prisons. Iraqis have lost their dignity, and for this reason the resistance grows.”
Iraqis were incandescent over rumors that their women were being held prisoner by Americans. Sheikh Saad told of three women imprisoned as hostages by the Americans in Khaldiya because their husbands were wanted by the Americans. “I went to speak with the American commander in Falluja, who called the commander in Khaldiya. I told the commander, ‘If you don’t release these women, you should arrest all the men in Anbar, because there will be an uprising.’” Sheikh Saad said that three hours later the women were released, and added, “The British never arrested women.” The sheikh himself was a resistance leader, and his men were fighting the Americans. “For us as the people of Anbar, revenge is an important tradition,” he said, “if they kill one of our men we have to kill at least one of their soldiers.”
At seven in the morning on July 20, 2003, Sheikh Saad was arrested with eighty-five of his men in an operation that took one hour and included, he claimed, more than 120 vehicles and helicopters. Sheikh Saad scoffed, “like it was a real battle, but they met no resistance from us. They accused me of belonging to an organized group called Nur Muhammad (Light of Muhammad) that is leading the resistance with the support and financing of Saddam and bringing in mujahideen from Syria, and they said 60 percent of the attacks in this area originate in Albu Aitha, so I must know about them, but none of it was true. Their method is to arrest many people and hope to at least find something. Until now they have no accurate information about the resistance” (though it seemed he did). Sheikh Saad was held for twelve days, but the rest of his men were held for a month, and five were still being held in the Abu Ghraib and Um Qasr prisons. “If Americans had not behaved the way they did there would be no resistance,” he said. “Their behavior and broken promises increase the resistance.”
The sheikh paused to contemplate, looking to the side. “Under the previous regime we all had equality,” he said. “We could all study in the university and succeed depending on the degree we achieved. The one exception was the security forces, which went to certain tribes. But I don’t want to talk about the previous regime. What’s gone is gone. Saddam disliked the Dulaimi tribe, and we had nobody in high positions in his government, because Saddam feared we would overthrow him. The Americans told me that I am the only sheikh in Anbar who did not visit their bases and work with them. They want me to help them against my people? This won’t happen. And this is why they make problems for me.”
The lawyer leaned forward, his face long and gaunt, unlike his better-fed relatives, and asserted, “Iraq is the cemetery of all its occupiers.” He rejected the possibility of a civil war but warned that “they [the Americans] want a civil war. Before the war we didn’t use words like “Sunni” or “Shiite.” We are one nation and drink from the same two rivers. There won’t be a civil war, but there might be problems.” The sheikh and his cousins were convinced that “they will never allow elections,” and so he smiled proudly, lifting his head. “We are an independent tribe. We don’t have relations with other parties or the Iraqi Governing Council.”
A lot had changed since those days. There was a civil war, and Sheikh Saad had actually joined the Iraqi government for a while, serving as a minister for provincial affairs. When I met him in late 2006, it was too dangerous for me to attempt such a trip to the Anbar province in a taxi, as I did in 2003. The sheikh and his companions still had thick mustaches, but now they wore the long black leather trench coats that had been popular with intelligence officers in the former regime. Sheikh Saad had brought his wife and children to Amman, where they lived in opulence. “All the leaders of the Anbar are outside of Iraq,” he told me. “In the Anbar America is killing and Al Qaeda is killing.”
I was stunned to learn that the recalcitrant sheikh had joined the government, and I asked him why. “Our country needs people like us who are well-known, especially in Anbar and its tribes. They wanted me.” Although he had received various threats for joining the government, he explained that he did not care. “Any Iraqi who becomes part of the political process is threatened.” I wondered if he still supported the resistance. “We all support the
Sheikh Saad admitted that there was a civil war in Iraq, “but it’s not announced or declared yet.” America was responsible for this, he told me. “If they want to calm the situation, they can tomorrow” by telling Syria and Iran to stop sending weapons into Iraq. “Why are the Americans fighting in the Anbar but not the militias?” he asked, referring to the Shiite militias. “Why don’t they fight Badr and the Mahdi Army?” He answered his own question: “The Americans are part of them.” Then he asked, “Why don’t they make a balance in the political process between Shiites and Sunnis? They are making Iraq like Iran.”
The sheikh was no longer part of the government. “I’m resting now,” he said. The minister who had replaced him, Saad al-Hashimi, was loyal to Muqtada, and he had changed the ministry’s staff, imposing, Sheikh Saad explained, “the agenda of his party and militia,” which in practice meant firing all Sunnis and ideologically disloyal Shiites.
I was shocked when Sheikh Saad admitted that the problems in Iraq were not the fault of the current Shiite-dominated Iraqi government. “The Sunnis left the political process,” he said. “This is our fault. Sunni scholars led by Harith al-Dhari forbade political participation.” I had never heard an Iraqi Sunni admit such an error. Sheikh Saad added that even though he had realized his mistake, “Harith didn’t change his mind.”
The men who had accompanied Sheikh Saad were two former generals in Saddam’s military intelligence, one of whom had also served as deputy chief of police for the Anbar province during the American occupation. He explained that for this he had survived numerous assassination attempts but had also faced difficulties working with the Americans. The head of his office had been arrested by the Americans and was still in jail, he said, accused of cooperating with the resistance. “The Americans only use force in the Anbar province,” he said. “I had many problems with the Americans. We advised them that their behavior is wrong in the Anbar, raiding, putting feet on heads, this is worse than killing.” He also blamed the Americans for the sectarianism. “They brought in the militias,” he said. “The militias belong to Iran, not Iraq or America. Since the invasion until now they are fighting the Sunnis. There is a new dictatorship now, a religious one.” For his trouble, he said, Al Qaeda had blown up his house. “Al Qaeda is not cooperating with the Iraqi resistance,” he said. “The real Iraqi resistance considers Al Qaeda an enemy.”
IN THOSE DAYS it felt as if the Americans had withdrawn from Baghdad. They were devolving their authority willingly, abandoning their attempt at rebuilding the Iraqi state. It resembled Britain’s “colonialism on the cheap.” They no longer had the interest or money to micromanage Iraq. Iraq now felt as if it was occupied by Iraqi Security Forces and militias running amok, shooting into the air, shouting out of loudspeakers. Nowhere in Baghdad was safe from the militias. Even hospitals and universities were part of the battlefield. Whereas in the past Muqtada’s followers had conducted joint prayers with radical Sunnis to demonstrate their solidarity, by 2006 mosques were no longer sacred. On Friday, December 22, 2006, Mahdi Army militiamen raided the Abdullah Bin Omar Mosque in the Binook area near Shaab. The raid occurred during the important noon prayer, when a large congregation gathers to hear a sermon. Sunnis claimed that fifty Mahdi Army militiamen raided the mosque while the sheikh was giving his sermon; all but four of the prayergoers managed to escape, but the sheikh and the muezzin were taken prisoner. The Shiite version of the story is that the Mahdi Army entered the mosque ten minutes before prayer time. They claim they ordered the Sunni prayergoers not to move and told them they had come only for the sheikh. One of the men praying had brought his pistol with him. He ran behind the pulpit and opened fire. There was an exchange of fire that lasted until the Mahdi Army men ran out of bullets. The Mahdi Army men then captured him, the sheikh, and the muezzin. Their corpses were later found with signs of torture, and it was revealed that the third man who opened fire during the raid was the sheikh’s son.
In late 2006 Baghdad’s walls and streets were covered with calls for students and professors to stay home. The radical Sunni movement Ansar al-Sunna had declared a “campaign for halting the assassinations of students and academics in Baghdad universities.” According to one banner hung in a majority-Sunni part of Baghdad, “In order to protect the lives of our dearest academics and students from the assassinations of Maliki’s government and the death squads of Maliki’s government, we decided to stop the universities and all academic institutes including the private ones for this academic year 2006-2007.” The banner stressed that this applied only to Baghdad. “It is strictly forbidden to attend universities in order to cleanse them from death squads that use the universities as centers to launch their attacks from,” the banner said. Such threats, warnings, and announcements are typically
