Home > ’After three wars we have all had enough’
The uprising against US troops in Najaf is causing further divisions among many Iraqis, who are fed up with fighting, reports Rory McCarthy, who has been in the holy Shia city for the past week
In the darkness an hour before dawn the floodlights snapped on, shining into the tiled courtyard of the ancient Imam Ali shrine in the heart of the old city of Najaf. Silently, streams of militia fighters left their weapons and walked into the mosque, led by the call to prayer.
They washed their hands and faces, joked with friends, visited the wounded in the makeshift hospital and knelt to pray. There they chanted intonations to their leader, the rebel cleric Muqtada Sadr whose 10-day uprising has shaken the fragile grip of Iraq’s new government.
We left the courtyard where we had slept the night on a carpet under the open sky, and followed them back to the front lines. It was Friday morning, only hours before the militia agreed a truce with the US military and Iraqi forces to begin negotiating an end to the rebellion in the holy city.
As they had every morning for a week, US tanks and Humvee armoured personnel carriers pushed towards the narrow alleys of the sprawling old city, controlled by the militia, in a test of strength. ’Ali be with you,’ the fighters said as they passed one other. ’Ya Muqtada, Ya Mohammad, Ya Ali,’ they chanted.
’The Americans took a new position and we attacked. They didn’t succeed,’ said one stocky, bearded man carrying a Kalashnikov rifle. ’They tried to move forward to control a new position and then moved back. It happens every morning, but it is the first time it has happened here.’
For at least an hour the two sides traded heavy machine-gun fire and the militia lobbed mortars towards the American tanks, several hundred metres east of the shrine. The militia cheered when a sniper reported a tank was on fire, although it seemed unlikely. Then the Americans fired back at the sniper’s position atop an abandoned three-storey building. Moments later he was carried down, badly injured with his head in his hands. Two friends lifted him into the back of a pickup truck that raced to the hospital in the mosque.
’We hit a tank with our mortar and fired our BKC [a Russian machine gun],’ said Jalal Hamood, 22, who had been with the militia for four months and alongside the sniper in the building. ’The tank fired back and made huge holes in the roof and our friend was hurt.’ Hamood, dressed in a T-shirt printed with the words ’Oh Hussein, Oh Martyr’ was covered in dust. He spent several minutes cleaning the debris out of his machine gun with methylated spirits as the others smoked furiously.
And so the fighting contin ued. Sadr’s several hundred militiamen were outnumbered and heavily outgunned, yet yesterday they remained in control of the streets of the old city as the truce took hold. The US military appeared to have pulled back from the cordon it had set up at dawn last Thursday and Sadr celebrated victory even as the negotiations went on.
A procession of thousands of his supporters drove down from his stronghold in the eastern slums of Sadr City in Baghdad yesterday into Najaf and to the Imam Ali shrine. Behind them came trucks of food and medicines, a gift to the Shia from the Sunni resistance stronghold of Falluja, north-west of Baghdad, and an astonishing sign of unity among disparate fighting groups who feel ever more emboldened to take on the Iraqi government.
Yesterday, Sadr’s men in other southern cities continued to fight against the US-led multi-national forces, cheered by the appearance of the cleric, one arm bandaged from a shrapnel wound, before crowds of militiamen in the shrine at midnight on Friday.
Throughout the week the golden-domed shrine had been at the centre of the rebellion. It was here that Sadr probably spent his days and here that his young clerics controlled the fight through radios and mobiles. Fighters would check their weapons at the gate and walk in to collect plastic containers of water, or to have their wounds bandaged. Every few hours the mosque’s loudspeakers exhort his men to battle.
’You are defending Imam Ali, the prince of the faithful. Hit them and protect your shrine. Hit them and protect your holy city. Be patient and fight. Victory will be yours with the help of God,’ they announced at one stage. An hour later, after midday prayers, it continued: ’Fighters return to your positions. The enemy is running away. Go to your places immediately.’
In the end the sanctity of the shrine, one of the holiest sites in the Shia faith, is what gave Sadr his strength. It left the Iraqi government and the US reluctant to press on into the old city, however much the US military commanders wanted to. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, admitted as much when he said the US was ’squeezing’ Najaf to stop the fighting but then added: ’We do not wish to get involved with the mosque. It’s a very holy place for all Shia.’
Wresting control from more moderate clerics of the mosque and its vast annual revenue from pilgrims was itself a key victory for Sadr.
The strength of this young cleric, the scion of a revered religious family, was his populist call to arms. For five days, fighters told us again and again they were fighting for their religion but then described at length how they struggled to find work, how they were frustrated that the welcome defeat of Saddam Hussein had brought such little improvement to their lives. We spent one morning with a group of men from the southern city of Amara, who had a position behind abandoned houses and hotels just short of the vast Valley of Peace cemetery to the north of the shrine that had become the key frontline.
On one wall was written in chalk: ’Saddam the criminal.’ One fighter, Abbas, injured three times, spoke of the hatred for Saddam.
’He should be handed to the Iraqi people and cut into slices. He destroyed the whole nation,’ he said. ’But still we are facing the same economic problems. There are other religious parties but they co-operate with the government and we don’t believe in them.’
Their attraction to Sadr was that he had held out against the United States and its Iraqi supporters in the new government.
Another day, a second group of fighters, again from Amara, sat to rest in a basement and complained about the difficulty of finding jobs. Many had been farmers or conscripts in Saddam’s army. All had been in Najaf for five months, since Sadr’s first uprising last April.
’Most of the people who are fighting are very poor. They don’t even have the money to get to Najaf,’ said Hassan al-Amari. ’Only those who are with the Iraqi exiles are getting jobs,’ said Latif al-Khalisi, a man who escaped four death sentences under Saddam for suspected membership of the Da’awa, then the leading Shia opposition group. ’The people in the West don’t think about the poor people who are living here in Iraq.’
The men spoke boldly of their courage, but many were clearly scared by the fight. They spoke to their families by phone, playing down the risks they faced. ’I’m OK,’ said one. ’There is no fighting around me. They gave me a rest. You can hear shooting? That is far away. Don’t worry.’
Although Sadr had thousands of supporters around him yesterday, his remains a movement of extremists unloved by the majority of the Iraqi population, however frustrated they are with the military occupation of the past year.
As we walked back from the mosque, past the frontlines, Iraqis sat on their doorsteps watching. ’Why do you come here to see the misery in Najaf?’ said one woman. ’May God take his revenge on the one who is responsible for this.’ Another man ran to us shouting: ’Muqtada and his thugs are outlaws. They are criminals and they are not from Najaf.’
Many of the houses, pilgrims hotels and shops had been destroyed by the fighting. Large roadside bombs, artillery shells with wires leading from them, still lay in place every few hundred metres along the main streets.
In a large grocery shop, a few hundred yards from where the US military set up its cordon last Thursday and Friday, shop owner Raad Abdul Karim said Najaf was in the grip of ’a tragedy’.
’There is no security, no basic rights, there is fighting between the Iraqi people. It is unnatural,’ he said. ’Muqtada Sadr’s militia has some good people and others who are bad. But we just want to live peacefully. After three wars we have had enough. We just want somebody who can bring peace and security.’