Dread and Limbo in Iraq
Nabil Salih on life stuck between two wars
Baghdad: The Illusion of Peace
Nabil Salih
Close to midnight on Tuesday, April 7, a loud explosion rattled my family’s house in a suburb of Baghdad. A column of white smoke shadowed the alleys nearby. Men murmured, milling about in the street. Policemen drove past, unsure what had landed where. Downstairs, two days before her eleventh birthday, my niece shivered in her mother’s arms.
Soon we learned that militiamen had fired a barrage of rockets and suicide drones across the city. One pierced the concrete reinforcement of a neighbor’s house, smashing into a vacant bedroom. Another killed eight-year-old Siraj Qadouri and his father, Mohammed, on their doorstep in nearby al-Amiriyah—the same neighborhood where, in 1991, American “smart” bombs incinerated some 408 civilians, including my great aunt Rajiha and her children, in a bomb shelter. Iraqis remember that inferno as al-Fajr al-Hazin—the mournful dawn.
The next morning Mohammed’s nephew, a survivor of the night’s attack, roamed the atlal—the ruins—of the crime scene, a blue nylon bag in his hand, gathering splinters from Siraj’s small cranium and bits of his brain. The image invited another from a day more than twenty years ago. After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, my second cousin’s father, a security official in the new regime, was assassinated by unidentified gunmen on a highway in al-Seleikh, in the city’s north. During the funeral I looked on as the young boy picked up fragments of his father’s brain, which were strewn on the trunk mat of his red Peugeot.
No party dared or bothered to claim responsibility for the attack on April 7, which was aimed at the US-run Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center and its surrounding structures near the city’s international airport. Known collectively as Victory Camp, these installations served Washington’s embassy and facilitated movement to and from NATO coalition bases elsewhere in the country before the US and its allies shrank their footprint in Iraq earlier this year. (As in colonial times, US and NATO advisers stationed in these bases had often emerged from their barracks to conduct training drills and instruct their disgruntled native peers.) The camp in Baghdad sits on a highway that also leads to a prison, where Islamic State detainees are held after their transfer from Syria by the US, as well as several other security bases, including one for Iraq’s elite force, the Counter-Terrorism Service.
Whoever launched it, the attack was emblematic of the violence always lurking underneath Iraq’s illusory peace. After the start of the US–Israeli war on Iran and the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the constellation of Shi‘a paramilitary groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (IRI) opened a new front in Baghdad. They have carried out hundreds of missile and drone strikes against NATO positions, Washington’s diplomatic mission, and Abu Dhabi’s consulate, as well as against Kurdish Iranian oppositionists and targets in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond. They have threatened to lash out against Syria in the event that its new president, the former jihadi Ahmed al-Shara‘, dares move across the border against the Lebanese Hezbollah, with whom Iraqi militias had once allied to defend the Ba‘ath regime of Bashar al-Assad.
Most Shi‘a armed groups in the country, including the larger of the IRI’s members, belong to al-Hashd al-Shaabi (the Popular Mobilization Forces, or PMF). The PMF came together after Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the highest Shi‘a authority in Iraq, issued a 2014 fatwa calling on “able-bodied citizens” to defend their country against the Islamic State. It incorporated existing Shi‘a militias—such as Asaib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hezbollah—and organized volunteers into dozens of brigades, eventually reaching over 200,000 members in total. Some are Sunni; others are Yazidi, a non-Muslim ethnoreligious group stationed around Sinjar, their ancestral home in the north of the country; but the PMF is mostly known as a Shi‘a force in a multi-religious country with a large Sunni community.
Institutionalized by a 2016 law under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi (2014–2018), the PMF was then designed to be independent of existing security structures, tied directly to the prime minister and commander-in-chief. It later started receiving some $3 billion from the annual budget. But the network became increasingly involved in politics and the economy over the past four years under Mohammed al-Sudani, who served as the country’s prime minister until ceding the job in May to a young tycoon and political neophyte named Ali al-Zaidi. It was al-Sudani, for instance, who enabled the PMF to establish al-Muhandis General Company, an ambitious conglomerate—now under sanction by the US—that works across construction, agriculture, and other industries.
When, in February of this year, the US and Israel started bombing camps and checkpoints manned by PMF brigades in northern and western Iraq, they seemed to be going after this loosely state-controlled network. In late March, a regional leader and over a dozen PMF members were killed in a strike against a PMF headquarters in al-Anbar, and the coalition went so far as to bomb the PMF chairman Falih al-Fayyadh’s residence in Mosul. Between February 28 and April 8, the PMF has said, eighty fighters were killed and more than 270 were wounded in the “Zionist-American” aggression.
In fact, what Washington had done was resume an undeclared war on the country it had supposedly “liberated” twenty-three years ago. The Americans have hardly been discriminating in their targets. The bombs have fallen both on Washington’s supposed partners in the Iraqi military and on civilians, including Imad Abdul-Dayim, a sixty-three-year-old killed on the Iranian side of the al-Shalamcheh border point with Basra during a trip to secure medicine for his wife.
Al-Sudani spent the early phase of the war making overtures to Trump, promising to rein in rogue militias. He fired intelligence officers in Nineveh governorate, which has been used as a launchpad for attacks on Harir Air Base and Washington’s consulate in Erbil; in late March his forces apprehended four suspects behind an attack that targeted a US base in Syrian territory. In a call with Emmanuel Macron on April 8, he reassured the French president that the militants behind the drone attacks the previous month that killed a French soldier, Arnaud Frion, had been arrested.
Al-Zaidi wanted to transcend al-Sudani’s limitations. In his first months in office he has presented himself as an uncompromising strongman: on June 29 he seemed adamant that he wanted to disarm the paramilitary groups, telling the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat that he “will not accept the existence of a state within a state.” The need for resistance “no longer exists,” he said. Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council has doubled down on al-Zaidi’s efforts, saying that anyone who illegally “manufactures, uses, or possesses” a drone shall be charged as a terrorist. So far, however, the masterminds behind the attacks have seemed untouchable.
Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, spent the past three months in a no-man’s-land between two wars, and the Western press seemed alarmed more by the fate of Iraq’s oil than by that of its people. Weeks after Iraq’s airspace was finally reopened to civilian traffic, US and Israeli warplanes could still be heard over Baghdad, making it clear that any neighborhood, back street, or building in the former “city of peace” could be struck at any moment.
Read the full article on the Review’s website here.
