I didn’t know what to expect in Najaf. There was an immense energy in the city, and the closer we got to the shrine of Imam Ali, the more people I saw who were crying for this man, one of my forefathers. It seemed that they felt deeply pained by Ali’s death. Seeing the mourners’ devotion, I realized how much they were willing to do for anyone who was preaching about or asking for something in the name of Imam Ali or his son Imam Hussein.
I spoke to some younger men outside the shrine, asking what Imam Ali and Imam Hussein meant to them. “I would die for them and kill whoever insults them,” one told me. “I would give my blood.”
It would be easy, I thought, for Muslim leaders to use this emotional attachment for their own political benefit. They could justify any action in the name of Ali or Hussein. I also understood in a new way that the descendants of the Prophet’s family had a grave responsibility to stop this from happening.
*
IN MY CONTINUING attempts to understand the roots of the Sunni-Shia conflict, one of the people I most wanted to speak to was Aquila al-Hashimi, a prominent Shia politician and one of only three women on the Iraqi Governing Council. Under Saddam, she had been involved in the United Nations’ oil-for-food program on behalf of the Iraqi government. She had a doctorate in French literature from the Sorbonne and had sometimes served as Tariq Aziz’s French translator. Before coming to Iraq, I’d read many news stories about Shia being treated like second-class citizens under Saddam, and I wondered, if that was true, how a woman like al-Hashimi could have risen to such a powerful position in the government. Ahmad Chalabi and others were saying that everyone in Saddam’s party had to be purged, but if al-Hashimi had succeeded under that system, things must have been more nuanced than we were hearing. I wanted to ask her what it had been like to live as a Shia under Saddam and what she thought of the de-Ba’athification plan.
“Please come and visit,” she said when I reached her. “There is too much going wrong here.” Her voice was friendly, and I could tell by her English that she was highly educated. “I’m worried there will be lots of bloodshed. I fear for the unity of my country.”
She invited me to lunch the following afternoon. When I called in the morning to confirm the time, a man picked up. He was crying and his voice sounded broken. I heard women screaming in the background.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I told him I was a journalist and had a meeting with Aquila al-Hashimi that afternoon.
I could hear him breathing fast. “They shot her.” A carful of gunmen had attacked al-Hashimi’s car, and she’d been severely wounded. I hung up the phone in shock. I later learned that al-Hashimi had been shot in the stomach and leg. For several days, she lay in a coma in an American military hospital. As I waited for her to recover, I worked on other stories, including one for NPR about rising violence in the city. We wanted to gauge the concern of young Iraqis, so I interviewed some of the young men listening to Iraqi pop music around the corner from our hotel. While I chatted with them, a man with light brown hair came and stood near us. He introduced himself as “Mustafa” and said he was Palestinian.
We started talking about music, but the conversation shifted to politics. Mustafa was very angry about what had happened in Iraq. “This country was so good to me and my family,” he said. “This is all part of a bigger plan to cut the Middle East into pieces and feed us to the Iranians.”
Mustafa said he had worked in the security sector under Saddam, but since the security forces had been dissolved, he and others had nothing to do except meet up and spill out their hatred against America, Iran, and Britain. “We felt sorry for the people who were killed in the 9/11 attacks, but now I think this was all just a plot by the Americans so they could have an excuse to invade Iraq,” he said.
He asked me where I was staying. Given the lack of security and my experience with the tribal chief in Mosul, I didn’t tell anyone where I lived. I apologized to Mustafa, telling him that my parents had taught me not to share such private information with strangers.
“Fine, fine. Just tell me, are you staying at this hotel?” he pointed to a nearby hotel where the NBC crews stayed.
I told him I wasn’t.
Afterward, when I got into my car, I told Abu Ali to drive around in case someone was following us.
The next morning I was awakened by a giant explosion. My room was on the first floor, and my bed wasn’t far from a window. The impact forced the window open, and I fell out of bed. Whether it was some instinctive reaction or an effect of the blast, I don’t know.
I lay on the floor wondering if someone was going to burst in and drag me away. Kidnappings in Iraq sometimes worked that way: attackers would use explosives to blast open the gates before coming inside. I could hear my heart beating and my own deep breathing. Shaking, I stood up, put on my clothes, and grabbed my satellite phone and notebook. I shouted Guy’s name and heard him shouting mine. Out in the hall, we saw the hotel workers with shocked, white faces. “Are you okay?” I screamed. “Is everything okay?”
They told me there had been an explosion at the hotel where the NBC crews stayed. We ran outside and around the corner and saw broken windows and lots of smoke. People poured out into the streets, and soon all the reporters got on their phones. I stared in amazement at the burning hotel. Then I turned and saw the man from the night before, Mustafa, standing nearby. He was watching the scene, and when he saw me, he nodded and smiled. I suddenly remembered him asking me where I was staying and mentioning the hotel that had just been bombed. I walked toward him, but he stopped smiling and shook his head as if to say, don’t.
A white car stopped in front of him. He got in, and the car drove away.
I talked to people from NBC and learned that at least one man, a Somali guard, had been killed. After finishing my report for NPR, I did a quick interview with a German radio station. Back in Germany, my professor Lothar Brock heard it and emailed to say that he was worried about me. My voice had been trembling, he wrote, and I seemed to be in shock. I hadn’t realized how traumatized I was.
That afternoon, I learned more bad news: Aquila al-Hashimi was dead. I had already missed the funeral, but I wanted to visit her family and offer my condolences. When I arrived at the house, a young boy pointed me toward a room.