Aftermath

victory to all Muslims, to get rid of the Americans, of dictatorships and secularism.” He asked the people to raise their hands in prayer “for victory for all mujahideen in the world” and for freedom.

After the sermon and the prayer that followed, lunch was brought for Sayyid Jalil and other mosque staff. Firas and I were offered food by a famous Mahdi Army IED maker. As Sayyid Jalil walked to his office, men came in and said that an American patrol was in the area and he was ushered away. As we left several young men in the courtyard asked us to join them for lunch. After my friend returned me to Mansour, his friends from the Mahdi Army asked him suspiciously if I was a foreigner and a friend of his. He said I was. They asked him if I drank alcohol, and he said I did not. They asked him if I slept with Iraqi women, and he said I did not. Apparently, they wanted to kidnap me and were looking for a proper pretext to justify it.

We ended up having lunch that day at Mustafa Husseiniya in Ur. Its imam, Sheikh Safa, had fled to Iran to avoid arrest and had not returned. I sat with the caretaker, Abul Hassan, and his assistant, Haidar, in Abul Hassan’s home. (Haidar had been expelled by Sunni militias from the town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. His brother was killed working as a policeman.)

Born in Sadr City in 1972, Abul Hassan, whose real name was Adil, was a muscular and voluble man. He had a raspy voice, permanent stubble. He was jocular and warm and spoke in colloquial Iraqi Arabic because he lacked education. His grandfather had moved to Baghdad from the south when Abul Hassan’s father was still a child, and President Abdul Karim Qasim gave the family land in Thawra (Revolution) City, which would become Saddam City and later Sadr City. Abul Hassan did not attend high school, and after his military service he worked a number of odd jobs, like driving a taxi and small trade. He had always been a Sadrist, he said with a smile, and had followed Muqtada’s father. Following the elder Sadr’s murder, Abul Hassan and his friends established a small underground armed resistance cell but failed to engage in any successful operations. After the war he and Sheikh Safa took over the Baath Party office and were the ones who converted it into a husseiniya. Now Abul Hassan informally led the Ur district.

The Mustafa Husseiniya, which had been demolished after the previous year’s raid, was now being rebuilt. Abul Hassan maintained his office in an adjacent one-room structure, where he sat on the floor behind a desk and received guests and supplicants. The mosque still provided help to poor families and IDPs. “Only Sadrists help the displaced,” he said. They also helped families of martyrs and other needy people, giving them bags with basic requirements such as milk, oil, rice, sugar, and similar items. “The government doesn’t do it,” he said.

The Mahdi Army in the area assisted the families of one thousand martyrs and three thousand prisoners with stipends, the size determined by whether they were married, Abul Hassan said. The family of an unmarried Mahdi Army martyr received seventy five thousand dinars a month (about sixty dollars), as did the family of an arrested man; and the family of a married Mahdi Army martyr received twice as much. Most of the displaced families they helped lived in other people’s homes, he said, but many still lived in tents in the nearby Shishan (Chechen) neighborhood, thus named because Iraqis thought Chechnya was very poor.

Haidar brought lunch in: mushy cooked tomatoes with kabob and bread. As we ate, two women in abayas came in and asked for bags of supplies and children’s clothes. Haidar went to fetch them.

Already in December 2007, before the March 2008 clashes, Abul Hassan was comparing the Supreme Council, which dominated the government, with Saddam Hussein. “Why did Saddam kill Shiites?” he asked. “He was also afraid of Shiite masses. The Supreme Council wants a secular Islam; they don’t reject occupation or even talk about it.” Under Saddam supporters of Muqtada’s father walked to Karbala for pilgrimages. Abul Hassan complained that people walking to Karbala were still targeted because they were viewed as Sadrists. “The Sadr Current represents 75 percent of Iraqi Shiites and is a popular movement,” he said. “Only the Sadr Current helps the poor and represents them.”

Some materials and labor were donated to help with the mosque’s reconstruction, but the government-run Shiite religious endowment was controlled by the Supreme Council. “We always have problems with the Supreme Council,” he complained. “They always instigate it. The Supreme Council are untrustworthy and just want power.” Abul Hassan was suspicious of the Sunni Awakening militias. “There is an Awakening group in the Fadhil neighborhood,” he said. “There is a man called Adel al-Mashhadani, he killed hundreds of Shiites, he beheaded many Shiites. He is well-known by people for his terrible crimes. Later they put him as head of the Awakening in that neighborhood. He is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. This is not logical.”

Since members of the Mahdi Army had committed to the freeze, he observed, they had been arrested, their families displaced and their savings stolen. “Now the freeze is ongoing and the arrests continue. I think it’s better to lift this freeze,” he said. “With things happening like the night raids, I don’t think the freeze will continue. The followers of the Supreme Council displace the families of arrested Mahdi Army members in the city of Diwaniya.”

I told Abul Hassan that Sunnis accused Sadrists of being Iranians. “This is nonsense,” he said. “We are Iraqis. Did you see Iranians or hear us talking the Iranian language? We are the followers of the first and the second martyred sayyids.”

The War Inside the Mahdi Army

The Golden Group—Golden JAM, in U.S. military parlance—was established, composed of trusted Mahdi Army men led by Abbas al-Kufi. The group was tasked with cleaning up the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and killing rogue militiamen. Shiite militias called assassins sakak, the equivalent of “ice men,” maybe because corpses were put on ice. Sak meant to “get iced.” (“Ahmed sak Hassan” means “Ahmed iced Hassan”—or, if he was in New York, “Ahmed whacked Hassan.”) While the ice men were doing their job, it was not clear if Muqtada had miscalculated with his freeze, allowing his Shiite and American rivals to gain the momentum. On the other hand, he may not have had a choice but to flee to Iran, as he did in 2007. “We would have killed or arrested him if he had stayed,” one National Security Council Iraq expert told me.

But the cease-fire was allowing the Mahdi Army to reorganize. In Baghdad it was split into two commands: eastern and western Baghdad. Eastern Baghdad had three subcommands: north, east, and Sadr City. They were further divided into sub-subcommands, each consisting of about three hundred men. At the top of this chain of command was a council in the southern town of Kufa, near Najaf, which Muqtada chaired. In Shaab there were about three thousand Mahdi Army fighters, led by a man called Adil al-Hasnawi. They were required to be devout, lest they be expelled. They did not receive a salary or training; instead they manned checkpoints, attended Friday prayers, protected pilgrims traveling to holy cities such as Karbala, cleaned the streets, and guarded mosques.

Nominally the Mahdi Army responded to Muqtada or his designated representatives. But there were highly criminalized elements that were displaced from Sunni areas and occupied Sunni houses in Hurriya; these elements resorted to a protection racket in order to support themselves and their families. “This was done at the behest of the community civil leadership and clerical leadership to protect against Sunni incursion and attacks,” noted a major who served with the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Airborne Division. But then, according to the major, there was the Mahdi Army sent from Najaf—the so-called Golden JAM—to clean up the criminalized elements and bring them in line with Muqtada’s office. At the same time the Iraqi Security Forces leadership either worked in conjunction with the Mahdi Army or independently to conduct offensive actions against coalition forces and sectarian cleansing of Sunnis. The ISF was an “institutional sanctuary” for Mahdi Army members; the Shiite-majority police and national police in that area were actively targeting the Sunni population. Furthermore, the major said, the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr conducted its own census by collecting ration cards, effectively forcing Sunni displacement by preventing Sunnis from receiving goods and services within Hurriya and sending displaced Shiites into evacuated Sunni houses. The Office and Mahdi Army elements funded operations by intercepting propane shipments and conducting their own delivery operations, raising the price of propane and preventing delivery to Sunnis. At the same time, clerical and tribal leadership meddling into socioeconomic affairs allowed the Mahdi Army to become criminalized and terrorize the Sunni and Shiite population. “Most of the Sunni population had been displaced to the district south of the Hurriya DMZ [demilitarized zone], so to speak, when my company arrived in Hurriya,” the major told me.

“There were some Sunnis who lived there, but were mostly women without husbands and lived pretty low-