"It's All Bad News"

Chaos in liberated Iraq

Nir Rosen | March 26, 2004

(Page 2 of 3)

Though Shi'ite and Sunni leaders hastened to mouth professions of unity following the attacks in Karbala and Kadhimiya, they hate each other. Sunni and Shi'ite newspapers have grown more brazen in their attacks against each other. The only things they agree on are the need for an Islamic government (though they disagree on what it will look like) and their insistence that the Jews and Americans are to blame for all their woes. The Sunnis are scared, they fear the impending Shi'ite takeover of Iraq if anything resembling a democratic election takes place. Sunnis view Shi'ites the way white South Africans viewed blacks, and now feel disenfranchised, seeing the barbaric heathens threatening to rule their country. Many Sunnis cling to the fiction that they are in fact the majority, and the Shi'ites are all Iranians. Shi'ites don't fear the Sunnis, they just dislike them. Shi'ites hate the Kurds now, blaming them for attempting to divide the country with their calls for federalism and autonomy. Arab Shi'ites have already started supporting Turkmen in the north, who are often Shi'ite as well, in their bloody clashes with Kurds.

A war of words has begun in the newspapers belonging to the religious parties. Sunni papers insist that Sunnis are a majority and warn of the "Persians" who are coming in by the millions to claim citizenship. For successive Sunni governments, the Shi'a Arabs of Iraq have been Persians, and the leading Sunni clerics of Iraq continue that tradition. Shi'a newspapers warn of the "crimes of the Wahhabis" and remember the Wahhabi assaults from Saudi Arabia that threatened Iraq's Shi'a in the 19th century. This war has been escalating with increasingly brazen critiques of the rival communities.

But Sunni Arabs don't scare Shi'ites anymore. The threat is America now. Only America can thwart the long-suppressed Shi'ite hope to control Iraq and establish a theocracy. Their expectations are high. Now is their time to inherit Iraq and only America stands in the way. Leading Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani has not left his house for nearly a decade but pronounces judgments on everything from elections to whether or not women should wear high heel shoes. (They cannot because it makes their asses shake too much.) Other, more radical clerics such as Muqtada Sadr speak of a jihad against the infidel Americans who have come to kill the Mahdi (Shi'ite messiah). Radical Sunnis and members of the resistance hate the compromising Sistani but respect Muqtada for his defiance. In every mosque and religious center in the country one can purchase the DVDs, CDs, tapes and literature of the Islamic revolution that rejects "American democracy" and "American freedom." In Shi'ite stores you can buy books about Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, and in Sunni stores you can buy radical Sunni magazines published in Saudi Arabia.

Sunni and Shi'ite leaders were quick to condemn the new interim constitution for its secularism. They were united in calling the Quran their only constitution. They need not have worried since what happens in the walled-off "Green Zone" of the Occupiers is a land of make believe that does not affect the rest of Iraqis living in the "Red Zone" which is the rest of the country. Westerners who work for the Occupation in the green zone rarely venture beyond its walls; Iraq is as alien to them as they are to Iraqis. Congressional staffers put in six months to spice up their resumes, former military or State Department officials fish for contracts with General Electric or KBR after they finish their stint. They don't have to deal with many Iraqis. In the Rashid cafeteria for military and civilian servants of the Occupation, non-Iraqis serve the food. When they do deal with Iraqis, they have interesting choices. The deputy minister of the interior has been diverting arms and stockpiling them privately. He is accompanied by two doting American intelligence agents. Perhaps he is their last hope, should all else fail. The minister of higher education has banned all student unions that are not ethnically or religiously based. He is forcing even Christian girls to cover their heads and instituting mandatory Islamic education.

In the bathroom of the country director of an important D.C.-based and US-funded democratization institute I found, in the bidet by the toilet, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Quran," a brochure explaining that Arabic is written from right to left, and a guide to focus groups. It is from these focus group results that westerners in the green zone learn "what Iraqis want." The director of the institute, a motivated and well compensated man with experience in Asia and eastern Europe, was dejected, his advice ignored by the CPA, the tribal leaders he lectures about democracy interested only in securing contracts with the Americans.

A massacre

He seemed to be missing the point when he was lecturing to the Farmer's Union about civil society while the war was going on in Iraq. There is never a day of peace, anywhere in the country. One night, after a slow day, I was sitting in my room, having just read about a report declaring my adopted city Baghdad the worst city in the world to live in, and debating with a friend which cities might be worse, when an immense blast hit me and sent my door flying out of its hinges. That's a car bomb, I thought, and ran to my balcony to see if any nearby buildings had collapsed. Downstairs, I sprinted past Fardus circle to Andalus circle, where the Mount Lebanon hotel, which I had never heard of, no longer existed. It was dark and hazy, with visibility nearly impossible, but a huge orange glow the size of a building shimmered through the smoke and dust.

Hundreds of people were emerging from the smoke, running away, hundreds more were running to it and hundreds more were standing in shock, crying, screaming. A woman walked by carrying the inert body of her child. American humvees pulled up, as did Iraqi police cars. "There are many dead people," shouted one man running from out of the hotel's wreckage, asking people to help. Terrified and confused US soldiers tried to turn back the crowd of Iraqis who rushed to help; they swung in ever direction with their rifles, looking for the enemy, as Iraqi police with guns drawn tried to push people back. Ambulances arrived, by now well practiced in quick responses to bombs, and carried away the lucky ones who survived, screaming and with their shredded clothes and bodies drenched with blood. Inside one I saw a hellish scene—an entire family, all red, six of them looking up and screaming, holding a lifeless bloody piece of meat that lay between them. Everywhere on the street angry men, stunned, hurt, feeling vulnerable. Survivors attacked cameramen, seeking someone to vent their fury on, neighbors stood crying, friends rushed to the scene looking for loved ones, terror on their faces. Two fat women in their nightgowns began screaming at an American soldier angrily. Bewildered, he told them "Everything's gonna be alright," not knowing what they were saying. From atop their Humvees other American soldiers swiveled their machine guns, screaming and cursing orders at the Iraqis and journalists below them. An Iraqi policeman with his gun drawn pushed me away. The entire scene was lit glowing orange as the fire spread to a nearby building.

Journalists moved away to report on their phones in English, Turkish, Italian. Others stood still, filming the scene. At least we didn't have to go far; the resistance is considerate enough to strike close to the hotels and neighborhoods where the press reside. Arguments broke out between Iraqis who wanted the journalists to film and those who wanted them to leave. More and more bodies were carried out from the gaping wreckage of the flaming hotel building. Al Jazeera, always first on the scene of any attack, didn't have to go very far since their hotel was across the street, its windows blasted out. A rumor spread among the crowd that an American missile had hit the hotel and the crowd argued over who was responsible.

I returned to my hotel. The staff were congregated around the television, I assumed to watch the aftermath on Al Jazeera. But no, they were watching a soccer match and barely acknowledged the entry of the silly foreigners who run to find explosions, the ambulance chasers with notebooks and cameras. Perhaps they are used to this. American missiles, far more powerful and deadly than car bombs, had fallen on them before, and this was just a bomb, only a tremor. They didn't seem to wonder, as I did, when their hotel would be next.

Everybody's got a hidden hand

That same night the "Iraqi street" was blaming it on a missile, meaning on the Americans, and as always everybody had a friend who swore he had seen the missile hit the car. Sunnis and Shi'ites are united in believing America and "the Jews" are responsible for the sectarian attacks, because of the absurd belief that America wants to remain in Iraq and will provoke a civil war to serve as a pretext. The Jews are blamed for everything, because they're the Jews. The Jews are everywhere in Iraq. They are feared and loathed, the "Jewish hands" working their evil, the "Jewish fingers" reaching every nook and cranny, selling their drugs and pornography, defiling Islam.

Americans still cling desperately to their own myths, blaming the phantom Zarqawi for all the attacks, because they cannot blame Saddam anymore. But the Zarqawi story seems to have worked with the press, who remain as gullible today as they were when they bought the "45 minutes" claim.

Meanwhile over ten thousand Iraqi men are being held prisoner, and most of them are innocent. Iraqi security guards as well as American soldiers hate the explosive-sniffing dog in front of the Sheraton and Palestine hotels, because they, like the rest of us who live in the area, are subject to its olfactory whims as it imagines every day that it smells a bomb and they must close off the street for several hours. Two of my friends were arrested for not having a bomb last week, when the dog decided their bag smelled funny. They were jailed for four days though they were not carrying a bomb. Unlike the murderous accuracy of the Israeli security forces, who at least speak Arabic, the American security forces are a blunt instrument. They arrest hundreds at once, hoping somebody will know something. One morning in the village of Albu Hishma, the local US commander decided to bulldoze any house that had pro-Saddam graffiti on it, and gave half a dozen families a few minutes to remove whatever they cared about the most before their homes were flattened.

Ayoub's bad day