The Shadow of Iraq

On March 4, amid the ebb and flow of Baghdad’s infamous traffic, I saw a forty-something peddler sporting a bunny headband that glowed in the dark as he walked the neck of Al-Sinak bridge, hawking toys he carried in both hands. To his left was the Al-Mansour Melia, a derelict hotel built in the early 1980s where CIA operatives once checked in to offer their Iraqi counterparts satellite maps during Iraq’s war against the Ayatollah. To his right was a security complex with a pile of concrete security barriers waiting to be deployed in future protests. And behind him was Tehran’s embassy. On its mammoth T-walls were plastered the faces of some of those who perished in the twelve-day war against the Islamic Republic last year. A sign called them “victims of the Zionist aggression.” Among them was a little girl whose eyes stared into the void, a mute emissary from the afterlife who can no longer play.

At the other end of the bridge, the downtown’s atrophied architectural splendor dissolved into the night. On the fifth day of the unprovoked U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, the national power grid was down due to gas shortages. The heart of the city was “quiet as a graveyard,” as the late Charles Simic once wrote. Driving to the east bank, I sped over the shallow waters of the Tigris and headed toward a protest just outside the Green Zone. For days, angry youths had gathered in a standoff with security forces, who prevented them from reaching Washington’s embassy. Policemen stood sentinel at hastily erected roadblocks—as locals call them, flying checkpoints—just as they did after 2003, when Saddam Hussein’s statue last stood at Al-Firdous Square. Nearly twenty-three years to the day after I watched its toppling on TV from a village outside Baghdad, I was greeted by a giant billboard looming over the entrance of the nearby Al-Alwiyah Club, where Gertrude Bell had lounged. It showed the image of Ali Khamenei, whose assassination has crowned him in the halo of martyrdom.

Down the street a child sold water outside the French Embassy ghetto. The guarded enclave houses international press bureaus where would-be “Middle East” editors had built easy careers at a time when the War on Terror presented hundreds of corpses a day. I parked on a side street in Al-Karrada and got on a bus headed to the demonstration near the hanging 14th of July Bridge. Known as Al-Jisr al-Mu‘allaq, it was designed by David B. Steinman and was later bombed during the Gulf War in 1991. More than 85,000 tons of explosives destroyed everything from baby milk factories to civilian shelters. Like broken sentences, several bridges fell in the Tigris, failing to touch the other shore. Now the 14th of July was the sole border keeping an angry mass from reaching the fortified embassy, a sprawling compound on an exclusive highway inaccessible to locals.

By nightfall, some two hundred had gathered under an overpass that is yet to open to traffic. The construction is one of many plans inaugurated by Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani, whose schizophrenic remodeling of Baghdad intends to project prosperity but has only erected an unconvincing simulacrum. Al-Sudani, who seems keen on preventing an escalation, ordering the arrest of those firing rockets at U.S. forces and energy facilities, was the target of scurrilous chants throughout the night, insulted and heckled as “an American agent.” One protester waved the Iranian flag; others hoisted portraits of Khamenei and Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr (father of prominent Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr), himself assassinated in 1999. One image showed Ayatollah Sayyid Ali al-Sistani, whose statement from earlier in the day condemned the U.S.-Israeli aggression and called for “a just and peaceful resolution to [the crisis posed by] Iran’s nuclear program.”

The atmosphere was tense but the standoff was peaceful, unlike previous nights when, according to security forces, “a number of security members came under fire and had their caravans and one of their vehicles burned.” Riot police had fired tear gas in return, dispersing the crowd. A few young women in their black abayas had showed up—a palpable legacy of the 2019 October Uprising, which saw thousands of young people turn out to protest government corruption, foreign intervention, low wages, and poor public services—but when I visited, the crowd mostly comprised middle-aged and young men. They sat on the curb or milled about, following the latest news on Telegram. It was a mournful and modest congregation, punctuated by chants against “the great Satan” that is the United States. Earlier in the evening news had come from Babil province, where a leader of Katai’b Hezbollah, a paramilitary group, was assassinated. His casket would be taken to his home in Baghdad the next morning for a final goodbye. Footage showed a modest dwelling in a blue-collar neighborhood, very different from the former bourgeois avenues favored by the nouveaux riches after 2003, including Sunnis and the self-styled revolutionary Shia elite.

Not everyone under the overpass that night was a member of Al-Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Popular Mobilization Units, the constellation of paramilitary groups that fought the Islamic State before some factions metamorphosed into considerable political and economic entities. Someone in his early twenties asked if it was safe for him to wade deep into the crowd. I told him it seemed fine, but he should be alert. It seemed to be his first protest. He reminded me of two young men I had met during the 2019 protests who had lost brothers fighting against the caliphate only to be forgotten, with not even a pension to support the families they left behind. Had he lost a brother in Mosul? I kept the thought to myself as he walked away. The words “Death to America” were graffitied in red paint on pillars near where we stood.

Shiism and the ready-made category of “proxies” are too simplistic explanations for these protests and expressions of cathartic anger. Something afoul persists. The roads taken by each protester are riddled with traumatic memories from years of occupation. Iraq remains a country with deep wounds of neocolonialism and camouflaged ruination. Its unions and revolutionary parties have long lost their capacity to mobilize. For some of those living in liminal districts, the response seems less about the attack on the Islamic Republic itself; rather, the sight of another Muslim of humble origins murdered for standing up to common enemies during a holy month and amid genocide in Gaza is unbearable, let alone the humiliation caused by another defeat before Israel. Palestine and Dahiyeh are not so easily forgotten, no matter the American codger’s “Board of Peace” and his spurious declaration that the war on the besieged strip is over. The weight of all the concrete in Gaza is crushing, the images from the elementary school bombed in Minab impossible to unsee. In personalizing Khamenei’s loss some find an antidote against what depersonalizes and makes life disposable and obsolete.

Yet the Shia are not a monolith; fissures run between the haves and have-nots as well as through the paramilitaries. In another demonstration last week, a young protester seemed livid that senior leaders ride in Tahoe SUVs to funeral halls but do not join them to help set the embassy alight, as they have done before. Comfortable with parliamentary representation, posts in the highest echelons of power, and access to state revenues and real estate investments, some Shia elites opt for restraint, even if factions under the moniker “Islamic Resistance in Iraq” carry out limited attacks against U.S. bases, mostly in Erbil. Their allies may be fighting an existential war that could also be theirs, but the status quo is unlikely to be traded for a coffin. Reactions have varied. Al-Sadr, at odds with Iran’s allies inside Iraq, has been watching from the sidelines. Nouri al-Maliki, the former premier currently grooming himself for a third term, retracted his condolences for Khamenei on X and is making overtures to the Beltway. Sheikh Akram al-Ka‘abi, leader of Harakat al-Nujaba’, chastised his ilk for being “shaken and servile” before Donald Trump. His later invectives against the Shia political elite were scathing; in one he spoke of a rat “leaking information about the mujahideen to Cypriot and Jordanian intelligence.”

By midnight, messaging from paramilitary leaders seemed to be taking a new dimension. One of them addressed U.S. citizens in their own tongue, urging them to “reclaim your country” and “protect your future.” I drove away along Abu Nuwas, a riverine street named after an Abbasid poet known for his licentious verses and wine-soaked revelries. In one poem, he writes that he would only make the pilgrimage to Mecca “after Baghdad’s delights expire.” There were times when they seemed endless, but that night the riverside park that once housed Isma’il Fattah al-Turk’s sculpture of the poet was silent, the grounds unkempt and strewn with litter. I thought of the specters of all those who could have walked the city streets but died too soon. The latest victim was Yanar Mohammed, a leftist women’s rights activist murdered on March 2 outside her Baghdad residence by unidentified assassins. Her monochrome portrait, smiling, was plastered on the city’s walls by her comrades at the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. “We did this,” the group stated in a message calling for protests on International Women’s Day, “to say clearly that killing women will not stop women’s struggle, and that bullets cannot silence the idea of freedom.”

Against the risk of online vilification, some Iraqis, including Shia, express schadenfreude at the misfortune of their eastern neighbor, whose regime and its allies in Baghdad they blame for Iraq’s decades of murder, displacement, and theft. In 2019, when unarmed youth took to the streets in a sect-transcendent uprising against the U.S.-installed regime and its neoliberal policies, the late supreme leader dismissed the movement as a Western plot. Hundreds were slain with impunity. But as plumes of smoke tower over Tehran, many recall the long nights when Baghdad was irreversibly defamiliarized by violence. I remembered the voice of the late communist poet Saadi Youssef. It was the United States, he writes in one poem, “that demolished a homeland over your head / and hired death squads / and uprooted the meaning of branches / from your garden.”

In the days following March 4, the girl’s image outside the Iranian embassy was replaced by Khamenei’s. U.S.-Israeli raids on paramilitaries intensified, as have counterattacks. Oil fields, U.S. troops, hotels, and Kurdish Iranian opposition camps in Duhok, Erbil, and Suleimaniyah have been hit by drone and rocket attacks. On Telegram, Iranian-aligned armed factions claim over two dozen operations each day, with some hitting Basra and reaching as far as Kuwait and Jordan. The familiar wail of sirens has returned to the capital, and the U.S. embassy was targeted by rocket fire. Al-Sudani called it “a terrorist act.” He insists Iraq shouldn’t be forced into war, but a familiar miasma already pervades the air.

This a portrait of another nadir, on the other side of our “regime change.”

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