Inside the Imam Ali Shrine

NAJAF, Iraq — There’s a storm brew­ing over the Imam Ali Shrine in the old city here, and it’s going to get ugly.

We made it into the shrine today after an early morn­ing dash to the city of Najaf from Bagh­dad. I had to hun­ker down in the back while trav­el­ing through Mah­moudiya and Lat­i­fiya, because those are the two hot spots where most journos seem to get them­selves kid­napped. We made it through with­out inci­dent, how­ever, mainly because we were going about 180 km/hour and we were there before any of the kid­nap­pers were awake. It was 6:30 a.m. when we blasted through the twin burgs.

We hit Najaf around 8:30 a.m. or so. After a quick check in at the Sea of Najaf hotel, which is about as crappy as it sounds, we sur­veyed the sur­round­ings. The hotel was crawl­ing with journos. Some old friend from Bagh­dad who had been on this story for a week longer. And tem­pers are short. If you’ve not been here for three weeks, the com­pletely fried old hands just hiss at you.

We headed out. Najaf is divided into the old city and the new city. The old city is a roughly cir­cu­lar area sur­round­ing the shrine while the new city sprawls out to the east and south. To the north is the Wadi al-Salaam, the Val­ley of Peace ceme­tery that some say is the largest in the world. It’s cur­rently occu­pied by the U.S. Marines and other Army units. The Mahdi Army has been pretty roundly chased out of there.

Any­way, we had to cross Med­ina Street to get into the Old City. We approached from the south. The place is crawl­ing with snipers from all sides — Amer­i­cans, Mahdi and Iraqi Secu­rity Forces. We hugged the walls of the close-to-collapsing build­ings and raised our hands to show we were unarmed as we crossed every inter­sec­tion. H, and I had hooked up with some Iraqi and Alger­ian pho­tog­ra­phers from AP, AFP and Reuters, and they seemed to know what they were doing — until the Reuters guy almost started cry­ing in one inter­sec­tion. It’s under­stand­able. It’s an incred­i­bly stress­ful thing to do, to walk out into the mid­dle of a free-fire zone with a bullet-proof vest, “TV” or “Press” taped to it, and hands raised in the air. Through­out this 2 hour long ordeal, we were con­stantly sur­rounded by the sharp bang-bang of small arms fire and the colos­sal booms of Bradleys and M1-A1 tanks fir­ing. Oh, and mor­tars being launched and land­ing about two blocks over. That was fun. At one point, a huge plume of black smoke rose up and a Bradley or an M1-A1 — I couldn’t tell from the dis­tance — was return­ing fire. It was about 500m away from us, but the smoke was too thick for me to shoot through.

As we rounded a cor­ner approach­ing Med­ina Street, which is the Red Line on the front, the sound of gun­fire opened up around us. We scram­bled to the lee of a build­ing and squat­ted. As the exchange died down, incred­i­bly, some guy came up and sold us all ice cream.

I asked him what he was doing.

“I’m sup­port­ing the Mahdi Army,” he grinned. “They like ice cream and I have a lot of customers.”

It was good ice cream, I’ll admit. So while bul­lets whizzed around and over us, we crouched by the side of a wall that radi­ated heat from the mid-morning sun and snacked on a rain­bow swirl. Unreal.

Finally, the shoot­ing eased up and we backed up to another block fur­ther away to try another run toward the front. Mid-block, sev­eral men sat on the side­walk dis­cussing the state of the war.

“I would not call this the worst,” mused Muham­mad Jasim, who seemed to know the pho­tog­ra­phers. “All of the days in Iraq are worse than the oth­ers, but these are dark days.” He instructed his son to fetch us water, mat­tresses and pil­lows. We all stretched out on the side­walk and napped. The incom­ing shells didn’t seem to be get­ting any closer and I found myself oddly unwor­ried about this improb­a­bly turn of events.

Jasim doesn’t think Moq­tada al-Sadr should be in the shrine. “If you attack the Amer­i­cans,” he shrugged, “then they will attack you.” He seemed to think that Moq­tada should go far away and fight the Amer­i­cans some­where else. “All thath I hope is to see peace in the city and the shrine,” he said. As we spoke, men wan­dered up and soon enough it was a salon of sorts, with about a dozen Iraqi men, three pho­tog­ra­phers, assorted fix­ers and trans­la­tors and me. We lounged on the side­walk. I dozed. FInally, after a cou­ple of hours we decided to make another run for it to cross the line.

Now it got hairy.

Med­ina street is wide open, with a low divider in the mid­dle. We were sit­ting ducks. One of the pho­togs took off his white shirt and we waved that. We were clearly marked as jour­nal­ists, but friends had been telling me that the Amer­i­cans were shoot­ing at every­one. And the Iraqi Secu­rity Forces were even worse. The upside is that the ISF are bad shots and the Amer­i­cans are good enough to fire warn­ing shots above people’s heads and not hit them. It’s still dis­con­cert­ing to have a bul­let snarl past your ear by a few inches I’d imag­ine. I say “I’d imag­ine” because no one shot at us. We still were com­pletely freaked out by the idea of an instant death from an unknown enemy perched on a rooftop, but after a while, I started to breathe a lit­tle easier.

We crossed Med­ina street. Another street, who’s name I don’t know lay ahead, and it was guarded by tanks and other heavy armor. As we began to cross, I looked down to see a wire snaking across the alley­way we were prepar­ing to dart from. It led into a pile of debris, and the cas­ing of an unex­ploded shell was clearly vis­i­ble. Great. We were stand­ing on an IED. We decided it was time to move. This was when the Reuters pho­tog started crying.

When we got to the other side of the street, we began to relax a lit­tle. Until we saw another IED in the ground at our feet. We hopped it and entered the maze of the Old City.

We were met by the chil­dren of the Mahdi Army. They couldn’t have been more than 18 or so. And they were so small and frag­ile com­pared to the Amer­i­can troops who hulked over every­thing in this coun­try. They’re big guys. But our Mahdi Boys were friendly and searched us almost apolo­get­i­cally. We showed them our pass to the Shrine and they imme­di­ately guided us through a war­ren of twisty, cov­ered alley­ways that was straight out of the 11^th Cen­tury, which is about when the Shrine was built, I believe. (Some­one check me on that one.)

As we approached the Shrine, the gold dome gleamed in the mid-day sun. The twin minarets glit­tered. The whole thing is cov­ered with gold, pure gold, and the tile work is exquis­ite. I’ve never seen any­thing more ornate and beau­ti­ful. We dashed inside, avoid­ing more unseen marks­men, and beheld the Shrine itself.

Sur­rounded by high walls, the Shrine is the rest­ing place of Imam Ali, the third Imam and intensely holy to the world’s Shi’ites. This was their Vatican.

Inside, we were greeted warmly. The Mahdi know how to work the media, and they know the world press gen­er­ally likes the scrappy under­dog — espe­cially if they don’t actively try to kill you like the Sunni insur­gents do. And to give Moq­tada credit, he does try to dis­cour­age kid­nap­pings and he’s been help­ful in get­ting two of my friends released. There were no weapons in sight, and I don’t think — any­more — that there are any in the Shrine proper. But I did watch mor­tars being fired from just beneath and out­side the east­ern wall of the Shrine. The mor­tar teams were right up against the wall, allow­ing them quickly leave the mor­tar out­side and dash inside to become unarmed pil­grims again.

And this is piss­ing off a lot of the peo­ple who live around the Shrine. The Mahdi aren’t par­tic­u­larly accu­rate in their fir­ings, and they’re drop­ping live rounds in a densely pop­u­lated area. Houses and cars are being blown up. Peo­ple are dying, and the res­i­dents of Najaf are blam­ing Moqtada.

“There is no food, no water,” said Akil Ramahi, 32, in the streets before we entered the old city. “Death is bet­ter than this.”

“One man did all this,” he con­tin­ued. “If Sad­dam had been here, he would have got­ten rid of Moq­tada al-Sadr in one day. I accuse Moq­tada al-Sadr of destroy­ing the mar­ket — ” he was refer­ring to a bombed-out mar­ket — “Not the Americans.”

To be fair, more com­mon was the “pox on both houses” sen­ti­ment, but inter­est­ingly, the Mahdis are about as pop­u­lar as the Amer­i­cans, which is to say not very pop­u­lar at all. And one man had noth­ing good to say about the U.S. troops.

“Are the Amer­i­cans here just to see how many Iraqis are dying?” asked Dakhel Sha’ban. “Or is there a point to this shooting?”

We spent the after­noon in the shrine, and a group of human shields — they said — told me that they were helped by Allah.

“The Army of the Imam Mahdi is get­ting its power from God,” said Ali Hus­sein, 41. “Our mor­tars are destroy­ing things the Amer­i­can mor­tars are not.” Like tanks and heli­copters, he said. “This is a heav­enly power.”

The sup­port­ers in the shrines are devoted men, ready to die for Moq­tada, they assured me. And they would die for the Shrine.

“One of the most impor­tant things in our lives, as Mus­lims, is our Shrines, which are more impor­tant than our fam­i­lies, our chil­dren,” said Sha’ban. “We will die for them.”

One of the things I’m here for is a small story about the fabled trea­sures of Imam Ali sur­round­ing his sar­coph­a­gus. So I con­vinced Sheikh She­bani, Moqtada’s man in the mosque, to let me enter and take a few pic­tures of the shrine and the trea­sures of Ali. So now you see a lit­tle of what’s at stake here. (The green light is how they dis­play the sar­coph­a­gus and the trea­sures.) After see­ing the trea­sures, I was taken on a tour of the dam­age done to the shrine. It was calm affair, and I felt a bit like an insur­ance appraiser.

In both cases, Sheikh Mustafa Muham­madi told me calmly and with­out ran­cor that no Mus­lim could tol­er­ate it. He seemed to be tol­er­at­ing all right, how­ever, and I thought he would be the fire­brand! And this is some­thing I’ve noticed around Bagh­dad: The long-feared out­burst of Shi’a anger just isn’t hap­pen­ing. The ceme­tery has been bombed and occu­pied by infi­dels, the shrine has been dam­aged, and we keep hear­ing warn­ings of a loom­ing Shi’a upris­ing. But shouldn’t there have been some demon­stra­tions or expres­sions of con­cern? I hear rote expres­sions, said more with a feel­ing that it should be said rather than what they really feel. I don’t have any quotes or any­thing to back that up, and it’s really more the way they say it any­way. It’s just an impres­sion I’ve been struck by.

Finally, at 4 p.m., we high-tailed it out of there. The bom­bard­ments were get­ting closer and the Mahdi were return­ing fire more robustly. As we threaded our way out again, with hands raised at every inter­sec­tion, we ran into an Iraqi Army patrol. The lieu­tenant in charge said they were the Rapid Reac­tion Force, which has been one of the few units get­ting high marks from the Amer­i­can train­ers. They’re good, and I won­dered just what they were doing here, since Lt. Rafat Kad­him Mas­soun said they had come down from Bagh­dad just today. Are you going to storm the Shrine I asked him?

“We hope that tonight or tomor­row this will be fin­ished because the time for them to quit is over,” he said. “The Shrine will be attacked; the Marines are get­ting closer. In two or three days, this will be over.”

I’m wait­ing to see what hap­pens next. He might have been just talk­ing out of turn, but tonight might be interesting.

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