Aftermath

militiamen who blocked off the street with cars and killed at least two civilians. In the nearby village of Bashir, they attacked the Shiite Imam Ridha shrine. Officially, Muqtada opposed attacks on Sunnis, but he had unleashed his fighters on Sunnis. Sectarian and ethnic cleansing continued apace, with mixed neighborhoods being purified. In Amriya, dead bodies were being found on the main street at the rate of three a day. People were afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, because they would be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya, and other mixed neighborhoods, Shiites were being forced to leave. In Maalif Sunnis were being targeted. In its statements the Association of Muslim Scholars referred to the police as “government police,” not the Iraqi police, because it viewed them as illegitimate, and it called the Mahdi Army the “black sectarians” because of their uniforms, or the “new sectarians.” Iraq was a divided country, even in its media. New channels such as Al Furat, which was controlled by the Supreme Council, and Sharqiya, which was controlled by former Baathist Saad Bazzaz, continued the wars fought on the street, inflaming people’s fears and hatreds. If Sunni and Shiite militias could not assassinate political figures, they often targeted the close relatives of judges, governors, ministers, and members of the national assembly.

Shiite families fled Abu Ghraib, Al Taji, and Al Mashahada, moving into Shiite strongholds in Baghdad, such as Shuula, where Muqtada’s representatives took care of them. Shiites were still angry. “Destroying all Sunni mosques is still not equivalent to bombing the Askari shrine” was the dominant Shiite attitude in Baghdad. Hundreds of Shiite families from Sunni towns settled in Red Crescent-run refugee camps near Kut. The United States constantly shifted its support back and forth between Sunnis and Shiites, calling on Shiites to rein in their militias, a key Sunni demand, while conducting massive and lethal raids on the Sunni population—alienating everyone in Iraq but the Kurds.

In February 2006 the National Accord Front—the largest Sunni coalition, with forty-four seats in the new Parliament—threatened to begin civil disobedience if attacks and arrests targeting Sunnis were not halted. In areas where Shiites were the minority, they feared the mulathamin (masked ones), referring to the Sunni militias who covered their faces with their head scarves. Sunnis, in turn, feared “interior,” a reference to the Interior Ministry, or “the black sectarians” of the Mahdi Army.

THE CIVIL WAR IN IRAQ was a victory of the slum over the city, or the periphery over the center. The Kurds, the Shiites, and even the Sunnis of the center were marginalized or killed. For the Sunnis, for example, it was the Anbar Sunni—more rural, more tribal—who briefly rose to prominence in 2007. In Kurdistan, the pesh merga and the Kurds of the mountains have prevailed. Under Saddam there were many pro-regime, Arabic-speaking, Iraqified Kurds living in Baghdad and Mosul. They have been pushed into Kurdistan.

For those who resisted having to choose a sectarian identity, there were few choices except exile. The integrated Iraqis had been Saddam’s citizens; they were his middle class, his urban dream, and they lived in the heart of the state. Many were state employees under the direct control of the state. They were of the state’s making, and they have died with the state. Millions of Iraqis have left Iraq. More than two million Iraqis had fled before the war, in the 1990s, when the UN-imposed sanctions destroyed Saddam’s allies and his urban middle-class technocrats. Millions more have fled their homes since the war began, most of them from the mixed areas of Iraq. Many have been expelled from their urban homes by the sectarian militias who descended from the mountains, the desert, the marshes, the slums.

CHAPTER THREE Slaughterhouse

ON MARCH 26, 2006, AMERICAN AND IRAQI FORCES RAIDED THE Mustafa Husseiniya, the small but locally well-known Shiite gathering place and place of worship in eastern Baghdad’s Ur neighborhood, adjoining the larger Shaab district. Sixteen to eighteen people were killed in the raid. A U.S. military statement issued later that day claimed that “Iraqi Special Operations Forces conducted a twilight raid in the Adhamiyah neighborhood in northeast Baghdad to disrupt a terrorist cell responsible for conducting attacks on Iraqi security and coalition forces and kidnapping Iraqi civilians,” adding that “no mosques were entered or damaged,” that the operation was conducted at dusk to “ensure no civilians were in the area and to minimize the possibility of collateral damage,” and that U.S. forces were only advising the Iraqi soldiers who conducted the raid. Some accounts claimed that American and Iraqi soldiers had been pursuing a suspect who fled to the mosque. They were fired upon and returned fire, killing sixteen “insurgents” and arresting fifteen others. It was also claimed they rescued a hostage. Former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the Dawa Party angrily complained that the sixteen dead had been inside a mosque. Nuri al-Maliki, who had succeeded Jaafari as prime minister, was interviewed on Iraqi state television. “This was a hostile attack intended to destroy the political process and provoke a civil war,” he said. He blamed the American military and American ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya the day after the raid. I arranged to meet an old friend Firas from Shaab who was a friend of Sheikh Safaa al-Tamimi of the Mustafa Husseiniya. We drove into Shaab and into a long convoy of Mahdi Army pickup trucks and minibuses waving flags and machine guns. Shaab had deteriorated since my previous trip a few months earlier. After the recent Samarra explosions, three Sunni mosques in Shaab had been burned. The siege there was palpable. There were several hundred Mahdi Army fighters, and among the convoy were also blue-and-white Iraqi police pickup trucks. After we passed a police checkpoint, a white civilian car began to follow us. My driver gestured with his head at the rearview mirror to let me know. Suddenly he made a U-turn and squeezed into traffic going in the opposite direction, losing them. We met Firas on the side of the road far from the husseiniya. He would act as if he did not know me when we met at the mosque because it could be dangerous for him if people in Shaab knew he had foreign friends. He was himself a journalist and a close confidant of Sheikh Safaa, and had asked the sheikh to guarantee my safety. He wore a black suit and dark shirt with no tie and leather shoes. He had an informal intelligence-gathering capacity in the neighborhood.

Three years earlier I had shared with Firas the thousands of Baathist security files I found in the abandoned and looted general security office. These files contained the day-to-day operations of Saddam’s dictatorship and revealed the names of Baathist collaborators and spies. I felt that they were Iraqi patrimony and that I should hand them over to some Iraqi movement. Firas gave them all to the Tawhid association, and I never got them back. I now know from other friends that my files were used to compile hit lists by Shiite militias in Shaab and that Firas was involved in this. I never asked him directly. He had told Sheikh Safaa about me, and the sheikh was expecting me, but Firas warned me once more to pretend I didn’t know him.

It was immediately apparent that the raid had targeted the husseiniya, which strictly speaking was not a mosque but had the same function as one and even had a minaret with loud speakers on its top to broadcast the calls to prayer. Moreover, the husseiniya was not located in the Adhamiya neighborhood, contrary to the coalition press statement. Adhamiya is a Sunni bastion not far from Shaab, but the two neighborhoods are worlds apart. Could the Americans have confused the most heavily Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad with a Shiite stronghold? Could they have confused Muqtada’s Shiite militia with a terrorist cell? Before the war the Mustafa Husseiniya had been a Baath Party office. Like other political movements, Muqtada’s had seized many Baath Party buildings following the war. Some former Baath Party buildings even had domes now.

A large sign in front of the Mustafa Husseiniya bore the faces of Muqtada’s father and local Mahdi Army martyrs. Black banners hung on the wall with Arabic letters in white, red, green, and yellow. “We express condolences to the Mahdi and the whole Islamic nation for the disaster of the martyrdom of the brother believers and the attacks on them in the Mustafa Husseiniya at the hands of the takfiris backed by the occupation forces.” Other banners echoed this: “The massacre of the Mustafa Husseiniya was done by the Wahhabis with the help of the Americans.” Another said that the massacre had been committed by “the forces of darkness with the help of the forces of occupation.”

The large lot before the husseiniya was blocked off by concrete traffic barriers. A large black chadir (a round tent used for mourning) was erected in it. Big red-and-green