Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

[Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, Ned Parker, veteran Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, and Reuters’ Raheem Salman have written a groundbreaking profile of Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. To understand Iraq today, one needs to understand Maliki and his rise to power. Unfortunately, Maliki provides a dangerous lesson to Islamist leaders about how to consolidate and maintain power.]

By Ned Parker and Raheem Salman

BAGHDAD—It was December 2010, and Nouri Kamal al-Maliki sat in a faux palace, erected by Saddam Hussein, on the Feast of Sacrifice, one of the most sacred days in the Muslim Calendar. The politician, who had just secured his second term as prime minister of Iraq after an eight-month stalemate, sat in a gilded, thronelike chair, surrounded by members of his Shiite religious Dawa Party. Former enemies walked into the hall to congratulate him, and Maliki rose to embrace them. To his left was a founder of his party, the oldest surviving Dawa member, who had been tortured under Hussein and was now spending his golden years in quiet retirement near the Shiite shrine of Imam Khadim in western Baghdad. There were others like him, who basked in the pageantry like a balm for the jail, death, and humiliating exile they endured. Their grip on power, a feverish dream during decades abroad putting out tracts and plotting, now seemed permanent.

Hussein had once presented himself on television receiving obsequious visitors and inspecting his forces, and now Maliki did the same. The irony of the moment was not lost. But after years in the wilderness, the prime minister understood, as did his opponents who wished to replace him, the importance of strength and ruthlessness. Without it, you would perish.

There had been moments when Maliki recoiled from such displays, uncomfortable with the parallels. Once, he shuddered in anger when a Western official commented on the photos of him meeting dignitaries lining his walls. Maliki was disgusted. This was Hussein’s behavior, and the pictures were removed. But in the winter of 2010, in the sunset of the American presence in Iraq, Maliki was comfortable projecting power, and his aides deferred to him as they would a great man. He was confident he would dictate the makeup of the government and how power would be apportioned to his rivals. Those in the Shiite ranks who had conspired against him greeted him now as a conquering hero. If their smiles were false, their scheming was dead for the moment. The methods he had used to consolidate power were as cruel as those inflicted upon him and Dawa members under Hussein—arresting and torturing political enemies and turning a blind eye to his allies’ corruption and criminal acts.

But this was the price of his victory in Iraq. Maliki, disparaged by others as a Nixonian paranoid, given to rages and delusional displays of grandiosity, had persevered, tacking left and right on the touchstones of nationalism and his Shiite character—both coming naturally to him—in the name of survival.

At his moment of triumph, celebrated by friends and rivals, he could hardly imagine that he would soon be tested as never before. Despite his iron-fisted rule, Sunni areas harbored a resilient insurgency that would endure after the Americans’ departure. In contested lands in the north, the Kurds answered him with their own hard-headedness, wooing Turkey as a protector and landing large foreign oil corporations to drill for oil in disputed northern territories. Each step promised to bring the Kurds closer to a declaration of independence from Baghdad.

Eventually, a popular revolt inside Syria would push Maliki into a deeper embrace of Iran, convinced he needed his Shiite neighbor’s treacherous involvement as a check on Sunni competitors in Iraq and their supporters in Saudi Arabia and Turkey. In short, the reign of Maliki is an object lesson to other nascent Islamist leaders across the Middle East of how to consolidate one’s rule from the rubble of a toppled state.

To understand Maliki—this century’s first Arab leader elected through a genuinely democratic process, which prefigured the Arab Spring and came out of the extraordinary circumstances of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq—one needs to explore where Iraq’s prime minister comes from, his early days as an ambitious young revolutionary, and his defining decades of hardship and punishing exile. This is a man swept up by the spirit of Islamic revolution, who lost his home and family in the name of an idea, and then plotted for 23 years devoting himself to incremental guerrilla violence. All the while, his backers and allies betrayed him as he bought time, studied them, and drew strength from every blow until one day he was stronger and tougher than them all. He understood what it was to lose everything, be betrayed, and then surprise your enemy by outlasting him.

His past provides insight into whether he will be able to transform Iraq into a freer society or perpetuate the country’s recent history of violence, corruption, and authoritarian rule. His experiences—his successes and failures—are likely to provide their own critical lessons to Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia, states that have recently cast off authoritarian rulers. Their citizens, now grappling with long-suppressed, volatile questions of ethnic, religious, tribal, and national identity, may look to the course taken by Maliki and Iraq as a cautionary tale. His story suggests the dangerous ways secular and Islamist parties, shaped and defined by an authoritarian and conspiratorial political culture, are poised to mirror the very oppressors they cast off. His efforts to govern show how difficult it is to lead a transformation to democracy, while ending a period of vendettas.

ORIGINS: 1950-1979

Nouri al-Maliki’s home village of Janaga lies along the Euphrates. Wandering the family’s date groves as a child, the legend of his grandfather, Mohammed Abu Mahesin, surrounded him. Tall, with an owlish face, Abu Mahesin wrote poetry about his homeland and revolution—incendiary verses recited at mosques and public gatherings, urging people to fight for Iraq’s freedom against the British. He represented the Shiite clergy and led his tribesmen in the 1920 armed uprising against the British occupation. Maliki would memorize his grandfather’s poems, imbued with their love of Iraq and revolution. His father, Kamel, kept Abu Mahesin’s political traditions alive, pursuing a career as an ardent Arab nationalist, inspired by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdul Nasser. In 1963, when the Baath Party and military officers violently overthrew the Iraqi government, Kamel sided with the military in forcing out the Baath. When the Baath plotted their own successful coup in 1968, they briefly detained Kamel, having not forgotten his loyalties five years earlier. Maliki’s father exited jail with a black eye.  

The son watched the failure of his father and elders to build an Arab state equal in strength to the West and Israel. The humbling loss to Israel in the 1967 war proved decisive, so Maliki turned back to the Islamic values of his grandfather to revive Iraq and the Arab world—embracing the then clandestine Dawa Party and its spiritual guide the late Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Sadr. Even now, Maliki proudly displays the ring the Sadr wore at the time of his execution by Hussein’s security apparatus in April 1980. Sadr, who earned a reputation in Shiite Islamist circles as a child prodigy, joined in founding the Dawa Party at a secret meeting in the late 1950s. Seeking a religious answer to the Middle East’s emerging secular nationalism and Western encroachments, Maliki joined the party in a mosque in Hindaya, the larger town that bordered Janaga. The party took hold of his life, and when other young men chose Baghdad University, considered liberal and urbane, Dawa members asked him to attend a religious college associated with Sadr.

The work of a young party member in the late 1960s focused on promoting Shiite Islam through producing magazines and organizing events at mosques and on religious holidays. To be a member was to belong to a secret society. The very name Dawa would not be revealed publicly until the early 1970s when the government arrested and executed its first members. After college and serving briefly in the army, Maliki found a job in accounting at the education department in Hilla, an hour’s commute from his home. On the surface, Maliki’s routine as a minor bureaucrat was ordinary, but behind the scenes, he quietly preached the teachings of Sadr and Islam to his relatives. Maliki did his best not to attract attention, unlike his friends who didn’t shave and refused to shake a woman’s hand. Yet already, he was under scrutiny for having gone to an Islamic college in Baghdad and had not been made a teacher, because the government viewed him warily. He sought to win over the Hilla education department’s party members. “The senior Baath Party member in our department fell under the impression that I was a Baathist,” he recalled. 

By Maliki’s final year in Hilla, however, the noose had tightened. Inspired by the February 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, Dawa had become bolder, with pilgrimages to Najaf to declare their loyalty to Sadr. These marches encouraged Hussein to multiply his arrests and executions of members of underground Shiite religious groups and silence the moderate voices in his government. Maliki continued traveling by bus to work every day but now sounded angry and nervous. He criticized a visit by Hussein to a village in the south where the dictator handed out presents, calling it shameless. At work, the mood was tense after masked men stormed their building and beat Maliki’s friend, who was suspected of being Islamist. In his final weeks at work in Hilla, Maliki and a colleague, Kareem, were summoned by security officials for questioning on suspicion of being Dawa members. “They blindfolded us and took us to the security and put us together in a garage. When my friend Kareem asked what was going on, I told him this is the end of our lives,” Maliki remembered.

But by a stroke of luck, a judge sympathetic to Maliki, later executed by the regime, freed him, and the young revolutionary promptly prepared for departure. At 2 p.m., October 20, 1979, Ahmad Najat, a police security officer from Hindaya, entered his office building with three officers and asked for Maliki. A friend said he hadn’t shown up that day. Najat slammed his hands together as if he had lost something, then rushed down the street to an alley where 16 security cars were waiting, and sped off.  

INTO EXILE: 1979-1981

That same morning, Maliki walked from his lush farming village to Hindaya. A police car passed him, but the officers planned to arrest him at work that day, so they ignored him. Maliki, passport in his pocket, hailed a ride through the desert of the western Anbar province to the Jordanian border, where guards demanded his papers. He handed over his passport and tried to act normal, explaining he was going to Amman for medical treatment and would be back in two days. Behind him was detention, torture, and death. Maliki arrived in Damascus with nothing. He waited at the tiny Abbas hotel for an old friend from his army days. Each vowed to keep the ideas of Islamic revolution alive. Back in Iraq, the state had confiscated Maliki’s family land and, over the next decade, killed at least 67 of his relatives. His wife and two-year-old daughter changed houses regularly, fearful that they would be killed. It took a year to smuggle them to Damascus. In April 1980, came the execution of Sadr and Sadr’s sister. Stunned by the loss of their movement’s spiritual leader, Dawa rallied 45 protestors in front of the Iraqi embassy and tried to storm inside, but Syrian forces stopped them.

The Baath Party had executed several Dawa members and religious figures before, but never a cleric of Sadr’s stature, respected across the Shiite world. His execution marked a hardening of sectarian divisions in Iraqi society, with Hussein killing anyone he suspected of affiliation with Dawa. The killings implanted vengeance as a guiding principle for Maliki and his generation of Islamists. Radicalized, Maliki drew on his military experience recruiting fighters to set up guerrilla cells in Iraq, training them and hiding weapons and pamphlets inside cars and bicycles entering the country. Their party carried out the Middle East’s first modern suicide bombing in 1981—a  suicide car bomb at the Iraqi embassy in Beirut—and conducted assassinations and sabotage against Hussein’s regime.

Maliki proved himself a tough leader in Damascus, establishing new communication channels with Dawa members from Iran to Beirut as the movement reinvented itself in exile as a resilient, battle-tested organization. The Dawa Party took notice and summoned Maliki to Iran to help run its military training camp in 1981. Hussein’s war with Iran had broken out the previous year, and Iraqi opposition groups were using Iran as a base for their efforts to topple Hussein.

THE IRAN YEARS: 1981-1989

Maliki confessed an infatuation with the Iranian revolution in its first bloom—a fervent belief in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a seminal figure who did what Shiite Iraqis could only dream of. “When the Iranian revolution began, we interacted with it madly. It was the first revolution with Islam embedded. Its leader wore the turban and was a cleric,” Maliki recalled. But actual life in the new Islamic Republic proved a rude awakening for the Dawa Party. Most members speak with bitterness of Iran and Khomeini to this day. 

Maliki, his wife, and a second daughter, born in Syria, arrived and settled into the small Dawa-run military camp outside of Ahwaz in Iran across the border from the marshes of southern Iraq. The camp, named after the recently executed Sadr, was run under the supervision of Dawa’s military veterans like Maliki and was in a dangerous location. Iraqi missiles often shelled the base. Over two years, Maliki saw 63 Dawa members die in bombardments. Maliki’s time in Ahwaz coincided with the growing tensions between Iran and Dawa. Both were comprised of Shiites, but Iran wanted Dawa as a proxy for its fight with Iraq—expecting Dawa to recognize Khomeini as the organization’s spiritual leader and submit to Tehran’s will. The demands sparked resentment among Dawa members who saw themselves as Iraqi Islamists, not puppets for Iran’s theology and ambitions. Unable to co-opt Dawa, Iranian political and military leaders formed a competing movement, coaxing senior Iraqi Shiite clergy including Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Hakim and his brothers—sons of an Iraqi grand ayatollah and founding members of the Dawa Party—to accept Iran’s offer of patronage and pledge allegiance to Khomeini as their religious guide. Rank and file Dawa members defected to the Hakims, joining their new party, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution, and their militia, the Badr Brigade.

Dawa’s leading members recall with hatred the dark hour when the Iranians announced the Ahwaz camp no longer belonged to Dawa and handed the facility to the Hakims’ Badr troops. Some remember Maliki marching to the front of Ahwaz’s mosque, telling fighters they could choose to carry on or leave, but the camp no longer belonged to them. It was a lesson to Maliki in the exercise of power and perception. Dawa was abandoned by those who saw that prestige was with the Hakims. People could be bought, and old alliances severed in an instant. Summoned to Tehran to serve on the party’s military committee, Maliki grew to hate life there and the small indignities that followed. “You don’t know their arrogance until you live among them,” Maliki told an American diplomat long afterward, explaining why he never learned Farsi.

Miserable, he returned to Damascus hoping for more freedom. Instead, Maliki found himself doing little but sipping tea in party offices, while suffering from stomach bleeding. Finally, he packed a suitcase and took off for Iran, hoping a change of scenery would lift his black mood and improve his health. But the situation in Tehran remained bleak. Iran had co-opted specific Dawa factions to carry out attacks, including the bombing of the American and French embassies in Kuwait in 1983. Another Lebanese Dawa member took part in the creation of Hezbollah. There was never a formal rupture between Dawa and its splinter groups. They were all fellow travelers who received funding from Iran, shared basic religious tenets, and believed in war with Hussein. The U.S. government eventually cleared Dawa’s main branch of responsibility for the attack in Kuwait. But U.S. officials declined to authorize meetings with senior Dawa leaders until 2002.

Asked about Iran’s manipulation of Dawa, Maliki told an American diplomat years later: “I don’t trust the Iranians for a minute.” In 1987, he quit Iran when its security services began to harass and kill Dawa members, according to a classified U.S. government biography of Maliki. One American diplomat remembered Maliki in 2004 choking up as he recalled a Dawa Party friend in the 1980s, who was jailed and executed by the Iranians for not pledging allegiance to Khomeini. Maliki roamed from the marshes of southern Iraq to the mountains of Kurdistan to Damascus as he strove to guard his independence and carry on his guerrilla fight. “I never stopped working in Iraq. I lived the suffering of the Iraqis,” Maliki said. “I refused any other nationality.”

Little was left of the young man who had grown up in a village off the Euphrates River. Pictures of him from this time show a middle-aged man standing unsmiling in gray fatigues with a prayer rug and worry beads in hands. He was known by his pseudonyms—Jawad, Abu Mohasin, Abu Isra. Nouri al-Maliki no longer existed.

[To read the rest of this article from the Spring 2013 Beyond Borders issue, click here.]

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Ned Parker, a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, reported from Baghdad for seven years and has contributed to World Policy Journal.

Raheem Salman covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the post-Saddam era for the Los Angeles Times from 2003 to 2011. He is currently a Baghdad-based Reuters correspondent.

[Photo courtesy of Al7ob-One ]