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BY JANINE DI GIOVANNI / NOVEMBER 27, 2014 7:57 AM EST
Nemesis Cover
SIPA PRESS/REX
Down a dusty backstreet in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Karada this month, I met Sheikh Raad Al Kafaji, a former Iraqi Army officer specialising in artillery, and a veteran fighter from the days of the Iran-Iraq war. He is head of the al Kafaji tribe and a commander in the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia, one of the Shia militias at the forefront of the fight against ISIS in Iraq.
After the fall of Mosul in July, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a religious edict (fatwa) calling on Iraqi “citizens to defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens, and its sacred places”. That is, to come defend their religion in a holy war against ISIS.
Sheikh Raad says that in the initial days after Sistani’s fatwa, men as old as 60 came to his small offices begging to fight to hold back ISIS and Sunni-led insurgents.
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According to Iraqi Deputy National Security Adviser, Dr Safa Hussein al-Sheikh, the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia, founded in the months leading up to the 2003 American invasion, is known for being smaller and more organised than the other Shia militias – and is considered highly secretive and adept, even by Iraqi intelligence standards.
“In the past, they had focused more on American targets – sophisticated, lethal, organised attacks that were not penetrated by the American or Iraqi intelligence,” Al Sheikh says.
When I visit, the 58-year-old Sheikh Raad sits wearily in his office wearing battle fatigues and several jewelled garnet and turquoise rings. With him is his young fourth wife, who surprisingly has her dark hair uncovered, and is heavily made up, dressed in tight trousers and high heels. She wants to film his conversation on her cell phone.
The Sheikh sees no irony in the fact that his current financial backer, Iran, was his former mortal enemy.
“Saddam imposed that war (the Iran-Iraq war) on the Shia people in Iraq and Iran,” he says. “It was Saddam’s fault. Not the fault of Iran.”
He says Kata’ib Hezbollah has about 4,000 fighters (Iraqi intelligence puts the figure closer to 1,000) that are “experienced from fighting in Amerli, Samara, but also have past experience fighting with Hezbollah in Syria”.
He himself goes back and forth to Syria, largely to protect Shia shrines near Damascus. Much of it is done around the town of Sayyidah Zaynab – “Lady Zaynab” – a southern Damascus suburb that has a Shia shrine of the same name.
11_28_IranIraq_01
Sadr City residents carry weapons as part of a local auxiliary militia to defend Baghdad, June 14, 2014. AYMAN OGHANNA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Some of his men, he says, were paid up to $700 (£446) a day by Iran to fight in Syria, but in Iraq they are getting far less, although he says Iran is arming his men with weapons – AK-47s, 12.7 mm heavy machine-gun and PKCs, a lighter, 7.62 mm, machine-gun used in many of the *former-Soviet Bloc and Middle Eastern countries.
“Here, we are fighting for justice – for our faith – not for money,” he insists. “And don’t forget there is a big difference between Hezbollah in Iran and Hezbollah in Iraq. Philosophically, we have the same enemy – Daish (ISIS) and Israel – but we are fighting here for justice.”
To understand the presence of Shia militias in Iraq today, and the increasing sway of Iran, you have to go back to the legacy of the mass graves.
Shortly after Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who had systematically repressed the majority Shiites for decades by cracking down on their political parties and crushing Shia movements, fell from power in April, 2003, human rights workers and US investigators began exhuming graves where thousands of Shiites and ethnic Kurds had suddenly disappeared.
It is unclear how many Shias died during the Saddam years, but the figures range from 400,000 – 700,000 people. One grave near Baghdad alone held nearly 15,000 bodies. In another, near the southern city of Samawah, more than 72 were discovered, mainly women and children.
It is believed that up to 60,000 Shias disappeared from Baghdad during those years of terror, and ended up in pits of earth. Years later, when Saddam was finally gone, relatives would stand at the open graves, desperately tried to find something that could link them to their lost.
“I just wish I could feel him, touch him, see him,” said the sobbing mother of one of “the disappeared,” Hilu Issa, who went missing in 1980 at the age of 25. (I spoke to her in May 2003 just after the US-led invasion.)
The image of her vanished son remained *frozen in time. “I need to know what happened to him.”
Saddam’s men typically came at night, and took people away without warning. Hilu’s mother never saw him again.
The day after Saddam fell, with the city of Bagdad in chaos, it was finally possible to put together pieces of the puzzle. In al-Haakimiya, a notorious Mukhabarat (secret police) prison used during his reign, I and an Iraqi colleague found *evidence of brutal torture: restraints; blindfolds; torture instruments with hardened blood still on them; cells the size of bathtubs where desperate men had scrawled messages to the families they would never see again.
In post-war Iraq, the political tables flipped. After the American invasion, it was the Shias in power, the Sunnis who were being hunted.
When Haider al Abadi, a moderate Shia was designated prime minister last August, it was with the promise that his government would be more inclusive, and break the cycle of revenge and vengeance between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis.
But it is still hard to find any Shia family that has not, in some way, been touched by Saddam’s brutality and that does not still bear, in some way, a grudge or at least a quest for justice.
Last January, Nouri al Maliki, the former prime minister, and a Shia dissident under Saddam who held strong nationalistic ideals, launched a bombing campaign in Anbar Province, which is largely Sunni, apparently with the intention of driving out jihadists, aka, ISIS.
But human rights groups were concerned that the bombs were not just landing on the insurgents – but on civilian targets and neighbourhoods, in particular hospitals and residential areas. They saw the Anbar campaign as another widening of the endless sectarian conflict. As the bombing went on, it also became apparent that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were simply not up to handling the job of pushing back ISIS. This opened the door to the Shia militias.
“What happened then is that some smaller Shia groups proposed they would join the fight,” says al-Sheikh, the deputy national security adviser, at his office in Baghdad.
“That was their first operation. There were initially probably only a couple of hundred Shia militiamen fighting then, until the fall of Mosul. Then it went in a different direction.”
Nemesis Cover
SIPA PRESS/REX
Down a dusty backstreet in the Baghdad neighbourhood of Karada this month, I met Sheikh Raad Al Kafaji, a former Iraqi Army officer specialising in artillery, and a veteran fighter from the days of the Iran-Iraq war. He is head of the al Kafaji tribe and a commander in the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia, one of the Shia militias at the forefront of the fight against ISIS in Iraq.
After the fall of Mosul in July, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani issued a religious edict (fatwa) calling on Iraqi “citizens to defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens, and its sacred places”. That is, to come defend their religion in a holy war against ISIS.
Sheikh Raad says that in the initial days after Sistani’s fatwa, men as old as 60 came to his small offices begging to fight to hold back ISIS and Sunni-led insurgents.
Subscribe to Newsweek Today: Christmas Offers
According to Iraqi Deputy National Security Adviser, Dr Safa Hussein al-Sheikh, the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia, founded in the months leading up to the 2003 American invasion, is known for being smaller and more organised than the other Shia militias – and is considered highly secretive and adept, even by Iraqi intelligence standards.
“In the past, they had focused more on American targets – sophisticated, lethal, organised attacks that were not penetrated by the American or Iraqi intelligence,” Al Sheikh says.
When I visit, the 58-year-old Sheikh Raad sits wearily in his office wearing battle fatigues and several jewelled garnet and turquoise rings. With him is his young fourth wife, who surprisingly has her dark hair uncovered, and is heavily made up, dressed in tight trousers and high heels. She wants to film his conversation on her cell phone.
The Sheikh sees no irony in the fact that his current financial backer, Iran, was his former mortal enemy.
“Saddam imposed that war (the Iran-Iraq war) on the Shia people in Iraq and Iran,” he says. “It was Saddam’s fault. Not the fault of Iran.”
He says Kata’ib Hezbollah has about 4,000 fighters (Iraqi intelligence puts the figure closer to 1,000) that are “experienced from fighting in Amerli, Samara, but also have past experience fighting with Hezbollah in Syria”.
He himself goes back and forth to Syria, largely to protect Shia shrines near Damascus. Much of it is done around the town of Sayyidah Zaynab – “Lady Zaynab” – a southern Damascus suburb that has a Shia shrine of the same name.
11_28_IranIraq_01
Sadr City residents carry weapons as part of a local auxiliary militia to defend Baghdad, June 14, 2014. AYMAN OGHANNA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Some of his men, he says, were paid up to $700 (£446) a day by Iran to fight in Syria, but in Iraq they are getting far less, although he says Iran is arming his men with weapons – AK-47s, 12.7 mm heavy machine-gun and PKCs, a lighter, 7.62 mm, machine-gun used in many of the *former-Soviet Bloc and Middle Eastern countries.
“Here, we are fighting for justice – for our faith – not for money,” he insists. “And don’t forget there is a big difference between Hezbollah in Iran and Hezbollah in Iraq. Philosophically, we have the same enemy – Daish (ISIS) and Israel – but we are fighting here for justice.”
To understand the presence of Shia militias in Iraq today, and the increasing sway of Iran, you have to go back to the legacy of the mass graves.
Shortly after Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who had systematically repressed the majority Shiites for decades by cracking down on their political parties and crushing Shia movements, fell from power in April, 2003, human rights workers and US investigators began exhuming graves where thousands of Shiites and ethnic Kurds had suddenly disappeared.
It is unclear how many Shias died during the Saddam years, but the figures range from 400,000 – 700,000 people. One grave near Baghdad alone held nearly 15,000 bodies. In another, near the southern city of Samawah, more than 72 were discovered, mainly women and children.
It is believed that up to 60,000 Shias disappeared from Baghdad during those years of terror, and ended up in pits of earth. Years later, when Saddam was finally gone, relatives would stand at the open graves, desperately tried to find something that could link them to their lost.
“I just wish I could feel him, touch him, see him,” said the sobbing mother of one of “the disappeared,” Hilu Issa, who went missing in 1980 at the age of 25. (I spoke to her in May 2003 just after the US-led invasion.)
The image of her vanished son remained *frozen in time. “I need to know what happened to him.”
Saddam’s men typically came at night, and took people away without warning. Hilu’s mother never saw him again.
The day after Saddam fell, with the city of Bagdad in chaos, it was finally possible to put together pieces of the puzzle. In al-Haakimiya, a notorious Mukhabarat (secret police) prison used during his reign, I and an Iraqi colleague found *evidence of brutal torture: restraints; blindfolds; torture instruments with hardened blood still on them; cells the size of bathtubs where desperate men had scrawled messages to the families they would never see again.
In post-war Iraq, the political tables flipped. After the American invasion, it was the Shias in power, the Sunnis who were being hunted.
When Haider al Abadi, a moderate Shia was designated prime minister last August, it was with the promise that his government would be more inclusive, and break the cycle of revenge and vengeance between Iraqi Shias and Sunnis.
But it is still hard to find any Shia family that has not, in some way, been touched by Saddam’s brutality and that does not still bear, in some way, a grudge or at least a quest for justice.
Last January, Nouri al Maliki, the former prime minister, and a Shia dissident under Saddam who held strong nationalistic ideals, launched a bombing campaign in Anbar Province, which is largely Sunni, apparently with the intention of driving out jihadists, aka, ISIS.
But human rights groups were concerned that the bombs were not just landing on the insurgents – but on civilian targets and neighbourhoods, in particular hospitals and residential areas. They saw the Anbar campaign as another widening of the endless sectarian conflict. As the bombing went on, it also became apparent that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) were simply not up to handling the job of pushing back ISIS. This opened the door to the Shia militias.
“What happened then is that some smaller Shia groups proposed they would join the fight,” says al-Sheikh, the deputy national security adviser, at his office in Baghdad.
“That was their first operation. There were initially probably only a couple of hundred Shia militiamen fighting then, until the fall of Mosul. Then it went in a different direction.”