Sadrist militiamen from Saraya Salam (The Peace Brigades) in Baghdad’s Green Zone, August 2022, after fighting with a rival pro-Iranian faction. Murtadha Ridha/AP
REPORT – The Sunnis, Saddam Hussein’s community that flocked to jihadism, are under the thumb of the Shias and their Iranian mentors, while the Kurds try to break out of a violent and corrupt game.
Special Envoy for Baghdad, Samarra and Kirkuk (Iraq)
“That was the happiest day of my life,” Salam recalls. It was like a dream come true to overthrow a regime that killed my father in 1985. We had hopes of building a modern state. Salam was 18 when, on March 20, 2003, he heard the first American missiles fall on Baghdad. He lives with his mother and brother in Saddam City, a slum on the outskirts of the Iraqi capital where 1 million Shias are crammed together and the community is regularly oppressed by a power that has been Sunni-dominated for decades.
During the three-week war, while his neighbors fled to agricultural areas fearing chemical bombardment from a besieged regime, Salam lived to the rhythm of news broadcasts in Arabic on an Iranian radio. “On April 9, he recalls, just after an American tank drove by my house, I went to burn the portrait of Saddam Hussein in the neighborhood. But I still had…
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