the Sadrist turn: Patrick Cockburn interviewed

Below the fold is the director's cut of a phone interview I did with Patrick Cockburn just before the publication of Muqtada al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, which charts the rise of Sadrism as a nationalist religious movement of the Iraqi Shia poor from the 1950's to the present day standoff in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere across southern Iraq. I'm not going to review it right here and now. let's just say that if the thought ever occured to you that "it's Sadr's turn now" it's a book you need to own as soon as possible, and if that thought never occured to you then you need to buy it to find out why it should.

The interview was or an article in the Big Issue in the North, and it constitutes an attempt to explain to a general audience in Britain the movement that was/is the main antagonist to British forces in Iraq. There's plainly much more to Sadrism than that, but I've never seen a general attempt to try and lay out in reasonably simple terms what was waiting for us when we marched in in a fog of misinformation and wishful thinking, where this movement came from and what it wants. So here it is.

Patrick Cockburn has been reporting from Iraq since 1977. He has made more than sixty journeys to the country, covering the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War and the invasion of 2003 and all five years of its catastrophic aftermath.

The closest he came to death was on a stretch of road outside the town of Najaf in 2004. The Iraq insurgency was already getting well underway in the Sunni Muslim parts of the country, to the North and West of Baghdad. Now there were reports of a new militia in town and groups of armed men dressed in black converging on Najaf, the site of the shrine of Imam Ali and the holiest place in the Shi’a Muslim world.

Sure enough, the men at the checkpoint wore black. They were also armed, nervous, trigger happy, and prepared to die. They were even more ready to kill an “American spy”, as they called Cockburn. Only pleas by his interpreter led them to decide instead to take them all to a local Shi’a cleric, who finally calmed them down. The men previously intent on killing Cockburn now fed him cigarettes and orange juice and told him about themselves.

“They were very poor, self educated or uneducated, and above all very religious” he says. “They were from Sadr City in Baghdad and had borrowed money from friends to pay traveling costs and their families had rallied round to buy them their weapons. They were puritanical, committed and ready to die.”

Die they did, many hundreds of them. Most men in Iraq know how to use a gun, but the men who fought the professionally trained, heavily equipped US army around Najaf knew very little more than that, only that their spiritual leader had told them to defend the shrine of the Imam Ali with their lives.

A survivor later told Cockburn that his life had been saved because Allah sent a giant golden bird which brushed away the bullets and bombs of the US army in mid flight.

These were the men of the Jaish al Mehdi, better known as the Mehdi Army. And they in turn were the newly inaugurated armed wing of Sadrism: a militant social and religious movement rooted in Shi’ite theology and the desperation of the Iraqi underclass.

It’s a name that should be better known in Britain. The JAM, as they are called in military terminology, were and are the British forces’ main antagonists in Iraq,
responsible for the deaths of many of the 176 British troops killed there.

And their rise was completely unexpected. Prior to the war, the US political scientist Fuad Adjami declared that Shi’ite political Islamism was “a dead letter”. British troops were expected to be greeted as liberators and for the first few years of the occupation, the area under British control was generally known in the media as “the quiet South”. If there was any trouble, then the British Army’s experience in counter-insurgency operations gained in Northern Ireland and Malaya during the 1950’s would help them bring an end to it quickly and without much bloodshed.

In Muqtada Al Sadr and the Fall of Iraq, Patrick Cockburn explains why things didn’t turn out as advertised. The book charts the evolution of the Sadrists from the first venture of the Shi’a clerics into local politics in the 1950’s, through years of terror and endurance under Saddam Hussein to the resurgent militancy that ran head on into British forces entering Southern Iraq in the years after 2003.

“It was always nonsense to compare the situation in Iraq with the counterinsurgencies in Northern Ireland and Malaya” says Patrick Cockburn. “In those countries, the insurgents were confined to minority groups, and the British had the support of the majority communities.”

In Basra and elsewhere in Southern Iraq, Britain never had any allies; just groups willing to reach strictly temporary agreements for tactical reasons.”

The story of political Islamism in Southern Iraq goes back over forty years, but to understand it you have to be aware of the most important difference between Shia and Sunni Islam. This is not religious, though the two schools differ greatly in many areas.

The most important difference is that everywhere that Shia and Sunni Muslims live in the same country, Sunnis rule and Shias are ruled. As a result, Shia Islam developed a theology of endurance and redemption designed to console the downtrodden. This is especially significant in Iraq, where the majority of the population are Shia.

Shia Islam also places a much larger importance on the role of the clergy – the ulema - in everyday life. Devout Shia are supposed to look to senior clergy as “objects of emulation”. Traditionally, the Shia clergy in Iraq offered their flock moral and religious guidance while protecting them from the oppression of the state by keeping out of politics.

That changed in the 1950’s as Iraq began to modernize and urbanise. Many thousands of Shia Iraqis began to move to Baghdad and other cities, where they increasingly fell under the influence of secular political movements. If the clergy were to keep hold of their flock they too would have to move into political activism.

Step forward Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, often known as Sadr 1. From a prominent clergy family and already with an extensive following, Sadr evolved a religous ideology combining populism, nationalism and direct rule by the Shi’a clergy. This was the same potent mix that saw the Ayatollah Khomeni sweep into power in neighbouring Iran during the Islamic revolution of 1979. But in Iraq, it was not without opposition.

Many among the traditional Shi’a elite were hostile towards Sadr 1’s emphasis on rule by the clergy. They also disliked his Arab nationalism; the Iraqi Shi’a have traditionally had extensive contacts over the border in Iran. Above all, says Patrick Cockburn:

“There’s a very strong class element to Sadr’s support. Even today, if you go to a market in Iraq, the porter, the guy carrying the load, is the one who support the Sadrists. The man with the shop or the market stall thinks they’re demagogues stirring up a criminal underclass.”

This is the conflict being played out now in Southern Iraq. Ostensibly pitting government forces against gangs and militias, the fighting reflects the traditional fault lines within Iraqi Shia politics. It pits an army under the control of parties like Dawa and ISCI, supported by the local middle classes, the United States and Iran against a popular but unstable mass religious movement of the Iraqi poor. It’s a struggle that is at least partly about keeping the rabble in line.

That was also a preoccupation of Saddam Hussein, who had Muhammad Baqir al Sadr executed in 1979. If that was supposed to put an end to Shi’ite radicalism, it didn’t work. Following Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War in 1991, a mass uprising took place throughout the Sh’ite south, led by disaffected Shi’a army units and supported by the clergy.

“Then Saddam had the idea of appointing Muhammad Sadiq al Sadr (Sadr 1’s cousin, predictably known as Sadr 2) as head of the Shia religious hierarchy. The idea was to co-opt a religious leader from a family that had always had the loyalty and support of the Shi’a masses and allow him to set up a religious mass movement” says Patrick Cockburn.

“This was at a time when UN sanctions were destroying Iraqi society, and Sadr’s organization built up an alternative. Imagine being in the position of a Gulf war widow: you’ve lost the family breadwinner, you have children, the economy has been devastated by sanctions, there’s no means of earning a living, so you turn to Sadr’s office. And there you find money for rent, food, an education for your children. You have religious consolation, moral guidance, structure. It becomes your world, and it becomes your children’s world too.”

These are the children who grow up to sell their possessions to buy a gun and join the Jaish al Mehdi.

Saddam thought Sadr 2 was keeping the public quiet through social work. But he was in reality building a template for the society that Iraq would become once Saddam was deposed: he was organizing an inheritance. The dictator finally caught on in 1999 and had Sadr 2 gunned down in his car, along with two of his sons.

This left the movement in the hands of his third son, Muqtada, was kept under close house arrest until Saddam’s overthrow in 2003. Then he began to put the movement to work. In his book Occupational Hazards, Rory Stewart, who served as an official with the British administration in Iraq’s Maysan Province, described how the Sadrists established themselves.

At first, they set up a small office which distributed food and cooking oil to the poor. Then pictures of Muqtada began to appear everywhere. Soon, the Sadrists began taking a lively interest in education, law and order and the morals of the population. Eventually, Stewart and the rest of the administration found itself under siege by JAM insurgents. The British weren’t defeated in Maysan so much as elbowed out of the way by a movement intent on building a new society from the ground up in the ruins of the old.

As such, the Sadrists tend to regard the Iraqi state either as an obstruction to be overcome or as a source of jobs and money for their followers.

“Iraq has always been a sectarian state, and for the Shia it’s historically both a source of oppression and is now the major source of jobs” says Patrick Cockburn. “So it follows from that that the Sadrists don’t trust it and won’t put themselves under its authority, but they will control different ministries if they can, because these are sources of welfare for their constituents.

“Under Saddam, a man might be denied a job because he was a Shi’ite. But the Sadrists will give someone a job for exactly that reason. He won’t get paid much, but he won’t have to show up for work very often either. And he’ll thank Muqtada for that, not the Iraqi government.”

“And take the average Mehdi army militiaman. He doesn’t get any wages. Service is supposed to be a religious duty. But he does have a gun. So he comes to an arrangement with the man who runs the local petrol station to protect him while he sells his petrol on the black market in return for a share of the proceeds.”

An obvious answer to this problem would be to promote greater involvement by the Sadrists and their constituents in national Iraqi politics. Yet this is something that the Americans in particular seem to be hostile to.

“Muqtada represents exactly what the US doesn’t want to see taking power in Iraq” says Patrick Cockburn. “A shia cleric in a black turban sounding to their ears almost exactly like a younger version of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They have a reflexive hostility and that has always led them to underestimate him.

His actual track record shows him to be very cautious – people I know who have met him say he’s the most cautious man they’ve ever met. After all, he managed to survive Saddam. The real question about him is how much control he can keep over the movement he has launched.”

Muqtada al Sadr’s uncle was tortured and executed by Saddam’s regime. His father and two of his brothers were murdered, and Muqtada himself spent four years under house arrest unsure if the regime would one day decide that it was better off with him dead. He has always existed in an environment where the basic political choices are between power and death. He was never likely to form a local franchise of the Liberal Democrats. But the monstrous cruelty and bigotry of many of those who attach themselves to his cause also cannot be denied.

The Iraq war has sometimes been justified on humanitarian grounds, using ethnic cleansing in the Balkans during the 1990’s to argue that the international community has a “responsibility to protect” civilian populations against dictators. But in 2006, Baghdad under occupation was the site of ethnic cleansing and sectarian murder far in excess of anything that happened in former Yugoslavia. The Jaish al Mehdi were well to the forefront of a civil war that saw, at one stage, 3000 civilians a month murdered and millions more become refugees.

In Basra, the JAM have targeted so-called collaborators working with the British. In 2006, two 17 year old Iraqi girls who worked as laundresses at the local British army base were kidnapped and shot in the back of the head.

“The Sadrists always claim that the worst sectarian killings done in their name are the work of renegades or criminals and you have to be suspicious of that” says Patrick Cockburn. “Yet it’s also true that they have to turn the movement into something like Hezbollah in Lebanon, disciplined and well organized, with the death squad element at least reined in.”

If so, it’s still not likely to overcome the hostility with which the Sadrists are viewed by other Iraqi factions. And while they are too large to be destroyed, they are too small to take power without a firm alliance with other groups.

“No-one’s going to win in Iraq” says Patrick Cockburn. “the state is divided into factions which are divided, too weak to take power on their own, but very tough.

You have a situation now where every faction in Iraq is basically weak but can become strong if it gets the support of the US - we’re seeing this with the fighting in Basra and with the ex-insurgents now installed in parts of Sunni Iraq after turning on al Qaeda. But this doesn’t create security. It institutionalizes the insecurity, because it encourages each faction to use the power of the US against each other in the name of the Iraqi state.”

Unlike the US, he says, Britain never tried to choose sides in the areas it presided over. The last contingent of British troops now waits at Basra airport for a final decision on withdrawal. The process seems agonizingly slow. But for Iraq, the agony just goes on and on.

Comments

[Rob Lane]

I picked up Mr.Cockburns book today in Borders
and on the back was a little note proclaiming
Cockburn to be the best journalist in the middle east,Are you kidding me?? He is not nor will he
ever be in league with Michael Yon,Michael Totton
or Bill Riggo...The Americans should have killed
“Muqtada" when they had the chance and if they
get the chance again send him off to find his Virgins.So what if he is a martyr he would still be dead..Out of sight out of mind...