All in all, just the sort of people the United States might want as allies in any overt or covert attack on the Iraqi regime. There’s just one enormous problem. In the 1980s, when Washington was Saddam’s friend and “Iranian-backed Shiite radicals” were the enemy, Daawa members took part in some of the worst terrorist attacks ever carried out against Americans. Suicide bombings of U.S. embassies in Beirut and Kuwait and the kidnapping of Americans in Lebanon were linked to Daawa members. “These are people with American blood on their hands,” says one administration official.
But in today’s rush to be rid of Saddam, people formerly deemed terrorists could yet become this administration’s freedom fighters. There is growing recognition that the future of Iraq will not depend on the Kurds who’ve created a quasi-independent state in the mountains of the north. Nor with the Sunni Arab minority who have ruled the country since it was created as a British protectorate after World War I. But rather, the future lies with the Arab Shiites, who are the long-suffering majority of the population. “If you believe in a democratic Iraq, then you believe in an Iraq where the Shiites run the show,” says Ambassador Peter Galbraith, now at the National War College. But who speaks for them? Al Daawa? Some ayatollah? A secular general? Tribal chieftains? The U.S. administration is scrambling to find an answer as evidence mounts that Shiites will rise up after a U.S. invasion, or perhaps even before, to stake their claim on the country.
“The Shiites are 50 to 60 percent of the Iraqi population,” explains Amatzia Baram, who is Israel’s leading authority on Iraq. “But in Baghdad they make up 70 percent, so that the capital city is de facto a Shiite stronghold.” The Iraqi dictator is especially worried about the suburb of high-rise apartment blocks that bears his name–Saddam City, where 2 million Shiites live–and Washington has to worry about it, too. “This area is bubbling all the time,” says Baram. “The Shiites may help the U.S. with information; they may even organize local militias. But after the U.S. has gained control, they will present their own fait accompli–that they are in charge of their own areas.”
To the extent that the Bush administration has focused on the Shiites, most of its attention has been directed toward the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), an exile group that is based in Iran. Its leader, Ayatollah Seyed Mohammed Baqer al Hakim, is close to the most conservative elements of the Iranian leadership, and he claims more than 10,000 Iraqi exile troops at his disposal. The group is one of six the United States wanted to attend a conference of Iraqi opposition forces in London last weekend. (To encourage them, the administration sent what one U.S. official called an “attaboy” letter signed by several administration officials including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis [Scooter] Libby.)
But there have been quiet contacts with other Shiite groups as well, including past and present members of Al Daawa. These include Mowaffaq al-Rubaie, a former spokesman for the group, who has met with Wolfowitz. Another former Daawa activist, Laith Kubba, is now at the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. The British have given political asylum to many current Daawa leaders, and those based in London have received visits from U.S. officials in recent weeks, including special envoy to the Iraqi opposition Zalmay Khalilzad. But Al Daawa has not yet committed itself to supporting the U.S. effort. It opted to stay out of last weekend’s Iraqi opposition conference. And U.S. officials, while conceding there have been contacts, suggest they’re trying to work around Al Daawa, not through it.
If a United States or United Nations invasion of Iraq goes smoothly and quickly, that might be possible. But if it doesn’t, then the streets of Baghdad could be up for grabs. Seething with anger, the Shiites know the pressure on Saddam today gives them the best chance they have had–or may ever have–to throw off the system that has kept them second-class citizens. As the United States works through the United Nations to humiliate and weaken Saddam, “his authority definitely will be eroded and they will feel encouraged,” says al-Rubaie. “It is very hard to know what they will do.” Al Daawa is one of the very few groups that “has the cadres who know how to put things together,” says Kubba. “If there is a failure of the system, then these people will lead the Street.”
According to other Iraqi Shiite sources, Washington has used intermediaries to contact some of the most important Shiite clerics still alive inside Iraq. One of the messages: if people start to rise up, tell them to stay in their homes. The last thing Washington wants right now is a spontaneous, leaderless Shiite insurrection. Yet even among secular and moderate Shiites, who are the silent majority, reserves of bitterness still linger because the United States supported Saddam while he was massacring them in the 1980s, and failed to help them when they rose against him in 1991.
If there’s good news for the United States in this picture, it’s the fact that Iran is almost as deeply resented as the United States by many Iraqi Shiites–including some conservative religious leaders and many members of Al Daawa. As a result, any intervention by the Iran-based SCIRI could meet with some surprising re-sistance. One influential Iraqi mullah declares that “it’s going to be civil war if they come inside the country.” SCIRI leader Baqer al Hakim has been warned that he can return to the holy city of Najaf, which is also a center of Islamic scholarship. “But we told them if you want to return as the Khomeini of Iraq, we are going to have a problem,” says this mullah.
Indeed, present and past members of Al Daawa now blame Iran for their fearsome reputation as anti-American terrorists. They make no apologies for operations carried out against Saddam. But they say the most infamous anti-U.S. operation to which they’ve been tied was never authorized: the bombing of the U.S. and French embassies and five other sites in Kuwait in 1983. Of the 17 men arrested and convicted in that plot, 14 were members of the Iraqi Daawa. But present and former members now insist that their colleagues were “hijacked,” as one put it, by the Iranian intelligence services. They also say some of their members in Lebanon and elsewhere were lured into the service of Iran and, says Kubba, “dissolved into Hizbullah.”
For U.S. officials, that sort of distinction never used to make much of a dif-ference. They remember that to try to force the release of those 17 prisoners in Kuwait, Hizbullah’s master terrorist, Imad Mugniyeh, kidnapped AP journalist Terry Anderson and other Americans in Lebanon. Today, however, U.S. officials tend to accept the Daawa version of events, especially as conveyed through ex-members like Kubba and al-Rubaie who are willing to work closely with the U.S. government.
Terrorists? Freedom fighters? One thing is clear: Iraq’s Shiites–whether secular or ex-communist, whether conservatively religious or radically Islamist–are waiting anxiously for their liberation. Once Saddam is gone, they expect to find their own way to run the country. If the United States wants to remain their friend, it had better be ready to let them do it.
