Death squads, Isis and a new generation of fighters - why Iraq is facing break-up

More than a decade on from his first visits to Iraq, former Baghdad correspondent Colin Freeman finds the country in its worst crisis since Saddam's fall

As an MP for one of world’s most heavily-armed constituencies, Hakim al Zamili knows how to dress for the occasion. At parliament in Baghdad's heavily-guarded Green Zone, he normally wears a suit and tie. But on a recent visit to his support base in Sadr City, the capital's vast Shia ghetto, he donned the paramilitary fatigues of the Mahdi Army, the feared Shia militia that is now remobilising to fight the jihadist take-over of Iraq’s north.

"The Mahdi army fought on Iraq's behalf against the occupation, and now we are ready to do so again," Mr Zamili, a former deputy health minister, told The Telegraph last week, as unit of Mahdi army fighters walked past, bristling with machine guns. "The Iraqi army has their chains of command, but our peace brigades are more flexible."

"Peace Brigades" is the Mahdi Army’s euphemism for its bands of newly-reconstituted fighters - the same men who killed hundreds of British and American troops during the occupation. Officially, their new role is limited to defending the Iraqi capital and protecting Shia shrines, but in the past, their "flexibility" saw them act as death squads during Iraq's 2006-7 Sunni-Shia civil war. Mr Zamili himself was accused of running such squads from the department of health's hospitals, using ambulances to kidnap and murder hundreds of Sunnis.

_{Isis fighters hand out Qurans to motorists in Mosul (AP)}

As with much in Iraq, hard facts in Mr Zamili's case are thin in the ground - as were witnesses willing to testify to court - so when a US backed-prosecution took place against him in 2008, it promptly collapsed. Mr Zamili strongly denies the accusations, describing them as a smear campaign by Iraq's now-long gone occupiers. But the fact that he has been able to continue his political career, despite the gravity of the accusations, speaks volumes about the kind of polarised, sectarian atmosphere that is now tearing Iraq apart.

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Still, Mr Hakim, a tough-looking man who wears the short-cropped beard favoured by devout Shias, does seem right on one thing. When I bumped into him by chance in Sadr City last week, I asked him what the best way was out of the latest crisis. Was it to get rid of Nouri al Maliki, the authoritarian Shia prime minister, whom many liken to a new but less effective version of Saddam? He shook his head. "It is not about Maliki, he said. "It is much deeper than that. We are facing huge danger here."

It's not often I find myself in agreement with such company. But having spent the last two weeks in Baghdad - a city I lived in for two years after the war and have visited a dozen times since - it's hard to avoid the feeling that Iraq now faces meltdown.

_{Refugees at a mosque that is serving as a temporary refugee camp in Sinjar, Iraq, near the border with Syria}

On previous visits, even during the dark days of the civil war, I've always retained some optimism: that the Iraqi security forces would get their act together, that the ruined infrastructure would eventually be repaired, and that its huge oil wealth would help its politicians bury their sectarian differences.

Instead, almost exactly a century after Britain and France drew up the 1916 Sykes-Picot borders that turned Ottoman Mesopotomia into modern day Iraq, it is on the verge of a bloody break-up. In the north and west, the alliance of jihadists and ex-Ba'athists who have seized the cities of Mosul and Tikrit are now well dug in, better armed and better motivated than the government troops that fled without a fight. Diplomats fear that with even with the help of US airstrike and military advisors, the Iraqi army may simply not be up to the kind of desert Stalingrads needed to retake the cities from religiously-motivated rebels.

Which leaves the border lines devised by Iraq’s colonial overlords being redrawn anew by the head-chopping fanatics of Isis, the jihadist splinter organisation that even al-Qaeda has declared too brutal. Once dismissed as a grandiose jihadist fantasy, their official title - the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (an old term for greater Syria) – now looks set to become a statement of fact.

"This really is a crisis," one exhausted-looking diplomat in Baghdad told me. "There is no doubt about the scale of the threat that it poses to Iraq's continued existence as a state."

^{Sajad Mortada, 11, junior Mahdi army volunteer (COLIN FREEMAN)}

In the Iraqi capital last week, the sense of fear was palpable. Shops and restaurants were half-empty, while on the streets, patrols of nervous, balaclava-clad soldiers manned checkpoints nearly 100 yards - not that they inspire much confidence any more. On the road to the airport, road signs point to Mosul and Tikrit to the north and Fallujah and Ramadi to the west - all now part of the Isis fiefdom that has annexed the country's entire western flank. Now, the only safe exit that way is by air - although such has been the demand from panicking Iraqis that the next available flights in Baghdad’s travel agencies are three weeks from now.

By then, many fear the nightmare scenario might be underway – an uprising in Sunni districts of Baghdad by Isis sleeper cells, throwing an already jittery city into all-out chaos, and inviting a response from the Shia militias that could be even worse than the 30,000 lives in the civil war. In Sunni neighbourhoods like Adel, which was turned into a ghost town by sectarian bloodshed, memories of that dreadful period are still raw. Firas Jawad, 40, a shopkeeper tells a story about seeing a man gunned down in front of his wife and children, who waited sobbing by his body for five hours before anyone came to help. "People were afraid that if they came to help, they would get killed themselves," he said. "I still feel bad about it now. No-one, I tell you, wants a return to those days."

Indeed, some would prefer a return to the days of Saddam, whose brutality was at least a known quantity. Nowhere is that feeling stronger than in al-Adhamiyah, a wealthy Sunni neighbourhood that used to house much of the old Ba'athist elite. Nicknamed Chelsea-on-Tigris, it was a hotbed of the anti-US insurgency after Saddam's fall, and today is also home to many Sunnis who fled Shia death squads during the civil war. Among them is Sayida Nawas, who forced out of her home in Sadr City by a Mahdi Army unit that also kidnapped her brother. He still bears the signs of their signature torture – drill marks in his legs and arms.

"They tortured him almost to his last breath," said Sayida, who now works in an Adhamiya dress shop. "People will tell you that they don't want Saddam back, but they are lying. Yes, he was unjust sometimes, but he was unjust without discrimination."

_{Iraqi Shiite Turkmen Families fleeing the violence in the Iraqi city of Tal Afar}

So how is it that Iraq has come full circle, given that Britain and America spent so much blood and treasure trying to put it on the right track? And how come the jihadists are back, after the success of the 2007 US troop "surge", which encouraged Iraq's Sunnis to abandon their alliance with al-Qaeda?

The answer, like in neighbouring Syria, lies partly in the destabilising effects of the 2011 Arab Spring. It spread to Iraq the following yearand saw large demonstrations by the Sunni community, who claimed Mr Maliki's Shia government treated them as second-class citizens. In cities like Fallujah – once dubbed the “graveyard of the Americans” – hundreds of thousands gathered, alleging brutality by the Iraqi security forces.

But while their grievances bore some legitimacy, the protesters were always unlikely standard bearers for any kind of civil rights movement.

These, after all, were same Sunnis who had lorded over the Shias during Saddam's time, many of whom had spent the last decade in alliance with al-Qaeda. Amid pressure from his own side not to negotiate with “terrorists”, Mr Maliki largely ignored their demands, arresting senior Sunni politicians and breaking up protest camps, sometimes violently. But in doing so, he created fertile recruiting ground again for Isis.

_{Iraqi soldiers prepare to take their positions during clashes with militants in Mosul}

By the beginning of this year, the movement was stronger than al-Qaeda had ever been in Iraq, organising huge jail breaks and planting massive waves of carbombs, most aimed at Shia neighbourhoods. Armed with heavy machine guns captured in Syria, and run by veterans who had honed their skills against the US military, it was already a match for Iraq's regular army, taking the entire cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in January.

Today, the tables are even more in its favour. With nearly half a billion dollars captured from banks during its take-over of Mosul, Isis can easily buy the mercenary allegiance of Iraq's western Sunni tribes, who resent the Shia regime anyway. In its newly-claimed turf – dubbed “Sunnistan” by some - key bridges and entry points have been blown up or booby-trapped. And as Isis's muscle grows, the Iraqi army's wilters. In recent weeks it has lost 28 Abrams tanks and several helicopters, and has used up the Hellfire missiles supplied by the US last year. So although “Sunnistan” may not be recognised by the rest of Iraq, never mind the wider world, it can easily defend its borders.

Who will want to live there is another question. For all the stories of Sunnis in Mosul welcoming Isis as "liberators" from Shia rule, most are likely to chafe under Isis's Taliban-like religious edicts, which was one of the reasons why the 2007 "surge" worked. But with no US ground troops to help them rebel this time, Sunnistan could easily for exist for many painful years - a vast terrorist homeland in the very spot on earth where Britain and America tried hardest to stop it happening. The Shias, Christians and other minorities who live there right now will probably also have to flee.

^{A Mahdi Army fighter stands guards in front of a Shiite mosque as prayers leave (AP)}

Is there a way out? Diplomats hope that if Mr Maliki can form a more inclusive government, he might persuade "reconcilable" factions in Sunnistan that Iraq might still be worth saving. But the omens for everyone pulling together are not good. Only two weeks ago, Mr Maliki failed to get a parliamentary majority to grant him emergency powers because not enough MPs turned up for a quorate vote. Many had already left the country - hardly the response of a political class uniting in the face of a crisis.

Instead, the main show of official unity has been state propaganda, which has been broadcasting a special television show in which different Iraqi singers and entertainers dance together and sing patriotic songs. The British equivalent, perhaps, would be watching Bruce Forsyth, Cheryl Cole and Ant and Dec all warbling away. And judging from the bemused laughs it gets from most Iraqis, it is about as effective, suggesting the government is every bit as in denial as it was before Saddam's fall.

Osama Helfi and his son Ibrahim, a member of the Mahdi Army's youth wing

Meanwhile, with little inspirational lead from their political, many Iraqis are preparing to fight again - but not necessarily under government control. In Baghdad last week I met Raad al Khafaji, a powerful Shia sheikh who spent three years as a US detainee because his 50,000-strong tribe had supported the Mahdi army. Already he has had some 4,000 of his men volunteer to fight Isis, including an 80-year-old who offered to be a suicide bomber. "I told him that was against our religious principles," he said. "But yes, we are ready to defend our nation from these dark forces."

At the other end of the age range, a new generation of fighters - some too young even to remember the US invasion - are being groomed for war. In Sadr City last week were youngsters like five-year-old Ibrahim Helfi, dressed in Mahdi Army fatigues by his father Osama, a veteran militiaman. “He is in the Mahdi Army's youth wing, and when he grows up he will defend Iraq" said Mr Helfi proudly, as his son struggled under the weight of an assault rifle.

The question now, though, is whether there even be an Iraq to defend by then.

Source : The Telegraph