The Weight of a Mustard Seed (27 page)

During the following winter, the new American policy of arming local Sunni groups to defend their neighborhoods against Al-Qaeda groups spread from Anbar province, through the Western suburbs of Baghdad and down into the Janabi tribal lands south of Baghdad. But news remained sketchy: there were no phone connections with that region, rival checkpoints sprang up overnight as militias battled, enveloped and withdrew, travel was virtually impossible, a tribal leader that I had hoped to contact via an interlocutor in Baghdad who was
going to and from the area regularly was besieged in his compound and in the middle of cutting ties with a local Al-Qaeda group and going over to an alliance with the Americans. Some of my Iraqi contacts in Damascus and Amman told me bits of this story, others didn't want to tell me anything in case I was a spy. Of the Sachet women, of Um Omar and Shadwan and Amani, there was virtually no news at all; it was not seemly for men to ask after the female members of a family.

After the summer battles, a brave and determined Iraqi journalist friend of mine went down to Jurfa Sakr, the main town of the Albu Hassoun tribe, several times to check out the new developments and he asked after the Sachet brothers among insurgent commanders and tribal leaders that he talked to. According to one, a senior commander in the Islamic Army, one of the local former insurgent militias, Omar Sachet had joined the insurgency in 2004 and graduated to commander level the following year, running pitched ugly battles against the Shia on Saidiya's border with Dora. The commander was contemptuous and angry.

“Their father was a hero, but they desecrated his name.”

A local Sheikh was more specific.

“If I see Omar Sachet I will shoot him on the spot.”

For a while it seemed that Omar and his brothers were on the run, but then came reports that Omar and another brother—which one was unknown—had been detained by the Iraqi government. Of Ali, news trickled through even later, third or fourth hand through the tribal grapevine: he was dead, apparently, maybe, killed fighting in Salahuddin.

I thought back to the Sachet family I had known in the months after the invasion, now torn by events, out of contact, lost, dead, imprisoned. I remembered Omar's tall gravity; his father's height, his father's taciturn quietness. He had always
avoided sitting down and talking to me one-on-one; he was busy, he was out, he sent his greetings. Now I understood why. I thought of Ali who I teased because he got fatter and fatter every time I saw him. I remembered how funny and abashed he had been, showing me the room he had decorated for his new bride and pointing out, blushing, the pink tulle draped over the lamps and the satin pink bed spread and the vases of cloth roses, shyly, asking my opinion, “Will she like it, do you think?” I thought of their father, whose picture I kept as I wrote—as I write—to watch over my efforts and of Shadwan of whom there was no news at all. And I thought of Ali's baby son, named Kamel after his grandfather, and the legacy of war and anger and revenge and pride that he would inherit.

I mused these final paragraphs into an unfinished conclusion. So many unintended consequences. How/why had the sons of Saddam's Iraq come to break their country, deracinate family and murder neighbors? Who knew when it might be possible to go back to Baghdad and drive through the scarred and scabbed and re-wounded neighborhoods, look up the Sachets, and other friends, those that had managed to survive and ask, again: What happened here?

THE SACHET FAMILY

Of the sub tribe of the Albu Hassoun of the greater Janabi Tribe.

General Kamel Sachet Aziz al Janabi
Abu Omar

Um Omar
Shamh, his wife

Shadwan
Kamel Sachet's eldest daughter, and his favorite

Omar
his son

Ali
his son

Sheima
his daughter

Amani
his daughter

Ahmed
his son

Zeinab
his daughter

Mustafa
his son

Zaid
his son

Abdullah
Kamel Sachet's elder brother

Khalid
Kamel Sachet's younger brother

Abu Shakr
Kamel Sachet's brother-in-law

Abdul Qadir
Kamel Sachet's nephew and driver

Ali Misjil
sometime servant and driver of Kamel Sachet

OFFICERS IN THE IRAQI ARMY

General Raad Hamdani
Commander of the 2nd Republican Guard Corps until 2003. Cooperated with the Americans after the invasion. Now lives in Jordan.

General Latif
Commander of the battle of Seif Said 1981. Died of natural causes sometime in the nineties.

Adnan Khairallah
Saddam's cousin and brother-in-law. Khairallah was the popular Defense Minister throughout the Iran-Iraq war. He died in a helicopter crash in 1989. There were always rumors that Saddam had Khairallah killed; earlier that year there had been a family dispute, when Saddam imprisoned his eldest son Uday for killing his favorite bodyguard and Uday's mother and close relative of Khairallah's tried to intervene. It was not the first time a prominent military figure had been killed in a helicopter crash. Khairallah's was the only Baathie statue to remain untouched in Baghdad after the destruction and looting of 2003.

Nizar Khazraji
Chief of Staff of the army 1985–88, defected to Jordan in 1996. Khazraji spent much of the '90s conspiring with other exile groups, from exile in Denmark. Human rights groups demanded his arrest for crimes against humanity for his involvement in the Anfal campaigns against the Kurds, but he fled prosecution before the war in 2003 and was last spotted in southern Iraq just after Baghdad fell. He has since disappeared and is rumored to be living in Saudi Arabia.

Barakh Haj Hunta
Special Forces General, friend of Kamel Sachet's and famous for throwing Kurds out of helicopters during the Anfal operations. He was involved in an officers' plot against Saddam just after the uprisings of 1991.

Major Nejar
Special Forces officer and Kamel Sachet's sometime adjutant. In 2003 he fought with Ali Hassan al-Majid in the south against the British.

BAATHIES

Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan
Saddam's half brother and head of Mukhabarat during the 1991 Gulf War, head of the Amn from 1991 to 1996, later a Presidential adviser to Saddam. When the Americans invaded he sought refuge in Syria from where he organized insurgent operations inside Iraq until the Syrians handed him over to the Americans in 2005. He was put on trial in Baghdad for crimes against civilians during the 1991 uprising and sentenced to death in 2007.

Sultan Hashem
The popular and well respected commander of the First Army Corps on the northern front in 1988. Sultan Hashem later served as Defense Minister at the time of the American-led invasion of 2003. After the fall of Baghdad he went into hiding in Mosul; General Petraeus offered him a dignified surrender and there were intimations of a brief detention, but the new Iraqi government put him on trial on Anfal charges and he was sentenced to death, along with Ali Hassan al-Majid, in 2007. His execution has been delayed as the Sunni faction in the Iraqi government argues that he was just a career soldier discharging his duty and President Talabani has stepped in, refusing to sign his death warrant, saying that Sultan Hashem had good connections with the Kurds while he was serving in the north.

Ali Hassan al-Majid
Held many key posts in Saddam's regime: head of the Mukhabarat, Defense Minister, Acting Governor of Kuwait. But it was his role as Saddam's ruthless instrument of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1987–88 that defined his career. He oversaw the forced deportations of Kurdish villages and was given the nickname Chemical Ali in reference to his enthusiastic gas attacks against civilians. In 2003 he was Commander of the South and was captured by American forces soon after the fall of
Baghdad. In 2007 he was convicted on Anfal charges in the same trial as Sultan Hashem and also sentenced to death. At the time of writing he is still pending execution.

Aziz Salih Numan
Governor of Basra, Najaf and Kerbala during the eighties, Governor of Kuwait during 1990–91 occupation, Baath Party Chief of Maysan province early nineties. In 2003 Numan was Regional Baath Party Commander for West Baghdad. He was captured by American forces near Baghdad in May 2003 and remains in detention awaiting unspecified charges.

Hussein Kamel
Saddam's son-in-law and cousin. Rose through the ranks of the Mukhabarat to head Iraq's Military Industrial Complex until 1995 when he defected, along with his brother and both their wives (Saddam's daughters), to Jordan. For several months he gave information to Jordanian intelligence and to UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency, about Saddam's weapons programs and capabilities. Unbelievably he and his brother were persuaded to return to Iraq in mid 1996. Apparently they trusted that their family status would offer some immunity; instead Saddam forced his daughters to divorce them, and then ordered the house where they were staying surrounded. Hussein Kamel and his brother, Saddam Kamel, were killed after a twelve hour shoot out.

Saddam Kamel
Hussein Kamel's brother, also married to one of Saddam's daughters. Head of the Republican Guard in the mid eighties, afterward consigned to “Presidential Adviser.” He died along with his brother after their defection to Jordan. His wife and children, together with Saddam's other daughter and her children, now live quietly in Amman.

Arshad Yassin
An Air Force Lt. General, Saddam's cousin, brother-in-law, sometime chief of his bodyguards and per
sonal helicopter pilot. Yassin was notoriously involved in the looting of archaeological treasures from Baghdad's National Museum in the nineties and selling them abroad. He was captured by American forces disguised as a poor farmer in November 2003 and remains in American custody in Iraq.

Sheikh Khalid Al Janabi
Adnan Janabi's elder brother, close friend of Saddam's and Mayor of Baghdad. Died in Rome in 1996, Adnan suspects, poisoned on Saddam's orders.

Uday Hussein
Saddam's eldest son, head of Iraqi Olympic Committee, Commander of Saddam Fedayeen, main oil smuggler during the sanctions years and heir apparent. Uday was notorious for his drinking and playboy ways and for his psychotic sadism. He tortured his friends and raped whatever pretty girl was unlucky enough to walk into his view. In his two more famous bouts of murderous excess he killed his father's personal servant at a party in 1988 (in front of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of the Egyptian President, who was a guest), and shot his uncle Watban (wounding him only) at a family party in 1995. He survived an assassination attempt in 1996, but the eight bullets he took left him with seizures and a limp. After the American invasion he and his brother went on the run until they were betrayed to the Americans in July 2003 for a combined $30 million reward. Both were killed in the house where they were hiding in Mosul after a four hour battle with American troops.

Qusay Hussein
Saddam's second son, quieter and more responsible than Uday, sometimes tipped as Saddam's successor over his brother. He oversaw the intelligence and security services, the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard. In the final shoot out with the Americans, Qusay's fourteen-year-old son, Mustafa, was the last to die inside the house.

POST INVASION

Ayad Allawi
Secular Shia and former Baath Party member, later Prime Minister of the interim Iraqi administration under the American occupation. In the mid seventies Allawi left Iraq to pursue medical studies in London and began to break with the Party. In 1978 he and his wife survived a vicious ax attack at their home, widely believed to be an assassination attempt by Saddam in retaliation for plotting against him. In the eighties and nineties he remained politically active among exile groups, eventually founding the Iraqi National Accord and maintaining myriad links to foreign intelligence services. In 2004 he became the Prime Minister of Iraq in a temporary government responsible for drawing up a constitution before national elections. Allawi's party polled only 14 percent in the election in January 2005, much to the disappointment of his American backers, his secular model of liberal democracy losing to a coalition of Shia parties. His party continues to be represented in the Iraqi parliament, although his MPs withdrew their participation during a boycott in 2007 and Allawi now spends much of his time in London with his family and traveling throughout the Middle East, maintaining his networks and garnering support for the future.

Ahmed Chalabi
Hailing from a prominent Shia family, Chalabi left Iraq in 1956 and has spent much of his life in the United States and Britain. In the seventies he headed Petra Bank in Jordan, but was forced to flee over fraud charges, which have never been reconciled. In the mid nineties Chalabi founded the INC, Iraqi National Congress, an opposition group, funded by the Americans, among others (he always had close ties with the Iranians) and based himself
in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq from where he tried to overthrow Saddam. In the run up to the American invasion, he was the Pentagon's favorite to run the country, but reports of his fraud and unpopularity with Iraqis curtailed American support. In particular Chalabi was accused of supplying some of the faulty intelligence used by the British and American governments as part of their arguments for the urgency of a war. In post-Saddam Iraq Chalabi has proved himself a wily chameleon, allying himself to the Shia parties in power and positioning himself as acting Oil Minister and head of various political committees, ever the operator.

Jalal Talabani
Leader of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurds Party) and currently President of Iraq. Talabani fought Saddam from the Kurdish mountains for almost all his life. After the uprisings of 1991 Kurdistan became a de facto autonomous enclave, divided between Talabani's PUK and his rival Masoud Barzani's KDP (Kurdish Democratic Party). Despite a civil war in 1996 between the two, Talabani was instrumental in establishing a reasonably functional administration in Kurdistan during the nineties. After the war he became President of Iraq, a largely ceremonial position, to which his grandfatherly elder statesman air is well suited.

Moqtada Sadr
Head of the Sadr political block in the post war Iraqi parliament and one of the largest militias, the Mehdi Army. Often referred to as the “firebrand cleric” by Western media, Moqtada's sudden rise as the champion of millions of the poor urban Shia underclass surprised many Iraqis as much as the Americans. He has consistently opposed the American occupation, alternately fighting an insurgency, clashing with rival Shia parties and their mili
tias and then offering periodic ceasefires. He remains a key player, one of the few in the current political firmament who remained in Iraq throughout the Saddam years.

SCIRI
Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic of Iraq, now renamed, more tactfully, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. During the Saddam years it was based in Tehran and funded by the Iranians. It is one of the main Shia parties of the post Saddam Iraq and maintains its own militia, the

Badr Brigade
Now renamed the Badr Organization. SCIRI and Moqtada's party and militia have continued to battle for control over southern Shia cities, in particular Basra.

Dawa Party
The Dawa Party was founded in the sixties by a group of prominent Shia leaders, some from the Shia religious establishment, as a political party that would promote religious laws, use Islam as a framework for governance and combat the secular promises of the Communists and Baathists. By the early seventies it had attracted a strong following among young disenfranchised Shia from the South and was militantly opposed to the new Baathie regime. There followed the inevitable brutal crackdown. The Dawa Party was naturally attracted to the success of Khomeini's Shia revolution in Iran, although there were fundamental ideological differences between them. When the Iran-Iraq war broke out fragments of the Dawa Party fled to the safety of Iran, split into SCIRI, ideologically and financially much closer to the Iranians, and continued to organize attacks on the Baathie high command inside Iraq. In fact it was Dawa assassins who tried to kill Saddam Hussein in 1982 in the town of Djeil. This assassination attempt was punished with a mass execution of local men and it was these murders which provided the case against Saddam for which he was ultimately hanged in December 2006.
Dawa returned to Iraq from impoverished exile after Saddam's fall and became part of the Shia ruling coalition, along with SCIRI and Moqtada's party, based on their bloc victory in the 2005 election.

Nouri Al Maliki
Leader of the Dawa Party, was chosen as Prime Minister as a compromise after weeks of stalemate between the other Shia candidates.