Freedom unbound, and out of control
By Paul Belden
atimes.com
BAGHDAD - The imam was on fire. "None of us want an occupation of an Islamic country!" he seethed over the (very loud) loudspeakers of the Abu Hanifah mosque in the capital during Salat al-Juma prayers last Friday afternoon.
"Not Shi'ites! Not Sunnis! The soldiers of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, will destroy any American or Israeli troops - just wait! We will not let any government trick us! No one can be the governor of Iraq if he is not a good Muslim and applies sharia [Islamic law]!"
When the celebrated Sunni Doctor Ahmad al-Qubaisee got to the obligatory part that goes "America is the enemy of God! Israel is the enemy of God! Down with Israel! Down with America!" - his voice rose to a shrill hectoring screech that harmonized sweetly with the occasional staccato pop-pop-pop sound of Kalashnikovs going off in the distance.
The imam was breathing fire, and the crowd was catching. It was the sort of stump speech that's designed to pack them in in this part of the world, and liberated Baghdad proved no exception. Thousands strong when the sermon began, the crowd had been expanding by the minute, overflowing the mosque and taking over every available speck of pavement on Omar Abduaziz Street in the northwestern Adhamiya district. By mid-afternoon, everything not able to walk, crawl or roll out of reach of the crowd - including a surrounded tanker truck complete with hapless driver trapped in the cab - found itself blocked in by prayer rugs and unable to move.
Adding fuel to the blaze, various camera crews had climbed onto the very walls of the mosque itself and were filming straight down into the courtyard while trying to avoid kicking in the lovely blue-tile squares bearing the 99 names of the Islamic God adorning the wall's crest. The smell of smoke hung acridly in the air from several buildings still burning downtown. Chunks of the mosque were missing where bullets and shells and hit during a battle the week before. Nobody in this crowd other than one or two of the better-off journalists had had a hot shower in weeks. Many were holding signs that read "Shi'ite blood and Sunni blood is the same!" and "Leave our country, we want peace!" and "Iraqis didn't let you here" in both English and Arabic. Emotions were running high.
And now - unaccountably, incredibly, unbelievably - into this Cecil B DeMille epic nightmare scene wandered a lightly armed foot patrol of about half a dozen US Marines gawking about like farmboys come to see New York. God knows what they were thinking.
The next day, I asked US Marine Staff Sergeant John Jamison, the public information officer in charge of the Adhamiya sector, that very question: "What the hell were you guys thinking?" And he had no idea what I was even talking about. His jaw dropped when I told him what had happened.
Because it wasn't pretty. Whatever that patrol had been expecting to find, it was clear it was something else. The crowd surged in to enclose them, and they immediately went into a sort of mobile defensive crouch, keeping in a tight circular formation with their gunbarrels out covering a 360-degree horizon, and backing slowly down the street, looking tense and scared.
People started shouting things at them, mostly in Arabic, until somebody who knew English asked them what they thought they were doing here. The soldier in charge gave the stock talking-points reply to this sort of question - they'd come to deliver food and medicine to the Iraqi people - and it was a miracle there wasn't a bloodbath.
Even then it was a near-run thing. Both sides were angry and scared and trying not to show it, but they didn't succeed. It showed in their eyes. Their voices, too: At one point, the soldier in charge strode toward one of his own men, smacked the man hard on the shoulder and screamed: "You pay attention to me, you son of a bitch!"
They crowd closed in, and the soldier in charge ordered a middle-aged man in a white dishdasha (gown) to back up. The guy shrugged and lifted his chin: Yeah? And what if I don't?
"I have this weapon," the soldier informed the throng.
"You're going to shoot me?" the middle-aged man said, raising his voice. "You're going to shoot me?" He wasn't moving an inch.
This was the moment of maximum danger. All it would have taken would have been one of those ever-present Kalashnikov bursts to have sounded somewhere in the near distance right then, and I seriously believe the death toll would have been in the dozens. And that number would probably have included every one of those soldiers.
"This thing is a big mistake," said one man in the crowd, "It is possible to be the beginning of a new battle in this place." Another man said, "We want all the Marines to leave this place now, and also all of the press cars, or we will destroy them."
Later that day, I drove around to see if I could tell how near the closest Marine backup had been. I found a stationary armored checkpoint two blocks away. Not close enough. The only backup that arrived on the scene was a single forlorn-looking Iraqi policeman sitting in a white patrol car, who came rolling in slowly, with no lights flashing. I think he was packing a sidearm, but I'm not sure. It wouldn't have mattered.
So everybody got lucky. Eventually, several cooler heads, all of them Iraqi - and, in particular, an old man who said his name was Fa'iz, who had the look of authority, with a white turban and a long flowing white beard and handlebar moustache - gently shooed away the gawking children, quietly urged the angry Iraqis to back up, and lightly persuaded the soldiers to consider their best interest and not linger.
So this is what freedom looks like to Iraqis - the freedom to preach about kicking out the infidel invaders and running their own country. From an American point of view, it certainly wasn't pretty. And especially galling must have been the fact that, exactly a week and a day earlier, this very mosque had been the site of a battle that had provided the good Doctor al-Qubaisee the freedom to preach politics from his pulpit.
One would have expected the thankful Iraqis to have erected a monument to their liberation at this site - not to have organized a million-man march against their liberators. But that's the way of freedom - once you unleash it, it can be hard to control, and dangerous to try.
It's not as if the people didn't know about that earlier battle. The evidence was everywhere at hand. Smashed, burned cars, including one that had been flattened by a tank. A series of concentric seismic cracks in the grassless earth of a riverside playground surrounding a hole in the ground where a (presumably still unexploded) missile had penetrated. Burned-out buildings in every direction. Palm trees that had been shot in half.
This, the rumor went, was where Saddam Hussein and his most loyal men had made their stand the day after American forces had helped pull down Saddam's statue in Paradise Park. There's a bridge to the north of the area, the al-Aaemmah Bridge, and it is this bridge over which the people of Adhamiya presume that Saddam escaped north, to his hometown of Tikrit.
Even as the statue had been coming down, Abu Dhabi TV reportedly was shooting live video images of a smiling Saddam dressed in his trademark olive-green military uniform and beret while stepping out of an official car and wading into an ecstatic crowd in front of this very mosque. Amazingly, the Iraqi leader had been accompanied by his smiling, sharply dressed favorite son Qusay. One striking image was the crowd, most of them armed, and jubilantly proclaiming their loyalty to Saddam, some of them embracing him and kissing him on both cheeks in their jubilation.
The next day, the American hammer came down. "The tanks came from three directions," said Khalid Adnan, who lives in the narrow alley behind the mosque. "There were soldiers on foot with them, and they all met in the traffic circle on al-Imam Alaatham Street [in front of the mosque]. Then they began spreading out into the side streets. There were Fedayeen hiding in the neighborhood, and the shooting was intense. The American tanks stayed in the area for six to eight hours, and then they left."
Another group of loiterers - an old man named Jabbar, and three younger men named Bashar, Mouthanna and Nazar - told a similar tale, of a battle that had matched a mixture of poorly armed Iraqi soldiers and Arab Fedayeen with tanks and A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft. It must have been deafening and terrifying, and those who live here still viewed the memory of the battle in apocalyptic terms. Fa'iz, the 53-year-old manager of the mosque's northern gate, said flatly, "This was the battle that is one of the marks of the end of the life. You understand?" Another resident, Amir Shakir, a veterinarian, said he was certain that the Americans had used "prohibited weapons" in the battle because "the earth, it was shaking".
Whatever the cause and intent, the battle had not captured Saddam, nor had it cleansed the residents of their fear and awe of the missing tyrant. Said Abdel Razzaq, a man in the crowd, "I am sad for this situation, and only Saddam can be the leader of Iraq. But we can only hope that this situation will be better day by day, and that the Americans will leave Iraq very soon."
Whether it was designed to or not, the battle also failed to cow the people into submission. Adhamiya may be shot to pieces, but it is one defiant place.
After the sermon, which the doctor concluded with a call to "walk over the streets saying, 'Allahu Akhbar, we trust in God'!," the people boiled out of the mosque and headed en masse down Omar Abduaziz Street chanting and carrying signs that read, "Same Iraq, Same people" and "We reject the occupation" and "All Muslims are brothers". They took over every vehicle at hand, and even pressed the surrounded tanker truck into service, forcing the driver to roll slowly along through the horde with men packed onto the top of the tank and clinging to every available handhold.
They were chanting, La Sin'iya, La Shi'iya, Wahda wahda Islamiya (No Sunni, No Shi'ite, Unity for all Islam.) And also, La ilaha ila Allah, America Aduallah (There is no God but Allah, and America is His enemy.) And also, La America, La Saddam, Wahda wahda Al-Islam. (No America, No Saddam, Only Islam.)
So two battles took place in the Abu Hanifah mosque. The first - a pure clash of weaponry - was a lopsided victory for American armed might; the second - a more ambiguous affair that matched guns against the more indistinct arsenal of argument, ideal and freedom - was as lopsided a defeat.
Both results should rightly be cheered, by both Americans and Iraqis alike, because in both cases, freedom won. But as was shown in Adhamiya on Friday, freedom can be a dangerous thing - and now that it has been unleashed in Iraq, nobody can know where it will take the country, or the region.
Earlier articles in this series:
All according to the notebook Apr 19
Suddenly, a war without a border Apr 18
A lady with real attitude Apr 18
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