Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 6

The flow of fighters into Iraq, of millions of refugees out of Iraq, the smuggling of weapons and even sheep, and the export of dangerous ideas such as sectarianism and jihadism demonstrated that the Iraqi civil war was close to becoming a regional conflict. One factor militating against such a development was the fact that the Iraqi refugees had not settled in camps but instead had been absorbed into cities like Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, which made it more difficult to organize or mobilize them, though also more difficult to help or monitor them. Like the Palestinians, most Iraqi refugees may never return home. The decimated Christian and Sabean minorities had left for good. Sunnis from Baghdad and the south, now cleansed and controlled by s.h.i.+tes, were also likely never to return. Although the Palestinian cause and its initial popularity in the Arab world eased their integration into Syria and elsewhere, and they were tolerated and even welcomed with generosity by the local population in some instances, this goodwill did not last forever. In Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and elsewhere, it ran out. Jordan and particularly Syria have shown extreme generosity, but they are both straining under the burden.

Damascus became so full of Iraqis that rent prices soared, driving many refugees as far as Aleppo. One hour away from Damascus, in Qudsiya, I found an Iraqi neighborhood with a "Baghdad Barbershop" and "Iraq Travel Agency." Off an alley I entered a hastily constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, cement and cinder blocks thrown together without paint. The carved wooden doors to each apartment were a stark contrast to the grim hallways. Inside I found Dr. Lujai and her five children. At fifteen, Omar was the oldest; the youngest was two years old. Dr. Lujai, a family medicine specialist with her own clinic, had lived in Baghdad with her husband, Dr. Adil, a thoracic surgeon and professor at the medical college. Both were forty-three-year-old Sunnis who originally came from Ana, a town in the Anbar province. They had been married for fifteen years.

Right after the war Dr. Lujai began to notice changes. s.h.i.+te clerics took over many of Baghdad's hospitals following the postwar looting, and they did not know how to manage a hospital. "They were sectarian from the beginning," she said, "firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement, and the minister was only a general pract.i.tioner." Following the 2005 elections the Sadrist ministers initiated what they called a "campaign to remove the Saddamists." The advisers to the minister of health wore the turbans of clerics and mismanaged the ministry. In hospitals and health centers, walls were covered with posters of s.h.i.+te clerics. Traditional s.h.i.+te music could often be heard in the halls.

Sunni doctors began disappearing. Ali al-Mahdawi, who managed the Diyala province's health department, was said to have gone into the ministry for a meeting and never came out. Several months later, American military raids uncovered secret prisons run by Ministry officials with hundreds of prisoners. Several days after Mahdawi was released, he was murdered on the street. A pharmacist they knew called Ahmed al-Azzawi went in for a meeting with the minister and was killed by his militia.

Dr. Lujai reported that Sunni patients were accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors completed their operations, she said, the Interior Ministry's special police would arrest the patients. Their corpses would then be found in the Baghdad morgue. "This happened tens of times," she said, to "anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn't s.h.i.+te." Dr. Lujai knew of five Sunni doctors and two Christians who were threatened to leave or fired.

On September 2, 2006, Abu Omar, as Dr. Adil was known, went to work as he usually did in the morning. He had three patients to operate on that day. A fourth came in unexpectedly after he was done, and since no other doctor was available to treat him, Dr. Adil stayed later than usual. He finished work that day at around two in the afternoon. Their home was about fifteen minutes away, on days when the road was open. At 2:15 Abu Omar was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later his dead body was found on the street, and the next day his body was found in the morgue. I tried to find out the way he was killed, but Dr. Lujai was overcome, crying, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband's murder, but an officer told her, "He is a doctor, he has a degree, and he is a Sunni, so he couldn't stay in Iraq. That's why he was killed." Two weeks later she received a letter printed from a computer ordering her to leave the area.

On September 24, Dr. Lujai fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife, and his four children. Her sister had already been threatened, and had fled to Qudsiya. They gave away or sold all their belongings and paid six hundred dollars for the GMCs that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, up to twenty other doctors fled. Abu Shama was an engineer and professor at the College of Technology. He had lived in Baghdad's Khadhra district. In June 2006 a letter was placed under the door in his office ordering him to leave Iraq or be killed. He stopped going to work after that. One of his best friends, a Sunni married to a s.h.i.+te, had been killed in front of the college.

In Qudsiya they paid five hundred dollars a month in rent for the three-bedroom apartment both families shared. Their children were able to attend local schools for free, but Iraqis were not able to work in Syria, so they depended on relatives and savings for their survival. Twenty-five members of their family fled to Syria. Four days before I visited them they heard that a Sunni doctor they knew had been killed in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, where he worked. He had been married to a s.h.i.+te woman. "He was a pediatric specialist," she told me. "We needed him." The people and government of Syria had been good to them, they agreed, and they did not expect to go back to Iraq. Dr. Lujai did not think Iraq could go back to the way it had been. "It's a dream to return to our country," she said.

"First minorities left Iraq, now we get Sunnis targeted by s.h.i.+te militias."

Jordan had already closed its borders to Iraqis, and Iran required a sponsor for Iraqi refugees, though for obvious reasons most would never think of going to Iran. "Syria is the only open gate for refugees," said Lorens Jolles of the UNHCR in Damascus. "At one point Syrian society won't be able to accommodate them," worried a worker from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Syria, with a population of only nineteen million, has a record of extreme generosity to refugees. It houses four hundred thousand Palestinians expelled from their homeland. During Israel's July 2006 war against Lebanon, Syria took in up to half a million Lebanese refugees.

"For us every Iraqi who is here is a refugee," said Jolles. "This takes into account the generalized violence and targeting of most groups in Iraq. And everybody is in need of protection." Because Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan are not signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, the Iraqis did not have the right to work-although those with sufficient money could open businesses, and others worked illegally. UNHCR had signed memorandums of understanding with those countries requiring refugees to be resettled in a third country within a year after UNHCR had declared them refugees. UNHCR had to establish a category of "persons of concern" without calling them refugees in order to avoid getting dragged into battle with the national authorities. It therefore gave the Iraqis the opportunity to register for temporary protection, a legal trick to recognize them as having fled a situation of generalized violence for a temporary period of time. In theory this protected them without presenting the host countries with any formal obligations (though Syria had not deported Iraqis, Jordan and Lebanon had). Most Iraqis had not yet registered with the UN for temporary protection, but hundreds could be found lining up in front of the UNHCR office in Damascus in the early hours of the morning. Between February and April 2007 ten thousand Iraqi families, or at least fifty thousand individuals, had made appointments with the UNHCR.

"First the minorities left Iraq," a UNHCR official told me, "now we get Sunnis targeted by s.h.i.+te militias." Until February 2006 the majority had been Christians, although Muslims were represented as well, with Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes equally represented. Starting in March 2006, though, the number of Sunni refugees shot up, far exceeding all other groups; July through September 2006 saw a sharp rise in Sunnis registering. Between January 2005 and the end of February 2007, 58,924 Iraqis registered with UNHCR in Damascus. Forty-two percent of those registered since December 2003 were Sunni, 21 percent were s.h.i.+te, and 29 percent were Christian. In January 2007, 3,144 Sunnis and 901 s.h.i.+tes were registered. In February it was 5,988 Sunnis to 1,570 s.h.i.+tes. Only the most desperate refugees bothered to register, so the true figures were unknown. Ninety-five percent of those registered with UNHCR were from Baghdad.

The s.h.i.+tes were generally single young men, while the rest came as families. For the first two years the Syrians provided free medical care to Iraqis, but they were overwhelmed; in 2005 they ended the practice except for emergencies. Iraqis could attend Syrian public schools provided they were not too crowded, which they often were. Child labor became a problem, since parents were unable to work and children were easier to hide. Children dropped out of school as a result, and Iraqi prost.i.tutes became extremely common. UN screeners reported seeing numerous victims of torture, detention, rape, and kidnapping among newly arrived Iraqis. Most had family members who had been killed, and many were intellectuals.

"The problems of Iraqis have not come to Syria," said Jolles, referring to sectarianism. "The [Iraqi] refugee communities don't integrate, and the government has good control." But he still had his worries. "They are less manageable and understandable because they are not in camps. One million people are uprooted, and they don't know what the future has in store for them. It's normal to have some degree of criminality, violence, and disruption."

According to a Western diplomat, the presence of so many Iraqis gave the Syrian government political leverage in Iraq. Nearly every Iraqi political movement was represented in Syria. Historically Syria had accepted Iraqi dissidents such as those from the left wing of the Baath Party, Dawa leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and even Kurdish independence parties. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was established in a Damascus restaurant. The Syrians were still playing a complex game. They diplomatically recognized the Iraqi government but also housed members of the former regime, security forces, and Baath Party. They invited s.h.i.+te leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr and radical Sunnis close to the resistance, such as Harith al-Dhari of the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars. Syria saw the Iraqi civil war through the prism of Lebanon, thinking it could manage the conflict through its contacts; thus the Syrians were monitoring and cultivating everybody. But there were also dangerous contradictions in Syrian policy. Syria is a majority-Sunni country, but its close ally is s.h.i.+te Iran-which, in the eyes of Sunnis in Iraq and the region, sponsored the very militias that were persecuting Iraq's Sunnis, who were often related to Syria's Sunnis, especially in the border region. "The Syrian government is very capable of managing those issues," the Western diplomat a.s.sured me, but sectarianism was at its peak in the region, and Syria, which was once a major exporter of fighters to Iraq, may face its own blowback.

"Their need is enormous," a top official at UNHCR told me. "The temptation is there. The money from bin Laden is there. If the international community doesn't help, then the other groups will, and all h.e.l.l will break loose. Iraqis are sitting in Syria or Jordan, where the Baathists and Wahhabis are strongest. If 1 percent of the two million can be bought, then that is very dangerous. If they stay on the street you will have youth violence or terrorism. If people are in need they turn to crime or terrorism." He mentioned the North African community of France as a model, some of whom were drawn to Islamic radicalism or terrorism out of frustration and neglect. "They come to the UN and queue at our door for five hours to get a registration card, or they can turn to radical groups for funding," he said, explaining that the money came from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and was disbursed there. "This problem will be with us for a long time," he added, shaking his head in frustration.

Many poor Iraqi refugees settled in the Jaramana district of Damascus. They came to the Ibrahim al-Khalil convent for a.s.sistance. The convent was the only white structure amid the graying and incomplete buildings surrounding it, many of which were so hastily thrown together that they were unpainted and lacked gla.s.s in the windows. In front of the convent I found a small bakery preparing the typical Iraqi bread known as samun, a thick pita with two pointy ends. The owner, Haidar, had left Iraq three months earlier "because of the occupation," he told me. In Baquba he had been a sports teacher.

Sister Malaki, an elderly nun who ran the convent, expressed wonder at how quickly the neighborhood had been built since the Iraqis began showing up. Until 2006 there were no buildings around the convent, she said. It used to take her thirty minutes just to see a taxi on the street, and now she had to wait an hour to find an empty taxi. The first wave arrived in the spring of 2006, she said, but the biggest wave began in the fall of 2006. At first she saw many cases of rape, including boys and girls only ten or twelve years old. "Now it's mostly cases of extreme poverty and people who will never go back to Iraq," she said. "They fully reject returning to Iraq. They will die."

She had worked in a hospital in Beirut throughout the Lebanese civil war and was seeing similar traumas. "The children have a strong fear," she said. When asking her for something many children would threaten her, she said. "If you don't give it to us we will tell the Americans," she repeated with laughter. "Any nation that goes into a civil war," she said, "the pressure makes them bitter. They ask, 'Why us and not you?' Today I was insulted by three different Iraqis. They feel ent.i.tled: 'We suffered, you didn't.' The people who really suffer are those who had a lot-educated, university people. Now they are begging. They show me pictures of what they had."

Um Iman worked as a cleaner in the convent. She had come with her husband and three daughters two months earlier. They were Christians and had lived in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood. They had received four letters threatening them with death if they did not leave. One night they took a taxi to a relative's house in Baghdad, and the next morning they joined a convoy of buses heading to the Syrian border. "There were explosions behind us and in front of us," she said. Her husband looked for work every day but could find none. She looked defeated to me. "What can we do?" she asked with resignation. "Even if I die of hunger here I don't want to go back to Iraq. Now there are no Christians in Baghdad."

Lost Amid the Millions in Cairo.

As Iraq fell apart its human detritus was scattered throughout the region. Lost amid the millions of Cairo, Iraqis could be found struggling with the bureaucracy in the Mugamaa, the ma.s.sive labyrinthine edifice where all people's interactions with the Egyptian state began and ended. On the first floor, in the Arab Nations section of the Visa Renewal section, past Somalis and Sudanese sitting and awaiting their turn, was a sign that said, "Booth 23 for Iraqis only." When I visited in late February 2006 the crowds of Iraqis there exceeded the numbers at the nearby section for Palestinian refugees. Iraqis continued to enter Egypt by the planeload. They came on tourist visas at first, but extended them indefinitely or applied for temporary protection at the UNHCR, and settled into the urban sprawl of Cairo.

In the Medinat Nasr district, past the Layali Baghdad (Baghdad Nights) restaurant, I found a small Internet cafe owned by Muhamad Abu Rawan, a twenty-seven-year-old Sunni man who fled Iraq on May 15, 2006, with his wife, Lubna, also twenty-seven. Muhamad walked me to their nearby apartment, where we found Lubna watching a soap opera and holding their three-month-old daughter, Rawa. Their home was spa.r.s.ely decorated: flower patterns on the sofas and carpets, pictures of a forest, a beach and a lake on the walls. Both Muhamad and Lubna were from Basra. Back in Baghdad Muhamad had worked repairing air conditioners for the same electronic appliance company where Lubna, a civil engineer, worked.

At first they both spoke Egyptian Arabic with me, because, like most Iraqis, they had quickly a.s.similated into Egyptian culture and had learned the dialect from the country's famous soap operas and films. At the beginning of the American occupation, Lubna told me, "Our lives were normal, like all Iraqis. Every once in a while the Americans would besiege the area, but my father was never politically active, so the Americans never bothered us." One morning in December 2004, Lubna's father, also a civil engineer and structural designer, drove toward the Mansour district to pay his contractors. He took the airport road and got off at the exit that would take him to Mansour, but the roads had been blocked by American soldiers, who were conducting an operation in the area.

In Yarmuk's Qahtan Square American soldiers fired into the air as Lubna's father drove. He sped away to avoid the shots. Perhaps thinking he was attacking them, one American soldier fired at him, and then several others opened fire as well. "He did not have time to close his eyes before he died," Lubna told me, because there were so many shots in his body. She showed me pictures of his bullet-riddled car, with holes in every side. "That year the Americans were killing many Iraqis on the street," Muhamad explained. Lubna, her mother, and her two sisters did not learn about his death until later that afternoon, when Iraqi police contacted them. Their neighbors persuaded them to demand compensation, and they approached one of the lawyers the Americans had authorized to deal with such cases. "After one year the lawyer said the Americans had rejected it twice," Lubna told me as she rocked Rawa steadily and patted her back. The Americans did offer her family seven hundred dollars, but they rejected it as a paltry sum. "My mother had to go back to work as a teacher because my father was the only provider," Lubna told me.

At the time, Muhamad still lived in Baghdad's volatile Dora district, where s.h.i.+tes and Christians were targeted by Sunni militias. When he picked up a wounded s.h.i.+te from the street and took him to the hospital, he found himself targeted by the Sunni militia that had shot the man. They told him they would have killed him were he not a Sunni and forced him to move out of Dora. One year after her father was killed, Lubna and Muhamad got married. They lived with her mother in Hai Jihad, a majority-Sunni district Muhamad described as "very hot." Two days after they were married, there was a joint American and Iraqi operation in their neighborhood. One hundred and fifty Sunnis were arrested, he told me. "The Americans would surround the neighborhood, and the Iraqi police commandos raided the houses. It was our neighbors and friends. They still haven't been released."

"We were afraid to admit we were Sunnis," Lubna told me. "All men stopped going to the mosque to pray because they would have been hara.s.sed or killed." Muhamad's sister was married to a s.h.i.+te man, he told me, and they had many friends and relatives who were s.h.i.+tes. "It's the militias of Badr and Sadr," Lubna told me, "they are ruthless." The company they worked for was owned by a Sunni man, and it had branches in Baghdad and Basra. In Basra twenty members of the company were kidnapped. The s.h.i.+tes were released, and thirteen Sunni employees were murdered. In Baghdad the company's s.h.i.+te lawyer was killed by Sunni militiamen, a security guard was kidnapped, and the manager was threatened. The owner belonged to the Omar family, a name that gave them away as Sunni, and his company was known as a "Sunni company." He fled Basra to Baghdad because of threats, and after more threats he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Muhamad was beaten, and his car was stolen. "Every day we heard of people we knew getting killed," he told me.

Lubna and Muhamad chose Egypt because the cost of living was cheap and Syria was threatened by the Americans. They came on a three-month tourist visa and rented their apartment, for which they paid three hundred dollars a month. Lubna felt welcomed by the Egyptians, she said, and Muhamad felt at home because the social environment reminded him of Iraq. After they arrived they were joined by Lubna's mother and her seventeen-year-old sister, Najwa, who attended a private high school. Lubna's grandfather was dying, so her mother returned to Baghdad to see him, but then she could no longer get permission to return to Cairo. Muhamad heard rumors that Iraqis who had tried to renew their visas at the Mugamaa were deported by Egyptian authorities, so he obtained an asylum-seeker registration card from the UNHCR.

The couple ran out of their savings, and in December 2006 Muhamad opened his Internet cafe. Lubna hoped to work when Rawa was older. "Our standard of living in Iraq was much better," she told me. In Medinat Nasr they had s.h.i.+te neighbors who had been expelled from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. I asked if the sectarian problems had followed them here. "On the contrary," Muhamad said, "we are happy to see any Iraqi so we can speak our dialect." Lubna added that "the Iraqis who come here are all tired and don't want to organize or attract attention."

Muhamad had to get an Egyptian partner just to open a business. The Egyptian owned 51 percent of the cafe, even though he had not invested anything in it. Muhamad's friend Haidar helped him out at the cafe. A twenty-three-year-old s.h.i.+te pharmacist from Baghdad's Khadhra district, where s.h.i.+tes were under attack, Haidar was married to a Sunni woman. After a local supermarket owner and his two brothers were murdered for being s.h.i.+te, Haidar began to receive threatening calls. His uncle's car was stolen and his house burned down, and the walls of the neighborhood were scrawled with notices saying that s.h.i.+tes' property was forfeit and could be taken by any Sunni. Haidar's family sold their house, and the new owner was killed. "All the s.h.i.+tes in the neighborhood fled," he told me. Haidar moved to Cairo in September 2006 to arrange a place to live before his wife arrived. But when she applied for the Egyptian visa it was denied, leaving her stranded in Baghdad. Haidar met Muhamad in Cairo. "We get along better here than in Iraq," he told me. "We feel closer." Hatred of s.h.i.+tes was increasing throughout the region, and even in Cairo Haidar did not feel fully comfortable. "On the street and in cabs people ask if I am Sunni or s.h.i.+te," he told me. "They say we are infidels." One day at the supermarket the grocer heard Haidar's Iraqi dialect and told him, "Your s.h.i.+tes are infidels."

Egypt had stopped issuing visas to Iraqis, although it was widely rumored that Iraqis who paid bribes at the Egyptian emba.s.sies in Syria and Jordan could obtain them. Iraqis in Egypt told me that they had paid hundreds of dollars to visa agencies that managed to obtain visas for their relatives. Egypt had absorbed between two and four million Sudanese, and had refugees from thirty other nationalities. It also had a high rate of unemployment. Egyptians and Sudanese could not find work, so additional Iraqis would further burden the state's weak social services. Between 100,000 and 140,000 Iraqis lived in Egypt before the influx of refugees, but by March 2007 only 5,500 had registered with UNHCR for an asylum seeker's card because, in the eyes of a UN official, "not every Iraqi in Egypt is a refugee." Many of the middle-cla.s.s Iraqis in Egypt were beginning to run out of resources, and it was only then that they turned to the UN.

Egypt's reasons for no longer letting Iraqis in were twofold. In the post-9 /11 world, concern over terrorism justified almost anything. "Tourism is a major industry, so one incident would cost millions in lost revenue," said the UN official. In addition, Egyptians were afraid of s.h.i.+tes, an Iraqi diplomat told me, "because they think they have links to Iran." Many Egyptians had raised fears of a s.h.i.+te wave and of Sunnis converting to s.h.i.+sm. They also feared making permanent demographic changes to Iraq. "You are taking them from Iraq and implanting them somewhere else, and most of them are Sunnis," a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat told me. "It disturbs me. It means the whole area will be s.h.i.+te."

Many Iraqi refugees have carried the sectarian bitterness with them. In an apartment complex that resembled American housing projects, only partially occupied and complete, I found a collection of Sunni Iraqis in a courtyard inside, where a few had opened shops. Ghaith, an eighteen-year-old from Amriya, long since cleansed of its s.h.i.+tes, had owned a supermarket back home and had opened up a small grocery store on the ground floor of the complex in Egypt. He pointed to his twelve-year-old brother playing soccer with other boys and told me that he had been kidnapped in Baghdad and held for one week. Sitting in the grocery store was Dhafer, a round thirty-five-year-old man with a sharp nose and stubble from a few days of neglect. He had the tired look of a defeated man. Originally from Baghdad's Ghazaliya district, he had been threatened by s.h.i.+te neighbors whose sons worked with the Iraqi National Guard and Interior Ministry, he said, and given forty-eight hours to leave. "I brought my relatives for protection and weapons and they escorted us out," he told me. I asked him why he had then left Amriya. "Civil war," he said. "All of Baghdad, all of Iraq, is a civil war. The guy who goes on television and says it's not a civil war is mocking the people." On August 16, 2005, Dhafer came to Cairo with his wife and son. Since then another son had been born. Dhafer and his family regularly watched Al Zawra TV, the Iraqi satellite channel that broadcast resistance operations and was openly pro-Sunni and anti-s.h.i.+te. They had recently seen a video of a Sadrist cleric calling on s.h.i.+tes to kill Sunnis. "I was not surprised," he told me. "I know the s.h.i.+te sect. But my wife was crying." Dhafer told me that up to twenty of his friends had already been killed in Baghdad. He had not renewed his residency and instead had applied for refugee status at the UNHCR. Although he missed his family, he never wanted to return to Baghdad. His relatives had also warned him not to return, telling him that it was better to starve outside.

Next door was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple from Baghdad's Ghazaliya district. It was decorated in pink and red in honor of Valentine's Day, and there was only a chair for one customer at a time. Its owner, Ghada, had taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar, a former colonel in the Iraqi Army, had retired in 1999. After retiring he had opened a stationery shop in the Nafaq al-Shurta district with a friend. The American military raided their home twice. "They said to me, 'You look like an American woman,'" Ghada said, laughing with pride. The military asked permission to use their roof for surveillance, and Abu Omar agreed. "Could we have said no?" Ghada asked.

"After the war I started to feel the Iranian influence," Abu Omar told me. "Before there were no problems between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or s.h.i.+tes." Like many former military officers, Abu Omar was actively involved in the Iraqi resistance. "As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers," he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable. When talking of the resistance, he slipped and said, "we" instead of "they."

s.h.i.+te militias a.s.sociated with the Iraqi government obtained lists of former military officers and their personal information, he told me. "Every day we heard names of officers killed," he said, estimating that he knew at least one hundred people who had been killed since the Americans overthrew Saddam. He was threatened twice in front of his house, and then his partner was a.s.sa.s.sinated. "After they killed his partner he told me that we must leave in five days," Ghada told me. She started crying. "They have stolen my house, my furniture. I left everything. Even now I hope to go back. Here we have many troubles. We have no money. It's very difficult. There you feel that you can die every day. Here I am dying every day. Every day you hear bad news. There is no hope. I lost everything. I was a queen in my house before. I had a home, furniture, a BMW. Now I live in a dirty area. What did I do? What did my children do?" Ghada sold most of her jewelry to help support the family. They had been in Cairo since 2005 and had managed to pay for their children's school the first year but could no longer afford to.

Ghada told me that Iraq's sectarianism had followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children's school. Iraqi s.h.i.+te boys beat their son Omar, she said. "He hates s.h.i.+tes so much," she said, adding that many fights had occurred between Sunni and s.h.i.+te Iraqi children. Her son's fight had been provoked by Saddam Hussein's execution, which they watched on television. "We had hoped that Saddam would return to lead Iraq. It was like they ripped my heart out," he told me. "After I saw the images I stayed up all night." Ghada told me that Egyptian customers had cried with her and consoled her after Saddam's execution, and they had recited a prayer together. "The ones that Saddam killed," she said, meaning s.h.i.+tes, "I would go back and kill more of them. I hate s.h.i.+tes."

Abu Omar still held out some hope that peace could be restored. "If America comes down from her pride and negotiates with resistance, then maybe there can be a solution. The resistance is very strong and has the best officers." He was not as sectarian as his wife, explaining to me that "there are real Iraqi s.h.i.+tes, and they have the same feelings we have. It is the s.h.i.+tes of Iran who are the cause of the problems." Abu Omar often referred to the resistance as "the patriots," explaining that "there are Sunni and s.h.i.+te patriots. The patriots can defeat the Iranian s.h.i.+tes."

Many former Baathists and Iraqi Army officers had settled in Egypt following the war. Harith al-Dhari, leader of the Sunni a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, frequently visited Cairo, where he met with Egyptian leaders, including his friend Mahdi Akef, leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars controlled some militias that fought in the resistance. More resistance leaders based themselves across the border from Iraq's Anbar province, in Amman and Damascus, however. Nearly three years into their war against the occupation, many were growing introspective-much like the tribal leader Sheikh Saad, whom I met in Amman in late 2006.

In Damascus in February 2007 I met one of the leaders of the Anbar resistance that Sheikh Saad referred to when he told me they had all fled. Sheikh Ya.s.sin was a weathered and frail man with a thick white scarf over his head. He fingered black beads as we spoke. He led a mosque in Hit but had fled a month before we met and left it with his sons. Hit had become deserted, he told me. "The situation there has become disastrous," he said. "They hit my son's house in an airstrike and destroyed his house and killed my grandson. The people of Hit are caught between Americans on one side and Al Qaeda on the other side. And the police and army do not treat people properly."

He too recognized the strategic Sunni error made at the beginning of the American occupation. "That is the origin of the problem: they boycotted. If they had partic.i.p.ated with all their weight, they would not have let the s.h.i.+te militias take over the government of Iraq." He blamed the Iraqi Sunni leaders.h.i.+p for denouncing elections and threatening those who partic.i.p.ated. "They made the wrong interpretation," he said. "s.h.i.+tes wanted to prevent Sunnis from voting, and jihadists did as well. The jihadists fight the Americans on one side and on the other side they destroy the community." Sheikh Ya.s.sin had not fled s.h.i.+te militias, but rather Al Qaeda. "Sunnis must choose between death or seeking refuge in the Anbar, Syria, or Jordan," he said.

Another opponent of Al Qaeda was Sheikh Mudhir al-Khirbit of Ramadi, a former leader of the Confederation of Iraqi Tribes. The Khirbits had been favored by the former regime, and in March 2003 an American airstrike on their home had killed eighteen family members, reason enough for them to seek vengeance. Sheikh Mudhir had sought shelter in Damascus but made frequent trips to Lebanon for medical treatment. The Iraqi government placed him on its new list of forty-one most wanted, and in January 2007, on a medical trip to Lebanon, he was arrested by that country's Internal Security Forces. His affairs were now being handled by his oldest son, Sattam, who was only eighteen years old but who, according to one Western diplomat, had his father's trust and went on missions for him. I found Sattam in an apartment in Damascus, dressed in a gray suit, wearing pointy leather shoes, and taking business calls from sheikhs well into the night.

In 2004, when he was only fifteen, Sattam and an uncle were arrested in an American military raid on their home. "Every tribal sheikh has weapons, machine guns, missiles, Kalashnikovs," he told me. Sattam was jailed for one month and interrogated about his father's activities. "They treated me badly," he said. "We were tied up for two days, and it was really cold." His uncle was held for three months and was later imprisoned again for one year. Iraq had grown too dangerous for the family's leaders.h.i.+p. "In Ramadi you can't drive in a car," he told me. "You don't know if the Americans or Al Qaeda will kill you. Not only s.h.i.+tes are slaughtering Sunnis; Sunnis are slaughtering Sunnis."

Iraq's Sunnis were beleaguered, he said. He called the initial Sunni boycott of Iraqi politics "a big mistake," one that opened the door to s.h.i.+te domination. "Now it's too late," he said. "People here and in Amman feel like they lost." The only way to protect Sunnis, in his view, was to establish a Sunni state that would include the Anbar province, Mosul, and Tikrit. Radical Sunnis in groups like Al Qaeda were now in control of Anbar, and the resistance was taking on Al Qaeda as well as the Americans. "Al Qaeda kills Sunnis the most, and you don't know what they want," he said. His priority was to deal with Al Qaeda in Anbar first, then reconcile with the s.h.i.+tes, and then work to end the occupation. "When Sunnis in Baghdad get arrested by the Americans, they feel good because it's better than being arrested by s.h.i.+te militias." Despite this, he did not bear hostility toward the s.h.i.+tes. "My father doesn't differentiate between Sunnis, s.h.i.+tes, and Christians," he said. "We don't have anything against s.h.i.+tes. s.h.i.+tes didn't kill eighteen people from our family-the Americans did."

Another longtime resistance fighter was Abu Ali, commander of Jeish Nasr Salahedin (The Army of Salahedin's Victory) in the Tikrit area. A short, stern man wearing a brown jacket, a sweater showing his s.h.i.+rt collar, and green pants, he had a small mustache atop his tight lips and spoke without expression in a low voice. He had arrived in Damascus with two comrades who were wounded and could not get treatment in Iraq. "Our people here said they could help them," he told me. The Americans had raided his home, and he had not slept there for two years, stealing only occasional visits to see his family. I was told that Abu Ali had led a much-publicized attack on the American base in Tikrit on the day American amba.s.sador Zalmay Khalilzad attended a ceremony handing it over to the Iraqi army, and he confirmed this.

"They expressed democracy with bullets against demonstrators," he said of the Americans. "I will keep fighting until the last American and Iranian leaves." Abu Ali added that he antic.i.p.ated a clash with Al Qaeda as well. Although there was no political leaders.h.i.+p in the resistance, he said, "there are politicians, and we express our ideas to them." He worried that the resistance was becoming too public, with many people appearing on television and claiming they led it. "The secret of the success of the resistance is that n.o.body knows who we are," he said. "If we make it public, then we will be like Palestine, sixty years and no state."

"Nothing positive has come from the Iraqis," he said. "You can't trust an Iraqi."

The prospect of the Palestinian refugee crisis happening all over again is especially worrisome for Jordan. At least half its population of nearly six million people are Palestinians who were expelled from their homes in 1948 or 1967. Following the Gulf War in 1991, Kuwait expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom ended up in Jordan. Jordan has close and longstanding ties to Iraq, dating back to that country's monarchy.

In a fast food restaurant in Amman I sat with a major from Jordan's powerful General Intelligence Directorate. He insisted that there were more than one million Iraqis in Jordan, though in truth the number never exceeded more than a few hundred thousand. He denied that they were refugees because they had not been forced out of Iraq. When I asked him what he expected a Sunni living in s.h.i.+te militia-dominated Basra to do, he told me that the Sunni should merely move to a Sunni area of Iraq. "Nothing positive has come from the Iraqis," he said. "You can't trust an Iraqi." Like most Jordanians he complained that the influx of Iraqis had tripled housing prices.

After Iraqis a.s.sociated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's Al Qaeda movement struck two Jordanian hotels in November 2005, detonating suicide bombs in a wedding, Iraqis began facing interrogations at the border. Beginning in 2006 Jordan imposed strict restrictions on the entry of Iraqis. By the end of that year a sign on the Jordanian border proclaimed that men between eighteen and thirty-five years of age could not enter. Families entering with many suitcases or belongings were turned away as well. Many Iraqis entering Jordan at the border and airport reported being questioned about whether they were Sunni or s.h.i.+te. s.h.i.+tes were more likely to be turned away. Once in Jordan, Iraqis could register with UNHCR for their temporary protection cards.

At first, Iraqis were given three-month tourist visas; but when they left Jordan to renew the visas, they could not return. As a result, many Iraqis chose not to leave and fell into illegal status. Underground, they were unable to work formally and often didn't get paid for the work they did illegally. Many young Iraqi men left their families behind and came to Jordan seeking work. They lived in virtually empty apartments, the only furniture being mattresses on the floor. Their children did not have access to schools or medical care. In February 2006, there were officially fourteen thousand Iraqi children in Jordanian private schools.

Jordanian society was very sympathetic with the plight of Iraq's Sunnis, but s.h.i.+tes had a hard time there. A young Iraqi s.h.i.+te man working with an NGO in Jordan reported being regularly questioned about his ident.i.ty. Major Jordanian newspapers like Al Rai often published anti-s.h.i.+te articles, he said. "In Jordan, if you want to work they might ask you if you are s.h.i.+te or Sunni, and if you are s.h.i.+te you can't work," he told me. "Taxi drivers ask me, 'Are you Iraqi? Are you Sunni or s.h.i.+te?'" If he answered truthfully, they would ask him why he was helping the Americans. "After Saddam was executed, they asked me, 'Why didn't Iraqis make a revolution after his execution?' They don't believe Saddam committed crimes. I told one I am Iraqi and s.h.i.+te. He asked, 'Are you supporting those Iranians killing Iraqis?' I don't argue, I don't want trouble or to be taken to police station. I bought a bicycle to avoid the taxi drivers."

Dr. Mouayad al-Windawi was a s.h.i.+te professor of political science who left the University of Baghdad in May 2005. "In my first lesson after the war, I said this will be a disaster and bring us nothing. We will live in chaos for a long time." A member of the Baath Party until 2001, he explained to me that under Saddam there was some sectarianism, but it was not overt. A gla.s.s ceiling kept many s.h.i.+tes from advancing too high. "I worked with the Iraqi government for the last forty years," he said. "Not much attention was paid to who you are." I asked him how sectarianism had increased after the war. "Ask Mr. Bremer," he told me, referring to Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. "Bremer's system for political parties was good for blocs, not parties. It was good for Kurds and [Supreme Council leader] Hakim. Nationalists boycotted the political process after 2003, but the hawza and Sistani told s.h.i.+tes to wait and see, and Sunnis had no such guy to issue a fatwa. The Jaafari government forced Sunnis to see themselves as defending themselves and not the nation. Former Baathists and nationalists like me have no place. I realized there is no future. I told my family we have to stay ten years away from the country."

Mouayad lived in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold in Baghdad. Members of Zarqawi's Tawhid and Jihad militia attacked his house. His brother, married to a Sunni woman, was kidnapped and released after a ransom of twenty-five thousand dollars was paid. He then fled to Damascus. "I realized that the country would have a civil war one way or another," he told me. "I still believe the worst is coming, not only to Iraq but in the region. It's the first stage of a conflict that might lead to a Sunni bloc against s.h.i.+tes. There is no hope for the future." A month before I met Mouayad, his house was occupied by a Sunni militia. Two days before we met, a relative of his was killed when mortars landed on his home.

In Jordan Mouayad was working as a consultant for the political advisory group to the United Nations amba.s.sador to Iraq. "Jordanians were very cooperative until last summer," he said, "but they realized the civil war might lead to new wave. Sixty-five percent of Iraqis in Jordan are Sunnis because Sunni areas in Iraq are under attack." He did not expect the sectarianism to spread to Jordan. "In Jordan security is too strong, and Iraqis here don't want to engage in sectarianism. But over time things might change."

Many officers from the former regime in Iraq had chosen to settle in Jordan. I met two one rainy evening at the home of Maj. Gen. Walid Abdel Maliki, a former a.s.sistant to the minister of defense before the war. With him was Gen. Raed al-Hamdani, a former commander in the Republican Guard Corps. Both men, I was told, "had contacts" with the Iraqi resistance. As we sat down, Abdel Maliki's young son burst into the living room. "This is the Mahdi Army," Abdel Maliki told me as he kissed his son, "his behavior in the house." The two former generals were nostalgic for the time before Iraq was overrun with sectarianism. "We never had this sort of fighting before between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes," said Abdel Maliki. "Saddam didn't believe in Sunnis or s.h.i.+tes; he was tribal. Saddam didn't put down the s.h.i.+te rebellion because they were s.h.i.+te but because it was an uprising. The soldiers who put down the s.h.i.+te uprising were s.h.i.+tes. We never heard from our fathers and grandfathers such a thing as is happening now. The problem now is from Sunni and s.h.i.+te political leaders: Hakim, Dhari, and Adnan Dulaimi are playing the same game." Abdel Maliki blamed Iran for the problems in Iraq. "It's a military idea, to move the battle from your land to the enemy's land," he said, and Iran sought to confront the U.S. in Iraq. "Iranian occupation is worse than American occupation. The only way is a military solution. Al Qaeda, the s.h.i.+te militias, the Iranian groups-they have their own agendas but don't want to solve their problems. We have to attack Al Qaeda and the militias. Thousands of Iraqi officers can help Americans."

General Hamdani, Abdel Maliki's former superior officer, had fought and lost in six wars against Americans, Iranians, Kurds, and Israelis. He had been severely wounded in 1991. "The hardest loss was this last one. We were given the responsibility to defend our country. We lost the war and we lost our country." Hamdani also resisted a sectarian approach to Iraq. "It is a mistake to think Sunnis ruled s.h.i.+tes," he said. "Most of the coup attempts against Saddam were Sunni. If we have a point of view on Iraq, it is as Iraqis, not as Sunnis. There are nationalists and those who are not nationalists."

He did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been problematic. "Many Iraqi Sunnis partic.i.p.ated in the government. What was the result? Nothing." Although Hamdani thought the Iraqi resistance should continue its struggle, he too saw a larger threat. "These groups were established to fight the occupation, but now I think the danger from Iran is greater than from America. American national interests and the resistance's interests are the same. The U.S. did itself harm by demonizing the Iraqi resistance and anyone who deals with it. They have prevented the emergence of moderates who can sit and negotiate, and you see now, four years after the invasion, the strongest factions are Al Qaeda and not the nationalists."

Hamdani was involved in a new political party called Huquq, which was formed by Dr. Ha.s.san Bazzaz in August 2006. Bazzaz was a professor of international relations who taught at the University of Baghdad. He left Iraq two months before I met him in February 2007. "I just ran away. I was afraid they will kill me," he said, referring to the s.h.i.+te militias. Being a well-known professor was a sufficient reason to be targeted, he explained. When I entered his office he was on the phone with someone in Iraq. "Where did they find him?" he asked. "Who shot him? The Americans?"

Bazzaz was also from Adhamiya. "Good fighters, good people," he said of his former neighborhood. "It never fell."

The Americans had just initiated their new security plan for Iraq, and Bazzaz was trying to be optimistic. "Everything must come to an end, and I don't think this will go on forever," he said. "We are not the first nation to get occupied by a foreign power or the first nation to fight among itself. The Americans are doing it for their own benefit, and we, the Sunni people, can benefit from that." Although he struggled to be optimistic, he still placed hopes in the resistance. "If things get worse, then we, the people who are talking politically, will take the military option," he said. "The Sunni Arab neighbors will have to support us. The worst is coming."

In February 2007 I met Mishan al-Juburi of Al Zawra TV in the offices of a charter airline company in downtown Damascus he claimed belonged to his wife. Two heavy-set thuggish young men stood guard. As I sat down, he began complaining about a recent New York Times story about him. "It's completely from a dream," he said angrily. "All the story except my name is not correct."

Juburi told me his version of his life's story. He claimed to have been a businessman in Baghdad's Shorja market. "I knew Saddam personally," he said, "and gave him my full support. Saddam tried to show he was a winner and he didn't care about those who supported him. I lost my son in a car accident and criticized the health minister." Juburi claims that this criticism provoked the ire of the regime. He told me his father had led the Juburi tribe but that since Mishan had an older brother, he was never expected to lead the tribe. "I like city," he said. "I don't want to be tribal." He also claimed to have been involved in a coup attempt by the Juburi tribe. "I tried to kill Saddam, and he killed thirty-five people from my family: my brother, my cousins. I lost ninety-five people from my family to Saddam, but it's indisputable that Saddam was better. I'm sorry I opposed him."

He had lived in Jordan, Turkey, Britain, and Syria, he told me, and had founded the Iraqi Homeland Party. Before the war he had taken part in an opposition conference in Salahaddin, in Kurdistan. Now he regretted his partic.i.p.ation in this conference: "I trusted the American lie of building democracy in Iraq, and I found myself a part of the American destruction of Iraq." He claimed he had come to this realization one month after the war ended, when Bremer declared the American presence in Iraq to be an occupation.

Immediately following the war, Juburi and his militia went down to Mosul from Erbil, where he had been staying as a guest of Kurdish leader Ma.s.soud Barzani. "Barzani is my friend. I fully support an independent Kurdistan." He claimed Barzani's militia had helped him take Mosul. I asked him what had become of his militia, and Juburi told me, "I think they are resisting."

I expressed surprise at his support for an independent Kurdistan. "I believe it's good for the Iraqi future," he said, though he admitted that the Kurds were planning on cleansing the Arabs of Kirkuk. He told me he had remained in Mosul for one month and then arranged for an election. "I didn't put my name or any name of my family" on the list of candidates, he said, somewhat implausibly. After the elections in Mosul, he left for Baghdad and eventually joined the Iraqi government and Parliament. His small party, he said, received 142,000 votes in the first Iraqi elections.

Juburi was known for his sectarian attacks on Iraq's s.h.i.+te leaders and militias, whom he called "Safawis," the Arabic way of saying "Safavid," the name of a Persian dynasty that ruled from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is a common epithet used to imply that Iraq's s.h.i.+tes are not Arabs but are part of an Iranian or Persian conspiracy to gain hegemony over them. "On April 18, 2005, I said the government is Safawi," he said proudly. "I'm the first man to use the word 'Safawi.' Since then I haven't gone to Parliament. The first Jaafari government was Safawi-Persian. We are not against s.h.i.+tes; we are against Safawis. We fear Iran. The Americans will leave; first we are afraid of Iran."

In November 2005 he established Al Zawra TV. "From the first day we said we are going to say what no one else dares to say," he told me. At first Al Zawra was known for its entertainment programs, but after Juburi's immunity as a Parliament member was lifted following charges of corruption and aiding the resistance, the channel began broadcasting proresistance propaganda. Since most of Al Zawra's target audience in the Middle East did not have access to the Internet, Juburi rebroadcast the propaganda videos that many had seen worldwide online. The videos consisted of members of the resistance preparing for or conducting operations against the Americans. Two commentators, a man in military attire and a veiled woman, occasionally provided news bulletins. Although his channel was praised by the resistance, many also expressed their skepticism about Juburi for being "opportunistic."

Al Zawra received widespread attention throughout the Arab world, and many Iraqi Sunnis in exile watched it as well. One newspaper in Jordan, Al Arab al-Yawm, wrote that only Al Zawra transmitted the reports of the resistance without focusing on suicide attacks that promoted sectarianism. The newspaper praised Al Zawra's stance against the occupation and its call for the overthrow of the "puppet sectarian regime." The channel was unique and important, the paper said, because there was otherwise a media blackout imposed on the resistance. The channel showed Arab children the real picture of Iraq, praising the "martyr leader Saddam Husayn."

In April 2006 Juburi absconded to northern Iraq and Erbil, where his friend Barzani provided him with safe haven. "If I stayed in Baghdad the government militias would kill me," he said. "Maliki told me he would execute me if I opposed the government. I am against the Iranians in Iraq, so the authorities accuse me of certain things. Now the office in Baghdad is destroyed." The Americans eventually closed down his station in Erbil too. He explained that he broadcasted from Anbar using mobile transmitters on taxis and other vehicles.

When we met he was running his station from Damascus with the help of his son and publis.h.i.+ng a pro-Sunni newspaper. He claimed that he alone funded the station. "I was one of the top-ten richest men in Iraq," he said. Al Zawra was broadcast by the Egyptian satellite network Nilesat. Juburi expressed glee in the distress he was causing as a gadfly. "The Americans pushed me to be against them," he said. "I know how much I give them a headache." He would soon also be broadcast by Arabsat and Hot Bird, a European company.

Juburi maintained that Zarqawi and other Salafis had hurt the Sunni cause. They had sought to provoke a civil war, he said, and they had succeeded. "That's why Sunni society doesn't support them," he said. "There are clashes between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi resistance, which we consider ourselves to be a part of." Al Zawra had become a symbol of the resistance everywhere, he told me. "The resistance are serving us; we have relations with all the resistance in Iraq except Al Qaeda," he said. "We never show anything from them. Al Qaeda is a danger like America in the Middle East. We don't want to make the mistake they made in Afghanistan."

Like many Sunnis, Juburi feared a potential genocide of the Sunnis of Iraq. He believed that Sunni children and women would leave the country. He did not think the s.h.i.+tes had won yet. "If we are outside the city but s.h.i.+tes cannot leave their homes, then you cannot say that there is a winner to the civil war," he said. Unlike some Sunni leaders, he did not think the Sunni boycott of the Iraqi government had been a strategic error. "If you push people to join the Iraqi police and army, it means you accept the American occupation."

Although Juburi was ready to criticize Iraq's s.h.i.+tes and what he saw as their Iranian sponsors, he refrained from criticizing Lebanese Hizballah, a successful s.h.i.+te resistance movement. Many Sunni Iraqis saw Hizballah as an Iranian proxy and were thus hostile to the movement. Juburi told me he did not want to talk about Hizballah, possibly because he was a guest of the Syrians, themselves supporters of the movement. He conceded that Hizballah's general secretary was very charismatic and expressed his admiration for Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Lebanese cleric formerly a.s.sociated with Hizballah. "I love Fadlallah especially," Juburi told me. He agreed with me that it was ironic that in Lebanon the Sunnis supported American policy while the s.h.i.+tes were opposed to the Americans.

He predicted that Al Zawra would soon go live on the Internet. "We use the Internet the way photography was used in Vietnam," he said. "We will cause Bush a real headache. We will show the reality of American soldiers. America must apologize for what it did to Iraq."

In January 2007 Juburi famously debated Sadeq al-Musawi, a s.h.i.+te Iraqi journalist, on Al Jazeera. Juburi came out swinging, asking Musawi to recite a prayer for the soul of "the martyred president Saddam Hussein." Musawi refused, condemning Saddam instead. Juburi called Musawi a Persian, and Musawi responded that Juburi was a thief. Juburi claimed to have evidence that Musawi was an Iranian, and Musawi claimed that Juburi's father had killed Kurds. Juburi called Musawi a "Persian shoe." Musawi stormed off the set, and Juburi continued alone, praising the executed Saddam. Invoking sectarianism and the ancient split between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes, Juburi said that the people who killed Saddam were the same people who had killed the caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab and who hated the caliph Abu Bakr and the other companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Musawi eventually returned to the set, his exchange with Juburi was no less acrimonious.

In February 2007 Juburi made a speech condemning Al Qaeda for provoking Iraq's s.h.i.+tes while failing to protect Sunnis from s.h.i.+te retaliation, for imposing itself on other resistance groups, for killing Iraq's Sunni leaders, for seeking to create a Taliban state in Iraq, and for killing a messenger sent by Juburi to negotiate with them. Juburi warned that Iraq's Sunnis would fight Al Qaeda. Following his speech, many jihadist websites and forums condemned Juburi. Although the Egyptians had ignored threats from the ruling s.h.i.+tes in Iraq, in February Nilesat finally pulled the plug on Juburi's channel (other satellite networks continued to broadcast it). The Americans, who had long been pressuring the Egyptians to shut Al Zawra down, finally succeeded.

Others I spoke to disputed Juburi's account of himself. Amatzia Baram of the University of Haifa, an expert on Iraq's tribes and its former regime, was one of them. According to Baram, who also advised the American government: "He is a middle-level sheikh of the Jubbur [tribe], originating from the vicinity of Tikrit. In the mid-1980s he was approached by Saddam to recruit young and uncouth Juburis that would go through a crash (and often crush) course of army officers and then sent to the front with Iran to lead troops in battle. Saddam believed that country tribal boys were tough, very Arab (no mix with Turkish or Persian genes or culture), and imbued with traditional tribal ideals-murua (manliness or n.o.bleness), sharraf (honor)-and so they will fight the Iranians tooth and nail. Actually, they did prove themselves. Saddam promoted them at a neck-breaking speed in the war. Your man claims that he recruited fifty thousand such, but he is exaggerating. Still, he did a good job. Now, many Juburis were angry at Saddam for other reasons and planned a coup d'etat in January 1990. Saddam exposed it and executed many Juburi army officers, imprisoned or just sacked others. It became dangerous to be a senior Juburi for a while. I don't know whether your guy was or wasn't part of the plot, but he felt that the soil was burning under his feet, and fled. He always tried to present himself as far more important than he really was. He returned to Baghdad in 2003 but was not successful in attracting meaningful Juburi support. He always had money, who knows where from. a.s.sad? CIA? Saudis and Gulfies?"

An Iraqi politician close to many Sunni leaders and the resistance who also lived in Syria provided me with another account. My source, who preferred anonymity, explained, "The resistance has doubts about him. They are using him, but they won't give him their trust to speak in their name. When the occupation ends they will judge him for all that he did." He was referring to charges the Iraqi government had made that Juburi had run off with millions of dollars he had been paid for contracts he never completed. He had allegedly used that money to launch his television station.

My source explained that under Saddam's regime Juburi had worked for the Jumhuriya newspaper. Juburi then met Saddam's son Uday and fell into his good graces. Juburi came from a poor family, my source told me, but he had made deals with Uday during the sanctions era and had stolen money from Uday before fleeing to Jordan and Syria, taking advantage of the fact that Syria would not hand him over to Saddam. Juburi then pretended he was using money to overthrow the government. My source mocked Juburi for attending the Iraqi opposition conferences in London and Salahaddin before the war, legitimizing the American occupation. When the former regime learned of a coup being plotted by members of the Jubbur tribe, many members were executed, including Juburi's brother, his wife's brother, and many military officers from the tribe.

"When the Americans invaded," my source explained, "he came down with the Kurds to Mosul, and he partic.i.p.ated in robbing banks and burning them. He tried to lead Mosul and gave a speech, and people threw shoes and vegetables at him. He bought a lot of votes and got three seats in Parliament. His tribe has rejected him because he came on the back of American tanks." My source explained that Juburi received various building contracts but never built anything. He also received a contract to provide security for oil pipelines. "When he started clas.h.i.+ng with the government, they opened his file, and the first file they opened was the pipelines," my source said, adding that some Sunni Iraqi politicians had appealed to Juburi to stop promoting sectarianism. "We told him he serves the American agenda of dividing Iraqis," he said.

CHAPTER SIX.

The Battle of Nahr al-Barid: Iraq Comes to Lebanon.

IT WASN'T ONLY IRAQI REFUGEES WHO WERE LEAVING THE COUNTRY. Al Qaeda in Iraq was searching for new sanctuaries as well. Most countries in the region were harsh dictators.h.i.+ps with strong security services that would never countenance an influx of the new "Arab Afghans," veterans of the jihad in Iraq, the way they had after the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s. But with its weak state, sectarian structure and divisions, foreign interventions, and extreme social inequalities, Lebanon was especially vulnerable to the destabilizing influences of the civil war in Iraq. Best of all, large swaths of it were ungoverned, and there was a Sunni community that felt increasingly insecure. Though there were many differences between the two countries, Lebanon showed a possible glimpse of what parts of Iraq might look like-especially if, as in Lebanon, there was never any process of justice, truth, or accountability to grapple with the civil war and the ma.s.sacres.

The wave of Sunni extremism and the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia were especially felt in Lebanon. Fighting in the northern Nahr al-Barid refugee camp near Tripoli and street clashes in January and May 2008 were a sign that the war in Iraq was spilling over into neighboring countries, with fighters, weapons, tactics, and sectarian tensions all making their way to Lebanon and elsewhere. The clashes were also a sign that America's "New Middle East," based on supporting U.S. client states at the expense of rival movements that had more popularity or legitimacy, was failing. America's support for Sunni regimes that manipulated sectarianism was increasing radicalism in the region and threatening to provoke a larger regional conflict.

While many a.n.a.lysts were promoting a theory of "s.h.i.+te revival" in the Middle East, recent events in Lebanon and the region pointed to a Sunni revival. According to a Lebanese political scientist I spoke to, Amer Mohsen, the s.h.i.+te revival, spoken of with fear by Sunni dictators in the Middle East and with pride by supporters, was pa.s.se. It had happened in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini. "If by revival we designate a movement revolutionizing s.h.i.+te thought or the way s.h.i.+tes think of themselves, this already happened in 1979 in much of the Middle East, and that movement reached its apex and is no longer in fas.h.i.+on," he said. "Hizballah in Lebanon is gaining popularity not based on the notions of the Iranian Revolution but as a communitarian movement working in the context of ident.i.ty politics, much like the other movements in Lebanon. And it is the same thing in Iraq, where s.h.i.+te movements have no clear ideological commitment. If by revival we mean increased power for s.h.i.+te groups within their countries, that would apply solely to Iraq, where the fall of Saddam supposedly catapulted s.h.i.+tes to a position of power they had not had since the creation of the country. But this is also a local