CHAPTER TWO

The Shia of Iraq

In April 2003, the US troops who had just captured Baghdad and overthrown Saddam Hussein saw a strange sight that they did not understand. All over central and southern Iraq more than a million Iraqis had taken to the roads and started walking towards the holy city of Kerbala. The journey took them between three and five days and they often slept in the fields at night. Many of the pilgrims carried green flags as the symbol of Imam Ali or black flags as a sign of mourning. Others bore once-green palm fronds that were turning yellow as they dried in the intense heat of the Iraqi plain. Young men poured out of the great Shia stronghold, now called Sadr City (a fortnight earlier it had been Saddam City) in Baghdad and headed for Kerbala 60 miles away. Straggling along the roads from other parts of Iraq were knots of people representing every Shia city, town and village in the country. Often the pilgrims were accompanied by an elderly vehicle, usually a battered white pick-up van, carrying their food and a few people too old or sick to walk. The mood was buoyant and confident but they were not celebrating the fall of the Baathist regime, though if it had still been in power the giant assembly could scarcely have taken place. The pilgrimage was in fact the first demonstration of the ability of Muqtada al-Sadr to mobilise great masses of pious Shia. In his first Friday sermon in his martyred father's mosque in Kufa on 11 April Muqtada, liberally quoting his father's words, had called for people to walk on foot to Kerbala as a sign of their faith.1

The American troops who sped past the walkers in their trucks would have been surprised to learn that the people walking beside the road were commemorating a battle. It was not one that had just been fought as the American army advanced north, but a battle that had taken place 1,400 years earlier at Kerbala. In military terms it was no more than a skirmish that ended in a massacre. But it was here, nor far from the Euphrates, that the great Shia martyr Imam Hussein and his warrior half-brother, Abbas, had been killed in 680 AD. The grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of Ali, assassinated in Kufa nineteen years earlier, Hussein was overwhelmed with his small caravan of solders and family members by the greatly superior forces sent against them by their arch-enemy Yazid, the devilish ruler of Damascus and Hussein's rival to be ruler of the Muslim world. It is this battle at Kerbala which is at the centre of the Shia faith. The story of what happened so long ago on the banks of the Euphrates has become a symbol, like the crucifixion in Jerusalem for Christians, of the eternal conflict between good and evil. The legend of the death of Hussein, Abbas and their followers tells of courage, martyrdom and redemption through sacrifice on one side; and betrayal, cruelty and violence on the other. It is the tale, too, of a righteous minority against a powerful but evil government authority.

The pilgrimage I saw on the roads around Baghdad in the days following its capture was the Arba'in, which marks the fortieth day of mourning after Imam Hussein's martyrdom. In any country of the world at any time so many pilgrims on the roads at once would have been a striking event. The processions and marches dwarfed in size the Roman Catholic religious processions in Mexico. They were hundreds of times larger than those that I had seen as a child in Ireland where the columns of carefully ordered marchers belonging to religious organisations blocked the main street of Youghal, the small town where I was born in county Cork. But what made this pilgrimage unique was not only its size but its timing: it was taking place within days of the end of a war. The roads were not safe. Burned-out Iraqi tanks had only just stopped smouldering beside the road. Well-armed looters were still active, their trucks piled high with stolen property. Edgy American soldiers were beginning to earn a grim reputation among Iraqis for opening a torrent of fire at anything that made them feel nervous.

Astonishing though the Arba'in may have been, it passed almost unnoticed in the US and Western Europe. This was a pity because what we were seeing was of great significance for the future of Iraq. The throngs of people answering Muqtada's call and making their way to Kerbala were the first open display of the strength of the Shia of Iraq, who made up 16 million out of the country's total population of 27 million. The giant pilgrimage showed their religious commitment, their solidarity as a community, and their ability to mobilise vast numbers. The US, supremely confident after its easy initial victory, was about to try to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of the old regime itself. Pre-war plans for an Iraqi provisional government were cast aside. 'Occupiers always call themselves liberators,' said my friend the Kurdish leader Sami Abdul-Rahman disgustedly when told just before the war that America's plans for democracy in Iraq had been put on hold. Nobody in Washington paid any attention to the pilgrims, numerous though they were, or foresaw that they were serious competitors to the US for control of Iraq.

Perplexity among American soldiers over the religious rituals of Iraqis did not diminish over the coming years. The next Arba'in came in April 2004. A year into the occupation, the mood was angrier in the Shia community. On 2 March Sunni insurgents had planted five bombs in Kerbala and Kadhimiyah that killed 270 worshippers and injured 570. The confrontation between the Mehdi Army and the US military was escalating by the day. The American forces were having great difficulty in distinguishing between the Mehdi Army and pilgrims marching across Iraq waving green flags to commemorate Arba'in. One day in early April I was driving on the main road on the northern outskirts of Baghdad when I saw that a heavily armed US patrol had herded about a hundred Iraqis into a field and forced them to sit down. The American soldiers were eyeing their captives with suspicion and demanding to know why they were carrying green banners. It turned out the pilgrims came from the town of Dujail, one of the few Shia centres north of Baghdad. It was famous as the place where Shia fighters had tried to assassinate Saddam Hussein in 1982 and 147 townspeople had subsequently been executed or tortured to death in retaliation. It was for this crime that Saddam Hussein was hanged on 31 December 2006.

We came across a group of six men carrying a green flag walking beside a date-palm grove near a main road. They turned out to come from Sadr City and were very willing to talk. A slightly built man wearing black clothes, who seemed to be their leader, said his name was Hamid al-Ugily and that he and his friends were spending two or three days walking to Kerbala. Surprisingly, he said he had made the pilgrimage under Saddam but had had to do so secretly, walking mainly at night. He showed no gratitude to the Americans for overthrowing the old dictator. 'The Americans are just as bad as Saddam Hussein,' he said. 'We think they will attack Muqtada in Najaf. We will defend our religious leaders.' These opinions were not unexpected. The occupation was becoming ever more unpopular among the Shia. I asked the pilgrims what jobs they held and the answers they gave underlined the fragility of the Americans' hold on Iraq. All six men said they were soldiers in the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC). This paramilitary body, created by the Coalition Provisional Authority, was supposed to take over duties currently being carried out by American soldiers. Abbas, one of the marchers, said: 'I have been in the ICDC one year and the Americans didn't do anything for Iraq.' The ICDC was just the first of a series of Iraqi military and paramilitary organisations created by the US on whose loyalty it found it could not rely.

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I had visited Kerbala, the site of the golden-domed shrines to Hussein and Abbas, a few weeks after it was recaptured by the Iraqi army in March 1991 after the Shia had risen up in the wake of Saddam Hussein's defeat in Kuwait. The desperation of the Shia rebels besieged by Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard cannot have been so different from that of the outnumbered followers of Hussein and Abbas trapped in the same place in 680 AD. The original martyrs of the Shia faith likewise knew that they could expect no mercy from their murderous enemy. In both cases defeat was inevitable. Iraq is full of the ghosts of terrible tragedies, both recent and buried in the distant past, but nowhere do they jostle one so closely as in Kerbala, Najaf and Kufa. Here, just to the west of the Euphrates, the death by assassination or in battle of the progenitors of the Shia faith was mirrored by the persecution and massacre of their followers during the thirty-five-year rule of Saddam Hussein.

The Mesopotamian plain is the birthplace of civilisation where writing was discovered, but few Iraqis identify with Ur of the Chaldees, the Babylonians or Nebuchadnezzar and the Assyrian empire. (An exception was Saddam Hussein who portrayed himself as being in the tradition of Iraq's ancient rulers and had ugly yellow bricks inscribed with his name used to rebuild parts of Babylon.) It is what is believed to have happened after the first Islamic army burst out of the desert into the lush Euphrates valley in 633 AD that Iraqis, and above all the Shia, see as belonging to a past which they feel is truly theirs. Saddam attempted to create a nationalist anti-Iranian counter-myth surrounding the battle of al-Qadisiyya, when the Islamic Arab army decisively defeated the Persians...