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>From the Iraqi perspective, the greatest loss has been the flight of
the professional class, the people whose resources and skills might
once have combined to build a post-Saddam Iraq. It seems, however,
that precisely because they are critical to rebuilding Iraq and less
prone to sectarianism and violence, professionals are most vulnerable
to those forces that are tearing Iraq apart. Many of them are now in
Syria. An hour's drive from Damascus, in Qudsiya, there has grown up
an Iraqi neighborhood complete with a Baghdad Barbershop and an Iraq
Travel Agency. Off one alley, in January, I entered a hastily
constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, the concrete and
cinder blocks slapped together. The carved wooden doors to each
apartment were in stark contrast to the grim, unpainted hallways.
Inside one such apartment lived a doctor named Lujai — she refused to
give her family name — and her five children. Omar, at 15, was the
oldest; the youngest was just 2. A family-medicine specialist, Lujai
arrived in Qudsiya last September from Baghdad, where she had her own
clinic and her husband, Adil, was a thoracic surgeon and a professor
at the medical college. They were the same age and from the same town
(Ana, in Anbar Province), and they had been married for 15 years when
Adil was murdered.
Right after the invasion of Iraq, Lujai told me, Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad's hospitals but did not know how to manage them. "They were sectarian from the beginning," she said, "firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the problems started. They wanted to separate Sunnis. The Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement" — that is, to the Shiite faction loyal to Moktada al-Sadr. Following the 2005 elections that brought Islamist Shiites to power, Lujai said, the Sadrists initiated what they called a "campaign to remove the Saddamists." The minister of health and his turbaned advisers saw to it that in hospitals and health centers the walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics like Sadr, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Shiite religious songs could often be heard in the halls. In June of last year, Ali al-Mahdawi, a Sunni who had managed the Diyala Province's health department, disappeared, along with his bodyguards, at the ministry of health. (In February, the American military raided the ministry and arrested the deputy health minister, saying he was tied to the murder of Mahdawi.) Lujai told me that Sunni patients were often accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors treated them, the special police from the Ministry of the Interior would arrest the Sunni patients. Their corpses would later be found in the Baghdad morgue. "This happened tens of times," she said, to "anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn't Shiite."
On Sept. 2, 2006, Lujai's husband went to work and prepared for the first of three operations scheduled for the day. At the end of his shift a patient came in unexpectedly; no other doctor was available, so Adil stayed to treat him. Adil was driving home when his way was blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later, his dead body was found on the street.
As she told me this story, Lujai began to cry, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband's murder and was told: "He is a doctor, he has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn't stay in Iraq. That's why he was killed." Two weeks later she received a letter ordering her to leave her Palestine Street neighborhood.
On Sept. 24 she and her children fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife and their four children. They gave away or sold what they could and paid $600 for the ride in the S.U.V. that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, as many as 20 other doctors also fled.
In Qudsiya, Lujai and her brother pay $500 a month in rent for the three-bedroom apartment they share. The children attend local schools free, but Iraqis are not permitted to work in Syria, so they depend on relatives and savings for their survival. Twenty-five members of their family have fled to Syria. Four days before I visited them they heard that a Sunni doctor they knew had been killed in Baghdad's Kadhimiya district, where he worked. He was married to a Shiite woman. "He was a pediatric specialist," Lujai told me. "We needed him."
In some ways, despite the ethnic and religious motives of most of the Iraqi factions, the Iraqi civil war resembles internal conflicts in revolutionary China or Cambodia: there is a cleansing of the intelligentsia and of anyone else who stands out from the mass. The small Iraqi minorities — Christians and such sects as the Mandeans — are mostly gone. The intellectuals and artists are gone. Abu Ziyad, for example, is a 60-year-old artist, a Christian, who used to have his own gallery in Baghdad's Karrada district. Soon after the Americans arrived in 2003, he began to be threatened for reproducing the human image, which is forbidden by Islamic law. His gallery was burned in August 2004, and the violence seemed to be growing — and growing out of control. Neighbors were killed, houses exploded, with little evident pattern. "You go shopping in Iraq and an explosion happens, and you see a man dead on his steering wheel," Abu Ziyad told me when I met him and his wife in January in Damascus. "We got headaches from the smell of blood and explosions in Iraq," his wife added. In October 2004 their house was set on fire as they slept, and they escaped only by climbing from their roof to their neighbor's. On the front wall of their house someone had scrawled, "Collaborators."
II. A Portable War
Unlike Damascus, Cairo seems to have been able to assimilate Iraqi refugees without much fuss. It is a vastly bigger city, and the number of Iraqi refugees there is much smaller. And Iraqis are familiar with the Egyptian dialect from the many popular soap operas and films produced there. Cairo is not unlike Baghdad, in some ways, and many of the refugees in Egypt are Baghdadis. They also tend to be Sunni — and the Egyptian government has made anti-Shiite statements in the past. In mid-April, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Misriyun cited security sources as saying that Egypt was withholding visas from Iraqis for fear of Shiite proselytizing. This may have been merely rationalization, but it does indicate the understandable fear that Iraqi refugees will bring their sectarian war with them.
I met Muhammad Abu Rawan in February at the small Internet cafe he runs in Cairo's Medinat Nasr district, near the restaurant Baghdad Nights. Off the busy main street, tall, leafy trees shade quiet neighborhoods. Muhammad was an air-conditioner repairman in Baghdad until he and his wife, Lubna, both Sunnis, fled last year. Lubna lost her father in 2004 when the Americans killed him; he was driving away from a roadblock and somehow aroused suspicion. "He did not have time to close his eyes before he died," Lubna told me, because there were so many shots in his body. She showed me pictures of his bullet-riddled car, with holes in every side. We were talking in their sparse apartment. Flower patterns decorated the sofas and carpets, while on the walls were pictures of a forest, a beach and a lake.
In Baghdad, Muhammad lived in Dora, a Sunni district — which meant that the Shiites there were targets. When Muhammad picked up a wounded Shiite from the street and took him to the hospital, he said, he found himself targeted by the Sunni militiamen who shot the man. They told him they would have killed him were he not himself a Sunni; as it was, he was forced to move out of Dora. Muhammad's sister was married to a Shiite man, he told me, and they had many friends and relatives who were Shiites. The company that Muhammad and Lubna worked for was owned by a Sunni man, with branches in Baghdad and Basra. In Basra, they told me, 20 members of the company were kidnapped. The 7 Shiites were released, and the 13 Sunni employees were murdered. In Baghdad, however, the violence went the other way: the company's Shiite lawyer was killed by Sunni militiamen. The owner himself belonged to the al-Omar family, a name that gave him away as Sunni, and thus his company was known as a "Sunni company." He fled Basra to Baghdad because of threats; after more threats, he fled to the United Arab Emirates.
Now in Cairo, Muhammad and Lubna said, they have Shiite neighbors who were expelled from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. I asked if sectarian problems followed them to Egypt. "On the contrary," Muhammad said, "we are happy to see any Iraqi so we can speak our dialect." Lubna added that "the Iraqis who come here are all tired."
Not all of them are tired of sectarian conflict, though, and the Egyptians themselves may just be getting started. Muhammad's co-worker in the Internet cafe is a Shiite named Haidar. Hatred of Shiites is increasing throughout the region, and Haidar does not feel fully comfortable in Cairo. "On the street and in cabs, people ask if I am Sunni or Shiite," he told me. "They say we are infidels." One day at the supermarket, the grocer heard Haidar's Iraqi dialect and told him, "Your Shiites are infidels."
There are Iraqis in Cairo who feel roughly the same way. In the courtyard of a hastily constructed apartment complex on the airport road, I found a group of Sunnis sitting outside their small shops. Ghaith, an 18-year-old from Baghdad's western Sunni stronghold of Amriya — long since cleansed of its Shiites — had opened a small grocery. He pointed across the courtyard to his 12-year-old brother playing soccer with other boys and told me he had been kidnapped in Baghdad and held for one week. The kidnappers demanded six million Iraqi dinars. Sitting in the grocery store was Dhafer, a round 35-year-old man with a sharp nose. Originally from Baghdad's Ghazaliya district, he had been threatened by Shiite neighbors. He was given 48 hours to leave. "I brought my relatives for my protection, and weapons, and they escorted us out," he told me.
Next door to the grocery shop was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple also from Ghazaliya. It was decorated pink and red for Valentine's Day. Its owner, Ghada, taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar was a former colonel in the Iraqi Army who retired in 1999. "After the American invasion, I started to feel the Iranian influence," Abu Omar said. "Before, there were no problems between Sunnis and Shiites, but then on television we started hearing people talking about Sunnis or Shiites." Like many former military officers, Abu Omar had been active in the Iraqi resistance. "As long as they are attacking the occupiers or those cooperating with the occupiers," he said, the Iraqi resistance was honorable.
Ghada told me that Iraq's sectarianism followed them to Cairo, causing problems in their children's school. Iraqi Shiite boys beat their son Omar, she said. "He hates Shiites so much," she told me, adding that many fights occurred between Sunni and Shiite Iraqi children. Ghada told me that Egyptian customers cried with her and consoled her after Saddam's execution, and they had recited a prayer together. "The ones that Saddam killed," Ghada said, meaning Shiites, "I would go back and kill more of them. I hate Shiites."
III. The New Normal
Of the main destination countries, Syria is the friendliest for Shiites. Egypt may be ill disposed toward Shiites, but Jordan is downright hostile. Syria is a different story, and Damascus in particular has a variety of Iraqis seemingly ready to live together. Ali Hamid, a Sunni barber from Baghdad's Shiite district of Shaab, has been working in the same Damascus shop since 2003. He explained that many barbers fled Iraq to Syria because Islamist radicals, who believe beards should be left to grow and Western-style haircuts avoided, had forced them to close their shops. "In Iraq there is a sectarian war," he told me. "Here, we all get along." He attributed this to the vigilant Syrian authorities: "Praise God, thanks to the Syrian government we have no problems. If anything happens, they deal with it when it happens. As shop owners we are not allowed to talk about sectarianism. Word spread to all business owners: You live in a different country, not your country; you have to respect their rules."
Even Moktada al-Sadr's representative in Syria, Sheik Raed al-Kadhimi, was espousing antisectarianism, even though Sadr's Mahdi Army has systematically targeted Sunnis. "All Iraqis are united and well integrated," he told me when I visited his offices in the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood one morning. "I can say that they are like one body against the common enemy. Also I should say that Iraqis do not kill Iraqis. It is not possible. It is only those who come into the country, as well as takfiris" — radical Sunnis who anathematize Shiites as infidels — "and former Baathists who operate under the umbrella of the Americans. You see how they kill Iraqis through torture and suicide bombings." Under such conditions, he said, it was natural that "people resort to a safe place and they come to Syria."
Kadhimi's office was in an Iraqi neighborhood that has sprung up in southern Damascus around the shrine of Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad and the daughter of Imam Ali, the fourth caliph. Her brother Hussein was killed at Karbala. For Shiite Muslims, this moment, when the family of Ali was betrayed, is one of the defining moments of their history. A vast commercial district has grown around the shrine. It has become home to so many Iraqis that, walking through its streets, I felt transported back to Baghdad, where I had spent so much time reporting — back to Kadhimiya, the Shiite commercial district built around the shrine to Imam Kadhim. The Damascus streets bustled with men speaking Arabic in the Iraqi dialect, overflowing indifferently onto the road nicknamed Iraqi Street. The walls were covered with political posters from Iraqi elections past. There was a mobile-phone shop named after the Euphrates River, and there were barbershops called Karbala and Son of Iraq.
On the eve of the 10th of Muharram — the month on the Muslim calendar when the martyrdom of Hussein at the hands of the caliph Yazid's forces is commemorated — a procession organized by Sheik Kadhimi's office gathered. Dressed in black, the men were led by youths wielding immense wooden flagpoles with colored flags that they struggled to wave from side to side. Others carried framed pictures of Moktada al-Sadr and his father. It was a latmiya procession, in which the men chanted songs lamenting Hussein's martyrdom and vowing fealty to him. "We have chosen our destiny," they sang, "we are the sons of Sadr, soldiers for the Mahdi." The thousands of onlookers waited until dawn for the culmination of the events. At 4 in the morning, hundreds of men dressed in white robes met in tents. They carried short swords, which they cleaned in buckets of soap. After performing the dawn prayer they lined up, and led by trumpeters and drummers, they began a march through the alleys toward the shrine of Zeinab. They chanted: "Haidar! Haidar!" — another name for Ali, father of Hussein and Zeinab. The men and boys swung their swords rhythmically, hitting their foreheads and drawing blood, which soon drenched their faces and robes. As onlookers filmed the scene on their camera phones and the sun rose above them, the men danced in bloody ecstasy until they reached the shrine and the event ended suddenly, with people returning to their homes or hotel rooms. In Iraq's shrine cities, I had seen such religious marches end in explosions and armed attacks. Here in Syria, the commemoration ended with the beginning of another unremarkable day. This must be what Iraqi normality is like, and now it can only happen outside Iraq.
-- Yoshie