The grand ayatollah’s little lecture hall in Najaf is as shabby and dilapidated as it was in the days of Saddam Hussein. Material upgrades, the peeling paint seems to suggest, might compromise the spirituality of the hawza, the center of Shia learning in the southern Iraqi city. Crosslegged on a threadbare carpet, 100 turbaned men hang on the words of the squat figure crouched slightly above them in a makeshift wooden armchair several sizes too big for him. A camera recording his lecture on the Islamic laws of bartering is Grand Ayatollah Sayyid al-Hakim’s only compromise with modernity.
While the scholars are disciplined with monastic conditions, the hoi polloi are dazzled with the opulence of the Imam Ali Mosque. In his office above the commotion, the shrine’s treasurer, Zuhair Sharba, maps the progress on a $600 million expansion, set to swell the shrine’s capacity fivefold. Appropriately enough, since pilgrimage is the city’s prime income generator, he is also chair of Najaf’s chamber of commerce. He banks the tithes that the world’s 200 million Shias raise worldwide for the city’s ayatollahs, and much of the income that 30 flights of pilgrims a day generate. A dozen cranes rotate above the holy site, industrial spiders weaving a web of luxury hotels, fountained courtyards, a towering media city, and accommodation for a student intake that has quadrupled since Saddam’s downfall. The city is the most flourishing and peaceful in Iraq.
Puncturing this splendid isolation, a new funeral cortege arrives at the shrine’s thresholds every few minutes and unloads a fresh cadaver. Each makeshift coffin is wrapped in the costume of a military funeral—Iraqi flags made in China stuck on with sticky tape. Relatives snuffle; fellow fighters stare blankly ahead, awaiting their turn. In much the same way as Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, blocked Saddam Hussein’s eight-year invasion with human waves, so Najaf’s ayatollahs unleashed droves of Shia poor to stem IS’s sweep south. “We know we’re going to die,” an armchair apologist with a UNESCO seat in religious studies at the local university told me. “We go to the front as if on a pilgrimage.” The editor of a local periodical, al-Asala, is more circumspect: “The clerics don’t send their sons to the front,” he scowls. “They send the poor.”
For over a decade, Ali Sistani, the foremost of Najaf’s four grand ayatollahs, struck a pacifist’s pose. When Sunni suicide bombers targeted Shia rites, he refused to call Shias to arms. When others demanded revenge, he called for elections. When militants blew the dome off Samarra’s al-Askari Shrine, he warned against descending into civil war. Critics said that he was unable to shrug off the mindset of centuries of submission to Sunni powers, well-honed under Saddam Hussein, when deference was the best defense mechanism. He called it righteous restraint.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, IS’s caliph, succeeded where other Sunni emirs had failed in rousing the ayatollah into battle. Ten days after al-Baghdadi’s capture of Mosul, with IS closing on Baghdad and openly threatening to storm Najaf, Sistani issued a call for “citizens to defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens, and its sacred places.” Delighted militiamen hailed it a fatwa for jihad. In their panic, cloistered clerics morphed into militant mullahs. A Shia preacher from Qatar, Nazar al-Qatari, wearing military fatigues, called on worshippers to fight “the slayers of Imams Hasan and Hussein”—an oblique reference to Sunnis—and enlist in the hashad shaabi, or popular mobilization. As I walked out of the shrine with a businessman, his five-year-old son pulled on his father’s arm and asked daddy to buy him a pistol.
In their antechambers, the clerics gave vent to a long pent-up sectarianism. “IS is nothing new,” an advisor to Sistani told me. “Sunnis might sometimes have worn a suit and tie, but they have been killing Shias from the beginning.” Rather than find explanations for IS’s rise in the exclusive policies Iraq’s Shia leaders had pursued, they traced the violence to something brutal and innate in Sunni Islam. Shia television preachers lambasted Sunnis for the three usurpers, or nawasib, who “raped the wilaya,” or reign, the Prophet had bequeathed to his son-in-law, Ali. The third caliph, Omar ibn al-Khattab, regarded by Sunnis as a pinnacle of virtue, was the most treacherous of all, a thug who broke open the Prophet’s front door, smashing the ribs of Fatima (the Prophet’s daughter and wife of Imam Ali), who had been standing behind it, causing the abortion of her child Abdel Mohsin.
In the Shia telling, Omar’s followers had maintained the tradition. Saladin, the Sunni hero who vanquished the Crusaders in the twelfth century, was no less a butcher of Shias than IS. He had overthrown the Shia caliphate of the Fatimids, conquered their capital, Cairo, and converted the world’s first university, al-Zahra, named after the Prophet’s daughter, into a bastion of Sunni orthodoxy renamed in its masculine form as al-Azhar. “He left Cairo’s backstreets knee-deep in Shia blood,” a cleric told me, as if recounting a recent news bulletin. “He burned libraries and universities and destroyed two million books. He turned Islam into a religion of killing.” His name should not be Saladin, literally the reformer of religion, scoffed a colleague, but Kharab al-Din, the destroyer of religion.
By transitioning from passivity to activism or from submission to power, Arab Shiism was undergoing a form of Sunnization. Under Ottoman rule, Shias had been denied their own millet and subjugated under Sunnis. But as they consolidated their hold over central and southern Iraq, they assumed the same prerogatives Sunnis had enjoyed for centuries. For the first time since the overthrow of the Fatimids and Buyids a millennia earlier, mainstream Shiism ruled a state in the Arab world. With their newfound hubris, many struck incalcitrant positions. There was no room for negotiating with terrorists, one of Sistani’s advisors told me, insisting with almost Israeli logic that “we don’t have a Sunni partner.” Ezzedin al-Hakim, the grand ayatollah’s son, would lecture me for hours on the necessity for inter-religious dialogue, but rule out the prospects for an inter-denominational one. When he spoke of the battle against IS, he thought less of rescuing Sunni countrymen from IS’s totalitarian rule than of the climactic turning point of an epic 1,400-year-old schism.
The Shias’ assumption of power challenged not only the sectarian order but the divine order as well. For the previous four centuries the trajectories of Persian and Arab Shias had been at loggerheads. While Shiism was the state faith of Iran’s shahs, it was considered a near heresy in Sunni-ruled Iraq. Living under Sunni rule in Najaf, Shia clerics fashioned theories that defensively deemed all rule after the twelfth imam went into occultation as illegitimate, while their Persian counterparts increasingly posited the assumption of power for themselves. One scholar even referred to Iran’s rulers as deputies of the ayatollahs. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Shia jurist Mulla Ahmad Naraqi coined the term wilayat al-faqih, or theocratic rule of the jurist. Ayatollah Khomeini put theory into practice 160 years later with his Islamic revolution in Iran. Now that Iraqi Shias, too, were ruling themselves for the first time in a millennia, Najaf’s traditional theories propounded by Sistani looked increasingly anachronistic.
Sistani’s sway over Iraq’s 40 separate Shia militias had long been tenuous. Many took their arms and funding from Iran, and openly declared their allegiance to their paymaster, Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. For form’s sake, they still paid Sistani and his Najaf clerics lip service, but argued with a degree of religious gymnastics that while they followed his spiritual pronouncements, they heeded political statements from Tehran. Some disdained Sistani’s traditionalism, cherry-picking more modern fatwas. While Sistani railed against satellite television on account of the surfeit of sexual imagery, one militia commander told me he preferred the opinion of Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon’s leading cleric who died in 2010 and deemed pornography acceptable for men who otherwise struggled to satisfy their wives. Others protested the backing Sistani appeared to give the American assault on Najaf in 2004 to oust the followers of a junior cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who had taken up arms against both the occupation and its clerical apologists.
But after a decade of tension, Sistani’s fatwa narrowed the gap between him and his activist critics. Shia militia commanders who had hitherto denounced Sistani’s vacillation celebrated his de facto legalization of the militias’ advance, proclaimed themselves his loyal subjects, and relished a new crop of recruits and government finance—worth $2.3 billion, said Iraq’s prime minister. Not even Khomeini had dared to declare such an open-ended jihad, waxed Abu Jaafar al-Darraji, a senior commander running recruitment for the Badr Organization, the largest and most openly pro-Iranian of the militias. He pointed at the portraits he had pinned of Sistani throughout his vast indoor training center overlaid with stencils of guns. For the first time since the ninth century, when the twelfth Shia imam went into hiding, he smiled, the Shia world’s luminaries had authorized a jihad not just for self-defense, but expansion.
It was false praise. Sistani was credited with much that he never said. Though dubbed the fatwa of jihad, his ruling had not mentioned the word. And it stipulated that any hashad, or mobilization, be “sufficient,” that is, limited in place and time, not open-ended. Moreover, al-Darraji had no intention of taking his orders from Sistani. From his office sofa, he pointed at a portrait Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gruffly perched over his desk. “He’s our wali amr al-muslimeen, the legal ruler in all the Muslim lands,” he said. Around the compound he had hung vast images of Khamenei and Sistani, side by side as if complementing each other. Asked if he was betraying his country, al-Darraji insisted that sectarian ties took precedence. There are, he explained, “no borders between Muslims, or between Arabs and Persians, except in faith.” More powerful, disciplined, and effective than the national army, he insisted, the hashad would survive its battle with IS and form Iraq’s counterpart to Iran’s Basij, the paramilitary youth group Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had founded in 1979 to defend Iran’s revolution and uphold its religious mores. “The current government doesn’t represent Islam,” al-Darraji insisted. It should accept the Supreme Leader’s leadership.
The threats were only part bombast. The deputy chief of Iraq’s hashad was an Iranian-Iraqi dual national called Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis who reported directly to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. For decades he had worked as an Iranian agent targeting America’s interests in the Gulf. He was blacklisted on Washington’s terror list for masterminding the bombing of the American and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. And when U.S. forces in Iraq tried to capture him in 2007, he had fled to Iran. To ward off the threat to Baghdad from the Sunni north, his forces had overrun the capital from the Shia south. He shared Baghdad’s government enclave, the Green Zone, with the American embassy.
Conscious, perhaps, of the genie he had unleashed, Sistani made an attempt to curb increasingly public excesses. A video apparently showing hospital orderlies watching while Shia militiamen beat a Sunni man to death in a hospital in the Baghdad suburb of Kadhimiya went viral. Reports of looting of Sunni homes as Shia militiamen advanced were rife, and news broadcasts relayed Shia beheadings of captured IS fighters. Sistani dispatched middle-ranking clerics to monitor the front lines and teach the hawza’s rules of war. “Do not pray in the house of a stranger if you can pray in the street,” said one bound for Tikrit. “But if there’s a threat of snipers then you can enter. If food is on the table and it’s going to decay, you can eat it, as long as you pay for what you eat.” But discipline proved harder to maintain on the battlefield than in Najaf’s mannered cloisters. “I saw them looting armchairs in Saladin province,” complained a cleric after a trip to the front. “I made them put them back, but who knows what happened once my back was turned.”
Though the Badr Organization’s commanders might not have been listening, Sistani earned unexpected support from his erstwhile foe Muqtada al-Sadr. Over the course of a decade his messianic militia, the Mahdi’s Army, had mellowed, resurfacing as Saraya al-Salam, or peacekeepers. They committed to protect Sunnis and Shias from each other, and banned their cadres from sporting bushy beards and wearing military fatigues when off-duty. “The positives of the hashad have become negatives,” Sayid Ibrahim, a Baghdad-based leader of the Sadrist Movement, told me. He criticized the hashad for not submitting to the command of the defense ministry and lambasted its habit of burning houses, stealing cars, and indulging in random killing. Having defended Iraq against America’s occupation, some Sadrists wondered whether the time might come when they would have to do the same against Iran’s.
But reestablishing Shia factional support for a national army required overcoming generations of mistrust. In its 80-year history, the country had only one Shia chief of staff, Abdul-Wahid Shannan ar-Ribat. And even after 2003, the defense ministry had remained a nominally Sunni fief. A new force Shia-led from the outset seemed more reliable. Either way, able to outgun and outman the formal army and with far higher morale, the hashad’s 40 militias, almost all of Shia extraction, had no intention of ceding control to a weaker force. Able to field 23,000 men on the front lines and almost 100,000 more in reserves, they asserted their presence both on and behind the front lines. While some led the assault on IS, others consolidated their hold on the territories they retook from IS, and operated as a home guard in the main government-held cities enforcing strict social codes. Despite an official ban on paramilitary operations away from the front, reservists moved onto the streets as auxiliaries to the local police. Vans without side windows and license plates waited in side streets, apparently to take suspects away. Sunnis were a particular target.
In the towns ringing Baghdad, the hashad engaged in fresh bouts of sectarian cleansing, turning much of the capital’s environs into Sunni-free zones. The perpetrators called them “settlers”, put there by Saddam Hussein to dilute and control Shia populations, though many had roots dating back centuries. They posed a security threat, insisted a militia commander who rejected in writing Prime Minister al-Abadi’s order that Sunnis be allowed to return. Had they not provided the pool of suicide bombers and fired the mortars that preyed upon pilgrims? he asked. If the Shia holy shrines were to be spared repeated attack, Sunnis residing near pilgrimage routes from Baghdad and Iran should be removed.
“What can the prime minister do?” asked Sunni tribal leader and politician Mudher al-Janabi. “He’s not in charge.” Inside his fortified villa in Baghdad, he nervously eyed the bank of monitors on his desk relaying footage from the security cameras installed on the high walls surrounding his house. He had promised his tribe to lead them home to Jurf al-Sakhar, a village just south of Baghdad, but despaired of ever doing so. The irrigation system piping water from the Euphrates to his villagers’ farmland had been broken and no one had bothered to fix it. Baghdad’s breadbasket had turned into caked scrub. Three thousand Sunni homes in Jurf al-Sakhar had been destroyed, a parliamentary committee had reported, and a further 2,000 rendered uninhabitable. Thirteen Sunni villages around Sherwan, near the Iranian border, had been leveled entirely and turned into military zones to provide unfettered access from Iran. Even if the army had wanted to protect Sunni residents, militiamen barred their path.
To prevent the flight of displaced Sunnis further south, Shia provincial governors imposed entry restrictions, barring access to those without local sponsors. Henchmen also targeted Sunnis who had lived with Shia in the south for centuries. Under the loose tutelage of the Ottomans, the Al Saadun, a Sunni tribe originating from the Arabian Peninsula, had led a confederation of predominantly Shia tribes, the Muntafiq, and defended Shia against the warrior monks of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab who raided Najaf and Karbala in 1802. “Religion cannot be brought by the sword,” the Al Saadun tribal leader was reputed to have cried. A provincial capital, Nasiriya, was named after its chieftain, Nasir al-Saadun Pasha, who founded the town in the late nineteenth century. Under the monarchy, the Al Saadun kept their elevated status. Saddam Hussein appointed an Al Saadun his interior minister. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia made a Saadoun, Abdel Muhsin, his prime minister, and Saddam Hussein appointed one interior minister. The Iraqi branches of the Communist Party and the Ba’ath Party, which first emerged from Nasiriya, began in part as Shia working-class protest movements against their Sunni overlords.
But the path America’s invasion had made for Shia militias to return from Iran upset the old power structures. Saddam’s apparatchiks fled, and Sunnis who stayed found they faced a glass ceiling when seeking government jobs. The city’s opera house, where divas had sung arias in the 1950s, was converted into a hall for performing the lutm, the chest-beating dirge that accompanies Shia memorials. Shia chauvinists dubbed Sunnis a fifth column, and as the latter’s alienation intensified, the label became self-fulfilling. Dozens were incarcerated on suspicion of repeated attacks on Nasiriya’s high-security Hout prison, where under arc lights America jailed the highest-risk al-Qaeda and Ba’ath Party leaders, including Saddam’s foreign minister Tariq Aziz, who died there in June 2015. In 2012 the suicide bombing of a pilgrimage procession at the gates to the town triggered the first pogrom. Police found it easier to scapegoat the Al Saadun clan than catch the culprit. Apparently fearing his own assassination at the hands of Shia militiamen if his ruling was not to their liking, a circuit judge sentenced 13 Sunnis to life imprisonment and one to death.
Most of Nasiriya’s Sunnis have now left Iraq and headed back to the Arabian peninsula, from whence, several centuries ago, they came. The few who remain receive death threats slipped under their doors. When I went to meet a Sunni family who lived on a date plantation alongside the river that runs through the town a visiting Shia businessman demanded my passport and called the local intelligence chief. My taxi driver, who turned out to have been a local policeman, shook with fear of the reprimand he would receive for having let a foreigner visit Sunni residents. I finally found someone who admitted to being of Al Saadun stock on a farm out of town. “You’re not wanted,” read a piece of hate mail he recently received. “Leave.” When he talks of Nasiriya’s Sunnis, he uses the past tense. “There were Jews here once, too,” he says.
In the far south, Basra’s Sunnis have hung on for longer. In 2003, they comprised perhaps 15 percent of the population and the core of the mercantile elite of a province so awash with oil it provides 95 percent of the government’s oil revenues. But the killing of clerics, the burning of mosques, and attacks on Sunni officials have also depleted their ranks. Mass rural migration from poor Shia provinces into squalid shantytowns that ring the city has only exacerbated the decline of the Sunni share of the population and the sense of siege that they feel. The religious parties ruling Basra use their grip on the governorate’s budget to control university appointments, and award tenure according to party allegiance. Basra’s five cinemas remain shuttered 12 years after the American invasion. The restaurants on the banks of the Shatt al-Arab have reopened, but not the bars that once attracted thousands of pleasure-seekers from the dry Gulf. “The last bar till Bahrain,” bemoans a boozer in a Baghdad bar, Jannat al-Ahlam. In the 2013 local elections, only one Sunni was elected to Basra’s 23-man council. Two Sunni councilors elected in the neighboring town of Az Zubayr were both killed. A Sunni elder played me footage recorded by security cameras of uniformed police officers hauling an oil ministry official in late 2014 into an unregistered white van as he walked through a Basra market.
For a time Az Zubayr had been a byword for southern Sunni resistance. Its people lived up to their namesake. Az Zubayr ibn Al-Awam was one of the early Sunni commanders who fought Islam’s first civil war against Imam Ali at the Battle of the Camel in Basra. In the nineteenth century, the town had been a refuge for Sunni tribes that spilled out of Najd fleeing the northern advance of the Al Sauds. And after Saddam Hussein launched his faith campaign in the 1990s, its mosques were a first stop for Saudi Salafis gravitating to Iraq. After 2003, America and Britain incarcerated many of Sunni inhabitants, including the local Al Saadun chief, in Camp Bucca, triggering the first wave of suicide bombings. But a decade later, Zubair’s Sunni elders seem broken. The Sunni share of the town’s population had fallen from 90 percent to 10 percent, Sheikh Jamal al-Dosari, the imam of its main Sunni mosque told me. Of the town’s 40 Sunni mosques, only 15 open for Friday prayers. “Basra was known as Iraq’s most cosmopolitan city,” says Ramzi Mostaf, a Kurd who had spent his life in Basra as a civil servant in the higher education ministry. When a row erupted between Shia and Kurdish politicians in Baghdad, he fled after receiving death-threats.
All told, the south of Iraq is becoming almost as single-sect as its north. In tandem with the flight of Sunnis, its non-Muslim population has fallen to marginal levels. Until Saddam Hussein’s fall, 400 Christian families lived in Amarah, another provincial city on the southern reaches of the Tigris. When I visited in October 2015, just 12 remained. “Four families left three weeks ago,” bemoaned their community leader, insisting he would be last to leave. Mandeans, the biblical-era Baptists, tell a similar tale. From 50,000 in Basra in 2000, they numbered just 4,000 in 2015. Those too, says Basra’s Mandean community leader, Emad Awra, are preparing to leave. “Why don’t you wear the veil and become Muslim?” his daughter had been asked in front of her all-Muslim class. The headmaster had assured him it would not happen again. He wasn’t sure.
Haider al-Abadi
Saddam Hussein’s cavernous Republican palace seems several sizes too big for the man tasked with turning a country ruled by sectarian militias into a state. Saddam filled it with his megalomania; America with its occupying army of soldiers, spies, and carpetbaggers. On the way to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s antechamber, I passed the locked offices of Paul Bremer, the American governor who gutted the state and laid the foundations of its current dysfunction. Al-Abadi, who is a jolly man, was reminiscing about his modest home in Karrada, a central Baghdad neighborhood, with its small garden where he would sit sipping lemon and mint tea, klaxons hooting in the background. “I’d had it renovated and was moving back in,” he says forlornly. “And then they made me prime minister.”
At any time, he would have made an unusual Middle East leader. In the grip of a war on the Islamic State, his appointment in August 2014 as prime minister and head of the armed forces seemed almost obtuse. He had held no military post, and in his youth he dodged the draft.
Initially, Abadi’s popularity ratings climbed, particularly among Sunnis, who welcomed his inclusive messaging, his occasional visits to their mosques, and—in marked contrast to his predecessor, Nuri al-Maliki—his aversion to bellicose threats. The problem was his ability to deliver.
On his Facebook page, he promised to open the Green Zone, the forbidden city the Americans carved out of central Baghdad in 2003 whose closure had bunged up the capital ever since. But all that transpired was a sole one-way road, disrupted by so many checkpoints that the old traffic jams seemed more bearable. He abolished the three vice presidents under him, including the powerful former prime minister, and gave them and their hundreds of security guards 48 hours to leave their official residences, but did nothing when the deadline expired. “Under the constitution, he doesn’t have the jurisdiction,” protested one of them, Ayad Allawi. “These are not reforms, they are hostile measures.” To prune expenditures he proposed halving the $25,000 monthly allowance MPs receive for their security details; Parliament overruled him, citing the principle of its sovereignty.
He did little to hide the constraints he felt on his exercise of power. As a member of the Islamic Dawa Party, he owes his job to the political system, but remains a bit player in it. Party apparatchiks address al-Maliki, his predecessor, and not him, as al-Zaim, the leader. The factions divvy up government posts and appoint his cabinet. “If he’d have touched the party system, we’d probably have shot him,” says a middle-ranking Dawa hand.
The most immediate threat to the prime minister’s tenure came less from the Sunni jihadis over the horizon than the Shia warlords of the hashad sharing his Green Zone. Courteously, al-Abadi praises the hashad for rolling IS back from Baghdad’s gates. It succeeded, he says, in puncturing the psychological pall that IS had cast over Iraq, and for the first time forced IS onto the defensive. But he admits, too, that the hashad’s victories might have proven a double-edged sword. “Any force that you arm is a threat,” he tells me, sounding more like a pundit than Iraq’s chief decision-maker. “I remember in some countries with a history of coups d’etat, usually leaders are afraid of arming the army. And the same I think [holds] for this popular mobilization force.” He spoke of plans to incorporate Sunnis into the hashad and assign all Sunni territories the hashad liberates to local police forces. When I suggest that he might lack the capacity to deliver, he agrees, and voices concern at commanders nursing “uncontrollable vendettas.” The number of soldiers that loyalists have under their command “is very few.”
“How will Iraq disarm the hashad?” asks Wathiq al-Hashami, a political scientist at Baghdad University. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, al-Maliki’s former national security advisor, shares the concern. The hashad, he says, “saved the day for Baghdad, but could yet destroy Iraq.” Buoyed by their popular standing, militia commanders, he ventures, might march on Baghdad.
Few Iraqis in the south openly champion separation. In a meeting with four professors at the engineering department, of the University of Kufa on the outskirts of Najaf, three of them waxed lyrical about the golden age that awaits a united Iraq, or at least its Arab provinces, once the hashad vanquishes IS. But a dissenting fourth engineer quietly questioned why the south should bother. As long as Sistani’s jihad defended Shias from IS’s predations he supported it, but why shed blood for a Sunni population that is neither welcoming nor particularly wanted, he asked. The further north the militia advances, the more lives are lost, and the returns from the battle diminish. Compared to the south’s mineral wealth, the Sunni provinces offer few natural resources. Much of it is desert, and its feuding tribes will only cause trouble. Better, he argued, to safeguard what the south already has. In short, he said, breaking a taboo by uttering a word he claims many privately espouse, why not opt for taqsim—partition. A heavy silence followed.