[Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Inside Iraq's hidden war

[harry.sifton at sympatico.ca]

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Inside Iraq's hidden war
As a new 'national unity' government prepares to take power in Baghdad, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from behind the lines of a vicious sectarian conflict rapidly spiralling towards civil war
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad 
Saturday May 20 2006
The Guardian


Some men hold paper tissues under their noses; others wrap their kuffiya ends around their mouths. It is a hot and humid day at the city's main morgue where 20 men stand in a yard, their faces pressed with silent urgency against the bars of a window, next to a white plastic sign that baldly announces the location of "The Refrigerator".

Inside sits the clerk of the morgue, his computer monitor turned towards them. Faces flash on the screen: a man with his face blackened and bruised; another man, older, maybe in his 50s, with a white beard and an orange-sized hole in his forehead; and another on a green stretcher, his arms twisted unnaturally behind him.

Occasionally the silence of Baghdad's daily slideshow of death is broken by an appalled act of recognition, as one of the men mumbles "No god but the one God" or "God is great."

So many bodies arrive at the morgue each day - 40 is not unusual on a "quiet" day - that it is impossible to let relatives in to identify them. Hence the slideshow in the yard outside. The bodies are dumped in sewage plants or irrigation canals, or just in the middle of the street. Many show signs of torture. Every morning a procession of pickup trucks, minibuses and cars line up with their coffins outside the concrete blast walls of the ministry of health to pick up their cargo. One death often courts another. Many Sunnis say the mourners are attacked en route. When they go to retrieve the body of a relative, family members often wait in the car clutching their weapons in anticipation.

The ministry is under the control of the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and a large mural of his dead ayatollah father decorates the entrance to the compound. Most of the security guards in the morgue and the ministry are affiliated to his militia, the Mahdi army, one of the militias thought to be behind the sectarian killing going on in their neighbourhoods.

"Why do you want to go inside? Those inside are all terrorists, Sunni terrorists," said Captain Abu Ahmad, the officer in charge of security at the morgue, when the Guardian presented a document granting permission from the ministry of health to visit. "If you want to see innocent victims, go to the hospitals and see the victims of Sunni terrorism on Shia civilians."

After months of argument about whether Iraq is teetering on the verge of civil war, a "national unity" government is due to be inaugurated today. Legislators plan to swear in a new prime minister and cabinet, and much will be made in London and Washington of the fact that this completes a democratic transition that began in December with the election of its parliament. But the reality encountered during three weeks behind the barricades of Baghdad's increasingly bloody sectarian conflict has more in common with the "ethnic cleansing" of the Balkans than the optimistic rhetoric to be heard on the manicured lawns of the embassy compounds and in western capitals.

The Patriot

Adel is 26. He is tall and well built, with long, thick dark hair styled with gel and a thin goatee beard. With his basketball shirt and knee-length shorts, he looks more like a rapper than a vigilante commander. Four years ago, when most of his friends were still reeling from the shock and awe of America's occupation, Ali stepped out of his life as a wealthy playboy from the leafy neighbourhood of Yarmouk in the west of Baghdad, and into the life of a Sunni insurgent.

"When I saw the first American patrol in my street I went to my room and cried for three days," he said as we sat in his family's huge living room. He emerged from his bedroom, crossed the street to a school that was used during the war as a Ba'ath party office, collected some RPG rockets, a launcher and ammunition, and drove around the neighbourhood looking for American troops. He soon found them.

"You think you are brave and you want to fight for your country and defend your home, but when I stood in front of them with the RPG on my shoulder, my legs were shaking from fear and my body went stiff. I just remember a huge bang and a cloud of dust and my friend grabbed and pushed me to the car and we drove away.

"Now its much easier. I am more focused and I know it's a split-second decision: either I kill or get killed."

For months Adel fought the Americans almost every day, firing RPGs and laying IEDs (improvised explosive devices). His friends mocked his enthusiasm and his talk about the need to defend his country and started calling him "The Patriot".

But it has been a few months since he has taken part in any attacks against the hated occupiers. Adel The Patriot has a new mission. He commands a Sunni vigilante group, a dozen or so men armed with Kalashnikovs and a heavy calibre machine gun, attempting, they say, to defend their area against raids and "arrests" made by Shia interior ministry commandos.

It was early afternoon when we met and he had just woken up. He doesn't get much sleep these days. At midnight, just as the streets fall silent, Shia death squads roam the streets looking for prey. Adel and his group sit outside and wait. Most of the streets in Yarmouk are barricaded by bits of metal, palm tree trunks, boxes, bricks and cinder blocks. Streets are cut off to make a maze that only local people know how to negotiate.

One of Adel's friends was snatched from his shop by men wearing Iraqi police force uniforms, he says. "They knew the area where his house is was well protected, so they went to his shop." The friend's body surfaced three days later. His nose had been mutilated, he was handcuffed and left to die in a garbage dump. "I knew he was dead from the moment he was taken. We feel very angry. Even the people who didn't want to kill the Shia have joined the fight now."

Adel says 10 Sunnis have been killed in his neighbourhood in the past month. In retaliation 20 Shia were kidnapped and killed by Sunni insurgents. During one week the Guardian spent in Yarmouk in May, a grocer, his two brothers and a cousin, a school guard, a generator operator, and four ministry of education employees, all Shia, were killed. Two Sunnis were killed in the same week.

"Look, a full-scale civil war will break out in the next few months. The Kurds only care about their independence. We the Sunnis will be crushed - the Shia have more fighters and they are better organised, and have more than one leadership. They are supported by the Iranians. We are lost. We don't have leadership and no one is more responsible for our disarray than [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi, may God curse him," he said.

The logic of Adel The Patriot's new sectarian struggle against the Shia is driving him and his fellow Sunnis into radical new directions. Asked what will save the Sunnis, he replies almost instinctively.

"Our only hope is if the Americans hit the Iranians, and by God's will this day will come very soon, then the Americans will give a medal to anyone who kills a Shia militiaman. When we feel that an American attack on Iran is imminent, I myself will shoot anyone who attacks the Americans and all the mujahideen will join the US army against the Iranians.

"Most of my fellow mujahideen are not fighting the Americans at the moment, they are too busy killing the Shia, and this is only going to create hatred. If someone kills one of my family I will do nothing else but kill to avenge their deaths."

Most of the Shia in Yarmouk and other Sunni areas have left and their young people have now joined the Shia militias. So what would Adel do to stop the cycle of violence? "If I have some money I will pay regular salaries to my men, buy three black Opel cars [the preferred assassination car in Baghdad]. We will kidnap members of Badr brigade [the main Shia militia], we will kill some and get ransom on the other and the ransom money will finance more operations and I can have my own mujahideen faction."

Later he and two friends explain how to distinguish a Sunni from a Shia. One of the friends says: "The Shia are darker. Sunnis have coloured eyes. Shia foreheads are smaller. Sunnis walk with arms away from the body. It's so easy: look at that man, the way he is walking he is obviously a Sunni."

The Shia

No one tries to move the body of a man in grimy tracksuit bottoms, lying in Mu'alemeen Street, in Dora. A grocery store continues to sell vegetables across the street, and two women carrying plastic bags pass by the body, a pool of dried blood around his head, without looking.

"He is a Shia, no one can move him. If anyone tries to touch the body, they will be killed. The mujahideen want him to rot in the street in front of his family and friends," a local man says.

Dora used to be one of Baghdad's most mixed neighbourhoods. Shia, Sunnis and Christians all lived together. The Christians were the first to leave after attacks on their churches. They were followed by the Shia, killed and intimidated by Sunni insurgents. Then came the Shia retaliation, raids by interior ministry commandos, Mahdi army death squads; scores of Sunni men detained only for their mutilated bodies to reappear later.

Today gun battles erupt every week, between Sunnis defending their patch against the Shia militias or Shia defending their homes against the Sunni insurgents.

Abu Muhammad's family is one of two Shia families left in his street. The other 18 have all left. To survive, he has to pretend he is a Sunni. He stood in front of his house and shouted insults at the Shia government. He stopped calling two of his sons by their real Shia names. He bought a Kalashnikov and gave it to the local mujahideen. Even the screen on his mobile announces "the one of Fallujah", a reference to the battle between insurgents and US forces that is iconic to many Sunnis.

"What can I do? I have to make sure that they don't think that I am Shia. Every time I leave the house I say my prayers and kiss my children as if I am not going to see them again."

In Karrada, another Shia neighbourhood, a man speaks with detachment about the Shia death squads. "It's really bad what the Shia forces are doing now, but truth has to be said: most of the Sunnis who get killed deserve it. The terrorists come from the Sunni community. They are not insurgents themselves, they have cousins who are insurgents. For three years now the Shia have been patient and now Sunnis have to see what the Shia can do."

Sheikh Omar - director of the human rights office of the Iraqi Islamic party, one of the leading Sunni political groups - is explaining how it was all the Americans' fault for empowering Shia militia to fight the insurgency, when a man opens the door and rushs in.

"Sheikh, the ministry commandos are attacking the Mahdiya area in Dora and people are in the mosque fighting back."

Phone calls followed. One report spoke of a force of 20 interior ministry vehicles. Sheikh Omar bashes out a number on his mobile phone. "We are receiving reports that a force of 20 ministry of interior commandos are attacking this Sunni area and people are fighting back from the mosque. Can you ask Colonel Paul to send his troops? If our people see the Americans, we will stop fighting."

A couple of streets from Abu Muhammad's house, in an empty house deserted by its Shia occupants, five Sunni gunmen sit on the roof, one crouched behind the roof parapet, his rifles stuck through a breeze bloc. They are the local neighbourhood watch. An old woman with a white headscarf brings them a tray of glasses of tea. "May God protect you my sons," she says.

One of the gunmen explains: "We never fire in the morning - we don't want to expose where we are."

Back in Yarmouk, not far from Adel the Patriot's house, a group of eight-year-olds gather by a makeshift barricade, armed with plastic pistols and sunglasses. Their "commander", a 12-year-old, orders them to pull a log of wood away from their make-believe checkpoint, to let a car through.

But then a police pickup truck appears, its Shia occupants wearing balaclavas. The children instinctively take up firing positions with their plastic Kalashnikovs.

The police pickup takes a right and disappears up a sidestreet. The kids cheer and shout.

Some people's names have been changed to protect their identity.

Five days in the life of a nation on the brink

Saturday

Basra Two British soldiers killed in roadside bomb attack.

Baghdad US soldier killed when vehicle struck by roadside bomb.

Mosul Two policemen ambushed and killed by gunmen.

Balad Ruz Two bombs kill civilian and wound police officer.

Sunday

Yusufiya Insurgents shoot down US helicopter, killing two soldiers.

Baghdad Two suicide car bombs explode near entrance to international airport zone, killing 14. Roadside bomb kills two US soldiers. Bomb at al-Mustansiriya University kills one and wounds 11. Three killed by bomb at market, four killed by another roadside bomb, two more die in further roadside bombing.

Kerbala Bodies of four brothers who worked for humanitarian organisation found beheaded.

Adhaim Three bodyguards working for Iraq's foreign minister killed when motorcade hit by bomb.

Mosul Two killed by car bomb.

Yusufiya US forces kill more than 25 insurgents during ground and air attacks.

Monday

Baghdad Saddam Hussein trial resumes.

Amara Four British soldiers wounded in mortar attack.

Balad Two US killed by roadside bomb.

Mosul Policeman killed when bomb explodes near house where gunmen killed six members of same family.

Mahaweel Roadside bombs kill two.

Latifiya 16 suspected al Qaida-linked militants killed in raids.

Kerbala Body of policeman abducted by gunmen two days earlier found.

Balad Ruz Gunmen kill four primary school teachers.

Wajihiya Girl of seven dies and seven members of her family wounded when mortar round lands on their house.

Tuesday

Baghdad 19 people killed in attack at bus garage. US soldier killed by roadside bomb. Four workers at US military base shot dead. Kidnappers abduct United Arab Emirates diplomat. Six die in clashes between insurgents and police.

Wednesday

Anbar province US navy member killed in combat operation. Most naval personnel in that area are attached to marine units as medics.

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