City of vengeance

Before I left Darragi's house, the commander talked about his frustration with the current arms ban in Baghdad. Only the Army, the police and U.S. forces are allowed to carry arms on the street. "If I could bring my weapons I could go to al Rusafa [Baghdad east of the Tigris] and capture the terrorists who are building the bombs and sending them to this side of the city. Now, I can do nothing." If the U.S. pressure was off Darragi and his men, it is a safe bet that there would be open conflict on the streets of Baghdad, this time not with the Americans, but between the Shia and the Sunni groups. As the recent bloodletting shows, the battle for the control of Iraq will be fought in these neighborhoods.

I decided to try another approach to get information about the secret court. After a few phone calls, I found a Shiite police source who was willing to meet near the hotel and talk about the situation with the Mahdi Army. Meeting in Sadr City was out of the question.

The police officer, Sgt. Jasim, was a well-groomed man in his 40s, clean-shaven except for a large mustache. He wanted to meet at a restaurant called Say Saban, a fancy garden place not far from the bomb-damaged Hamra hotel and the University of Baghdad. In more peaceful times, Say Saban is a restaurant that caters to families on a Friday night out. The place is like a miniature golf course surrounded by palm trees and tiny lakes, with a slightly unsettling and formal atmosphere. On the day we met, June 7, it was empty, except for Sgt. Jasim, his enormous, shiftless brother, and my driver and translator. Waiters hovered too closely around our table and the fixer who set up the meeting, Amar, continually looked around, afraid of being seen with a Westerner.

Sgt. Jasim worked in the police department in Sadr City. He said that he personally knew of many incidents where people were found killed at al-Seddeh. When I said that bodies had been found hanged, which suggested a judicial process, he said, "They aren't hanging them now, they are killing them by suffocating them with electrical tape." He illustrated the grim workings of the death squads with a grisly example.

"The Mahdi Army soldiers come in a convoy and put the victims in the trunk of the car. About a month ago, there was this guy they put in the trunk but they didn't search him first, and this civilian happened to have a pistol on him. The Mahdi Army drove him to a place where he heard people being executed, and from inside the trunk he pulled his pistol out and shot himself."

I asked what it was like to work as a police officer in Sadr City. He said, "Our job is to get rid of bodies and take them to the morgue. That is the only thing we do, day and night. On a quiet day we find five bodies."

Jasim did not support the Mahdi Army. In fact, he was disgusted with them and seemed to hate his role as a corpse bearer. More than once, he said he wished that the U.S. military would intervene and stop the killings. After describing a massive protection racket Muqtada al-Sadr's followers were running on the merchants in the Jamila market, he said, "Whenever an explosion goes off in Sadr City, the Mahdi Army brings three bodies to the place where it happened and they leave them there, saying, 'Here, we are dealing with the terrorists, these people are responsible for the bombings.' They don't really deal with those responsible for the bombings, they just do whatever they want."

The killings are a form of theatrical control, and this gruesome public display, in which brutal neighborhood thugs pose as Robin Hood's merry band, sums up the Mahdi Army perfectly. They simultaneously want to appear virtuous and to scare the daylights out of anyone who might oppose them. It is a preview of how they will govern if they seize power. With each new mosque bombing and assassination it is easier to imagine the advent of maximum darkness, a future where no Sunni Arab family is safe and the entire society falls under the control of militia groups.

Over the lime sodas, Jasim suddenly fell silent and decided to leave Say Saban. Something had spooked him and it also had the fixer Amar about to jump out of his skin. Under his breath, Sgt. Jasim said he had seen someone he knew sitting nearby and wanted to move the meeting to another spot. No one wanted to be heard speaking English, so we paid and left. We decided to move the meeting down Jadriyah Boulevard, to a ratty, abandoned cafe near the Hamra. When we assembled in the back of the place, away from the street, I asked the officer for specific information about the sharia court that the Sadr official Darragi had alluded to in our interview.

"Yes, I know where it is. The court is in a school in Sector 30. The Mahdi Army takes their prisoners to the court where they obtain forced confessions. Then they kill them because they can't let them walk out of there even if they are innocent." I asked if he knew of anyone who had survived and could describe his experience. He shook his head.

Jasim said that U.S. forces had placed Abu Dereh on a target list and had tried to capture him in several raids, but had failed.

What about the police -- could they intervene and stop the killing in Sadr City? Jasim vehemently insisted it was impossible. "No. They threaten us every minute. They [the militiamen] are not allowed to be arrested or brought up on charges." Jasim accused a senior official in the Interior Ministry, Hussein Neuma, with covering up and protecting the militia members from prosecution. "He's one of them," Jasim said.

A few days after my meeting with Jasim, Ahmed, the student, told me, "The killings are becoming something that's normal. When you hear about someone you know who has been killed, there's a part inside of you that shakes. Now when I hear that someone I know has been killed, I don't feel anything. It's like a part of me has died."

This is the first of three articles. Tomorrow: the daily nightmare at Baghdad's morgue, and an encounter with a grieving woman who is sheltered by the Mahdi Army

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