In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq

by Nir Rosen

Overview

Nir Rosen has been hailed by The New York Review of Books as the reporter who managed to get inside Fallujah "at a time when it was a death trap for Western reporters," and as one of the few Western reporters able to report the truth from Iraq. Still in his twenties, a freelancer who has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, Rosen speaks Iraqi-accented Arabic and has managed to report from some of the country's most dangerous locales. Even The Weekly Standard notes that "he probably has more sources in the insurgency than any other American reporter."

Rosen knows better than anyone how much the Americans are hated, and how deeply the Sunni Iraqis hate the Shias and vice versa. He has listened to the insurgents, and he knows that they will never rest until the Americans are gone. Too many Sunnis and Shias are willing to use violence for Iraq to ever have peace. The overthrow of Saddam has proved to be nothing less than a triumph for the martyrs who use violence at every turn.

Ever since the fall of Saddam's regime Rosen has been in and out of Iraq, from north to south, listening to Friday sermons in mosques, breaking bread with dangerous men, interviewing political henchmen, joining Shia pilgrims, and listening to ordinary Iraqis who face American soldiers on raids in the Sunni triangle. He has had to plead for his life at times, and he has received more than one death threat. He has been pres-ent when bombs were detonated, and he has sat in meetings of insurgent leaders as they made policy decisions about territory they controlled. He has heard the double messages of Iraqi leaders -- the careful English messages for Western ears and the unvarnished hostility in Arabic -- and he has interviewed politicians and imams and seen how the insurgents and gang leaders create militias, private courts, prisons, security services, and more.

In the Belly of the Green Bird is a searing report, unlike any other book about the American experience in Iraq. Almost everything covered in the Western media has been at least one or two steps removed from the minds and acts of the people who will determine the future of Iraq. Some of them are peaceful, some are violent. Some of them hate one another with the intensity of ancient enemies. The depth of discord between Sunnis and Shias is difficult to fathom without listening to them. Their anti-Americanism is much more recent, but not much less intense. The divisions within this cobbled-together country, much like those within Yugoslavia after Tito, are simply too intense to contain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743288835
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	05/08/2006
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	767 KB

About the Author

Nir Rosen is a fellow of the New America Foundation. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, among other publications.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

On April 9, 2003, as the world watched, Iraqis dragged a bronze statue of the body of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein through the streets of Baghdad. Sahel, a word unique to the Arabic of Iraq, means, literally, to pull a body through the street. Iraqis have coined the term because they have done it so many times before, to other deposed leaders, usually in the flesh. Once again change had come with violence. This time, the violence did not end with the change.

It was that April that my experience of the new Iraq began.

The overthrow of Saddam unleashed a wild mix of reactions: a spontaneous burst of repressed fury from one segment of Iraqi society, which caused more damage to property than did the American bombs; solidarity and a volunteer spirit eager to restore security and normalcy from another segment. Common civilians stood all day, directing traffic in a country with no traffic lights or rules, and the absolute liberty to drive anywhere, in any direction, at any speed. These volunteers protected neighborhoods and established order. Shia groups self-organized and managed hospitals, city governments, and police. But many criminals, gangs, and mafias took over, and the fear of Saddam's totalitarian state was replaced with complete indifference to the idea of a state.

This is the story of the occupation, reconstruction, and descent into civil war of the new Iraq. It makes no attempt to cover the invasion or debate the decision to invade. (Those topics have been well covered, if not resolved, elsewhere.) Instead, this is an attempt to capture the story of the new Iraq from the point of view of the Iraqis themselves.

From the start of the liberation, Iraqis have been divided not only in their views of America, but also among themselves. Many Iraqis might have preferred an occupation, imperialist or not, to the anarchy that prevailed. When I would ask Iraqis what they wanted, they would always say "amn," safety, security. Some called for an immediate evacuation of U.S. and British troops, others asked to be the fifty-first state, and some asked for both in the same breath. Most longed only for a place in the shade and a better future than their past, though they were proud of their history.

New political parties and organizations appeared every day, announcing their birth and their intentions on walls. Their banners covered the abandoned buildings they had confiscated. The Iraqi Communist party headquarters bore the hammer and sickle associated with dogmatic atheism, right next to a huge banner proclaiming their participation in an important Shia holiday. Seventy newspapers appeared in Baghdad after the war, their viewpoints as divergent as possible. Azzaman, the most popular, professional, and mainstream paper, was owned by a former senior intelligence official who worked directly for Saddam's son Qusay. In May, Azzaman used a Reuters picture of an old Iraqi man being held by two American soldiers on each side. Its caption read "American soldiers help Iraqi man cross street." Tariq al-Sha'ab, the Communist party paper, had the same picture over the caption "American soldiers beat Iraqi man."

Everywhere I looked, I saw division, conflict, struggle. (Only one group of Iraqis remained virtually invisible amid the throngs. Iraq's greatest majority, its women, outnumbering men by as much as 1.5 million, were imprisoned in silence. In my many months in Iraq, I met hundreds of men, but very few women. I became afraid to look at them or walk too close to them and thus arouse the ire of their male guardians. Among the Shias in particular, Arab tribal mores had combined with religious conservatism. The Shia women reminded me more of the prisoners behind the Taliban's burkas in Afghanistan than their comparatively liberated Iranian coreligionists, who granted women far more participation and liberty.)

Civil war requires that fratricidal violence be organized. At first, after Saddam fell, the violence was mainly chaotic. But there was an endless supply of it, and it was soon organized, as the chapters that follow attempt to show.

According to almost every Iraqi, the Americans "came as liberators and now they are occupiers." For Americans occupation conjures images of postwar Germany or Japan, and the repair of damaged societies. In Arabic, tahrir, or liberation, and ihtilal, or occupation, have much greater moral and emotional significance. Ihtilal means the Crusaders who slaughtered Muslims, Jews, and Orthodox Christians, it means the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the thirteenth century, it means the British imperialists who divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire with the French, and it means the Israelis in southern Lebanon and Palestine. It is hard for Americans to understand just how deeply they are hated by ordinary Iraqis. "We warned them," one member of the Free Iraqi Forces says of the Americans, "but they didn't listen. They are turning a thousand friends into enemies every day."

Was it an occupation or liberation? On June 2 the Coalition Provisional Authority hosted an Iraqi Senator Council for nearly three hundred tribal leaders of all religions and ethnic groups. Ambassador Hume Horan, a political advisor to Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, addressed the audience in fluent Arabic. After Horan finished speaking, a Shia tribal leader from Amarra thanked President Bush for removing the Baath regime of Saddam and stated that he had seen the mass graves of Shias in the south and was firmly opposed to Saddam. He asked Horan if the coalition forces in Iraq were liberators or occupiers. Horan responded that they were "somewhere in between occupier and liberator." This was not well received. The tribal leader said that if America was a liberator, then the coalition forces were welcome indefinitely as guests, but that if they were occupiers, then he and his descendants would "die resisting" them. This met with energetic applause from the audience. Several other sheikhs echoed the same sentiment. The meeting deteriorated, and one-third of the audience stood up and walked out, despite the efforts of Horan and other organizers to encourage them to stay.

I first crossed into Iraq in April 2003, a few days after Baghdad fell. I split the $2,000 taxi ride with three other journalists and we drove the twelve hours into Baghdad. The city's walls were covered with leaflets and banners announcing the deaths of "martyrs." At first the names of those martyred by the liberating American military festooned the walls, but soon there were new martyrs, victims of the nihilistic anarchy spreading in the country, the faudha (chaos) as Iraqis called it. These new names up on the walls were those martyred first by violent men let loose in the power vacuum, and then by the Iraqi insurgency's terror -- men seeking martyrdom. Without the Baath Party or any other political force, without police or an army, all that remained was the mosque. Old authorities were destroyed and angry young clerics replaced them, arrogating to themselves the power to represent, to mobilize, and to govern. Sunni clerics exhorted their followers to seek martyrdom. Shia clerics wearing turbans and often wielding Kalashnikovs, hailed the memory of two particular martyrs; their bearded visages soon dominated much of the country's walls.

Known as the First and Second Martyrs, these were, in order, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, martyred in 1980 after Saddam's men tortured and killed his sister and hammered nails into his skull, and then his kinsman Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, slain with all but one of his sons in 1999 when their car was riddled with bullets by Baathist assassins. Supporters of the First and Second Sadr Martyrs now swept throughout Iraq's Shia areas, imposing a new order. The downtrodden Shia masses were now ascendant for the first time since the seventh century.

The story of the new Iraq is the triumph of its martyrs. When I arrived, Saddam's statue had just fallen, marking the beginning of what Iraqis would call "the fall." For some it was the fall of the regime, for some it was the fall of Iraq. But all those in Iraq would forever view time as "before" and "after." I would, too, for Iraq changed my life. I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday a month after I arrived. My dark complexion and grasp of Iraqi Arabic allowed me greater access to the country and its people than some of my colleagues. I tried to live with Iraqis as much as possible, in small unfortified hotels that did not imprison me and remove me from the rest of the country. I traveled by taxi and ate in local restaurants. I befriended Iraqis who became my interlocutors and taught me how to survive, how to act, what to look for. I witnessed with excitement and wonder Iraqis struggling to grasp the new reality and to redefine themselves. With concern and sorrow I was with them when the postwar world of possibilities became chaotic and violent.

I did not belong to an organization and had no backing or supervision, so I wandered wherever I wanted. I focused on the Sunni and Shia Arab parts. (Kurdistan was a different country, not occupied by foreign troops, independent of Baghdad in its political development, and apart from the occasional terror attack in Erbil or Suleimaniya, free from the flames engulfing Iraq.) I consciously chose to avoid reporting about events in the Green Zone and focused instead on developments in the "red zone" that was the rest of Iraq. These events seemed more real to me than the world of make-believe acted out on a political stage removed from Iraqis and surrounded by American soldiers.

As Iraqis were searching for new authority, I was too. Like them, I found it in the mosque and the tribal meeting hall, the new centers of power in Iraq. Perhaps I neglected those who were silent, but they would not be the ones to determine the shape of the new Iraq. Perhaps I neglected those who shied away from violence, but they would not seize power in the new Iraq. My book begins with Iraq's oppressed majority, the Shias, awakening and expressing their identity with an unprecedented vigor, vowing never to be shackled again. They, and perhaps the Kurds who are on their way to independence, were the only victors in America's war. I continue with the Sunnis, the losers, struggling to adjust to a painful new reality. I visit the occupation, seeking to understand how American actions were alienating the Iraqi population they had come to liberate. Their presence and the realignment of power unleashed sectarian forces of internecine hatred that the people of Iraq had never experienced. Into the vacuum stepped foreign radicals in need of a home base where they could operate without obstruction and arrive in paradise via martyrdom.

As Iraq's violence made a journalist's work more and more dangerous and finally prohibitive for most, I continued to venture out, relying on my Middle Eastern features and Arabic, as well as a young freelancer's recklessness borne of desperation. But as friends were killed and others fled, and the violence came closer and closer to me, I too found it increasingly difficult to work with integrity in Iraq, where foreigners were a target and a commodity, and the ranks of the martyrs in Iraq only increased.

Copyright ©2006 by Nir Rosen

Table of Contents

Contents

Cast of Characters

Introduction

1 The Triumph of the Martyrs: April 2003

2 The New Mongols: Summer-Fall 2003

3 If They're Not Guilty Now, They Will Be Next Time: Fall 2003

4 Iraq v. Iraq: Spring 2004

5 The Heart of the Insurgency: Falluja, Summer 2004

6 The Rise of Zarqawi: Fall 2004

7 Elections: January 2005

Afterword

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Index

Editorial Reviews

Rosen minutely charts the course of Iraq's rapidly metastasizing sectarian conflict, which he observed up close from the immediate aftermath of Baghdad's fall in 2003 to the elections of January 2005. A fluent speaker of Iraqi Arabic and a freelance journalist, Rosen gained an impressive measure of access to both the Sunni and Shia resistance, dissidents and ordinary Iraqis, attending sermons at mosques and visiting tribal meeting halls across Iraq-from Baghdad to Tikrit, Najaf and Falluja to Kirkuk. The title is a reference to the Islamic idea that martyrs' souls are flown to heaven in the belly of a green bird, the book serves as a window onto the rhetoric, ambitions, strategies and historical context of the numerous violent groups struggling for power. From interviews with major Shia, Sunni and Kurdish players, Rosen reports that most people primarily want the U.S. out, while newly arrived foreign jihadis, radicalized by the American occupation, are at war with Christians, Jews and Shia Muslims. Despite the book's choppy chronological organization and Rosen's workmanlike prose, the end result represents brave reportage and significantly increases our understanding of what Rosen describes as an already raging civil war. (May 8) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Unlike Arnove, journalist Rosen spent many months in Iraq during the current war. His fluency in Iraqi Arabic enabled him to travel and converse where many Western journalists could not. His stories of culturally insensitive acts by Western troops reinforce his conclusion, like Arnove's, that the United States is losing this war and cannot reverse the negative opinions in the street. An accessible selection. Marcia L. Sprules, deputy director of library and research services, Council on Foreign Relations, NY, is a longtime LJ reviewer Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

To go by current polls, most Americans think American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq. To judge by freelance journalist Rosen's account, most Iraqis agree. "It is hard for Americans to understand just how deeply they are hated by ordinary Iraqis," writes Rosen, who has been covering Iraq since the first days of the invasion. That invasion-which a hopeful Bush administration deemed a "liberation"-swiftly became an occupation, which, Rosen writes, translates into Arabic as ihtilal, the term applied to such historical events as the Crusaders' invasions of the Holy Land, the Mongol sack of Baghdad in the 13th century and the British dominion over Mesopotamia early in the 20th century. In that light, the honorable thing to do is resist, and the call to do so made some unlikely alliances among sworn enemies, the Sunni and Shia sects that have since plunged Iraq into civil war. Long oppressed in Iraq, the Shias were the ones who, war planners assured us, were supposed to greet the Americans with bouquets; instead, as early as April 2003, Rosen writes, Shia crowds were out in the streets calling for death to America (and Israel, of course), while learned Shia clerics informed their followers that the Americans were only in Iraq for the oil, guided there by "global Masons." Free to engage in politics since the fall of Saddam, the Shias swiftly formed an organized resistance against the "new Mongols," namely the American army, which does not acquit itself well whenever it turns up in Rosen's pages; the GIs, it seems, know better than to go bursting into mosques, say, but their officers tell them that that's the reason they have guns. Of course, the former members of Iraq's Hussein-era armedforces have guns, too, and so do the al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq, and so does everyone else arrayed against the invaders. Sobering reading, and yet more evidence against the neocon adventure in the Middle East.

Kirkus Reviews