foot made their way to the mosque. The men were crying and beating themselves, stopping to collapse on the ground or raise their arms in desperation, then shouting, “There is no god but Allah!” Their screams competing with one another, they cursed the killers. “Faggots!” “Brothers of whores!” they shouted. “This is a disaster! What did they do?”
“We are almost extinct! They broke our backs!” “The pimps! The bastards! The infidels!” I asked one of the men to tell me what had happened. “They took them in the south from their shops. They took them to an office, and then they took their car. We found them yesterday in the fridge in the morgue. They live in Ghazaliya. Four brothers. And two were father and son!” he began crying again.
An older man wearing tribal clothes and hiding his face with his head scarf shouted, “This is an Iranian wave, arranged by Iran. We are Muslims, and this is our country. Why are they doing this to us? And they are saying, ‘We are the Mahdi Army.’ Did the Mahdi tell them to do that? One of them is only twelve years old!” He explained that the dead were Sunni shopkeepers. “They took them to Kut, and they executed them. In the Jihad district they killed fifty-seven people. They arrested them and executed them. Everywhere they kill Sunnis.” He added that when relatives came to pick up their bodies from the morgue, they too were kidnapped.
The trucks stopped at the mosque’s steps. The rugs were removed from on top of them, and the wooden coffins were placed on the ground, their covers pulled to the side, revealing bodies hidden by plastic. “Open the bags so they can see,” one man said. “This one is only ten years old,” cried a man. “They killed him by strangling. This is a kid. Should he be strangled? Look at him. Open the bag, let them see!” The boy did indeed look about ten, his face swollen and eyes closed, thick stitches lining his chest.
They opened another coffin. “This one was tortured before killing!” one man shouted. “Look at his teeth. They pulled out his teeth! He was helping his father. Why did they do that to him? Is it only because they are Sunnis?” he raised his hands up and shouted, “
Then somebody decided the show was over. The coffins were placed on the trucks and driven away, followed by the Iraqi journalists. Members of the AMS remained outside, discussing a Sunni man who had gone to visit his relatives in the hospital but was kidnapped by six men. “They control the hospitals,” said one man, referring to Muqtada’s followers. He noticed me filming him and angrily covered the lens with his hand. I was later told that he was head of security for the AMS.
On my way back I drove through the wealthy Mansour district, where I had lived briefly in my first months in Iraq. Two bodies were lying dead on the main street. It was a normal sight. I later found out they had been Iraqi staff of the embassy of the United Arab Emirates. That day a Sunni friend from Amriya called me distraught because his Shiite neighbor and friend had been killed the previous night. It was normal. At least ten bodies were found in Amriya that day. A Sunni man who picked up one of them to bring him to the hospital was also killed, for doing just that. On a different day a friend from Amriya told me that two cars pulled up in front of a Shiite home and riddled it with machine-gun fire. On another typical night, Shiites in a Sunni neighborhood saw masked men in their garden. They found a letter ordering them to leave. The following day they did. One day a friend from Amriya was delayed meeting me because seven bodies had been found on his street.
The Road to Najaf
Three days later I was on the road to Najaf from Baghdad, a key pilgrimage route for Iraq’s Shiites. It was fraught with the unique new dangers of the country’s civil war. I drove down with Shiite pilgrims, aware that the day before a minibus much like mine carrying Shiites had been sprayed with machine-gun fire from two cars in the Sunni town of Iskandariya, about twenty-five miles south of Baghdad. Five of the pilgrims had been killed. My companions were a young man called Ahmed, his mother, and their friend Iskander, who was the driver. They hailed from Sadr City, and we were going to see Muqtada speak in the Kufa Mosque, outside Najaf.
Numerous Iraqi police and Iraqi National Guard checkpoints slowed our progress. At each stop the policemen would peer through the driver’s window and ask where we were going. “We’re a family from Sadr City,” Iskander would say, or sometimes just “from the city,” since the men would know what he meant. “We’re going to Najaf.” We would be waved along with a smile: “Go in peace.” We drove past brick factories and palm groves, and as we approached Najaf we were stopped more and more often, our minibus searched, our bodies patted down. Finally all roads were closed off to vehicles. Our minibus was parked on a sandy lot with hundreds of others. Some had wooden coffins lashed on top. They were to be buried in the City of Peace, the vast cemetery for Shiites who seek to lie close to Imam Ali in Najaf. ING men waved metal detectors over all visitors. The day before, there had been a massive car bomb on this very road. Men waited with pushcarts to carry the feeble, or load as many shrouded women as possible, or carry coffins. Other coffins were carried on relatives’ backs in long processions sometimes led by clerics. We walked past three minibuses that had been crushed and blackened by the previous day’s explosion and one car that had flipped over. ING men in blue fatigues surrounded the charred wreckage and beseeched the many pilgrims who stopped to stare in silent wonder, “Please, brothers, move on.”
Nearby was the cemetery set aside for the martyrs of the Mahdi Army. Hundreds of tombs of young Mahdi Army fighters had flags waving on them. Pictures of the dead wielding weapons were placed behind glass on the stones. Many streets in Sadr City had been named after Mahdi Army men who had been martyred by the Americans on those streets. My friend Ahmed, himself a Mahdi Army fighter, visited the tombs of his friends after regaling his mother with tales of their derring-do fighting the Americans in Sadr City. Ahmed was related to an important Shiite politician, and his oldest brother led Mahdi Army fighters and planted roadside bombs for American convoys. I was told Ahmed dabbled in this as well.
We continued to the Shrine of Ali, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. A steady stream of pilgrims went through the stringent security procedures to enter. Coffins were carried into the mosque to circle around Ali’s tomb before burial. Iranian pilgrims had their pictures taken in front of the shrine by enterprising Najaf boys with enough Farsi to take advantage of the dazed pilgrims. Pilgrims kissed the wooden doors and entered the vast courtyard where the golden shrine shimmered in the sun. Families sat in the shade and picnicked; others prayed together or strolled around. Outside, boys sold souvenir photos of Shiite leaders such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Sistani, Muqtada al-Sadr and his father.
Kufa, a town just outside Najaf, was dominated by followers of Muqtada. As we approached the Kufa Mosque, all roads were once more blocked off. We were searched by members of the Mahdi Army. Lugubrious
It was in Kufa that Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr made his forty-seven famous sermons, beginning in 1998, when Saddam relaxed restrictions on such activities. Saddam promoted Sadr at first, viewing him as an Iraqi nationalist and as a pliable tool to use against Shiite leaders of Iranian or Pakistani descent, and against Iran. But Sadr, like Thomas a Becket, did not show sufficient loyalty to the ruler. In his last sermons he even criticized Saddam. In 1999 Sadr and two of his sons were shot on the road by unknown assailants. The government accused rival Shiites of the murder and executed the suspects, but Sadr’s followers blamed Saddam and rioted. Many were killed in Sadr City, then known as Saddam City. Some Sadrists blamed the Hakim family or Iran for the assassination. After the war Muqtada took over the Kufa Mosque, and it was to this mosque that he retreated in April 2004 when his followers began their intifada, urging them to “make your enemy afraid” and assuring them that he would not abandon them. “Your enemy loves terror and hates peoples, all the Arabs, and censors opinions,” he said.
Kufa has a mystical importance to Shiites. Some Iraqi Shiites believe Kufa Mosque is the oldest mosque in the world. Imam Hussein’s cousin, Muslim bin Aqil, was buried there after being slain by the same traitors who would later kill Hussein. Many Shiites believe that the Mahdi will return to that mosque, descending down from
