The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  I stayed in Amman for a few days this time before going on to Baghdad. I wanted to talk with the Sunnis, which had become difficult and risky inside Iraq. Most of their leaders—an assortment of party politicians and conservative imams—were boycotting the elections. Some candidates had withdrawn under threat, and others made the political calculation that boycott and violence would reduce their vote totals to humiliating levels. The hard-liners rejected the whole notion of an election held under occupation. But the insurgency had always been driven in part by the loss of Sunni group power, and as the elections drew near, its sectarian character became glaringly obvious. The Shiite south and Kurdish north were eager to vote. In the Sunni center, if people wanted to go to the polls, they kept their plans for election day to themselves. Real political leadership among the Sunnis, capable of persuading the alienated and armed that the political game was their only hope, did not yet exist. One evening in Amman, I had dinner with Ghassan Salamé, the late Sergio Vieira de Mello’s political adviser. When I mentioned the underdeveloped state of Sunni politics in Iraq compared with that of the Shia and the Kurds, Salamé replied by asking me to name the Sunni faction leader in the Lebanese civil war. “You can’t,” he said. “Sunnis don’t see themselves as one among many factions. They see themselves as power. They consider themselves the inheritors of the Ottoman Empire. This is not going to change.”

  Through the good graces of a former Baathist embassy official who had been close to Uday, I met a group of Sunnis from Anbar province who were vaguely connected to the insurgency. Two were tribal sheikhs from Ramadi; the third was a young businessman rumored to have been one of Saddam’s bagmen. We met in the offices of his holding company on a quiet Amman street. The businessman, Talal al-Gaaod, had a master’s in construction management from USC, wore jeans and suspenders, and was up on the latest op-eds from the American press. All of them presented themselves as anxious to build a democratic Iraq. They had nothing against Americans; they had long dreamed of the good things America could bring to Iraq, and they had welcomed the overthrow of the regime. “I am a believer in the Americans’ good intentions,” Gaaod said, “but something happened on the way from Washington to Baghdad.” The whole guerrilla war was a terrible misfortune that needn’t have happened if only the Americans had listened to people like them instead of invading their houses and dishonoring their women and compelling the Iraqis to seek revenge. Gaaod admitted that some of the insurgents were living in the Middle Ages, extremists who gave the rest of them a bad name. But the legitimate resistance, as they called it, was an Iraqi resistance against occupation. It included two hundred thousand people, and if the elections went ahead, Gaaod said, it would increase tenfold. The civil war would become quite real. These were hardly the masked cutthroats of my imagination. They were recognizable Iraqis, the tribal sheikhs traditional, the businessman modern, and they had far more connections to my world than I had thought possible.

  Then the underside began to emerge. One of the sheikhs, Zaydan Halef al-Awad, claimed that the Sunnis were the majority in Iraq—63 percent, in fact. “If Sunnis settled in America, they would rule America,” the sheikh said. “We always carry the stick in the middle. We can move it any way—we control it.” The politicians running for office in Iraq, Kurdish and Shiite, were illegitimate pawns of the Americans or the Iranians, and if they happened to be assassinated, too bad for them.

  Gaaod distributed copies of boycott declarations issued by most of the major Sunni tribes.

  “What if some people in the tribes want to vote?” I asked.

  “They cannot.”

  “What would happen to them?”

  “If anybody goes to vote, he will be killed.”

  * * *

  THE IMMIGRATION OFFICER at the Amman airport looked at my passport, looked at me, and pointed to his temple. “Iraq. Iraq. Head—no head.” There were several ways to interpret this, none of them reassuring. The charter flight to Baghdad, with its South African crew, was full nevertheless. There were always people ready to go to Iraq, most of them drawn by the money. In the seats around me I noted a group of grizzled construction contractors with Southern accents wearing baseball caps, and another group of beefy young security guys with iPods. Farther back there were South Asians and Iraqis. In the front row sat Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s Kurdish foreign minister. The journalist next to me was chewing a piece of gum as if she was determined to destroy it. No one spoke. “We’ll follow a zigzag course all the way to Baghdad,” the captain announced cheerfully. “Once we get overhead, we’ll spiral down.”

  Baghdad was in a state of dread. There were more roadblocks than ever, more Apaches buzzing the city from low overhead. The last Humvee in the American convoys now displayed a sign that said, in English and Arabic, “Stay 100 meters back or you will be shot.” Campaign posters of Prime Minister Allawi and of the coalition that Ayatollah Sistani had assembled covered the walls and hung from the streetlights, but all the election talk was of security measures and bloodbaths. I spent two nights at the Rashid Hotel, which meant that for the first time I slept inside the Green Zone, and being sealed off from Iraq only heightened the sense of anxiety. The Rashid was under the command of Lieutenant Colonel E. A. Strosky, of the Army Reserve and the Buffalo electrical utility. Strosky, a small, exasperated man with a big mustache, asked each new guest, “Do you want a room on the bullet side or the mortar side?” The house rules were: no communications equipment in the rooms, no visitors, no conversation with military personnel, stay off other floors and out of the canteen. “You are here to eat and live in a safe place,” Strosky said. “If there’s a mortar or rocket attack, go into the bathroom. A Gurkha will come to explain what is happening.” For security reasons I was told to sign in under the name “Strosky #494.” “Forget about logic here,” he said. The war seemed to have entered the M*A*S*H phase—on my next trip, I would expect Lieutenant Colonel Strosky to be wearing a dress.

  * * *

  MY DESTINATION WAS BASRA, Iraq’s largely Shiite second city, in the country’s far southeastern corner. I wanted to see the elections where it would be possible to move around with some freedom, and where they would have more to do with politics than killing. I flew down in a British military transport plane. Basra was in the British sector. That interested me, too.

  The flatness of the light told you that the Persian Gulf coast was only an hour away. The water table in this marshy region was so high that Basra depended on a system of canals for drainage. But the canals were blocked, and on one winter day a hard rain submerged whole neighborhoods under several feet of water and sewage; a week later, the flooding ebbed, turning the streets to mud and the city into a picture of soggy neglect. The poverty in Basra, surrounded by most of Iraq’s oil reserves as well as export-crop plantations, was on an African or Asian scale. Clay houses that had proliferated illegally jostled for space amid the garbage heaps of the Shiite flats; they provided shelter to families that had been driven from the marshes drained by Saddam after 1991. The city center was choked with decaying shops and the ruins of concrete government buildings that were hit by American air strikes during the invasion. Near the Ashar mosque, an Islamic group had taken over a park with a derelict Ferris wheel and a sun-bleached tyrannosaurus. Looted buildings overlooked the banks of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which emptied the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates into the Persian Gulf. Downstream, toward the gulf, was the domed palace complex that Saddam had built and allegedly visited only once. It was now occupied by the British and American regional embassies.

  One mild, breezy evening, I visited the Corniche, the old street that ran along the waterway, and stood with my back to a row of concrete blast walls. Flocks of white egrets flew above the rusting smugglers’ trawlers that floated alongside the wreckage of an Iraqi navy pilot boat. The moon was rising over the palm trees on the far bank, with Iran hidden a few miles beyond them, and it was almost possible to imagine the city at my back as the rich center of international trade
that it once was. Basra’s modern history was perhaps more tragic than any other city’s, yet this same history had prepared Basra to be the testing ground for the future of political power in Iraq.

  In 1982, in the second year of the twentieth century’s longest conventional war, two young Iraqi army officers from Basra, Youssef al-Emara and Majid al-Sary, slipped separately across the border and defected to Iraq’s enemy, Iran. Emara was a thirty-three-year-old major, Sary a twenty-year-old lieutenant. Like most people in southern Iraq, they were Shia; otherwise, they could not have been more different. Emara, bearded, stocky, and square headed, with the wary manner of a man long involved in underground politics, was a strict Muslim and bore a prayer bruise in the middle of his forehead. His intention in defecting was to fight to spread Iran’s Islamic revolution to his own country. Sary, for his part, kept his cleft chin clean shaven; he was a dapper dresser who laughed and cried easily. As a young man, he liked to drink and chase women. Basra was then a cosmopolitan port with spice shops owned by South Asian merchants and nightclubs with Egyptian bartenders and Kuwaiti patrons; it had been a congenial place for him, until the war. Sary fled Iraq to escape the brutality of Saddam’s regime and the pointless war it had launched.

  Emara and Sary first met in an Iranian town east of Tehran, where they and other Iraqi defectors decided to form an opposition group. But they couldn’t agree whether to call it the Free Officers Movement or, as Emara wanted, the Free Islamic Officers Movement. In the end, Emara’s faction prevailed, and Sary was pushed out of the organization, which came under the control of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and was renamed the Badr Brigade, after a decisive battle in A.D. 624, when the Prophet and his faithful supporters, though vastly outnumbered, defeated the Meccan army.

  Emara became Badr’s artillery commander. The militia expanded with the recruitment of prisoners of war: Iran, which eventually held up to seventy thousand Iraqis, pressured the Shia whom they captured to join their Persian brothers against the apostate tyrant who was killing their religious leaders in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Remarkably few Iraqi Shia were willing to place sectarian belief or self-interest ahead of national loyalty, even though those who refused faced years of squalid confinement. Those Iraqis who did reverse their allegiance were led into combat, in the marshes north of Basra, by Emara. The Badr Brigade earned a reputation for ferocity, and Emara felt no compunction about killing fellow Iraqis.

  Sary quickly found that he liked revolutionary Iran no better than fascist Iraq, and he moved on to Pakistan. In 1985, the Pakistani intelligence service arrested him and turned him over to Iraq. Sary spent two years in Abu Ghraib and other prisons that were even worse. He was in solitary confinement for eighteen months; after being sentenced to death, he watched friends taken away for execution while he awaited the same fate. Instead, in 1987, Saddam, who was losing the war and was short of manpower, issued a general-release order, and Sary found himself once again a soldier in the Iraqi army. He served out the war back home in Basra with an air-defense unit. By then Basra was on the front lines; Iranian troops, just seven miles away, constantly shelled the city from across the Shatt al-Arab. Saddam had launched the war to seize the waterway and to prevent Ayatollah Khomeini from inspiring Iraq’s oppressed Shiite majority to rise up and create the Islamic Republic of Iraq. But when the Iran-Iraq War ended in 1988, after eight years of human-wave and gas attacks, with missiles raining down on the two capitals and more than a million casualties, the border remained exactly where it had been in 1980: in the middle of the waterway. “Nobody won,” Emara said when I met him at Sary’s office in Basra just before the elections. “Ask Saddam what it was for.”

  The next war came to Basra in 1991, when the American-led coalition expelled Saddam’s forces from Kuwait. Sary had been sitting in his house for three years, reading history and poetry; he was afraid to leave, and his record made him unemployable. When soldiers of the routed Iraqi army began to stream north on foot from Kuwait into the city, exhausted and hungry, some of them sold their weapons to Basrawin for a pack of cigarettes or just enough cash to reach their homes farther north. On the morning of March 2, Sary’s cousin arrived at his house with news that, during the night, in al-Hayaniya, the vast slum west of downtown, young men trying to spring a group of friends from jail had taken over a police station and begun attacking Baath Party offices. Women were in the streets shouting, “Saddam is falling!” Sary was swept up in the spontaneous uprising. He had nothing to lose and, suddenly, nothing to fear. “It wasn’t a decision,” he said. “It was like a historical movement for me. I heard that the people started to move against the regime and I moved by myself. I attacked the intelligence building.” Sary called the Iraqi intifada “ten days of happiness.”

  On the fourth day of the revolt, which had spread to other cities, two men in black suits appeared before a crowd outside a mosque in the Temimiya district. They had arrived in a Toyota Land Cruiser with license plates from Tehran. Speaking in accents of the Iranian border region, they urged local people to form checkpoints around the city and stop the advance of Republican Guard soldiers that Saddam had sent to quell the rebellion. They also instructed the women of Basra to wear full-length black abayas. Around the same time, an intelligence cell of the Badr Brigade was sent across the border by the Shiite exile opposition in Tehran, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, to organize the chaotic uprising in Basra and give it an ideological focus. Pictures of SCIRI’s religious leader, Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Hakim, appeared around Basra, along with images of Ayatollah Khomeini.

  Seven days after the uprising began, as the Republican Guard approached the city center, Sary was navigating through pitched battles in the streets when he spotted a familiar face from a distance: that of Youssef al-Emara, who was on a reconnaissance mission to prepare for two hundred Badr fighters to attack Basra’s main square and navy yard. Sary was suspicious of the Badr Brigade and worried that the intifada, which had begun as a popular movement without a sectarian cast—one of its first martyrs, he said, was a Sunni from Ramadi—would be overtaken by religious Shia under Iranian control. Still, the sight of Emara, after almost a decade, was welcome. “We were in a war,” Sary said. “We needed any help.” Emara was too far away for Sary to speak with him, but Sary was led to believe that Emara and other Badr members would supply the local fighters with Katyusha rocket launchers. They never materialized.

  In fact, a Badr commander ordered Emara to withdraw his men from Basra and return to Tehran. He was told that Iraqi army helicopters were hitting the city with napalm. “I thought: Why should we come back if a few members were targeted? The situation was favorable,” Emara recalled. “When I said that to my leader, I found that he didn’t care, he was cold. I’ve never understood it until this day.” Sary, however, saw the hand of Iran in Badr’s retreat. The government in Tehran feared that Saddam was setting a trap for Iran’s proxies.

  On the tenth day, Emara and the Badr cell withdrew, and, according to a leader of the intifada, the Iranian army temporarily blocked Saddam’s Iraqi opponents from crossing the border. A few hundred local Iraqis remained in Basra to resist the Republican Guard, in what amounted to a suicide mission. Men were hanged from the gun barrels of tanks; others were machine-gunned to death, their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. The cease-fire between the United States and Iraq had permitted Saddam to resume using helicopter gunships, and they strafed fleeing civilians. Tens of thousands of Iraqis across the south were slaughtered. Republican Guard tanks were painted with the mocking motto, “After today, no more Shia.”

  On March 17, Sary escaped into Kuwait and eventually arrived at an American prison camp in Saudi Arabia. From there he went into exile in Sweden, where he wrote a book about the intifada, Death Coming from the West. The title referred to western Iraq, the Sunni Arab heartland that was home to the Republican Guard leaders. But there was a larger implication. Like everyone in Basra who told me the story of the intifada,
Sary felt betrayed by America as well as by Iran. Two weeks before the uprising, President George H. W. Bush had told Iraqis to overthrow Saddam; flyers dropped by American planes had urged the same thing. In the first days of the revolt, dissident Iraqis thought that the American military was on their side. U.S. soldiers positioned south of Basra had initially provided medical aid and food to people leaving Basra, and American planes had attacked Iraqi tanks. But the dissidents I spoke with said that the United States had suddenly stopped supporting them. “Bush told us to uprise,” an Iraqi said at the time. “When we uprose, he went fishing.” A Basrawi who had fled to the Kuwaiti border asked American officers there, “Can you help the people dying?” An officer answered, “We are military—there’s nothing we can do. This is politics.”

  The no-fly zone that allowed the Kurds in the northern mountains to survive and create an autonomous region was of no use to the Shia in the relentlessly flat southern marshes and desert. “Saddam Hussein wasn’t entering houses by plane, he was entering on foot, in cars,” a leader of the uprising named Mufeed Abdul-Zahraa said. He ran a veterans’ group whose certificate of membership asserts that the bearer “is one of the participants in the intifada, and he participated with all he owns and sacrificed his material goods and his soul to save our city, even to the last moment when the intifada ended, when the evil powers united, the Americans and the Baathists.” Bitterness over the events of 1991 remained strong in Basra, and it helped to explain the wariness with which the Shia, more impoverished and disenfranchised than ever, greeted the American invasion in 2003. To many, the defeat of Saddam came twelve years too late.

  Emara and Sary both returned home after Saddam’s fall, but, just as they had tried to push the intifada in separate directions, they came back from Tehran and Stockholm with sharply different visions of a new Iraq—one Islamist, one secular. Emara and Sary, the former rebels, had become middle-aged men in pin-striped suits. The Badr Brigade, renamed the Badr Organization, now operated freely in Basra—the provincial governor was a member—and Emara was one of its top officials. A couple of weeks before election day, he was appointed to the local office of the national Defense Ministry, where Sary was also an official. One of Emara’s first moves in his new job was to pay a visit, just three days before the elections, to Sary’s office. He had some political business to discuss. They sat down under a wall plaque that commemorated the intifada after Sary’s own persuasion: Its imagery emphasized the revolt’s national character, with a Sumerian sun, an Arab sword, a Kurdish dagger, and symbols of workers and peasants. Emara didn’t realize that he and the man behind the desk were old acquaintances, with a certain shared history, until Sary reminded him. Then they spent several hours talking over the unhappy past.