The Shadow Commander by Arash Azizi

Author:Arash Azizi [Azizi, Arash]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786079459
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2020-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

We Protect the Shrines

Tears ran down Ahmad’s face; his eyes were red with crying and his hands were shaking. This was a moment he had waited for all his life. He was standing in the courtyard of the shrine built for the greatest man who had ever lived: the Lord of Martyrs, the Master of Tears, the Blood of Allah, the Third Shia Imam, Hossein, son of Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad. This was Karbala, the city near the Euphrates around which, in 680, Hossein and his comrades had lost their lives fighting the forces of the caliph Yazid, playing their parts in the most monumental event of Shia history.

Like any typical Shia, Ahmad had grown up on the stories of Hossein and his cruel death in Karbala. But he had a more personal connection. For eight long years, he had fought the Iraqi soldiers led by Saddam Hussein, a man who appeared as the Yazid of his age: a Sunni tyrant, out to drench a rightful movement, this time led by Imam Khomeini, in blood. Ahmad had been stuck in the mud of the Iraqi battlefields, he had been injured, he had come close to death. Now the Yazid was gone and he could enter Iraq as a proud Shia pilgrim. When he saw the golden dome and double minarets of Imam Hossein’s shrine, when he saw the red flag shaking in the wind, he couldn’t help his tears of joy and honor.

Ahmad was no ordinary pilgrim. He was among the first party of Iranians sent to staff the diplomatic missions of the Islamic Republic in the new Iraq. Officially, he would be an employee of the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, headed by an ambassador who had to answer to the foreign ministry. In reality, he was a soldier-diplomat and his ambassador answered to a man who had never been in the ministry: Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force.

In March 2003, a few months before Ahmad’s arrival, the Americans, joined by troops from the UK, Australia, and Poland, invaded Iraq and overthrew forty years of rule by the Baath Party. Faced with the preponderant might of American firepower, the Baathist state quickly collapsed. By May 1, after about five weeks of combat, the Americans controlled most of the country. A transitional government named the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was set up. Plans for a government led by Iraqi dissidents had quickly come to naught. The men (and they were mostly men) of Iraqi exile politics had run their mini political parties from Tehran, Birmingham, England, or Dearborn, Michigan, often along with their grocery stores or dental practices. Like all political exiles, especially those away from home for decades, they were a squabbling bunch who knew how to shout each other down in a meeting but not how to govern. The CPA was instead a straightforward foreign occupying power, whose top executives were US military officials, even though it was adjoined by an Iraqi Governing Council, formed of Iraqi politicians, that it theoretically had to answer to.

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