Clerical error
Having overestimated his support, radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr backs down
NAJAF--In the moments before Moqtada al-Sadr cut a deal to withdraw from this holy city, his Mahdi Army fighters were up in arms. Hundreds of bedraggled men circled the holy shrine of Imam Ali in a beelike swarm, heads swathed in black bandanas, hands clutching beat-up Kalashnikovs. Wooden coffins containing men killed in recent fighting were lifted above their heads, while the rabble-rousers chanted "We will follow you to the death, Moqtada!"
In the past two months, hundreds have done so. Fighting between Sadr's men and U.S.-led coalition forces has claimed the lives of over 350 Iraqis, a heavy toll on the ad hoc militia, and 21 coalition soldiers. With his losses, Sadr started looking for a way to bow out gracefully, approaching high-ranking Shiite politicians and clergy to help him cut a deal with the United States. Finally, last week, in the latest of on-again, off-again cease-fires, Sadr agreed "to put an end to the tragic events in holy Najaf, and the violation of the holy shrines in it," by disbanding his troops.
That at least held out hope for a break in the worst violence here. "The country has a lot of problems and a poor population. The mobs were there, waiting for an activist to lead them," said Adel Abdel Mehdi, a prominent Shiite member of the Governing Council. "But [Sadr] went beyond his limits and undertook a task his organization can not fulfill, like waging war and taking a holy city hostage. This is something that exposed him, and now people are rejecting him."
While the mob of men pulsating outside the shrine continued to cry that all of Najaf was united with the Mahdi Army, just a few blocks away the attitude was starkly different. "The ideal solution is disarmament of all militia," said Internet cafe owner Ali al-Assadi, 50. "Najaf wants peace."
If both parties stick to the deal, Assadi will get his wish. The agreement calls for U.S. troops to pull back, making way for Iraq's newly minted security forces to patrol the city. Under the terms, Sadr will withdraw all fighters who are not residents of Najaf and shut down his impromptu sharia courts, which had been convicting citizens as "traitors" and "spies" for cooperating with coalition forces. It was unclear whether the outstanding murder arrest warrant against Sadr would be suspended, or what the deadline was for his rebels to disband.
With the party over, some of Sadr's fighters got to packing, loading rocket-propelled grenades and bags of clothes into a rundown pickup truck outside the vast, ocher-colored graveyard on the city's outskirts. The crumbling wall surrounding the cemetery displays gaping holes from the fighting, as elsewhere in the city, where buildings were peppered with mortar rounds and bullets.
Ghost town. Tensions escalated when Najaf's proudest symbol, the Shrine of Imam Ali, was hit by a Russian-made mortar--weapons used by the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein. The hole in the golden dome, and brick-size damage beneath it, seemed modest compared with the outrage it caused from the international Shiite community and the locals, who blamed U.S. troops for the sacrilegious aggression. "We're very upset with what happened," said Haider Hassen outside the multicolored mosaic tiles and cool, marble floors of the shrine. "We couldn't believe that America, a democracy, would hit a holy shrine. Even Saddam Hussein with all his might never did that. America's credibility has fallen bellow zero."
Two months of fighting transformed this mecca in the Shiite heartland into a ghost town with razor-wire tumbleweed. After Saddam's fall, Najaf and other holy cities in Iraq's Koran belt had prospered from the inflow of hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims from Iran, Syria, and Bahrain. Many new hotels rose out of the dust to meet the demand, but, because of fighting, construction sites on Najaf's monochromatic streets remained abandoned last week.
The bazaar--a bustling, narrow alleyway that burrows through the heart of the city like a passageway into the ancient world of date peddlers and carpet merchants--echoed from the emptiness. Dust caked the metal shutters pulled over shops, and the alley was dank with the smell of sewage. Only one shop remained open for business, "as a challenge to show we're not weak," said its owner, goldsmith Ahmed Nasser, nervously fingering neon-green prayer beads. "If we all close our shops, it will look like we're frightened," he said, before a young woman, completely covered by a black robe except for a slit at the eyes, rushed in to purchase a $50 pair of gold earrings. "The economic situation stopped when the fighting began. My business went down by 90 percent."
The conflict hit dramatic highs and lows, with widespread public protests over the closing of Sadr's Al Hawza newspaper and fighting that threatened to grow into a unified Sunni and Shiite uprising. As a result, Sadr has ostensibly lost the battle, but coalition forces, which had previously counted on the support of the Shiite-dominated south, have lost ground in the war for hearts and minds here. Reeling from months of fighting and damage to the shrine, locals have been quick to forget the coalition's previous good deeds.
Publicly furious with the occupation, the citizens are also privately blaming Sadr for bringing the fighting to the holiest Shiite city, and they say that they will be grateful when he and his ragtag bandit army leave. "Things were very good two months ago. It was a peaceful town. Then people from outside our city came in [and] the majority of the fighters came from outside of Najaf," said Ali Nasser, 25, while eating a lunch of stewed lamb and rice in the emptied bazaar. "When the Americans first came here, they played soccer and dominoes with us. They were just like our friends. We didn't even see a tank."
This story appears in the June 7, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.