A land ruled by chaos, Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, Saturday October 4, 2003

From: "Raja Mattar"
A land ruled by chaos, Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, Saturday
October 4, 2003

A land ruled by chaos

Award-winning writer Suzanne Goldenberg returns to Iraq, from where she reported
on Saddam's fall. But in place of the promised peace she finds a country where
lawlessness, violence and fear have filled the void

The Guardian, Saturday October 4, 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1055766,00.html

In the centre of the rollicking Iraqi border town of Safwan, where dusty small
boys dodge cars and lorries - and the odd slap from overheated adults - to offer
tins of Pepsi for sale and Kuwaiti mobile phones for hire, lives a man who has
inflicted his own private joke on Saddam Hussein's regime.

On a road lined with shabby tents and shacks, squatted by tea sellers, phone
merchants and car salesmen, Risan al-Mana occupied the raised brick platform
where Ba'ath party leaders used to take the salutes of the coerced and terrified
"volunteer" brigades. Then he turned it into a sales office for a dubious trade
in used cars from Kuwait. So much for Saddam, and his all-powerful Ba'ath party,
Mr al-Mana laughed. They were consigned to the scrapheap of history.

So was the old Safwan, or at least the version I visited a few weeks before the
war that would end Saddam's brutal career. The town, a sad and flyblown place,
had been sinking into lethargy for 12 years, ever since the border was closed
after the Kuwait war. It had one teahouse, where the most vigorous motion was
the clicking of domino tiles. The town's inhabitants, under closer than usual
surveillance because they lived in the border area, were the most terrified
people I had ever seen, frozen into silence by the sight of my government
minder.

By the time I returned to Safwan it was nearly six months since US forces had
roared across the border from Kuwait, and I was no longer required to travel
with a minder. From the border towns of Safwan and Umm Qasr, the US columns had
advanced north along the Euphrates river, rising from the flat, featureless
desert to the isolated stands of palm trees and the fertile plains before
curving eastwards to Baghdad. On April 9, they entered the capital's Firdowz
Square, where a crowd looped a noose around a statue of Saddam and broke it off
at the knees.

The moment, recorded by a legion of cameras, came to symbolise the end of the
regime. But what has risen in its place? Are the forces which now occupy and
control Iraq building the foundations of the modern state they promised, or
laying the foundations for another version of the old, repressive regime? My
route, as I retraced the road to Saddam's ruin, took me through the southern
heartland of the Shias, the despised and neglected majority of Iraq. It crossed
sectors controlled by British, American, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, Bulgarian and
Polish troops. It led past charred and contorted Iraqi army vehicles sinking
into the sands, government buildings and army installations reduced to powder.
But there was a more fundamental destruction.

Iraq under the US-led occupation is a fearful, lawless and broken place, where
murder rates have rocketed, 80% of workers are idle and hospital managers
despair at shortages of IV sets and basic antibiotics. Police are seen as thugs
and thieves, and the American and British forces as distant rulers, more
concerned with protecting their troops than providing security to ordinary
Iraqis. The governing council they created is simply irrelevant. A mile away
from one of the richest oilfields on earth, the queues at petrol stations
stretch for hours. "We completely underestimated how broken this system was,"
says Andrew Alderson, the financial officer of the British-led administration in
Basra.

Gratitude at having been freed from Saddam has given way to resentment and
mistrust in a part of Iraq that could never remotely be considered as Ba'ath
country. Compared with Baghdad, the south is an occupation success story. Apart
from Basra, where there have been sporadic attacks on British forces, the
foreign troops in the south operate in relative security.

Thankful

None of the towns has a night curfew and, aside from in Basra, there was
relatively little looting at the end of the war. In Nassiriya, the first town in
Iraq with 24-hour electricity, Italian soldiers patrol without helmets. There
has never been an attack on US forces there.

And for good reason. Almost every person I met along the way had had a member of
their immediate family jailed or executed by the regime, or had been jailed
themselves. Some were exiled, but returned in the wake of the US invasion with
their hopes for a new Iraq.

All were thankful to be rid of Saddam, but months after that cataclysmic event
they detect few dividends from the occupation. "You have done very little for
the people of Iraq," says Salaam Daoud Salaam, an English teacher in Basra.
"Yes, you removed that man from power - a very good thing. But what about the
rest? We haven't felt that meaning of liberty. It lasted just for a few days,
but then our suffering is coming back."

Benefits, when they did arrive - a partial restoration of electricity, and a
gradual reduction in crime - were seen as miserly and overdue, a betrayal of the
promises made by Britain and America to build a new Iraq, prosperous, modern,
and free.

Saddam's Republic of Fear, the mechanism of iron controls that held the state
together, was gone, but its replacement is a violent chaos. The void created by
the defeat of Saddam's highly centralised one-party regime has empowered
religious extremists, political gangs, tribal chieftains, criminals and
speculators, the venal and the corrupt. These are the men profiting in the new
Iraq. The knock at the door at night is no longer a member of Saddam's secret
police, but it could very well be an armed robber, an enforcer from a political
faction, or an enemy intent on revenge.

For men with strong nerves, like Mr Mana and his nephew, Yusuf al-Ghanem, there
is still money to be made. One of the features of the new Iraq is the porosity
of its borders, not only with Kuwait, but Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey,
and the explosion of smuggling: sheep and stolen oil to Kuwait, drugs from Iran,
and guns and extremists from several directions. Mr Mana has exploited the
postwar chaos to do a roaring trade in used cars from Kuwait.

Most of his models are from the 1980s. A Chevrolet Caprice - the car of choice
for Iraqis - sells for perhaps $800 (£500), and he moves up to 15 cars a week.
That's a substantial amount of money in today's Iraq, but it carries enormous
risks.

A number of the drivers bringing the lorries from Kuwait have been murdered and
robbed of their cargo. Nearly every day Mr Mana is asked to moved on by the
British forces, who control the southern zone of Iraq, threatened with death by
business rivals, or visited by the local Iraqi police. "They think we are doing
business in an illegal way but they should know that in Iraq, everything is
illegal," he says.

Such annoyances are part of the price of doing business in today's Iraq. It is,
he says, "a time of great danger, but also of opportunity".

Dangers

The dangers are readily apparent in Basra, Iraq's second city after Baghdad. It
also ranks second in terms of its problems: a capricious electricity supply,
kidnappings, carjackings and revenge killings, marauding tribesmen from the
countryside, a more generalised lawlessness and economic paralysis.

The day I arrived in Abul Haseeb, on the south-eastern edges of the city, the
mourning canopies had gone up, and the Sunni minority was preparing to bury five
members of the Augebi clan. The mood was less one of grief than revenge.

The gang that had descended on the small plot of palm trees belonging to the
Augebi clan some nights before had not bothered to hide their faces or their
names. Armed with AK-47s, and with a captured member of the clan in tow, they
burst into the hut of Shaab Ahmed Ismail al-Augebi, 52, dragging him out with
his two adult sons, and a boy, Ibrahim, 13.

It was five days before all five bodies turned up, horribly mutilated. Three had
been splashed with acid and dumped in a pit of diesel and water at a fertiliser
plant 15 miles away. The motives for the attack remain murky, but Assad, one of
Shaab's surviving sons, swiftly turns accuser. "The main reason they came here
is because we are Sunni. We pray at the mosque and we wear beards," he says, and
then names the gang leader, an enforcer from the Islamic Dawa party, one of the
most powerful Shia groupings of the new Iraq. "It's hell now, what we are living
through," he says.

In the party's offices in the heart of town, a property purloined from the
departed Ba'athists, the local Dawa chief is noncommittal. "A lot of gangs and
bad people are using the name of Dawa party," says Hassan al-Saadi. "But they
are not Dawa." However, he goes on to warn of the dangerous import from Saudi
Arabia of the radical Wahabi strand of the Sunni faith, and suggests the Augebis
are followers.

Whatever the force behind the murders - thugs from the Dawa party, the fallout
from a struggle between radical Shias and Sunnis, or personal enmities that have
yet to come to light - it is clear to all what the murders could produce:
revenge and more killing, the explosion of tensions barely contained since the
war.

The murders are deemed sufficiently provocative to appeal to the mediation
services of a higher authority. That is definitely not the British, whose forces
control the sector and are nominally the rulers here, but a local religious
leader, or more properly, his brother, Abdul Radha al-Moosawi. Beneath the huge
glittering chandelier of the Moosawi mosque, a collection of domes that is the
largest in Basra, Mr Moosawi, an urbane man who normally devotes his energies to
the family's date farm, is unusually ruffled. "This has a deep danger if you
look in all directions. It will have a very bad effect," he sighs. "I believe
the target is to destroy the social fabric of the people."

Longing for the stability of old is never far from the surface in Iraq, and
understandable in the present chaos. But it is not mere nostalgia. My next stop
is beneath a burlap tent where a tribal chieftain, Ali al-Ghazi, is holding
court, peeling off $100 bills for supplicants and overseeing the preparations
for lunch for 300. In these parts, near the town of Nassiriya, there is no more
powerful authority.

Clashes

The town straddling the Euphrates saw the first serious clashes of the war on
March 23, when US convoys were ambushed and 18 troops were killed. A few months
before the war, Mr Ghazi threw in his lot with the US invaders. His men,
equipped with Thuraya satellite phones from the Americans, fed information on
Iraqi troop positions to the CIA, and his brother, Taysir, took two bul lets in
the shoulder around the time the convoy was attacked. Now, it is payback time.

After suffering in a neglected backwater during Saddam's time, Nassiriya's new
rulers have yet to appoint a provincial governor, or to consolidate a new police
force. The local elected council has no money. That has given the Ghazis and
other tribal leaders a free run as arbiters of disputes, and dispensers of
justice according to the ancient tribal laws of revenge and retribution. In the
months since the war, the clans have sanctioned the revenge killings of about 50
Ba'athists in Nassiriya. There would have been far more but for the new-fangled
notion of settling old scores with cash.

The system of keeping order is imperfect. The day I met the Ghazi clan, a local
businessman turned a gun on the manager of the local television station,
demanding it put his advertisement on air. A few days before that, a local
enforcer from an Islamist party, meant to be providing security to the town
hospital, rampaged through the wards, beating up two male nurses and firing
shots in the air outside the cardiac care unit.

"You can sit in the hospital from 7pm to midnight most nights and watch the
emergency room turn into a bazaar," says Imad al-Din, the deputy manager. "Some
people come injured after fights. Some people come injured after trying to stop
someone stealing their car. Some people come as drunkards."

The atmosphere of lawlessness is even chipping away at the authority of the
tribes as a younger generation grows impatient with the rituals attached to
avenging old injury. At the Ghazi tent, an elderly chieftain notes with dismay:
"The young people are so hasty nowadays. They don't follow the rules."

Still, the Ghazis are not about to jump to attention when the police come
calling. "They don't deserve our respect," Taysir says, and describes two
episodes when police officers questioned the rightful ownership of vehicles
driven by members of the tribe. "I told them that if they don't give back the
car, we will take one of theirs," he says.

The Nassiriya police see little choice but to acquiesce. They say they are
afraid to patrol without enforcers from the tribes or the city's political
factions. "Every time we try to make an arrest they threaten to kill us," admits
one police captain. So the police back off.

Tribes

No one dares to challenge the threat to the emerging institutions of Iraq.
Instead, the power of the tribes is being reinforced and legitimised. On this
day, a handful of important visitors make their way to Mr Ghazi's tent: two
British representatives from the provisional administration, and Mowaffak
al-Rubaie, a physician who returned from London to become a member of the Iraqi
governing council. "The centre has no influence, not compared to the previous
regime, so we are trying to give them that sense that there is a government," Mr
Rubaie says. "What I came here for first is to show that the IGC cares."

What he came for second was to formalise a tribal role in the police force, or
at least extract a promise from the tribes to obey the law. Mr Ghazi is
unimpressed. "We, we will keep order and security in our region," he says, and
dismisses the IGC. "We have no need for them. They have need for us."

The resurgence of traditional forces has dismayed Iraqis, and disoriented those
exiles who returned believing they could rebuild lives interrupted. "I spent the
last 20 years outside Iraq, and now it's a different country. It has been a big
shock," says Adil al-Ageli, an official in the local administration of Najaf.
The Agelis were among thousands of Iraqis expelled by Saddam, who branded them
foreigners because their families trace their roots to Iran. Almost all of the
acquaintances and friends who arrived with Mr Ageli in the first optimistic days
after the war have returned to Syria and Iran, convinced they no longer have a
home.

For Mr Ageli's son, Ali, the dislocation is intense. The child is dismissive of
the family's original home in the holy city of Najaf. By the standard of today's
Iraq, Najaf is having a revival, with Shias eager to practise their faith after
the repressions of Saddam. In the town's market, TV sets blare images of men
beating their chests and chanting, and the pilgrims from Iran, India and inside
Iraq throng to the shrine of Imam Ali, despite the devastating car bomb attack
at its portals in August, which killed scores of people and a leading Shia
cleric.

But for Ali, there is only chaos. There are no sports teams, no public parks, no
friends. "I don't like the children here. I can't like them. I met adults, and I
liked them because they tell me what I can and cannot do, what is yes and what
is no, but the kids my age don't care about any of this," he says. "They are so
rough."

Mr Ageli looks on, sad-eyed. He shares his son's misgivings, but he has sold
their house in Syria and his savings have run out. In the meantime, he is
disturbed by the growing rivalry between Shia clerics over control of the holy
shrines of Najaf, and their coffers. A few mornings ago, the armed followers of
a relatively upstart cleric called Muqtada al-Sadr turned up at a shrine in the
adjoining town of Kufa. As pilgrims watched aghast, the thugs from Sadr's
so-called Mahdi army beat and chased away the men who have been hereditary
custodians for the site as long as anyone in Najaf can remember.

They then took control of the strongbox where donations from pilgrims are
gathered, shearing off the three locks from the finance ministry, the community
charitable trust and the keepers, which had served to regulate the funds for
years. The bonanza was estimated to be worth several million dinars a week,
enough for a steady supply of AK-47s. All of Najaf is talking about the affront.

Rabble

Locals, or at least the wealthy ones, see Sadr's followers as an ill-bred
rabble, because he draws much of his support from the poor slums of Baghdad. In
the wake of the takeover, there is talk of a full-on battle for supremacy
between the upstart cleric and more established religious leaders. "No one tried
to usurp us, not even Saddam himself," says Ali al-Kufi, one of the hereditary
keepers of the shrine.

But in the new Najaf, there was no one equipped to stop them - not the police,
and certainly not the clerics, who are engaged in their own power grabs. "The
destruction didn't happen only to Iraq as a state, but it touched their very
souls," Mr Ageli sighs. "We can rebuild the state of Iraq, but for our souls
there is no way." Ali seizes the moment: "Does this mean we can go back to Syria
or Iran?" he asks.

After the social fragmentation of Basra, Najaf and Nassiriya, I had been looking
forward to Hilla. Built near the ancient ruins of Babylon, the town lies on the
eastern bank of the Euphrates, within striking distance of Baghdad. The US
forces forded the Euphrates on March 31, moving swiftly to take the capital's
airport on April 3, and consolidating their hold six days later. While Baghdad
descended into violence and looting, the people of Hilla took their destiny into
their hands. They looked to the future as well as the past, establishing a local
administration and setting up a commission to excavate the mass graves outside
town, perhaps the largest collection of Saddam's murdered victims.

Ask anyone in Hilla, and they will say: "You can't find a city better than
this." Police patrol at every junction, the criminals are on the run. Power
remains intermittent, but adroit management of supply has allowed the factories
to get back to work. On the edges of town, the vast Babylon textile mills, with
2,800 employees, have rumbled back into production, although they are running at
half capacity.

In the centre of town, at the blue and white-striped headquarters of the Babylon
governate which houses the department of martyrs and missing persons, Captain
Amer Mahmoud al-Shemari toils into the night. It is hard to know what prepared
Mr Shemari for this job in his previous existence. He fled Iraq on a forged
passport in 1985 after completing his military service. He returned two days
before the start of the war, confident that Saddam would fall. During the
intervening years, he lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Oman, Iran and
Dubai. He worked at a factory making oil soap (in Jordan), as a car mechanic
(Syria), and as a secretary (Dubai).

During his first full month of work in Iraq, last May, he oversaw the first
exhumation of Hilla's mass graves, a time when they were digging up 100 to 150
corpses a day. Most were young men, seized at random and killed without trial or
mercy after Saddam's troops reasserted their control over Hilla following the
1991 uprising. But workers also dug up the corpses of old men, and of women
clutching their babies in the folds of their now crumbling abbayas.

That particular grisly task has stopped now. Mr Shameri says he can not continue
digging without proper equipment. There are about half a dozen additional
gravesites around Hilla. At the first site unearthed, at the back of a farm
north of Hilla, the unidentified dead have been reburied, with their bloodied
scraps of clothes placed atop small mounds of earth.

In the interim, he is trying to notify families of the dead. On this evening,
Saida Hathem al-Reda has arrived to pick up the black-bordered slip of paper
that will at last enable her to obtain a death certificate for her husband,
Mohammed Abid al-Tufaili. Like many of the thousands killed by the regime in
Hilla in the dying days of the intifada, Mr Tufaili was not in the least
political. He went out to buy groceries and never came back. His wife, an
illiterate and unworldy village woman with four small children, made the rounds
but there was no word until his body was recovered in June. "Every day I said
tomorrow he will come," she says. Now that she is certain of his death, she
says: "What kind of difference will it make? What good does it do if I get angry
or upset?"

Mr Shameri tells her that atrocities will never be repeated. He says Iraq's new
rulers - when they emerge - will be guided by the suffering of the past, and
chart their way to a better future. "I am quite sure that nothing like these
crimes will happen in the future because all the people in high positions have
been damaged under Saddam Hussein so that they can feel what happened to the
people," he says. "They will deal with others in a more compassionate way."

But it is difficult to see how the disorder fostered by the occupation is
preparing the way for such an state. At no point in my journey did Iraqis
mention the US-appointed governing council as a potential force for good.
Although southern Iraq is relatively quiet in the absence of any real authority,
it is hard even here to sustain hopes for a stable future. At the casualty ward
of Hilla's general hospital, gunshot and stab wounds have tripled since May.
Nowhere is safe in the end.

The neighbourhood of Nuab Dubat is a dreary row of hovels built to house the
soldiers from the adjacent Iraqi army base. One is the home of Ali al-Meyahi,
who was a member of the Republican Guard, meant to be Iraq's premier force. Like
the other 400,000 members of Iraq's army, he lost his job at the end of the war.
Now he faces the prospect of losing his home. The base has been taken over by
Polish soldiers, and the night before three mortars intended for those forces
landed practically on Mr Meyahi's doorstep.

Shrapnel perforated the blue front door of his house, injuring his son Ahmed,
10, and daughter Safa, 12, who were sitting on the wooden bench at the back of
the house. The children were only lightly wounded, but when a Polish soldier
looms in the doorway, offering medical treatment at the military ambulance
parked outside, Ahmed screams in terror.

Mr Meyahi shakes his head. In his 21 years in uniform, he says he was always a
reluctant soldier, more so after the regime killed his uncle and a cousin in the
purges of 1991. When he was ordered to defend Baghdad, he melted away during the
night of shock and awe on March 21, and went home to await the peace. Instead,
he lost his job, and watched his finances dwindle.

As the months passed, he sold the bedroom set and his wife's jewellery. The
family's only assets now are the television and the refrigerator, gifts from his
wife's parents. After half a lifetime serving the regime he dreaded, he does not
fancy his chances in the new Iraq. "When the war started, we thought our dream
would come true, that the coalition would come to liberate us. That is why we
left fighting. We were looking forward to having a better situation, but what we
have seen until now leaves us without hope," he says.

It's hard to shake off the despair that descends as I draw nearer to Baghdad,
and the end of the journey. I stop in the town of Mohawil, 30 miles from
Baghdad. Last April the troops paused here for just 37 minutes before pushing
onwards to victory. The new mayor of Mohawil, Wasil al-Shameli, returned with
them from exile in circumstances that he was not prepared to describe. But he
offers his explanation for the violence and disorder that has descended on his
country.

Jungle law

"It's true there was a horrible regime, but there were government departments,
and offices working. But after the war and the looting, all the government
institutions were destroyed, and it happened suddenly. It left Iraqis feeling
naked," he says. "This was also complicated by the fact that we had an entirely
military way of change. So of course we have a jungle now, and jungle law."

After an elegant dissection of the chaos of the present, Mr Shameli sketches an
even more depressing scenario for the future. At his mayor's desk, beneath the
empty picture frame that once held a portrait of Saddam, he says he has given up
hope of building the political and legal institutions that could transform Iraq
into a law-based society.

"It will not be a society of institutions because the Americans are allowing
tribalism and religious extremists to take part in this society, so of course it
will affect the future," he says. "If the forces of modernity retreat in the
face of tribalism, it will create another dictator, another Saddam."

He pauses. "I am so, so sad. I am so sorry. I am one of those citizens who hoped
to build another culture for Iraqi society. Now I have started to feel that we
are returning to the 1920s."

There seems little more to say, and we take our leave. Mr Shameli invites us to
return some day, but he isn't sure how long he will be mayor.

From Mohawil, it takes less than an hour to reach Baghdad. The car passes
through a few crumbling towns, and soon an entire expanse of wrecked Iraqi army
vehicles appears on the left side of the road, the detritus of the regime. It
gives way to the brash concrete pillars of an American army post, and then we
are speeding on one of the raised highways into Baghdad.

In Firdowz Square, since I was last there, a new statute has been erected in
place of the toppled Saddam. It is a female figure rising from a green mass of
algae to hold up a sun and a crescent moon. The sculptor has said it is meant to
be a symbol of hope and renewal for the new Iraq.