The curse of Saddam city - cont and end 2/2
A hand written note hangs on the gates of the largest mosque, Al-Hikma, "mosque of the wisdom": "Be obedient to the representatives of Sadr and pay Zakat", the Islam tax. A snake of children is pushing through the entrance, everyone with a melon-sized refrigerator aggregate on his shoulders.
After the call was made for the return of the loot from the al-Hikmas minaret, the inner court turned into a stockroom. Piles of tires, disassembled furniture, originally packed doors. Bags after bags of Brazilian sugar, the day before yesterday still stored in some hall at the other end of the city, are dragged into the prayer room.
And with each bag, with each bundle, the power of the "mosque of the wisdom" is growing. And the power of its leader Mohammed Al-Fartussi, the new lord of the Saddam/Sadr city.
The 35-jaehrige sheikh is a good looking man with a beard and ironed khaftan. Next to him sits a young woman covered up to her forehead, with a microphone in her hands. She is with "US News". "What are you covering up for?", asks Al-Fartussi. "Do you run around like this also when you're home?"
Tiredly he scratches something on a piece of paper and hands it to his assistant next to him. Sheikh Fartussi is the emissary of the powerful Hawza Theology seminar in the holy city of Nadjaf. He is responsible for the Shiites on the eastern side of the Tigris river. He led the first Friday prayer at the the Hikma mosque, attended by 20,000 faithful. Would it come that far, the two or three million Shiites of Saddam city would obey him. He is a powerful man. Probably more powerful, than he knows.
"We do not need the USA", he begins. "The Iraqi people knows to deal with weapons. Saddam's wars taught us that." His advisor whispers somewhat into his ear. "We do not need the power. We just want our freedom."
Fartussi is a pupil of Mohammed Sadik al-Sadr, after whom the city of the poor has been named. Sadrs are a famous theologian family. In Iraq that meant that Baathists murdered Mohammed Sadik's uncle in 1980 and his body was dragged by a tractor through the streets of Nadjaf the roads. That in February 1999 they murdered Mohammed Sadik, together with two of his sons, after he dared during a Friday prayer to criticize Saddam. Today his third son is worshipped as the leader by his followers. The killed Imam was no Chomeini, no proponent of a political Islam. For some of the Shiites Sadr was even too soft. They accused him of being active only within the mosque walls.
His death led to a rebellion in all Shiite parts of the country and in Saddam city. It was struck down by the republican guard. On some mosque walls you can still notice bullet holes.
Naturally sheikh Fartussi is prepared for the question: "Sharia? We want to obey the Islamic right in the at the level of community. Not in the state." All further questions about a system of government end in limbo.
"We secure rights for the minorities. For Christians and Kurds. Even for Jews." It is not the first interview of the sheikh. "We even treated well the wahhabite terrorists, who we caught." Fartussi writes a note and rises: "Go and to see for yourself."
It's reported, that during the last days of the war a few dozen Fedajin from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon attacked the mosques and hospitals in Saddam city and fired on clergymen. Already in 19th. Century the adherents of Wahhab devastated the Shiite towns of Nadjaf and Kerbela. Now they supposedly terrorized the inhabitants of Saddam city to keep them from welcoming jubilantly the Americans.
Saddam city is the only part of Baghdad, where they did not ransack the hospitals.
As prison for these slipped-in and then arrested terrorists is the mosque "the Lord of the paradise youth". A meagerly ornamented building next to a roaring generator station of a newer design. From time to time you can hear shots from the roofs. The photograph of the white-bearded Imam Sadr hangs on the wall, in the corner squats a toothless, unshaved man with a fresh scar on his temple: the prisoner. The "wahhabi terrorist". He opens an new pack of "Sumer King Size" and begins to smoke.
His name is Samir Allahwi, 31 years of age, a truck driver from Lebanon. "We wanted to fight against the coalition." Why? "Because they did not want the freedom for the Iraq." What has he to do with the Iraqi freedom? "For each operation I would have gotten 600 dollars."
He entered via Syria and was accommodated, together with 450 other Fedajin in three mosques in Ramadi, west of Baghdad. "They had a Syrian Mullah with them, Mohammed Ilektron, whö's a member of Osama bin Laden group", reads his guard from a notebook, where the statements of the prisoners get recorded. They were supposed, says he, to get prepared for suicide attacks against Shiites. "We arrested 19 terrorists. Some are dead, the others we handed over to Americans."
The shower of rifle shots is strengthening. Now they shoot all roofs: "They are pleased", says the guard. "perhaps power is back again."
The caught terrorist goes back into the inner court. The gate to the road is open, but he does not go out.
A man, who guards the prisoners and introduces himslef as sheikh Abd al-Sahra, offers water and an office chair, stolen from some office. The men around us murmur quietly, but clearly: "Down, down with USA! Down, down with Israel!"
The fact that his visitors come from Germany does not make things any better. Quite the opposite: "Get out! Go! Germany supported Saddam, get lost! I know very well, what's the play. I saw the demonstrations on the television." The sheikh is hardly to be calmed down. From what the interpreter can still translate out of the commotion, one can deduce that he was tortured: "I saw it on the electro-shock machine: Made in Germany. I saw it, before they pushed it up my behind."
Like so many others the tortured sheikh the last few days went to see offices of the safety organs. They were often bombed out, and between the rubble lay mountains of records, documents, judgments. Papers with the state coat of arms, with passport photos attached to them, sometimes serious sometimes smiling young women and men. Sheikh Abd al-Sahra stood in the heaps of paper and pilfered through the drawers of the broken-open filing cabinets. He was collecting the dead.
In the execution books he found names, which he knew, and strangers, coming from his neighborhood. They carried the papers in flour bags to the Saddam city mosque. Now lists with names hang in the inner court, and everyone can look whether his father, his sister, her son is on them.
Sahra found his father. He shows a dossier and an ID document: "here: Death by hanging. Together with ten others. Odered on 28 April 1997. That's the Saddam's birthday. That's how he celebrated."
His father belonged to the Shiite party "the call", that after the first Gulf War was mercilessly persecuted by Saddam Hussein. "You in the west, you all kept your mouths shut", says Sahra, who has regained his composure in the meantime and invites the visitors to come in."We are lucky, you can believe me", he says. "We welcome George Bush and Tony Blair." And the speech choirs a while ago? "For you. The men believe that you journalists love to hear that."
Next day you can't speak to nobody anymore in the mosques of Saddam city. The gates are closed. The guards strengthened. The sheikh was arrested, they say. Americans locked up Fartussi, together with his assistants. On the way to the martyr celebration of the Imam Hussein in Kerbela, one just can't believe, the leader of Saddam city, put into chains by infidels!
A truck full of roaring young men drives past. They have all green and black flags, green for the Islam, black for the martyr Hussein. They shout: "To the Fardos place!" The central place in Baghdad, the place with the fallen statue of Saddam Hussein.
"I saw it on the electro-shock machine: Made in Germany. I saw it, before they pushed it up my behind."
For the second time after the end of war the people from Saddam city are moving into Baghdad, the poor getting drawn to where they assume power and wealth are. With the same rage. But this time it is not to plunder, but to protest. Even if nobody exactly knows, how that's done. It just needs to be loud and if possible in English: "We asking for realease our pressoners at once", stands on a sign. It's the message, not on the orthography, that counts.
A few thousand men pull down the Abu Nuwas street, in front the Mullahs in their turbans. You may find the whole no less uncanny than the inhabitants of the city center, the Sunnites, Baathists, Christians. There they are again, the angry from up-town. And the people in the house entrances are already checking if there's weapons being carried in the marching crowd.
The message of Fartussi's arrest will later prove to be a rumor. Is it an issue? The march of the Shiite poor is a generic example for the piece called "the new Iraq", a piece, That's still being written.
They pull on past two US tanks. "Ruff Ryder II" stands on one and "Camel Tow "on the other one. Then they are there, where in the new Baghdad you can assume to get attention and power: at the shopping arcade of the Palestine hotel. Here stand the cameras, TV sedans and tents of the TV stations.
"Down, down with USA!", they roar into the cameras. Most of them are switched off. "Down, down with Israel!", call they and punch in the air with fists. And: "Yes, Yes to state Islam!" If the GIs behind the barbed wire were somewhat older than the actual 20, 25 years, their ears would start ringing. . That's the same slogans, that were roared 1979 in front of the US embassy in Teheran. It was ten thousands of Iranian Shiites then, now its a few thousand Iraqi Shiites from Saddam city, who probably know just as little, what they are shouting.
"Set al-Fartussi free!", screams somebody into the megaphone. "Wailla..." That means "otherwise". What are they threatening with? "Wailla...", roar the demonstrators. And again it comes out of the megaphone: "Set al-Fartussi free, otherwise..." And then a third time: "Wailla. Otherwise... " Otherwise? Nobody knows, what comes next.
Spiegel 18/2003 -
spiegel.de
transl DJ |
