From oppressed to governing

Hassan Suneid remembers the time the cattle prod stopped working as his guards were torturing him.

He kept screaming louder and louder, hoping to fool his tormentors, but they quickly realized he was overacting. Other times, he says, he tried to bore them by showing no reaction whatsoever.

“Prison gives the human another personality, makes him tougher and patient in order to solve the problems and to not feel the pain from anything,” said Suneid, who was sent to prison under Saddam Hussein and is now a senior leader of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party.

Men like Suneid, members of Iraq’s Shiite elite, help explain the manic hot-cold nature of Maliki’s rule since he came to power in 2006. And as Iraq heads into pivotal elections Sunday that could determine the country’s future as a democracy, they show how difficult it will be for Iraq to break out of its cycle of suspicion and distrust.

These men’s ambitions and obsessions were forged in the crucible of prison, secret cells and double identities. Now they’re torn between a desire to build a state that transcends sectarian divisions and an instinct to strike back hard at real and imagined Hussein sympathizers.

With his frizzled black hair and spectacles, Suneid looks the part of a mad scientist, or Groucho Marx’s lost cousin. But lawmakers in rival blocs have credited Suneid as being one of the key players in the remaking of Maliki and Dawa, from a party of strict Shiite Islamists to a broader, nationalistic movement.

Suneid was a chief negotiator in building Maliki’s State of Law alliance for the election. He prides himself on his ability to be all things to all people. Ambling through the national assembly with a wooden cane, he chats up an Arab nationalist, then a minute later a fellow Dawa member.

Last fall, in one of many interviews in the last several months, he boasted of his chameleon-like nature and slippery rhetoric. “If we ask the Kurds who is honest, they say me. The Sunnis will say so too,” Suneid said.

In the dark days of the sectarian war, Suneid’s was a lonely voice among Shiites, urging reconstruction in Sunni neighborhoods. But he also has adopted sectarian positions -- denouncing U.S. raids against a Shiite militia in its Baghdad stronghold, Sadr City, and branding former Sunni insurgents now working with the U.S. as “gangs of killers.”

Suneid likes to flaunt his eclecticism, with showy statements about how the universe is one and proclaiming his fondness for writers such as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, a socialist and secularist. He describes himself as a sponge, soaking up the works of political leaders, from Adolf Hitler to Menachem Begin and Golda Meir.

He tells of a childhood in Nasiriya, in southern Iraq, where Shiites, Sunnis and Christians joined in one another’s festivals. At university in Sulaymaniya, in northern Iraq, he participated in heated coffee-house debates with students from across the political spectrum, including Baathists and Communists.

He joined the Islamic Dawa Party at 19, lured by the word of the Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr Sadr, the intellectual godfather of Iraq’s Shiite political activists who provided religious answers to the challenges of living in the modern world. Sadr was executed along with his sister in 1980.

Fearful of persecution, Dawa members devoured the movement’s tracts in secret, as they sought the proper balance between civil society and the Koran. Members were recruited over several years, watched and studied to ensure their trustworthiness and then brought into a local cell. They were the elite: academics, engineers and lawyers, the pious and strong.

“It was like Plato’s Republic,” Suneid jokes.

The party wasn’t formally banned until 1979, with Hussein’s rise to the presidency and on the eve of the Iran-Iraq war. Suneid labels what happened during that period a genocide, as thousands were killed.

Suneid said being imprisoned in 1981 transformed him. “It was an environment of sacrifice. It wasn’t like fearing a bullet or . . . explosion. Now our feelings changed,” he said. “Prison was a factory for Dawa.

“We were practicing something like a resistance at the highest level.”

He remembers when the guards threw a beaten prisoner back into his cell. Suneid tapped the man’s face, the eyes glassy. The other detainees laughed at him for not recognizing that he was dead.

When Suneid was freed, he stayed in Nasiriya working on a construction site as an engineer. But he knew he was being watched, and his younger brother, Haider, had worked out a system to tip him off; he’d send a boy with a message if the security forces planned to arrest him.

The boy told him, “You are invited to your uncle’s.” Suneid immediately fled. He scratched out letters on his identity card, changing his name to Hassan Jamil, and lay low in Baghdad, working in a brick factory, before heading into exile, first in northern Iraq’s Kurdish region, then Iran and around the Middle East.

Haider would be executed, his body never found. Suneid became a fighter then, waging war in the Kurdish mountains, and slipping into southern Iraq from Iran in the 1991 Shiite uprising. He was no longer a simple idealist, but someone who had been tortured and who fought on the battlefield.

Traveling in Iraq in the 1990s, he returned to Baghdad disguised as an army colonel and stayed at the Rashid, a hotel favored by Hussein’s regime. At long last he returned to his birthplace of Nasiriya, only to find his home razed by the government.

Until the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Suneid based himself in the Kurdish north, helping to manage military cells across Iraq, while indulging his creative side, writing poetry under a pseudonym and editing a children’s magazine.

It is as though he has himself squared away, ready to do whatever is necessary now in the name of his party for the state.

In the recent crisis after hundreds of candidates were barred from the election over alleged Baathist ties, Suneid, who had prided himself as being open to all, hailed the “de-Baathification” process as independent of the government.

This is the same man who, through last summer, led talks about forming a political coalition with Sunni Arab lawmaker Saleh Mutlak, one of the most prominent figures blocked from running.

Relations between the two men had been noticeably warm. Mutlak now rues the day he entertained talks with Dawa and Suneid in particular. “He doesn’t commit himself to what he says,” Mutlak said recently.

But Suneid’s life has been based on poses, as an underground Dawa member and a fugitive who operated with false names and waged a 30-year war.

After the election, he will be ready to bargain again in the name of his party and Maliki’s ambitions for a second term.

“We are not prophets, but we are good at organizing the blocks and squares of incidents to get results,” he said. “It is like a game.”

ned.parker@latimes.com

Salman is a staff writer. Times staff writer Usama Redha contributed to this report.