No Escape

I have spent two of the three years since Baghdad fell in Iraq. On my last trip, a few weeks back, I flew out overcome with fatalism. Over the course of six weeks, I worked with three different drivers; at various times each had to take a day off because a neighbour or relative had been killed. One morning 14 bodies were found, all with ID cards in their pockets, all called Omar.

Omar is a Sunni name. In Baghdad these days, nobody is more insecure than men called Omar. On another day a group of bodies was found with hands folded on their abdomens, the way Sunnis pray. These days many Sunnis are obtaining false papers with neutral names. Sunni militias are retaliating, stopping buses and demanding the jinsiya, or ID cards, of all passengers. Those belonging to Shiite tribes are executed.

Saddam Hussein is gone. But now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from US troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

At first, the presence of the US military seemed overwhelming. Now you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

Last fall I visited the home of a Sunni man called Sabah in the western Baghdad suburb of Radwaniya, where the Sunni resistance had long had a presence, and where a US soldier had recently been killed. On Friday night a few days before I came, his family told me, American soldiers surrounded the home where Sabah lived with his brothers Walid and Hussein and their families, and broke down the door. The women and children were herded outside.

Inside, the soldiers beat the men with rifle butts, while the Shiite Iraqi translator accompanying the troops exhorted the Americans to execute the Sunnis.

As the terrified family waited outside, they heard three shots from inside. Thirty minutes later the translator emerged with a picture of Sabah. “Who is Sabah’s wife?” he asked. “Your husband was killed by the Americans, and he deserved to die,” he told her and tore the picture before her face.

Walid was taken away, and inside the house the family found Sabah dead. His shirt showed three bullet holes that went through his chest; two of the bullets had come out of his back. The house was ransacked. Photographs of Sabah had been torn up and his ID card confiscated. One photograph remained on his wife’s bureau: Sabah standing proudly in front of his Mercedes.

I later asked Hussein if they wanted revenge. “We are Muslim, praise God,” he said, “and we do not want revenge. He was innocent and he was killed, so he is a martyr.”

Across town, US troops had also raided the Mustapha Huseiniya, a Shiite place of worship in the Ur neighborhood. The Huseiniya (mosque) belonged to the nationalistic and anti-occupation Moqtada al-Sadr movement. The Sadr militiamen kidnapped Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency, tortured them until they confessed on video, and then executed them.

When the Americans raided the Huseiniya, they brought Iraqi troops with them. They killed not only Mahdi fighters but also innocent Shiite bystanders, including a young journalist I knew named Kamal Anbar

The next morning, the Huseiniya’s floors, walls and ceilings were stained with blood; pieces of brain lay in caked red puddles. Just as Shiites cheered when the Americans hit Sunni targets, Sunni supporters of the insurgency greeted the US raid with satisfaction.

The Mahdi militiamen were already back in force that morning, blocking off the roads and searching all who approached, wielding Iraqi police-issued Glock pistols and carrying Iraqi police-issued handcuffs. In most of Iraq, the police are the Mahdi Army and the Mahdi Army is the police. The same holds for the actual Iraqi army.

The sectarian tensions have overtaken far more than Iraq’s security forces and its streets. Militias now routinely enter hospitals to hunt down or arrest those who have survived their raids. And many Iraqi government ministries are now filled with the banners and slogans of Shiite religious groups, which now exert total control over these key agencies. If you are not with them, you are gone.

In the negotiations between parties after the January 2005 elections, Sadr loyalists gained control over the ministries of health and transportation and immediately began cleansing them of Sunnis and Shiites not aligned with Sadr. Indeed, some government offices now do not accept Sunnis as employees at all.

An apartheid process began after the Shiites’ electoral success. In the Ministry of Health, you see pictures of Moqtada al-Sadr and his father everywhere. Traditional Shiite music reverberates throughout the hallways. Doctors and ministry staffers refer to the minister of health as imami or “my imam”.

I saw walls adorned with Shiite posters—including ones touting Sadr—in the Ministry of Transportation. Sunni staffers have been pushed out of both ministries, while the Ministry of Interior is under the control of another Shiite movement, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (its name alone a sufficient statement of its intentions).

Shiites with no apparent qualifications have filled the ranks. In one case in the transportation ministry, a Sunni chief engineer was fired and replaced with an unqualified Shiite who wore a cleric’s turban to work.

Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn’t unite Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites. During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.

But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved.

When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias. Soon such cleansing had become widespread and commonplace, both out of vengeance and out of its own cruel logic; both sides took part. There was no space left in Iraq for non-sectarian voices.

Sunnis and Shiites alike were pushed into the arms of their own militias. The insurgency became secondary as resistance moved to self-defence.

In November I asked a close Shiite friend if life had not been better under Saddam. “No,” he said definitively. “They could level all of Baghdad and it would still be better than Saddam. At least we have hope.”

A few weeks later, though, he e-mailed me in despair: “You can’t be comfortable talking with a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni…A civil war will happen I’m sure of it.”

The time came on February 22, when the Golden Mosque of the Shiites in Samarra was blown up. More than 1,000 Sunnis were killed in retribution. Attacks on mosques, mostly Sunni ones, increased.

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighbourhoods are “purified”. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighbourhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings.

It started when US troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

Rosen is author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq