Holiday Offers Little Joy in Iraq

As the usually joyful Eid al-Adha holiday began in the Shiite Muslim heartland of Iraq, relentless violence and disappointment trumped centuries of tradition. This holy city’s renowned cemetery lacked the multitudes who have made their way here for generations. Relatively few visitors appeared Friday along the forlorn pathways that slice through endless acres of headstones.

“It’s half-empty,” lamented Naja Hussein, who ventured here for the annual three-day Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice, which marks Abraham’s willingness to offer his son at God’s request. “With all the car bombs and violence, no one will drive.”

Across Iraq, some people expressed hope that the muted holy day would give way to an honest vote in the Jan. 30 national election, but there remained a palpable sense of anxiety and uncertainty. U.S. and Iraqi officials have been blunt: Things may get bloodier before they get better.

In Najaf, the threat of ambushes, kidnappings and killings -- particularly on the perilous road from Baghdad -- kept many Shiites from embarking on the annual journey of remembrance.

In the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul, parents were fearful of letting their children play outside during a time typically filled with festive family get-togethers and tributes to departed loved ones.

But the darkest cloud over the day was in Baghdad, where a car bomb targeting a Shiite mosque in a working-class quarter killed 14 and injured 40. Authorities said most of the victims were worshipers leaving the mosque after morning prayers.

At the capital’s Yarmouk Hospital, Um Hussein, a middle-aged woman shrouded head to toe in black, beat her chest and asked God to have mercy on her two children, Hussein, 7, and Amna, 4, both seriously injured in the blast. “They are all I have,” she moaned. “Don’t take them from me.”

Word came later that the boy was going to lose one of his legs.

It is unclear how many families are facing the Eid holiday in mourning.

There are no reliable estimates of how many thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed or injured since U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in April 2003. The Ministry of Health has stopped making public tabulations of the dead. It is not even possible to judge whether the wave of pre-election violence has caused an uptick in casualties.

In Najaf, people are chillingly aware that bomb-wielding insurgents seem drawn to crowds, be they in mosques, on the streets or at the graveyard.

“How can you ask me to celebrate the Eid?” lamented Abbas Eissawi, who lives on the edge of the great cemetery. He lost his father and brother in last summer’s U.S.-led offensive against Al Mahdi militia, which featured ghoulish scenes of combat amid the tombs. “How can you ask me to feel festive?”

Despite the ouster of their longtime oppressor, Hussein, Najaf residents say the last year has brought precious little reason to rejoice. Najaf’s Old City is still in ruins from the battles between U.S. and Iraqi government forces and the militia of radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. The masses of Iranian religious pilgrims, who produced a huge income stream, are long gone. Even Iraqi religious tourism has plummeted to a fraction of pre-2003 levels.

Still, the despair is tempered in some quarters, especially here in the Shiite heartland, with the hope that the national election can somehow dissipate the pall of violence, atrocity and economic distress. The country’s Shiite majority is widely expected to finally ascend to power. The learned men with beards and turbans have preached that voting is a duty, a sacred trust.

“I wish it were today,” Eissawi said as he supervised a pair of butchers carving a dangling sheep carcass, its blood pooling on the cobblestones in front of a war-damaged home. “It will solve all of our problems. We can’t wait.”

In accord with Muslim teachings, Eissawi said, he planned to distribute the meat to Najaf’s poor in memory of his father and brother. Five months after their deaths, the black funeral banner still hung on the crumbled exterior wall of Eissawi’s family home.

Opinion polls have consistently shown that Iraqis, with some exceptions, are eager to participate in the elections, despite the campaign of intimidation that is especially lethal in the Sunni Muslim areas of central, northern and western Iraq. That enthusiasm for voting was evident in interviews with Iraqis across the country at the holiday’s outset, although the Sunni Arab minority, the insurgency’s main source of strength, stood as an exception.

“The elections are coming and we are going to vote, and hopefully the next Eid will be better,” said Majida Alyas, a 42-year-old Baghdad mother who came to a jouba, or outdoor meat market, to collect her freshly slaughtered lamb for the traditional holiday stew. “We have to be optimistic.”

Nowhere is the sense of a new beginning more evident than in Iraqi Kurdistan, in the north. The region is comparatively unscathed by violence and full of enthusiasm for the first elections since Hussein’s overthrow.

“Everyone is happy that none of our relatives are held in Saddam’s jails,” said Hamid Ali, a 24-year-old office worker in the Kurdish city of Sulaymaniya who spent much of the first day of the holiday visiting friends and relatives and wishing them Eid mubarak, or blessed Eid.

Yet even as Kurds celebrated and Shiites voiced guarded optimism, members of Iraq’s other major group -- Sunni Arabs -- are reeling on this holiday. Long the nation’s dominant faction despite making up only about 20% of the population, many Sunni Arabs view the coming election as a U.S.-backed contrivance to ensure their permanent subjugation to rival Shiites and Kurds.

“No, I will not participate in the election because there is no election under the American occupation,” Sheik Amir Ahmed Azzawi said Friday during his sermon to the Sunni congregation at the Muhammad Qubancy mosque in Baghdad. “Anyone who is participating in the political system today entered the country sitting on an American tank, so anyone who collaborates with them now we consider part of the occupation.”

In the largely Sunni Arab city of Mosul, Omar Abdul-Ghani said his three children awoke on the first day of Eid and were eager to go to a playground. But Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, has been transformed into a battlefield.

“To be truthful, I didn’t take them out because I can’t guarantee that I could protect them if anything happened on the street, such as a blast or the crossfire of a gun battle,” said Abdul-Ghani, 33. “They had tears in their eyes because they weren’t able to go out and have fun. They kept on looking at me as if I were to blame.”

At the great cemetery in Najaf, scattered groups picked their way among the graves, sprinkling rosewater and leaving incense burning at the plots. One tombstone bore the somber inscription: “You who reads my writing, cry over my youth/Yesterday I was alive and today I am dust.”

The size of the burial ground -- it is among the world’s largest -- dwarfed the visitors. Shiites across the globe yearn to inter their dead in Najaf’s sacred soil.

Saadoun Daoud, a grizzled 75-year-old in a white head cloth, dishdasha gown and circular shades, spat pumpkin seeds out the passenger window of a van. Starting from Baghdad, about 100 miles to the north, he and 13 family members spanning three generations chanced al ziyarah, or “the visit,” in the predawn darkness.

“Either they kill us,” he said, shrugging, “or we do what we want.”

Khalil reported from Najaf and McDonnell from Baghdad. Special correspondents Zainab Hussein and Caesar Ahmed in Baghdad, Roaa Ahmed in Mosul, Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf, Azad Stuff in Sulaymaniya and Othman Ghanim in Basra contributed to this report.