In Sadr City district of Baghdad, a billboard has an image of Moktada al-Sadr, second from left. His candidates won 40 seats in last March’s elections. More
AMARA, Iraq — The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who in the past decade has been both an anti-American insurgency leader and a behind-the-scenes power broker, is not expected to be personally in attendance when Iraq’s leaders sketch out a new government on Monday.
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
Friday Prayer in Sadr City, a stronghold of the militia that fought the Americans. The Sadrists are recasting themselves as politicians. More Photos »
But with his followers standing to gain control of powerful government posts, his influence is likely to become apparent in many facets of Iraqi public life, from the halls of Parliament to the tomato farms and marshlands here in southeastern Iraq.
Maysan Province was a stronghold for Mr. Sadr until sweeps by the Iraqi Army in 2008 helped break the grip of his militia forces, and political change ousted his ally from the governorship here last year.
Now, the winds are shifting again, and the area has become a stage for Mr. Sadr’s remarkable political resurgence in Iraq after years of schism, military defeats and Mr. Sadr’s own flight to Iran.
Mr. Sadr’s followers are pushing for control of the governor’s seat here in Maysan Province again, one of several positions they hope to gain as rewards for joining the political coalition that will keep their onetime enemy, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, in office after the months of wrangling that followed March’s inconclusive elections.
That the party, still Iraq’s most fiercely populist and anti-American bloc, has come this far is a reflection of the Sadrists’ efforts in recent years to recast themselves as maturing politicians who can actually govern and deliver badly needed services.
“We want to show the world we are a modern people, an intellectual people,” said Fathal Namaa, the group’s political director in Maysan. “We don’t want to be radical Islamists. I tell my supporters, don’t dress all in black or carry weapons.”
They are tracing a path mapped out by militant groups like Hezbollah or Hamas, which built popular support by augmenting their armed wings with social and political groups that ran schools and hospitals and handed out jobs.
“If we’re able to succeed this time and erase some of the mistakes of the past, we think we can win the most seats,” said Hakim Zamili, who was re-elected easily after beating charges of murder, kidnapping and corruption stemming from his time as an official in the Ministry of Health. “And maybe the prime minister’s position.”
Those outsized ambitions may exceed the movement’s grasp at the moment. But its growing political power has stoked new worries about how the Sadrists will play a stronger hand.
“We do not see compelling evidence they have renounced, in practice or in theory, the idea that they can use force against their opponents,” James F. Jeffrey, the United States ambassador to Iraq, told reporters.
In Iraq’s last government, Mr. Sadr’s followers were accused of using their offices to spread corruption and sectarian enmity, with officials lining their pockets and death squads roaming public hospitals.
There are also remaining fears, among Americans and Iraqis, that the militia that helped bring Mr. Sadr to power initially — and was responsible for much of the sectarian violence that threatened to tear the country apart — could again be mobilized against his enemies, particularly after the American military finishes its withdrawal.
The growing strength of the movement could significantly complicate the United States’ relationship with Iraq. Mr. Sadr, who waged bloody street battles against American forces and Sunni Muslims, and his rank-and-file members insist that no American troops should remain on Iraqi soil, and they do not speak with American officials.
“We know there are going to be Sadrist ministries,” said an American diplomat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic ground rules. “We want to make it work. But we will also be true to our own principles, and they may not want to work with us.”
In addition to the governor’s seat in Maysan, they are seeking control of service ministries and a slot as one of Mr. Maliki’s deputies.
“We’re going to get everything,” said Nasser al-Rubaie, a leading Sadrist politician, as he emerged from Parliament one afternoon.
The posture and power of the Sadrists have forced a shift in tone from American officials and erstwhile Iraqi rivals, who now find themselves thrown together an awkward partnership government.
After fully embracing the political process, Mr. Sadr’s candidates pulled off surprising victories to win 40 seats in last March’s elections. Female members of the Sadrist slate, who campaigned in black, head-to-toe abayas, fared particularly well compared with their secular counterparts.
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The Sadrists are now embracing — at least in public — the sunny tones of national unity and partnership, referring to Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers as brothers, not foes. After dozens of Christians were massacred at a Baghdad church on Oct. 31, members of Mr. Sadr’s group visited the priests to show the party’s solidarity.
Shiho Fukada for The New York Times
A vendor in Sadr City. The Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s influence is likely to grow after the new coalition government is formed.
The New York Times
The Sadrists have great influence in and around Amara. More Photos »
They send out daily news releases to announce street-cleaning projects, new orphanages and community centers. And at Mr. Sadr’s behest, party leaders said that some newly elected lawmakers had been sent to Lebanon and Turkey to attend classes in public speaking and political etiquette.
The party’s newest lawmakers include appellate lawyers, engineers and accountants, as well as candidates with less technocratic backgrounds. Among them is Mohammed al-Khafaji, a former bodyguard to Mr. Sadr whose biography on a Sadrist Web site says he “participated” in the fight against the occupation.
“What the Sadrists want is what Iraqis want,” Mr. Khafaji said, sipping a glass of peach nectar. “We have to lead the political process.”
In Amara, the resurgence of the Sadr movement has stirred mixed emotions, as well as resistance from the current governor, Mohammed al-Soudani, who has a good working relationship with the Americans.
This is a city where black, red and green banners of Shiite devotion flutter from the rooftops of homes, and photographs of clerics adorn the awnings of fast-food restaurants. But it is one still unsettled by the Sadrists’ time in power, when militias dominated local security and bombings and attacks against American forces were common.
Some residents said they welcomed the Sadrists’ return.
They blamed the Maliki-supported governor, Mr. Soudani, for persistently high unemployment and creaky services, and said they were ready to allow the Sadrists another chance at power. Some spoke of a deeper fealty to the Sadr family, some of whom were towering Shiite patriarchs killed for resisting Saddam Hussein’s rule.
“The Sadrists are very good people, and qualified,” said Abdul Wahid Bedai, 78, whose living room was decorated with a photograph of Mr. Sadr’s slain father. “We respect them. We respect the movement.”
But Abdul Qarim Muhamadawi, a local leader and former guerrilla fighter during the Hussein era, spoke to the fears of those who worry about the consequences of handing power back to the Sadrists.
Mr. Muhamadawi, known here as the “Prince of the Marshes,” said he had already seen once-imprisoned members of Shiite militias back on the streets of Amara, among those said to be released under part of a deal with Mr. Maliki. And he feared the relative stability of the last two years could unwind.
“We are upset about this deal,” he said. “This is the moment before the storm.”
Khalid D. Ali contributed reporting from Amara, and Duraid Adnan and Yasir Ghazi from Baghdad.
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Mix of Trust and Despair Helped Turn Tide in IraqBy SABRINA TAVERNISEPublished: October 23, 2010
The Iraq war archive, taken as a whole with its details of incidents small and large, offers a cautionary postscript for the current military strategy in Afghanistan.
That same strategy, based on an infusion of additional troops, is often credited with rescuing Iraq. The American military applied it and turned around an increasingly hopeless war, according to one narrative. And while it is true that the additional troops offered better security, the reports in the archive suggest that the approach was also successful because many Iraqis were ready for it.
A unique set of conditions had coalesced on the ground. The warring communities were exhausted from the frenzy of killing. Mixed neighborhoods and cities were largely cleansed. The militias, both Sunni and Shiite, long seen as defenders of their communities, had begun to cannibalize them, making local residents newly receptive to American overtures.
The war that emerges from the documents is a rapidly changing set of circumstances with its own logic and arc, whose fluidity was underestimated by the military, the media and Washington policy makers. The troop increase, devised and led by Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is now the commander in Afghanistan, came around the time that many Iraqis were so fed up with their local militias that they were ready to risk cooperating with the Americans by giving them information. Two years earlier, they were not.
That is not to say that the troop increase, commonly known as the surge, and the accompanying strategic changes, were unimportant. On the contrary, that risky gamble was central in initiating the reduction in violence. Without it, Iraqis would have been stuck.
Taken together, the archives from Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that each war has had its own alchemy.(A medieval chemical philosophy having as its asserted aims the transmutation of base metals into gold, the discovery of the panacea, and the preparation of the elixir of longevity.
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Now General Petraeus is confronting a far different society. It remains to be seen whether Pashtun society is ready to resist the Taliban, as Sunnis were in Iraq, whether tribal leaders in Afghanistan are strong enough to lead that resistance or whether the Taliban and a deeply discredited central government are ready to reconcile. Afghanistan is a poorer, far less literate and centralized country than Iraq; each valley is its own nation, a patchwork that makes it tricky to apply any policy nationwide.
In Iraq, Americans expected to be hailed as liberators, but they were resented as occupiers, and Iraqis eventually turned to the Americans largely out of exhaustion and despair. In Afghanistan, Americans were welcomed at first, but as the war dragged on, Afghans lost faith in the Americans’ ability to protect them — and it is unclear whether that faith can be restored. The lesson of Iraq is that without it, no strategy, however well conceived, can be successful.
If Afghanistan is a war of small cuts, Iraq was a gash. In the war’s bloodiest months, according to the archive’s reports, more than 3,000 Iraqi civilians were dying, more than 10 times the current civilian casualty rate in Afghanistan, a country with a larger population.
The reports read like nightmares. In January 2005, a human head was thrown from an Opel Omega into the Mufrek traffic circle in the city of Baquba. The next month, 47 workers from a brick factory were found murdered north of Baghdad. One report noted that a discovery of six bodies at a sewage treatment plant in Baghdad was the third such episode at the same plant in recent weeks. Later during that month, there were also two more similar discoveries there. All the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head. Read the Document »
The Pentagon was slow to acknowledge what had become abundantly clear on the ground — that Iraq had sunk into sectarian war. The military began to release partial civilian casualty figures in 2005 under pressure from Congress. The word “sect” appears only 12 times in the archive in 2005, the year that systematic cleansing began. Corpses that were surfacing in garbage dumps, rivers and empty lots were blandly categorized as a “criminal event” and seem to have been given about as much importance as traffic accidents. Read the Document »
In a briefing for reporters several days after the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in 2006, the event that unleashed an all-out civil war, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, the military spokesman at the time, said: “Over the last three days what we’ve seen is not widespread sectarian violence. And we believe that there has not been widespread sectarian violence because of a capable Iraqi government.”
But the Iraqi government, or at least part of it, was one of the perpetrators. The documents in the archive cite hundreds of cases of prisoner abuse by the Iraqi Army and the police. A jail in the western province of Anbar in June 2006 had “large amounts of blood on the cell floor,” an unhinged metal cell door positioned against a back wall and electrical wires with blood at the ends. (The Americans reprimanded the police.) Read the Document »
There were killings.
A report from February 2006 described how Iraqis carrying official Ministry of Interior identification cards used false documents to remove 12 prisoners from a police jail in Basra. Their fate? “Prisoners are now dead,” the report stated. “All prisoners are of Sunni religion.”Read the Document »
Sectarian turf wars burned hotly until mixed neighborhoods were largely cleansed. But exactly when the tide turned remains foggy. According to the existing reports, the single worst month for civilian deaths was December 2006, two months before the buildup’s first brigade arrived. Casualties dropped slightly in January. In February, when the first new brigade arrived, the recorded casualties dropped by a quarter, though it is the shortest month.
Around that time, Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American cleric, decamped to Iran, perhaps fearing American troops.
What the documents suggest strongly is that Iraqis themselves were looking for an escape from the orgy of sectarian killing made worse by the growth of ordinary, but still violent, crime. Uses of the word “kidnap” in the reports increase sharply in 2007, as do “theft,” “loot,” and “carjacking.” Torments varied according to location. In Sunni areas, the fundamentalist militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had brutalized and alienated people. As early as September 2006, tribes in Anbar came together to oppose Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.
General Petraeus was quick to seize that opportunity, turning the tribes’ cooperation into a program that he aggressively expanded throughout the country, working with American diplomats to push a reluctant Iraqi prime minister to accept it.
His predecessor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. — who had been pursuing a policy of drawing down American troops — had seen it more as a local program.
That effort became perhaps the turning point in the war. The appearance in the documents of the initials S.O.I., a reference to the Sons of Iraq, the Sunni groups that banded together against insurgents, spiked in 2008. In Shiite areas, militias like the Mahdi Army, known as JAM (for Jaish al- Mahdi) by the military, once seen as protectors, had turned into parasites, extorting, kidnapping for ransom and demanding protection money, Mafia-style. A February 2007 report noted that the young son of a businessman was kidnapped by Mahdi Army members. The family paid $15,000 for his release, but he was killed anyway.
Iraqis of all stripes began to use the Americans as a bridge, coming forward with information about everything from Al Qaeda hide-outs to gas station extortions. Uses of the word “source” peak in 2007, with five times as many references as in 2004. “Tip” follows the same pattern. A report from May 2007 noted the arrest of a bus driver who was extorting a gas station on behalf of the Mahdi Army. The owner of the gas station provided the tip.
Meanwhile, Americans’ understanding of Iraq had become more sophisticated. If at first the sectarian war was played down or ignored, by 2007 the word sect had become part of the military’s template for daily violence reports. The often fruitless search operations that were the hallmark of the early years of the war suddenly became effective as Iraqis gave Americans information. The holdouts were many, and the Americans waged hard-fought campaigns, with heavy casualties, to eliminate them.
By 2007, the detainee population had exploded. Among the prisoners was a much feared Shiite militia leader, Abu Dura, captured by the Americans in a raid based on a local tip.
The Iraqi partners were not ideal. The documents in the archive contain references to shady politicians, like the head of security for Fadilah, a Shiite political party, who, according to one report, was believed to have received money from Iran and to “control a secret arm of the Fadilah Party that conducts kidnappings and assassination operations to influence local politics.”
Even the Sunni tribal forces that eventually helped turn the tide of the war were prone to raucous shooting episodes, including one in 2008, in which sheiks had to be airlifted to an American hospital after being wounded in a shootout over sheep food.
By 2009, civilian deaths had dropped to the lowest levels recorded in the archive. In interviews in the summer of 2008, Iraqis said they were so deeply frightened by the killings in 2006 that they would do anything to avoid being dragged into that kind of violence again.
But war is always clearest in retrospect, and it remains to be seen whether Afghanistan has reached that point.
Jacob M. Harris contributed reporting from New York.
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