Holy City’s Heart Is Wounded in Battle

The wide streets leading to the gloriously mosaicked shrines of Imam Abbas and Imam Hussein used to be so thronged with pilgrims and peddlers selling religious mementos that cars could barely move.

The gracious loggias that provided shade for those walking to the shrine used to enclose an outdoor marketplace, crowded with tea sellers and Karbala natives trading the latest news.

Now the two historic, gold-domed shrines have closed and there was hardly a soul on the streets Sunday. The religious and economic heart of Karbala has fallen silent; the emptiness jolts.

Although the fighting between the Al Mahdi militia loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr and heavily armed U.S.-led troops appeared to have ended early Friday morning, there was only a partial sense of relief as Karbala natives began to take stock of the damage to the city’s heart.

The few people on the street moved like sleepwalkers, shaking their heads as if unable to believe the destruction around them.

Ahmed Gizawi, 45, a thin, hollow-cheeked man, sat on a broken piece of concrete outside his grocery store, which used to do a bustling business with the pilgrims.

He stared at the rubble at his feet.

“We are astonished that this could happen to our beloved city,” he said. “I don’t feel we have lost it, but I feel a disaster has happened.”

Karbala is one of the most sacred cities to the world’s Shiite Muslims. It is the burial place of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad and one of Shiite Islam’s most revered martyrs.

Along with the Iraqi city of Najaf, it draws millions of pilgrims every year.

Many residents are not sure whether the shooting is truly over; others are filled with a sense of betrayal by their fellow Shiites and by the Americans, both of whom brought guns, blood and violence to the very doors of the shrines.

“Most people are angry that the Mahdi fought in a holy place. They should have taken their battles outside the city, but people say the Americans exacerbated the situation,” said Fouad Zubaidy, a surgeon at the Karbala hospital.

For Karbala natives, the Al Mahdi army’s decision to occupy the center of the city, which resulted in battles with U.S. troops near the shrines, meant the death of the religious tourist trade, the core of the city’s livelihood.

For Shiite Muslims worldwide, the fighting near the shrines has become a kind of call to arms. Unlike the Karbalis, most of whom blame the Al Mahdi army and the Americans equally for the destruction, Shiites outside Iraq view the fighting by non-Muslims in Karbala and Najaf as sacrilege. Many are using it as a way to rally anti-American sentiment.

Blasted by tank and mortar rounds and gunfire during more than 10 days of heavy fighting, the facades of central Karbala’s hotels, businesses and a city health office were ripped away, exposing the rooms inside. Some structures were so severely damaged that the metal supports within the walls were visible, the concrete itself crumbled in piles on the ground.

Not a window is left intact in some areas, and the unfortunate cars that had been parked where the fighting started are burned white as bone, their metal carcasses dented by shrapnel. Electrical wire hangs in furls from the building windows as if the structures themselves have been disemboweled.

Although the city seemed quiet Sunday, residents appeared uneasy -- certain, despite reports that the militia had vanished late Thursday night, that Al Mahdi had not entirely quit their city.

Indeed, as the sun sank in the sky, several Al Mahdi fighters took up positions in one of the main mosques on the street leading toward the shrine. Others could be seen in the Al Mukhaiyam mosque, which has been Sadr’s headquarters and was his militia’s base during the fighting with U.S. troops.

A hospital admissions officer named Hadi said some Al Mahdi members had told him their commanders had given them a choice of staying in Karbala or going to Najaf, and many had moved south.

Even the presence of the few Al Mahdi troops that remained disturbed the Karbalis.

“I cannot rebuild yet; it is not over,” Gizawi said, gesturing to Sadr’s men.

The cleric’s modus operandi has been to withdraw or tamp down the fighting in one area, then resume it suddenly when defenses are down. The most striking aspect of his tactics is that even very small numbers of his militia have been able to close down activities at crucial places such as the U.S.-led coalition’s offices in Nasiriya.

Even in Karbala, estimates by police of the number of Al Mahdi fighters operating in the city at any one time was “scores,” according to Rahman Ashawi, the police spokesman. That seems a small number given the mayhem and intensity of the fighting with U.S. troops.

Al Mahdi’s intentions Sunday were hard to read.

“Mahdi is still here, we are still here,” said one of the guards at the mosque gate.

Many Karbala residents, however, said they understood that a deal had been reached between the U.S. military and the Al Mahdi army in which both agreed to leave the city. The U.S. military denied that.

Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Saturday, “We have repositioned some forces inside of Karbala, but it’s quite a stretch to consider that to be anything remotely resembling a withdrawal.”

However, there were no Americans in sight Sunday. Iraqi police and civil defense force troops were again manning checkpoints outside the city and had taken up residence in the main police stations.

During the fighting, life in much of the city went on as usual. The hospital was busier, but otherwise little changed.

The number of casualties is hard to estimate, doctors say, because often Al Mahdi troops buried their dead and treated their wounded in their own facilities for fear that if they brought them to the hospital, U.S. troops might arrest them there.

The overriding sentiment in Karbala is that much of the destruction and carnage could have been avoided.

“The Mahdi are just unemployed people like me. If [the Americans] gave them jobs, they would go away,” said Bassem Abid Wassaf, 43.

Zubaidy, the surgeon, said he and many people he talked with believed the United States should have moved much more quickly to deal with Al Mahdi when militia members began to enter Karbala months ago. “And recently, how is it that the Mahdi could get troop reinforcements and weapons. Why couldn’t the Americans stop that?” he asked.

Alaa Asadi, who owned a small grocery store in the destroyed Al Mukhaiyam district, said he too wondered why the Americans had not done something months ago, when the Mahdi were few and weak.

“We wanted them to move sooner,” he said.

His friend Gizawi nodded pensively, his eyes sweeping the street before him. His melancholy gaze stopped on a building across the street next to one of the mosques already being reoccupied by the Al Mahdi army. The building’s windows were broken, parts of its top floor were charred black, and gash marks from mortar shrapnel and gunfire pocked its surface.

“You see that building over there? That’s an elementary school,” Gizawi said.

“I am feeling sad because that school is 70 years old. It is destroyed. All my family went to it and I graduated from it too and now....” His voice trailed off as he stared at a pile of glinting shattered glass that was once his shop window.