How Al-Sadr Became the Most Powerful Man in Iraq, and other stuff that happened a long time ago, elsewhere
I have to think this Foreign Policy article by the NYT’s Dexter Filkins on Moqtada al-Sadr’s rise power and how he is now waiting in the wings, with no mention of how far into the wings he has now retreated, suffers greatly from a 20th-century production schedule, not to mention superficiality that renders the headline overhype. But because Filkins is a good reporter who was been around the block several times in Iraq,* I wouldn’t mind reading a more thorough update:Â
How a radical Shiite cleric became the most powerful man in Iraq
… Moqtada al-Sadr, the young, rabble-rousing cleric few people had even heard of when the invasion began, can now plausibly claim to be the most powerful man in the country … He commands as many allies in the Iraqi Parliament as any single party; and his armed followers permeate Iraq’s security forces, control the streets throughout eastern Baghdad and the Shiite south, and fill the ranks of many of the death squads that terrorize the country’s Sunni minority. The Americans would like to see Moqtada off the scene; many moderate Shiite leaders would like to see him dead. Yet Sadr, still in his 30s, appears unassailable.Â
Sadr’s rise was less a determined climb than a bubbling up. He ascended on the hopes of his supporters, the millions of downtrodden Shiites who had once looked to his father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a scholar and cleric who, along with two other sons, was murdered by Saddam’s gunmen in 1999. The surviving Sadr does not have his father’s learning; at times he seems to be riding his movement rather than directing it. But like any born demagogue, Sadr possesses an uncanny sense of timing.
… Sadr capitalized on the growing disenchantment with the American occupation—and the growing ferocity of the Sunni insurgency, which the Americans were unable to stop.
… Sadr is more powerful than any of the clerics who put up with him two years ago. Next time, he won’t be going out the side door; the stage is now his.
* Filkins was the one the media ethics handwringers were clucking about because he started carrying a gun after an ugly crowd incident early on in the occupation, late 2003 or early 2004. Not normal behavior for an NYT scribbler.Â
I missed Filkins by a week in Muzzafarabad, Azad Kashmir, in 1998, but heard all about him and his amazing satellite phone from Tariq, the Kashmiri freelancer we both hired as a translator.Â
“Do you know Mr. Dexter Filkins of the Los Angeles Times?” Tariq said.
“No.”
“He is a very nice man,” Tariq said. “Very good journalist.”Â
Tariq described a James Bondian suitcase phone with a little dish antenna that Filkins set up on his balcony at the Sangum Hotel, overlooking the horrific torrent of the Neelam River.Â
“With this he spoke direct to Los Angeles,” Tariq explained. He had never seen anything like it.
Back then, neither had I. We had to wait several hours for the operator to get back to us on the hotel phone, when we wanted to talk to the States on a scratchy, echoing line.Â
What a place. I remember Tariq’s face going grey as we sat at breakfast, and all the help becoming similarly ashen and deferrent, as a man with a hard look strode in and invited himself to a seat at our table. He explained he was “Rafiq Khan,” something like that, from the ”Foreign Ministry.” He described all of our activities from the past couple of days in detail and wanted to know exactly what we were up to, how much money we had, what our intentions were. His agents, whom we had dubbed “Barney Fife” and “Gomer Pyle,” had not exactly been discreet following us around on their scooter, but this guy was scarier than them.Â
He also wanted to know if we were Christians, really Christians, because he knew most people in the West were not and had very low morals. He was not the first Pakistani with whom we had had this conversation. His own son was studying in Britain, where he was exposed to a great deal of immorality, but his son was a very upright young man and he was confident his son was not engaged in any unacceptable western activity.Â
When he was convinced of our legitimacy, our good intentions, our monotheism and morality, and that we weren’t going to create any problems for him, Mr. “Khan” stopped trying to intimidate us and became accommodating. Even eager to please and show us how an important guy like him could get things done. He snorted at the bureaucratic obstacles that had been placed in our way and offered to assist us in our desire to get up to the Line of Control, where the cross-border shelling of villages took place.
“The Army tells us we must have the approval of a Col. Chishti, in Rawalpindi. And Chishti says we must go to his office there and drink tea with him if we want approval. But we don’t want to go to Rawalpindi. It’s a long drive.”
“Col. Chishti? I don’t know any Chishti. Who is this Chishti? I will get you your approval.”
That afternoon, “Rafiq Khan” of the “Foreign Ministry” called us at our hotel room. A somewhat brusk “Rafiq Khan.”
“Apparently, for the approval you need to visit the Line of Control, there is a Col. Chishti in Rawalpindi. You must speak to him.” Click.Â
Chishti and I, it turned out, had a mutual friend. A Pakistani professor at Boston University who used to be his intern when Chishti was an editor at a Pak newspaper. It was like old home week.  Tea and biscuits, a good long chat about everything. Then another long but always entertaining ride on the Murree Road, where you laughed yourself silly at how many times you almost died on tight, hill-clinging turns, narrowly missing livestock or overloaded trucks painted up like gypsy caravans — the usual Third-World teamster decorative exuberance but with a massive flying facade over the cab, a variant I hadn’t seen before.  Â
With Chishti’s approval, we were off with Tariq to the Line of Control, to get the photos of shot-up stuff we needed and with any luck, to get shot at, for a little drama in our series.Â
To get there, we rode with a Pak major in an army Land Cruiser over the 9,500-foot Nakka Pass, on a narrow dirt track cut into a mountain so steep that if your vehicle went over the edge, you’d drop 1,500 feet before you hit anything. Not counting any Dogpatch-style huts you might take out on the way down.Â
“We took some Karachi journalists on this road two months ago,” said the Pak major. “They had loose movements every 15 minutes.”
Back down in the Neelam Valley, in Athmuqam, the Pak major informed us we were under direct observation of Indian Army forward artillery observers on the hillside opposite and should endeavor to stay under the cover of trees and avoid bunching up. The shell-cratered town was largely deserted, except for a couple dozen men tending to their property. They had no intention of not bunching up around us, and followed us as we inspected and photographed the damage to their houses, each importuning that we should come examine his mortar-blasted hovel. So we did that, with a growing entourage of Paks. We were walking along a road past the shell-pocked soccer field when some big exploded in the woods on other side of it.
If you’ve never been shelled before, it is something you feel in your gut as much as you hear, and though I had become quite relaxed this pleasant morning, I was immediately gripped with intense visceral fear.  The Paks took flight, and the major said, “This way. We must run. The next one will be on our heads!”
We bolted along a muddy ditch behind a stone wall, jostling with pajama-clad men. I had never felt so exposed in my life, and with each step scoped out which mud puddle or rock pile I would dive for when the next one came down. We headed for the local school teacher’s substantial but somewhat reduced concrete house, where the basement was intact, and a dozen or so of us piled in. We were dripping sweat, and there was a small terrified child peaking out from under a mattress at the back, while a couple of the men peered out the sand-bagged entrance.Â
“Those Indian mortarmen are very rude!” I told the major, who giggled.
“My wife would be very upset if she knew what those Indians were doing,” I said.
“Oh, we never tell our  wives what happens here!”
And we waited, chatting and joking, for artillery rounds to start dropping on us, and as we made jokes I wondered what the odds were one would come through the concrete floor over our heads. But when nothing more fell, we moved out. A short, brisk walk across a wide-open, utterly exposed, horrible field. Down into the blessed ravine where our Land Cruiser was parked, and we high-tailed it out of there with a flat tire. Back over the Nakka Pass and along that mountain goat track, which we shared with overloaded trucks and buses.
At the end of that day, I had a bag of trash, wrappers and drinks and so forth, that I needed to get rid of.
“What should I do with this, Tariq? Where is a place I can throw it?”
“Throw it by the side of the road.”
“No, Tariq. When I am in your country, whatever you do, I do. But this, I cannot do.  In our country, it is considered very bad to this.”
Tariq threw me a quizzical look.
“Oh. Well, then throw it in the river. It will go all the way to Karachi!”  Â
Another time, looking at the unbelieveable rush of Tariq’s river, like nothing I had seen before, I said, “You know, Tariq, if this river was in America, there would be people running raft trips, making a lot of money. Does anyone do that on this river?”
He looked at me like I was insane.
“Sometimes people fall in,” Tariq said. ”They find them two weeks later down at the Mangla Dam.”Â
That night, Tariq wrote up the shelling incident for the newspaper he freelanced for, and submitted it to me for my review as a senior newspaperman. I made one or two minor corrections and declared it an excellent piece of work. Here it is, lifted word for word in this report from what Tariq wrote:
On July 15, one local and two foreign journalists had a narrow escape in Neelam Valley as an Indian mortar shell fell close by, official sources and witnesses said. Jules Crittenden and Brian Walsky of the Boston Herald, a US newspaper, were at Athmuqam, the sub-divisional headquarter of Neelam Valley, along with a local journalist to prepare a report on the losses caused in the area due to India firing and shelling, when a mortar shell fired by Indian forces landed barely 200 yards from them near the already devastated degree college building, sources said.
As the mortar shell was fired, the journalists and the officials accompanying them rushed to take shelter in a bunker constructed by a local resident. Later, the foreign journalists were evacuated safely.
It was a non-incident that earned Tariq a little extra pocket change, and we declined a Pak TV request to be interviewed on the horrific Indian war crime to which we had been subjected. I suspect what had happened was more or less this:
Indian FO: “Two sahibs wearing trousers, one with camera, one Pak officer, large mob of villagers, inspecting shelling damage.”
Indian artillery officer: “Hmmm. Sounds like foreign press. Do they look like healthy specimens?”
Indian FO: “Yes sir, very healthy.”
Indian artillery officer: “Then let’s see how fast they can run!”
KABOOM!
Indian FO: “They run very fast, sir!”
OK, sorry about the extended blah-blah-blah. I’ll back this beat-up Daihatsu out of Muzzafarabad’s Memory Lane.
Topics: Iraq, Pakistan, media, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:48 am on Wednesday, February 21, 2007
10 Responses to “How Al-Sadr Became the Most Powerful Man in Iraq, and other stuff that happened a long time ago, elsewhere”
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February 21st, 2007 at 2:58 am
Bill’s Nibbles — 2007.02.21
Some Bill’s Bites posts, some things I excerpted and linked but I’m sending you to the original post. I may rearrange the order of the items within this post as I add new things that I think belong above the
February 21st, 2007 at 3:04 am
A long, long, time ago, in a galaxy …
How Al-Sadr Became the Most Powerful Man in Iraq, and other stuff that happened a long time ago, elsewhere Jules Crittenden have to think this Foreign Policy article by the NYT’s Dexter Filkins on Moqtada al-Sadr’s rise power and how
February 21st, 2007 at 4:47 am
Don’t apologize. I love it when you reminisce.
We shoulda oughta kilt that bassart when we had the chance.
I say that about too much in this war.
February 21st, 2007 at 11:22 am
Web Reconnaissance for 02/21/2007
A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention.
February 21st, 2007 at 11:52 am
Jules-that was hilarious (I say that with much empathy). You’re probably right about the Indian gun bunnies, I can just see them pulling the lanyard and laughing.
February 21st, 2007 at 12:46 pm
These stories are great. Like I said… book.
We made a mistake not killing Sadrsack when we had the chance. Yet another instance of pols not letting the military do its job.
February 22nd, 2007 at 12:39 am
Our guys had Muktard the Satyr well and truely beat down before traitors kennedy and bird took up his salvation as their personal cause. This was back when “Iraq is vietnam” was just getting started.
Anyone else remember watching traitors kennedy and bird trade quotes back and forth with Muktard himself about how Iraq was vietnam back then?
February 22nd, 2007 at 2:59 am
“Anyone else remember watching traitors kennedy and bird trade quotes back and forth with Muktard himself about how Iraq was vietnam back then?”
Yep. And they’ve followed through in stunning single-mindedness to make it so.
April 8th, 2007 at 9:06 am
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October 24th, 2008 at 2:27 am
[...] radical religion became a way of life, if not to just keep the people occupied. Leaders like Moqtada al-Sadr quickly became warlords and created their own [...]