The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  The day before the elections was a feast day called Ghadir al-Khumm. In 632, as Mohamed made his way back to Medina from his last pilgrimage to Mecca, he is believed to have stopped by a pool of stagnant water, or ghadir, in the desert and held up the hand of his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. “For whomever I am his mawla,” the Prophet told the world, “Ali is his mawla.” Those Muslims who took mawla to mean “master” and believed Ali to be the Prophet’s chosen successor as caliph became the Shia, or the “partisans” of Ali and his son, Hussein, and all of the imams who descended from them, down to the twelfth and last, the hidden Mahdi, whose reappearance would usher in the apocalypse. Those who took mawla to mean “friend,” and who believed in an entirely different account of who succeeded Mohamed, became the Sunnis. So Ghadir al-Khumm marked the beginning of the great fracture among Muslims, and the Arab Shia were its historical losers, living down the centuries under the religious authority of the Sunni caliphate, and, more recently, under the temporal power of Sunni politicians—even in Iraq, where the Shia were the majority. Shia had failed to join the first Iraqi government, under British occupation in the 1920s, because of a fatwa, and during Saddam’s regime their leaders had been systematically murdered. For secular Iraqis, the country’s first truly democratic elections meant that they could at last escape the nightmare of the Saddam years and join the civilized world. For religious Shia, after the martyrdom of Ali and of Hussein, after the centuries of penitence, quietism, and suffering, the elections would grant them their rightful share of power and correct a historic wrong going back more than a thousand years.

  On the Friday before the elections, at the Hakemiya mosque, off a busy commercial street near the bombed intelligence building, Imam Mohamed al-Basry delivered prayers to the men packed into his small shrine. A loudspeaker blared his words to the surrounding neighborhood. He was just thirty-one, a former biologist with square-framed glasses, a missing front tooth, and an ill-at-ease manner. He made sure that his flock understood the significance of the fact that election day was the day after Ghadir al-Khumm. Ordinarily, Shia would travel to Najaf on Ghadir al-Khumm to visit the shrine of Ali, but this year, as part of the election security effort, there would be a nationwide ban on car travel beginning at dusk on the eve of the elections. The imam said, “There is something we can do that’s maybe more important than this visit. We will make our rights clear. And that is much more important than visiting Najaf on the right day.”

  The imam’s voice rose as he tried to galvanize the men kneeling before him. “The day after tomorrow is election day,” he said. “It will be a great day, and we should prepare ourselves for this day as we prepare ourselves for any other Islamic feast, because this day will bring victory to the people who suffered from injustice. It will be the day when there will be no more suffering for the people. It will be the day when the victim will get rid of the person who abused him.” On election day, the imam declared, Shia should follow their marjayia, their religious scholars, who were heirs to Ali and his family—the true heirs to the Prophet. The word of a marja was like the word of the Prophet, and following the marjayia meant accepting Ali as caliph: This was the doctrinal connection between Ghadir al-Khumm and election day. The imam had arrived at the point of the sermon. “The marjayia composed and support a list, the United Iraqi Alliance, which carries the number 169, which carries the candle symbol,” he said. “Did anyone not hear me? I want this word to reach even to the outside loudspeakers, so no one will be able to say it is a lie. And I don’t want to hear that the marjayia didn’t support this list.”

  The imam was venturing onto controversial ground (and when I met with him afterward, he refused to discuss any of it). The other parties claimed that Sistani, who no one doubted had helped to compose No. 169, had blessed all the lists, and they cried foul when his picture started appearing on No. 169 campaign signs. Sistani himself said nothing to resolve the dispute. The clergy had previously kept out of it. Now Imam Basry wasn’t content merely to clear up the doubt about Sistani’s support for No. 169; he went on to imply that the Allawi government, by raising salaries, was trying to bribe voters. “I remind you that death is close to every person,” the imam said. “No one knows when he will die—he might die at any moment. What will he say to our God? ‘I voted for a certain list because they gave me money’? How can he face God with this answer?”

  The imam then told his flock what time the polls would open and close, how many pieces of ID to bring, how to find List 169 on the ballot, and how to check the right square. Apparently satisfied that his instructions were clear, he offered his valediction: “God will be with you that day, so you should not fear anything, you should have no fear of terrorists. The Shia of Hussein should remember this saying: We refuse humiliation, and we should go to vote.”

  * * *

  SUNDAY MORNING was strange and beautiful. The streets of Basra were so quiet that people later said it was like a feast day. Families, including small children and grandparents, were walking together along the wide avenues, everyone dressed in fine clothes. Many Basrawin I spoke with had discussed with their families what to do on election day—whether it would be safer to go out in the morning or afternoon, whether it would be better to lose only one or two members of the family or to die together. Policemen and National Guardsmen stood at intersections every couple of hundred yards, and snipers perched on the roof of the provincial government building. People on their way to vote were amazed to see men in uniform actually doing their jobs. By seven-thirty, at the schools that had been designated polling places, voters were already lining up; the queues were orderly and the faces a little solemn. People submitted without complaint to the frisks, and they seemed to keep their voices down out of respect. Election workers—schoolteachers, housewives, unemployed college graduates—wore badges on their shirts. They handed out ballots with the slightly exaggerated seriousness of people performing a small but important ritual, like professors distributing final exams. They guided each voters’ right index finger down into the little glass half full of violet ink. Ordinary Iraqis on any other day, the election workers were thanked as if they were the heroes of 1991. The ballots themselves—beige for the national elections, blue for the provincial—were large and crowded with a bewildering array of party symbols. They looked cleaner and newer than anything else I’d ever seen in Iraq.

  At the Republican School, just off Independence Street, Shadha Mohamed Ali, a fifty-year-old housewife in a stylish red-and-black scarf, cast the day’s first vote. “I spent thirty-five years of my life going from war to war,” she said. “Now my hopes are for my children. We lost our future. We’re looking for the future of our children.” Mehsin Richem Hashem, a teacher of Arabic at the school and the manager of the polling station, said, “I’ve lived over fifty years, and I’ve never had such a feeling. My skin had a strange feeling, like goose bumps. We’ve had a great culture for six thousand years, and now I think our humanity is proved. We hope this democratic experiment brings this result, that the people are the real owners of the decisions in this country.” He wore a slightly tattered jacket and a floral tie, and his face was taut, with a carefully clipped mustache. “There’s a rumor they poisoned the water supply in as-Zubair this morning,” he said, referring to a Sunni suburb south of Basra. (The rumor proved false.) “We don’t care what the terrorists do. They have tried everything but they can’t do anything. Poisoning the waters shows they’re desperate.”

  Around 8:20, the school shook slightly when a mortar round landed a few hundred yards away. “Yalla,” someone muttered. “No problem, no problem,” Laith Mahmood Shaker, a thirty-two-year-old traffic policeman who had brought his children, said. “What we are doing now is a big thing against terrorism. It’s like a challenge to them: We’re voting—what can you do?”

  A number of voters recalled the only elections they had known, the farces that had certified Saddam’s popularity. They had been offered a choice between one box marked yes and one marke
d no; sometimes, the election workers simply cast their votes for them. This time, many people exercised their newfound right to keep their choices to themselves. Feisal Jassim, a retired oil-company employee—he had been among the worshippers who listened to Imam Basry’s instructions—wouldn’t reveal his choice. For him, the experience of voting freely for the first time, at age seventy, was what mattered. “Most Iraqis don’t know what democracy means,” he said. “Is it sweet, is it bitter? Does it have a taste or a smell? We don’t know. After the elections, we’ll find out.”

  In one polling place, I met Abdul-Khadem Hussein Abood, a uniformed National Guard colonel with a fragile physique, a hollow face, and piercing black eyes. Fifty-six years old, he had been a prisoner of war in Iran for seventeen years, during the prime of his life; he was released and came back to Basra two days before the start of the war in 2003 and was overjoyed to find that his small children had grown up to become engineers and a doctor. Colonel Abood held up four fingers, one for each child: His index finger was stained.

  My translator in Basra was an overweight, pleasantly melancholy young doctor from Baghdad named Omar. After the first bombs fell on the city in March of 2003, Omar stayed at his hospital for three weeks to treat the wounded and then, when order collapsed, to stave off the looters; by the end he was one of only five doctors still on duty. He was easily bored, even during the occupation, when the endless explosions and high body counts meant that every young doctor became a hardened trauma specialist. Election day, said Omar, a secular Sunni without strong political views, was “just another day.” So he felt—until, as we were about to leave a polling station after talking with a dozen voters, he suddenly exclaimed, “Please wait!” He went back inside and begged the election workers to let him vote, even though he was registered in Baghdad. Phlegmatic Omar came out beaming. “I feel great!”

  His family lived in Amariya, a western Baghdad neighborhood off the dangerous airport highway that was a notorious hotbed of the insurgency. No one in the family knew that Omar worked with Westerners for a living. All morning, he kept calling home to see whether his family had voted, and around noon he was stunned to hear that his mother and brothers, having looked out the front door to find their neighbors trickling into the street, had made a dash to the polls themselves. They returned home safely, and before nightfall even his father, a retired army officer who was becoming a Sunni extremist in his later years, was envious enough of their purple fingertips, of the tremendous excitement spreading through Baghdad and most of Iraq, to go down and vote as well. Omar’s best friend, Ali, who also lived in Amariya, made three attempts to vote. On the first try, Ali got halfway down the street when a friend known to be a sympathizer with the insurgency greeted him suspiciously. “Where are you going?” he asked. “To get some bread,” Ali said. “I’ll go with you,” the friend said, and Ali proceeded to the bakery for a loaf of bread he didn’t need. A few hours later he tried again, and some men coming out of the mosque cornered him. “Where are you going?” they asked. “To the pharmacy, for my aunt’s prescription,” Ali said. “We’ll go with you,” the men said, and when they reached the pharmacy Ali had to pretend that he’d forgotten the prescription at home. As the afternoon grew late and the polls prepared to close, Ali, who had been watching scenes of people lining up to vote on television all day, panicked and called Omar in Basra. Patiently, Omar talked Ali through a two-mile detour around the back streets of Amariya. Ali reached the polling station only to find out that it wasn’t his: He was supposed to vote in the school just behind his house. And so Ali did, and as soon as he made it home his mother frantically scrubbed the purple dye off his finger with chlorine.

  I returned to the Republican School in Basra just before the polls closed, at dusk. The last person in line was Abid Hamid, a policeman who had been so busy all day that he’d almost forgotten to vote. “It’s not important whom I choose,” he said. “I just want to participate.” The outer gate was locked, and I was allowed to stay and watch the count. The ballots were collected in bundles of twenty-five, and then laid out, one after another, on a wooden table in the middle of a sixth-grade math classroom. The right hand of the counter, a math teacher named Salih Younis Mahdi, was deformed; he had only the three middle fingers, and they were webbed together. He ran his hand rapidly down the ballots like a ruler, slapping the paper when he came to the checked box, then calling out the number. Ahmad Salih Mahdi, an elderly first-grade teacher, stood silently at the chalkboard and recorded the votes in groups of five. Monitors from the parties and the election commission stood by, and when, predictably, the power failed, hurricane lamps were produced, and the classroom became a chiaroscuro study of long shadows and illuminated faces.

  The final count at the Republican School was 721 for the Allawi list, 595 for the Sistani list, and a handful of votes scattered among the others. The total number of ballots distributed was two greater than the number of votes counted, and so the men stood around the table in the middle of the room for half an hour more, their faces lit from below, going over the tallies again and again, until they realized that two ballots had been left blank. Everything had come out right.

  * * *

  THE ARRIVAL of the Americans and the British in 2003 freed Iraqis from Saddam but not from their own suspicions and grievances and fears. It was a victory of foreigners, and the occupiers wondered why they were greeted with prickliness instead of mere gratitude. Liberation was, in a way, humiliating, and the almost two years that followed brought new calamities. On election day, the foreign troops were nowhere to be seen, and when Iraqis went to vote, the achievement was finally their own.

  Two days after the election, I went back to see Majid al-Sary and found him elated. After the fall of the regime, with all the looting and violence, he had been too ashamed of his country to bring his family to Basra, and he had been thinking of going back to Sweden if the election results meant the loss of his job in the Defense Ministry. Now, he was determined to stay: Iraqis, he had learned, were worth fighting for. “The elections showed the strength of religious ideas here. I will stay and fight those bad ideas. It’s changing from a fight against violence and explosions to a new category—thoughts.”

  After a few days, the euphoria from the elections began to wear off, along with the ink on index fingers. Nationwide, the Sistani list won nearly half the vote, and in Basra it took 70 percent. The Allawi list won less than 15 percent nationally, 20 percent in Basra. In the provincial election, the local Shiite coalition won a third of the vote, with the Fadilah Party a strong second and the Allawi list a distant third. The coalition of small parties put together by Jawdet al-Obeidi, the former limousine company owner from Portland who had attended the workshop in Hilla, didn’t even register in the national results. The success of the religious parties left the supporters of Allawi and other secular candidates stunned, and some of them attributed the result to the misuse of Sistani’s name and face. Some Iraqis said that Mohamed Rida, Sistani’s son and spokesman, had panicked on the eve of the elections and ordered the imams to hand down an official endorsement of List No. 169. (Sistani’s office denied this.) It was the Ghadir al-Khumm Surprise. In this first chance to “give their voice,” most Shia had obeyed their religious leaders.

  In Basra, at least, there had been a contest. Iraq as a whole emerged from its first democratic election profoundly split between those who voted and those who did not. The national turnout was 58 percent, but the voters were overwhelmingly Shia and Kurds. The Sunni turnout was estimated to be 15 percent; in Anbar province, it was 2 percent. The party of Ghazi al-Yawer, the interim president and a tribal sheikh from Mosul, won two seats in the new national assembly. Adnan Pachachi, a former foreign minister and elder statesman of Arab politics, could not even win a seat for himself.

  I visited Pachachi in Baghdad to find out how Iraq could move forward from such a divisive event, in which the country’s historical losers had become winners and its winners losers. The transformation wo
uld be felt beyond Iraq: The country’s Arab neighbors were already alarmed by the specter of Iranian and Shiite influence rising in the Middle East, disturbing the old Sunni order. Pachachi, a man of liberal views, told me, “I hope there will never be Sunni politics in Iraq. I don’t think there should be Shiite politics, either. We don’t want to be like Lebanon. I think this is a temporary thing, this ascendancy of Shiism. Eventually, the majority of the Shia will turn away from the religious parties. It’s an aberration,” he said. “You will see. I think probably sooner rather than later Iraqis will go back to their secular roots.”

  Pachachi was busy holding meetings with Sunni politicians and religious leaders to find out what it would take to bring them and their constituents into the political game. “They said they were eager to rectify this mistake” of sitting out the elections, he said, chuckling—“without admitting it, of course.” Pachachi was acting as a broker between the marginalized groups and the new centers of power, trying to find a formula by which Sunni leaders could join in the writing of a new Iraqi constitution despite their lack of representation in the assembly. This would both act as a brake on Shiite sectarianism and provide a way for Sunnis who were weary of fighting to rejoin politics. The vote magnified ethnic and religious divisions, and it moved the Americans farther from the center of Iraq’s political life. The contest was more and more among Iraqis themselves. At a meeting of tribal leaders in Baghdad several weeks after the elections, a Sunni Arab from Kirkuk said, “The Americans aren’t the problem. We’re living under an occupation of Kurds and Shia. It’s time to fight back.” Kirkuk once again became ground zero for the dreaded, threatened, desired civil war. Another tribal leader at the gathering declared, “The Kurds are asking for Kirkuk. Later on they will start asking for Baghdad. It was Saddam Hussein who gave the Kurds too much, more than they deserved.” The Arabs would soon rise up, he said. “The last remedy is burning.”