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Residents of a Shattered City Begin to Pick Up Its Pieces
By Dexter Filkins, The New York Times
August 29, 2004
Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP for Yahoo Photos
Ajaf, Iraq -- In a corner of this ravaged city, the dead are marked by slips of paper, tucked into tiny bottles that mark the graves.
"Hamid Qadim Murtada," read one piece of crumpled paper. "Medina Street, Moktada al-Sadr Brigade, martyred."
"Old woman," read another slip that marked a tomb. "Medium height, black dress, dark skin."
"Haider Abdul Zahra, Najaf, martyred," read a third.
"He was a friend," said Walid Haadi, standing over Mr. Zahra's dusty grave and holding the piece of paper bearing his name. "He wasn't a fighter. He stepped out of his house, it was Friday, and he was killed by a sniper."
Mr. Haadi was one of dozens of Iraqis who came Saturday to this makeshift cemetery built on the edge of town. At the height of the fighting, which pitted Mr. Sadr's militia against American soldiers, it was too dangerous to take the bodies to the city's main cemetery, which had become a battleground. So the people buried their dead here, in this small outcropping of rocky soil at the end of the road.
There are perhaps 50 graves in all, most of them holding fighters of the Mahdi Army, including at least one from Iran. But civilians were buried here, too, like the old woman of medium height and black dress. By late afternoon, three of the graves were empty, their bodies carried away by families and friends.
The people of Najaf began their journey back to normal life on Saturday, the first truly calm day here in almost a month. After 23 days of unrelenting combat, the fighting came to a halt Thursday, when the country's most powerful Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, returned from abroad and secured Mr. Sadr's surrender. On Friday, Mr. Sadr's men vacated the Imam Ali Shrine, which they had turned into a fortress, for the first time in four months.
So when the sun rose Saturday, the people of Najaf went into the streets, looking over the damage, picking through the ruins, burying and digging up their dead. With the Mahdi Army fighters gone and the Americans pulled back, even the mundane rituals began to reassert themselves. One man sold cold Pepsi from the trunk of his car; another sold cigarettes.
But even as people got back to work, they paused, of course, to survey the breathtaking destruction that the battle had wrought: whole city blocks decimated, streets littered with shrapnel and shell casings, buildings reduced to dust. One man took his young son by the hand as they walked, pointing out the wreckage and trying to explain.
"You have to let me into my store, please let me into store," said a confused elderly man, Shakir Abdul Hussein, as he pleaded with the police. One of his shops, Mr. Hussein said, had already been looted of its carpets and bedding; he wanted to save the other before the looters got to it, too.
"Sorry, but there are too many unexploded bombs," an Iraqi police officer told him. "Give us two days."
After weeks of fighting, the streets of Najaf were left littered with unexploded shells, some tucked under buildings, some hidden in piles of rubble. One unexploded shell sat on the ground beneath a pupil's chair in the middle of the street. Another was stuck deep into the sidewalk, buried halfway, as if it had been planted like a knife.
The smell of death, too, was everywhere. Men walking down one of the Old City's narrow streets would suddenly catch a putrid drift, stop and begin to dig. Sometimes they found a dead animal, like a pigeon or a goat, sometimes a human form.
No one knows how many people died in the fighting here, some of the heaviest since the Americans toppled Saddam Hussein's government 16 months ago.
American officers said they had killed hundreds of Mahdi Army fighters, but there was no way to be sure. Mr. Sadr's office said the militia lost 110 fighters and suffered another 300 wounded. But with ready-made graves like the one at the end of the Rasool Street, it seemed that many more had met their end here.
The departure of the Mahdi Army appeared to free people to speak their minds for the first time in months. Since April, when the militia first took control of the shrine, people here have seemed to muffle their comments about Mr. Sadr and his men. On Saturday, people spoke openly about Mr. Sadr, even if some of the old fear remained.
"Moktada and those people around him, they know nothing," said an Iraqi cleric who had studied under Mr. Sadr's father, Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, a cleric who was widely respected by the mainstream Shiite establishment.
"Moktada, he just sat on his father's computer," the cleric said. "He is not an educated man."
With that, the cleric began to tell of the threats delivered to men like himself by Mr. Sadr's men. He pulled out a small handwritten letter from his pocket, delivered to him by the Mahdi Army. "Some clerics sell their consciences to Jews and foreigners," the letter said. "If you are not careful, you will be killed."
"Tell the truth about Moktada," the cleric said, and he walked away.
After they spent weeks pushing deeper into the city, the Americans, too, were hard to find on Saturday. One group of soldiers was helping to direct the flow of traffic, a much less strenuous duty than the Americans had grown used to lately.
One solider who seemed to be taking particular pleasure in his work was Sgt. First Class Willie Marshall, 33, of Hot Springs, Ark. On Thursday, while he was directing his armored personnel carrier in a firefight with the Mahdi Army, a sniper fired a bullet directly into his chest.
The bullet struck the armored plate that Sergeant Marshall was wearing, cracking it, and knocked him backward. But the plate did its job: he had a hole in his jacket and a shallow wound in his chest. He was back on duty the same day.
"The guy was a good shot," Sergeant Marshall said. "He aimed straight at my heart."
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