As Iraqi Militants Flee, Families Are Targets of Blood Reckoning

 

But someone needed to pay. Late last year, Faras’s younger brother Yousef was kidnapped, shot in the head and dumped in an abandoned lot. The police called it a lawless act of revenge — one brother dying for the sins of another.

Tribal leaders say that scores of other family members of insurgents have been attacked and killed in recent years as Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda and other militant groups. Insurgents’ families have also been driven from their homes and villages, accused of being complicit in their loved ones’ crimes or simply guilty by association.

The attacks represent a small fraction of the overall violence, but they illustrate one of Iraq’s greatest struggles as it tries to break a vicious cycle of killing and revenge. As Iraq tries to evolve into a more settled nation, one based on the rule of law instead of codes of blood, its leaders struggle to persuade Iraqis to put their faith in a flawed, sometimes ineffective, legal system. “This is the problem in Iraq,” said Zuhair al-Chalabi , Iraq’s national reconciliation adviser, who spends his days trying to mediate blood disputes between warring militias and tribes. “Iraqis have to forget their wounds. Time. We need time.”

But not everyone is patient, or ready to forgive. “The law and the courts do not help us,” said Jasim al-Ajili, a Shiite Muslim in the northeastern city of Baquba, who lost two nephews to Qaeda assassinations. He said he had identified the family responsible for the murders and is planning his revenge.

“I will arrest him, kidnap him, record his confessions,” he said. “Then I will kill him if the judiciary does nothing.”

There is little sympathy for families associated with the foreign and homegrown Qaeda fighters who slaughtered tens of thousands of Iraqis and tilted the country toward chaos. The militants’ wives and widows are pariahs. Their young children are not legally recognized by Iraq’s government.

In the rural stretches of Diyala Province, in northeastern Iraq, militant recruiters found fertile soil in the seething ranks of poor, young Sunni men. Scores of the tribesmen of one local sheik, Yousef al-Hilan, joined Qaeda. They bombed cars; guarded checkpoints where they shot and killed passing Shiite motorists; and controlled entire villages.

Now, Sheik Hilan estimated, about half of their families had been killed or displaced by reprisal attacks.

“We had many families whose sons joined Al Qaeda,” said Sheik Hilan, who lost four sons to tit-for-tat slayings. “All of the pain lands on them. People want their revenge. They’ll storm the house and kill everyone there. They just want to be satisfied.”

A Diyala provincial council member said revenge killings accounted for about 5 percent of all murders over the past two years.

The killings and attacks reflect deeply rooted tribal cultures that permit — even demand — a harsh accounting, in which blood is paid with blood. Kareem Mohammed Abu Hatem said his home, car and small oil and gasoline store in the village of Bohruz were burned down as payback for his stepson’s work with Al Qaeda. The culprits were never caught, making it impossible to verify his account.

Shortly after the 2003 invasion, Arab men with long beards, foreign accents and a veneer of righteous anger arrived at Ahmed Mustafa’s village in Diyala and urged its young men to fight the American occupier. Mr. Mustafa’s oldest son, Waleed, was enraptured, and left home with the militants.

As the bodies of beheaded Iraqis began appearing in the streets, Mr. Mustafa said he urged his son to stop fighting. Then, Mr. Mustafa said, he received a letter that warned, “We will cut your tongue and kill you.” In 2007, his 17-year-old son was killed while leaving the family farm. The next year, his other son was shot to death while shopping with his mother.

Fearful for his life, Mr. Mustafa and his wife moved to a village where few people know him. “I am an innocent man,” he said.

Still, he worries that he will die next.

For the Awad family in Kirkuk, the story of their two oldest sons unspooled like Cain and Abel in the age of Al Qaeda.

Durain Adnan contributed reporting from Iraq.

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Should U.S. Stay or Go? Views Define Iraqi Factions

Iraq now has a choice of whether American troops stay or go at the end of this year, but United States officials have said time is running out to make a decision. The debate rippling across the country reflects a nation still struggling with issues of sectarian identity, national pride and how to secure its future.

For many Iraqis, it is a decision with two bad choices: remaining beholden to a foreign power many still view as an occupier or charting a perilous new future on their own.

“We can choose now,” said Mustafi Ali, 26, holding an Arabic translation of an American political philosophy book while trolling the stalls recently on Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. “But it’s not useful. Both choices are bad.”

But like many important milestones of the war, from ratifying a constitution in 2005 to negotiating a security agreement in 2008 to setting elections in 2010 and forming a government afterward, Baghdad is marching to its own clock, not to the one in Washington, where affairs of state are harnessed to the dictates of election schedules and the 24-hour news cycle.

The decision could prove to be one of the most momentous ones yet of Iraq’s young democracy. As Iraqis debate the issue on the streets and in the mosque, the discussion often pivots on symbolic matters of national dignity and has less to do with whether Iraq can remain secure without the help of the United States military.

“It’s a golden opportunity for the Iraqi government to have the decision of whether or not U.S. troops stay or leave in its hand, to show to the Iraqi people that the government has sovereignty,” said Majid Mohammadi, a college student in Anbar Province.

Iraqis are also asking themselves a simple question with no simple answer: Will the country become more or less violent if the Americans leave?

Many Iraqis, especially in the northern areas where Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens compete for land, believe that the American presence is a buffer against an ethnic civil war.

But elsewhere, Iraqis who were inclined to see the Americans stay now worry that if they do, their presence could cause new violence set off by insurgent groups like the Mahdi Army, the militia loyal to the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I prefer that the U.S. forces leave Iraq because then extremists wouldn’t have an excuse to carry guns,” said Amira Jwad, 35, a government worker in Najaf.

Last month, Mr. Sadr said he would order his men to attack United States forces if they stayed. A member of Parliament from Mr. Sadr’s party was recently quoted in an Iraqi published report as saying that the party would recruit foreign fighters to take on the American forces. A spokesman for the party later said that it had no intention of recruiting the fighters.

The most fervent opposition can be found in Sadr City, the Shiite slum in Baghdad that represents the heart of Mr. Sadr’s constituency. On a recent Friday before prayers began, Najim Abbas, a young house painter, echoed what many there say when asked about Mr. Sadr’s threat to reconstitute his militia.

“Whatever he says, we will do,” Mr. Abbas said. “We will keep on resisting until the last days of our lives.”

Once prayers began, the preacher cast the American issue as the most important one facing the Iraqi people.

“Government services are important, but there are things that are more important than these things, which is the U.S. withdrawal according to the agreement,” the preacher said. “We need to make this decision now. We don’t want to wait. If we do, they will say, ‘We don’t have enough time to withdraw.’?”

The agreement between the United States and Iraq requires all American troops to leave the country by the end of 2011, barring a request from the Iraqis to extend their presence.

In the corridors of power, no politician, not even Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, seems to want ownership of the issue.