The New Middle East (48 page)

Bremer nominally handed over power to an interim Iraqi government on 28 June 2004, two days ahead of schedule, in a brief ceremony witnessed by just a couple of dozen people. He was already on the plane on his way out before the wider world knew anything about it. He may have gone, the occupation was technically over, but the power stayed with the Americans. The fledgling democracy that he also left behind was carrying the whole weight of the US military adventure on its back. And though George W. Bush could rightly claim that his administration had produced the first free and fair elections in the Middle East, which took place for a National Assembly in January 2005 and again in that December, the polls just reinforced to the Sunnis how much power they had lost.

Those sectarian strains spilled out across the region as Sunni leaders, and particularly those in the Gulf, saw another Shia-led government emerge in an oil-rich and powerful nation, alongside already resurgent Iran. Another manifestation of this was a renewal of al-Qaeda, this time in Iraq. The conflict became a magnet, not only for extremists from around the world who wanted to kill Americans, but also for Sunni extremists who wanted to kill Shia.

Much of the coordination and transport of these Sunni extremists was arranged by Syria. I was told by someone who lived in Damascus at the time that busloads of Salafists would be gathered together in an area near the Algerian embassy before heading off to the border. When the Americans left at the end of 2011 many of those men hopped back across the border to fight the same Shia regime that had sent them into Iraq in the first place.

Within a few months of President George Bush declaring on 1 May 2003 that ‘major combat operations in Iraq have ended’,
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the commander of the US forces in Iraq, General John Abizaid, said his troops were facing ‘what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us . . . It’s a low-intensity conflict, in our doctrinal terms, but it’s war however you describe it.’
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His boss Donald Rumsfeld described them as ‘pockets of dead-enders’.
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President Bush said: ‘There are some who feel like the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring ’em on.’
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As he later admitted, his comment provoked a ‘firestorm of criticism’. It underlined just how little his administration understood about the size of the insurgency it was beginning to face.
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The Bush administration made it clear that it neither valued nor wanted much to do with the United Nations or other international agencies, and so when the bomb attacks started most of them simply packed up and left, leaving the US to shoulder the entire load. The capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003, found hiding in a hole in the ground near Tikrit, caused much excitement among the Americans but did not, as they’d hoped, dampen the violence. One of the guns he had with him in hiding was mounted and presented to President Bush.

By the following spring the insurgency had gathered steam and the US forces found themselves fighting Sunnis in Fallujah and other areas of Anbar province. They were also fighting the Shia followers of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

He was the youngest son of Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who had a huge following among the poorer members of the Shia community. Sadiq al-Sadr was assassinated by the Iraqi regime in February 1999 when the car carrying him and his two eldest sons was sprayed with machinegun fire.
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Muqtada al-Sadr was not targeted afterwards because the regime did not think he was a threat. He was dismissed by his opponents as being a bit slow-witted.
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Because he lacked his father’s charisma or religious credentials, Muqtada al-Sadr was not a major player before the invasion, but after it he successfully used his family name to create perhaps the biggest single problem the occupying forces would face. Al-Qaeda never offered an alternative to the government the Americans were trying to stitch together. They were spoilers, not players. But Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army did.

Like his father, Muqtada al-Sadr’s power base was the poor working classes of the Shia community. Many of them had been made destitute by the UN sanctions for which they, like everyone else, blamed America. As the local government in Baghdad disintegrated, his followers filled the gap in Sadr City and other Shia areas in the south of Iraq with food, health care and, most importantly, security.

His Mahdi army though were seen by many middle-class Shia Iraqis as nothing more than criminal gangs, particularly after al-Sadr issued a religious ruling or fatwa which said that stolen property could be kept by thieves if they donated some of the proceeds of their loot to Sadrist imams.
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His newspaper also printed lists of Iraqis it said were collaborating with the occupation, which was tantamount to issuing their death sentence.

Al-Sadr and his followers simply saw the American troops as one oppressive regime replacing another. Along with Sadr City, al-Sadr sought control of important religious cities like Kabala and Najaf.

I had visited the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf in 2002 before the war. To add insult to Saddam’s long list of injuries perpetrated against the majority Shia population there was a huge tiled image of Saddam praying inside the courtyard facing the worshippers as they mourned Imam Ali. It didn’t last long beyond his fall. Neither did peace in the city. It was the scene for a series of battles with the Western forces in 2004 as they saw both al-Sadr’s political and his military power grow. The constant fighting decimated the pilgrimage-related economy, and in the end the local traders and clerics were as happy to see the back of his forces as the Americans were.

In the December 2005 parliamentary elections al-Sadr essentially became kingmaker, supporting the candidacy of Nouri al-Maliki, from the Shia Dawa Party, as prime minister in the coalition government. He would play the same role again in the parliamentary elections five years later. One Pentagon report in 2006 declared that his Mahdi army was a bigger threat to Iraq’s security than al-Qaeda.
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But in March 2008 al-Maliki showed he was also willing and able to take on the Mahdi army in its strongholds in and around Basra, and in Baghdad’s Sadr City. This encouraged many to think that he might be able to govern impartially, and some Sunni politicians agreed to join his cabinet. Muqtada al-Sadr had by then already fled to Iran, ostensibly to complete his religious training but actually to escape an arrest warrant. After his militia was crushed by al-Maliki’s forces he recast them as a humanitarian group, but one that could easily be reconstituted into a serious fighting force.

Al-Sadr did not return until January 2011, but he then became a major influence on the decision by al-Maliki to refuse a US request for its troops to stay on, in a reduced form, beyond 2011. Al-Sadr warned in a statement released on the eighth anniversary of the toppling of Saddam’s statue that he would remobilise his Mahdi army if the US pull-out did not meet its deadline. But by then, even though they were nervous of what might follow, many Iraqis believed they had already paid too high a price for having the Americans around.

The Iraq war was big business. At times there were more private contractors in the country than there were military personnel.
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Nearly 10 per cent of these people were providing a security service. The country was made more dangerous by the way some of the tens of thousands of security contractors who rotated through the war dealt with the Iraqi people. Iraq was a licence to print money for some of the men working for private security firms if they were willing to strap on a weapon, puff out their chests and claim military expertise they did not have. The US Department of Defense didn’t even begin to count how many there were until four years into the war, by which time they were feared to have undermined the country’s counter-insurgency efforts. At their peak in June 2009 there were thought to be 15,279 private security contractors in Iraq, though even that figure may have been an underestimate.
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There were of course many experienced and disciplined security contractors operating in the country, with long previous service in special forces and other such units. But these men, along with journalists and most importantly the Iraqis, soon realised there were also motley crews of racists lording it around the country, bullying, harassing and shooting at ordinary people with total impunity.
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Their actions disgusted and infuriated the local population.

The country was on a slow boil, but the sectarian tensions built into the political process by Bremer’s decisions were being stoked by the Sunni extremist ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ group, led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His aim was simple – kill lots and lots of people: ‘It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us.’ According to a computer disk the US said it found in Baghdad in January 2004, he wrote to senior al-Qaeda leaders: ‘If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands of the Shia.’
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Al-Zarqawi and his followers adhered to the teachings of Sayyid Qutb, but stretched them to their barbaric extremes. Not only did his men bomb and kill Shia, they terrorised Sunni Muslims too in the areas they operated in. They applied Qutb’s ideas of Takfir to pass judgement on anyone who stood in their way, leaving decapitated corpses lying in the streets.

‘It was really when the Global Jihadis came in that Takfir just climbed exponentially. The violence was unbelievable, I’d just never seen anything like it,’ Doctor David Matsuda told me. He was among a small group of specialist anthropologists deployed with American troops after 2006 to develop a better understanding of how to implement an effective counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq. He worked in two of the country’s most dangerous areas, Sadr City and Anbar province.

It became a battle for the heart and soul of Islam – who is a Muslim and who has the right to define that not just for themselves, but for everybody. There was a lot of animosity between Sunni and Shia before the two Gulf wars [but] the concept of Takfir just took everything to a completely different level. Even without rule of law, even when that was at its worst, Takfir increased the propensity for frontier justice and motivated the revenge factor. Global Jihad really got its voice once Iraq became a global proxy war for who among the Sunnis are the first among equals and then who among Muslims are the first among equals.

It would eventually be these excesses that would lead to a real turning point in the war, but before that happened a lot more people died. In April 2004 Bremer concluded of his chief foes: ‘Zarqawi was the mirror image of Muqtada, a
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Muslim fascist.
Somebody has to stop them both before the poison spreads.
’ (Bremer’s italics.)
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Even the central al-Qaeda leadership ended up internally condemning al-Zarqawi and his successors’ vicious campaign of violence. But al-Zarqawi’s excesses were not new to them. When he was previously involved with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, before 9/11, he had to be moved by the organisation to Herat in the north because he started slaughtering members of the Shia Hazara community in the place he had been based in.
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Killing Shias seemed to be his primary reason for coming to Iraq too, not killing Americans.

If al-Qaeda was the very fringe of violent Sunni fundamentalism, al-Zarqawi was the fringe of al-Qaeda. Although they had fallen out with him in Afghanistan they needed him when he turned up in Iraq to keep the al-Qaeda franchise in the public eye. But letters found in Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan after bin Laden was killed by US special forces in May 2011 showed he considered the brutality of both Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the insurgency umbrella group ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ to be counterproductive. He eventually concluded that his Iraqi affiliates were in fact a liability. One of his media advisers, the American Adam Yahya Gadahn, was infuriated by the constant attacks on moderate Sunnis and Christians which continued even after al-Zarqawi’s death. He wrote in January 2011: ‘The attack on the Catholic Church in Baghdad . . . launched by the organization of the Islamic State of Iraq that we support, which is – if we like it or not – known to people as [Al-Qaeda in Iraq] do not help to gain people’s sympathy.’ He added: ‘I believe that sooner or later – hopefully sooner – it is necessary that al-Qa’ida publicly announces that it severs its organizational ties with the Islamic State of Iraq.’
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The irony was that it was the ‘war on terror’ that brought al-Qaeda into Iraq. The final report of the 9/11 commission published in the summer of 2004 found ‘no evidence that these or the earlier contacts [between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda] ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.’ They had not, as the Bush administration claimed in the run-up to the war, been involved with the Iraqi regime before.