shut down. Roads were blocked with tree trunks, trucks, and motorcycles. Mahdi Army militiamen sat on chairs on the main road asking for IDs and observing the men slowly walking in the sun to the noon prayer. The militiamen, most of whom were in their twenties and thirties, sported carefully groomed beards. Some wore all black; others wore cotton shirts that said “Mahdi Army” and named their unit within the militia. Some wore Iraqi police-issued bulletproof vests, and many carried police-issued Glock pistols and handcuffs at their sides. They were off-duty policemen.
By the time I arrived, thousands of people were seated in the bright sun. They wore sweatpants or dishdashas, and many of the older men had head scarves on their heads. Plastic, rubber, and leather slippers and shoes lined the street. As the men assembled, they stopped by wooden boxes to pick up a torba, a medallion-shaped piece of earth from Karbala upon which their foreheads would rest when they bowed to the ground. When they found an empty spot on the street, they opened their prayer rug, placing the torba at the front edge.
A wooden pulpit was set up across from the Husseiniya. Behind it a large truck was parked. It was covered in a green cloth, and a large painting of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr stood on its bed. Mahdi Army men patrolled the street and stood atop the husseiniya and on the rooftops of neighboring buildings, pacing back and forth, silhouetted against the bright sky. In the front row sat dignitaries such as Sadrist National Assembly member Fattah al-Sheikh and key clerics from the movement like Abdul Hadi al-Daraji. Hundreds of men brought umbrellas with them to provide some shelter from the sun. Young men in baseball caps with exterminator packs on their backs walked through the crowd spraying people with rose water to cool them off. Loudspeakers on the road facing different directions blasted the call to prayer.
As the call ended, a man stood up to yell a hossa. “Damn Wahhabism and Takfirism and Saddamism and Judaism, and pray for Muhammad!” The crowd yelled back, “Our God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad!” They shook their fists, “And speed the Mahdi’s return! And damn his enemies!” Sheikh Hussein al-Assadi stood up behind the pulpit, wearing a white turban and white shroud to show he was prepared for martyrdom. “Peace be upon you,” he greeted the crowd. “And upon you peace and the mercy of God and his blessings,” the crowd murmured back. Some in the crowd filmed the sermon on their mobile phones.
“I ask everybody to sit down except those who are on duty,” he said, referring to the militiamen providing security. “Before I begin I want to express my sympathy to Muhammad and all the imams, especially the Mahdi, for the martyrs of the Mustafa Husseiniya.” They had been martyred by international Zionism, world imperialism, and the American occupation, his angry voice echoed against the city’s walls. “We demand that the Iraqi government expel the Zionist American ambassador from Iraq and do not accept any apology from him. . . . We demand the release of all the prisoners of the outspoken hawza,” he said, along with the prisoners “who survived the Zionist massacre,” as he called the raid. He demanded that an Iraqi court supervised by the clergy try the perpetrators of the Mustafa Husseiniya attack. He demanded that occupation forces be prohibited from entering eastern Baghdad at any time. He rejected any need to investigate the attack. It was as clear as the murder of Hussein, he said. He complained that Shiites were still waiting for the results of the investigations of the Kadhimiya bridge disaster, the Samarra and Karbala explosions, and other massacres Shiites had faced. “We demand the execution of the Wahhabi American takfiris who were arrested and confessed in front of all who saw them,” he said. He blamed the Americans for killing Sunnis and throwing bodies in the Sadda area near Sadr City to ruin the city’s reputation and blame its residents for committing crimes. “The American Zionist forces have declared that they have handed the security file to the Iraqi government,” he said, “so what is the reason to violate this and attack the holy mosque of God?” The American and Iraqi governments had negotiated agreements without Parliament’s review; he demanded that the Iraqi people be told what they were. He demanded that the Iraqi Security Forces declare whether they “work with the American forces against unarmed Iraqis or for Iraq?”
A man in the crowd shouted a hossa. “As we learned from the second Sadr, history will be written with the blood of the pious, not the silence of the fearful!” The crowd shouted, “Our God prays for Muhammad and the family of Muhammad! And speed the Mahdi’s return and damn his enemies!”
The sheikh continued. “We ask God to support the outspoken hawza of mujahideen and the heroes of the Mahdi Army against the enemies of Islam, and to keep the Friday prayer going and to be a fork in the eye of the enemy America and especially Israel.”
People ask why the outspoken hawza was silent, he said. “But this is the silence before the storm,” he answered, warning the Americans and Zionists that he knew what they wanted to do to Muslims. “We already know very well, and I thank God for that. We already know what is going on in the dirty minds of the monkey infidels. They have a conspiracy against Islam and Muslims.”
America “brought war to the Iraqi people and ended the wars with sanctions, it was trying to make Muslims hungry. . . . Today it slaughters our sons, and it has started doing the same things Saddam did, and this is exactly the same way Saddam killed us, and George Bush the Cursed said he came to get rid of Saddam’s killings but instead he brought Israel’s killings, and they started doing it themselves in the holiest places in Iraq, and it’s only because they have hated Islam since the beginning and they hate the prayer because it is the way of communication between the servant and his lord, and they are trying to kill the belief.” What was the difference, he asked, between Saddam’s massacres of Shiites in mosques and the American raid on the Mustafa Husseiniya?
The spirits of the martyrs demanded that those responsible for the massacre at the Mustafa Husseiniya be exposed. The Zionists were killing and torturing injured Iraq, he said, but members of the government were too busy stealing and enriching themselves and were too afraid to lose their positions to speak the truth, as was the clergy. He asked the crowd of thousands to shout “We will never be oppressed!” and they thundered in response. Only the outspoken hawza of the mujahideen represented the voice of the Prophet Muhammad and his family, and they were the voice of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr. The jihad being waged by Muqtada’s hawza was the Mahdi’s jihad, and nobody could defeat them. “And today the outspoken hawza promises the martyrs that were killed in Iraq by the hands of the Zionist takfiris that we will return their aggression with a thousand aggressions. And we will step on the face of the Zionist ambassador if he stays in Iraq, and we will do that with our heroes of the Mahdi Army, and we will break all the legs that carried aggression on the houses of God and shed the blood of our brothers, and if the government is unable to prosecute the criminals in front of all people, then we will apply justice ourselves as much as we can, and the battalions of the Mahdi Army will never be handcuffed in case the government suspends their case, just like all the other suspended cases, like the massacres of Karbala and Kadhimiya and the destruction of the domes of the two imams in Samarra and other shedding of believers’ blood. . . . The government should not put their hands in the hands of those who killed us, and we want them to prove their Iraqi identity and Islamic identity, and we want them to release our prisoners, or an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”
As the streets of Ur and Shaab filled with thousands of men indolently strolling home in the heat or heading to minibuses and trucks to depart, across town, in the western neighborhood of Ghazaliya, prayer was also ending, and several hundred Sunni men were leaving the Um Al Qura Mosque, which had once been so central to the resistance. It had once been a symbol of Sunni domination; now it was a symbol of vulnerability and fear. Gruesome posters lined the mosque’s walls, depicting slain members of the Association and other murdered Sunnis. “Our martyrs are twinkling stars in the Iraqi sky,” said one, while others showing dead bodies demanded “yes to the state of law,” “no to organized government terrorism,” “no to endless sinning,” and lamented what they described as a “massacre of freedom,” and “massacre of seven innocent men.” I was stunned by the shift in tone.
A few days later, on April 4, 2006, I was back at the Um Al Qura Mosque, waiting in the sun after a friend who moonlighted for the Association of Muslim Scholars told me the bodies of Sunnis slain in sectarian violence were coming from the morgue. In front of the Um Al Qura Mosque, Iraqi National Guardsmen manned their machine guns on a pickup truck. Ghazaliya had long been one of Baghdad’s main no-go zones for foreigners, journalists, and even many Iraqis. When American or Iraqi army or police forces were not looking, Sunni militias openly patrolled its streets and stopped cars at checkpoints to look for suspicious outsiders. Shiites living in Ghazaliya had been receiving death threats, if they were lucky, warning them to leave the neighborhood. As I stood in the parking lot with a few Iraqi cameramen working for local and international media, I could hear exchanges of fire in the distance; later I saw American Humvees and Iraqi police in pickup trucks circling the mosque.
Finally we heard the sounds of wailing coming from the mosque’s gate. Two trucks accompanied by men on
