Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 1

Aftermath.

Following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world.

Nir Rosen.

Part One.

THE LEBANONIZATION OF IRAQ.

CHAPTER ONE.

Occupation.

ABDEL SATTAR AL-MUSAWI'S DECOMPOSED REMAINS LAY ON THE ground above his grave. His older brothers sat beside them, holding them, crying. Although he had been arrested in 1998 and killed in 2001, they had just learned of his death three days earlier, and now they had come to claim his body. "His crime was loving freedom," said his friend Abdel Karim, who had come to find his own brother too.

It was April 2003, and I was beginning my career as a journalist. I had been in Iraq for only a few weeks, and I thought nothing good would come of the war: it was predicated on lies, and would subvert democracy and law at home as well as abroad. I was skeptical that a foreign occupation would be welcomed by Iraqis, and I knew that the American civilian and military leaders were ill prepared to understand a different culture, especially a Muslim one, and especially after the trauma of September 11. But I had come to Iraq wanting to give a voice to Iraqis, and this meant restraining my views and listening. As Iraqis rubbed their eyes and awoke to the new reality in a mix of shock, depression, and euphoria, I was as confused as they were; nothing seemed black-and-white.

With the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, the circ.u.mstances surrounding the disappearance of thousands of political prisoners were finally being revealed to their families. Iraqis could find files on their loved ones and discover what had become of their fate. More often than not, the news was not good.

Several dozen members of the Musawi family had come to claim four of their brethren from the Karkh cemetery. The cemetery, in Haswa, just outside Baghdad, entombed political prisoners, many of whom had been murdered at the nearby Abu Ghraib prison. All four murdered members of the Musawi family were cousins: Abdel Sattar al-Musawi, born in 1966, hailed from the Dora neighborhood of Baghdad and was married with two children; Salah Hadi al-Musawi, born in 1974, was from Baghdad's Thawra neighborhood; Salah Hasan al-Musawi, born in 1971, was also from Thawra, as was Saad Qasim al-Musawi, born in 1967, who was married with six children. The body of family friend Qasim Ahmad al-Maliki was here too. He was Abdel Sattar's age, from Thawra as well, married, with no children. All had been killed in 2001. "They were killed for no reason," a friend of the Musawis explained. "There was no justice, no court, no defense."

The Musawis had traveled by bus and in a pickup truck. They carried with them flimsy wooden coffins made of boards and a black flag of mourning. At seven in the morning, they were the first family in the cemetery that day. The dafan, or grave digger, Muhamad Muslim Muhamad, was a small man in sweatpants with a b.u.t.toned s.h.i.+rt tucked in. He a.s.sisted with an obsequious eagerness, and I suspected that he was compensating for an unconfessed complicity in the crimes he helped bury.

Karkh was the size of a football field, surrounded by a brick wall fringed with eucalyptus trees. The ground was a sandy gray, with mounds to mark the shallow graves. Some of the mounds had holes burrowed into them where animals had fed on the corpses. On a stick in each mound was a card with a number on it. The Musawi family had the plot numbers for their dead, and Muhamad led them to the first one, casually strutting over other graves. It belonged to Abdel Sattar. When the family found the grave, the previously silent men collapsed in loud sobs. They kneeled on the ground and clung to one another, quieting down only when the grave digger began to undo his work. They watched in an apprehensive and lachrymose silence. Perhaps they still hoped that the grave would be empty? The digging slowed as the earth being removed turned to a wet, dark red, as if stained with blood. Muhamad abandoned his shovel and used his hands. Abdel Sattar's exhumed body was the color of the earth, thin and dry. Amid calls for "my brother!" his body was placed on a plastic sheet and wrapped in a kiffin, or white cloth. It was then placed in the wooden coffin to await the trip to Najaf, south of Baghdad, where it would be buried in the City of Peace-the biggest cemetery in the world outside China, and the preferred burial site for all s.h.i.+tes.

As Abdel Sattar's brothers and a handful of others remained by his coffin, the rest of the family moved on to another cousin's grave. The body emerged in separate pieces, and the bones were placed together in a pile around the skull. By nine in the morning six other families had arrived to reclaim their loved ones, and their wailing cries could be heard from all corners of the cemetery. I couldn't help but cry too. Abdel Sattar's former employer was also present. "He was a lovely boy," he said. I asked if this had happened to many people he knew. He gestured behind him to the hundreds of graves and said, "See for yourself."

I felt ashamed to be intruding on the Musawis' private pain, and I sobbed with them. One month into my career as a journalist, I was not yet able to watch other people's pain without partic.i.p.ating in it.

Hussein al-Musawi told me he had served time in the Saddam City security prison with his four murdered cousins. He was jailed for seventy days beginning in July 2001 because the regime had learned that in 1991, after the failed uprising against Saddam following his defeat by the Americans, a relative of the family attempted to defect to Iran. The relative had visited Abdel Sattar before escaping, and this was the cause of the Musawi family's suffering: eleven men were arrested. In prison Hussein's interrogators had tortured him with electricity. They had tied his hands behind his back and hung him from them, dislocating his shoulders. And they had beaten him with cables and metal rods until he was drenched in his own blood. At the cemetery he told me he would still be able to recognize the faces of the security officers who had done this to them. "If I saw them I would seek revenge," Hussein said. "I would eat them."

Before leaving the cemetery, several men of the Musawi family voiced their resentment toward the Arab press. "They were a part of these crimes," one said. "They covered it up. They always said Saddam was a hero, and they took his money."

Baghdad-City of Decay.

The Musawis had not known whether their lost sons were dead or alive until three days before they dug up the bodies. They received the information from a remarkable organization called the a.s.sociation of Free Prisoners. Located in the confiscated riverside villa of a former security official in the Kadhimiya neighborhood of Baghdad, the a.s.sociation formed right after the war ended. Muhamad Jamal Abdel Amir, a twenty-eight-year-old volunteer, explained that the a.s.sociation was created by four former prisoners. It was an entirely Iraqi project; the founders had not coordinated their activities with anyone foreign or received any outside help. After the war, when Iraqis began looting the headquarters of the security organizations that had terrorized them for so long, many handed over the files they found to the a.s.sociation.

On the external walls of the a.s.sociation hung sheets of paper with alphabetical listings of prisoners' names. Hundreds of desperate people ran their fingers down the lists taped to the walls, hoping to learn their relatives' fate. Inside, past the two boys with machine guns who guarded the a.s.sociation, workers bustled back and forth, their faces blocked by the immense piles of doc.u.ments they carried to different rooms in order to organize them by subject. They planned to enter all the information into a database, but for now the dozens of rooms were full of thousands of files going back to the 1960s. The files were stacked on top of one another, stored in sacks or kept in their original file cabinets. They were marked "Dawa" (for a banned Islamist party) or "Communist," or had other labels that indicated independent political activity-all designating the subjects as victims of ruthless repression.

New files continued to come in by the thousands from all over Iraq. One revealed that a soldier accused of joining the Dawa Party in 1981 and criticizing the regime had been sentenced to five years in prison for his crimes. Another file doc.u.mented the ma.s.s execution of sixteen people. Saad Muhamad, a volunteer at the a.s.sociation responsible for gathering information, explained he was imprisoned for four years for criticizing Saddam. He showed me a Procrustean British-made traction couch that had been found in the general security headquarters. It was used during interrogations to stretch victims until their bodies broke and tore. He also showed me a meat grinder used for humans.

I found my own trove of records one day as I was walking through Baghdad's streets. In the poor neighborhood of Betawin, I stumbled across an abandoned police station housing the Saadun General Security Directory Office on its second floor. It was clear that a systematic attempt had been made to destroy the doc.u.ments on the second floor, presumably by the minor intelligence officials who had worked there. I found two overturned doc.u.ment shredders and thin strings of paper strewn all over the floor, along with broken gla.s.s and ashes, the only remnants of the bureaucratic records of various horrors. Most file cabinets and their contents had been thrown into a few rooms that were torched; all that remained in the drawers were ashes. A young Christian boy brought sacks for me to load files into. Those that were salvageable doc.u.mented the mundane daily operations of a dictators.h.i.+p's local security station over the previous years, right up to March 2003, the final days before the war. The files recorded: the 2001 duties of security officers, changes of residence of ordinary Iraqi citizens, information from a snitch about a stolen antique sword, lists of people belonging to enemy or sectarian organizations, lists of people who criticized Saddam, lists of people under surveillance, reports on people observing religious ceremonies, information on partic.i.p.ants in the 1991 s.h.i.+te uprising, weekly orders to spread proregime rumors and combat antiregime rumors, lists of executed political prisoners and the reasons for their execution, information on bank employees in Baghdad, lists of spies in mosques and churches, names of applicants to study in the Islamic university, reports on people who had tried to leave Iraq illegally, orders to spread rumors that Iraq could defeat the U.S. and would attack Israel and liberate Palestine, a list of people accused of belonging to a group seeking to avenge the murder of s.h.i.+te leader Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, and a report about a man accused of breaking a picture of Saddam, among others.

One dense folder particularly caught my attention. It contained numerous security service memos concerning the arrest of Abed Ali Safai Ahmad, who had been accused of insulting Saddam and the Baath Party. According to the files Ahmad was a taxi driver, born in 1975, who lived in the s.h.i.+te slums then known as Saddam City. He was a veteran of the war against Iran, and one of his brothers had been killed in that war.

On July 4, 2002, the leaders.h.i.+p of the Abtal al-Tahrir (Heroes of Liberation) section of the Al Aqsa group office of the Baath Party ordered the arrest of Ahmad for his "a.s.sault on the person of the master and leader the President may Allah bless and protect him." Basically, he stood accused of a.s.saulting Saddam, and it had been decreed that he undergo detention for "a reasonable period."

Basher Aziz al-Tamimi, Ahmad's neighbor, also a taxi driver living in Saddam City, testified against him. A staunch Baath Party member from the Al Aqsa branch, Tamimi alleged that he encountered a very drunk Ahmad on the night of July 3. According to Tamimi, Ahmad suggested they sell a privately owned car, but Tamimi reminded him that such a sale would be illegal. Tamimi then testified that Ahmad cursed Saddam Hussein, saying, "Saddam's sister's p.u.s.s.y over this law!" (In Arabic, as in any other language, referring to the v.a.g.i.n.a of a man's female relatives is a terrible insult.) Tamimi asked Ahmad why he was attacking the president when he knew that Tamimi was a member of the Baath Party. Ahmad is quoted as replying: "Your sister's p.u.s.s.y and the Baath Party's sister's p.u.s.s.y!" A fistfight ensued. Tamimi presently reported the case to his Baathist supervisor, Saad Khalaf: "He requested I file a written report, and then we went to Shahab because he is responsible for the branch security." The men organized a group to go to Ahmad's house and confront him. Apparently, when they arrived Ahmad hit Tamimi and threatened, "I will shave your mustache and the Baath Party's mustache." (In Iraq a mustache is often considered a symbol of manhood and honor, and threatening to shave a man's mustache-like referring to the genitals of a female relative-is a terrible insult. A man can also take an oath, swearing by his mustache, and if he or his sister, for example, has been humiliated, he can shave his mustache and refuse to grow it until his honor has been restored.) Other witnesses testified in support of Ahmad's accusers. In his defense Ahmad claimed, "I did not a.s.sault the person of the master and the leader president, Allah bless him and keep him." Ahmad insisted he had witnesses who supported his side of the story. He admitted that he had a.s.saulted Tamimi on the night the party committee came to arrest him: "I was in a bad temper and I hit him, and as he does not have a mustache I said to him, I shave yours and the party's mustache, and I did not mean to direct the a.s.sault on the party in my words. . . . I was under the influence of alcohol and was drunk and in a bad temper for I had a brother who was martyred in the great battle of Qadisiat Saddam. His name was Abad al-Radha, and he died in 1986. . . . I seek forgiveness, and this is my testimony." Ahmad claimed that Tamimi owed him ten thousand dinars and that when he asked for it back they got into an argument. Ahmad was jailed but released in an amnesty granted two months later.

Another file I found doc.u.mented the arrest of a woman accused of being a witch. I tracked down the accused witch, Aliya Jasem, who lived in the village of Huseiniya, north of Baghdad. Amid sewage and waste-filled unpaved roads where half-naked toddlers played, I finally found Aliya's modest house. Her husband, Sadiq Naji Muhamad, was a tailor in Baghdad. They had four children. Sadiq had been a prisoner of war in Iran for nine years. He told me that s.h.i.+te prisoners were singled out for special punishment by the Iranian guards, who viewed them as traitors fighting for Sunnis. He was held in the Hashmetiya prison in Tehran, where he saw many fellow prisoners killed or tortured.

As an unrelated male, I could not meet Aliya; I could only catch a glimpse of her silhouette or the end of her dress, hear her voice as she spoke with her husband and hear her moving about in the kitchen. Sadiq related their shared story. Aliya was a fortune teller, psychic, and traditional healer. Many Iraqi s.h.i.+tes believe that descendants of the Prophet Muhammad can treat the spirit using the Koran. Aliya was one such descendant. She treated spiritual ailments such as depression. If a woman had been expelled from her husband's family's home, Aliya could treat her and she would be taken back. If a dog had attacked a child, she would open and close the Koran three times in the child's face in order to cure it. She cured women who were not wanted as wives by placing special stones in front of the afflicted woman's house, was.h.i.+ng her, and reading from the Koran and the sayings of Imam Ali, Muhammad's nephew and a key figure for s.h.i.+tes. Sadiq proudly related that even though Aliya could not read or write, she could know everything about a person by looking at her face.

When Aliya was a child, her legs were paralyzed. No doctor could treat her, so her family took her to a s.h.i.+te shrine near Hilla-where, Sadiq explained, she was able to stand and walk. Since that moment she had possessed special powers. "There are two types of magic," said Sadiq, "the devil's magic, practiced by some sects in Iraq but which is against the Koran, and merciful magic, which can combat the devil's magic and which she practiced."

Aliya was paid for her services, but very little. Traditional healing is very common in Iraq, and since every woman in the neighborhood knew about her (she only treated women), word of her abilities spread. Sadiq maintained that most women in his wife's field were also security agents or collaborators. The security service wanted Aliya to work with them because she had access to every woman in the city and could discover the secrets of each home, such as who was involved in illegal political activity. Aliya refused to be an agent and was subsequently accused of harboring an anti-Saddam political group in her home. In describing this course of events, Sadiq accused the mayor of being a security agent and Baath Party official.

On August 10, 2002, Aliya was arrested by the Iraqi Security Forces. She was found guilty of witchcraft and spent two months in jail. The order to arrest her came from the national security directorate. The doc.u.ments said she was released because of her husband's request. He wrote a letter to the security service saying that she had only been using special spiritual techniques to cure ailments of the soul. She only had treated women and only had used the Koran. Sadiq asked for another chance, promising that Aliya would never practice healing again. He also mentioned that he had been a POW in Iran and had chosen to return to Iraq, unlike other s.h.i.+tes who had joined Iranian-sponsored anti-Saddam militias.

Although Aliya was sentenced to six months, she was released after seventy days from the Rashas women's prison (she was transferred from the Al Rusafa prison) in a general amnesty. Aliya had been beaten in the police station, and Sadiq was still bitter. "She is a good wife, and they put her in the same prison with prost.i.tutes," he complained. "She was so traumatized she has ceased performing her magic."

After her release Aliya went to the tomb of Abbas, an important s.h.i.+te shrine to one of Ali's sons, and said, "If I am really your relative, prove it by destroying Saddam and all his men within a year." Six months later, his government fell. Sadiq explained that this happened because "G.o.d answered the prayers of those who had suffered."

I AM OFTEN ASKED now if it was all worth it. Would it have been better to leave Saddam in power? Are Iraqis better or worse off than they were before the American war? I never know what to say. How do you compare different kinds of terror? Those who were spared Saddam's prisons and executioners may be better off, though they have not been spared the American prisons, or attacks, or the resistance's bombs, or the death squads of the civil war. The Kurds are certainly better off, on their way to independence, benefiting from their relative stability and improved economy. But the rest of Iraq? Under Saddam the violence came from one source: the regime. Now it has been democratically distributed: death can come from anywhere, at all times, no matter who you are. You can be killed for crossing the street, for going to the market, for driving your car, for having the wrong name, for being in your house, for being a Sunni, for being a s.h.i.+te, for being a woman. The American military can kill you in an operation; you can be arrested by militias and disappear in Iraq's new secret prisons, now run by s.h.i.+tes; or you can be kidnapped by the resistance or criminal gangs. Americans cannot simply observe the horror of Iraq and shake their heads with wonder, as if it were Rwanda and they had no role. America is responsible for the chaos that began with the invasion and followed with the botched and brutal occupation. Iraq's people suffered under the American occupation, the civil war, and the new Iraqi government, just as they did under the American-imposed sanctions and bombings before the war and just as they did under the years of Baathist dictators.h.i.+p.

While the spontaneous burst of repressed fury from one segment of Iraqi society often caused more damage to property than the American bombs, another segment demonstrated solidarity and a volunteer spirit eager to restore security and normalcy. Common civilians stood all day directing traffic in a country with no traffic lights or rules, where there was absolute liberty to drive anywhere, in any direction, at any speed. These volunteers protected neighborhoods and established order, but it was too late. After the war, looters pillaged the country, stripping everything but the paint from the buildings they preyed upon. Under the gaze of U.S. troops, looters destroyed the physical infrastructure of the Baathist state, while the U.S. occupation eliminated its bureaucracy.

The atmosphere of lawlessness that pervaded the country in those first few days and weeks never went away. Eventually it allowed for criminals, gangs, and mafias to take over; it replaced the totalitarian state and the fear it had imposed with complete indifference to the idea of a state. It was a shock from which Iraqis did not recover. In Baghdad the dominant man in any area was called a shaqi. He was normally a thug who would sometimes engage in extortion and other small crimes; after the war these shaqis were recruited into armed groups and even religious militias.

A few weeks after the war against Saddam's regime ended and before the war against the resistance began, I moved into a house in the Mansour district, where I stayed for a month. I was stringing for Time magazine, but I clashed with my colleagues, who were focused on the English-speaking elite Iraqis, the American military, and the s.h.i.+te clerical establishment, but ignored the Iraqi street, the mosques, the Sadrists. At night, to the sound of gunfire and frogs calling, I would sit by the pool and watch bats swoop down to sip water, as I fought loneliness by making calls on the satellite phone to my future wife. Taha was our somnolent guard. He arrived in the afternoon and left in the morning. He had a chair in the driveway, where he sat with his Kalashnikov leaning lazily against the wall. I bought newspapers for him every day because I sympathized with the solitude and ennui of his job, but mostly so that he would remain awake a little longer. He was a sound sleeper. He sat reading the newspapers, or staring in front of him, his head hanging down wearily, and evinced no perceptible reaction when machine gun fire erupted outside our walls, as it did intermittently all night. I grew accustomed to it, but sometimes, when I was sitting on the lawn eating dinner and a burst went off on our street, I still jumped.

Five minutes from the house was a market that sold looted goods and heavy-caliber machine guns, bazookas, grenade launchers, RPGs, handguns, and ammunition. The grenade launcher was fifty dollars. I was inquiring about prices one day when a large burst was fired from right behind me. I leaped high in the air, checking my body for holes. The sellers were demonstrating their merchandise to interested consumers by firing them into the sky.

Not far from the neighborhood I was living in was the Washash district, its narrow streets awash with sewage. Like much of Baghdad, a greenish brown deluge had descended upon the streets, reaching from one side to another. Residents waded through the putrid liquid, and children ran barefoot through it. Women gathered in a loud gaggle, anxious to voice their complaints. There was no electricity, no gas, the water was dirty, and their children were sick. There was shooting all night, and they were afraid to go out. These families, like 60 percent of Iraqis, relied entirely on the state's food distribution program to survive.

In a field in the Jihad neighborhood of Baghdad, I found every little boy's fantasy. Several dozen abandoned Iraqi tanks lay beside bushes and palm trees. Their treads had been sabotaged by the Americans, but they had plenty of ammunition. Fifty feet away were mud houses, with cows beneath the shade of a tree. A troop of local boys, ages five to twelve, avoided the cl.u.s.ter bombs on the ground and climbed on top of and inside the tanks. They lit some explosive powder. Somebody blew up a tank, and the turret shot a few dozen meters in the air before embedding itself in the ground by a house. I gave an eleven-year-old named Ali a dollar to show me around. He was timid at first, denying ever having played with the tanks, so I asked him to show me the tanks others had played with, and then I asked him which one he had played with, and which one he and his friends had shot, and he admitted more and more. His cousins joined us and said they were scared to take me to the ammunition. I told them they were girls, and they said, "No, we are strong!" and puffed their chests. Then their uncle showed up and ruined our fun. He told me he was scared for the children, but it didn't seem like he was making any attempt to control their behavior.

My driver's children, about five and three years old, played with ammunition their uncle had found in a nearby arms depot that had been abandoned and looted. He showed me live anti-aircraft bullets and a bundle of detonation cords for explosives, which Iraqis were using to cook. Five-year-old Fahad lit one and watched the flame shoot through it while his three-year-old sister held one of the charges in her mouth. In a restaurant where I often had lunch, I took note of an increasingly common sight-a customer walked in with a pistol stuck in his belt behind him.

We a.s.sumed with egotistical condescension that Iraqis were "used to" the ubiquitous hards.h.i.+p that has been their unearned fate, as if they were different from us, suffered less than we did, and did not have the same hopes for a prosperous, peaceful life. Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world, and Iraqis were in no way used to the nadir to which life had sunk. Since the Gulf War they had slowly watched their heavily developed, educated, and industrialized society deteriorate and regress to a preindustrial era. Power, water, and security were not just abstractions; they meant life or death.

Imagine bombs raining on your city, the ground shaking, the walls reverberating. Imagine your city losing its power, its water, its security, its communications, and its government. Law and order disappear, weapons abound, machine guns rattle, and bullets fly. Mountains of garbage grow higher on the streets as goats, donkeys, and children sift through them, dispersing the waste everywhere. Rivers of sewage cut through neighborhoods and roads, and people wade through them. The food supply dwindles, dead dogs litter the streets, their legs frozen in midair with rigor mortis, and a modern city becomes a jungle. Hundreds of thousands of foreign occupiers are ensconced in the bedrooms and barracks of the former dictator, their leviathan tanks dominating traffic, but the newcomers do not replace the system they destroyed. Armed gangs roam freely, and dogmatic religious organizations attempt to fill the power vacuum, though they too have no experience in governance and espouse an intolerant and regressive political ideology.

A UN representative explained to me that after the war Iraq had "gone back to the stone age." It was a stone age lived in the midst of a modern state. Sheep were herded through traffic jams, unexploded bombs hid like snakes, diarrhea killed children minutes away from immense hospitals, and tantalizing glimpses of a different possibility beckoned on satellite television-it was not an impossible or unfamiliar dream but a return to the future Iraqis had taken for granted only a decade or two ago.

Baghdad in 2003 was a neglected city, broken like the spirit of its people, who seemed ashamed that they had not put up more of a fight against the occupiers, as was expected by the rest of the world. Um Qasr in the south took a week to fall, but the Republican Guard protecting the city barely put up a fight. They were perceived outside Iraq as the elite, as those who would fight to the death for their city, but this mythic status had more to do with their privilege than anything else. The American military was warned that the battle for Baghdad would be the most bitter and desperate. The Republican Guard felt no loyalty to Baghdad, though. They were terrified of the American juggernaut, and they could see what had already transpired in the rest of the country.

The media showed Iraq only during the day, when stores were open and Americans patrolled. At night, darkness and fear emerged. Most people had no electricity and resorted to oil lamps and fans made from straw to cope with the heat-which drove some to sleep on their roofs, under the moonlight.

There were rumors that Americans were paying three dollars for every cl.u.s.ter bomb returned. It did not matter if the rumors were false. If people believed them, they would touch a cl.u.s.ter bomb; and if a bomb was moved, it would explode. Children played with them, attracted to their shape. A child threw a stone at one and blew up a nearby house.

Iraq had thousands of locations serving as weapons depots that contained unexploded ordnances, abandoned missiles, armored vehicles, and tanks. Even if the Americans had known where to look, there were not enough soldiers to protect all of the sites from looters. Removing them required a delicate expertise, which meant that some locations might take several days to clear. Baghdadis would have to wait years for their city to be free from the dangerous detritus of war that the American and Iraqi militaries had left behind.

On streets throughout Baghdad people tried to hawk their wares, hoping that buyers would be interested in the screws, pipes, sneakers, computers, soccer b.a.l.l.s, AK-47s, and grenade launchers they had likely stolen. Every neighborhood had its own weapons bazaar, an unofficial collection of a few dozen men, who displayed heavy weaponry of every variety and eagerly demonstrated their use by firing them repeatedly into the air right next to you. A rocket-propelled grenade launcher could be found for fifty thousand dinars, or fifty dollars. When an American patrol drove by, the men hid their goods under boxes or in the trunks of their cars, and then took them out again as soon as the patrol moved on. The chatter of Kalashnikov shots and exchanges of fire punctured the empty silence of Baghdad nights. Iraqis evinced no perceptible reaction to these new sounds; they were normal, and no thought was given to the unknown circ.u.mstances and actors responsible for nearby violence or to its many victims.

The victims usually ended up in Baghdad's Criminal Medicine Department, which squatted on a muddy congested road next to the Ministry of Health. On the morning I visited it in May 2003, a busload of sobbing women sat in the entrance. An old man vomited on a wall to the side, while several other men sat glumly on the floor. An empty coffin made of wooden planks lay abandoned by the entrance, a large blood stain in its center. The sour stench of death wafted out into the halls. Ninety percent of Baghdad's violently killed pa.s.sed through the Criminal Medicine Department before burial. Ever since Baghdad fell on April 9, Dr. Lazim had been seeing an average of fifteen to twenty-five corpses a day-all murdered, he said, pointing to a large stack of files on a shelf and opening a drawer to show another stack. Before the war he would see about five such cases a month. The state had a monopoly on violence, but victims of the regime were taken elsewhere. He said it was also possible to accommodate oneself to life under Saddam, and to live without arousing the state's ire and incurring its wrath. The new violence was random, and Lazim attributed it to the lack of security.

"Weapons are easy to find, and Iraqis are full of anxiety from three wars and the economic circ.u.mstances after 1991," Lazim said. Since it was so easy to obtain a weapon and there were no legal consequences, disputes were often settled violently and with impunity. "I am afraid to argue with any person on the street," he said. "There is no regime, no order." He added, "It is the duty of the international forces to create security." Lazim recently had begun seeing female victims for the first time. One was a teenager found by American soldiers with her throat slit. Two others set a ghoulish precedent-they had both been raped and then murdered.

For those wounded in Baghdad's gun battles, there was little hope of finding help. Yakub al-Jabari, a microbiologist at the National Blood Transfusion Center for Iraq, located in the complex of buildings known as Medical City, summarized the situation when asked if there was a shortage of blood. "There is a shortage of everything," he said, "blood, equipment, staff." He had not received his salary for three months. The labs looked like a dusty bas.e.m.e.nt where a hospital might store its obsolete machines. The staff used food refrigerators to store blood, though frequent blackouts made Jabari's efforts worthless, as everything became contaminated. "If you want to save people's lives, bring us more of these machines-you will go to paradise," he said, opening a dirty refrigerator and pointing inside. "We kill people here, we don't save them." He smiled bitterly. "Many people are dying because of our shortages. We lie when we give people hope, but we can't be honest with them." Iraqis in need of blood must bring their own, which meant bringing a friend or relative to donate. I heard shooting from outside the blood center as I hurriedly asked Jabari about HIV and other concerns the center faced without the ability to screen donors. He told me he knew of only two cases of HIV in the past decade. He believed Saddam had executed them.

Baghdad's hospitals had collapsed at a time when improved health care was needed more than ever. Hospital directors and doctors complained that they had received no a.s.sistance from the coalition forces, only promises. They relied on generators, because they got only a few hours of electricity a day. Sometimes they were forced to operate by candlelight. Most hospitals and clinics received contaminated water or none at all. Contamination resulted in outbreaks of typhoid, gastroenteritis, and diarrhea. They had no air-conditioning, medicine, oxygen, or anesthesia. And there was no one to clean the floors, so they remained stained with blood.

Chaos reigned, as staff were overwhelmed. They had no computers and they recycled carbon paper. Ambulance crews had no gas or security escorts, and Americans stopped them at night for violating curfews when they transported patients. Security concerns led staff to leave work early in order to get home safely. When hospitals did receive supplies, staff worried about attracting looters. Hospitals had no cooling systems because of electricity shortages, so medicines and vaccines were routinely destroyed.

A visit to a hospital coincided with a car screeching to a halt in front. A shrieking, black-clad woman was thrown onto a broken wheelchair; relatives had to hold it together as she was wheeled in, blood pouring from her womb. A midwife had botched her labor. A thick trail of blood led from the hospital driveway to the reception and down the hall to the emergency room.

Iraqis grumbled about their invisible ruler, the proconsul Paul Bremer, who rejected representation for them, declaring Iraqis too immature to decide their own fate. The country had three dictators in three months: Saddam was replaced by the bucolic Gen. Jay Garner and then the urbane Bremer, while others, such as Gen. Tommy Franks and President George W. Bush, issued edicts that affected their lives, and Arnold Schwarzenegger visited but did not greet his Iraqi fans. Even the name of the government changed three times: the Baathist regime became the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian a.s.sistance (ORHA), which was replaced by the Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority (OCPA). In his "freedom message to the Iraqi people," Franks, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, announced that the Americans had "come as liberators, not occupiers," adding that they aimed to "enforce UN resolutions requiring the destruction of weapons of ma.s.s destruction." These weapons, of course, had not existed for years.

The foreign troops became an onerous presence as the burden of Saddam was removed. Iraqis had to suffer numerous intrusive checkpoints, roadblocks, and lines for gasoline, and there were raids, killings, arrests, and property damage. They were awakened by the rumbling of tanks through streets. Unaware of the fact that many soldiers chewed tobacco, they asked me why Americans spit so much. Frustrated young soldiers pointed their machine guns at grand-mothers and teased Iraqi youths about how easily they could kill them.

In the face of the American juggernaut, Iraqis were lost and confused. They were used to the way ministries got things done. Now they had to march through long paths carved out with barbed wire and stand in the sun with gun barrels facing them. They were searched, patted down, and questioned; their IDs were declared unsuitable; they were told they could not be helped, or sent elsewhere, their protests and supplications falling on deaf ears. Tempers were lost, and Americans screamed in English as Iraqis shouted in Arabic, neither understanding the other. American soldiers did not sympathize with the inconvenience. "We stand in the sun all day," said one soldier, looking at hundreds of men standing or squatting, waiting.

Falluja 2004.

A year later I was in Falluja, a small town forty-three miles west of Baghdad on the Euphrates, in the Anbar province. Before the American invasion Falluja was rarely thought of unless Iraqis were stopping to get kabobs on their way to a picnic at Lake Habbaniya, an artificial lake in the middle of the desert with bungalows and a 1960s-style resort built along its rocky banks. True, it had a reputation for being conservative, with tribal mores still important, and its claim to fame was having the highest per capita number of mosques, earning it the nickname City of Mosques. But Falluja was conservative, not radical; it had not been a center of religious extremism or loyalty to the former regime. But it became a case study of how American policy in Iraq promoted sectarianism and armed resistance.

The city, once a Sufi bastion, suffered at the hands of the former regime because of the importance of religion there. Its Sufis began to depart in the 1990s, when Saddam stopped oppressing Salafis. Named after "al-Salaf al-Salih" (the virtuous predecessors), meaning the companions of the Prophet Muhammad and their followers, Salafis seek to purify Islam of innovations introduced over the centuries since Muhammad received his revelations, and they seek to return to a way of life similar to that of the early Muslim community, basing life only on the Koran and the Sunna, the deeds and words of the Prophet. Saddam began to encourage their revival, perhaps to counter a perceived s.h.i.+te threat. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion Falluja also suffered political purges, uprisings, and killings of tribal members who had served the previous regime. It was not a wealthy town, with little signs that it received preferential treatment. It was a trucking and smuggling hub, which would later prove useful to other clandestine networks.

Although it is common to blame the American decision to dissolve the Iraqi army and security agencies in May 2003 for the emergence of the resistance, the truth is that resistance in Falluja and elsewhere in the Anbar province began before this order. No hostile shots were fired at the Americans from Falluja during the invasion, and the city saw little looting. Instead, after the war, local officials and dignitaries took control and tried to establish order. It took two weeks before the Americans even established themselves in Falluja. Key influential foreign fighters later told me that they had tried to organize an armed resistance in Falluja and failed in those early days, because Falluja's people wanted to give the Americans a chance. But the American perception was that Sunni Arabs were loyal to Saddam and thus to be treated with hostility. The Americans took a more aggressive posture in Sunni areas than in s.h.i.+te ones.

The Americans set up an imposing presence on the main street in the center of town, using a school as their base, and mounted aggressive patrols. Their presence in other civilian areas, and their practice of observing neighborhoods from rooftops, offended traditionally minded locals. The elites who had taken control of the town following the war were not recognized by the Americans. Little interest was shown in improving the local economy. A demonstration in April calling for the Americans to leave the school ended up with nearly twenty dead civilians, as the Americans met it with extreme force. There was no public American inquiry or attempt to reconcile with the locals. One foreign fighter I spoke to would later name this as a turning point. Similar demonstrations occurred in s.h.i.+te areas, but they were met with a different response from the Americans. In Diwaniya, a s.h.i.+te city that was also a bastion of the former army, anti-Bremer demonstrations following the disbanding of the army featured pictures of Saddam and Baathist slogans, but the Americans did not respond aggressively.

More demonstrations and more killings followed in Falluja, and the Americans adopted the att.i.tude that "Arabs only understand force." Tanks on the streets, low-flying helicopters, frequent patrols-Fallujans felt like they were under a foreign occupation. Local leaders who sought to avoid violence would eventually change their minds. The American view that there was a monolithic group of Iraqis called Sunni Arabs had always been mistaken, just as it was a mistake to identify a Sunni Triangle. The Baath Party was incorrectly viewed as an exclusively Sunni party, and Saddam's regime was incorrectly viewed as a Sunni regime, since not all Sunnis were loyal to it. Many Sunnis felt they were victims of Saddam, and even Sunni clerics had been executed by the former regime. Some tribes were given privileged status, while others were weakened or marginalized. That there were no obvious Sunni leaders after Saddam was removed was but one sign that his own community had been weakened by his regime. But Sunnis would soon consider themselves the targets of collective punishment. Treated as the enemy, many of them soon became just that, fearing that they were about to be exterminated. These fears would be manipulated by those interested in promoting violence.

THOSE FEARS WERE the political effect of ideas and decisions that were fermenting thousands of miles away from Iraq. Much of what we have come to know about Iraq has come from self-styled "Iraq experts" or "terrorism experts"-celebrity pundits-who catered to the political demands of the occupation and the American administration. Most of these experts could not speak or read Arabic, had not been to Iraq, and had only a superficial experience of the Middle East. They hailed from Was.h.i.+ngton think tanks like the Brookings Inst.i.tution, the American Enterprise Inst.i.tute, the Center for Strategic International Studies, and others. If they visited Iraq (or Afghanistan), they hopped from base to base, with the military as their baby-sitter and escort. They invoked terms that were barely in use before 2003, such as "Sunni Arab." Geographical regions were simplistically layered onto Iraq's ethnic groups, and simplistic labels like the "Kurdish north," "Sunni Triangle," and "s.h.i.+te south" were popularized. The importance of cla.s.s ident.i.ty-and the revolutionary potential of the poor, who supported Communists in the '50s and the Sadrists in the '90s and later-was ignored, as was the heritage of nonsectarian nationalism.

The Iraqis the Americans installed after the invasion, however, came mostly from the former opposition parties, many of which were formed on a sectarian or ethnic basis. None had a broad base of support. The American approach to Iraq was sectarian, as Iraqis quickly complained. The Americans viewed Sunnis as the bad guys and s.h.i.+tes as the victims, and the U.S. media followed suit. The Iraqi Governing Council, a symbolic body created in July 2003 as a concession to Iraqi demands for representation, was established on purely sectarian grounds, as Iraqis were quick to note. Members were chosen for being Sunnis, s.h.i.+tes, Kurds, or Turkmen, rather than for representing Iraqis. Even the Communist Party member was chosen for being a s.h.i.+te rather than for being secular or leftist. Barbara Bodine, a veteran Arabist from the State Department and former amba.s.sador to Yemen, was briefly put in charge of Baghdad and then fired when the CPA needed a scapegoat to blame for the descent into chaos. "One of the first mistakes we made was to put Iraq into three neat little packages, h.o.m.ogeneous, monolithic," she told me.

The occupation empowered s.h.i.+tes and Kurds, specifically the most sectarian and ethnocentric leaders, and punished the Sunni population. It also empowered parties with little gra.s.sroots support (with the exception of the Kurdish parties), which meant that their members had to appeal to sectarianism. Sunnis and some s.h.i.+tes were driven to resist the occupation. At first the resistance was a nationalist one. Foreign Arabs had flocked to Iraq during the war to defend their brethren. Some were radical Sunnis who sought a jihad. Their numbers grew as volunteers flocked to kill Americans and s.h.i.+tes, often at the behest of Sunni clerics and theologians throughout the Arab world. The most radical among them sought to destroy the American project in Iraq by provoking sectarian warfare, setting off suicide bombs at key religious sites. Although the Iraqi government under Saddam had not been a Sunni regime, as many outside observers have claimed, the new sectarian Sunni parties in Iraq have come to view that era as a "Sunni golden age."

Arabs are often criticized for their "conspiracy theories," and it was common in Iraq to view the Americans as new colonists intent on dividing and conquering Iraq. But the approach implemented by Paul Bremer attempted to do just that. In Bremer's mind the way to occupy Iraq was not to view it as a nation but as a group of minorities, so he pitted the minority that was not benefiting from the system against the minority that was, and expected them to be grateful to him. Bremer ruled Iraq as if it were already undergoing a civil war, helping the s.h.i.+tes by punis.h.i.+ng the Sunnis. He was not managing a country, in his view; he was managing a civil war. As a result, he helped to create one.

The Bush administration believed that s.h.i.+tes could lead the Arab world to an Islamic reformation that would increase secularism. Bremer claimed that Saddam had "modeled his regime after Adolf Hitler's," and he compared the Baath Party with the n.a.z.i Party. This was sheer fabrication: there is no proof or mention of this in any of the copious literature about Iraq. (If anything, Saddam's inspiration was the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin or Michael Corleone from The G.o.dfather.) The Iraqi Baath Party was established by a s.h.i.+te, and the majority of its members were s.h.i.+tes. So Bremer created this n.a.z.i a.n.a.logy and imagined himself de-n.a.z.ifying Iraq, saving the s.h.i.+tes from the evil Sunnis. (Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also often compared Baathists to n.a.z.is.) Indeed, one of the reasons Bremer performed so horribly in Iraq is that he viewed the country through this distorting lens.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was unwilling to commit resources to the stabilization of Iraq. When Larry Di Rita, Rumsfeld's de facto chief of staff, arrived in Kuwait to serve as the political commissar over ORHA, he met with the humanitarian a.s.sistance team led by Chris McMullen. McMullen began the briefing by saying, "What we intend to bring to the Iraqi people," but he never got to finish his sentence. Di Rita slammed his fist on the table and shouted, "We are bringing freedom to the Iraqi people! We don't owe them anything more!" Later Di Rita explained that the U.S. military would not be in Iraq for long. Rumsfeld considered Bosnia and Kosovo to be failures, and he considered Afghanistan a potential failure because U.S. troops were still there. The doctrine of the day was "shock and awe" and a hasty U.S. withdrawal.

President Bush had approved of a plan to take over the Iraqi army, but Bremer and Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Walter Slocombe reversed the decision, casually agreeing to fire more than three hundred thousand armed men without a second thought. ORHA officials had not planned on maintaining the Iraqi army indefinitely. Instead they had hoped to put the army to work until they could get it through a demobilization process. The men of the Iraqi army thought that they would be part of the solution. Iraqi generals did not acknowledge defeat, and the Iraqi army did not feel defeated. The CPA's refusal to maintain state industries led to the loss of a further 350,000 jobs. In August 2003 the Americans removed agricultural subsidies, forcing many farmers off their land.

Bremer later claimed that Iraqis hated their army, which was, in fact, the most nationalistic inst.i.tution in the country and one that predated the Baath Party. In electing not to fight the Americans, the army had expected to be recognized by the occupation; indeed, until Bremer arrived it appeared that many Iraqi soldiers and officers were hoping to cooperate with the Americans. Bremer, however, treated Iraqis as if they harbored ancient grievances, claiming in an article after he retired that "s.h.i.+te conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers." This was not true: although Sunnis were overrepresented in the officer corps and s.h.i.+tes sometimes felt there was a gla.s.s ceiling, there were s.h.i.+te ministers and generals, and at least one-third of the famous deck of cards of those Iraqis most wanted by the Americans were s.h.i.+tes. Complex historical factors account for why Sunnis were overrepresented in majority-s.h.i.+te areas. Many attribute this to the legacy of the Ottomans and the British colonizers, while others theorize that minorities took power in several postcolonial Arab countries-Alawites in Syria, Maronites in Lebanon, and Sunnis in Iraq. Although there is debate about these matters, n.o.body has ever argued on behalf of Bremer's ludicrous view of a n.a.z.i-like regime where Sunnis were the Germans and s.h.i.+tes were the Jews. There were many s.h.i.+te officers in the army. The elite Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard were dominated by Sunni tribes from Anbar and Salahaddin, as were sensitive security services, but there is a false notion that s.h.i.+tes had no access to power. It implies that there was an open political field for Sunnis from which s.h.i.+tes were excluded.

Iraq had a legacy of statism. The state controlled the country's oil wealth as well as production in industries such as agriculture. The government also employed the majority of the Iraqi workforce. Strict regulation governed the economy, controlling the movement of capital. The American occupiers found an Iraq where the state had played a tremendous role in the lives of citizens, and they a.s.sumed this was a timeless character of the culture that they would have to repair, but in fact it dated to the sanctions imposed from 1990 to 2003. The sanctions led to a huge increase in the role of the Iraqi government in the daily lives of the population.

Denis Halliday, the UN a.s.sistant secretary general and the humanitarian coordinator of the oil-for-food program in Iraq, resigned in 1998 in protest at the economic sanctions on Iraq. The oil-for-food program was meant to alleviate the impact of the sanctions, but Iraq could not pump enough oil to get enough money to cover its food and medicine needs, and the drop in oil prices at the time made it even worse. Halliday admitted that Iraqi children were dying directly because of the sanctions. The UN itself estimated that about half a million children under five died because of the sanctions.

Iraqis had few political or civil rights under Saddam, but they had economic rights and a decent standard of living. The sanctions took even those. Halliday's successor resigned in 2000 protesting the "tightening of the rope around the neck of the average Iraqi citizen. . . . I felt that I was being misused for a United Nations policy that was punitive, that tried to punish a people for not having gotten rid of their leader."

To prevent the Iraqi people from starving, the Public Distribution System was established to deliver rations to the population via more than fifty thousand local agents. Rations included soap and basic food needs. For the first time, the people now depended on the government to eat, giving Saddam more control over them than ever before, and making dissent more difficult and dangerous than ever. The middle cla.s.s, which might have formed the base of that dissent, was wiped out as savings were made worthless. Many Iraqis were driven from towns back to a rural and agricultural life, and the power of feudal landlords increased.

A stated goal of the American occupation was to transform Iraq into a free-market economy. One of the first measures taken by the American occupation was to impose laws that liberalized capital accounts, currency trading, and investment regulations, and lifted price regulations and most state subsidies. An important principle guiding the occupation was not to invest in any state inst.i.tution that could be privatized in the future, in antic.i.p.ation of the liquidation of state a.s.sets.

Extreme measures such as these radically changed the lives of Iraqis as they struggled with higher inflation and reduced state subsidies while imported consumption goods flooded the market at lower prices. Consumer spending increased drastically. This was coupled with the growth of new private inst.i.tutions that sought to replace the role formerly played by the state. National industry and the export sector were severely undermined. The entire structure of the Iraqi state has been shattered and the central state in Iraq has been vitiated, as shown by the clauses in the Const.i.tution that address control over oil. Although similar attempts at "shock therapy" techniques applied to countries in the 1980s and '90s showed poor results, often only damaging countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America, these same techniques were imposed on Iraq in extreme form. The measures taken in Iraq were neither democratic nor successful, but their ramifications will be felt for years.

America's relations.h.i.+p with Iraq did not begin in 2003. The U.S. encouraged and helped Iraq go to war against Iran in 1980. It was a war that devastated both countries. The U.S. and its Gulf allies also helped support Iraq's ma.s.sive army, which encouraged the adventure in Kuwait and which later, after the Americans disbanded this vast army, led to such a large group of unemployed armed young men in 2003. The American project in Iraq resembled and was sometimes even consciously modeled after other colonial endeavors in the region. The act of occupying a country, dismantling and rebuilding its inst.i.tutions, economic structures, and even its political ident.i.ty, is not a new feature in the modern history of the Middle East. But occupied Iraq has rarely been studied as a colonial case. There has been a clear effort to avoid labeling the American project a colonial one. This has led to a.n.a.lysis of Iraq through an ahistorical framework.

Outside observers, including American politicians, have a tendency to a.s.sume that the current political divisions, violence, and prejudices in Iraq have "always been there," and the new conflict between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes has been conceptualized as "timeless." But Iraqis were merely adapting to the American view of Iraq as a collection of sects and trying to fit into the political system the Americans were building around that idea. These observers disregard the fact that the American presence actively created many of these problems and "read history backward" in an attempt to minimize the American role in Iraq. But Iraq is not Rwanda, where Americans could watch Tutsis and Hutus slaughter each other and claim it was not their problem. The civil war in Iraq began with the American occupation.

The occupation was based on a vision that saw Iraqis as a collection of atomic sects. Even before the invasion, theorizers of the "new Iraq" such as Kanan Makiya sought to de-Arabize the country. They blamed Arabism for the ills of totalitarian Iraq and proposed ideas such as "regional autonomies" and federalism as alternatives to a centralized, top-down, state-sponsored ident.i.ty. Prescient critics such as Azmi Bishara warned that if Iraqis ceased to be "Arab," then they would simply adopt more primordial forms of ident.i.ty that would not necessarily be less violent or damaging.

After the war Iraq was treated as a tabula rasa experiment, and the political inst.i.tutions built by the occupation reflected these views. They were devised to undermine the idea of Iraqi nationalism that Saddam had tried to promote, and to correspond to the vision of Iraq as a trinational state. This further politicized sectarian forms of ident.i.ty, making them the only avenue of political action in Iraq. Several incompatible views of Iraqi ident.i.ty were promoted by the occupation and postwar Iraqi politicians: Iraq as a tribal society; Iraq as a liberal, multicultural polity, where a concept of Iraqi citizens.h.i.+p trumps other loyalties (promoted by Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, Mithal al-Alousi, and other "liberal" politicians); Iraq as a collection of nations or sects. The last definition was the most potent. Electoral laws and sectarian violence played the largest role in cementing this vision. In addition, the Americans divided Iraq into winners and losers, and they soon made it clear to the Sunnis where they fell into that divide.

In late 2003 an American NGO arranged a meeting in the Green Zone between several representatives of Falluja's major tribes (such as the Albu Eisa, Jumaila, Albu Alwan, and others) and representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority. "We had a lot of hopes of big and meaningful projects that could show a more attractive future for the people," said one of the organizers. "We were talking with the sheikhs about good projects for the city, and they were really interested in the business centers and the links with the foreign companies. They told us the 'troubled kids' were few and they could arrange with the bigger tribal leaders to control the situation as long as they can have something to show their people. Their other concern was about the s.h.i.+te domination. They said they would really appreciate it if the Americans promised to protect the city from the Badr Brigade [the huge Iranian-trained s.h.i.+te militia of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI]. They were really concerned about this point. The CPA attended the meeting, but they seemed so uninterested. I can say that their general feeling was, 'You lost, and we don't care about you.' To everyone's disappointment, the main representative of the CPA left fifteen minutes into the meeting. The sheikhs left to Falluja knowing they would have nothing to offer there. One of them was kidnapped and killed a couple of months after the meeting, and the other was attacked and his son was killed. One of them got connected to the armed groups and went on his own."

In the spring and summer of 2004, I met many fighters and leaders of the resistance in Falluja. They believed they were defending their city, the country, and their religion. They clashed frequently with their rivals, the Al Qaeda-inspired jihadists and foreign fighters who had based themselves in the Anbar province and threatened to undermine the power of the more conservative Fallujan leaders.h.i.+p. Many Sunnis had no alternatives even as the Al Qaeda men undermined the Anbar establishment and imposed a reign of terror, which not only bloodied communities but destroyed infrastructure, inst.i.tutions, and businesses there. Their traditional leaders.h.i.+p was more pragmatic and wasn't ideologically opposed to an accommodation with the Americans at that time, though they had yet to be chastened by s.h.i.+te militias into reducing their expectations.

A FOREIGN MILITARY OCCUPATION is a systematic imposition of violence on an entire population. Of the many crimes committed against the Iraqi people, most have occurred unnoticed by the American people or the media. Americans, led to believe their soldiers and marines would be welcomed as liberators, still have little idea what the occupation is really like from the perspective of Iraqis. Although I am American, born and raised in New York City, I came closer to experiencing what it feels like to be Iraqi than many of my colleagues. I often say that the secret to my success as a journalist in Iraq is my melanin advantage. I inherited my Iranian father's Middle Eastern features, which allowed me to go unnoticed in Iraq, march in demonstrations, sit in mosques, walk through Falluja's worst neighborhoods, sit in taxis and restaurants, and look like every other Iraqi. My ability to blend in also allowed me to relate to the American occupier in a different way, for he looked at me as if I were another "hajji," the "gook" of the war in Iraq.

I first realized my advantage in April 2003, when I was sitting with a group of American soldiers and another soldier walked up and wondered what this hajji (me) had done to get arrested. Later that summer I walked in the direction of an American tank and heard one soldier say about me, "That's the biggest f.u.c.kin' Iraqi [p.r.o.nounced "eye-raki"] I ever saw." Another soldier, who was by the gun, replied, "I don't care how big he is, if he doesn't stop movin' I'm gonna shoot him."

I was lucky enough to have an American pa.s.sport in my pocket, which I promptly took out and waved, shouting, "Don't shoot! I'm an American!" It was my first encounter with hostile checkpoints but hardly my last, and I grew to fear the unpredictable American military, which could kill me for looking like an Iraqi male of fighting age. Countless other Iraqis were not lucky enough to speak English or carry an American pa.s.sport, and entire families were killed in their cars when they approached checkpoints. In 2004 the British medical journal The Lancet estimated that by September of that year, one hundred thousand Iraqis had died as a result of the American occupation; most of them had died violently, largely from American airstrikes. Although this figure was challenged by many, especially partisan backers of the war, it seemed perfectly plausible to me based on what I had seen during the postwar period in Iraq. What I never understood was why more journalists did not focus on this, choosing instead to look for the "good news" and to go along with the official story. I never understood why more journalists did not write about the daily Abu Ghraibs that were so essential to the occupation.

The occupation pitted Iraqis against one another as old scores were settled and battles for resources and Iraq's ident.i.ty raged. Sectarian differences that had previously been suppressed are now exaggerated. This book, which begins by looking at the events and trends that led to the outbreak of civil war in Iraq, tells the story of what happened to Iraq as it descended into the nightmare of sectarianism and militia fighting between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. And it tells the story of what happened after "the Events," or "the Sectarianism," as Iraqis called their civil war, much as the conflict in Northern Ireland is called "the Troubles." It is a story of Iraq after dark, so to speak, away from the glare of the Western media and far from U.S. patrols and, most important, away from the elite politics of the Green Zone. I focus on the Iraqi "street," because after the overthrow of Saddam, power was distributed there.

I first came to Iraq when I was twenty-five years old, a former nightclub bouncer with a skill in languages who hoped to remake himself as a journalist. I have been traveling and living in Iraq ever since, and the longer I ha