The Day the Former Saddam-City Did an About-Face By Christophe Ayad La Liberation
Saturday 11 October 2003
Thursday�s attack destroyed Baghdad Shi�ites� pro-American feeling.
�Thursday night the Americans came back in force. They fired without warning even though no one had attacked them,�, according to a witness to the altercation.
It wasn�t only two men Medinet al-Sadr buried Friday, but also the brief �enchanted parentheses� between the immense Shi�ite neighborhood and the American army. In the same place where American tanks filed through to shouts of �Long live��s several hours before the fall of Baghdad six months ago, a crowd of several tens of thousands of men marched Friday to cries of �Down with America; Long live Islam!� after an inflammatory sermon during which a cleric called on American troops to leave Iraq. It was the largest Shi�ite demonstration in Baghdad since the arrival of American troops.
One day of blunders and provocations was enough to swing the former Saddam City into anger. Thursday morning a kamikaze hurled his Oldsmobile stuffed with explosives into Medinet al-Sadr�s police headquarters, killing eight people. In the hour that followed, American troops showed up on the spot. �Instead of concerning themselves with our safety, they found nothing better to do than to surround the second martyr�s office�, mutinies Sheik Dhia. The �second martyr�s office� is the representative office of Moqtada al-Sadr, Iraq�s most nationalistic and anti-American Shi�ite leader. It�s the true seat of power in Medinet al-Sadr: a crowd of clerics in white and black turbans and armed men from Moqtada al-Sadr�s paramilitary militia, the �Mahdi army�, gathers there permanently. �The neighborhood youth chased the Americans away with stones�, continues Sheikh Dhia. �They would have done better to hunt down the criminals who had just committed the attacks on us, instead of searching and arresting our religious men.�
Jassem, who runs a little hair salon on the sidewalk across the street, picks up the story: �Thursday night, around 8PM, the Americans came back in force. They opened fire without warning, even though no one had attacked them.� The fusillade lasted a good hour. Jassem lowered his steel curtain. When he brought it up, he found it filled with holes like a strainer. On the floor above, where eight families live in ten rooms, a projectile destroyed the balcony and cut through the apartment, miraculously without any victims. When the Americans left, two corpses were picked up: Ali Qazem and Ha�dar Yousr, two militiamen from the Mahdi army, buried Friday with great pomp following the weekly grand prayer.
According to an American spokesperson, the patrol had been lured into an ambush a little before: once they were without cover, the GIs endured fire that left two dead and four wounded. In Medinet al-Sadr, no one saw or heard any of this. On the other hand, everyone talks about the three armored vehicles that came back in the middle of the night to lay siege to �the second martyr�s office�, all the while not entering it, however. �Until dawn two helicopters flew over the neighborhood�, Jassem recounts. �They have supposedly come to liberate us and they treat us like enemies��
At the little hairdressing salon, the litany of grievances is interminable. �O.K. now we can criticize Saddam and pray in public, but for the rest, what have we gained?� one client gets all worked up. �Our streets are still as rotten. We�re dying of hunger.� In Medinet al-Sadr, sewers continue to run open to the sky, carrying along black water that children splash around in. �Nobody asks for thirty-five years of injustice to be repaired in a week, but they could make a little gesture,� Jassem continues. �Electricity functions eight hours a day. I can�t work under these conditions. At night I have to close up at ten o�clock on account of robbers. Before the war, I closed the boutique after midnight.�
�As before�. With the exception of Jassem, all six men present in the hairdressing salon are unemployed. Hakim tried to get a job as a garbage collector at the municipality the Americans put in place: at 3 dollars a day, a fortune for Medinet al-Sadr, the bonanza didn�t last. �There were 300 places, the council members gave 100 of them to their friends and relations and pocketed the rest of the budget. Everything has become just as it was before. Saddam�s stool pigeons have become the Americans� translators. If you want to lodge a complaint at the police station, you have to baksheesh the cops. Before it was 250 dinars, now it�s 1,000 (a half-dollar).� In these circumstances, �the second martyr�s office�, which gives out aid to the poor, has no trouble monopolizing public approval.
�It�s the same with security. The Americans should have just let the Mahdi army do the job. They�re our own, they�re Muslims�, continues Hakim. Friday night, the GIs abandoned Medinet al-Sadr streets to the Shi�ite militiamen, recognizable by the green bandana around their foreheads. At every corner, a troop of adolescents armed with clubs and of men with Kalashnikovs searched the cars. Perhaps a new front has opened for Americans already harassed daily in the Sunni triangle!
------- Mitayo Potosi
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