After Zarqawi’s Death
The death of Zarqawi in an American strike in June 2006 was hailed by the Bush administration as a turning point, but the civil war had its own cruel logic and did not need Zarqawi. Instead, a new Zarqawi emerged. Sunnis began speaking of the “Shiite Zarqawi.” In the summer of 2006, rumors began spreading throughout Baghdad of a shadowy Shiite killer known as Abu Dira, a nickname meaning the Armor Bearer. In the Shiite uprisings of 2004, he was said to have held off the Americans in southern Sadr City. He earned his name either by destroying American armored vehicles or after killing an American soldier and stealing his body armor. Some rumors claimed he wore this armor at all times. Hailed by Shiites as a hero who defended them, he was also known by Sunnis as the Rusafa Butcher, a reference to the eastern half of Baghdad, where he was said to live. Another story claimed that a Sunni prison guard under Saddam called Abu Dira was notorious among Shiites for his brutality. The vengeful Shiite known as Abu Dira might have taken his nickname out of irony. All information about him was based on rumors, but he was said to be a man in his thirties called either Salim or Ismail, who lived in Sadr City but was born in the southern Shiite town of Amara. Some said he was a member of the Mahdi Army and commanded hundreds of fighters, but other sources claimed he was a renegade militiaman, out of Muqtada’s control. Some said he was a bodyguard in the former regime who had deserted and fled to Iran; others thought he had been a guard who tortured prisoners in one of Saddam’s prisons. One website claimed that he controlled the Interior Ministry’s Falcon Brigade, which kidnapped Sunnis from Baghdad’s Zafraniya district.
It was said that every time there was a terror attack against Shiites he counted the dead and killed an equal number of Sunnis, although by other accounts he killed a higher ratio of Sunnis when he extracted vengeance. He was said to kill dozens of Sunnis every day in a remote part of Sadr City called Sadda, and he was also said to have threatened to fill the craters left from car bombs in Sadr City with the bodies of Sunnis. Some Sunni sources believed he was obeying the
Muqtada’s control over his militia was tenuous. He issued statements such as “We are the enemies of the Saddamists,” which were interpreted by his followers as a license to kill all Sunnis. The Mahdi Army was not strictly hierarchical, and Muqtada was unaware of most of its local commanders and activities. The Mahdi Army’s cells were loosely organized; many of them were composed of friends who were on local soccer teams. Sayyid Hassan Naji al-Musawi, an important Mahdi Army commander in Sadr City, had been a well-known local soccer star before the war. Different leaders of the Mahdi Army disliked one another. There were jealousies and rivalries. There was nothing stopping a group of Shiite youths from declaring that they were a Mahdi Army unit, collecting weapons, and interpreting Muqtada’s statements as they saw fit. Mahdi Army leaders could be imams, sheikhs, or local toughs called
Rather than remaking the Middle East, the Iraq War was tearing it apart. Kurdish independence could provoke Turkish intervention. At a minimum it would push the Turks closer to the Iranians and Syrians, who would have the same concerns of Kurdish irredentism. Sunnis throughout the region, who already had so many reasons to hate the United States—Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Palestine, Guantanamo—would now have one more, for the Americans had handed Iraq to the Shiites. As we shall see in the next chapter, Salafi jihadis could pour in to fight the hateful Shiites. Shiites might attempt to push Sunnis out of Iraq, for until they could control the key highways in the Anbar province leading to Syria and Jordan, their economy would be threatened. Arab Sunni countries such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia would support Sunni militias and perhaps intervene directly. Sunni retaliation against Shiites or Alawites in Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and even Afghanistan could provoke sectarian clashes throughout the Muslim world. At some point Iran would intervene, and if it threatened the waters of the Persian Gulf, the entire world’s economy could be threatened. It seemed as though we were seeing the death throes, and not the birth pangs, of a new Middle East.
Soon after the war, black and colorful flags appeared on rooftops throughout Iraq. Some Shiites even covered their houses with big sheets of black cloth. Each referred to parts of the story of the martyr Imam Hussein. Under Saddam such public displays of Shiite identity could have been met with punishment. Now more and more areas in Baghdad were full of Shiite symbolism. During the civil war, as more and more territory came safely into Shiite hands, the black flags and pictures of Hussein became ever more pervasive. Shiites were no longer afraid; the city was theirs.
It was soon very clear that sectarian Islamist Shiite militias and parties had won the civil war, empowered as they were by their numerical superiority, their control of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the fact that the Americans were targeting the Sunni population of Iraq. Sunni leaders realized this too.
In late 2006 Sheikh Saad Mushhan Naif al-Hardan strode into a hotel lobby in Amman, Jordan, accompanied by two stern-faced companions. He wore a tailored suit and was more svelte than I remembered him from when I first met him more than two years earlier in his village of Albu Aitha, a collection of family compounds nearly hidden by the thick verdant fauna kept fertile by the wide still waters. One hundred miles west of Baghdad, past Ramadi and Falluja, a left turn off the highway led to dirt roads passing through fecund fields fed by the nearby Euphrates. Sheep and cows drank from the river bank in the shade of towering date palm plantations.
Back then the sheikh had been draped in black and gray robes, his face partially concealed by a white head scarf, crowned with a black rope. His small keen eyes, thick arching brows, and mustache lay still, waiting for an emotion to animate them. He had been joined by his three cousins: a lawyer, a history professor, and a history teacher. Since 1995 the sheikh had led the Sunni Aithawi tribe, the largest subtribe (he claimed) of the Dulaimi tribe, one of Iraq’s largest tribes (every sheikh in Iraq, it should be noted, claims his tribe is the largest). Sheikh Saad refused to enumerate his tribe’s manpower; it was the tribal equivalent of classified information. The enemy could not know the potential force his tribe could wield. In this case the enemy was the Americans. The Dulaimi tribe, whose lands reached from the Saudi border to the Syrian border and up to the outskirts of Baghdad in Abu Ghraib, was just as recalcitrant in the face of American occupation as it was nearly a century ago, during the 1920 uprising against the British occupation. Sheikh Saad’s grandfather Hardan Hamid, head of the Aithawi branch of the Dulaimi tribe, had ridden south to Kut with his five brothers and all the fighting men his tribe could muster to face the invading British army. “The British had more advanced weapons and better tactics,” Sheikh Saad said. His relatives were still buried near Kut. Sheikh Hardan had retreated to his tribal lands, fighting all the way. “When the British reached Anbar,” he continued, “we told them that the only way Anbar would fall and they could occupy us was if they killed or arrested at least two of our sheikhs.” The British took the advice of the Anbar leaders, killing Sheikh Sabar of the Albu Nimer tribe and arresting Sheikh Hardan, who was imprisoned in India for six years. “Then the British occupied the Anbar,” Sheikh Saad concluded, adding with pride that it had been the last province to fall to the Americans (though the fact that it did not have a Jordanian or Saudi or Syrian front may have been a factor). “The British occupiers befriended the tribal leaders,” he said. “This is the key to winning the people. They understood our traditions, unlike the Americans now. The British did not surround homes and break into them. They consulted sheikhs and respected them, and after they occupied all of Iraq, there was no more resistance.” The Americans occupiers, Sheikh Saad maintained, “push people to the ground and step on their heads. They arrest the relatives and wives of wanted men and hold them hostage. They are holding one hundred thousand Iraqis in their
