Real Life in Baghdad – January 5, 2005

BAGHDAD,Iraq - A cab driver trolled down Baghdad's Karadah Street, past rows of barber shops and electronics stores just lifting up their gates for the day, fishing for a final fare to cap off a long night of kidnap and murder.

My friend flagged down the taxi and, according to one of many fraternal Arab customs, sat in the front seat, so as not to make the driver feel too much like a driver.

"Where you going?" the cabbie wanted to know.

"Dora," said my friend, who, without casting aspersions, looks remarkably like Saddam Hussein when he was in his 40s, with a bristly mustache, an athletic build and deep-set brooding eyes.

But their conversation was interrupted by a convoy of Humvees that cut them off, an American gunner in the turret pointing a machine gun at the car, telling the driver in no uncertain terms to stay back.

"Where I'm from they can't do that," the driver grumbled acerbically.

Thus began their conversation about Mahmoudiya, a Sunni Muslim town south of Baghdad overrun by rebels, bandits, bullies, hijackers, Islamic militants and others who specialize in organized nefariousness.

"If we see a Humvee, we destroy it. The Americans can't come into our city," bragged the driver, also in his early 40s, but unlike my fastidiously groomed friend, he had an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard and a strong yet plump physique like an aging fisherman or a construction foreman.

Tribal game
"How do you manage that?" probed my friend, a local journalist I've known for the past two years in Iraq.

"Why do you ask?" the driver shot back, which in an Arabic conversation — often amply-sprinkled with saccharine platitudes — translates to something like, "What's it to you, tough guy?"

To assuage the driver, the two men played the Iraqi "tribal game."

The rules are simple. My friend — also a Sunni Muslim — listed his family's credentials, ticking off names of prominent relatives, some alive, most distant and long dead.  The two men were not from the same tribe, but were both descendents of giant extended families known to be friendly to each other, powerful and, most important in Iraq, "honorable." 

So now the two acted like reunited cousins. The driver explained that he lived in Mahmoudiya, but came every day toBaghdad to work the cab, which he used for his "real job."

"And what's that?"

"I specialize in killing women," he said.

A long bloody blade
The atmosphere in the car turned stifling and tense, as if an inconsonant note had been played on an unseen piano.

"I kill whores, women who go to the Green Zone and have sex with the Americans," the driver added as a justification.  

The Green Zone is the sprawling American headquarters in Baghdad; Saddam Hussein's erstwhile Republican Palace, then and now, a forbidden city within the Iraqi capital where rumors continue to circulate about what goes on behind its high concrete walls.

My friend eyeballed the road for a place to get out.

"I use this," continued the driver, taking a nearly foot-long folding knife from under his seat.  He opened the long blade. It was encrusted with blood.

"I pick up the women as they leave the Green Zone, drive them to a quiet area and kill them," he said, waving the big knife like a violin bow.

Like most Iraqis who lived under Saddam's Orwellian state my friend has become an expert at saving his own skin.

Under Saddam, courts sentenced people to a year in prison for blaspheming the Muslim Prophet Mohammed and, with amazing chutzpah, hubris and apostasy, to death for insulting the president. So it was relatively easy for my friend to feign sympathy for those who kill "whores" and other transgressors. 

He soon had the murderer laughing and relaxed, but got out of the cab well short of his home.

"I didn't want this man to know where I lived," he told me.

Depressingly, when we met for coffee the next day, my friend was not surprised that Baghdad had become a place where people can butcher women like joints of meat and show their freshly used tools to strangers, confident there will be no repercussions.

"It's not a good sign of the times," I said.

"No, it isn't."

But how can Baghdad stop being such an obscene theater, where hate, greed, chauvinism and other of our less-proud predilections are acted out?

So far, American officials in Iraq explain their strategy to locals as hunting down the "bad guys" and building the Iraqi security forces and government so they can impose order on the nation's population.

To some Iraqis, it sounds good in theory, but a bit naïve.  Iraqis are cynical about themselves and in moments of frustration or self-doubt they self-deprecatingly quote al-Hajjaj, an Umayyad governor who at the turn of the 8th century described Iraqis "as-shaab al-shiqaq wa an-nifaq" -- the people of division and hypocrisy.  It’s a criticism apparently ignored by Europeans who, after World War I, cobbled the modern state of Iraq together despite deep tribal, ethnic and religious gaps — rifts which were only made worse by 25 years of Saddam Hussein’s brutal mismanagement.

Battle for Fallujah 
Something had to be done about Fallujah. The "city of mosques," as it is locally known, had become governed by self-styled mujahedeen, or "those who wage a Jihad."

The rugged city of tough Sunni tribesmen was a base where insurgents — Iraqis, foreign fighters and greedy opportunists — assembled car bombs, grabbed hostages and videotaped stomach-turning snuff videos.  

The U.S. answer came (for the second time) in November when the Marines led a mission to, in an analogy often used at the time, "clean out" Fallujah. 

The rules of the battle were simple: if shots were fired from a building, U.S. forces fired back with penetrating 50-caliber machine guns, tanks, artillery and airpower until the enemy fire stopped. Two thousand Iraqis (most of them gunmen) and nearly 100 Americans troops were killed, and Fallujah was made uninhabitable.

U.S. military officials continue to describe the mission as an unabashed success, "breaking the back" of the insurgency, getting the militants moving, on the run.

This ultimately may prove to be the case, but as I wrote the above paragraph a huge explosion detonated in front of the house of one of Iraq's leading Shiite politicians. The blast, about 750 meters from our news bureau in Baghdad, sent me crouching to the floor and pushed a shock wave through our office that knocked out sections of the ceiling.

The chief Iraq’s of intelligence service General Mohammed Abdullah Shawani has questioned the effectiveness of the Fallujah operation, saying in an interview with the French news agency AFP, “What we have now is an empty city almost destroyed.. and most of the insurgents are free. They have gone either toMosul or toBaghdad or other areas.”

Militants have gone elsewhere
U.S. commanders agree with Shawani that many insurgents escaped Fallujah, but few in the military or U.S. civilian administration in Iraq seem to be addressing why Mahmoudiya and Fallujah became rebellious safe-havens in the first place, or that there are still many "little-Fallujahs," all of them home to Sunnis. One is Haditha, 78 miles northwest ofBaghdad.

In Haditha today all institutions linked to the U.S.-appointed government of Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi do not function.

Schools are closed as often as they are open. In October, insurgents stormed police stations in Haditha and executed 21 officers. After that, the police stopped going to work. The insurgents declared their own state of emergency and use bullhorns to tell people the timing of their curfews.

The people of Haditha listen, mostly out of fear no doubt, but also because many have no love for the American occupation or what the U.S. administration is promising for the future of Iraq — which people in this Sunni town see as Shiite and therefore Iranian domination, and a favored, autonomous status for the Kurds. 

The Iraqi elections set for Jan. 30 will be decisive for Iraq's history, but they may turn out to be divisive as well for Iraq's Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis. 

The elections are not final, but they will set the character of the emerging state. 

On election day Iraqis will select 275 members of parliament, who will then have the duty of writing a permanent constitution, answering fundamental and volatile questions including the role of Islam in the state and, critically, the power of the central government over the regional provinces — the equivalent in American history to the framers debate about states’ rights vs. national supremacy. 

Once the constitution is written and ratified in a national referendum, new elections are scheduled to be held at the end of 2005 based on the document.

Shiites looking to seize majority rule
It’s safe to say that the majority of Iraqi Shiites appreciate the American gift of "democracy," which many of them oversimplify to mean strict majority rule.

Estimated to be 60 percent of Iraq's population, Shiites — especially the once-oppressed, now- invigorated clergy — are convinced the elections will sweep them to power.

The most senior Shiite religious leader, the grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (religious edict) declaring that voting is more important than praying and fasting during the sacred Muslim month of Ramadan, and said women should divorce their husbands if they prevent them from going to the polls. This is extraordinary. 

For religious Shiites — the vocal majority in Iraq — this is a historical moment, a chance to regain power in Mesopotamia lost with the death in the middle of the 7th century of their first imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, in Kufa, a city in modern Iraq near Naiad. 

There are also undeniable regional implications of the emergence of a Shiite-led Iraq.
 
Iranian influence
Iran, the world’s leading Shiite power, is clearly excited about the prospect. 

It has reason to expect to have friendly relations with the future Iraqi Shiite leaderships. Abdel Aziz al-Hakim — the top politician whose house was destroyed near our news bureau last week — was the leader of a militia trained by the Iranian government before he came to Iraq, from Iran where he was living, after the fall of Saddam’s government. 

Al-Hakim has already suggested that cash-strapped Iraq should pay Iran reparations for the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

The Sunni countries, nearly all of them Arab, are nervous about having a new Shiite neighbor. Jordan’s King Abdullah for one has accused Iran of trying to create a Shiite "arc" of hegemony and of allowing one million Iranian Shiites to cross the border into Iraq to vote. 

Kurds seeking independence
The Kurds, for their part, have been struggling for independence since at least World War I when the British glued together the defeated Ottoman provinces ofBasra,Baghdad andMosul and named them "Iraq."

Like the Shiites, this is a historical moment for Kurds in Iraq. Making up roughly 15 percent of the population, if the Kurds win enough seats in parliament, they hope to codify their autonomy in law. In Iraq’s future parliament, the Kurds will be pushing for a great deal of freedom to act apart from the central government.  

Like the Shiites’ ascendancy, the growing autonomy of the Kurds is also felt regionally. 

After World War I, the Ottoman province of Kurdistan was divided among Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria. Since then, the central governments of each of these states has worried that Kurdish nationalism — at times in the form of armed revolts — could undermine its authority. 

Today, these states, foremost among them Turkey, are uncomfortable with the de-facto creation of a Kurdish state; it’s a source of tension in the region which is not being addressed.

Sunnis trying to regain legendary past
The Sunnis of Iraq once ruled much of the civilized world. Their Abbasid Empire (750-1258) with its capital inBaghdad, “the city of peace,” was a crowning moment in Islamic history.

Abbasid palaces, filled with poets, musicians and intrigue, are still legendary today, captured in the fantastic tales of "The 1001 Arabian Nights." The descendants of this storied tradition, the Arab Sunnis of Iraq, 20 percent of the population, are acutely aware of their past glory and the fact that they have ruled the land of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers almost without interruption from the legendary Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rashid to Saddam Hussein.

Will the forthcoming election improve the situation in Iraq?

It’s therefore not surprising why so many Sunnis are fearful about the elections, and why Sunnis make up the core of the insurgence, especially when considering that many of the militants are former members of Saddam's security services who oppressed the now-vengeful and empowered Shiites and Kurds.

Iraqis discuss these divisions in their society every day, but, troublingly, the American officials in Iraq seldom do. 

It seems Iraq's problems are unlikely to be resolved until actions are taken, or at the very least discussions begin, at home and with Iraq's neighbors about the Sunnis' disenfranchisement, the Shiites' newfound religious political and religious zeal, and the Kurds' national aspirations. Only then can there be any hope of national and regional reconciliation.