The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  When the reminiscing was done, Emara got to the point. He wanted Sary to put a stop to the ministry’s accusations of Iranian interference in the elections. The Iraqi Shiite religious parties were likely to come to power after the vote, Emara said, adding that if Sary wanted to keep his position it would be in his interest to cooperate. But Basra’s experience since the fall of Saddam had left Sary deeply suspicious of the Islamist parties. “These are the realities,” Sary said to Emara. “We’re not making it up. Iran is interfering.” And, as an Iraqi patriot, he was unwilling to forge alliances with people who served as proxies for Iran. “We’re looking at the parties from Iran,” he said after ushering Emara out of his office. “The good Iraqis we take. The others we leave.”

  * * *

  AFTER THE 2003 invasion, more than a hundred thousand Iraqi Shia who, during Saddam’s regime, had fled to Iran or were expelled returned to southern Iraq. With them came the Islamist political parties that had represented the Shiite opposition in exile: SCIRI and its armed wing, the Badr Organization; Dawa, the oldest Shiite party, whose cadres inside Iraq had been almost exterminated in the 1970s and ’80s; and a host of smaller parties with names like Revenge of God—some of which were armed subsidiaries of Iranian intelligence.

  The religious parties occupied government buildings in Basra, installed their militias, and organized faster than any of the local groups, except for the mostly poor and violent followers of Moqtada al-Sadr. The religious parties quickly established contact with the British military, filled the new police force with their cadres, and took control of the provincial government. “The Iran-backed parties had a strategic vision, which was more or less take over the south politically, cooperate with the coalition, enhance their religious position in Najaf, and then be in a position to get national power,” a British official told me. “I think they’ve succeeded without wide support, which is why they’ve overstretched themselves. Not that many people in the south support the parties.”

  The religious parties imposed their strict ideology on Basra, alienating many residents who were already wary of militiamen who had sided with Iran during the war that inflicted so much suffering on the city. Armed militias assassinated Baathists, harassed women who dared to forgo the veil, and forcibly shut down Basra’s DVD emporiums and Christian-owned liquor shops. Zealous university professors demanded that women and men sit apart from one another in classes, and a music school student told me that he could now study only theory, since playing instruments was considered immoral by some Islamists. This coercive social code sat uneasily on the worldly educated classes of Basra, though the city had grown increasingly conservative under the weight of war, sanctions, and the influence of Iran. The provincial government was widely viewed as incompetent and corrupt; oil products were reportedly being smuggled to floating markets in the Gulf. With vast oil reserves, date-palm plantations, and a strategically located port, Basra, long neglected by Baghdad, had the potential to become the engine of an economic boom in Iraq. In the governor’s office, I met a representative of a Kuwaiti firm with plans for a sixty-eight-story office tower—to be called the World Trade Center—and a $5.5 billion investment. For now, violence and bad government stood in the way.

  I spent several days with the British military in and around Basra. Most of them had been schooled in counterinsurgency tactics in Northern Ireland, and their posture in southern Iraq was a sharp contrast to that of the Americans up north. Their vehicles were smaller and less heavily armed, they wore soft hats on foot patrol, and in general they seemed far more at ease around Iraqis. Local cars could pass their convoys without fear of getting shot up. Some British soldiers were still shaking their heads over a recent incident on the highway near Nasiriya in which an American convoy traveling without lights had fired on British vehicles coming up on its rear. At the soldiers’ bar out on the British air base (unlike the Americans, the Brits were allowed two off-duty beers per night, which seemed an essential part of good morale), a sergeant told me, “The Americans don’t think. They react. When they come down here on exchanges we have to tell them. ‘There’s no danger yet. When there is, we’ll tell you. Until then, just chill.’”

  “I would be very disappointed to see a British soldier involved in a conversation or negotiation still wearing sunglasses,” Major Alan Richmond of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards told me on a trip south of Basra to the port of Umm Qasr. British training for Iraq included a bit of language instruction and some basic cultural sensitivity (don’t show the soles of your shoes, don’t reach with the left hand, don’t look at the women). “You want to be approachable—softly, softly—you want to be able to speak to people because that’s how you get things done.”

  “It also comes from fifty years of withdrawing from empire,” Major Simon Johns said. “What we do down here has risks, but the longer-term benefit is considerable compared to the approach of an absolute standoff. At a certain point, you have to engage.” He quickly added that the British might not have such success if they tried their tactics in more hostile cities like Baghdad or Mosul, where the Americans were under constant attack. When a unit of the Queen’s Dragoon Guards was transferred to a sector near Falluja in advance of the American assault on the city, a suicide bomber killed three soldiers at a checkpoint, and the British immediately tightened up their rules of engagement.

  It was clear that the scenario in Iraq—occupation, reconstruction, counterinsurgency—was easier for the British soldiers than the Americans. Several officers told me that these kinds of operations were at the core of British military doctrine and its role in the post–Cold War world. By contrast, American officers in Iraq either wanted to get back to the real business of the military, which was war training and war fighting, or else understood that Iraq was their real business but also acknowledged that the news hadn’t entirely sunk in with senior leadership. Among junior officers—lieutenants, captains, lieutenant colonels—Iraq was having a profound effect, and many of the ones I met were essentially teaching themselves and one another how to do it well. But even John Prior returned from Iraq knowing that his long experience in Zafaraniya would bring him few career benefits.

  As a result, there was much less friction between foreign soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Basra than in areas occupied by American forces. At the same time, some locals grumbled that the British were unwilling to impose order in Basra. In August of 2004, during a regionwide uprising of the Mahdi Army, the British military essentially ceded control of the city to Sadr’s followers, who had the support of the police chief. Throughout southern Iraq, which had been under non-American control since 2003, government authority was extremely weak and the various Shiite militias had the run of the streets.

  The question of Iran’s role in Basra’s political violence and religious repression was a murky one. To Majid al-Sary, the answer was simple. “There is no Iranian ‘influence’ in Basra,” he said. “There is an indirect Iranian occupation of Basra.” The Iraqi religious parties were agents of the occupation, Sary added, though even he drew distinctions between, for example, SCIRI and Dawa, which exerted a certain independence from Tehran, and the smaller parties that acted as hired guns. Iran, he said, wanted to prevent the establishment of a democratic and secular state next door; it also hoped “to put the American military forces inside the cloud of the Iraqi mess so they cannot hit Iran by military force.” Several people in Basra claimed that the old colonial governor’s residence on the Corniche was occupied by Iranian intelligence agents. According to one Western official, suitcases of cash were constantly ferried across what barely functioned as an international border. When Prime Minister Allawi visited Basra in November of 2004, he asked the governor, “Why aren’t you flying the Iranian flag above your office?” Still, no one seemed to know who the Iranians were. A farmer named Majid Moussa, who was attending a voter education meeting on the campus of Basra University, said, “They don’t come here as Iranians holding a flag.”

  British officials to
ok the view that Iran had a legitimate interest in Iraq: the establishment of a stable, friendly neighbor. Simon Collis, the British consul in Basra, said of the religious parties, “These organizations do have links with Iran. Are they Iranian owned? I don’t think so. If you wanted to fight the tyranny in the eighties and nineties, Iran was the address. It’s not obvious to me that these ties that they doubtless had and doubtless still have to Iran mean that there is some mullah in Qom who can jerk their chain and make them jump.” Another British official, speaking anonymously, admitted, “I’ve come to the view that we cannot know as outsiders. Their communications systems are much faster and more accurate than ours. We’re proud of our e-mail, our computers. But these are so much slower than word of mouth.”

  * * *

  AT THE MATERNITY AND CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL in Basra’s Jazaar district, Dr. Mohamed Nasir, the director, was fighting back against the religious parties that had taken over the city’s other hospitals and its university campuses. Nasir had the tough, jowly face and slicked-back hair of Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in All the King’s Men; he looked more like a ward politician than a hospital director. There were no religious pictures in his hospital, only the uplifting get-out-the-vote posters of the election commission and quaint alpine-meadow scenes inside gold frames that had once contained portraits of Saddam Hussein. In 2004, a religious militia had demanded the use of a brick wall to cover with political propaganda. “Come back tomorrow morning,” Nasir said. That day, he knocked down the wall with a sledgehammer. A few months later, one of his nurses was caught watching a pornographic DVD with her boyfriend, a receptionist. When Nasir ordered the receptionist transferred to another hospital, the man’s friends went to the local Sadr office and reported Nasir for tearing down pictures of Mohamed Sadiq al-Sadr, Moqtada’s martyred father. The militiamen confronted the doctor and demanded that he rescind the transfer order. “They said I need to be judged by a religious court in Najaf,” he recalled with amusement. Nasir armed himself, hired his own hospital security force, and by sheer nerve faced down the intruders.

  The hospital was now a model of order. “We need professional people who are expert at their work and they belong to Iraq only, not to any group, and they are brave people, they have brave heart,” Nasir said as we walked the corridors and toured a new nutrition ward, built by Save the Children with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The doctor was counting on a democratic election and a strong new government to rescue Iraq from chaos. His brand of secularism was all about law and order: He wanted to practice medicine without religious interference. “We have no in-between solution,” he said. “Either we will go ahead with freedom or the whole country will be destroyed. If you speak, I will speak. If you fight, I will fight. Because you have to protect yourself. And if you die, you must die with honor. You must not die a coward.”

  A half mile down the street, outside the modest headquarters of the Fadilah Party (the name meant Virtue, or Morals), someone had propped up a wide, vividly painted canvas: An old man with a white beard, standing against a flaming sky, was pushing a boatload of pilgrims across a desert-colored ocean toward the distant gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, in Najaf. The old man was Moqtada al-Sadr’s father. Fadilah’s founder, Ayatollah Mohamed al-Yaqoubi, claimed that Moqtada’s father, before his murder at the hands of Baathist agents, had chosen him as his successor—making Yaqoubi, not Moqtada, the genuine heir of hard-line Iraqi Shiism. Among the bewildering array of religious parties in Basra, Fadilah had the largest following among the pious educated classes, who wanted strict Islamic government but also independence from Iran.

  Dr. Haider Mohsin, an earnest young internist, sat under a portrait of Ayatollah Yaqoubi and explained Fadilah’s philosophy while, in the next room, bearded, leather-jacketed male campaign workers came and went in a flurry of preelection activity. “The Jean-Jacques Rousseau idea, the French Revolution ideas—we think that these ideas are typical ideas for the European society,” Mohsin said. “But how far it is from Iraq to the European societies is the distance from Islam to the French Revolution.” Cultural imperialism, he said, was the most dangerous kind of imperialism, and Iraq needed to resist the wave of low morals and rampant individualism emanating from the West. “One of the causes that made France fall down in the Second World War was the sexual freedom,” Mohsin said. He was quick to add that the Islamization of Iraq should take place by entirely democratic, constitutional means that respected the rights of religious minorities. Mohsin was equally distrustful of Iranian and American designs on Iraq; no country except Iraq, he said, could have the interests of Iraqis at heart. In Mohsin’s reasoning, the elections would allow Iraq to find the perfect balance of state and mosque, with the assent of the entire population.

  The opposing view was expressed most forcefully by Majid al-Sary. “All the Islamic laws from the time of the Prophet until our day don’t show acceptance of democracy,” he said. “Show me any country where there is Islamic leadership that can accept democratic persons. Where could that happen? In Saudi Arabia? In Iran? I don’t think so, no. The secular people, the communists—they accepted democracy. I don’t think the Islamic parties will accept anyone who opposes them.” Sary compared the prospect of monolithic Shiite rule in Iraq with the tyranny of the Baath Party. For this reason, he said, “religion is something between man and God and should be far away from politics.” Sary, who was protected by at least half a dozen National Guardsmen, added, “I’m the only one who can talk like that in Basra, and I know that, at any time, I can be turned to smoke, because they can blow up my office.”

  * * *

  THE ARABIC WORD FOR “secular” is a neologism, almaany, which comes from aalam, meaning “world.” It wasn’t often heard in public, for to many Iraqis almaany also meant “godless.” As Hashim al-Jazairy, the dean of Basra University’s law school, said, “This is not a good time for godlessness. God forgives, but the people don’t forgive. I don’t know if I’m going to hell or heaven, but there I can say, ‘I’m sorry, God, please forgive me.’ Here, the people don’t forgive.”

  In Basra, the confrontation between doctors and militiamen, and between technocratic and religious parties, was not just a matter of guns and posters. In the days before the elections, Basra became the stage for a passionate political struggle between competing discourses and ideas. The idea of a society based on Islamic values and religious authority, which inevitably meant a sectarian Shiite vision, was embodied by List No. 169, which people called the Sistani list, because the grand ayatollah had overseen the formation of the Shiite coalition. The idea of a society based on civil law, in which Iraqiness would take precedence over ethnic and religious identity, in an effort to heal the country’s deep divisions, was represented by List No. 285, headed by Iyad Allawi. Allawi himself inspired no great passion; people simply said that he was an educated man, a doctor, which seemed to embody a secular society. Sistani, however, was the most revered man in Iraq, even though he was an Iranian and not a candidate for anything. There were contradictions and illusions on both sides. Allawi supporters spoke of good government, though his administration was accused of being spectacularly corrupt; supporters of List No. 169 spoke of following the marjayia, the highest Shiite religious scholars, although Sistani, whose picture appeared on many 169 posters, had never formally endorsed the list he was so instrumental in forming. His fatwa said only that Muslim men and women had a religious duty to vote.

  In a sense, Basra was ahead of the rest of the country. Elsewhere in Iraq, the question was whether or not to vote at all. In Basra, where the violence was at a comparatively manageable level—that is, two murders of secular candidates, three or four car bombs, a handful of attacks on polling stations, and rumors of jihadis heading south from the Sunni areas to create mayhem on election day—the question was whether to vote for Sistani or Allawi.

  The religious parties had the best campaign song, chanted to a soundtrack, heavy on percussion and sweeping
violins, that was blasted from loudspeakers on convoys of pickup trucks:

  All the people should vote for 169

  Because it contains those who were in the jails,

  Those whose fathers and brothers were buried in mass graves,

  The women who gave their sons,

  Those who sacrificed for Iraq.

  It’s what the religious scholars want.

  169 is like a garden for Iraqis

  And Iraqis are the flowers

  And these flowers grow because of the blood

  Of those who gave their lives for Iraq.

  God is great!

  It’s the day for the Shia to give their voice!

  Allawi, in turn, was flooding the Arabic television channels with slick campaign ads paid out of official coffers, and his government had recently promised raises to civil servants and police officers. His ticket was gaining ground in the minority Sunni and Christian areas of Basra, as well as among professionals. In the days leading up to the elections, a number of Basrawin told me that they sensed a surge toward Allawi.