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The taming of Sadr
City
By Michael Schwartz
Sadr City - the overcrowded,
under-serviced 3 million-person Baghdad slum that
has been the site of some of the fiercest fighting
in Iraq - is the linchpin of the war.
Though there have been more spectacular
battles in Fallujah and Najaf, Sadr City is of
paramount importance because it is the center of
the Shi'ite rebellion, and the Shi'ites represent
60% of the Iraqi population. As a consequence, the
Mehdi army - the military arm of the Sadrist
movement that has dominated the area's politics
for the past quarter century - has become the most
important of all the insurgent groups, and a close
look how it operates in its home base yields some
startling conclusions about the trajectory of the
struggle for control of Iraq:
The Sadrists have developed an effective
political-military strategy aimed at converting
Sadr City into a "liberated area", in the classic
guerrilla warfare model.
Their main military strategy is to expel the
US from their domain; only when they are under
attack themselves do they venture outside Sadr
City to attack US bases or supply routes.
The al-Sadr organization is attempting to
construct a coherent "dual" government  that replaces the
central government and which administers the usual
set of public services - from traffic control to
apprehending street criminals - within limits set
by their inability to coordinate with a national
government. This proto-government has been
particularly assiduous in addressing the number
one problem of public order, street crime, and has
actually cooperated with the local police in this
campaign.
Mehdi soldiers - the guerrilla forces led by
the Sadrists - though prone to thuggery, are
largely under the control of this dual government,
which is led by civilians - tribal leaders and
Muslim clerics. The Mehdi soldiers act as the
police force within the community.
The Sadrists have been surprisingly successful
in co-opting the Iraqi police, by rewarding them
for working on community issues and fighting them
when they participate in efforts to suppress the
rebel political-military structure. American
military complaints about the unreliability of
their Iraqi trainees is actually a reflection of
successfully applied guerrilla policy.
The Sadrists have begun to enforce strict
Islamist fundamentalism by suppressing such "moral
crimes" as liquor sales and prostitution. The have
utilized an ugly brand of vigilantism
(firebombing, assaults and even homicide) to
remove moral criminals from the community.
The Sadrists, and parallel groups in other
cities (notably Fallujah), have publicly denounced
the spectacular bombings perpetrated by various
terrorists groups, complaining about their
negative impact on the lives and livelihoods of
Iraqi civilians and calling for an active alliance
with the Iraqi police in suppressing foreign
jihadis and domestic terrorists.
The organization in Sadr City is an echo of
similar developments in Sunni cities (with
Fallujah as the center), and it may foreshadow
similar developments in the all-important Shi'ite
south. The American attacks on various Iraqi
cities, including the brutal battle of Fallujah,
was an attempt to reverse this trend toward
self-governed cities into which American forces
rarely intrude.
The existence of these dual governments in
many cities rebuts American claims that US
withdrawal would result in chaos. Ironically, just
the reverse is true; US success in defeating the
guerrillas would result in chaos, whereas a
guerrilla victory would bring greater stability
(and perhaps too strict an order) to the Iraqi
cities.
To understand these non-intuitive
conclusions, we begin with the two battles, in
Najaf, which converted Muqtada al-Sadr - a young
cleric who inherited the leadership of the Sadrist
movement after his father and uncle were martyred
- from a rather obscure militant into the one of
the most visible and admired leaders in Iraqi
society.
The battles in
Najaf
Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi army
were thrust into the center of Iraqi politics by
the two battles with American troops in Najaf in
April and August last year. In both battles, the
US sought to recapture the Shrine of the Imam Ali
from the Mehdi army, and the battles were
concentrated in the historic cemetery near the
shrine and the densely packed residential and
commercial district surrounding it. The second
battle, particularly, annihilated the neighborhood
and inflicted irreparable damage on the lives and
livelihoods of the local residents. Dexter Filkins
of the NY Times (August 28, 2004) described it:
A scene of devastation. Hotels had
crumbled into the street. Cars lay blackened and
twisted where they had been hit. Goats and
donkeys lay dead on the sidewalks. Pilgrims from
out of town and locals coming from home walked
the streets agape, shaking their heads, stunned
by the devastation before them. Both
sides claimed victory in both battles, and each
had good cause to do so. But beneath this
disagreement over outcomes lay a larger mystery
about why these decisive battles took place in
Najaf. Since both sides agreed (particularly in
the second battle) that the US was determined to
deal a death blow to the Mehdi army, why weren't
the attacks launched at its principle base in Sadr
City, particularly since the presence of the
sacred Shrine in Najaf made it much more difficult
for the US to unleash its most devastating
offensive weapons.
The difference between
the two settings lies in a simple fact: in Sadr
City, the Mehdi soldiers were protecting their
home neighborhoods from the ongoing US military
incursions; in Najaf they were outsiders who had
entered the city for the precise purpose of
protecting the shrine, and had brought with them a
ferocious battle with the US Marines that
devastated the city. The US Army chose to attack
the militia in Najaf - after experiencing
frustration with attempts to assault Sadr City -
"because Sadr's ragtag militia doesn't enjoy local
support". (Christian Science Monitor, August 13,
2004)
While the Mehdi army could be seen
as courageously defending Najaf from US invasion
(and this is exactly the view taken by many
residents and the vast majority of the
international Shi'ite community); many local
residents and pilgrims felt that the militia could
have prevented all the carnage if they had never
come to Najaf. Before the militia arrived, there
was almost no fighting, as demonstrated by the
huge throngs of pilgrims. During the Saddam
Hussein regime, such pilgrimages had been severely
limited, and thus his demise resulted in a
mini-economic boom for local merchants.
Once the Mehdi army arrived and the
fighting began, tourism died and the lives and
livelihood of innumerable citizens were destroyed.
During the first siege, the opinion of many was
expressed by local cleric Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi,
who told NY Times reporter Abdul Razzaq al-Saeidy
(April 24, 2004):
It's not brave to take refuge in the
house or the mosque or the markets and use women
and children as human shields ... If that
happens, the [US] soldiers will attack Najaf and
our enemies will happily see our blood flow.
This sentiment was elaborated during
the second battle by Abu Muhammed, a pilgrim from
Kut, who told Times reporter Filkins:
"I blame Muqtada al-Sadr for what
happened here, and the Iraqi government, too,"
said an old Iraqi man, identifying himself as
Abu Muhammad. "We, the simple people, are paying
for their mistakes." Mr Muhammad seemed to speak
for many Iraqis here, who in dozens of
interviews over the last several days denounced
not only Mr Sadr but the Iraqi prime minister,
Iyad Allawi, as well. With their homes and
businesses in ruins, it seemed for many Iraqis
that most of Iraq's new leaders had failed.
"Look at all the damage," an Iraqi man said to a
friend as he walked down a street whose every
building had been broken and crushed. "Let God
take revenge on the Americans for this."
Though their hatred for the US was
undiminished, many residents and pilgrims bitterly
resented the presence of the Sadrist militia. In
this view, the Mehdi, no matter how well
intentioned, had created a war that killed many
innocent civilians, destroyed a large part of a
holy city, and devastated the lives of a whole
community.
Sadr City as a classic
'liberated area'
Things operated very
differently Sadr City, where the Mehdi army was
integrated into local life. The Sadrist movement
had erected a governing structure that could
viably lead the community, including a legislature
(made up of tribal leaders) and an executive
branch made up of movement activists (including
key clerics), with the Mehdi army playing the role
of the police. For the near term, this incipient
government had two key tasks: to make Sadr City
inaccessible to US troops (and whatever allies it
could muster among Iraqi armed forces); and to
institute "law and order" within its boundaries.
These dual goals, if successfully achieved, would
offer Sadr City a semblance of a normal existence
that had been disrupted when the US toppled the
Saddam regime. It could not, of course, solve the
larger economic and infrastructural problems that
were preventing the reconstruction and revival of
Iraqi society; those problems could only be
addressed if and when the national government
stopped being a part of the problem.
Sadrist military
strategy
Looking first at the relationship
with the American army, we note that the Mehdi
army has adopted a distinctly defensive posture.
Militia members rarely attack American convoys
outside Sadr City, nor do they lob grenades into
American bases located around Baghdad, two
strategies they used regularly during the Najaf
battles. On the other hand, once the Americans
enter Sadr City, the Mehdi usually resist
ferociously. They are determined to carve out
areas into which Americans are at least hesitant
to come, and, over time, make these areas
more-or-less immune to American incursions. This
goal may be unreachable in the sense that US
military superiority will always allow it to mount
an attack from the air or to march through the
community by massing a force of sufficient size;
but if the end result is that Americans come to
Sadr City infrequently and stay briefly, then the
guerrillas will have won a sufficient victory to
proceed with their broader plans.
Phillip
Robertson, writing in Salon.com, described how
this strategy played out in practice when he
described the reaction of Sergeant Reggie Butler
(the ranking non-commissioned officer of the 1st
Platoon of the 1st Cavalry) to orders that his
unit patrol one of the areas in Sadr City that the
Mehdi were most determined to defend:
Butler instantly understood that the
officers in the operations center had given the
1st Platoon the worst patrol in the Shi'ite
ghetto, a loop around the entire northern side
of the city. It was also a provocative one. The
Bradleys would go within blocks of the al-Hekma
mosque, a place where the Mehdi army has laid
many ambushes and constantly fires at American
patrols. During this patrol, there
was no fighting because both sides stayed within
certain unspoken boundaries. The Americans did not
attempt to actively search for guerrillas,
contenting themselves with a "snap checkpoint",
which involved "choking off traffic in both
directions, while Iraqi soldiers searched cars
full of young men". The Mehdi spotters, for their
part, contented themselves with tracking the
progress of the patrol:
At each of the stops, someone fired
a few shots from a rifle. "When you hear that
pop-pop from an AK, they are tracking you.
That's how they tell everybody where you are," a
gunner explained. The invisible men were
watching us and holding their fire ... Three
hours later, the ceasefire hadn't collapsed and
Butler's platoon had only had to endure a hail
of rocks thrown by Iraqi boys. They had trouble
believing their good luck. But this
"truce" was only situational. Several days
earlier, a vicious firefight had erupted. In this
case, the patrol that invaded Sadr City was intent
on searching a residence that the Americans
suspected was being used to sell arms. Robertson
described the events this way:
On a busy street in the middle of
the day, the people and traffic disappeared.
Spotters for the Mehdi army had seen the
Americans coming in their convoy and signaled
the fighters, who were ready to shoot from
alleys and rooftops. As the street cleared out,
a heavy soldier named Barron was yelling over to
me in the back of the last Bradley ... "See
that? No people. That's bad." Seconds after he
said it, the street around the Humvees
disappeared in clouds of dust where the Mehdi
army bullets hit the ground. The dust came up
around the wheels. It looked like the Humvees
were sinking. The heavy guns on the vehicles
shuddered. Gunners standing up in the Humvees
were returning fire, but it was hard to see if
they hit any of the Mehdi fighters who were
trying to hit the convoy. It was a gun battle on
an empty street against invisible men ... When
we drove into the ambush, the 1st Cavalry
soldiers were on their way to meet the Iraqi
police and search an arms dealer's house. As the
convoy arrived at the dealer's street, the four
Iraqi police trucks slowed down but didn't stop.
The Iraqis were supposed to conduct the search
while the Americans provided security ... With
the Iraqi police missing and the locals firing
rockets at the convoy, Alpha Company abandoned
the cordon-and-search and headed for the base at
50 miles an hour, narrowly missing a roadside
bomb. There are three noteworthy
elements to this event that speak to the strategy
of the Mehdi army in Sadr City. First, this
incursion involved the invasion of someone's home,
one of the most provocative acts the US routinely
undertakes. The rules of engagement for such
action call for smashing the door (rather than
giving the suspect a warning by knocking) and
extremely aggressive behavior inside; actions that
are pregnant with the possibility of greater
violence, including death, if the residents resist
or act in a suspicious manner. Sadr City residents
consider this terrifying procedure a heinous
attack on respected members of the community.
Because of notoriously faulty intelligence, the
suspects are usually not guilty of anything; but
even if this suspect were an arms dealer, his
neighbors would not see this as a crime. After
all, an arms dealer supplies his neighbors with
needed guns to resist crime or the Americans.
Because the resistance has spies within the Iraqi
police, they knew the destination of this mission;
and were able to prevent an American assault on a
respected resident of the neighborhood; and to
create a deterrent against future house invasions.
This sharply contrasts with the actions in Najaf
and Karbala, where the battles were between
militia members and US troops, both of whom did
not live there.
Second, the conduct
of the battle was designed to protect the
guerrillas from casualties. By occupying strategic
places in the buildings above the convoy, the
Mehdi were able to fire at the American and Iraqi
soldiers while using the buildings to protect
themselves from the superior weaponry of the
American troops. As Robertson put it, "It was a
gun battle on an empty street against invisible
men." Typically, the guerrillas sought to start
and finish battles before gunships could arrive,
thus reducing the danger to themselves and to the
buildings. They could easily hide their guns and
pose as civilians to escape capture; a strategy
that often did not work among the frequently
unsympathetic townspeople in Najaf. This posture
of protectiveness to the guerrilla cadre reflects
classic guerrilla strategy, which seeks to fight
battles only when casualties can be limited. (It
of course completely precludes suicide attacks, a
strategy that has not been practiced by the
Sadrists.)
Third, the community was
forewarned about the impending action, and given a
chance to evacuate the area. Our attention is
called to this by Robertson's dramatic remark, "On
a busy street in the middle of the day, the people
and traffic disappeared." They disappeared because
of the warnings issued by the guerrillas that a
battle was brewing.
It is important to
note that warning the civilians also warned the
Americans, since the quiet streets were a sign
that the American 1st Cavalry noticed and
understood. The Mehdi army was therefore
sacrificing the element of surprise in order to
reduce civilian casualties.
Evacuation of
civilians from the battlefield is a central
element in winning a guerrilla war. High levels of
civilian casualties alienate the local population
(even if they hate the invader). This sort of
consideration is part of the explanation for the
almost unanimous respect for Muqtada al-Sadr in
Sadr City, His standing is indicated by the
following incident reported by Washington Post
reporter Scott Wilson during a patrol conducted by
American and Iraqi troops (July 6, 2004):
A column of six US military vehicles
and a flatbed truck carrying Iraqi National
Guard soldiers stopped in traffic next to an
outdoor market. A child emerged from the
roadside stalls, carrying a cardboard poster of
Muqtada al-Sadr ... On tiptoes, the child handed
the poster to the Iraqi soldier manning a
machine gun, as US soldiers watched in dismay.
The Iraqi soldier, part of a nascent security
force trained and funded by the United States,
held Sadr's picture aloft for a gathering,
cheering mob ... "If we took it from them now,
this whole place would explode," said Sgt Adam
Brantley, 24, of Gulf Shores, Ala, watching from
behind the wheel of a Humvee. The
testimony of the American sergeant - that the
community would "explode" if they tampered with
the display of the Sadr portrait - is graphic
evidence of the Sadrist base in this neighborhood
(and most neighborhoods in Sadr City). This
military strategy contrasts sharply with the
orientation adopted by much of the Iraqi
resistance. Many groups try to undermine the
viability of the occupation army by attacking
convoys and bases in order to inflict casualties,
by fighting sustained battles designed to use up
huge amounts of the US's ammunition; and by
bombing supply convoys in order to deprive the
military of needed ordinance. This strategy
intends to exhaust the army and the American
people by making the war expensive in every
respect. The Sadrist strategy abandons all these
goals in favor of carving out liberated areas free
of American influence and - most particularly -
free of the havoc and destruction caused by the
various activities of the American armed forces.
It involves withdrawing into Sadr City, not
engaging in battles or even demonstrations outside
its confines, but creating a strong deterrent
against incursions by American armed forces.
Sadrist dual government
Insofar
as this military strategy is successful, it
enables the creation of a viable governing
structure. Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lasseter
described how this looks in practice (Houston
Chronicle, July 17, 2004):
From directing traffic to organizing
blood drives, the militia overseen by firebrand
cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is taking control of
Baghdad's largest neighborhood, even as Iraqi
and US officials demand that the group disband.
Al-Sadr's office, not the beleaguered police
station, is often the first stop for Sadr City
residents who want to report a crime in this
teeming slum of 3 million. "Who runs Sadr City?
Only the Mehdi army," said Ali Qassim, who works
in an ice cream shop off one of the area's dusty
boulevards ... On Tuesday morning, Iraqi police
near downtown Baghdad arrested at least 500
Iraqis in a roundup targeting petty crooks and
organized crime groups, but the sweep didn't
extend to Sadr City. To do so would require the
Mehdi army's cooperation. "If there is something
wrong in this city, they will fix it," said
Jasem Jaber, an Iraqi policeman assigned to Sadr
City ... Most residents interviewed said the
Mehdi army - named after the Shi'ite Muslim
messiah - doesn't need to carry weapons anymore
because it's in charge. Christian
Parenti, in a thorough Nation article put it more
bluntly:
If there is anything like "progress"
in Iraq it takes place here, under the radar, in
the rubble of occupation. Sadr's followers,
despite many faults, including thuggishness and
misogyny, are central to creating what order
there is in this ravaged ghetto. This
assertion of the Mehdi army as the backbone of law
and order is not a simple usurpation of power by
an armed gang. The Sadrists, like most successful
guerrilla armies, are the enforcement arm of a
politically controlled revolutionary movement.
Parenti provides a vivid snapshot of how this
larger structure operates in his description of
the Sadrist functionary in the al-Thawra district
of Sadr City:
I try to meet Muqtada's local
representative, a 29-year-old sheik named Hassan
Edhary, but he is on the run. The First Cav
wants him, dead or alive. His two predecessors
are already in Abu Ghraib. A few weeks ago, US
tanks blew up this office. Reconstruction [of
the office] started the next day at dawn.
When Edhary arrived suddenly at his
office later that week, he sounded and acted very
much like other politicians:
A stream of supplicants files
through Edhary's little office, asking for
advice, money and letters. One lives in an IDP
[internally displaced people] camp and has no
roof. Can the organization help? Edhary says, "I
don't have enough people to go investigate your
claim. But if you can find a religious sheik in
your area to write a letter on your behalf, then
come back." A young doctor explains that a group
of medical workers has some money and wants to
open a free or low-cost pharmacy to serve the
people. Can the office contribute some money?
The sheik leans close and plays with his string
of black prayer beads as the young man talks.
Finally, he tells the doctor that Hussein, our
hacker pal [and Parenti's interpreter], can help
the clinic with its computers. Hussein and the
doctor exchange numbers. There are
several interesting elements to this situation
that help us to understand ways in which guerrilla
war is essentially connected to a larger political
structure:
Most visible is the fact that Edhary is the
accepted political authority. While such
petitions could, in principle, be carried to the
US-appointed interim administration, in practice
virtually all local residents look only to the
Sadrists.
Almost as visible is Edhary's extreme
resource poverty. He is unable to help a
clearly worthy medical cause, except to provide
donated computer advice. This is a symptom both of
the poverty of Sadr City and of the fact that the
guerrilla government has no sure means of
accumulating resources. (We should note, however,
that they have by-and-large refused to extort
funds from the community through the coercive
power of the Mehdi - a mistake some Mehdi soldiers
made in Najaf.)
Somewhat less visible is the rest of the
governing structure. Edhary refers the IDP
resident to his local cleric, who must validate
the claim before he passes on it. This could
easily be a temporizing action (like so many other
public officials), but it also reveals the
existence of an elaborate tribal and clerical
structure that is the skeleton of the dual
government.
Though the resources are
meager and Edhary's presence is made episodic by
his "wanted, dead or alive" status, the dual
government is nevertheless visible and accessible
to the local community. As long as his decisions
are even-handed; as long as his authority is
buttressed by both the Mehdi army and by respected
community leaders, and as long as he can avoid the
clutches of the Americans, Sheik Edhary will
probably retain legitimacy among his constituents
- a legitimacy that is aggressively withheld from
the US and its appointed interim administration.
Law and order in Sadr City
Sheik
Edhary is one element in a much larger system of
administration headed by the Tribal Council, a
legislative body made up of 28 members. The
council issued its most dramatic edict in June
last year in response to a year of problematic
public order after the fall of Saddam. (Though
order was largely restored in the fall of 2003
after the Mehdi army was formed, it became much
worse when the US forces began their campaign to
eliminate the Mehdi).
The new edict,
circulated by leaflet throughout Sadr City, sought
to reverse this trend with a comprehensive ban on
a daunting range of anti-social activities, all of
them enforced by the Mehdi army and all of them
punishable by death. (NY Times, July 16, 2004)
Among the offenses were:
Street crime, notably hijacking (a
favorite of street criminals who resell stolen
vehicles and/or the contents of stolen trucks),
kidnapping (a lucrative and widespread criminal
activity targeted at prosperous citizens, who pay
as much as $50,000 to redeem family members), and
robbery (both from commercial sites and from
individual homes). Street crime is, by all
measures, what most Iraqis consider to be the
worst problem of post-Saddam Iraq.
Political crimes, including both
collaboration with the US government and terrorist
activities. The leaflet specifically mentioned
members of al-Qaeda, as well as locally bred
Wahhabis and Saddam loyalists. (This should not be
construed as purely anti-Sunni; the Sadrists
vocally and physically supported the Sunni
guerrillas in Fallujah and elsewhere.)
Moral crimes, including prostitution,
pimping, pornography, gambling and alcohol sales.
These crimes reflect the deep streak of Islamist
fundamentalism that forms a core part of the
Sadrist movement. There are several noteworthy
elements to this policy.
First, the
list was circulated so broadly that even the
American mass media took notice of it. The broad
circulation reflects confidence among Sadrist
leadership that the campaign would find favor with
local residents.
Second, the list
of crimes, particularly the moral crimes like
selling liquor, was more than a little offensive
to Western sensibilities. We will address this
issue at length below, but in this context we need
to point out that extreme hostility toward these
moral crimes is organic to the Sadr City
community, and not something imposed from the
outside. While many Iraqis are secular and oppose
such laws, the Sadr City community is dominated by
tribal leaders, clerics and citizens whose
fundamentalist version of Islam supports such bans
(even if some or most of them find the punishment
excessive - see below). For most Sadr City
residents, therefore, the morality expressed in
this leaflet was very resonant; and it did not
generate the revulsion experienced by most Western
observers.
Third, capital
punishment for thievery is excessive at least,
while it is unimaginably brutal for gambling or
selling liquor. The Sadrists themselves preferred
to use much less drastic (but often extremely
brutal) means of enforcing their new legal system;
but as long as the Americans controlled the larger
political context, they had no way to detain
prisoners or punish them with normal judicial
sanctions. Their ability to threaten perpetrators
therefore depended on punishment that could be
enforced without courts and jails. Most such
punishments are morally troubling. (More on this
below.)
Fourth, for most residents
of Sadr City the moral crimes were secondary to
the promise that the Mehdi army would act
decisively against the most pervasive problem
faced by virtually everyone in Iraq: street crime.
In a survey conducted (ironically by the American
interim government) at about the same time, an
overwhelming proportion of Baghdad residents had
listed personal safety as the most important
problem they faced. Street crime (like robbery,
hijacking and kidnapping) was by far the most
important, IEDs (street bombs designed to destroy
American Humvees and tanks, but which all too
frequently also injured or killed civilians) were
a distant second; and the American troops
themselves (whose reckless shooting whenever they
chased guerrillas accounting for a substantial
proportion of civilian injuries) were a close
third. (The devastating use of gunships and
bombers had not yet begun when this survey was
completed.) Mehdi's army was proposing to
eliminate all three: by arresting and/or executing
street criminals, by driving out al-Qaeda and
other terrorists who were responsible for the IEDs
in heavily populated areas, and by keeping the
American forces out of the community.
The Sadrists and street crime
In
the next few days, the Mehdi army proudly
advertised the results of its enforcement
campaign, including the arrest of an organized
ring of thieves who had been stealing from a food
warehouse that services the local community.
Rather than execute these thieves, they delivered
them to the Iraqi police, an option made available
by their quasi-symbiotic relations with formal law
enforcement. (NY Times, July 17, 2004)
The
complexity of the Mehdi policing function is
illustrated by Sheik Edhary's handling of a crisis
that occurred while Michael Parenti was observing
his office hours:
Some sweaty Mehdi men rush in.
They've just busted looters with four stolen
trucks full of sugar. It turns out the trucks
belong to a European [non-governmental
organization] NGO, not the government or some
rich company. The sheik wants the vehicles and
sugar returned, via the police, to the NGO. "We
have the trucks in storage. Can we turn them
over tomorrow?" asks the rotund Mehdi man in
charge of the bust. He's wearing a dirty
football jersey. "I am your servant. I have
given my whole life to the religion, but I
really cannot do this tonight." Edhary leans
away from the men at his desk and snaps taut a
section of his black prayer beads, then counts
the little glass balls. He is "asking God" for
advice. An even bead count means yes; odd means
no. "'No! No! Absolutely not," the sheik bounces
up from the desk, his outer black robe slipping
from one shoulder. He's addressing the sweaty
man. "The trucks must be returned tonight. If
the trucks do not move now we will be blamed.
Either you do it now, or just go and don't do it
at all. I will find someone else." The sheik is
electric with stress but dignified. "I am your
servant, as you wish," says the Mehdi guy, but
he looks pissed as he and his posse sweep out to
deal with the trucks. Much is revealed
here:
This scene underscores civilian control
over Mehdi's army. It disconfirms the image of
the Mehdi as undisciplined fanatics dictating to a
cowed civilian population. Instead, the Mehdi
soldiers meekly follow the orders of a
religious/civil authority, much like normal urban
government operations.
Edhary's decision demonstrates that the
guerrilla government operates within a logical
legal framework. If the owner of the trucks
had been the government, or the United States, or
"some rich company" (read, "non-Iraqi
corporation"), then the truck and its contents
could be confiscated and utilized by the guerrilla
government. Since the truck belonged to an NGO, it
had to be returned. The apparent illogic is
unraveled if we reference this fact of war: the
Iraqi administration, the US occupation and the
multinationals are all part of the occupying force
and therefore are the enemy. Since time
immemorial, warring countries have confiscated the
goods of their enemy, even when they were first
illegally taken by pirates or thieves.
Edhary's insistence on the immediate return
of the trucks reveals his concern about public
opinion. Any delay might result in community
residents thinking that the guerrillas themselves
were involved in the theft. That is, Edhary is
determined to convince his constituency that the
local authority follows both a larger morality and
its own laws.
Edhary's consultation with God is more than
symbolic; it represents the marriage of religion
and government. The dual government that the
Sadrists are erecting is embedded in Shi'ite
Islam, and the functionaries work simultaneously
as clerics and government officials. This
integration is a source of major complaint by
secular Iraqis, and a key point of condemnation by
the occupation.
When the Americans could
not control the looting after the fall of the
Saddam government, the Mehdi soldiers were
established by local clerics as alternate law
enforcement (Miami Herald, April 13, 2004). The
uprising in April, 2004 transformed them into an
insurrectionary Shi'ite army, but they have
retained both their police function and their
subservience to civilian authority. By Spring of
2004 their police credentials were so entrenched
that the Mehdis often patrolled their
neighborhoods or directed traffic without
firearms. (Washington Post, July 9, 2004)
The Sadrists and the local
police
The local insurrectionary leadership
cooperate with the police around issues of mutual
interest (like street crime and traffic control),
but unrelentingly attack the police when they
participate in American attempts to enter the
community or attack the guerrillas. We have
already seen that during the summer of 2004, the
police left criminal enforcement in Sadr City to
the Mehdis; and that the Sadrists delivered
arrested criminals to the police rather than
execute them. This was the carrot of cooperation.
And we have also seen the stick of violent
confrontation. In the aborted attempt to apprehend
the suspected arms dealer, the Iraqi police drove
right past the house in order to avoid the
inevitable battle that would ensue if they
attempted to complete the operation. In other
circumstances, when they did not or could not
avoid American sponsored operations, the Mehdis
fought them as ferociously as they fought the
Americans (Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 7,
2004). In one incident, the Sadrists co-existed
peacefully with an Iraqi police station until the
Americans used it as a launching place for an
incursion into the community. The next day, the
station was attacked and burned to the ground.
American media have repeatedly reported
the unwillingness of Iraqi military forces to
fight the guerrillas. In one instance, an attempt
to ambush guerrillas setting bombs was canceled
because "Iraqi troops refused to participate". The
American commander concluded, "They don't want to
work." But the same troops worked hard on other
assignments (Washington Post, July 9, 2004). The
problem is not cowardice, but an unwillingness to
engage the guerrillas. In a rare moment of public
candor, Iraqi Major Mehdi Aziz told New York Times
reporter Ian Fisher "We are not going to fight our
people." Or, as reporter Anne Barnard wrote in the
International Herald Tribune (September 6, 2004):
Police officers such as Razak
Abdelkarim, 20, say that their friends and
neighbors are members of the Mehdi army and that
the police cannot function without their
consent. "We are in the middle," he said. "If we
join the Mehdi army, the Americans will kill us,
and if we go and work with the Americans, the
Mehdi army will kill us." The problem
of police refusing to fight guerrillas became so
pervasive that it gave rise to what might be an
apocryphal story of premier Allawi, reported by
Paul McGeough of the Sydney Morning Herald.
McGeough talked to three eyewitnesses about
Allawi's alleged execution of seven suspected
insurgents. According to one of the eyewitnesses:
The prisoners were against the wall
and we were standing in the courtyard when the
Interior Minister said that he would like to
kill them all on the spot. Allawi said that they
deserved worse than death - but then he pulled
the pistol from his belt and started shooting
them. Re-enacting the killings, one witness
stood three to four meters in front of a wall
and swung his outstretched arm in an even arc,
left to right, jerking his wrist to mimic the
recoil as each bullet was fired. Then he raised
a hand to his brow, saying: "He was very close.
Each was shot in the head." Whether
or not this incident actually occurred, it is the
rationale for the action that is most important.
One of the witnesses, defending the act, stated:
Allawi wanted to send a message to
his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if
they kill anyone - especially, they are not to
worry about tribal revenge. He said there would
be an order from him and the Interior Ministry
that all would be fully protected.
This incident (or the myth of this
incident) is persuasive testimony to the power of
the guerrilla movement, not just in Sadr City, but
in all the regions where the resistance has taken
hold. The Iraqi police are reluctant, resistant
and even mutinous when asked to fight
locally-based guerrillas because they themselves
are members of the communities that nurture,
protect and applaud the guerrillas.
The
Sadrists and moral crimes
Because the
Interim government is secular and because the
Americans frown on both the content and harshness
of Islamist morality, the Mehdis cannot deliver
moral violators over to the Iraqi police. As a
consequence, their ad hoc enforcement of these
rules tends toward vigilantism.
This is
illustrated by a July, 2004, edict that all stores
in the Kadhimiya district stop selling liquor
within 48 hours, adding that "alcohol, songs and
prostitutes" were no longer permitted in what
would henceforth be a "sacred" zone (Washington
Post, July 20, 2004). This enforcement philosophy
was explained by Malek Suwadi al-Mohamadawi, a
tribal sheik who helped draft the original
proclamation outlawing liquor sales: "If they
admit they are doing something wrong and say they
will give it up, this will be fine. But if they
don't stop, they should face these punishments."
(NY Times July 16, 2004)
In the next few
days, many stores eliminated liquor from their
offerings, while some of those who refused were
firebombed. At least one store owner died in these
attacks. The most spectacular attack, described by
NY Times reporter Ian Fisher, took place after the
earlier warnings and attacks had failed to close a
key distributor:
Luckily it was mostly beer - 6,000
cans of it - that was shot up Sunday. But the
liquor distributor in Baghdad was hit with a
full-scale assault: several cars and a minivan
full of masked men with guns and grenades
sprayed the building with hundreds of rounds.
Fifty workers and customers huddled for safety
on a second floor as it was raked with bullets.
"It was a miracle of God that we survived this,"
said one of the liquor distributor's managers.
He would not give his name. "Do you want me to
have my head cut off?" he asked. The manager was
afraid because this seemed more serious than
just an attack on a liquor dealer, a fairly
common crime with the rise of religion in Iraq
since Saddam Hussein was removed from power last
year. The police said that the liquor store raid
on Sunday was a well-planned attack by the Mehdi
army. In an even more spectacular
incident, the Sadrists demolished a village known
for sexual libertinism (Financial Times, April 1,
2004):
A Shi'ite militia group loyal to
radical cleric Muqtada Sadr has wiped out a
large village in central Iraq which refused to
adhere to its puritanical creed, killing many of
its inhabitants and forcing the rest to flee.
Hundreds of militiamen from the Mehdi's army
group besieged the town of Kawali, 10 km south
of the city of Diwaniya, with mortars, and
smashed walls with sledgehammers three weeks
ago, reducing to rubble the entire village famed
for its dancers and prostitutes since the 1920s.
The Sadrists made no attempt to deny
their role in this demolition. Sayid Yahya
Shubari, the commander of the Mehdi's army in
Diwaniya, told Financial Times reporter Nicolas
Pelham:
The Mehdi's attacked after receiving
reports that pimps had kidnapped a 12-year-old
girl. "It was a well of debauchery, drunkenness
and mafia, and they were buying and selling
girls," he said. He said Kawali was flattened
after the villagers shot an emissary he had sent
to negotiate with them. And once
again, this was not just an ex-cathedra activity
by a self-appointed vigilante force. FT reporter
Pelham found considerable support for the
destruction of Kawali among the local population:
In Diwaniya, a town where women are
all but absent on the streets, many younger
residents and some policemen praised the Mehdi
army's methods as salvaging their town's
reputation. "People would come from all over the
south, and even Baghdad to dance with the Kawali
girls," said Bassam al-Najafi, a Diwaniya
restaurateur. "Women were leaving their husbands
to work there. They are cleansing the town."
The Sadrists have a great deal of
energy for eliminating moral crimes, and they are
willing to impose severe penalties on those who
resist them. Even taking into account their
guerrilla status, which deprives them of the
routine methods of law enforcement that might make
the penalties less harsh but more certain, the
zeal and determination that animate these moral
crusades presage a strict Islamist civil society
if they consolidate their leadership in the
Shi'ite regions of Iraq.
This combination
of questionable morality and murderous vigilantism
is abhorrent to liberal Western sensibilities. But
it is also apparent is that the social base for
these policies is very broad. As the above account
indicates, Diwaniya - even without Sadrist
leadership - is a town were "women are all but
absent on the streets" and Sadr City has long been
known for the fundamentalism of its population.
The campaigns to align local law enforcement with
Islamist fundamentalism springs from a deep well
of moral conviction in the community; it is not an
imposition by a small, morally righteous,
minority. The question of religious tolerance in
Sadr City and other fundamentalist areas,
therefore, represents one of the enduring dilemmas
of popular sovereignty in Iraq. The Sadrists and
numerous Sunni Muslim tendencies have repeatedly
indicated their willingness to impose their
morality on the non-believers in their communities
and in the country as a whole (though they have at
times enunciated a more tolerant approach to their
secular neighbors). This issue in Iraq is not
fundamentally different from the same issue in the
United States, where evangelical Christians seek
to embed their morality into the criminal code.
Journalist Naomi Klein, writing in The
Nation, summarized the political dilemma for
Western liberals thusly:
There is no question that Iraqis
face a mounting threat from religious
fanaticism, but US forces won't protect Iraqi
women and minorities from it any more than they
have protected Iraqis from being tortured in Abu
Ghraib or bombed in Fallujah and Sadr City.
Liberation will never be a trickle-down effect
of this invasion because domination, not
liberation, was always its goal. Even under the
best scenario, the current choice in Iraq is not
between Sadr's dangerous fundamentalism and a
secular democratic government made up of trade
unionists and feminists. It's between open
elections - which risk handing power to
fundamentalists but would also allow secular and
moderate religious forces to organize - and
rigged elections designed to leave the country
in the hands of Iyad Allawi and the rest of his
CIA/Mukhabarat-trained thugs, fully dependent on
Washington for both money and might. This is why
Sadr is being hunted - not because he is a
threat to women's rights but because he is the
single greatest threat to US military and
economic control of Iraq. The
Sadrists and the terrorists
The Sadrists -
and to a lesser extent, the Sunni leadership in
Fallujah - have attempted to dissociate themselves
from resistance fighters who utilize kidnapping,
suicide bombers and other tactics designed to
attack the civilian base of the occupation. Though
the official edict quoted above listed al-Qaeda,
Wahhabis and Saddamists as criminals subject to
the death penalty, other pronouncements indicate
that the denunciation extends to all "terrorists",
both foreign and domestic. The Sadrist opposition
to terrorism rests on much more than philosophical
grounds; they view the terrorists as killing
innocent civilians with bombings that fail to
drive the Americans out, while giving the US
military an excuse to remain in Iraq. Their
general attitude was expressed by Aws Khafaji, a
Sadrist cleric, after a day of coordinated
terrorist attacks in June (Washington Post, June
25, 2004):
We condemn and denounce yesterday's
bombings and attacks on police centers and
innocent Iraqis, which claimed about 100 lives.
These are attacks launched by suspects and
lunatics who are bent on destabilizing the
country and ruining the peace so that the Iraqi
people will remain in need of American
protection. A few days later,
Muqtada al-Sadr spoke out against beheading: "We
denounce those who decapitate prisoners. Islamic
law does not permit them to do this, and anyone
who does can be counted a criminal and be punished
if seized." (NY Times, July 24) A few days later,
he condemned the bombing of Christian Churches,
(NY Times, August 3). Later that fall, the
Sadrists freed 15 Iraqi national guards who were
being held in exchange for an arrested Sadrist
cleric, declaring "Kidnapping is not our style,
let alone killing. The time has not yet come for
us to follow this method." (GlobalSecurity.org,
September 25, 2004)
Moreover, the Sadrists
widely circulated a leaflet declaring their
willingness to work with the police in protecting
the country's infrastructure from terrorist
bombings (Washington Post, June 25, 2004):
The Mehdi army is ready to cooperate
actively and positively with honest elements
from among the Iraqi police and other patriotic
forces, to partake in safeguarding government
buildings and facilities, such as hospitals,
electricity plants, water, fuel and oil
refineries, and any other site that might be a
target for terrorist attacks. They
even aligned themselves with the interim
administration for this endeavor. Sayeed Rahim
al-Alaq, deputy head of the committee that drafted
the list of offenses described above, told New
York Times reporter Fisher: "We are with the
government. We are anti-terrorists." (July 16,
2004)
The importance of this clear
denunciation of the terrorists was nicely
expressed by independent reporter Rahul Mahajan
(DemocracyNow.org June 28, 2004):
I think that what has happened with
the resistance in the last few days is really a
dramatic, important and positive development.
Last week, as you know, there was a single day
of violence on which over 100 people were
killed. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's jihad claimed
responsibility for it ... Across the country,
anti-occupation figures - militant Sunni
clerics, Muqtada al-Sadr's organization, even a
representative of mujahideen in Fallujah - all
made open, public statements denouncing his acts
and distinguishing between terrorism committed
by foreigners - much of which is directed at
Iraqis - and what they call legitimate
resistance. It marks the emergence of the
resistance as a political force ...
In Sadr City, the on-the-ground
policies vis-a-vis the terrorists have yet to be
definitively developed. In the absence of clear
policies, the terrorists represent an ongoing
threat to the viability of the resistance, since
their indiscriminate attacks antagonize Iraqi
citizens while providing the principle rationale
for the presence of occupation troops.
Liberated areas and the question of
'law and order'
Despite important
differences in religious beliefs, the
proto-government in Sadr City is similar to the
proto-governments that developed in Fallujah and
other Sunni cites after the first battle of
Fallujah in April 2004. (For a detailed portrait
of the Fallujah government before the November
reconquest by the Americans, see the extraordinary
series of articles by Nir Rosen in Asia Times
Online, July 15-24, 2004 - Inside the
Iraqi resistance). The summer of 2004
saw an increasing number of liberated cities, with
the American troops on the outskirts,
unsuccessfully trying to reconquer them, leading
to Tom Engelhardt's elegant portrait of the new
Iraqi reality (TomDispatch, July 25, 2003):
Think of Sunni Iraq - and possibly
parts of Shi'ite Iraq as well - as a "nation" of
city-state fiefdoms, each threatening to blink
off [the US] map of "sovereignty", despite our
140,000 troops and our huge bases in the
country. He quoted independent
reporter Robert Dreyfuss to the effect that this
process is already very far along (TomPaine.com
July, 22, 2004):
Cities all over Iraq are totally
outside the control of either the US forces or
the government of Iraq. Not only Fallujah,
Ramadi and Samarra, but other population centers
in central Iraq are virtually self-contained
city-states. The Kurds run their little enclave
all by themselves. Parts of Baghdad are no-go
zones for Americans. And in the south, fascist
Shi'ite militia and armed gangs controlled by
Iranian-backed mullahs and the likes of
Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani run things without
any help from Baghdad. In attacking
first Najaf, then Tal Afar and Samarra, and
finally tackling the center of the Sunni
resistance in Fallujah, the US was seeking to
reverse this process. But these attacks were not
designed to restore order; they were, instead,
intended to prevent the consolidation of a very
orderly anti-American status quo in a constantly
expanding set of "liberated" areas.
Ironically, the American attacks in the
fall of 2004 underscore the larger contradictions
in American policy in Iraq: that the chaos
American leaders keep saying they are preventing
will, in fact, occur only if US military forces
succeed in destroying these nascent city-states.
To see this we need only begin by
recalling the description above of the Sadrist
regime in Baghdad. While there is ample room for
concern that the consolidation of Mehdi power
might result in the forcible imposition of
fundamentalist orthodoxy, there appears to be
little chance that law and order would
disintegrate. Without underestimating the thuggish
tendencies among the Mehdi and granting that there
is currently far too much street crime in Sadr
City, the Sadrists are the only effective
governing force in the Baghdad Shi'ite community.
The removal of US troops would allow Sadrist
civilian authority to operate openly and thus
consolidate their daily supervision of the
militia. This would enhance their ability to
control the excesses of the militia and
systematically reduce street crime, and would
almost certainly result in an orderly (perhaps too
orderly) daily existence in the areas they
control.
The same prognosis could have
been made with even more assurance, in Fallujah
and the several other Sunni cities that were off
limits to the Americans during the summer of 2004.
That is, before the US upset this
guerrilla-imposed order with invasions followed by
ongoing battles with the resistance. In the early
winter of 2004, therefore, the choice in the Sunni
areas appeared to be between peacefully run cities
controlled by the resistance, or chaotic,
constantly disrupted cities in which large numbers
of American troops prevented the guerrillas from
exercising control.
In the meantime, the
Kurdish provinces had a peaceful existence based
on a much more fully developed form of local
control, resting largely on their own militia, the
peshmerga, and the two political formations
that control them. The absence of an American
military presence in the Kurdish region has not
been a problem; on the contrary, this absence is
another reassurance that the other areas could and
would be quite stable if only the Americans were
not disrupting their efforts.
In the
Shi'ite areas of the country, the US maintains a
form of technical control, but most troops are
stationed outside the cites and do not pacify or
disrupt daily lives. There is no evidence to
suggest that the American presence has reduced
violence or prevented chaos. In fact, accepted
wisdom has been that American entry into the
cities would be a disruptive, not a pacifying,
force.
Local law and order would not
collapse if the US left. Quite the contrary - US
withdrawal would remove the key force currently
preventing law and order in local communities.
Another form of chaos, less frequently invoked, is
civil war, triggered by long-standing friction
among the key groupings in Iraqi society. Such
issues as the disputes over hegemony in Kirkuk,
the degree of autonomy to be granted to the
Kurdish provinces; and the Sunni and Kurdish fears
that Shi'ite dominance would lead to tyranny of
the majority are all real points of division that
require attention whenever Iraq becomes a
sovereign state.
The American presence,
however, can do no more than postpone resolution
of these frictions. And, while there is no
predicting the course of the negotiations, there
is some reason to be optimistic. The key factor is
the Shi'ites, since they are the overwhelming
majority, and Sistani seems to be able to lead the
Shi'ites toward compromise on these issues.
Ironically, the greatest barrier to Sistani's
leadership (besides the occupation) is the soaring
popularity of Muqtada, which rests on his militant
resistance to the US. Though the Sadrists have
consistently endorsed cooperation with Sunnis and
Kurds, they appear to be more volatile and less
committed to this stance than Sistani. The longer
the US remains, therefore, the more the ongoing
guerrilla war strengthens the position of the
Sadrists and weakens the leadership of Sistani. As
a consequence, the continuing US presence may be
undermining the chances of a peaceful resolution
on the key divisive issues in Iraqi society.
The final irony is that US success against
the guerrillas would almost certainly guarantee
long-term chaos in Iraqi society. The evacuation
and destruction of Fallujah certainly suggests
this, but the chaos there is so monumental that it
is probably not typical. The situations in Samarra
- successfully reconquered by the US just before
Fallujah - and Mosul - the main battleground after
Fallujah - are more representative. In each city,
the fall and early winter of 2004 were marked by
the ongoing guerrilla war, the constant disruption
of city life, an absence of any orderly law
enforcement, and degenerating economic and social
conditions.
The US effort to destroy the
insurgency can only succeed if it also destroys
the ability of Iraqis to govern their own
communities. Since the local clerics and tribal
leaders have - from the very beginning - been
instrumental in the resistance, defeating the
guerrillas involves detaining or killing the
leaders who form the backbone of local civil
society. This became apparent in the fall of 2004,
before the demolition of Fallujah, when the US
failed to convince "moderates" in key cities to
negotiate truce agreements that delivered militant
leaders to the Americans for arrest and
punishment. The failure of these negotiations left
the US with the choice of conceding rule to the
insurgents or attempting to reconquer the cities
and removing the local leadership. In Fallujah,
the US military leadership decided that they could
only accomplish this by demolishing much of the
city and converting the vast majority of residents
into refugees.
Contrary to the almost
universally accepted mantra, the US is not
preventing chaos in Iraq, it is creating it.
So far, Sadr City has escaped the frontal
assaults visited upon Tal Afar, Samarra, Mosul and
Fallujah. In some sense, the failure of the
American military to complete the pacification of
these cities may be Sadr City's main protection,
since the US troops have been stretched thin by
the ongoing fighting there. Sadr City's status as
the center of Shi'ite insurgency is another
protection, since a full-scale attack there could
well trigger insurrections throughout the
currently quiescent Shi'ite areas of Iraq. As this
article is written, the US has honored a
semi-official truce that keeps American troops out
of the guerrilla-held area, and therefore allows
for the Sadrist government to continue its rule of
the nascent city-state. As long as this lasts,
there will be "law and order" in Sadr City, even
if the law is anti-American and the order is
fundamentalist Islam.
Michael
Schwartz, professor of sociology at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook has written
extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and
on American business and government dynamics. His
work on Iraq has appeared on TomDispatch, Z Net
and Asia Times Online, and in Z Magazine. His
books include Radical Politics and Social
Structure, The Power Structure of American
Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social
Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited,
with Clarence Lo). His email address is ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.
(Copyright Michael Schwartz, 2005)
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