- At about 10am, when the evacuation of fighters was due,
Falah Kamel arrived at the Imam Ali shrine clutching the hand of his wide-eyed
sister Benin, 7. In the courtyard of the mosque, its 10-century-old golden
dome glinting in the morning sun, the 21-year-old said: "Normally
we come twice a week. Of course for the past three weeks we have been too
frightened."
-
- Was he glad the fighting seemed over? "I am very
happy and we have to thank God," he replied.
-
- Their presence especially that of Benin, perhaps the
first child of a civilian Najaf resident to visit the shrine yesterday
underlined that after three weeks as an insurgent field headquarters it
had returned to its historic role as the holiest place of devotion in Iraq.
It was liberated finally, not by Iyad Allawi's government, but by the exercise
of authority by the country's most venerated cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, over his unruly junior Muqtada Sadr.
-
- Three hours earlier it had seemed as if all this might
be an illusion. As the stream of Shia marchers was winding towards the
mosque, chants of "Allahu Akbar" resounded through Revolution
of 1920 Square. Then, just off Medan Square, we were obliged to take cover
when the still heavily armed Mehdi insurgents lining the alleyway to the
mosque suddenly opened fire on what they regarded as the provocative presence
of a police vehicle, its lights flashing. The police fired back, sending
hundreds of the marchers running. Twenty minutes later a badly wounded
man was brought into the mosque compound.
-
- But by last night, the peace, however uneasy, had held.
True, the Army of Mehdi in many cases seemed to have melted rather than
marched away, most no doubt retaining weapons for what a Sadr aide, Ahmed
al-Shabani, described as personal protection. True too, even as the deadline
ran out, a group of Sadr supporters, numbering no more than 150 in number,
paraded in the mosque courtyard, chanting their support for Sadr.
-
- But the majority who came to the mosque yesterday were
Shia believers such as the primary teacher Khadim Adnan, 50, who had not
been here since Saddam Hussein's fall. He had answered a call from the
Ayatollah Sistani. "I think I took part in bringing peace," the
teacher said.
-
- There was no celebration in the city, however. For the
past three weeks the route to the shrine had been impassable for civilians
and now they were seeing for the first time the effects of sniper fire,
mortars, and shelling on the shops, offices and pilgrim hotels that line
it. If a clause in the Sistani peace formula providing for compensation
is to be implemented, it will cost many millions of dollars. And when the
Toyota Landcruisers packed with police brandishing AK-47s toured Najaf
to demonstrate their control of the city, their loudspeakers blared warnings
not to wander in the old city because of unexploded bombs.
-
- The structures can be rebuilt; the still uncounted scores
of civilian dead cannot be brought back to life. "This is a disaster,
a real disaster," said Dr Mundhi al-Adhari, as he arrived in the old
city to seek the dead and wounded the ambulances had not been able to pick
up.
-
- By last night bodies were at the heart of the post-battle
propaganda war. The police eagerly showed us the day's most gruesome find,
in a Sharia courtroom allegedly used by the Sadr forces: 16 bodies, one
of a freshly dead woman, but the rest mostly blackened, grotesquely bloated
males. One had no head.
-
- The police said they were victims of Mehdi torture; the
Sadr people said they were mainly fighters they had neither the time nor
the means to bury. The fact is no one can say for certain whose bodies
they were; perhaps they were innocent civilians.
-
- It fell to Najaf's exhausted ambulancemen to do the dirtiest
job of all. Allowed by the men of Charlie company, 1st Battalion Fourth
Marines, through the wreckage of central Najaf, they picked up five corpses
of Mehdi Army soldiers killed by US forces three days ago. One ambulancemen
retched as he carried one of the bodies of the men. It had laid on wasteland
in 48C heat.
-
- For the men of Charlie Company, the end was as much of
a relief as it was for Najaf's civilians. They showed no regrets whatever
that the battle had not ended with a bloody storming of the mosque, but
Lance Corporal Joshua Cash admitted that while Iraqis forces had been intended
as the front line, a US storming had been a "worst-case scenario".
Giving a glimpse of indecision far up the chain of command, he said: "There
were a couple of times we loaded up our vehicles, then it was 'never mind'
and we all got out again," he said. "Has Najaf been in the news
much?" asked one Marine.
-
- Elsewhere, violence continued. In Fallujah an American
bomb killed four.
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=555909
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