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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The day in mid-April that the Iraqi mujahideen executed an Italian security guard who had been taken hostage near Fallujah, I went dynamite fishing on the Tigris. My host was a Shiite cleric, Ayad Jamaluddin, whom I met in Baghdad last summer. He lives on the river, in an imposing house supplied by the Coalition Provisional Authority, to which he has close ties, although they aren't as close now as they were when we first met. There were more bodyguards outside the house than I remembered, and a gauntlet of cement-filled oil barrels. There were also more new cars parked in the compound, late-model black Mercedes-Benzes, mostly, and a dark-blue Rolls-Royce with cream-colored leather seats and a gold-plated front grille. Gardeners were watering a carefully clipped lawn. Jamaluddin met me in a room with teal-green glazed brick walls and Islamic fretwork, and we walked to the garden in back of the house, where there was a raised stone platform ringed by carved stone plinths. It was designed for Sufi prayers. The previous inhabitant of the house, Saddam's vice-president, who now has a ten-million-dollar price on his head, is a practicing Sufi. The platform was not far from Jamaluddin's most conspicuous contribution to the garden, a mudhif, a reed house with an arched roof, traditionally used for meetings by the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. Jamaluddin's mudhif is about twenty feet wide by eighty feet long and stands perhaps twenty feet high. The floor is covered with handwoven Bedouin carpets, and the walls are lined with kilim cushions. The mudhif is air-conditioned, but it also has elegant ceiling fans. Jamaluddin intended it to be a conference center, he told me last summer, where people could meet to exchange ideas freely. It was a symbol of Iraq's position as a bridge between East and West, and he relished the irony of its being in the garden of Saddam's deputy: "It is built out of reeds that come from marshes drained by Saddam."
Jamaluddin is a handsome, serene man of forty-two with a short, neatly trimmed beard. He was wearing a white robe with a brown suede vest and a white crocheted skullcap. We walked through the garden, along paths shaded by date palms and planted with roses and gardenias, and out to a parapet above the river. A metal fence along the riverbank had been covered with a protective screen of corrugated roofing, and there were armed men in guard towers at the corners of the garden. We sat in plastic chairs and drank tea. Jamaluddin smoked a Cuban cigar while we watched some of his security men carry a plastic bag down the bank and fiddle with something inside it. Jamaluddin explained that it was TNT, which they were preparing for the fishing expedition.
The Jadiriyah bridge spans the Tigris a few hundred yards upriver from Jamaluddin's house. The old Tariq Aziz mansion, which is now the home of Abdulaziz al-Hakim, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, is next to the bridgehead. I asked Jamaluddin how he felt about having Hakim as his neighbor. He laughed. "It's good for my security," he said. The Hakim complex is crawling with bodyguards and gunmen from sciri's Badr corps, which is the largest and best-organized Shiite militia in the country.
A white plastic pedal boat was tethered to a jetty in the bullrushes along the bank below us. The men who had been fiddling with the TNT climbed into the boat, and only then did I realize that we would not actually be doing the fishing ourselves but observing it. The men pedalled into the river, a little upstream. One of them threw something out of the boat, and there was a tremendous boom and upwelling of water, green on top and black underneath. It looked as though a huge jellyfish had appeared. This quickly subsided, and the men in the boat pedalled around the spot for a while and then drifted downriver. We looked at the water, expecting to see some stunned river fish float up, but nothing happened. The river moved along, marked here and there by little whirlpools and swirling currents. The water was lime green, with pink and gray flecks in the fading light of day. In a few minutes, some tiny silvery fish appeared on the surface, no bigger than a finger.
Jamaluddin is the youngest son of a religious scholar from the Shiite holy city of Najaf and the nephew of a famous Iraqi poet. He participated in student protests against the government in the late seventies, and when Saddam came to power, in 1979, he was sentenced to death. He got out of the country, going first to Iran, where he studied Islamic religion and philosophy, and then, in the mid-nineties, to Dubai, which is his primary residence and where his six children and two wives live. One of the wives is a wealthy Iranian woman and the other is from Dubai.
Late in 2002, Jamaluddin was approached by American officials who were gathering together pro-Western Shia who could be counted on to help stabilize Iraq after the upcoming war. He was one of several Shia who were flown into the country by the Coalition just before Baghdad fell, and last summer he was full of ideas about forming a new political party and "tasting freedom," even though mainstream Shiite groups, like sciri, considered him too radical and had kept him off the Iraqi Governing Council. Jamaluddin says that he once believed in a Khomeini-style Islamist revolution for Iraq, but that he is now a fervent secularist. His current ideas about the separation of church and state would be considered heretical by many Muslims. (When I first met him, he had an Iranian house guest, Hussein Khomeini, the grandson of the late ayatollah, who advocated an invasion of Iran by the United States.)
Despite being marginalized by the Shiite establishment, for the first few months of the occupation Jamaluddin maintained a lively dialogue with the Americans. Now, however, he said, he isn't consulted often by Paul Bremer or other Coalition officials. The coolness set in early last winter, after Ayatollah Sistani began making pronouncements and issuing fatwas about direct elections and the constitution, and Bremer began accommodating him by accelerating the transition to Iraqi rule. "I advised them not to pay any attention to Sistani," Jamaluddin said. He thought that accommodation showed weakness. Sistani was not another Khomeini, but he was a fundamentalist, and he wanted Islam to play an important role in the new Iraqi state. Jamaluddin didn't see how this was compatible with ideas about a secular democracy taking root in Iraq.
After twenty minutes or so of roaming fruitlessly around the eddies downriver, Jamaluddin's men pedalled back to the jetty, and he suggested that we repair to the reed house to eat masgouf, the charcoal-grilled fish that is Iraq's national dish. Jamaluddin had bought a big fish earlier in the day, in case the dynamite fishing was unsuccessful.
The American plan to install friendly Shiite former exiles in positions of power in Iraq began to go wrong early on, most spectacularly on April 10th last year, the day after Baghdad fell, when Abdel Majid al-Khoei, a member of an important clerical family, was murdered near the Imam Ali Mosque in Najaf, one of the holiest Shiite shrines. Khoei had been flown into Najaf in early April, and Ayad Jamaluddin met him there. They were staying with American military forces on the outskirts of the city. Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's primary Shiite candidate for a leadership position, was bivouacked a hundred and forty miles south, in Nasiriyah, with his little band of Free Iraqi Fighters.
Jamaluddin had not...
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