TESTING GROUND.

The New Yorker's complete coverage of the conflict in Iraq.

In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, three days before the country's recent national elections, Youssef al-Emara, a man in his mid-fifties, visited the office of Majid al-Sary, a forty-two-year-old official in the Ministry of Defense. Emara, who had just been appointed to the same ministry, had a difficult political problem that he wanted Sary's help in resolving. He didn't realize that he and the man behind the desk were old acquaintances, with a certain shared history, until Sary reminded him. They then spent several hours talking over the unhappy past.

In 1982, in the second year of the twentieth century's longest conventional war, both men were young officers in the Iraqi Army--Emara was a thirty-three-year-old major, Sary a twenty-year-old lieutenant--who slipped separately across the border and defected to Iraq's enemy, Iran. They were from Basra and, like most people in southern Iraq, they were Shiites. Otherwise, they could not have been more different. Emara, bearded, stocky, and square-headed, with the wary manner of a man who has long been involved in underground politics, is a strict Muslim, who bears a prayer bruise in the middle of his forehead. His intention in defecting was to fight to spread Iran's Islamic revolution to his own country. Sary, for his part, keeps his cleft chin clean-shaven; he is a dapper dresser who laughs and cries easily. As a young man, he liked to drink and chase women. Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, was then a cosmopolitan port with spice shops owned by South Asian merchants and night clubs with Egyptian bartenders and Kuwaiti patrons; it had been a congenial place for him, until the war. Sary fled Iraq to escape the brutality of Saddam Hussein's regime and the pointless war it had launched.

Emara and Sary first met in an Iranian town east of Tehran, where they and other Iraqi defectors decided to form an opposition group. But they couldn't agree whether to call it the Free Officers Movement or, as Emara wanted, the Free Islamic Officers Movement. In the end, Emara's faction prevailed, and Sary was pushed out of the organization, which came under the control of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and was renamed the Badr Brigade, after a famous battle in 624 A.D., when the Prophet and his faithful supporters, though vastly outnumbered, defeated the Meccan Army.

Emara became Badr's artillery commander. The militia expanded with the recruitment of prisoners of war: Iran, which eventually held up to seventy thousand Iraqis, pressured the Shiites whom they captured to join their Persian brothers against the apostate tyrant who was killing their religious leaders in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Remarkably few Iraqi Shiites were willing to place sectarian belief or self-interest ahead of national loyalty, even though those who refused faced years of squalid confinement. Those Iraqis who did reverse their allegiance were led into combat, in the marshes north of Basra, by Emara. The Badr Brigade earned a reputation for ferocity, and Emara felt no compunction about killing fellow-Iraqis.

Sary quickly found that he liked revolutionary Iran no better than fascist Iraq, and he moved on to Pakistan. In 1985, the Pakistani intelligence service arrested him and turned him over to Iraq. Sary spent two years in Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, and in other prisons that he said were even worse. He was in solitary confinement for eighteen months; after being sentenced to death, he watched friends taken away for execution while he awaited the same fate. Instead, in 1987, Saddam, who was losing the war and was short of manpower, issued a general-release order, and Sary found himself once again a soldier in the Iraqi Army. He served out the war in Basra with an air-defense unit. By then Basra was on the front lines; Iranian troops, just seven miles away, constantly shelled the city from across the Shatt al-Arab waterway. Saddam had launched the war to seize the waterway and to prevent Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's leader, from inspiring Iraq's oppressed Shiite majority to rise up and create the Islamic Republic of Iraq. But when the Iran-Iraq War ended, in 1988, after eight years and more than a million casualties, the border remained exactly where it had been in 1980: in the middle of the waterway. "Nobody won," Emara said. "Ask Saddam what it was for."

The next war came to Basra in 1991, when the American-led coalition expelled Saddam's forces from Kuwait. Sary had been sitting in his house for three years, reading history and poetry; he was afraid to leave, and his record made him unemployable. On the morning of March 2nd, Sary's cousin arrived with the news that, during the night, in al-Hayaniya, the vast slum west of downtown, young men, using weapons they had bought from soldiers of the routed Iraqi Army, had taken over a police station and attacked Baath Party offices. Women were in the streets shouting, "Saddam is falling!" Sary was swept up in the spontaneous uprising. He had nothing to lose and, suddenly, nothing to fear. "It wasn't a decision," he said. "It was like a historical movement for me. I heard that the people started to move against the regime and I moved myself. I attacked the intelligence building." Sary called the Iraqi intifada "ten days of happiness."