by Kim Ghattas
Religious education was made compulsory in schools, alcohol was banned, Qurans were mass printed, more mosques were built. As the mosques got busier, intelligence officers were sent to keep tabs on clerics and their followers. Scores of them were dominated by Salafist clerics, a strand that had been growing under Saddam’s nose since 1979.
That year, Saddam had briefly jailed members of the Muwahidoun group, the absolute monotheist Salafists modeled after Wahhabism. Some of the key members were army officers. Removed from their positions, they were held in Abu Ghraib jail, where they met like-minded Islamists. Released in the mid-1980s, they continued to proselytize and recruit in mosques across the country. The men who referred to Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Bin Baz as the “father sheikh” and professed admiration for Juhayman al-Otaiabi went on pilgrimage to Mecca and brought Wahhabi literature back with them. After 1993, they used the Faith Campaign to their advantage. By keeping their most radical thoughts private, they posed as servants to the state, ready to help spread Saddam’s gospel. Over time, many army officers and Baath officials, broken by years of war, ended up embracing a more puritanical piety. Hanging out in the mosques they were supposed to report on, they absorbed Salafism by osmosis.
While some of Iraq’s Muwahidoun and other Salafists were focused solely on proselytizing, others had more jihadist tendencies. Underground cells formed, where militant literature was passed around, including the writings of al-Maqdissi. Around 1999, fearing the Islamization trend was getting out of control, Saddam executed dozens of people and jailed hundreds more. From far-flung villages or cities, store clerks, police, and army officers met in prison and expanded the network of Salafists. In October 2002, as the drums of war were beating, Saddam emptied his jails. This was a trick in the well-worn dictator playbook: preemptive sabotage. If he couldn’t stay in power, he would make sure no one else could rule by planting the seeds of chaos. The Salafist jihadists were now on the loose. When Zarqawi had arrived in Iraq, he expected to find a country of secular heathens, or at least a place where he would need to expend much effort on spreading the message of Salafism before he could recruit active fighters. Instead, he found a country with an extensive Salafist network connected to people in high places in the Iraqi state. Saddam’s Faith Campaign was the cauldron in which Salafism and nationalism had melded, a curious development and indirect result of the Saudi-Iran rivalry that would contribute in the years to come to the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
In the chaos following the fall of the regime in 2003, hardened Salafists found common ground with disgruntled soldiers and officers who were out of a job after the American administrator of Iraq disbanded the four-hundred-thousand-strong Iraqi army. They were then joined by the Arab fighters traveling by bus to Iraq. The Sunni insurgency against US troops was under way. It consumed policymaking in Washington for years and destroyed Iraq’s chances to recover from dictatorship in the short term. More than half a million Iraqis died. More than four thousand American soldiers were killed, almost forty thousand wounded. There were splinter groups and competitions, street battles and car bombs. There were those who simply wanted to resist the occupation and those who saw an opportunity to establish an Islamic state—a Sunni Islamic state, one that would undo the deep wound of seeing Shias and Iran become powerful in post-Saddam Iraq. The headlines about the surge of Shia power dominated the news. The ranks of the Sunni insurgency swelled. Dozens of young Saudi men joined the fight, the latest generation in the “caravan of martyrs” that had started in Peshawar with Abdallah Azzam and Bin Laden.
In the first few years following the invasion, Saudis made up almost half the foreign fighters in the insurgency and Saudi jihadists carried out more suicide bombings than any other nationality. Though it was a small number per capita for Saudi Arabia, compared to other nationalities, Washington was frustrated, complaining to Riyadh that this was undermining efforts to rebuild Iraq. The United States accused the Saudis of failing to stem the flow of fighters coming from the kingdom and of financing militant Sunni groups. The Saudis flatly denied that their citizens were heading to Iraq.
Unofficially, the Saudis were not displeased, and as always, they had plausible deniability; the state was not organizing anything. But individual Saudis were donating money to the cause, just as they had during the Afghan war, and fiery preachers in the kingdom were not silenced even while they exhorted their brothers to fight the infidels in Iraq. Across the kingdom, people were excitedly retelling stories they’d heard from the front line. The Internet was abuzz with memorials for the valiant martyrs. For a while, the kingdom looked away: it was rather convenient that young hotheads were going to die in Iraq at this point in time. The start of the insurgency in Iraq coincided with the first wave of bombings against civilian housing compounds that rocked Riyadh in 2003 and 2004. Iraq was a welcome release valve.
The Saudis had warned the Americans not to invade, telling them it served no one’s interests and would cause a resurgence of fundamentalism that would reach the United States and Europe. They warned about the destruction of Iraq, but what they really worried about was a Shia-ruled Iraq where Iran called the shots. A Sunni insurgency was the deadly antidote.
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On February 22, 2006, five minutes before seven in the morning, a huge explosion rocked Samarra. The city was home to two famous mosques that are more than ten centuries old: one with an unusual cone-shaped minaret with an outer ramp spiraling up its 170 feet, and another with a golden dome. Just over an hour away from Baghdad, on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, Samarra was layered with millennia of history, the history of all humankind, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. Samarra had once served as a lavish capital for a brief period during the Abbassid caliphate before the caliphs moved to Baghdad in 892. But Samarra’s urban planning and architecture had survived the passage of time—a rare example of an ancient Islamic capital still intact in modern times. There were also layers of sectarian coexistence that went back centuries.
The spiral Malwiya minaret belonged to the city’s Great Mosque, built by the Abbasid caliph. A Sunni mosque in a dominantly Sunni city, its minaret was still standing that morning. But inside the Al-Askari mosque, with its golden dome, dust and rubble was everywhere, the steel beams were exposed and the blue sky visible through the gaping holes blown through the onion-shaped structure. There lay the remains of the tenth and eleventh Shia imams, and it was where the last imam, the Mahdi, was said to have gone into occultation. The mystical legacy of the shrine had lived on for more than a thousand years, making it one of the most revered sites for Shias. But Al-Askari was part of the collective experience of the city: Sunni clerics had looked after it for centuries, and the Sunnis of Samarra swore by it, just as Shias did. Sunni families highlighted their lineage back to the Shia imams—sectarian belonging could change over time, but the proud heritage remained as identities overlapped.
One such family was the middle-class Badri family. The pious father taught Quranic recitation. Some of the uncles were Baathist officers. One son, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri, led neighborhood children in chanting the Quran. In 1996, al-Badri enrolled in Saddam’s Islamic University and obtained a master’s degree. He loved soccer but became increasingly intolerant, virulent in his puritanism. After the invasion he was jailed by the Americans but kept his jihadist views quiet and was soon released. In jail, he had met more jihadists and disgruntled army officers. Outside, he connected with al-Qaeda in Iraq, which sent him on a mission to Syria. In Damascus, he also finished his PhD dissertation in Islamic studies. All of this would serve him well in a few years, when he would inherit Zarqawi’s mantle, taking over the mission of establishing an Islamic state in Iraq and adopting the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
The magic and the mythical tragedies of Badri’s hometown of Samarra have endured millennia and traveled beyond the region, from the scribes of Solomon in the Babylonian Talmud to John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra—ranked as one of the
best modern English-language novels—and the tale of the merchant’s servant in W. Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppey. The tale is the same: trying to slip through the fingers of Death, people travel to Samarra, only to find that the appointment is inescapable and Death has followed them to the city.
On that morning of February 22, 2006, a young Iraqi woman set off from Baghdad to Samarra. Atwar Bahjat was fearless but not reckless. She was always pushing boundaries, gently but resolutely, until she became one of three women in a newsroom of more than a hundred men at the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad and then at another channel, Al-Arabiyya. The thirty-year-old woman with a sweet smile loved fashionable, colorful veils, which she often wore with a big knot to the side, like the flowers of a flamenco dancer. She was a poet at heart, a graduate of Arabic literature studies from the University of Baghdad. She had begun by writing in Iraqi newspapers under Saddam and then moved on to state television. With the US invasion came media freedom. International newspapers and television channels were not able to operate freely in Iraq without government minders, so all sorts of Iraqi newspapers and television stations sprang up. Wedding photographers became war photographers; English literature students became translators for foreign correspondents; poets became recognized faces on Al-Jazeera television. Atwar had first been assigned cultural stories, biding her time, building her contacts, and pleading with her editors until she was sent out on the big stories. She peppered her sentences with the customary terms of endearment that Iraqis—as well as others in the region, like Lebanese or Syrians—use equally with men and women, old and young. “Yes, my dear,” “What do you need, my heart,” “Of course, my eyes.” Born in 1976, fed a steady diet of Baathist propaganda in school, struggling through the embargo of the 1990s, she was now eager to do her bit for her country by telling Iraq’s story to Arabs across the region watching her on television. She was also a living symbol of the Sunni-Shia coexistence that comes naturally outside the arenas of politics and war. Her father was a Sunni from Samarra, her mother a Shia from Karbala.
When news came that a bomb had gone off in Samarra, she pleaded with her editors. She had to go. This was her hometown. It was dangerous, but she could handle it. Off she went with her two-man team. The city itself was too tense to enter, so they reported from the outskirts. She phoned in to the news desk a few times. Her television report, recorded and transmitted to the main station, aired at six that evening. It ended with the words: “Whether you are Sunni or Shia, Arab or Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis, united in fear for this nation. Atwar Bahjat, from the outskirts of Samarra, al-Arabiyya.”
Within half an hour, gunmen came looking for her in a pickup truck, firing shots in the air to disperse the crowd that had gathered to watch the television star in action. “We want the correspondent,” they shouted. Atwar and her team were snatched and taken away. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found the next day. There were conflicting reports about who had killed her: Shia gunmen or Sunni? Was it al-Qaeda because she was reporting about the bombing of a Shia shrine? Or the Mahdi army because her father was Sunni? If there was one thing the killers on the loose across Iraq could agree on, it was that people like Atwar did not belong in Iraq, and neither did the ideals of coexistence that she embodied.
Iraq’s educated middle class, its intellectuals, artists, progressive thinkers, empowered women, veiled and unveiled, would all become the victims of a systematic purge. Zarqawi and his ilk mostly blew people up indiscriminately, hoping to cause maximum death and destruction. Moqtada would send death squads, hunting people down at universities, medical clinics, and in their homes.
Atwar’s death on February 22, 2006, was overshadowed in the news by the fury that the bombing of the Al-Askari shrine had set off. From Kirkuk in the north to Basra in the south, from Najaf to Karbala and Baghdad, Shia militiamen and mobs went on a rampage. By the end of the day, twenty-seven Sunni mosques had been shot up, set on fire, or destroyed with rocket-propelled grenades or machine-gun fire in the capital alone—sixty in total across the country. Three Sunni clerics had been shot dead, a fourth had been kidnapped. In Basra, a dominantly Shia city, the police took ten foreign Arab fighters jailed in connection with the Sunni insurgency out of their cells and shot them dead in apparent retaliation.
Iraq had simmered with rage and violence since the US invasion: there was the Sunni insurgency and there was the Mahdi army. The two were mostly focused on fighting the Americans. Sometimes, they killed each other. The assassination of Ayatollah al-Hakim was intended to provoke sectarian strife but had not yet unleashed hell. With the bombing of the Al-Askari shrine in 2006, it was all-out civil war. Years of savagery ensued as people redefined their identities around sect and Sunni-Shia hatred began to take hold beyond Iraq’s borders. And there were bigger shifts happening in how Sunnis and Shias perceived their place in the Arab and Muslim world. Iran was taking revenge for the suffering and humiliation it had endured during the war with Saddam. This, in turn, would lead to counter-revenge by Sunnis.
14
FRACTURE
LEBANON, IRAQ
2005–2006
From the time of Adam to this day
humans have been created equal like the teeth of a comb,
with no advantage for the Arab over the Persian,
the red-skinned over the black, except in their piety.
—Hadith of the prophet Muhammad
The era of revenge had begun in 2005 with an assassination. Then an air strike. Finally, a hanging. Each act of violence killed a man of influence, with far-reaching consequences. All three were Arab, Sunni, and self-made. Yet their worlds and ideals were so utterly different that, in reality, the three men had nothing in common. One was a loser turned terrorist bent on wholesale destruction; the second was a revolutionary who became a megalomaniacal dictator and hollowed out the soul of his nation; the third, the son of a vegetable vendor, made billions in Saudi Arabia, then rebuilt his country and became known as Mr. Lebanon. Sunni strongmen each in his own way, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein, and Rafiq Hariri lived very different lives with very different purposes. Their deaths, all occurring within two years (at the hands of very different killers), produced an imperceptible fracture in the collective psyche of the Sunni world—a long, drawn-out moment when realities flipped and historical identities were switched, when the strong began to feel like victims and the oppressed began to subjugate.
Since 2003, Iran had been working hard to reap the benefits of the American invasion of Iraq. Saddam, its nemesis, was gone, and so were the Taliban, the enemy to their east in Afghanistan. Iran was unleashed. The country was acting imperial. Tehran’s allies and proxies were feeding off the chaos and consolidating their gains on the ground, from Iraq to Lebanon. The elimination of the three men during this particular span of time fed Sunni insecurity, the kind that pushes people to embrace, or silently approve, the most vicious form of violence in revenge for the loss of power, a ghastly balm for the humiliation of defeat, perceived or real.
First came the assassination, a declaration of war on Valentine’s Day in 2005, just outside Beirut’s famed Saint George Hotel. Once a den of beauty queens and spies with an outdoor swimming pool overlooking the glistening Mediterranean Sea, it was now a pockmarked empty shell, one of the jewels that had not yet been rebuilt since Lebanon’s civil war ended in 1990 with the Pax Syriana.
When Syrian troops took full control of Lebanon that year (with US acquiescence), in exchange for Syria’s participation in Operation Desert Storm, Hafez al-Assad was building on the 1989 Taef Agreement, the power sharing arrangement between the different Lebanese sects that the Saudis had helped broker. The Syrians would keep the peace with forty thousand troops—a Syrian soldier for every hundred Lebanese. All militias had to disarm, but an unwritten exception was made for those fighting against the continued Israeli armed presence in southern Lebanon, seen as a legitimate resistance against the occupation. Hezbollah, still a young organization, was qu
ick to take over that loophole, rebranding fully as a resistance movement. By then, it had also eliminated or outgunned everyone else. It was also holding Western hostages, and the outside world could not risk endangering their lives by putting pressure on the group to disarm. Hussein al-Husseini, the Shia politician and friend of Imam Sadr, had been elected speaker of parliament in 1984. He had helped father the Taef Agreement. His goal was to end the bloodshed—more than 150,000 Lebanese and non-Lebanese had already died. He still believed that with the end of the civil war, the anomaly that was Hezbollah in Lebanon and within the Shia community would disappear. But he too had, unwittingly, helped ensure their survival.
Hezbollah had become a useful tool for Assad. The wily Lion of Damascus posed as the good guy, helping with the release of the Western hostages thanks to his relationship with Iran. He made Washington happy by agreeing to negotiate peace with Israel, but then used Hezbollah to poke the Israelis on the border between Lebanon and Israel, giving him leverage in the negotiations. He made sure Iran understood that while Hezbollah could operate in Lebanon, he was the boss of the country. Assad used that alliance with Iran to keep Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries on their toes: eager to defuse his potential mischief, they provided him with huge subsidies. For years, Assad walked the fine line of being close to Iran but not opposed to Saudi Arabia, a strange modus vivendi that filled his pockets and helped Hezbollah entrench itself in Lebanon, building its arsenal and its “resistance society”—a modus vivendi that flourished during the Saudi-Iran détente of the 1990s and was maintained by Assad’s son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, until it exploded on February 14, 2005, at exactly 12:55 p.m., as a six-car motorcade drove past the Saint George Hotel.
