. These snuff films were kept in Sheikh Safaa’s possession and were not reproduced, saved as evidence that only people who deserved it were executed.
Sheikh Safaa’s death squad was well armed, with grenades, grenade launchers, and Kalashnikovs. The soldiers of the group were selected by the sheikh for their physical strength or martial prowess. The group was supplied with many vehicles by supporters in Shaab. Having Mahdi Army friends in the Vehicle Registration Department made it easy for the group to replace their license plates. Their assassination campaign led to a massive clearance of Sunnis from Shaab, part of a deliberate strategy to cleanse the area of Mahdi Army enemies following two years of clashes with Salafis.
Sheikh Safaa had final approval of all targets, who would then be tracked for a couple of days before their murder. When his men conducted operations and raids, they usually wore either all black or military uniforms. Sometimes they coordinated their operations with the Iraqi army. The group typically raided a target’s house at night, dragging him from bed, taking him to the mosque for interrogation, executing him, and then dumping the body on the outskirts of Sadr City in a place locally known as Al Sadda (The Dam), where there was a sand berm. Before these Shiite revenge attacks, radical Salafis had imposed their rule on much of Shaab, even killing barbers to prevent local citizens from having their beards shaved. In January 2006, one Mahdi Army soldier said, “We cleaned our city from all Wahhabis,” adding, “now we can live peacefully in Shaab.”
At around the same time, Muqtada’s spokesman in Kadhimiya, Hazim al-Araji, condemned “terrorists” (his euphemism for Sunnis), but he also asserted that the American occupiers were allied with these “terrorists” against Shiites.
BRUTAL AS THE American occupation was, it was also incompetent. The Americans never controlled much in Iraq. They could destroy, but they had trouble building. They allowed militias to take over Iraq and allowed the police, who should have been protecting civilians from the predations of militias, to become involved in the conflict as one of the main sectarian militias. And they either ignored it for the sake of expediency, as they did when they dealt with warlords in post-Taliban Afghanistan, or they were simply unaware. But there were exceptions,
