The Assassins' Gate (26 page)

Dr. Butti introduced me to several of his old classmates from the Jesuit-run Baghdad College. They were trying to set up an organization with a vague idea of improving social knowledge in Iraq by making contact with counterparts in America. We sat in a sweltering living room in Karada, the middle-class and commercial district on the eastern bank of the Tigris: There was a urologist named Nimat Kamal, who looked like Ed Asner when he scowled, and a fire safety engineer with a softer manner named Mohamed Abbas. Dr. Kamal was livid at his treatment by Americans. There were three tanks positioned outside his hospital, and every day soldiers searched him and his car—every day, even though they knew him. “They don't distinguish between a doctor and a terrorist.” One of his distant relatives and his neighbor's twelve-year-old boy had been shot to pieces recently when they inadvertently drove into a street that soldiers had cordoned off. At the same time, the urologist wanted more security from the Americans.

Abbas, the engineer, compared their situation to that of the Palestinians. “Same soldiers, same Apaches, same way of apprehending people. Iraqis are becoming more aggressive, because they make the connection.”

“It needs time for things to be settled, we know that,” Dr. Kamal said. “We are unlucky to be living in this boiling period. But people like us are in a layer of society that is very conservative. We have an unconscious fear of politics—we don't like to get involved. The Americans won't protect us.” Educated, professional Iraqis were lying low while others—the poor, the religious, the armed—took to the streets.

“I had conflicting feelings during the war,” Abbas said. “I wanted both sides to lose. I don't like American occupation, and I don't like to live under Saddam's rule.”

I asked whether they would share information about insurgent activity with the American military if they had it. None of them would, and not only for fear of reprisal.

“It is also my conflict over the American presence,” Abbas admitted. “To be very objective.”

Dr. Butti, who had brought us together, suddenly looked at me with concern and apologized. He hoped that I wouldn't take it personally. I pointed out that all of them were still trying to make connections with Americans.

“There's no love that doesn't come after a quarrel,” Dr. Kamal said, finally smiling. “Maybe we will learn to love each other.”

*   *   *

“THE HUMAN COMMITTEE FOR PRISONNERS AND LOSSNERS INTERNATIONAL” said the sign on a side street, not far from the bombed-out headquarters of military intelligence in Kadhimiya, an old neighborhood in the city's north with a famous market of goldsmith shops and one of the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam. The sign indicated a two-story building that was office and home to Sheikh Emad al-Din al-Awadi.

The chaos following liberation that had upended so many lives also created opportunities. There was, in fact, a kind of revolutionary situation in Iraq. Those who reacted first and fastest were the country's long-oppressed Shiite clerics: They filled the vacuum with energy and organization, taking over hospitals and schools, providing social services to the poor, and imposing their Islamic code on daily life, while more secular Iraqis, doctors and engineers and artists, moved about in a daze. The sheikh had spent almost ten years in Saddam's prisons, where he formed a clandestine prisoners' group. Now that Saddam was gone, he was becoming an important man.

On April 12, word reached the sheikh that the central market building in the expensive Mansour district was on fire. Before the war, the security police had stowed millions of prisoner files in the building's basement for safekeeping. Now the Baathists were trying to destroy them, and the sheikh and a handful of associates, armed with knives and stakes, raced across town to salvage the evidence of Saddam's largely successful attempt to turn all of Iraq into a prison. Other groups were already on the scene, fighting for possession of the records, including members of Ahmad Chalabi's militia. The INC seized millions of documents around Baghdad, but the sheikh's group managed to carry away carloads of files and microfilm to Kadhimiya, along with a partially melted Canon microfilm reader. The sheikh understood that these documents in soft pink and green folders represented not just the past but also the future.

They now filled old metal filing drawers stacked to the high ceiling of his office, they sat in nylon grain sacks under the banana tree in his yard, they baked on his rooftop under the sun. More were arriving from various locations every week. And they were a tiny fraction of the full record of imprisonment and execution left behind by the old regime. American soldiers hauled off nineteen truckloads for central storage. In the offices of a rival prisoners' association set up by former members of Hezbollah (the two groups traded accusations of file theft), I stood in a large room heaped waist-deep with loose documents and felt sick at the sheer anonymous quantity of it. Other regimes have created instruments of internal control as elaborate and meticulously documented, but even the files of the East German Stasi don't tell such unhappy tales as Iraq's Mukhabarat.

File: Saleh Issa Ali

Sentenced to Death

Serial #580392669

Republic of Iraq, Ministry of Justice, Prosecution

Department: Secret Pen

Date: 16-1-90

 

It is sent to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Its theme is execution. Following the telegraph sent by the Presidential Board #368 on 8-1-90, we send you the order of execution of the following convicted persons:

1. Karim Issa Ali

2. Saleh Issa Ali

3. Khaled Abdul-Rahman Ismail

 

They should be hanged until death.

With best regards,

Minister of Justice Akram Abdul-Khader Ali

The exterior walls of the sheikh's building were papered with photocopies of old black-and-white snapshots of young men, most of them wearing the hairstyles of the 1970s and '80s. Men and women came from all over the country to the office and combed through the files that the sheikh's followers had alphabetized, hoping to discover the fate of a lost son or a cousin who disappeared two decades ago. One afternoon, a doctor arrived from Baquba, a town about an hour northeast of Baghdad. His name was Yousef Ibrahim and he was an otorhinolaryngologist—an ear, nose, and throat specialist—with the highest postgraduate degree in his field. One night in 1995, local Baath Party officials came to his house with orders for the doctor to go to the hospital and perform an emergency operation. Dr. Ibrahim was to cut off the ear of a young army deserter. “I told them it is not probable to do this at night, and I am not ready for this psychologically. They told me, ‘You must cut it even if you are cutting it with your teeth—or we will cut your ear.'” The idea was Uday's, and in the months during which it was implemented, before Uday turned to other ideas, the doctor severed forty-seven ears. “I felt a feeling of nonexistence, a feeling of guilt,” Dr. Ibrahim explained, “but I am trying to satisfy myself that I had no choice.” He had come to the sheikh's office looking for information about his brother, an emotionally disturbed man who was arrested in 1992 for cursing Saddam. “I think he was still alive until last year.” The doctor left without finding his brother's file.

On the same day, one of the sheikh's best friends from prison had come for a visit. He was also a doctor, with hooded eyes and a calm, weary manner, named Saad Baghdadi, and when I told him about the ear doctor, he said, “If for me, I will not do it. What if he ordered you to kill these forty-seven? Will you do it?” Saddam had not been so savagely brutal from the beginning, Dr. Baghdadi said. “But when he found they obeyed him, Saddam increased his cruelty gradually. I'm very sorry, but if from the beginning no one obeyed him … in jail I and others disobeyed him in many things.”

The sheikh said, “I used to read seventeen hours a day—do you know what it means to read seventeen hours a day?—and I couldn't find anyone, a king or a sultan, who hurt people like Saddam.”

The sheikh was in his forties, short, round bellied, dark complexioned. He always wore a black cloak, white vest and pantaloons, pointed slippers, and the white turban that signifies a Shiite not descended directly from Mohamed. Though he kept his wife strictly hidden away and his forehead bore the dark bruise of fervent prayer, and in his inner office there was a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini, the sheikh was a worldly man, a bit of a sensualist, a lover of impish jokes. The bushy beard, the full lips, the bug eyes behind thick black-rimmed glasses, and the sonorous voice put me in mind of Ayatollah Allen Ginsberg. He often dropped hints that he wasn't a rigid interpreter of his faith. Once, when we were talking about dogs, he said that under Islam two kinds of dogs were sanctioned: guard dogs and hunting dogs. I said that my dog was a pug with no skills whatsoever other than companionship. Was this
halal
(lawful) or
haram
(sinful)? He thought for a moment. “It is neither
halal
nor
haram,
” he said. “It is allowed.”

The sheikh received me on several occasions in his pale-green sitting room, where we were served vast lunches and tea lasting hours. “I am one of the regime's victims,” he would begin—whereupon the power failed, his fan died, and the sheikh continued, “and one of the facts of the new regime is that the electricity has gone off.” He sat with his legs drawn up in a vinyl swivel chair, sweat now pouring from under his turban, and I felt compelled to apologize on behalf of the Americans for the terrible state of Iraq's utilities.

The sheikh was born near the south-central town of Hilla into a family of tribal chiefs, and he grew up studying religion with the Hawza, the Shiite school of theology in Najaf. His intellectual pursuits were broad—Catholic doctrine, the writings of Nostradamus, Arabic poetry, Greek philosophy (he taught Plato and Aristotle to his religion students every morning)—and there was a streak of mysticism in his brand of Islamic thought. But in Najaf he also met and admired Khomeini during the ayatollah's exile in the 1970s. It was the beginning of widespread Shiite political activism in Iraq, much of it inspired by Ayatollah Mohamed Baqr al-Sadr, and in 1977 the sheikh was arrested at a demonstration in the holy city of Karbala. After a year he escaped prison and fled to Kuwait, then to the Shiite-dominated part of Saudi Arabia, where he had friends and supporters. But the Saudi government betrayed him to Iraqi intelligence. He was drugged and sent back in a box to Baghdad, where he endured a year of interrogation at General Security Headquarters before trial. His own court-appointed lawyer recommended the death penalty, but the sheikh was sentenced to life. Before being sent to Abu Ghraib prison, he was beaten with cables for three days. “They wanted to make me taste torture, to give me an idea about torture, so that I would know this is a terrorist jail.”

The sheikh spent seven and a half years in a special internal ward, sharing a cell the size of his sitting room with fifty other men. It was so crowded that they took shifts lying down, sitting, and standing; those lying down had to sleep on their sides. There were no visitors. “For seven and a half years I didn't see anyone. We didn't see the sun. We didn't see the moon.” The guards themselves were punished if they failed to show sufficient cruelty. Pen, paper, books were all forbidden.

“Why do you forbid these?” Dr. Baghdadi, the sheikh's cellmate, once asked a prison guard.

“We want you to go outside after years here,” the guard replied, “and you'll forget not only your sciences, but even your own name.”

“But we have many prisoners here who are depressed. This would help.”

“We want them to be depressed. This is our purpose.”

Yet the sheikh described his prison years with an unmistakable nostalgia, and listening to his tales I began to understand why the religious Shia were the first Iraqis to seize the new opportunity with purposefulness. In prison the sheikh became a leader. He settled differences that arose over food, sleeping space, and the inevitability that a sleeping prisoner would embrace the man beside him, believing him to be his wife. When the guards distributed oranges on Baath Party holidays, the sheikh saved the rinds to treat his own and others' stomach troubles, and distributed the seeds as a psychological panacea for insomnia. He composed a book of theology on nylon sacks using the broken edges of tubes of distilled water. And when the known Baathist spies were asleep, he preached to his clandestine group. By chance, I met a man named Abdul-Jabbar Doweich, who had shared the sheikh's cell through the 1980s. At forty-one, Doweich was a rare Iraqi with almost no gray hair. “In prison I was happy,” he explained, “because I lived under Islam.” It was the sheikh who taught him and the other prisoners about
wilayat al-faqih,
the rule of the jurisprudent under Islamic law.

International pressure after the first Gulf War forced Saddam to release thousands of political prisoners, among them the sheikh. He spent the next decade under house arrest, with another year in prison for refusing an offer of money in exchange for supporting the regime. Just days before the most recent war, some of his followers from prison warned him that the government had plans to kill him. He took refuge in his sister's house until the fall of Baghdad.

The sheikh was utterly realistic about the Americans. He regarded them as neither liberators nor occupiers, but as a fact of life that could be turned to good or ill. He wanted them to leave fairly soon: “There's a saying that when you visit somebody once a month you'll be as lovely as the moon.” Meanwhile, he had established good relations with the Army captain responsible for security in his area and gotten what he could out of him—a faulty generator.