by Robert Fisk
I call on Sheikh Jouwad Mehdi al-Khalasi, one of the most impressive Shia leaders in Baghdad. A tall, distinguished man who speaks with both eloquence and humour, he has the forehead and piercing eyes of his grandfather—the man who led the Shia Muslim insurrection against British occupation in 1920. He brings out a portrait of the grand old revolutionary, who has a fluffy but carefully combed white beard. One of the most eminent scholars of his day, he ended his life in exile, negotiating with Lenin’s Bolshevik government and dying mysteriously— poisoned, his supporters believed, by British intelligence.
Sheikh Jouwad’s shoulders shake with laughter when I suggest that there are more than a few parallels between the Iraqi insurrections of 1920 and 2004. “Exactly,” he says. “In 1920, the British tried to introduce an Iraqi government in name only—it looks like a copy of UN Security Council Resolution 1546. Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi had become the grand ‘marja’ [the leading Shiite scholar] after the death of Mohamed al-Shiazi and he issued a fatwa telling his followers and all Shiites in Iraq not to participate in elections, not to give legitimacy to a government established by occupation forces.
“Not only the Shiites responded to it but the Sunnis and the Jewish, Christian and other minorities as well. The elections failed and so the British forced my grandfather to leave Iraq. They arrested him at his home on the other side of this religious school where we are today—a home which many years later Saddam Hussein deliberately destroyed.”
It was a familiar colonial pattern. The Brits were exiling troublesome clerics— Archbishop Makarios came to mind—throughout the twentieth century, but Sheikh Mehdi turned out to be as dangerous to the British abroad as he had been at home. He was transported to Bombay, but so great was the crowd of angry Indian Muslims who arrived at the port that British troops kept him on board ship and then transported him to the hot, volcanic port of Aden.
“He said to the British: ‘You don’t know where to send me—but since the pilgrimage season is close, I want to go on the haj to Mecca.’ Now when Sherif Hussein, the ruler, heard this, he sent an invitation for my grandfather to attend the haj. He met Sherif Hussein on Arafat Mountain at Mecca. And then he received an invitation to go to Iran, signed by the minister of foreign affairs, Mohamed Mossadeq. And in Iran, waiting for him, were many religious leaders from Najaf.” Thirty years later, the Americans would topple Mossadeq’s Iranian government— with help from Colonel “Monty” Woodhouse of MI6.
Sheikh Jouwad uses his hands when he talks—Shia prelates are far more expressive with their hands than Anglican clergymen—and each new episode in his grandfather’s life produces a pointed finger. “When Sheikh Mehdi al-Khalasi arrived at the Iranian port of Bushehr, he received a big welcome but an official of the Iranian Oil Company fired ten bullets at him. Many people said at the time that this was a plot by Colonel Arnold Wilson, who had been the head of the British occupation in Iraq in 1920. All the great religious leaders from Qom in Iran were waiting for him—Al-Naini and al-Asfahani, Sheikh Abdulhalim al-Hoeri al-Yezdi, who was the professor of the future Ayatollah Khomeini—and then King Feisal, whom the British had set up in Baghdad, announced that exiled religious leaders could return to Iraq—providing they promised not to interfere in politics.”
Sheikh Mehdi angrily dismissed the invitation as “an attack on our role as religious leaders and on the independence of Iraq.” Instead, he travelled to the north-eastern Iranian city of Mashad and established there an assembly “to protect the holy places of Iraq,” publishing treatises in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Russian and Turkish.
“There was even an indirect dialogue between my grandfather and the Bolshevik revolutionaries of Lenin,” Sheikh Jouwad says. “They wanted to use difficulties in the international situation to help Iraq to become a really independent country. There would be a revolution in Iraq. That was the idea. But then in 1925, my grandfather suddenly died. They claimed he had a disease. But my father always believed that the British consul in Mashad had Sheikh Mehdi poisoned. On the afternoon that he died, the consul had invited all the doctors in Mashad to a reception outside the city and so when my grandfather became ill, no one could find a doctor and there was no one to care for him.”
And now? I ask Sheikh Jouwad. What of Iraq now? He chairs the Iraqi Islamic Conference—which combines both Shia and Sunni intellectuals, and which is demanding independence for Iraq, just as Sheikh Jouwad’s grandfather did more than eighty years ago. “The Shia will not separate and they will not isolate themselves from the Sunni. They will have their rights when all the people of Iraq have rights. We have the right also to resist occupation in different ways and we do so politically . . . The Americans want civil war—but they will fail, because the Iraqi people will refuse to fall into civil war.”
But there are Arabs who might also like to provoke a civil war and who want to portray Islam as a religion of revenge and fear. I start to look at the videotapes, the kidnap tapes, of men and women pleading for their lives. The pictures are grainy, the voices sometimes unclear. But when Kim Sun-il from South Korea shrieks “Don’t kill me” over and over again, his fear is palpable. As the heads of the kidnap victims are sawn off, Koranic recitations—usually by a well-known Saudi imam—are played on the soundtrack. At the beheading of an American, the murderer ritually wipes his bloody knife twice on the clothes of his victim, just as Saudi officials clean their blades after public executions in the kingdom. Terror by video is now a well-established part of the Iraq war. The “resistance” or the “terrorists” or the “armed Iraqi fighters”—as U.S. forces now referred to their enemies—began with a set of poorly made videos showing attacks on American troops in Iraq. Roadside bombs would be filmed from a passing car as they exploded beside U.S. convoys. Guerrillas could be seen firing mortars at American bases outside Fallujah. But once the kidnappings began, the videos moved into a macabre new world. More than sixty foreigners had been abducted in Iraq by July 2004; most were freed, but many were videotaped in captivity while their kidnappers read their demands. Angelo de la Cruz’s wasted face was enough to provoke street demonstrations in Manila and the early withdrawal of the small Filipino military contingent in Iraq.
But the scenario has become horribly routine. The potential victim kneels in front of three hooded men holding Kalashnikov rifles. Sometimes he pleads for his life. Sometimes he is silent, apparently unaware of whether he is to be murdered or spared. The viewer, however, will notice something quite terrible which the victim is unaware of. When the hostage is to be beheaded, the gunmen behind him are wearing gloves. They do not intend to stain their hands with an infidel’s blood. There is a reading of his death sentence and then—inevitably—the victim is pulled to the right and one man bends over to saw through his throat. The latest victim had been Bulgarian. Just as Ken Bigley from Liverpool was to turn up, trussed like a Guantánamo prisoner, crying out for help from Tony Blair, so Romanian, French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish and other foreign nationals are paraded before the cameras.
The videos, usually delivered to one of two Arabic-language television channels, are rarely shown in full. But in an outrageous spin-off, websites—especially one that appeared to be in California—were now posting their full and gory contents. One American website, for example, had posted the beheading of the American Frank Berg and a South Korean hostage in full and bloody detail. “Kim Sun-il Beheading Video Short Version, Long Version,” the website offered. The “short version” showed a man severing the hostage’s neck. The long version included his screaming appeal for mercy—which lasted for at least two minutes and is followed by his slaughter. On the same screen and at the same time, there are advertisements for “Porn” and “Horse Girls.”
The Iraqi police had watched all the execution tapes and believed that they followed an essentially Saudi routine of beheading. In many cases, the captors speak with Saudi or Yemeni accents. But a video produced of eight foreign truck-drivers—including Kenyans, Indians and an Egyptian—showed gunmen speaking
in Iraqi accents. They demanded that the companies employing the drivers should end their contracts with the U.S. military in Iraq—just as a Saudi company abandoned its work after another Egyptian employee was taken captive. Clearly, the “resistance” was also trying to starve the Americans of foreign workers and force more U.S. troops back onto the dangerous highways to drive the supply convoys that traversed Iraq each day.
And where did the inspiration for all these ghoulish videos come from? In January 2004, a colleague had discovered a video on sale in the insurgents’ capital of Fallujah allegedly showing the throat-cutting of an American soldier. In fact, the tape showed a Russian soldier being led into a room by armed men in Chechnya. He is forced to lie down—apparently unaware of his fate—and at first tries to cope with the pain as a man takes a knife to his throat. His head is then cut off. It takes me several months before I realise why this tape was circulated. It was intended to be a training manual for Iraq’s new executioners, how to butcher your fellow man, be he a brother in religion or a brother in humanity.
But behind all this—above all this—the shadow that appeared at the back of the historical cave remained that of Osama bin Laden. Every few months, a tape or video of bin Laden himself would turn up on Al-Jazeera, often hand-delivered to the station’s correspondent in Islamabad. A routine would then be adopted by reporters. Was it really him? When was the tape made? The Pentagon would say it was “studying the tape” and journalists would then point out any threat that bin Laden had made. What they rarely did was listen to the whole speech, make a full translation and find out what bin Laden was actually saying. After all, if you want to know what goes on in his mind, you have to listen to the voice, even if the rhetorical flourishes about charging horses and flashing lances become a little tedious. On 27 December 2001, for example, he read a poem supposedly dedicated to the murderers of September 11th which included a “frowning sword,” “shields,” “bolts of lightning,” “drums” and “tempest.”
What is also clear from his tapes, however, is bin Laden’s almost obsessive interest in history. There are references to the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes– Picot agreement—on 20 February 2003 he suggested that the Bush–Blair friendship was a modern version of the latter—and, of course, to the Treaty of Sèvres. “Our nation [the Islamic world] has been tasting this humiliation and this degradation for more than eighty years,” he says on 7 October 2001. In the same tape, he blames the United Nations for the partition of Palestine in 1947: “. . . we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia will be repeated in Palestine,” he says. Andalusia was perhaps the greatest act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated against Arabs, when Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain ejected the Moors—and the Jews, although bin Laden showed no sympathy for them, even though they are the “People of the Book”—from south-western Europe in 1492.211
In the tape which was allegedly found by a British intelligence agent in a house in Jalalabad after the fall of the Taliban, bin Laden appears to admit his responsibility for the attacks of 11 September 2001. Since much of the tape is inaudible, I was initially suspicious of the Pentagon’s claim that it could make a translation of bin Laden’s remarks—until I read this extract:
We were at a camp of one of the brother’s guards in Kandahar. This brother belonged to the majority of the group. He came close and told me that he saw, in a dream, a tall building in America . . . At that point I was worried that maybe the secret [of the proposed 11 September assault] would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dream . . . So I closed the subject. I told him if he sees another dream, not to tell anybody . . .
How could I forget that frightening moment more than four years earlier when bin Laden smiled at me on a cold mountain in Afghanistan and told me that “one of our brothers had a dream,” that the “brother” had seen me on a horse, wearing a beard and a robe “like us” and that I must therefore be a Muslim? Dreams occur in the words of other bin Laden followers, and their influence on al-Qaeda is probably far greater than we imagine. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar claimed that in a dream he had been called by the Prophet Mohamed to save Afghanistan. Dream theories have a long history in Islam; as early as AD 866, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi argued that while asleep, the psyche is liberated from the senses and has direct access to “the form-creating faculty.” The basis of such a belief must have been founded on the experience of the Prophet himself, who received the word of God in a series of dream-visions, many of them presented to him as he sat in a cave on Mount Hira. Bin Laden’s followers would have known that their own leader dreamed in Afghan caves.
By 2004, bin Laden did not attempt to hide al-Qaeda’s involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks, and especially with the leading hijacker. “We had agreed with Mohamed Atta—may God rest his soul—to conduct all operations within twenty minutes, before Bush and his administration realised what was happening,” he said on 30 October. In his tape, timed to coincide with the imminent U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden specifically addressed Americans—most of his messages were primarily for a domestic Arab audience—and responded to Bush’s “they hate freedom” speech about al-Qaeda. “. . . we fight you because we are free men who don’t sleep under oppression,” he said. “We want to restore freedom to our nation—and just as you lay waste to our nation, so shall we lay waste to yours.”212 Now he attributed the attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to the memory of seeing Beirut’s “towers” bombed to the ground during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, adding that “I couldn’t forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere.” Bin Laden was not in Beirut in 1982—he was fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan—and could only have seen the bombardment of Beirut in video footage. There were high-rise buildings destroyed during the siege, but Beirut had no “towers” of the kind bin Laden spoke about. But Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker, had been in Beirut as a child in 1982. Did he, much later, recount his memories to bin Laden?
But the al-Qaeda leader’s most devastating remarks—the warning that America and Britain totally ignored, indeed probably never even read—came in an audio-message broadcast by Al-Jazeera on 13 February 2003. This was five weeks before the invasion of Iraq. Had they studied what bin Laden was saying—had they concentrated on his message rather than spent their time feeding his tape through computers for voice identification—the Pentagon might have grasped the extent of the ruthless insurgency that was to break out less than a month after America’s invasion of Iraq.
Bin Laden always expressed his hatred of Saddam Hussein, referring to him as just another American-created “agent” of the Arab world along with the House of Saud and sundry Gulf princes and emirs. But in that all-important 13 February tape, he made a clear offer to ally his forces with those of Saddam’s Arab Socialist Baath Party:
It is beyond doubt that this Crusader war is first and foremost directed against the family of Islam irrespective of whether the Socialist party and Saddam survive or not. It is incumbent on Muslims in general and specifically those in Iraq—seriously and in the manner of jihad—to roll up their sleeves against this tyrannical campaign. Furthermore they are duty-bound to accumulate stocks of ammunition and weapons. Despite our belief and our proclamation concerning the infidelity of socialists, in present-day circumstances there is a coincidence of interests between Muslims and socialists in their battles against the Crusaders . . . Socialists are unbelievers wherever they may be, be it in Baghdad or Aden. This fight that is taking place today is to a great extent similar to the Muslims’ previous fight against the Christians. The coincidence of interests is beneficial. The Muslims’ fight against the Christians coincided with the interests of the Persians and did not in any way harm the companions of the Prophet.
Bin Laden’s “coincidence of interests”—albeit accompanied by the reminder that socialists are “infidels”—was a call to his followers to fight alongside an Iraqi force which included Saddam’
s Baathists, not for Saddam, who bin Laden rightly appeared to believe might be doomed, but for the Muslim land of Iraq. Had the West read this message, then the catastrophe that would befall the Americans in Iraq might have been anticipated. Those words proved quite openly that al-Qaeda planned to involve itself in the battle against the United States in Iraq, even if this meant cooperating with those who had fought for Saddam. This was the moment when the future guerrilla army fused with the future suicide bombers, the detonation that would engulf the West in Iraq. And we didn’t even notice.
FROM THE EVER MORE dangerous streets of Baghdad, I would fly a tiny twin-prop aircraft back to Beirut, to breathe, to relax by the sea, to sit on my lovely balcony and watch the Mediterranean or swim in the pool of the old and broken St. Georges Hotel. Yet each morning, I would awake early, uneasy, fearful of what was to come. Never had the Middle East been so fearful a place in which to live. Where will today’s explosion be? I used to ask myself. On 14 February 2005 I was walking along the seafront corniche, opposite my favourite restaurant, the Spaghetteria, talking on my mobile phone to my old friend Patrick Cockburn, my replacement in Baghdad, when a white band of light approached at fearsome speed, like a giant bandage. The palm trees all dipped towards me as if hit by a tornado and I saw people—other strollers on the pavement in front of me—fall to the ground. A window of the restaurant splintered and disappeared inside. And in front of me, perhaps only 400 metres away, dark brown fingers of smoke streaked towards the sky. The blast wave was followed by an explosion so thunderous that it partially deafened me. I could just hear Patrick. “Is that here or there?” he asked. I’m afraid it’s here, Patrick, I said. I could have wept. Beirut was now my home-from-home, my safe haven, and now all the corpses of the Lebanese civil war were climbing out of their graves.
