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Power on the Streets

October 28, 2006 6:36 PM

A friend of mine, who is Shiite, was driving home the other day when a minivan clipped the front of his car, leaving a small dent. My friend leaned out of his window and told the driver of the van, a youth not yet old enough to shave, that he should be more careful. Instead of apologizing, the young man said: "We are Mahdi army, be careful what you say." The Mahdi army is the much-feared Shiite militia controlled by the fierce anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, is blamed for running death squads, and has a huge following among poorer Shiites in Baghdad and the south. Even the police are afraid of the Mahdi army. The US has been trying to get Prime Minister Maliki to crack down on the Mahdi army, but Maliki has been treading very cautiously, preferring to coopt Sadr than face him down.

My friend, however, with a dint in his car and facing a truculent youth half his age, was not in a mood to coopt. He said to the young driver: "So does Moqtada give you permission to go out and ram into other peoples’ cars?" The youth got out of his minivan, along with three passengers, and surrounded my friend’s car. They were quickly joined by several bystanders who knew them; the incident had happened near a small outdoors market where a number of youths were hanging around.

The youths converged on his car, and the situation looked as if it could turn ugly very quickly. My friend pulled his pistol from his belt and shot once in the air. The gang retreated, but didn’t run away. Then a police car stopped, alerted by the shot, and two policemen came over to investigate. They also shot in the air with their rifles to disperse the crowd. When they realized what had happened, the police announced loudly they were arresting my friend and taking him to the police station -- even though he was the one whose car had been hit by the others -- and quickly hustled him away. In the police car they told my friend they were taking him into custody for his own protection against the militia men.

At the police station the officer in charge took him into his office and took down the details. He asked about the gun, so my friend showed him his weapon's permit, which was in order. My friend had already contacted the police in his home neighborhood, who called the police station where he was held and said they knew him, that he came from a good family and was not a troublemaker. So he was released. As he was leaving, the officer in charge said he was lucky he was Shiite. "If you were Sunni, there is nothing that I could have done if those militia guys had come here and asked me to hand you over to them," he said. They both knew what would have happened in that case. And they both knew who had the real power in that part of Baghdad.

October 28, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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