Between the winter of 2007 and the winter of 2008, Maliki"s premiership transformed. Maliki won the trust of many Sunnis by making a surprise move and targeting Shiite militias. The Mahdi Army had overextended itself; Muqtada was not in control, and many Shiite militias had become mere criminal gangs. Nowhere was this more true than in the southern port city of Basra. Not only is Basra Iraq"s second-largest city; it is also where most of the country"s oil is concentrated, and it is from there that most of the oil is exported as well. A variety of Shiite militias and gangs controlled it, imposing an extremist reign of terror and letting the city and its port fall into the hands of mafias as the British, who nominally occupied the city, did little. In late March 2008 Maliki launched Operation Sawlat al-Fursan, or Charge of the Knights, dispatching fifteen thousand soldiers to Basra. There they attacked Mahdi Army fighters in the Sadr City-like slums of Hayaniya, Gzeiza, Jubeila, and Jumhuria, hoping to arrest those they described as criminals. Similar operations occurred throughout the south. Maliki described the targets as outlaws, not mentioning the Mahdi Army by name. Muqtada did not lift his cease-fire, but he did not tell his men to disarm either, and fighting spread throughout Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraqi Security Forces were unable to defeat the various Shiite militias in Basra, and it seemed as if they might even be repelled by the well-armed fighters. American armored vehicles and airstrikes were necessary to rescue the beleaguered ISF. Maliki"s seventy-two-hour deadline for the Mahdi Army to disarm was extended by several days, and his government even announced a weapons buy-back program. Maliki himself flew down to oversee the operation. Curfews were imposed in Shiite towns throughout the country, and the security forces acted with brutality. Up to 1,500 members of the ISF refused to fight, while about one hundred surrendered their weapons to the Mahdi Army. Rockets and mortars fell on the Green Zone in Baghdad. Many Iraqi civilians were also killed in the American airstrikes in Basra and Baghdad. The fighting spread to Washash, where the Mahdi Army fought the ISF for five days before deciding to abandon the neighborhood. The next month a few Sunni families returned to the area.
Before the operation was initiated, Ha.s.san Hashem, secretary to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, carried a personal message to Muqtada in Iran, telling him to evacuate his people because they were about to get hit. But Maliki"s decision to target unruly Shiite militias, regardless of his motivations, was one of the most important factors ensuring the civil war would end. Sunnis like my Awakening friend Osama in Dora suddenly changed their mind about the prime minister and started supporting him.
Maliki"s move was also a surprise for the Americans. A British general in Basra complained to me that the Iraqis had appropriated a British military plan for attacking the Shiite militias in the city, but he may have been looking to restore a wounded ego. "Charge of the Knights was a British-inspired plan," he told me eight months later. "It caught everybody by surprise. We were going to do it later. Charge of the Knights was written by the Royal Marines, but it was predicated on the Iraqi military being where they are now." Amba.s.sador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus had only twelve to twenty-four hours" notice of the offensive. "It is an open secret that it did not go well in the first few days and only turned around when the U.S. started to provide support, mostly intelligence, airpower, and planners," a senior American military official working on Iraq told me. "But I think Maliki started to realize that if his security forces didn"t control the country, then he wasn"t really the leader. I think it was a purely inst.i.tutional move to a.s.sert the primacy of the prime minister. How Maliki became a nationalist is a long story that I don"t totally understand myself. I think part of it was just growing into the job. I also think that there was a seminal moment in Basra when his personal bodyguard-and I understand the two were close-was killed by a Sadrist round."
An American intelligence official dealing with Iraq told me that the Mahdi Army"s attempt to take over Karbala had affected Maliki, especially when Mahdi Army rockets landed too close to Maliki"s house. "The Basra offensive caught us by surprise," the official told me. "He had no logistics, no plan, only General Mohan [Mohan al-Freiji, Maliki"s chief of security in Basra]. No food, no place for them to sleep. Petraeus and Crocker took advantage of it and saved his a.s.s. Maliki also wanted to go to Sadr City and Maysan, but the U.S. felt he wasn"t ready. Maliki realized he could be a nationalist leader." Importantly, it was Iran that brokered the cease-fire between Maliki and the various Mahdi Army groups.
The Iraqi decision to go into Basra was made independently; the Americans heard of the operation only after it started, when Maliki flew down with the key leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces to oversee it. Petraeus and Crocker were extremely worried when Maliki did this, but Bush, apparently, was supportive and said, "He"s finally doing it." "Maliki goes to Basra and takes on Iranian-backed stooges," an American intelligence official told me. "He is the one Arab leader who has taken on with force an Iranian-backed group." But there was a tense seventy-two-hour window during which Maliki"s forces were surrounded. When Americans came to Basra, with Navy SEALs and air support, they came in lightly, but they turned the tide. But once the Americans helped swing things in favor of the ISF, "they gave us the finger," Lieut. Col. P.J. Dermer complained to me. Dermer worked closely with the Iraqi army; even when the Americans were rescuing them, he said, the Iraqis just did whatever they wanted. "Maliki committed his men to battle knowing there was an American corps on the ground," Dermer told me. "What Maliki did [seizing the initiative against the Shiite militias] was brilliant, but his guys sucked. We bailed them out, so when [Gen.] Abud [Qanbar] entered Sadr City, he entered without a shot being fired at them."
Having the Americans come to the rescue may have seemed like a failure at first, but it won Maliki the support of more Iraqis, who saw it as a move against sectarian militias and demonstrated that he could take the initiative. He capitalized on his success by establishing tribal support councils throughout the south whose members benefited from his largesse and often acted as Maliki"s own Awakening councils, even arresting Mahdi Army men. It was a naked attempt to steal support from Shiite groups that had a deeper gra.s.sroots base than the prime minister, and it worked. Maliki was beginning to expand and a.s.sert his control. He was at once targeting Sunni areas and Shiite areas. Following his successful challenges of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and Basra, albeit with substantial U.S. support, he turned to Mosul. At the same time, he was consolidating control over the Shiite Maysan province and planning to target Al Qaeda in Diyala. The American victories in Najaf and Falluja in 2004 taught Iraqi groups that they could not remain for long under American bombardment, and it was better to disperse. Following Maliki"s American-a.s.sisted victories, he wisely adopted a key element of counterinsurgency theory and tried to establish the credibility of his government as the nonsectarian group that could protect the population.
Dermer lived in the Baghdad Operations Center (BOC), working with General Abud Qanbar every day. In the beginning, the Americans led the briefings, but by the spring of 2008 the Iraqis had taken them over and would ask the Americans if they had anything to add only at the end. "Abud was a good man," Dermer told me, "great for Iraq-a nationalist above religion. He ran his shop single-handedly; everything had to go through him. He didn"t rely on his staff enough. But he learned the importance of the media. Abud"s primary staff guy who handled the media was Maj. Gen. Qa.s.sim Atta. Abud called him first thing in the morning and last thing at night-what other military commander in the Middle East focuses on media so much?"
One morning Dermer was with Abud in the BOC. Abud saw an announcement on the news that the Sadrists were going to hold a demonstration in Baghdad in response to the battle in Basra. "I"m not going to let this stand," Abud said, according to Dermer. "I won"t allow it. The militias have to be stopped." Dermer had hoped to contain the demo, but Abud said, "No, I"m going to stop it." Dermer asked him if he needed Maliki"s permission. "I"m the commander of Baghdad," Abud said. "I don"t need anybody"s permission." Dermer realized Maliki had not given him guidance and that Abud was going to war.
Without telling the Americans, Abud started moving battalions to the site of the demonstration. He knew he had Maliki"s blessing, but he was making the plan up by himself. Dermer and the American leadership were taken aback. "I have a core patch," Dermer told me, "with a direct line to Petraeus, and I have battlefield responsibility with General Hammond [of the Fourth Infantry Division, which replaced the First Cavalry Division]. I have to translate this to the coalition, so I have to let Petraeus know."
Dermer persuaded Abud to sit down with the Americans and come up with a plan. Maliki then gave permission for the Americans to shoot into Sadr City, Ur, Shaab, and other areas, but the Americans were not allowed to enter Sadr City. Sadr City, and to some extent the Sadrists, had been off-limits to the Americans. In 2004 the Americans were about to kill Muqtada in Kufa, but he was with Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, so the American canceled the hit. Later Maliki would prohibit the Americans from operating in Sadrist areas or targeting the Mahdi Army. During the surge Americans had to get Maliki"s permission to kill or capture Mahdi Army men. Sometimes they wouldn"t tell him whom they were targeting because they were worried his people would inform the targets. Later there would be full coordination with the Iraqis about the target lists. In March 2008 the Americans were granted permission to use snipers and helicopter gunships, even if they couldn"t bring troops inside these areas.
But the National Security Council"s Brett McGurk and other Americans were worried. Sadr City was home to three million people. Maliki a.s.sured them he knew the street, and it turned out that he did, which created a sense that the ISF could handle security. American sniper teams positioned on the edges of Sadr City proved to be very effective in the battles, though many civilians were also killed.
"As a military Middle Eastern guy, Abud couldn"t fathom a militia," Dermer told me. "Under Saddam he had despised the fedayeen [Saddam"s guerrilla force]. The Iraqi army is fighting to regain their honor. It"s not about fighting skills. Iraqi fighting skills were terrible. It"s about regaining their place in society. We lost a lot of American lives because of Iraqi incompetence. The Americans wanted to take over the operations during the Battle for Baghdad but didn"t. We were telling the Iraqi army what to do, and they wouldn"t listen. They didn"t pair with us in the battlefield. When it was time to advance up an avenue or cross a line, the Iraqis didn"t; the Americans did, so American soldiers got killed. They wanted our logistics, Apaches, and ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance]. We tried to get them to use their own s.h.i.t, but why would they when they had our s.h.i.t? We had to prevent them from failing so we won"t look like we failed."
After one battle Dermer and the Americans visited an apartment building in Ur that the Iraqi army had just destroyed. "It was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess," he told me; the Iraqis had opened fire on the entire building, but the Americans had no choice but to tell them they did a good job.
"IEDs scared the s.h.i.t out of them," Dermer said of the Iraqis he worked with, "so our guys would go down the road and they wouldn"t. We lost two majors. We were having heated arguments in BOC, yelling and shouting. We would plan for two hours and then they wouldn"t execute. Iraqi commanders were not being held responsible. Abud finally fired the Rusafa commander, but n.o.body would replace him, so Abud rehired him. We had one or two Iraqi brigades disappear off the battlefield, but that"s not bad out of five or six divisions in Baghdad." I asked Dermer what made some units good. "It was the personality of the commander and his relationship with the American commander that determined whether a unit was effective," he said. "Abud was good at building civil infrastructure after the fighting," Dermer added. "He would take the minister of electricity, of water and power, of education-anybody in charge of building stuff, they wouldn"t go without him. Abud didn"t want the Iraqi military leading the effort; he wanted Iraqi civilians to do it."
The American and Iraqi surge, along with Charge of the Knights, emboldened Iraqis to resist militias. While Captain Salim attributed the improved situation in Washash to his efforts, and not the Americans", Abu Karar, a leader in the Khazali tribe, also claimed responsibility. When I met Abu Karar he had big Shiite rings on his fingers. He was a large, grave man with dark reddish skin and a stain on his forehead from praying. He worked as an accountant in the Housing Ministry.
Before 2006 there was no displacement in Washash, Abu Karar told me, and no explosions. Until that year the Mahdi Army was an army of principles and creed that fought the occupation. "They did a good job, and everybody liked them," he said. "They improved Shiite areas. Before Samarra, I supported them. But after the Samarra explosion, their way of thinking changed. They became gangs, they took money from people, and each house in Washash paid five thousand dinars a month. If you didn"t pay, they blew up your house. Only Mahdi Army families didn"t have to pay. When militias took over, displacement started, and all the Sunnis left. Shiites came here from Ghazaliya, Dora, Jamia. Some stayed in empty Sunni houses, some paid rent. The pious IDPs paid rent to the Sunni owners, while militias also charged IDPs rent for the houses they were squatting in. There were no Sunnis left and they started to kill Shiites."
On August 14, 2008, Abu Karar led a "revolution" in Washash, he told me. As he describes it, his tribe coordinated with the Iraqi and American armies and carried weapons with their permission. They attacked the Mahdi Army at 6 a.m. "We had an intifada," he said. "We knew where they stayed, and we arrested sixteen of them. I arrested [Mahdi Army leader] Ihab al-Tawil with my own hands. After the arrests, we found twenty-seven bodies, and twenty-five were Shiites." I suggested this sounded like the way the Awakening groups started, and he bristled. "We don"t believe that," he said, dismissing the Sunni resistance. "Most Sunnis supported Al Qaeda and turned on them because of pressure from the government." To him the Awakening was made up of former Al Qaeda men, but he was not a former member of the Mahdi Army. "When did Ramadi start to resist?" he asked me, answering that it was when the governing council gave Shiites more seats than Sunnis.
Soon after his uprising against the Mahdi Army, Abu Karar was elected to head the local tribal council. "My service to the area caused me to be elected," he said. In the eight months since Charge of the Knights began, n.o.body was killed in Washash, he bragged. Five days into the campaign, Abu Karar met with the representatives of forty Sunni families from Washash in the nearby Arabi neighborhood. "It was my personal effort and my tribe"s effort," he said. "I told them, "We want your return to be peaceful, without vengeance. Use the law or come to me to do it the tribal way, and anybody carrying weapons will be expelled again."" The forty families returned. But Sunni areas were still dangerous, he said. "Sunnis are safe coming back to Shiite areas. But Shiites are not safe to come back to Sunni areas. Shiite IDPs have not left Washash to return to their homes. Some Sunnis can"t come back to Washash; they are wanted for crimes. We have four or five wanted families. They killed more than thirteen people from my tribe, and we will avenge them."
Ha.s.san Abdel Karim and his brother Fadhil Abdel Karim were cousins of Abu Karar who also lived in Washash and were popular in the area. Both were thick and muscular. Ha.s.san was a boxer. "Militias wanted us to work with them and carry weapons, but we rejected it," he told me. "My wife is Sunni. My neighbor is Sunni." One evening Mahdi Army men knocked on his door and asked him to go knock on his Sunni neighbor"s door; his neighbor trusted Ha.s.san and would open it. But Ha.s.san refused. He warned his Sunni neighbors, who were from the Zowbaei tribe, that they were in danger. He told them he too would be leaving. But they insisted on staying. Three brothers from that family were killed. He also warned neighbors from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe, and they fled. After this, Mahdi Army men shot at his house and accused him and his brothers of being spies. He fled with his brother, his wife, and daughters to Syria, where they lived in Damascus"s Seyida Zeinab area. After they had fled, Mahdi Army men opened fire on their home, damaging it with hundreds of rounds and later charging the family for the expended bullets.
Ha.s.san remained in Syria for two years and nine months. In 2008, after Charge of the Knights, his cousins called him and asked him to return. "Let"s fight the Mahdi Army," they told him. "They are killing Sunnis and Shiites. The people are strong but scared, and you are popular here, so they will follow you." Ha.s.san returned and initially joined an Awakening group in the Mansour district. After the Mahdi Army threw a grenade at his cousins" house, Ha.s.san and his brother captured Ihab al-Tawil, he told me. "The neighborhood was with us," he said. "We gave Ihab to Captain Salim. We had an intifada against them in Washash." A Mahdi Army member called him up angrily, demanding to know why he did this and why he was letting Sunnis return to Washash. "We began to uncover bodies and weapons," he told me.
"Mahdi Army members called me up to tell me because they didn"t want the army to raid their homes and get their families in trouble." The Badr militia of the Supreme Council asked him to join them, he said, but he refused. "We rejected to carry weapons," he told me.
IN DECEMBER 2008 I flew Royal Jordanian from Amman to Basra. Most pa.s.sengers were Iraqis. Because of the Muslim holiday Eid, emba.s.sies were closed; we did not have time to get visas, but a contact in the British military promised to obtain them upon arrival. The Iraqi customs officials did not take kindly to the violation of procedure and were offended by the British presumption, but a letter from the British commander persuaded them to relent. The Iraqi officials made it clear they were doing us and the British military a favor. Five Iraqi policemen stood at the exit examining all luggage. My colleague had a copy of Patrick c.o.c.kburn"s excellent book on Muqtada, and when they saw Muqtada"s glaring visage on the cover, they turned giddy. They were amazed that a foreigner would have a book in English all about their beloved cleric. One of them kissed the cover and asked if he could keep it. My friend agreed. I was surprised, not by the sentiment but by the comfort in which the men publicly expressed it.
The Iraqi translator accompanying the Royal Marine who met us at the airport dismissed Muqtada"s supporters as merely poor and uneducated. It was the same mistake the occupiers had made from their arrival but was equally typical of middle- and upper-cla.s.s Iraqis. After years of war and devastating sanctions imposed on Iraq, most Iraqis were poor and uneducated. But so what? Did this delegitimize the Sadrists or in any way reduce their popularity? On the contrary. Unfortunately, the man expressing it this time was the personal translator and adviser to the British commander in Basra, and sequestered as he was in Basra"s airport, he was getting scant information about Basra"s realities. The British commander had never heard of Thar Allah, one of the most lethal Iranian-backed militias in Basra. And when I asked him about the Mahdi Army, he was confused; he knew them only by their American-designated acronym, JAM.
I found a city largely under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces, with little sign of the British presence except for the occasional patrol. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. A trickle of Sunnis had returned. Over and over again, when I spoke to civilians they told me the same thing: "Now sectarianism is finished in Basra." I spoke to officials of the once-formidable Communist Party. They blamed the Americans and British for introducing chaos into Basra. "Any foreign army is not good," one official told me. "The British army is less violent than Americans, but they let militias rule and made deals with them." The Communists also backed the prime minister. "Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist," they told me. "He went from being a man of a party to a man of state. He said only the state can have weapons." They agreed with me that the Sadrists were still the most popular movement among Shiites and worried that the Mahdi Army had sleeper cells. "The sectarian project failed in Iraq," one of them told me. People in Basra spoke of "before March" and "after March" to describe their lives, and in the city"s middle-cla.s.s areas, the Charge of the Knights campaign won only praise.
I attended a conference in a large auditorium at the local chamber of commerce that had been planned by local officials to explain how they spent the hundred million dollars Maliki had given them after Charge of the Knights. There were no foreign soldiers there, and I was the only foreigner. Representatives of local businesses, civil society, and the local media attended. The conference was a hosted by a woman and started with a prayer and recitation of the Koran. The national anthem was played, and everybody stood up. The host and others read poems. The conference had a decidedly Shiite tone: every time the host asked the crowd to pray for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, as was the Shiite way, the crowd responded loudly. Grandiloquent speeches about Basra and Iraq followed. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a postoccupation Iraq.
I met with Ja.s.sim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic Party in Basra. The party"s previous headquarters was destroyed after Samarra with the help of local police, and it was now based in an unmarked building across from police headquarters. The Islamic Party had sixty-eight martyrs in Basra, he told me. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. Sunnis began returning after Charge of the Knights, he said. Although the security forces in Basra had been closed to Sunnis, there were currently about four hundred Sunnis in the local police and army. "Now the Sunni sect doesn"t have problems in Basra," he said.
In stark contrast to downtown Basra were the slums of Hayaniya. They were far removed from the heart of the city, as if the population was segregated, and surrounded by sewage and garbage dumps. Streets were unpaved, and many houses were made of mud. An Iraqi army brigade surrounded them and had bases inside. The brigade, a mixed unit of Sunnis and Shiites that was headquartered in Ramadi and trained by the Americans, had arrived in Basra on April 13. I visited a school they were occupying in Hayaniya and met with two officers: one was a Sunni from Falluja, and the other was a Shiite from Baghdad"s Shaab district. They sat on beds in a room with no door. Their men played volleyball in the yard. "The enemy was anybody illegal," they told me, "anybody carrying weapons." They had clashed mostly with the Mahdi Army and Thar Allah, but now the city was quiet, they said, adding that "we don"t need help from the British." Hayaniya had the most problems, they explained-it was like Sadr City. The officer from Falluja joked that in the upcoming elections, the Saddamists in his city would win because the Awakening groups backed them. Both officers praised the Awakening"s Abu Risha. "Petraeus is wrong," the Sunni officer told me. "The Americans caused the problems. The army and the people and the Awakening brought peace." His Shiite friend agreed. "We are the highest authority," he said. Many locals complained that the Iraqi army"s occupation of schools and heavy presence in their neighborhood was oppressive and made them feel occupied.
One evening I met with four Mahdi Army men in the Gzeiza slum, adjacent to Hayaniya. One commanded one hundred fighters, one commanded forty fighters, and the other two were mere fighters. Their more senior commanders had fled to Iran. They had all taken part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam and a smaller one in 1999. They insisted that both uprisings had been influenced by the Sadrists. There were about 1,500 houses in Gzeiza, they told me. The Iraqi army occupied four schools, they said, complaining that soldiers mistreated children, wore shorts, and were inappropriately dressed in front of women. The army also stole from homes and hara.s.sed people, they said. They still supported Maliki despite his crackdown, but they insisted that Muqtada was popular throughout Basra. The Sadrist Current was under extreme pressure from the British forces, the Iraqi government, and the ISF, they said, but added that the Sadrists had no problem with the people or the government. They didn"t think that the Americans would leave Iraq. "The Mahdi Army is not weak," one of them told me. "We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says we do, and he said, "Don"t fight the government." We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity. Before Charge of the Knights the Mahdi Army controlled Basra. We can be more than the army. We can get rid of them in two days. There is pressure from the government now. There are provocations, but we were ordered not to have arms on the street."
The men conceded that killings were down, but they still complained about crime. "We are sitting on oil, and we don"t have electricity," one of them said. "In the summer for an hour or two. Now it"s three hours on, three off." The Mahdi Army was loyal only to Iraq, they told me, which was the same thing the two Iraqi army officers had said. The street in Iraq was Sadrist, they said, and the Mahdi Army was the muqawama (resistance). "The Mahdi Army made the government strong," one said. "Baghdad had terrorism, but the Mahdi Army and the government got rid of it together. There is resistance of the pen and resistance of the gun. After the occupation the Mahdi Army will be cultural. The government is now arresting people randomly. Now all countries pursue their interests in Iraq." Thar Allah had no links to the Mahdi Army, they said, but belonged to the Supreme Council, and the Supreme Council belonged to Iran. They blamed Thar Allah for the expulsion of Sunnis and Christians. Elections were coming up soon, and I asked whom they would vote for. "A week or two before the elections in the Friday prayers they will tell us who to vote for," one of them told me.
On my last day in Basra, a British armored vehicle was stoned by a group of local men. One brave man climbed on top of it and was persuaded to go down only when a British soldier emerged and pointed his weapon at him. There was little sign after more than five years of occupation in Basra that the British had built or improved anything in the vast slums where most of the population lived. And when the British tried to encourage the local government to increase services in Hayaniya and similar areas, the local officials said that these poor Shiites didn"t belong in Basra anyway, since they were from Amara, from the marshes. British officers told me the provincial council had a condescending att.i.tude toward the residents of Hayaniya and its neighboring areas, and that they were desperately trying to get services to these areas. Little had been learned after five years. The poor Shiite majority was still neglected, just as it was under Saddam. Only Muqtada carried their voice.
In late December 2008 I visited an Iraqi Christian family in East Beirut that had fled Baghdad only two weeks earlier. A small Christmas tree was in the corner of the room. "My husband couldn"t go to his shop, the children were without school because of the bad situation," the mother explained. There were less kidnappings in Baghdad now, she admitted, but there were still explosions. "It"s difficult to be away from my country," she said, switching back and forth between the Lebanese and Iraqi dialect. I told her about the book I was working on, a project about Bush"s legacy in the Middle East. Bush had only brought them war, not freedom, she said bitterly. "Why should I thank Bush?" she asked. "For the war we experienced in Iraq? For our displacement from our homes? For the year we couldn"t send our children to school and the year my husband couldn"t go to his shop to work? Why will I thank him? We just now left Iraq. Where is the democracy? Where is the security?"
When the family moved into their small apartment in Beirut, they found a pencil drawing of Saddam Hussein on their wall, beneath which was written "the brave martyr." The mother said she kissed it when she saw it. "I love him," she said. "In Saddam"s time Iraq was safe. We could go to school and work safely-there was no displacement. We were Christians living with Sunnis and Shiites, one next to the other. Since Bush came, the Sunnis left their homes. We have not seen any changes in Iraq. We don"t expect change because of Obama. He"s American."
I asked Saramand, another Iraqi Christian, the same questions. He had arrived in Beirut six months earlier and now worked in a local church whose congregation was made up entirely of Christian refugees. Two weeks earlier forty families had arrived, he told me. "Before, if there were five or six people in a house and one worked, they could live," he said. "Here they all work just to survive. Work is not allowed, but people work." He too blamed Bush for his plight: "What do you expect to happen in an occupation? The democracy that Bush sent us is killing, theft, settling of scores. Where is the democracy? Where is the freedom? Where are the promises he made? Garbage has reached up to our heads in Iraq. Children are dying every day in Iraq-for what? If there was no Bush, I would not be here. If you see a refugee laughing, it"s a lie. Inside, he is full of memories."
IN MARCH 2007 the surge was still nascent, but the legal basis for the American occupation was expiring. United Nations resolutions effectively let American troops do whatever they wanted, but the Iraqis wanted that to end. The Americans needed a bilateral agreement to anchor their presence in Iraq. Bush wanted a policy to hand to his successor, knowing he would be under a lot of pressure to leave. In the spring of 2007 the Americans began to discuss their options. The U.S. military said it needed a Status of Forces Agreement, but civilians in the government were skeptical that a typical SOFA could be pa.s.sed.
In the Middle East, most American SOFAs are secret, their terms hidden from the population, because the governments the Americans deal with are dictatorships. If citizens from these countries knew what was in a typical agreement, they would be outraged. But Iraq was sort of a democracy, and the SOFA would have to go through Parliament and be made public. The 1948 Treaty of Portsmouth, between Iraq and Britain, was on the minds of many Iraqi politicians. When the terms of Portsmouth became known in Baghdad, there were ma.s.sive protests led by a movement known as Al Wathba (The Leap). The treaty was abandoned. President Lyndon Johnson"s 1968 treaty with the Shah of Iran was also on Iraqis" minds, since Iranian anger at the treaty helped lead to the rise of Khomeini. Most SOFAs grant immunity to American military personnel. But the Iraqis were afraid that immunity could fuel the Mahdi Army and the resistance. It would look like the politicians were giving Iraq away.
The fall 2007 declaration of principles signed between Maliki and Bush set the atmosphere. It described cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties and laid out the terms of the partnership and security relationship. "It was very hard," an American official told me. "Maliki didn"t want to sign. He was timid politically, and the other parties would stab him for it even if they agreed with it. Bush wanted him to sign it in the U.S., but he balked, so they signed it via video conference." In February 2008 the State Department hired Amba.s.sador Robert Loftis, a senior basing negotiator and an expert on drafting SOFAs, but who had no Iraq experience. His draft gave the Americans full authority and control. Amba.s.sador Ryan Crocker and NSA"s Brett McGurk said it wouldn"t work, it was an impossible dream. The terms leaked, the Sadrists protested, and Maliki opposed it. This was not what he got on board for.
The Americans fired the entire SOFA team. McGurk arrived in Iraq in mid-May and worked directly with Maliki, meeting him twice a week and also working with Maliki"s close advisers. It was a small American team: McGurk, Crocker, and David Satterfield. They had a direct line to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and President Bush. The timelines set by the SOFA were very controversial within the U.S. military. It set a June 2009 withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and a full American withdrawal by 2011.
The Iraqis were making maximalist demands, but the Americans a.s.sumed Maliki was just posturing because of domestic politics. The Iraqis rebranded it the Withdrawal Agreement because the original draft had so poisoned the atmosphere. Immunity for troops was the hardest issue, but eventually the two sides came up with a hypothetical situation that was impossible to imagine. Perhaps if an American soldier went to a bar and raped an Iraqi woman or committed some other unlikely but egregious act, then he would be prosecuted under Iraqi law. Otherwise the Americans would try him. "During the SOFA they played us like fiddles," an American official told me. "The prime minister"s office got exactly what they wanted, a presence in the country that protects them and which they have oversight over and which they can use as a stick against opponents."
Maliki"s Law and Order campaign against militias resonated with the middle cla.s.s. His confrontation with Kurds galvanized Iraqi nationalist support, and the SOFA poured water on the Sadrist flames. There was now a timetable for withdrawal; it looked like the occupation would end. But a different iconic moment will be forever a.s.sociated with the trip Bush took to Baghdad to sign the SOFA.
THE YEAR 2008 ended with Muntadhar al-Zeidi reminding President Bush and the world for only a moment about the Iraqi victims. During a press conference on Bush"s last visit to the country, Zeidi spoke for the ma.s.ses in the Arab world and beyond when he shouted, "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!" as he threw his first shoe at the American president. Zeidi was a secular, left-leaning Shiite from Sadr City whose work as a reporter for Baghdadiya television had won him local acclaim because of his focus on the suffering of innocent Iraqis. He had been arrested twice by the American army and kidnapped once by a militia.
He remembered, as did all Iraqis, that the American occupation had not begun with the surge. The story of the American occupation was not one of smart officers contributing to the reduction of violence and increase in stability. That was only one chapter in a longer story of painful, humiliating, sanctions, wars, and b.l.o.o.d.y occupation. Those with short memories, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, might remember the American occupation as "a million acts of kindness." But to Iraqis and anyone else sensitive enough to view them as humans, the occupation was one million acts of violence and humiliation or one million explosives. There was nothing for Bush to be triumphal about during his farewell press conference. Even the surge had exacted a costly toll on Iraqis. Thousands more had been killed, arrested, thrown into overcrowded prisons, and rarely put on trial, their families deprived of them. The surge was not about a victory. With a cost so high, there could be no victory. COIN is still violence, and the occupation persisted, imposing violence on an entire country. As Zeidi threw his second shoe in a last desperate act of defiance, he remembered these victims and shouted, "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!"
Part Four.
AFTERMATH.
CHAPTER TEN.
Lebanon: Toward Zero Hour.
ONE EVENING IN THE SPRING OF 2008, I WAS SITTING ON A STOOP ON a dark street and speaking to several Sunni "concerned local citizens," the new euphemism for American-backed militias in the Middle East. The young men were speaking of the danger coming from Shiites when I interrupted one of them, who was wearing a white sleeveless shirt, and said, "Don"t take this personally, but would you let your sister marry a Shiite?" In an instant he flattened his hand and moved his arm like a blade, slicing into the air the way he would slice her throat. I was not in Baghdad, where this might have been commonplace-I was in Beirut, where, as in pre-occupation Iraq, once it would not have been out of the ordinary for a Sunni and a Shiite to marry. In the early years of the American occupation of Iraq there were concerns about the Lebanonization of Iraq; but now it seemed Iraq was coming to Lebanon.
Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut felt insecure. Thuggish Shiite Amal supporters regularly zipped through on their scooters to shoot in the air and taunt them. Leaders from the Sunni-dominated March 14 coalition were being blown up occasionally, and it was clear the security forces could not protect them. The Future Movement"s leaders felt pressure to protect themselves and their anxious const.i.tuency, so they created a private security company to protect Future leaders and local militias in various Sunni neighborhoods throughout the country, established under the leadership of Salim Diab, former general coordinator of the Future Current.
Lebanon had no history of strife between Sunnis and Shiites. There had been cla.s.s conflicts in the past-Sunnis were condescending to Shiites the way urban people often are to rural people, and Sunnis reviled Shiite religious traditions, which Shiites resented-but the divide had not been violent. Lebanese Sunni racism against Shiites was an artificial sectarianism, seeming to come out of nowhere. Lebanese Sunnis had never seen themselves exclusively as Sunnis. Even former Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri was not seen as a Sunni leader before his death. Until then he had not even had the support of most Sunnis, and Sunni leadership was not centralized. His death was exploited for political and sectarian reasons.
The first Sunni show of force was the Future Movement-backed demonstrations in February 2006 against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which turned into a riot targeting Christians. Hariri"s son Saad was very embarra.s.sed by this. Sunni power often seemed to be devoid of specific goals except keeping Shiites out of power. Historically Shiites were called the epithet "mutwali." But following Hizballah"s victory in the 2006 war, some urban Shiites reclaimed their victimization as a source of pride and made "mutwali" cool, in a way that resembled the African American reappropriation of the word "n.i.g.g.a." Hizballah has never exploited sectarianism and has always gone out of its way to ease tensions. Ha.s.san Nasrallah warned that the Americans were trying to drive a wedge between Shiites and Sunnis. But Hizballah could not escape the fact that it was a Shiite party.
From May to September 2007, the army had to contend with the crisis at the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian refugee camp, which left some 420 people killed, 168 of them soldiers. On September 4 of that year, Lebanese Defense Minister Elias Murr announced the cessation of 106 days of fighting against Islamic militants in the camp. It was the second war Lebanon had seen in two summers (see Chapter Six). The Lebanese army, which had stood by impotently in the summer of 2006 as the Israeli military destroyed much of the country in the name of fighting Hizballah, this time destroyed a refugee camp housing forty thousand people in the name of the war on terror. The three months of fighting with the jihadists from Fatah al-Islam, the worst the country had seen since its fifteen-year civil war ended in 1990, had been a distraction from growing internal divisions in Lebanon. These divisions had brought the country dangerously close to civil war once again in January 2007, when Sunnis and Shiites clashed on the streets.
There was a sense of foreboding that summer, a feeling that something worse was about to happen. The July war with Israel was still on everyone"s mind, and with it the fear that neither Israel nor Hizballah viewed the previous summer"s denouement as conclusive. Another war was ongoing in the north, with the interregnum punctuated by the occasional car bomb or a.s.sa.s.sination. And a third war, "the next civil war," seemed to be on the horizon. Meanwhile, according to Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen, Lebanese politicians seemed like Shakespearean actors on a stage, "tragic characters who follow a path that was already charted for them-i.e., they have no agency in what is happening." These politicians, Mohsen explained, "are clearly aware that, no matter what they do, events that control their country and destiny are decided by parties that are far larger than them."
In November 2006, six Hizballah and Amal ministers resigned from the government coalition to protest violations of the agreed-upon rules by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his March 14 allies. They called for the government to uphold the tradition of cabinet consensus, which dated to the end of the civil war. The opposition began planning for street demonstrations, which were called off after a Christian politician was a.s.sa.s.sinated. That month a young Syrian man detonated his suicide vest on the Syrian border with Lebanon after he was denied permission to cross because his papers were discovered to be fake. He was said to belong to the Al Qaeda-linked Tawhid and Jihad organization. On December 1, 2006, the opposition condemned the government as illegitimate and staged a "sit-in" in downtown Beirut, establishing a huge tent city in Martyrs" Square, the same place where anti-Syrian demonstrators had launched their March 14 "intifada." Key roads were blocked, and traffic became unbearable. Numerous shops and boutiques in the downtown area went out of business. Some Sunnis began to view the sit-in as a Shiite occupation. Three days later, a Shiite supporter of Amal was shot dead. The Lebanese army was deployed on the city"s streets. On January 24, 2007, three young men were killed following a strike called by Hizballah, as opposition supporters blocked roads and burned tires. The next day four Lebanese were killed and more than 150 were injured in clashes at the Arab University of Beirut, near the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood. It was left to Iran and Saudi Arabia to get involved and postpone further conflict. This was the nature of Lebanon"s sectarian system: it could never be stable; it was impossible to achieve ideal harmony. Lebanon was not a viable state.
Hizballah was the biggest party in the March 8 coalition, and its patron was Iran. Future, the Hariri family"s movement, was the biggest party in the March 14 movement, and its patron was Saudi Arabia. In a November 29, 2006, op-ed in the Washington Post, t.i.tled "Stepping Into Iraq; Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis If the U.S. Leaves," Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi foreign policy adviser to Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, warned that the Saudis would have to defend Iraq"s Sunnis from the Shiites of Iraq and Iran if the Americans did not. The Saudis were worried that the Americans were allowing the Iranians to win in Iraq and Lebanon. Along with the Jordanians, they would provide Iraq"s Sunnis with weapons and financial support. The Saudis had already commenced construction of a multibillion-dollar barrier between them and Iraq to isolate them from the violence they had helped foment. The Saudis also a.s.sumed the role of defenders of Lebanon"s Sunnis. Two years later I met Prince Turki-who had been the amba.s.sador to Washington, intelligence chief, and liason to Osama bin Laden-and asked him if he really feared Iran. "Iran wants Mecca and Medina," he said. "They want their ideology to control it." Hizballah in Lebanon was completely an Iranian tool, he said. "The Saudi interest is for Iraq to maintain its Arab ident.i.ty and not fall under Persian influence. Iran views Saudi Arabia as the little Satan, not Israel-read Khomeini"s work." But he added that Iran"s vulnerability was its ethnic minorities: the Kurds, Baluch, and Azeris.
The Saudis were getting nervous, watching their proxies throughout the region weaken. In the 1960s Egypt"s pan-Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Na.s.ser was the main compet.i.tion with Saudi influence in the region. The Saudis and Americans both tried to undermine Arab nationalist and leftist movements. The result was an increase in the power of fundamentalists and the weakening of Arab progressives. The Saudis now had no Arab rivals for their influence with the less powerful exceptions of Qatar and Syria. But Hizballah (and Hamas in Palestine) represented resistance to the Saudi, Israeli, and American project in the region, and the Saudis would not tolerate it.
ON AUGUST 10, 2007, four days before Hizballah was to commemorate the "divine victory" over Israel (as they called it), I visited the Salam Mosque in Tripoli, a northern coastal city-Lebanon"s second-largest-and its Sunni bastion. Hundreds of men filled the mosque and overflowed onto straw mats outside. They sat in the heat listening to a fiery sermon with apparent indifference. Sheikh Bilal Barudi, a Sunni cleric close to the March 14 coalition and also part of the Independent Islamic Gathering of Sunni clerics, gave the sermon. Arabs were once again in conflict with the Persians, he said, a conflict he saw as age-old and also between Sunnis and Shiites. "We ask the Iranians and Americans to withdraw from Iraq," he said. "Iran is our historic enemy. Throughout history Iran always had an ambition of controlling Arab countries around them." He spoke of the Shiites of Lebanon occupying Beirut, mocking Hizballah"s "divine victory" and calling its members enemies of Islam. The war had started after Hizballah captured two Israeli soldiers, hoping to exchange them for four leftist Lebanese resistance fighters held by the Israelis. Barudi condemned Hizballah for destroying Lebanon to rescue leftists whom he called "infidels." This was a refrain I would hear repeatedly over the next year.
One of those attending the prayer that Friday was Samir Jisr, a member of Parliament with the Future Movement, the Saudi-backed political movement cl.u.s.tered around Saad al-Hariri, which he inherited from his father, Rafiq. I met Jisr in his home a few blocks away. He explained to me that just as Sunnis had felt threatened during the Syrian era, so now they felt threatened by Hizballah. "Most people here were with the resistance to Israel," he said. "People looked at Hizballah as the resistance, but after the Israelis withdrew and they practiced politics and shifted to inside Lebanon, people considered it a threat." He explained that it was the presence of pro-Hizballah demonstrators "in the heart of the streets . . . the way they threaten to stop the country," and their possession of weapons, that "scares people." Jisr had criticized the army publicly for allegedly torturing Lebanese Sunnis suspected of militancy. Now Sunni militants were afraid, he said.
He blamed poverty and oppression for increasing extremism and complained that after the civil war Beirut had gotten all the attention in the reconstruction while the north was neglected. The Syrians were hated, he said, because of their sh.e.l.ling of Tripoli in the 1980s, which he claimed killed up to 1,200 Sunnis. "It"s a big wound for people in Tripoli," he said. The war in Iraq had negative effects on Lebanon too: "They are not spreading democracy. It"s obvious that they are trying to divide Iraq and steal its resources. Everybody believes the Americans are responsible for Sunni-Shiite problems. There is a fear among people that what is happening in Iraq will affect Lebanon."
Dai al-Islam al-Shahal, Lebanon"s most important Salafi cleric, blamed Shiites and Iran for the civil war in Iraq. Many Salafi clerics like him were obsessed with Shiites; Shahal was rabidly anti-Shiite. "The Sunnis in Iraq are oppressed by Shiites, and Iranians are allying with Americans there," he told me.
I met Shahal in his office in Tripoli"s Abu Samra neighborhood, where many Salafis are based. It was August 14, or "Victory Day," according to Hizballah. As I waited for Shahal to arrive in the morning, his devoted young male secretary a.s.sured me that my heart would race when I saw him. Shahal had a white beard and wore a white robe, with a white cap and a white scarf on his head.
Like most Sunnis, he did not think that the war with Israel had, in fact, ended with a victory-he wished it had not happened. He viewed Hizballah as a threat to the Lebanese government and the entire country. "There is an old Shiite project to control Lebanon," he told me, mentioning the canard of the "Shiite crescent," first described by Jordan"s King Abdullah. "Iran is exporting its Islamic Revolution," he said, and "the project of controlling Lebanon is being implemented. A minority rules Syria, allied with Shiites here and Iranians in Iraq."
Although Sunnis were being targeted, "Sunnis are more powerful," he told me. "If, G.o.d forbid, a civil war happens, they know how to defend themselves and are prepared." Sunnis were engaged with the state, he explained, but in the event of a civil war they would require militias. And while Sunnis in the government were allying with the Americans, "people on the street are totally against the Americans." Sunni Islamists had allied with the Future Movement and the Lebanese government because they defended Sunnis, he explained, but relations between Sunnis and the government had been damaged by the fighting in Nahr al-Barid.
Shahal had been one of the key negotiators between Lebanese authorities and Fatah al-Islam. "Fatah al-Islam used Fatah al-Intifada as a pa.s.sage into Lebanon to set up a movement to fight Israel," he said. "Most of Fatah al-Islam are not Palestinian." Fatah al-Islam"s ideology had been close to that of Al Qaeda, he said. Muslims were under attack, he said, explaining that the American administration wanted to strike Islam and was trying to establish bases in Muslim lands to take their resources. "The defense of Muslim lands from America and the West is better than attacking Americans and the West in their countries," he said. Al Qaeda"s mistake was "moving the battle to Western territory. When Muslims are under attack, it is right to defend themselves but not to move the battle to the West."
IF THERE IS A RED LINE separating Sunnis from Shiites in Beirut, it is the Tariq al-Jadida neighborhood, a Sunni bastion close to Dahiyeh, the southern Shiite suburb dominated by Hizballah. Entering the neighborhood, one pa.s.ses a Saudi flag, a Lebanese flag, and the flag of the Future Movement. Large posters of Saudi King Abdullah hang above the streets. Beginning in early 2007 various local militias began to appear, their names changing often. One was called the Panthers. Every night the streets of Tariq al-Jadida were patrolled by men who did not carry arms in public. They were recruited and paid by the Future Movement. Typically they were young men sitting on street corners, smoking water pipes, eating pistachios, and demanding that pa.s.sersby present their identification papers. Sometimes they had lists of wanted men. They were supervised by older men, veterans of the Lebanese army, security forces, or militias from the civil war. Just in case, Interior Security Forces sat in armored personnel carriers in the center of the neighborhood. On my first visit, in 2007, I asked some of the young men who they were protecting the neighborhood from. "Zaaran," said one muscular youth, referring to hoodlums, or thugs. I asked which zaaran. "From Dahiyeh," he said. "We will chop them up." During this visit, I was stopped by chubby young men on scooters who zipped over and took me to what they called on their radios Checkpoint One. Fortunately I had befriended a local militiaman named Fadi, a small man who owned a barbershop close to the edge of the neighborhood, who vouched for me. Fadi had a ponytail, wore tight black clothes, and had a huge shiny watch on his wrist. He patrolled his street on behalf of the local Future militia and was paid four hundred dollars a month by the Secure Plus company, which he said was the same as the Future Movement. Fadi had not done his military service, but he had received one month of training in Akkar.
Tariq al-Jadida, a mostly middle-cla.s.s Sunni area, was the heart of Sunni power in Beirut. In contrast, Bab al-Tabbaneh, a district in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon, was poor and marginalized; many of its unemployed youth were used by the Sunnis of Beirut as shock troops to intimidate rivals. Unlike poor Shiites, impoverished Sunnis in Tariq al-Jadida-and elsewhere in Lebanon-do not have a powerful movement to provide for them or protect them. Instead, rival politicians compete for popularity by occasionally dispensing favors, usually before elections. Crumbling buildings torn apart by sh.e.l.ls and bullet holes, with laundry drying outside the windows and balconies, look down over rows of garages and small workshops for wooden furniture. Black flags with Islamic slogans wave in the sun. Salafis helped clean up Bab al-Tabbaneh from gangs and drugs, improving its reputation. Many former gang members and drug addicts had become Salafis and even jihadists; the only evidence of their past delinquency was their remaining tattoos. In the 1980s, the Syrian army had been stationed in the Jabal Mohsen neighborhood, which towered above Tabbaneh. Thirty thousand Alawites lived there. From there the Syrians punished the recalcitrant Sunnis of Tabbaneh, and the scars had never healed.
I found a group of men drinking tea outside a shop. Mustafa Zaabi sat with his brothers and friends. "Everything is a lie," he said. "There is no electricity, so everybody is on the street. If we talk, who will listen to us? What are we, Palestinian refugees? I wish we were Palestinians so we had care from the UN or the government." They blamed the Palestinians for the fighting in Nahr al-Barid. "The people fighting in the camp are mostly Palestinian, just pretending to be Fatah al-Islam," said Mustafa"s brother Muhamad. "It"s impossible that they will rebuild the camp," said Mustafa.
Mustafa had been an active member of the Future Movement and had voted for the party in the past, but he had stopped giving his support. "They did nothing," he said. "Many people feel betrayed. Those who said we are sons of Tabbaneh, where are you now? We don"t want the hundred dollars that you paid on election day. If we knew what was waiting for us, we wouldn"t have voted for the entire Hariri list. For three years I didn"t see anything from the house of Hariri." Mustafa still had high hopes for Saad al-Hariri. "First because he is the son of Rafiq al-Hariri," he said. "We saw how Hariri made Beirut. We hoped he would build Tripoli and create work opportunities for youth."
Mustafa and his two brothers had all been accused of acts of sabotage against the Syrian military and had been jailed and tortured by the Syrians. Mustafa had belonged to the Murabitun militia in the 1980s. He spent six months training in Libya but had left in disgust because Lebanese weren"t trusted with weapons. Mustafa had been injured in the civil war when a sh.e.l.l landed nearby. His entire body had been burned, and his hand was still maimed. His brother Hussein was paralyzed and in a wheelchair, a result of being beaten on the back of the head with a gun while imprisoned.
Seated with Mustafa and his friends was a thin nineteen-year-old named Ayman. Like many young men, he was marked with crude tattoos and had scars up his entire arm that he had inflicted on himself. "He learned it in prison," explained Mustafa. Ayman had spent seven months in prison "for a simple problem," he said.
One way sectarian leaders in Lebanon distribute favors is by covering legal fees or helping people get out of prison. Ayman had many friends who had been to prison. "Most guys go to jail because of street fights with blades," said Mustafa, "not for robberies. There is nothing to steal here." Another thin young man, also called Mustafa, had similar scars from self-mutilation on his arms, which he had created with razors. I asked him why he had done it. "Depression," he said. "There is no work-we take it out on ourselves." The older Mustafa explained that young men like him used drugs and sniffed paint thinner.
They led me around the neighborhood, down dirt-strewn alleys with electrical cables hanging low and blackened walls ridden with bullets. I saw posters of Saddam on the walls next to posters of Rafiq al-Hariri. "Saddam is considered to be oppressed," Mustafa told me. "The Americans took him to kill him." Everybody in the area had been saddened by the news of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi"s death as well, he told me: "He was somebody liberating Muslim land." A group of young men stood beneath posters of Saddam and Hariri, alongside a picture of Khalil Akkawi, the slain founder of the anti-Syrian Tawhid movement, which was militarily active in the 1980s. After Akkawi"s a.s.sa.s.sination and the arrest or killing of most of Tawhid"s members, there was no powerful group remaining to fill the vacuum in Bab al-Tabbaneh. I asked the young men why they liked Saddam. "He was a Muslim," they all agreed, "a hero, a real Arab." They had all been sad and angry when he was executed.
I asked them what they thought of Saad al-Hariri. "He is a Sunni Muslim, clean," they said. I asked about Hizballah. "No! No!" they shouted, waving their hands. "Kish! Kish!" one added, making the sound he would make to shoo a dog away. "n.o.body likes the Palestinians," they told me. "They are pimps. They are the cause of all these problems; they let Fatah al-Islam into the camp. They should go back to Palestine."
Several hundred Palestinian refugees had been housed in the Bab al-Tabbaneh Elementary School, and others were in seven other schools in the area of Tripoli. Locals had demanded that one of the school gates facing their neighborhood be kept locked. Blue plastic sheeting had been used to divide halls and create private s.p.a.ces for families. They stood around or sat on chairs that students would soon need, just waiting. Hosam Ilmir, the princ.i.p.al, worried that the school year might be canceled if alternative housing was not found.
"Bab al-Tabbaneh has the poorest people in the country," Ilmir told me. "They are strangers in their country. The basic requirements of life are not here. Most students in school are not concentrating because at home their brother or father is on drugs, drunk, beating their mother. They can"t sleep at home, so they sleep in cla.s.s. There is s.e.xual abuse of children." The Future Movement paid poor Sunnis when they were needed for voting, protests, or demonstrations in Beirut, he said. Many people came down from Bab al-Tabbaneh for the Beirut protests over the Danish cartoons in February 2006, he said. The state mufti called for people to come down, the Sunni Endowment provided buses to transport some of the protesters, people were paid for their presence in Beirut, and gasoline prices were also covered for the ride. "One guy is responsible for many other guys," he said, "and he distributes the money." This was the case in all the main March 14 and Future Movement demonstrations in Beirut, he said.
"We Sunnis of Lebanon never had a militia," Ilmir said. "The Sunni army was the Palestinians. Sunnis were businessmen." Now Sunnis wanted their own militias, he said. Unlike the Future Movement, which offered only money when it needed manpower, "Hizballah always looks after their people." The Future Movement had influenced people in Tripoli "to think Hizballah started the war and destroyed the country," he said. He blamed the Lebanese media outlets a.s.sociated with the Future Movement and March 14, such as LBC and Future TV, for inciting people. "For Sunnis in Lebanon, Hariri was seen as a Sunni leader, and his killing enraged Sunnis," he told me. "Going back to the postwar period, the Sunni street was divided in two. Some Sunnis supported anybody who fights Israel, and some Sunnis said Hizballah will turn their guns on Sunnis." He insisted that Sunnis were being armed under the guise of private security companies set up as legalized militias by the Future Movement. People were also joining Salafi movements, he said, because "people need work. If there is money, people will follow you all the way to China."
Ilmir agreed that since the fighting began the heat had been turned up on Salafis. "There is a lot of pressure by security forces," he said. "People with beards are arrested for no reason, like in the Syrian days. They hold you for a week and give you two hundred thousand liras. Getting tortured by your people is worse than being tortured by strangers. As a Sunni, if anybody comes and throws a stone at Israel from Tanzania, I will kiss his hand. This is not just my view, this is the view of the silent majority of Lebanon." After I left he ran after me and clasped my hand. "Don"t be surprised from what you heard from me," he said. "This is the view of all educated Sunnis."
It certainly was not the view of several taxi drivers I met. One driver who took me from Bab al-Tabbaneh to downtown Tripoli explained the difference between the March 14 and March 8 coalitions. "The opposition thinks we are agents of America and Israel," he said, and did not disagree with the notion. "We are with America and Israel, and they are with Iran and Syria." Abu Ali, a taxi driver who picked me up in Tripoli, complained that politicians were destroying the country. "I have twelve children, and I can"t feed them," he said, not wondering if perhaps he should have had fewer. "They ask me if I"m with Syria or America. No, sir, I"m with America. They freed us from Syria. I don"t hate Shiites because I"m a Sunni. They destroyed the country. Hizballah is the party of the devil. The Palestinians are pimps. The Palestinians are killing our army." It seemed to me as though Lebanese Sunnis were becoming the new Maronite Christians, no longer interested in Arab nationalism but only in a narrow Lebanese chauvinism, looking to America for protection and hating the Palestinians to the point of sympathizing with Israel.
The army, long condemned by March 14 politicians, had become a rallying cry for them-so much so that in Marj, a small Sunni town in the Bekaa Valley, I pa.s.sed under a banner that declared, "The Army is the solution." It was a sharp contrast to the rallying cry "Islam is the solution," which one often heard from various popular Islamist movements in the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Although Marj had once been a bastion of Arab nationalism, it had also produced 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah. Not far from Marj was the town of Majd al-Anjar, from where at least a dozen men had gone to fight in Iraq. Salafism was introduced to Majd al-Anjar by Zuheir Shawish, a Kurd married to a local woman. Sheikh Adnan al-Umama was backed by Saudi funds and increased Salafi education. He was also on the Future payroll.
Minutes after I drove into town, in early August 2007, the mayor and a local police officer arrived to ask me who I was. I arranged to meet the mukhtar (town headman), who lived across from the Bilal Bin Rabah Mosque.
Graffiti on a