completely from a dream,” he said angrily. “All the story except my name is not correct.”
Juburi told me his version of his life’s story. He claimed to have been a businessman in Baghdad’s Shorja market. “I knew Saddam personally,” he said, “and gave him my full support. Saddam tried to show he was a winner and he didn’t care about those who supported him. I lost my son in a car accident and criticized the health minister.” Juburi claims that this criticism provoked the ire of the regime. He told me his father had led the Juburi tribe but that since Mishan had an older brother, he was never expected to lead the tribe. “I like city,” he said. “I don’t want to be tribal.” He also claimed to have been involved in a coup attempt by the Juburi tribe. “I tried to kill Saddam, and he killed thirty-five people from my family: my brother, my cousins. I lost ninety-five people from my family to Saddam, but it’s indisputable that Saddam was better. I’m sorry I opposed him.”
He had lived in Jordan, Turkey, Britain, and Syria, he told me, and had founded the Iraqi Homeland Party. Before the war he had taken part in an opposition conference in Salahaddin, in Kurdistan. Now he regretted his participation in this conference: “I trusted the American lie of building democracy in Iraq, and I found myself a part of the American destruction of Iraq.” He claimed he had come to this realization one month after the war ended, when Bremer declared the American presence in Iraq to be an occupation.
Immediately following the war, Juburi and his militia went down to Mosul from Erbil, where he had been staying as a guest of Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. “Barzani is my friend. I fully support an independent Kurdistan.” He claimed Barzani’s militia had helped him take Mosul. I asked him what had become of his militia, and Juburi told me, “I think they are resisting.”
I expressed surprise at his support for an independent Kurdistan. “I believe it’s good for the Iraqi future,” he said, though he admitted that the Kurds were planning on cleansing the Arabs of Kirkuk. He told me he had remained in Mosul for one month and then arranged for an election. “I didn’t put my name or any name of my family” on the list of candidates, he said, somewhat implausibly. After the elections in Mosul, he left for Baghdad and eventually joined the Iraqi government and Parliament. His small party, he said, received 142,000 votes in the first Iraqi elections.
Juburi was known for his sectarian attacks on Iraq’s Shiite leaders and militias, whom he called “Safawis,” the Arabic way of saying “Safavid,” the name of a Persian dynasty that ruled from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is a common epithet used to imply that Iraq’s Shiites are not Arabs but are part of an Iranian or Persian conspiracy to gain hegemony over them. “On April 18, 2005, I said the government is Safawi,” he said proudly. “I’m the first man to use the word ‘Safawi.’ Since then I haven’t gone to Parliament. The first Jaafari government was Safawi-Persian. We are not against Shiites; we are against Safawis. We fear Iran. The Americans will leave; first we are afraid of Iran.”
In November 2005 he established Al Zawra TV. “From the first day we said we are going to say what no one else dares to say,” he told me. At first Al Zawra was known for its entertainment programs, but after Juburi’s immunity as a Parliament member was lifted following charges of corruption and aiding the resistance, the channel began broadcasting proresistance propaganda. Since most of Al Zawra’s target audience in the Middle East did not have access to the Internet, Juburi rebroadcast the propaganda videos that many had seen worldwide online. The videos consisted of members of the resistance preparing for or conducting operations against the Americans. Two commentators, a man in military attire and a veiled woman, occasionally provided news bulletins. Although his channel was praised by the resistance, many also expressed their skepticism about Juburi for being “opportunistic.”
Al Zawra received widespread attention throughout the Arab world, and many Iraqi Sunnis in exile watched it as well. One newspaper in Jordan,
In April 2006 Juburi absconded to northern Iraq and Erbil, where his friend Barzani provided him with safe haven. “If I stayed in Baghdad the government militias would kill me,” he said. “Maliki told me he would execute me if I opposed the government. I am against the Iranians in Iraq, so the authorities accuse me of certain things. Now the office in Baghdad is destroyed.” The Americans eventually closed down his station in Erbil too. He explained that he broadcasted from Anbar using mobile transmitters on taxis and other vehicles.
When we met he was running his station from Damascus with the help of his son and publishing a pro-Sunni newspaper. He claimed that he alone funded the station. “I was one of the top-ten richest men in Iraq,” he said. Al Zawra was broadcast by the Egyptian satellite network Nilesat. Juburi expressed glee in the distress he was causing as a gadfly. “The Americans pushed me to be against them,” he said. “I know how much I give them a headache.” He would soon also be broadcast by Arabsat and Hot Bird, a European company.
Juburi maintained that Zarqawi and other Salafis had hurt the Sunni cause. They had sought to provoke a civil war, he said, and they had succeeded. “That’s why Sunni society doesn’t support them,” he said. “There are clashes between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi resistance, which we consider ourselves to be a part of.” Al Zawra had become a symbol of the resistance everywhere, he told me. “The resistance are serving us; we have relations with all the resistance in Iraq except Al Qaeda,” he said. “We never show anything from them. Al Qaeda is a danger like America in the Middle East. We don’t want to make the mistake they made in Afghanistan.”
Like many Sunnis, Juburi feared a potential genocide of the Sunnis of Iraq. He believed that Sunni children and women would leave the country. He did not think the Shiites had won yet. “If we are outside the city but Shiites cannot leave their homes, then you cannot say that there is a winner to the civil war,” he said. Unlike some Sunni leaders, he did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been a strategic error. “If you push people to join the Iraqi police and army, it means you accept the American occupation.”
Although Juburi was ready to criticize Iraq’s Shiites and what he saw as their Iranian sponsors, he refrained from criticizing Lebanese Hizballah, a successful Shiite resistance movement. Many Sunni Iraqis saw Hizballah as an Iranian proxy and were thus hostile to the movement. Juburi told me he did not want to talk about Hizballah, possibly because he was a guest of the Syrians, themselves supporters of the movement. He conceded that Hizballah’s general secretary was very charismatic and expressed his admiration for Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese cleric formerly associated with Hizballah. “I love Fadlallah especially,” Juburi told me. He agreed with me that it was ironic that in Lebanon the Sunnis supported American policy while the Shiites were opposed to the Americans.
He predicted that Al Zawra would soon go live on the Internet. “We use the Internet the way photography was used in Vietnam,” he said. “We will cause Bush a real headache. We will show the reality of American soldiers. America must apologize for what it did to Iraq.”
In January 2007 Juburi famously debated Sadeq al-Musawi, a Shiite Iraqi journalist, on Al Jazeera. Juburi came out swinging, asking Musawi to recite a prayer for the soul of “the martyred president Saddam Hussein.” Musawi refused, condemning Saddam instead. Juburi called Musawi a Persian, and Musawi responded that Juburi was a thief. Juburi claimed to have evidence that Musawi was an Iranian, and Musawi claimed that Juburi’s father had killed Kurds. Juburi called Musawi a “Persian shoe.” Musawi stormed off the set, and Juburi continued alone, praising the executed Saddam. Invoking sectarianism and the ancient split between Sunnis and Shiites, Juburi said that the people who killed Saddam were the same people who had killed the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab and who hated the caliph Abu Bakr and the other companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Musawi eventually returned to the set, his exchange with Juburi was no less acrimonious.
In February 2007 Juburi made a speech condemning Al Qaeda for provoking Iraq’s Shiites while failing to protect Sunnis from Shiite retaliation, for imposing itself on other resistance groups, for killing Iraq’s Sunni leaders, for seeking to create a Taliban state in Iraq, and for killing a messenger sent by Juburi to negotiate with them. Juburi warned that Iraq’s Sunnis would fight Al Qaeda. Following his speech, many jihadist websites and forums condemned Juburi. Although the Egyptians had ignored threats from the ruling Shiites in Iraq, in February Nilesat finally pulled the plug on Juburi’s channel (other satellite networks continued to broadcast it). The Americans, who had long been pressuring the Egyptians to shut Al Zawra down, finally succeeded.
Others I spoke to disputed Juburi’s account of himself. Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, an expert on Iraq’s tribes and its former regime, was one of them. According to Baram, who also advised the American government: “He is a middle-level sheikh of the Jubbur [tribe], originating from the vicinity of Tikrit. In the mid- 1980s he was approached by Saddam to recruit young and uncouth Juburis that would go through a crash (and
