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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Al-Mahdi fighters blame the U.S. for violating the cease-fire, and fighting rages in the streets of Najaf and Sadr City. As the Black Hawk swooped down to provide cover for U.S. fighters, I could see the laces on the gunner's boots.
Aug 13, 2004 |
Tuesday, Aug. 3
Forty-eight hours before the cease-fire collapsed in Najaf, the jovial al-Sadr militia sheik was sitting in the passenger seat of my car. We were driving down the long road toward Najaf, the Shiite holy city, from Baghdad, past Mahmudiya and Latayfiya, ambush towns hidden under long dark reefs of palm groves. In the back seat, I slept through the worst parts of the drive, waking up just north of the ruins of Babylon.
The sheik, a man who knew far more about me than I knew about him, did not dress in traditional Arab clothes. He did not, at least when he was around Westerners, wear the thin woolen abay, which is a symbol of rank and his right as a man of status. This barrel-chested man in his late 30s, a well-known figure of the Shiite resistance, was outgoing and intelligent. When he was in cellphone range of Baghdad, his phone rang every 20 seconds.
Perpetually hoarse from making arrangements, the sheik, perched in the passenger seat, was telling us what was going to happen. The sheik was fond of video above all other forms of mass communication because of its wide reach. He watched Al-Jazeera and Arabiya and knew that these stations catalyzed the Arab world against the American occupation of Iraq. Writers were not at the top of his list.
In a stroke of luck, Andrew Berends, an independent filmmaker from New York, had asked if he could ride with us to Najaf. The sheik took to Andy and his camera at first sight. For the next five days, we would travel together, recording the spreading violence.
As we headed south, the land flattened into white desert. Driving past a rime of houses along the highway, I realized that the man in the front seat was a new kind of Iraqi politician, half resistance fighter, half public relations man. He was worldly, not a cleric, and he lacked the soft manners of al-Sadr theologian-orators who had studied in Islamic seminaries. The sheik did not often speak of God, but he was careful to pray at the correct times. When he did, other men prayed behind him.
The sheik had an unsettling talent for finding out a great deal about new acquaintances. If the sheik wanted to know something about you, he asked everyone who knew you for information and was not satisfied until he got what he was after. The sheik did not mind if the background check made you uncomfortable, and it was unwise to lie to him. I never saw him look tired.
South of Latayfiya, we passed a convoy of Humvees and the sheik laughed when he saw the American soldiers. "Look at them, they are begging for rockets," he said. As it turned out, the rockets were on their way. The cease-fire was about to collapse.
In fact, the critical event had come on Monday, the day before we left for Najaf. U.S. Humvees and Iraqi forces had fired on buildings near Muqtada al-Sadr's house and attacked al-Mahdi army fighters across the street. According to witnesses, U.S. and Iraqi forces had come down the street several times before, but this would be the last straw and a deliberate provocation.
To show how dangerous the situation would become, the sheik, while in his Baghdad office, had given me a copy of a letter. It was a general mobilization order for all Mahdi forces in Iraq and had come directly from Muqtada al-Sadr's office in Najaf. Dated Aug. 2, the letter said that Americans had broken the terms of cease-fire and the militia would immediately go on alert -- a credible sign that things were about to go up in flames. As we drove into the center of Najaf, I kept the al-Mahdi mobilization order in my pocket, tucked under a safe-passage letter that was long out of date.
Our first stop in Najaf was at Muqtada al-Sadr's house for a look at the firefight damage. The sheik wanted us to see it. Set in the middle of an unremarkable block, with a view of a parking lot, Muqtada al-Sadr's house didn't look like much -- it was an exercise in modesty. Smaller than the houses around it, it was a simple two-story Iraqi modern place with aluminum gates and high walls. There was nothing to distinguish it from the neighbors except the cell of well-armed fighters across the street and the burned-out shell of a car on the sidewalk.
When we got out of our car to take a look around, the sheik ran over to the Mahdi guards to explain what we were doing and to get the latest news. The sheik joked with the house guards, who were happy to see him, and in a few minutes they took us on a damage tour. Without the sheik, we would have been arrested on the spot.
I asked a young guard near the house if he had seen the firefight; he said he had. He then gave us a detailed account that Andy recorded.
"The Americans are coming to provoke us and came four times but our people had no permission to fire," he said. "They crashed through checkpoint barriers. The fourth time was yesterday. A woman died and a hospital was damaged. God will punish them."
One U.S. news story said the patrol that went by Sadr's house had become lost in the city, ending up there by mistake. Since a new unit was patrolling Najaf, this was a possibility. But I believed, as other observers did, that the U.S. provoked the Mahdi army into all-out war.
