A Shi'ite Awakening in Southern Iraq

Guest post by Irfan Chowdhury, researcher and contributor to Middle East Eye

Irfan speaking at the Hastings Says No To War March

Felicity Laurence writes: On Sunday 29^th April, members of Hastings Jews for Justice joined a Stop the War action in which we marched slowly from Hastings town centre to the Peace Garden in Alexandra Park.  People from many different organisations came together to proclaim their opposition to the war against Iran, and to the accompanying invasion of Lebanon and the ongoing genocide in Gaza – and to all war. It felt profoundly important for us in HJJ to be part of this local action.

Among the speeches was Irfan Chowdhury’s imagining of how an Iraqi person who had lived through the onslaughts on their country and its people over the past decades might be feeling today.  Irfan’s speech, informed by his own research on the devastating and brutal experience of Iraqi people at the hands of those from our own country, was powerful and moving.  It gave a strong – and rarely heard – non-western/non-global north perspective on the lives of those whom we have destroyed over and over again, across the region, across the generations. And it offered a special kind of understanding of what a freed Palestine– the nub of it all – means for people living in the Middle East inferno.

We felt that Irfan’s words deserved a much wider audience, and so, with his permission, we are publishing them in the form of a guest piece here:

On 13 March, hundreds of Iraqi Shi’ites came together in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, to participate in the annual Quds Day rally in solidarity with the Palestinians, and to mourn Iraqi Shi’ite fighters who had been recently killed in US airstrikes on the country. Two weeks previously, a funeral was held in Basra for an Iraqi Shi’ite fighter from the city, who had been killed in a US airstrike. Shi’ite armed factions have been targetingUS and European bases in the region with rockets and drones, in an attempt to expel Western forces from Iraq, and in defence of Iran, which is being attacked by the US and Israel.

Amidst these scenes, as a PhD researcher of British war crimes in Iraq – knowing how the British behaved in southern Iraq, and the effects that this behaviour often had on the local population – I wonder what a Shi’ite Iraqi man in one of these armed factions must be feeling, given all that he has gone through. A traumatised mind, a hopeful soul; lost in an unjust world, forging a courageous path. I imagine one of these fighters, and I think about what his story might be, which I will narrate here.

The Path to Resistance

He grew up hearing from his parents and other family members about the repression of Shi’ites under Saddam Hussein; not allowed to participate in public mourning rituals for the Prophet’s grandson, Imam Hussain – the sacred Ashura and Arbaeen processions. The killing of hundreds of thousands of Shi’ites by Saddam’s regime – massacred on the streets in the 1990s after the US encouraged them to rise up, only to abandon them; others tortured to death in Saddam’s dungeons in the 1980s, all while the US and Britain supported the regime.

He remembers his family’s initial hope when the British invaded Basra in 2003; a chance to be free from this tyranny. That hope was quickly dashed when British soldiers began acting like a secret police force themselves; kicking down people’s doors, tipping furniture upside down, frightening children, hooding the men and taking them away to be tortured. He grew up in this atmosphere of fear and chaos; saw the injuries on his uncles and brothers after they were detained, the casual beatings that were meted out by British soldiers. He knew of the religious humiliation, such as a teenage boy being slapped in the face by a soldier and told: “Shi’ites are shit”, and heard whisperings of sexual abuse. He also heard about the US’s behaviour in the rest of Iraq; the bombings, the snipings, the torture at Abu Ghraib – similar to the techniques that the British used in their own detention centres here in the south.

He witnessed the chaos unleashed by the occupation; the looting, the criminality, the abject poverty. The sectarian violence, with Sunnis attacking Shi’ites, and Shi’ites attacking Sunnis. The terror of al-Qaeda’s suicide bombings. He saw his mother desperately trying to protect her children; doing all that she could, even though she was powerless against these forces. He remembers in 2006 when a British Lynx helicopter was shot down over Basra; carried out by a nascent Shi’ite armed faction which got its weapons from Iran. There was jubilation on the streets when the helicopter went down – he was there, dancing with his friends, pumping his fists – and the British responded to the joyful crowd with live ammunition and baton rounds.

He remembers that same year when Israel invaded Lebanon, massacring Shi’ites in the south of that country; and the euphoria that followed Israel’s defeat in that war. He remembers feeling enraged at Israel’s abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

When the British left in 2009 – chased out of Basra by these Shi’ite fighters – and the US began to leave in 2011, there was a reprieve from the worst violence and instability. But with the onset of revolution in Syria in 2011, which morphed into a sectarian civil war – propelled by the US and other states, as they pumped weapons into the country to support various sides – Iraq once again began to fracture. Then, in 2014, the breaking point came; a group called Daesh – many of whose fighters were former Ba’athists, loyalists of Saddam Hussein, in Iraq – began sweeping through Iraqi cities, destroying Shi’ite mosques and Christian churches, attempting to exterminate anyone who did not conform to their totalitarian worldview. The US-trained Iraqi Army fell apart in the face of this advance; which led Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shi’ite cleric in Iraq, to call on able-bodied Iraqi men to rise up and defend the country. Some Shi’ite armed factions that had resisted the US-British occupation reconstituted themselves – including the one which shot down that British Lynx helicopter all those years ago – and fought against Daesh. This young man joined one of these factions, fighting alongside Sunni tribesmen and Sunni volunteers who were also trying to defend the country from Daesh.

Victory came in 2018; Daesh was largely defeated. But the Americans were back in Iraq, and they had no intention of leaving. So, soon afterwards, he and his friends in some of these armed factions began to rocketAmerican bases, just like had happened during the years of occupation between 2003 and 2011. A tit-for-tat cycle of escalation began, and in 2020, the US assassinated Qassem Soleimani – an Iranian commander who had helped lead the fight against Daesh – and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iraqi commander who had answered Sistani’s call and fought alongside Soleimani.

He and his friends in some of these armed factions began to rocket American bases.

Against this backdrop of fighting in Iraq, Yemen had been reduced to rubble by a US/British-backed coalition of Sunni Arab states, and yet its Shi’ite revolutionary rulers had somehow emerged victorious – a glimmer of light for him and his friends.

With operations against the US military in Iraq now burning low, the world was flipped upside down again in 2023, when Israel began pummelling Gaza with a level of intensity that was unheard of. Entire families were being wiped out day after day; children were being burned alive and slaughtered on an hourly basis. And so, he and his friends in these by now battle-hardened Shi’ite armed factions decided to do what they could to protect the people of Gaza; they believed that by resuming rocket and drone attacks on American bases, and launching drones towards Israel, they could bring about a ceasefire in Gaza. They knew what they were risking by doing this. Sure enough, the US began bombing Iraq once more; he watched his friends perishing in American airstrikes, and he knew he could be next at any time. But he stayed the course, trying not to get targeted as he went out night after night, setting up the launch pads in the undergrowth. Every day, he saw the images streaming in from Gaza, whose Sunnis and Christians were being massacred; and he knew that his Shi’ite brethren in the hills of southern Lebanon and northern Yemen were treading the same path, trying to act as some form of shield for this defenceless population. He felt that they were following the path of Imam Hussain, taking the stand that he took at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD; standing firm against injustice, even when outnumbered, even when everything seems hopeless.

Gaza was annihilated; many of his friends were killed. But he knew that the region would ignite again; the US and Israel would not stop at Gaza, would not stop at Palestine, would not stop at Lebanon.

Back in the field, spurred on by faith, as a terrible fire burns through the region.

He and his surviving friends lay low.

Until the inevitable happened: the US and Israel launched a war against Iran. They killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was revered among many Shi’ites across the region; and the US bombed an Iranian primary school, killing more than 100 children. In Iraq, US/Israeli airstrikes hit the south and killed two Shi’ite fighters, on that very first day of the war, even before any armed factions in Iraq had joined the fighting.

And now the real battle has commenced; he is back in the field, accompanying his Shi’ite brethren in Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, spurred on by faith, with the ruins of Gaza still crying out to the skies, as a terrible fire burns through the region.

He knows that this time is different.

He has decided that this time, he won’t stop fighting. Not until the invaders leave Iraq. Not until the darkness is lifted. Not until Palestine is free.

© Irfan Chowdhury - only to be republished with permission of the author.