Kufa
Still Belongs To The Mehdi
By Donald Macintyre
22 August 2004
Independent
Recovering from the loss of three fingers
from his right hand, Abu Muqtada, as he called himself, was eager to
get back to the fighting.
Hit by US machine-gun
fire in Najaf's large, hallowed and now badly damaged Wadi al-Salam
cemetery a week ago, the 38-year-old Mehdi Army insurgent was relaxing,
his hand bandaged, in the shade outside Kufa's mosque, the second oldest
in Iraq. "My hand is finished but the other is still working,"
he said. "We are still fighting, and we will not stop."
Kufa is no doubt
a sensible place for one of Muqtada al-Sadr's militants to convalesce.
To visit this second holy city six miles to the north is to see what
Najaf might be like if there were no American Abrams tanks or Bradley
armoured vehicles surrounding and exchanging fire with the 1,000 or
so Mehdi gunmen in the streets around the Imam Ali Shrine. Najaf is
where the prophet's son-in-law was buried; Kufa is where he lived and
was stabbed in AD661 as he prayed in the mosque, martyred in the schism
that created Shia Islam.
And it is totally
in the control of the Mehdi Army, who patrol the streets with AK-47s,
rocket launchers and light machine-guns, many of them with ammunition
belts draped over their shoulders. One armed insurgent had even dragged
a chair into the middle of the road to monitor the Saturday morning
traffic.
There are fully
manned Mehdi checkpoints inside the city, at one of which, close to
the bridge over the Euphrates, another journalist and myself were briefly
detained yesterday. With an armed escort of one car in front and two
behind, we were taken for our press credentials to be pored over at
the Kufa mosque, the Mehdi Army's base. This is an entire town where
the writ of American forces, let alone that of the Iraqi police, does
not even begin to run.
But not for want
of trying. Yesterday, US forces, using air bombardment as well as armoured
vehicles, launched an attack on Mehdi strongholds in Kufa at what appears
to be the cost of at least some US casualties. But as detention turned
with welcoming smiles into interview opportunity, a local Mehdi commander,
Abu Mohamed al-Hilu, told how his forces had lain in wait for the attack
after seeing warplanes reconnoitring the area on Friday afternoon.
When the tanks and
Humvees, which he said had been carrying heavy machine-guns, approached
the Maitham Al-Tamar Mosque, "we let them come in until they were
in the range of our weapons. With the shelling and bombardment they
didn't expect resistance. But suddenly we started shooting." Mr
Hilu showed us the burnt-out and still-smouldering room in the empty
courthouse opposite the mosque, into which he said US troops had fired
a grenade before taking refuge there. In a smaller room beyond, he pointed
to blood and unrecognisable gore, which he claimed was part of a brain.
We were shown a captured torch, and what Mr Hilu said was one of several
bloodstained and discarded US army boots. "The foot was inside,"
said one of his men, in a medic's white coat. "We left it for the
dogs." With only one side of the story, the Mehdi Army's, it is
hard to check out exactly what happened.
A large jagged hole
in the wall of the Al-Tamar Mosque appeared to have been made by a tank
shell. The buildings opposite were pockmarked with high-calibre machine-gun
fire. And gaping holes in the roof and walls of the local college of
economics by the Euphrates bridge, which the Mehdis say also came under
aerial and ground bombardment early yesterday, showed all the signs
of blast damage.
Perhaps this US
advance, an attempt to broaden the front on which it is fighting to
recover the region from the Mehdi Army, had been repelled. But could
Mr Sadr win in Najaf against the world's greatest military power? One
of Mr Sadr's senior political lieutenants, Sheikh Azhar al-Renani, scarcely
hesitated before replying: "The Americans are fighting us with
all their money and weapons. We are fighting with the power of God."
And with the power of urban warfare.
While many of the
guerrillas come from far across Iraq, they have extensive local knowledge,
not least of the Najaf cemetery, which has been a key battleground over
the past fortnight. It stretches north from the holy sites of the city
- holy sites which remained firmly in the control of the Mehdi Army
yesterday.
Just as on Thursday,
the hundreds of pro-Sadr "human shields" in the courtyard
of the shrine, its archways stunningly bedecked with blue, pink and
yellow bird and flower patterns, were chanting slogans against the American-backed
Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, and telling their leader rapturously: "Your
voice is like a cannon." They were chorusing yesterday for television:
"We will win over Iyad Allawi and the traitors collaborating with
the Americans." Some held banners that said: "Where is the
bullet that will grant me martyrdom?"
It is hard, therefore,
to explain Friday's embarrassingly short-lived claim by the interim
Interior Ministry that police had seized Najaf's Imam Ali Shrine. Indeed,
the instant dismissal by the Pentagon of a claim rendered absurd by
the facts - "there's not a lick of truth in it" - is a powerful
illustration of who knows what is going on here militarily, and who
doesn't.
Much of the focus
of the past 36 hours has been on when, and if, Mr Sadr's forces will
carry out their promise to hand over the keys of the shrine to the mainstream
Shia clerics who answer to the most venerable in all Iraq, Grand Ayatollah
Ali al-Sistani. But even this may be to exaggerate the importance of
such a symbolic gesture. For what Kufa helps to illustrate is that even
if formal control of the shrine fell into neutral hands, such an advance
would hardly mean an end to the fighting. The guerrillas would still
control the approaches, just as they control Najaf's neighbour and sister
city.
This doesn't mean
that civilians caught in the fighting all absolve Mr Sadr's forces from
blame. To try to thread your way to the holy sites through the densely
populated, boarded-up streets of the old city is to experience for a
few uncomfortable minutes what they are suffering every day. Bullets
and shells make it unsafe to travel a single block.
Some see Mr Sadr
as a heroic leader of resistance. But some also blame his gunmen for
their suffering. Several said his Shia forces had been joined by former
Baathists with little interest in the Shia cause. Whatever the truth,
for the civilians of Najaf, a negotiated settlement cannot come soon
enough.