As the day wore on, more and more injured young men wrapped in bandages were being carried across the sun-baked tiles of the courtyard in the Imam Ali shrine.
In one alcove in the turquoise-tiled wall was a small makeshift hospital with two metal beds and a stack of drugs and bandages. On the far side of the building, behind a large wooden door, was another room, now a crowded ward chilled by two air coolers. Blood-soaked clothes floated in a metal bath outside.
For seven days the militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, the rebel Iraqi Shiite cleric, had been fighting the Americans on the edge of the holy city of Najaf. Yesterday, on the eighth day, the Americans finally advanced toward the narrow streets of the old city. The push began before 7 a.m. with a wave of heavy bombing; then dozens of tanks and Humvees drove in, blocking roads and fighting off the ragtag militia.
The people of the old city had long ago fled, leaving their streets controlled by small, nervous groups from Sadr’s militia, the Jaish al-Mahdi.
This uprising, the second in five months, has delivered the most serious challenge yet to the new Iraqi government. Like the U.S. military, Baghdad wants the militia crushed. But if it blunders into the heart of the old city and attacks the Imam Ali shrine — Sadr’s headquarters and one of the holiest sites in the Shiite faith — it risks increasing the size of the rebellion exponentially.
Some among the cleric’s deputies were privately anxious yesterday. Others tried to shrug off the mounting pressure. By midmorning one of the cleric’s most senior lieutenants, Sheikh Ahmad al-Shaibani, was dozing in his air-conditioned room. Occasionally he took text messages on his mobile phone from his commanders in the streets. Outside, loudspeakers around the mosque issued exhortations to the fighters: “God make your feet steadfast. God make you victorious.”
Shaibani, wearing sunglasses, wandered into the courtyard. “They are not in a complete circle around us,” he said. “We have been expecting something like this any day. It is either a massive attack or a massive withdrawal, and we expect the latter. There is a lot of political pressure in Baghdad.”
The sweeping courtyard that encloses the golden dome of the shrine is surrounded by an exquisitely tiled wall. Along its length are a series of alcoves, each housing small offices. Most are now locked or abandoned, but one, near the northern gate, is air-conditioned, thickly carpeted and decorated with dozens of posters of Sadr and his revered father. Under the sofa are stuffed several assault rifles and a pair of umbrellas.
This is the office of the Sadr movement, which now controls the mosque — perhaps itself one of the goals behind the uprising, since the site brings in a vast annual income from the millions of pilgrims who visit. Clerics from the other parties in the Shiite faith, including the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which ran the mosque until April, have gone. Even yesterday’s prayers were tailored to extol Sadr.
There was no sign at the mosque of Sadr — whose house in another part of Najaf was raided by U.S. forces yesterday. He has not been seen since making a public statement at the shrine on Monday.
Despite their confidence, the clerics were negotiating yesterday. At one point they insisted the U.N. should be involved. At another, one of the senior clerics, Sheikh Ali Smaisin, bawled into his mobile phone: “Just please ask the American forces to pull back from the old city until the negotiations have finished. Then they can do what they want.”
Fighters walked past with boasts from the battlefield. “We had two tanks coming towards us this morning,” said Abu Zara. “We destroyed the first tank. We saw the second tank come to tow it, and the soldiers got out and ran away.”
Then a crowd gathered to show off trophies of the fight — chunks of metal from U.S. vehicles, what appeared to be a helicopter tail rotor and an armored panel from a tank, peppered with bullet holes.
Iraq’s most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani — in London for unspecified medical treatment — appealed for an end to the standoff. He was “following the suffering of his Iraqi people and sons and sharing their pains with deep sorrow and great worry,” a statement said.
Iyad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister, urged the militiamen to abandon their stand. “Our government calls upon all the armed groups to drop their weapons and return to society,” he said. “We also call upon the armed men to evacuate the shrine and not to violate its holiness.”
His appeal had little effect at the mosque. Among the injured men was Hassan Liwis, 26, a student from Nassirya, who had left his final exams to fight with Sadr’s militia in April. Yesterday he was badly burned when a helicopter fired a rocket at him as he stood holding a rocket-propelled grenade.
“We didn’t see it coming,” he said. “I am fighting to defend my leader, the Imam Ali and my religion. We will do anything to stop the Americans. They have sex and drinking and other things, and we don’t want this.”
Later, Shaibani and his men sat in their office talking over the U.S. strategy, insisting it would fail. Then silence fell as a man came in to report the injury of a friend, a young man named Haider, shot in the head by an American bullet and barely alive.
Outside, the body of a dead fighter lay unnoticed in an alcove beside the makeshift hospital. He lay wrapped in a blanket and covered by a sheet as the sun set behind him.
In a dirty alley on the outskirts of the old city of Najaf, Iraq, yesterday stood a crowd of militia fighters — the newest volunteer among them a bright young biology student called Ali.
He arrived seven days ago, bearing a Kalashnikov, a green silk bandanna and a willingness to fight for radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
On his chest was a green ammunition belt, filled with loaded magazines and rusted hand grenades. Written neatly on the belt was his name, address and telephone number. “In case I die, so they can reach my family,” he said.
Like all of the fighters in this group on the front line, Ali, 26, came across the country from Amara, one of several southern Iraqi towns where Sadr’s Shiite militia has fought in the past week, including yesterday when, British troops said, 10 fighters were killed.
Most who take up arms for the 30-year-old Sadr are young and poor. A minority, like Ali, are also well educated.
They revile Saddam Hussein, who persecuted them, but their eagerness to fight now is largely borne out of frustration that the war and occupation have brought little material change to their lives.
Added to this is their avowed religious conviction. “I came for the defense of Islam,” Ali said. He and the other 20 or so fighters in his platoon describe themselves as an “Islamic resistance.”
Ali and his colleagues spent most of yesterday taking cover in the shade. From a window in a building above them a sniper fired out a round every few minutes into the Valley of Peace cemetery, just 100 meters away.
On the far side of the vast cemetery are 2,000 U.S. Marines, who have threatened to seize control of the city. Last night their commander said his troops were making the “final preparations” for an attack, though an early onslaught was delayed at the last minute, according to the New York Times. One of Sadr’s associates warned that vital oil pipelines in southern Iraq would be blown up if the U.S. attacked Najaf.
Occasionally a U.S. attack helicopter passed nearby, and the fighters fired off rounds from their machine guns and Kalashnikovs inexpertly. There were several command wires leading out to bombs hidden in the cemetery, ready to ambush American forces when they advanced.
The entire scene was imbued with deep religious overtones and constant references to the Imam Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law and a key figure in the Shiite sect. “Ali is with you,” they said to each other in greetings.
“Do you think I aim when I shoot this thing?” one machine gunner said to another fighter. “All these things are done by Imam Ali. All I have to do is carry the thing and pull the trigger and he will help me with my aim and bring down the helicopter. It is not me that does these things.”
The other Shiite parties hold little appeal for the fighters. “They just use Islamic slogans to cover up what they are doing,” said Ali. “Syed Muqtada is a nationalist and he demands the rights of the Iraqi people and the rights of the poor. He is the only one who didn’t betray the people and cooperate with the Americans.”
The fighters here in Najaf have rallied behind Sadr, the scion of a highly respected clerical family, because unlike all other leading Shiite political leaders he has so far shunned involvement in the pro-American governments. Although his radicalism is rejected by many middle-class Shiites, he carries a broad appeal for those looking for a revolutionary streak in the Shiite faith in Iraq. It was his father’s cousin, Muhammad Baqr al-Sadr, who began the activist, or “spoken,” school in Najaf’s Shiite clerical community, advocating an Islamic state through revolution until he was killed in 1979.
Muqtada’s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr also acquired a reputation as a social activist until he was assassinated in 1999. Since last year’s invasion, his son has sought to claim that activist’s mantle too.
It is an appeal that, for months after last year’s invasion, the U.S. and British occupation authorities seriously underestimated. Now Sadr is leading his second uprising in just five months.
For the past week Najaf, site of the holiest shrine in the Shiite faith, has been the focus of fighting, but there have also been clashes in Baghdad and in southern towns that have challenged the new government.
In an acknowledgment of the sensitivity of the conflict, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, one of Iraq’s two vice presidents and leader of the biggest Shiite party, the Daawa, yesterday said U.S. troops should stop fighting in Najaf and leave the job to Iraqi security forces.
The militia will be waiting — galvanized by the words of Sadr, who has urged the fighters to continue even if he is killed or captured.
Every few hours yesterday a cleric in the gold-domed Imam Ali shrine, in the heart of the old city, issued exhortations, and just after 1 p.m. the fighters pulled out sheets of cardboard, took off their ammunition belts and headscarves and knelt to pray. Then they sat in the shade, eating grapes stored over ice in a cooler.
The two young men sitting cross-legged in a small room off the courtyard of the Imam Ali shrine looked like any of the fighters around them.
Their beards were short and neat, their feet bare and their dress the simple dishdasha, the Arab robe. They were deferential to their militia commander and spoke idealistically of defeating the military might of America in Iraq’s holy city of Najaf.
But both were from London, the first Britons known to have joined the Mahdi army, one of the most prominent fighting groups in the Islamic insurgency that has gripped Iraq in the year since the invasion.
Though the two men were born in Iraq — one in Najaf, the other in Baghdad — their families took them to England as children. They went to school and college in the capital, picked up strong London accents and British passports, and finally returned to the country of their birth for the first time on Monday.
Their sole aim: to fight a “jihad” with a ragtag Shiite militia loyal to the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Mahdi army and its allies have staged violent uprisings across southern Iraq and are now battling the U.S. and British armies and the Baghdad government.
Neither would give his name, but the elder, a confident 23-year-old, used the nom de guerre Abu Haqid (father of fury). He said he had studied English and worked in a supermarket. The younger, quieter man — his 21-year-old nephew — called himself Abu Turab (father of dust, the connotation of death). He had been studying to be a computer teacher.
The pair had traveled secretly into Iraq in the past few days, via a “not legit” route, according to Abu Haqid.
They had talked to others in London about coming out to fight. “Some said they would wait and see what happens to us,” he said. “We told them ‘our brothers are fighting down there, they are not eating well, they are not sleeping well, we have to be in the same place as them, the same position as them.’”
They had the support of their families, Abu Haqid added: “It is our religion and our families can’t stop this thing. We all have a belief, me and my family, when it comes to jihad. We asked our families and they said yes. It is good to protect your country and be there with your brothers.”
For the first two days the pair were to be trained to use the Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles that most carry, as well as BKC machine guns, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
“They are training us how to use the weapons and how to move quickly when we move,” said Abu Turab. “We are going to complete our training and soon we will start fighting.”
On their first night they were handed a BKC machine gun and sent out into the Valley of Peace, the vast, ancient graveyard to the north of the old city of Najaf that has become the frontline of the latest six-day uprising.
“They taught us how to use the gun — it’s simple at the end of the day. I didn’t see any Americans. They were very far away,” said Abu Haqid. “It was good fun, actually. It was dangerous but we have our belief.”
Sadr’s militiamen are mainly fighting from the alleyways of the old city, using old weapons and no body armor. They face a force of thousands of U.S. Marines, backed up by tanks, armored personnel carriers and attack helicopters.
Asked where they slept at night, Abu Haqid said: “We believe Najaf is a holy city, so wherever you are in it you will just chill out and sleep.”
“There is no salary,” said Abu Turab. “The food is simple, no barbecues or anything. Just a simple sandwich of bread and nothing else. But we believe that if you see your brothers and someone is killing them and it is not fair, then you have to stand with them and support them, in Palestine or any place.”
The pair said they wanted to come to Iraq to fight as soon as the U.S. invaded last year. “They were wrong to come to our country. They said they came for chemical weapons and they didn’t get permission from the U.N., so they attacked Iraq for no reason,” said Abu Turab.
“It’s pride, my friend. It is pride,” said the other. “If someone wants to step on your head, I don’t know if it would be accepted in Europe or England.”
They planned their trip for months and when Sadr emerged as a powerful leader after organizing a series of uprisings in April, they decided to volunteer to join his force. “Bush said ‘you are either with us or against us,’” Abu Haqid added. “We had to decide either to be with him or against him, and we are against him definitely.”
Both were at pains to point out their disapproval of Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network and insisted their presence in Sadr’s militia did not amount to terrorism, because they were fighting against uniformed soldiers.
“Bin Laden and his group are totally against our belief, killing innocent civilians,” said Abu Haqid. “Killing innocent people we cannot do. That is terrorism; this is defending your country.”
