A married father of four, he was serving as a guard at a largely abandoned Iraqi airbase near the border with Saudi Arabia as the war began, a job he had held for four years.
THERE WERE ONLY FIFTY OF US garrisoned at the base, and half the men were on leave when American helicopters flew in from the desert and came low overhead. An interpreter’s voice sounded from a loudspeaker on one of the helicopters. He said anyone who wanted to live should change into civilian clothes and leave the base. Anyone who stayed on the base in uniform would be killed by soldiers on the way. Then the helicopters disappeared. We all took the advice and ditched our uniforms and abandoned the base. Some of the officers had their own personal cars and drove away in them. The rest of us took a minibus from the base and began heading toward our homes.
I eventually made it back to Baghdad. My family had lived on the western edge of the city for a long time, and I went home to them. There were fourteen of us in one house. We had always been very poor. Everyone worked either as a farm laborer or in fishing. It was the kind of life where you were lucky to eat meat once a month. Things went on much as they had after the invasion for us until 2006, when the violence started.
The area where we lived was mostly Sunni, but there were several Shi’ite families. After the Samarra bombings, all the Shi’ite families got threat letters from al-Qaeda in Iraq. The notes were delivered to every Shi’ite house. The letters said we were dirty collaborators working with the Americans, the Iranians, and the Jews and said we had 72 hours to leave. We didn’t bother to take anything from the house, just some blankets for the children because it was cold weather then.
At first we lived for a few months in Sadr City, all together in one room of a house belonging to a brother-in-law of mine. Eventually, though, I was able to find a cheap house built on land around an abandoned cement plant in Kadhimiya. Shortly after we settled in, one of the longtime residents of the neighborhood came to my door. He said the neighborhood was organizing some volunteer guards and wanted me to join. I did. There was a lot of thievery and murder in the area at the time and no police of course.
Twelve men from my neighborhood including me agreed to form a volunteer guard force. All of the volunteers were just neighborhood guys. Some were out of work. Some were students. Some were men from rich families in the area. All different backgrounds. We were split into two groups and worked twelve-hour shifts. During the day we would check cars coming into the area. If we knew the car, we would let them pass. If not we would stop them, looking for car bombs or strange guys who may be coming to the area. At night we would patrol the streets just keeping watch. We carried weapons all the time, unless we saw American troops. We’d hide our guns when U.S. patrols were around and take them back out when they were gone.
We weren’t part of the Mahdi Army then in those first days, but the militia was in our area and would talk to us. There was a guy, a commander for the Mahdi Army. His name was Abu Isra’a. He would hold meetings with us, usually calling us together in a mosque to avoid attention. He was a tall guy, a bit fat, with a big mustache. He preached a bit about the importance of looking after our neighbors and being good Muslims. He warned us not to get involved with anything Moqtada al-Sadr would not like. And sometimes he asked us to help with some chores or missions the Mahdi Army was doing in our area and in nearby neighborhoods.
Some of the missions were to watch people, to see if they were doing anything wrong. Some of the missions were raids on houses where people were doing bad things, like making pornography or cavorting with prostitutes. If we found anyone in those houses we were sent to, the people inside were dragged out and beaten in the street. Not killed, just beaten and told to leave the neighborhood. Some people had to be killed, though. The Mahdi Army found out that some people were selling the names of Shi’ites to al-Qaeda. Shi’ites from the area were doing this for money. They would sell names of Sunnis to Shi’ite killers too. Those people had to be killed.
I didn’t go on very many missions, and I never had a big role. I was only ever asked to stand watch on the street as the others went into the houses we were told to raid. We never went to attack Sunnis. I would not have done that. We were just working with the Mahdi Army to police our area, keeping out bad elements and making the place safe. But for the Mahdi Army, it didn’t stop there. Sometimes they would attack checkpoints manned by Iraqi security forces and ask some of us volunteers to help them. Some of the men who first volunteered as guards for our area joined them. When I heard about this, I had words with these men. I did not think this was right. The men at the checkpoints were there to protect us. There was no reason to attack them. Those who were joining the attacks called me a coward when I argued with them, but I didn’t care. I said how I felt.
I was at home one night when there was a knock at the door. It was one of my fellow guards. He said they needed me for a mission assigned by the Mahdi Army. Get your gun, he said, and come along. I asked what the mission was, and he said we would be attacking a nearby government checkpoint. I went and got my gun and handed it to him. I said, Take this and give it to Sadr himself and call me a coward to him for all I care. I won’t attack a checkpoint with you. Taking my gun, he said, Okay. But he said it in a way that was meant to be a threat. Like he was saying, Okay, we know what do to with you…
Ali Jawad Kadhem said he never had any further dealings with the Mahdi Army or the volunteer guard force in Kadhimiya. He worried for a time that someone would come after him because of his refusal to get deeper involved in militia activities, but nothing ever happened. He was living in the same area and struggling to make ends meet as a house painter as of May 2009.
Born in 1979, he was a college student at a local university in Diwaniyah, a town in southern Iraq. He remembers celebrating with friends and family in 2003 as the U.S. attacks began, knowing as the news spread across the airwaves that Saddam Hussein was finished. In the lawlessness afterward, however, Diwaniyah and other towns around the area felt the tightening grip of the Mahdi Army as the militia sought to spread its influence from Baghdad into southern Iraq.
THERE WAS A GROUP OF STUDENTS on campus who were involved with the Mahdi Army. We called them the militia students, and they went around trying to spread the Mahdi Army’s religious ideology. The biggest issue was females on campus. People involved with the Mahdi Army tended to believe that having females in school was against Islam. It was very hard for female students, believe me. A lot of the women who insisted on going to class came under threat. There were beatings and kidnappings targeting women just because they wanted to go to school. I didn’t believe in this kind of thinking, and neither did many of my friends.
It wasn’t just on campus where militia members and zealots pressed their ideas on people. In Diwaniyah generally, both the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade tried to intimidate people into conforming to their religious beliefs. People affiliated with one religious party or the other would go around in the streets as enforcers. If they thought the way you were dressed was against Islam, they might push you around or beat you up. Sometimes these enforcers would check people’s cell phones for pictures. If you were a guy and you had a picture of a woman on your phone, for example, they might rough you up or take your phone. This kind of crap. Initially it was an annoyance to have such people in the streets, but gradually it became so widespread that everyone began to fear. It got to a point that you could not as a man even walk alongside a woman anywhere in public who was not your wife or your sister. If you did, someone from these enforcers would stop you, rough you up, and haul you off to one of the party offices, where you would be questioned and lectured about religion and society from these goons. It was not just beatings and lectures they doled out, however. Some people who defied these zealots wound up dead. Look, it was the same religious bullshit that al-Qaeda in Iraq and its followers imposed on Sunni areas. The exact same thing, only one group did it in the name of Shi’ites and the other in the name of Sunnis. I didn’t see firsthand what happened in Sunni areas, but I’ve heard enough to know how similar the situations were to ours in places like Mosul and Anbar province in 2005 and 2006 as parties, gangs, and religious groups took over where the police and military were absent.
One day in the summer of 2006 I was on campus talking to a female friend of mine in one of the gardens. As we were sitting there talking, three of the campus guards came up along with five of the militia students and tried to break up our conversation, saying it was against the rules. It was bullshit. We weren’t doing anything wrong. These guards, like the militia students, were known members of the Mahdi Army. They were just harassing us, because they thought it was against Islam for a male and female student to be talking together on campus. I argued with them, and they ordered my friend and me to come to the campus security office.
All eight of them marched the girl and me away. I continued arguing inside the guards’ office, telling them they had no right to interfere in our personal lives on campus. They were lecturing me about rules and Islam. One of the guards, I don’t know his name, got up in my face, yelling things about how I should be ashamed of myself for such behavior and that I had no honor. He’s a tall guy, slim, dark-skinned with an ugly face. As he was berating me I heard one of the militia students standing around us say, Beat him. The guard suddenly gave me a hard shove. That’s when I lost my cool. I punched the screamer in the face. I boxed as a youth, so I know how to hit. I got him good in the nose, and blood began to pour over his mouth. I can’t tell you very well what happened in the moments after that, because it got very confusing. But a fight broke out. I was punching at the guards whom I could reach with my fists. They were punching me and tearing at my shirt. There were weapons in the room but so far no one was reaching for them.
This ruckus erupted toward the end of the day, so a lot of people were leaving the campus. The guards’ office is near the main campus gate, so some passing students saw what was happening through the window. Word spread quickly, and suddenly a group of my friends burst in and joined the fight. There were a lot of us who really hated the militia students, and they knew what was going on instantly. Then some more militia students came running. And more guards jumped into the fray. Soon my altercation with the guards had turned into a massive brawl. On the one side were the militia students and their friends among the guards. On the other side were the students like me who had been growing angrier and angrier at their intimidation and religious bullshit. All this tension on campus between the two sides was finally boiling over, and I was right there in the middle of it.
The fight got rougher and rougher until finally guns were drawn. The guards pulled out their pistols and began chambering rounds. The students fighting them backed up and began arming themselves with whatever they could—chairs, a bit of wood, whatever was within reach. I don’t know what would have happened next if the dean had not jumped in the middle and broken things up along with some of the other faculty.
I avoided school for a few days after that to let things cool off. After a bit I got word through a friend of mine that the militia students and the guards who had started all this were willing to let things go if I apologized. I can imagine why they would want to smooth things over. My brother is a local police officer. And my family is part of the al-Jabouri tribe, which is powerful and well respected in our area. My brother dropped me off in his police vehicle on my first day back and told me to keep in touch with him through the day on my mobile. I went straight away to the security guard I punched, to apologize. I found him in his office. I had broken his nose, it turned out. His eyes were still blackened from the blow. He said to me, My dear, the devil is inside you. What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you control yourself? All we were trying to do was guide you to the right path in life. I didn’t argue with him because I was trying to make nice. I just stood there listening to him and thinking, What an imbecile.
Saddam Hatif Hatim al-Jabouri went on to earn a master’s degree in archaeology from Baghdad University. He was working as a part-time lecturer at Baghdad University in the archaeology department as of May 2009, when the interview was conducted. He said the money was not enough, however, and that he was considering leaving Iraq to find better work outside the country.
Born in 1956, he worked with Time as a driver, bodyguard, and cook from the magazine’s early days covering the war in Iraq. From the beginning Hilali was one of the most beloved personalities in the Baghdad bureau. When not at work he lived in a rented house in Huriya, an area of northwestern Baghdad that fell under the sway of the Mahdi Army. The Mahdi Army’s civilian wing was widely known as simply the Sadr Organization, which opened offices around Baghdad in Shi’ite areas that offered public services and aid. The Mahdi Army and the Sadr Organization were always deeply intertwined, however, and the Sadr Organization’s offices stood as a transparent front for the militia in neighborhoods where its presence was meant to be felt.
I WENT HOME ONE NIGHT and parked my car across the street from my place as usual. All of a sudden this guy walked up and said, You cannot leave your car there. He was not wearing a uniform, but I guessed he was from the Mahdi Army or the Sadr Office. They liked to make a show of being bosses in the street. I said, No, you’re wrong, this is my place, and this is where I always park. I don’t know what his problem was or why he wanted me to move my car. He wasn’t clear with me. I argued with him, and then he got mad. He said, If you don’t move your car, I’ll have you chopped to pieces and dragged through the streets. I decided to ignore him. We have a saying in Arabic: Ruha, baba, ruha. It’s sort of like fuck off, but more dismissive. It means roughly go away, little one. Something you might even say to a dog. I said this to him. The guy replied, Okay, you have a lesson coming. And then he walked off.
About half an hour later I was outside, and someone grabbed my shoulder. I turned and saw this same guy, and he had a hand under his jacket like he was gripping a gun or a knife. I thought it was a knife, actually, since he was talking about chopping me up earlier. In any case I told him I didn’t want to fight and crossed the street. As I was walking away he called after me, saying I was a coward and all this. I should have kept ignoring him, but I lost my temper. I turned around, drew my gun, and put a bullet in the chamber. The guy ran into a nearby shop as soon as I did this and hid. A group of people appeared and got between the two of us. Some of them were telling me to calm down and forget about it, that he was just a punk. But I was angry, and before going away I shouted some insults toward him, cursing his mother and things like this.
About a half hour after that, this guy appeared again and found me on the street. This time he had with him a known member of the Mahdi Army, who came up to me and asked my name politely after the other guy pointed me out. I told him who I was. He wanted to know if I had a gun. I told him yes. Then he asked me to come to the Sadr Office in a very nice way. I said okay, and the three of us went.
The office the Sadrists were using previously belonged to the Ba’ath party. After the fall of Baghdad it stood empty for a while until the Sadrists reopened it. Initially they billed it as a learning center for Shi’ite religious studies, but gradually they started doing community services, things the government should have been doing but wasn’t. They organized trash pickups when no one else would. That was a big thing everyone in the neighborhood was happy about. They did traffic control, and posted night guards around the streets since police almost never entered. They would try to solve people’s problems, too. For example, a neighbor of mine was accidentally wounded by the Americans, and the Sadr Office paid his rent for seven months while he recovered. They would find homes for Shi’ites who’d been forced out of other areas of Baghdad and fled to Huriya. They distributed gasoline and kerosene when both were scarce. These were the kinds of things they did to give themselves a good reputation in the neighborhood. I have to admit they kept order on our streets, and we were grateful, especially in the early days of the looting. No shops were broken into and no vehicles were stolen from our area.
The Sadr Office itself was a tiny place with almost nothing in it. When we entered, there was nothing in the main room except a desk in the middle and a couch along the wall where a few old people sat waiting for I don’t know what. Two brothers ran the office, Adel and Raheem. They had a bad reputation for being involved in sectarian killings and displacement. Both were clean shaven and well dressed, not with heavy beards or looking ragged or anything.
Once inside Adel said to me, Why did you threaten to shoot him? Why, if you were having a dispute, did you not come to us? I said, You are not the police. Why should I come to you? Adel said, No, we are the police now. Then they drew up a letter, a contract, spelling out a kind of truce between me and this guy to settle our fight. It said we promised not to attack each other and to come to the Sadr Office if there were any further problems. And it said some stuff about how the Sadr Office represented the law and all this. They told each of us to sign the document, and we did.
Sami Hilali remained working for Time until the magazine shuttered its Baghdad bureau in the summer of 2009. After that, he found part-time work as a driver with National Public Radio’s Baghdad bureau. He continued to live in Huriya.
She and her husband, Mohammed, were living a fairly comfortable life raising three young children in Baghdad’s Jihad neighborhood at the time of the invasion. He had been working as an accountant for a poultry business, but the outfit folded when the occupation began.
MOHAMMED USED HIS CAR as a taxi for a time to make a little money after his accountant job ended, but then a roadside bomb went off near him one day and he was badly hurt. Shrapnel from the explosion went into his neck and back, and he’s never been able to get around the same since then. So, I had to go to work to support the family. I did domestic work, cleaning and cooking for people. We managed. But we could tell even before the Samarra bombing that sectarian violence was getting bad in Baghdad. We felt we needed to get out of the city. We thought any place would be safer than Baghdad, sensing what was coming.
Mohammed had a little savings, and we decided to buy a house in a small town about halfway between Baghdad and Fallujah. We didn’t know much about the place, honestly. Mostly we bought the house because we could afford it, and the area was close enough to Baghdad, where both of our families live. The town is called al-Haswa. It’s a small place. To tell you the truth I never saw much of it. We moved there but only stayed for a month. This was in late 2005, and the sectarian violence was spreading to that area. We’re a Shi’ite family, and soon after we arrived in al-Haswa we started hearing about violence against Shi’ites. Several Shi’ite homes were burned, and some older Shi’ite residents were found murdered. We decided to go back to Baghdad rather than wait for something to happen to us, even though we had no place to stay. We had almost no money and no income at this point. We spent most of what we had on the house, which we abandoned completely along with everything in it in our rush to go.
Without a home in Baghdad anymore, we had to split up the family among relatives who could take us in. I went to stay with my sister and her husband back in Jihad. I had a newborn baby girl then, and the two of us were allowed to stay there. But there was not enough room for my husband and three other children. They went to stay with relatives of his in a house not too far from where I was living in Jihad. As we settled in with family, the sectarian violence got really bad. I was able to visit my husband and my children only about every three days or so. It was hard to move around with a baby, especially then. The streets in Jihad were chaos. There were bodies in the road every day, Shi’ites and Sunnis. Snipers would attack the markets. I was out one day and saw a man walking on the street. Suddenly a car pulled up, and several men jumped out. They started beating this man very badly right in front of me, and eventually they threw him in the trunk and drove away. These were the kinds of scenes you saw almost every day in the neighborhood. At night you could hear gunshots and explosions. We spent most of the days just sitting in the house, totally terrified.
The Mahdi Army was active in Jihad, and a number of members lived in houses right around my sister’s place. One of the Mahdi Army men came over one day and asked to speak to me. He was a neighbor who noticed my situation and wanted to help. He said the Mahdi Army would give us a house in the area where we could live together. I cannot mention the man’s name, even now. It could cause problems. He was just someone who took pity on us and offered to help. I was told the house belonged to a Shi’ite family who had left the country. So long as we took good care of the house, he said, we could stay there until the family returned. They were very organized about this. They had a list of contents for the house they said would be double-checked when we moved out. Of course we said yes.
Did you have any problems accepting such help from the Mahdi Army, knowing as you must have that they were involved in a lot of the violence you were seeing?
I knew what the Mahdi Army was doing, and I didn’t like it. I don’t think there is ever a reason for a Muslim to kill another Muslim. Just because I accepted help from them doesn’t mean I supported them. You have to understand. We were desperate. They were offering my family a home. How could I refuse? For the sake of my children, for the sake of my marriage, I had to accept. I could not say no. It isn’t even such a nice house in any case. It’s small and very old. The walls had mildew, and the place was almost empty when we arrived. The only furniture was a broken locker for clothes, a wooden wardrobe, a couch with burned cushions, a couple of broken chairs, and an empty oil drum.
We were lucky to have the house, but our situation was still difficult. I began doing domestic work again, getting jobs wherever I could. It’s the only way we survived. On the days I worked, there was food in the house. If I missed a day of work, there was no food. That’s how we lived through the violence, and it’s the same now. I’ve even had to take my oldest daughter, Teba, out of school so she can manage the house while I work. She’s twelve. Someone has to look after the baby and my husband. She cries so much begging me to let her return to school so she can see her friends and continue with her education. I try to explain why she cannot.
The family who owned the house in which Hayfa Kareem Sabi’a lived had given her and her family notice to vacate as of April 2009. They apparently wanted the place back either for themselves or to sell. She was unsure where the family would go next at the time of the interview.
A Shi’ite and former Ba’athist, he had served as a distributor of government food rations in his northern Baghdad neighborhood since 1997. The Saddam Hussein government, under international sanctions, licensed a number of neighborhood merchants like him to distribute government-subsidized staples such as flour, rice, cooking oil, sugar, and tea on a monthly basis. The program continued after the U.S. invasion.
THE OLD REGIME always gave complete shares of rations. After 2003, you never saw complete shares. Things went missing from the ration packages. Three or four items were always gone from each. Part of it was corruption. Part of it was just incompetence of the new government in power. They were not used to running such a program.
My distribution shop is right next to my house. In 2006, I was in charge of monthly rations for about 450 families. I knew all the families well. Twenty-three of them were Sunni families who lived in the area. But as the sectarian violence grew, the Sunni families left our neighborhood. They moved to Sunni neighborhoods mostly on the western side of the city, like a lot of other Sunnis.
Normally, if a family moved, I would take them off my list, and the central distribution office would stop sending me their rations. The family was supposed to re-register wherever they moved. But I left the Sunni families who’d moved on my list. They had not left because they wanted to. They left because they felt threatened. So, I collected their rations, stayed in touch with them, and tried to deliver them whenever I could. It was dangerous for me to go to Sunni areas where they lived and difficult for them to come to me. Often I would meet them somewhere in the center of the city and hand off the rations in the middle of the road.
The Mahdi Army had basically taken over our neighborhood by the middle of 2006. They were very open about it. They established checkpoints on the main roads to search cars coming and going. At the end of my street was a big house that belonged to a family that had been forced to emigrate by the old government to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. The only person in that house for years had been a guard and caretaker hired by the family to watch over the place. When the Mahdi Army moved into our area, they told the guard to leave and made the place a safe house of theirs.
There were always rumors that they were torturing people inside. Neighbors said they heard screams coming from there at night. I heard a scream myself once. I was walking down the street, coming home after doing some shopping. I passed that house and saw what must have been twenty cars parked all around it. There was some kind of gathering. As I was looking toward the place wondering what was going on, I heard someone inside scream. No one dared to ask any questions about what was happening inside. Everyone feared the Mahdi Army. You had to. At that time, in our area, they controlled everything and were involved in everything.
One day in the middle of 2006 they summoned me and a bunch of other ration distributors in the area to that house at the end of my block. They made it seem like an official meeting. They said the government had given them authority to collect any rations dedicated to Sunni families and redistribute them to families of Shi’ite martyrs. Most of the distributors were so scared that they agreed to cooperate without asking questions, even though it was not clear whether there had been such an order from the government.
How could they have me do that to people who have lived for centuries alongside my family? I was not satisfied with the ideology of these Mahdi Army people and decided not to go along with them. They were losers. They were thugs. They were ruining our neighborhood. It used to be a good place, a place where people of both sects wanted to live. Now it had a reputation as a militia haven.
That night I called all of the Sunni families I’d been giving rations to. I told them I was going to go to the central records department and alter the books to make it look like the government had stopped handing out their rations some months before. I could not give them their rations anymore because of the Mahdi Army. They were sure to come and check my records as they collected food from the distributors. But at least I could keep them from stealing food that was not theirs. A lot of the Sunni families told me I should just cooperate with the Mahdi Army, especially if trying to trick them would put me at risk. It was risky, but I knew how to do it so they would not know.
I went to the central records department. Two friends of mine worked there, a Sunni woman and a Shi’ite man. They didn’t like the Mahdi Army. Few did. I explained the situation to them, and they helped me doctor the records to make it look like the rations for the Sunni families on my list stopped months before. After that, anyone looking at my records would see no signs of rations for Sunnis they might take. It was easy to do so no one would know. And the Mahdi Army does not have a reputation for smarts after all. They are quite stupid in general. If they really wanted to get a hold of the food, they would have gone to the central records department first and presented the distributors like me with lists they had gotten there.
I got married around this time, too. Her name is E’nas. She is Sunni, but neither of our families cared about this sectarian thing. We weren’t like that. She was a friend of my sister. I saw her just a couple of times with my sister that year before we got married but felt something in my heart toward her. From the time I first saw her to the time we were married was less than a month. I would have done it in two weeks if I could. It’s not much of a love story. It was not a time for romance. Love has no taste in war. When you see the misery of others, how can you love? When you go out and see all these black banners, and burned houses, homes belonging to people you know standing empty because they have been forced to leave, how can you have feelings of love?
Rasim Hassan Haikel was still serving as a rations distributor as of January 2009, when the interview was conducted in Baghdad. He said the Mahdi Army’s safe house at the end of his block had been closed down after several raids by American forces starting in 2008. But the Mahdi Army, he said, still maintained an underground presence in the neighborhood.