Why (some) Iraqis fight us, and why most don't...

[MKSheppard]

Because they used to be on top, now they ain't

In New Iraq, Sunnis Fear a Grim Future
Once Dominant, Minority Feels Besieged

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 21 -- The Bridge of the Imams draws together two Baghdads and divides two Iraqs.




Arching over the Tigris River, the overpass ends in Kadhimiya, a Shiite Muslim neighborhood built around the gold-domed shrine of a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. On Friday, the neighborhood pulses with promise. Pilgrims crowd its intersections, sidewalks overflow with money- changers, jewelers and kiosks brimming with hummus, cardamom and olives. Slogans written on the walls declare deposed president Saddam Hussein an infidel, and newspapers celebrate the capture of the man they call the tyrant.

At the other end of the bridge is Adhamiya, a grim Sunni Muslim neighborhood where the venerated Abu Hanifa Mosque is shielded behind eight steel barricades. Its twin minarets, clock tower and brick walls bear the scars of war. The slogans along the neighborhood's streets, where many of the shops are shuttered, convey nostalgia and anger. "Long live Saddam," reads one, scrawled in black. "Jihad is our way," declares another. A dozen or so men carrying AK-47 rifles sit atop the mosque's roof and patrol the street below, casting wary glances toward the bridge and the celebrations beyond.

"The future? What's the future?" asked one of the guards, Ammar Abu Nour Quds. "We don't have any future."

Of the emotions unleashed by Hussein's arrest, the darkest were those that gripped the country's Sunni minority, of which Hussein was a member. As a new Iraq unfolds, with Hussein's arrest the latest milestone, they are on the inside looking out -- a community besieged, leaderless and relentless in its refusal to accept the eight-month U.S. occupation. The Sunnis' reversal of fortune marks a spectacular shift for a group that for most of the country's modern history, and for centuries before that, guided Iraq through colonialism and coups, dictatorship and war.

In interviews across the Sunni Triangle, which gave Hussein much of his support and suffered the most with his fall, many insist they are no longer fighting for the privilege they enjoyed in previous decades, but rather for their community's survival in a country with a Shiite Muslim majority. Once divided and discredited clergy have stepped forward to try to end a crisis of identity, bringing a message of political Islam to a community that once embraced secular Arab nationalism and tribal traditions.

No longer kingmakers, the community's leaders vow that they still hold the key to stability. But casting a shadow over conversations with men such as Quds is a sense of dispossession, of a minority searching for a voice in the contest to create a new state.

"The people are waiting for something, to hear something, to see something," said Khaled Ahmed, a 23-year-old Sunni whose photo store is across the street from the Abu Hanifa Mosque. He listened for a moment to the sermon, a homily urging restraint and unity that was broadcast from loudspeakers. "They're waiting for some kind of hope," he said.

'A People Without'

Col. Abdullah Jassem and his brother, Gen. Abed Jassem -- two retired military officers from the northern town of Thuluya -- still espouse hope for what they admit is unlikely, that Hussein was somehow not captured.

It is the talk that swirls through towns in the Sunni Triangle and neighborhoods of Baghdad. In Tikrit, near Hussein's ancestral home town, young men insisted, without a hint of doubt, that the former Iraqi president visited Wednesday and doled out "10 papers" -- Iraqi slang for $1,000 -- to the sheik of the Bayt Habous mosque. His message: distribute it to the poor. They recounted another story, spread at a wedding last week, that Hussein was seen in the streets of Tikrit on the day of his capture, Dec. 13, greeting the people.

"I have some suspicions," Abdullah Jassem said while sitting in his home with a riverfront view of the meandering Tigris.

For the Jassem brothers, men of rural origins who rose to influence and prestige under the 35-year rule of Hussein's Baath Party, the suspicions derive as much from their fear of the future as from their loyalty to the past.

The Sunni Triangle stretches from the Iranian border in the east to Syria in the west, an arid region of central Iraq made livable by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But until Hussein took power, it was the Sunni elite in the capital -- not their poor, rural cousins -- who controlled the country. Blessed with wealth, education and the favor of overlords, they were the administrators and officers under the Ottoman Empire, then in large part through inertia, the favorites of the British who arrived after World War I.

To build the Baath Party, Hussein broke their hold on the country. Ever suspicious, he relied on the ranks of his fellow disenfranchised Sunnis, the neglected from cities such as Tikrit, Samarra and Thuluya. At first, he recruited from tribes, imbued with the fierce, often unforgiving traditions of the countryside. While, in time, he narrowed the ranks of his faithful to his family, men such as the Jassems profited, and today, the ranks of Thuluya's newly unemployed are filled with former military officers, intelligence agents and bureaucrats.

Hussein guaranteed their interests and provided their patronage. In a region given to prejudices against Shiites, he ensured that power would remain out of Shiite hands. Until Hussein's capture last week, when he crawled out of a dirt hole without resistance, the Jassems thought they shared with Hussein the ideals of dignity, pride and honor. After his arrest, they felt only shame, another reflection of their growing humiliation.




In Thuluya and elsewhere, the word that punctuated their conversations was ihana, insult.

"He's supposed to fight with honor, he's supposed to defend his honor," Abed lamented. His brother shook his head in dismay. He stretched out a leg crippled by shrapnel during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. "We believed in him, that he would always resist," he said. "We can't believe that he would be reduced to his level, as a coward."

"Believe me, the day of his capture was the same as the collapse of Baghdad, maybe worse," Abdullah added.

Qahtan Jabbouri, a friend sharing small cups of bitter coffee, interrupted. "We are now a shaab biduun," he said. "A people without."

Feeling Disenfranchised

For generations, sect and ethnicity have cast a long shadow over Iraq, and under Hussein's clan-based rule, Shiites and Kurds were the most frequent victims of his government's brutal repression. But now, in the freewheeling, postwar era, sect and ethnicity have come to define politics almost exclusively, with explicit quotas determining the allotment of power and patronage under the U.S.-led occupation. In that contest, the Kurds are represented by the community's two traditional parties. The Shiites, comprising perhaps 60 percent of the population, have a voice through formerly exiled groups or clergy, both radical and mainstream, who emerged forcefully in the wake of Hussein's fall.

The Sunnis, about one-fifth of Iraq's people, find themselves largely disenfranchised, posing a formidable challenge to the U.S.-led administration that is trying to craft an inclusive political process to transfer power by June.

The Baath Party, its leadership traditionally dominated by Sunnis, was outlawed in May. The Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party, whose leader serves in the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, struggles for support among a constituency that, in overwhelming numbers, refuses to accept the status quo. In the words of one leading Sunni cleric, Abdel-Salaam Kubeisi, the party does little more than "market the occupation." The sheiks of Sunni Arab tribes, aggressively courted by the U.S. administration, are seen by many Sunnis as compromised.

"In the past they took money from Saddam," Jabbouri said. "Now they're taking money from the Americans."

The sense of disenfranchisement is powerfully felt among Sunnis. Even today, many are reluctant to identity themselves by sect. They insist they are Muslims and that sectarian differences are only a ploy to divide Iraqis. Others say they are Arabs, even as the Arab nationalism that gave them voice has receded. Often, they identify themselves in opposition -- against the occupation or, more commonly, as a besieged community, facing an escalating campaign of shadowy killings of Baathists and Sunni clergy.

"We were the heads of the Arabs, and the people were happy," said Mohammed Abed, 24, owner of a CD store in Tikrit, recalling an Arab proverb. "But by God, time has turned its face on us, and we've now been placed at the mercy of the villains."

The play list at Abed's store is a window on such sentiments. It points to a society that he and others believe is growing more radical and ceding ground to once-divided clergy that can claim independence and moral stature.

From a room decorated with posters of Arab and international pop stars -- Kadhim Saher, Assala and Britney Spears -- he points to the video that he has trouble keeping on the shelf. It is by Sabah Abu Hashim Jannabi, an Iraqi singer from the northern city of Mosul. It is titled "Wrath," and at about 50 cents a piece, he said he sells 40 or so a week -- by far his best seller.

The video is a wild mishmash of images -- scenes from "The Lion of the Desert," a movie starring Anthony Quinn as the famed Libyan guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar, promotional video from U.S. armed forces and relentlessly violent footage taken from Arab satellite networks and Fox News of U.S. attacks and raids in Iraq.

To a heavy drumbeat, Jannabi sings: "America is losing in the thousands. Our paths are paved with bullets."




The Clergy's Role

Sheik Nadhim Khalil represents a new generation of leader. He has achieved influence by religious appeals and anti-occupation rhetoric. Only 25, he has led the Caliphs Mosque, Thuluya's oldest and most prominent, for seven years. Since the government's fall, he said, worshipers have tripled in number. Plans are underway, he said, to build a new floor to house them.

His followers, many of them young, point to his credentials. The Americans raided his house last month, they said -- a sure sign of his independence. Under Hussein, they recalled, he was questioned often for his sometimes explicit criticism of the government -- that it should build schools rather than palaces, that its administration lacked the justice of Islam's forebears.

"Now there's space. Now there's an opening," said Khalil, sitting atop red Persian carpets and leaning on pillows stacked against the wall, which was adorned with framed verses of the Koran. "Only the mosques represent the Sunnis."

While fearing their influence, many Sunnis express envy at the authority commanded by the most senior Shiite clergy. To religious Shiites, the pronouncements of the grand ayatollahs carry the force of law, and the clerics' ascent through a rigid hierarchy of scholarship is measured by their prestige among their followers. In times of change, the institution provides a voice of the community.

Through history, the Sunni clergy have lacked that status, tainted by what many view as subservience to the state and bereft of stature in a sect that, at its most orthodox, sees no intermediary between man and God.

Now, the Sunni clergy are trying to raise their standing. Just days after the government's collapse, several clerics established the Commission of the Muslim Clergy. Today, it claims 3,000 members, with offices in most provinces. Its advisory council of 41 scholars and clerics and secretariat of 11 meet weekly, and its statements speak explicitly on behalf of the sect. The most recent warned of consequences of more killings of Baathists and clergy.

"We have moral authority with the majority of the Sunni people," said the group's spokesman, Abdel-Salaam Kubeisi. "But there is no doubt now that things are boiling. The question is how long we can control the feelings of the people."

In his own way, Khalil has repeated the commission's experiment. Inside Thuluya, perched on a bend in the Tigris, he has convened weekly gatherings of the town's 17 clerics, the setting for the two-hour meeting rotating among the mosques. They have dealt with U.S. raids in Thuluya, sectarian strife in nearby Balad, with its mixed Shiite- Sunni population, and efforts to refurbish the mosques.

His message is harsh -- opposing the American occupation, defending Sunnis against Shiites.

Some worshipers recall a sermon Khalil delivered last month in which he spoke of three men competing to be the most vile. The first saw a woman carrying wood atop her head. He beat her. The second tore off her clothes and raped her. The third stood back. When the other two asked what he would do to prove his wickedness, he laughed. That was my mother, he said.

As the mosque fell silent, Khalil said the mother represented Iraq, and the men were those who betrayed the country.

"The occupation is like a cancer, and it has to be removed," he said. The clerics, he said, "are fighting with our tongues."

On this day, Khalil expounded on the need to form a Sunni militia to offset the armed presence of Shiites and Kurds. He said former military officers had started recruiting in Thuluya -- in his view, a welcome development.

"If you lose and cannot get a place in the government, you have something to fight with," said Nadhim, wearing a white skullcap. . "It's something to create a balance of power."

The future, he predicted, was grim. He saw no end to the occupation. He saw sectarian strife only mounting.

"The seeds for civil war have been planted," he said, his tone matter of fact. "I really think so."

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What a bunch of cockmonkeys there, they're not fighting us for
an "independent" Iraq free of american oppressors, but because
they used to be on top, and now they're at the bottom of the shitheap
in the new Iraq. Scum.

[Setzer]

Sorta like the Rebellion's top leaders.

[Guardsman Bass]

Yeah, well, FUCK them; if you can't maintain your position on the top, you don't deserve it.

[MKSheppard]

Sorta like the Rebellion's top leaders.

Ironically true