The tribal sheik leaned back on a pillow in his meeting house, and remembered the day, 12 years ago, when he had dared to confront his country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein. It was shortly after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the uprising that swept through the Shiite regions of Iraq.
Agents of the feared and hated security force known as al-Amen had taken away thousands of young men from the sheik’s town of Kufa, and the neighboring holy Shiite city of Najaf. Among those who had disappeared were three of the sheik’s sons, men in their 20s whose crime, he said, was to march in the streets celebrating Najaf’s 13-day liberation from Saddam’s repressive Sunni-dominated regime.
A month after they were taken away in the middle of the night, the sheik led a delegation of Shiite leaders to one of Saddam’s palaces in Baghdad for a meeting with the dictator organized by local Baath Party representatives. The Baathists had ordered the Shiites to travel to the capital to pledge support to Saddam. But as palace officials led the 40-man delegation into an assembly room, the sheik grabbed a microphone and looked the dictator in the eye. “We have been treated unjustly,” he said. “We want answers, your excellency. Tell us what has happened to our sons.” The sheik will never forgot the look of surprised annoyance that flickered briefly across Saddam’s face, or how the dictator cut him off midsentence with a flick of his hand. “He turned to his minions and said, ‘Why did you bring them here? Take them away’.”
Sheik Hassan al-Issa told me this story on a balmy evening in Kufa, two weeks after the downfall of the tyrant who had taken away his sons and repressed his fellow Shiites for a generation. My Iraqi fixer, a Shiite from Basra whose sister was married to al-Issa’s nephew, was paying a courtesy call on the sheik upon our arrival in the district, and he had invited me to accompany him. It was a visit back in time to the Shiite rural heartland, a part of the country that been closed to Western journalists and almost all other foreign visitors since Saddam seized power in 1979.
The region is lush, with fields of date palms irrigated by the waters of the Euphrates River, mud-walled villages and proud tribal peoples whose customs and dress have barely changed over the centuries. It was not, however, isolated from the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that dominated Iraq until last month: Baath Party members infiltrated every village, informers were everywhere and Baathist rules and regulations covered most aspects of life. Now that the Baathist infrastructure has been destroyed, power has been flowing back to tribal rulers such as al-Issa. My two evenings spent with the sheik last week provided insights into how the country’s rebirth is progressing in villages far from Baghdad–and the role that local figures such Hassan al-Issa are playing in that resuscitation.
When I arrived at 6:30 on a Monday evening, the sheik–a kindly looking man in his late 60s–was sitting on the floor at the far end of his nearly empty traditional meeting house, known as a madaife, a 100-foot-long, 20-foot-wide hall carpeted with faded Oriental rugs and lined with pillows. He was waiting for the traditional evening gathering of the men of the tribe to begin. The scuffed white cement walls were adorned with ancient Iraqi swords, spears, an Ottoman-era rifle, and sepia photographs of fierce looking Arab warriors in flowing white robes–including the sheik’s grandfather, a leader of the al-Issa tribe who had participated in the 1920 Iraqi uprising that led to the end of British rule in the territory. At the head of the room stood a carved oak, velvet-backed chair mounted on a high platform, from which the sheik presides while issuing judgments according to traditional law.
Shortly after my arrival, the first tribal elders began to trickle into the hall. Most of them were grizzled figures clad, like the sheik, in flowing robes and black-and-white checkered kefiyeh headdresses. Several of them carried pistols; nearly all held amber prayer beads, which they clacked and rattled during the course of the three-hour event. The greetings ritual is always exactly the same. Those already present jumped to their feet to greet each new arrival with warm handshakes and expressions of “As-salam aleikum” (Peace be upon you). The immediate response: “Wa aleikum salam.” A few younger men in Western dress showed up, along with a dozen children, and soon the room was filled with more than 100 people. I was the first Western visitor to set foot in the madaife, the sheik told me, since a female Austrian archaeologist toured the region two decades ago. (Iraqi women and girls, of course, are strictly barred from entering the meeting house.)
The meeting proceeded at a relaxed pace–more social club than formal gathering. Elders sat against the walls, gossiping and clacking their beads, others paced around the hall or ventured outside to take in the night air. A retinue of assistants served glasses of sugary tea and men periodically huddled with the sheik to receive his wisdom and receive the latest news about the pursuit of local Baathists and power struggles among the Shiite clerics. Over the last month, for the first time in a generation, the men have been free to voice their feelings about Iraqi politics, they told me. “We had to be extremely careful about what we said before,” al-Issa said. “There were informers, spies everywhere–the security police even made small children report on their parents. But now it’s over–completely.”
The repression has been replaced with a whole set of new problems. The collapse of central authority three weeks ago obliged the sheik and a committee of elders to organize a police force in Kufra, paid for by tribal contributions. Kufra lacks both electricity and clean water (the madaife’s lights are powered by a generator) and the sheik has consulted in recent weeks with the local U.S. military commander in Najaf to press him to meet the community’s needs. “We face shortages of medicine, food supplies, fuel for the irrigation pumps, just about everything,” the sheik told me. The community’s biggest problem, he said, was the breakdown of the marketing system for its wheat crop, the agricultural staple of the area.
