Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, listen to me; wives
of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, a
young man for injuring me. If Cain is avenged seven times, then
Lamech seventy-seven times.” (Genesis 4:23-24)
Baghdad, Iraq. Amar was a lifelong friend of Karim’s. Three months earlier, Amar and his older brother, Jafaar, had been riding in the van of a friend, Sayeed, when a group of gunmen hailed them. Amar recognized them as men from the Mahdi Army [a Shiite militia], and assumed that they were coming to say hello. As Sayeed braked, the car was riddled with gunfire. Amar crouched as low as he could, as the Mahdi Army men emptied their Kalashnikov automatic rifles. He was unhurt, but Jafaar and Sayeed were dead.
That night, Amar told Karim that, at the morgue, he had sworn over his brother’s body to take revenge. He had vowed to kill a hundred Mahdi men — ten for each of Jafaar’s fingers. His mother, Um Jafaar, supported him, and begged Karim to help her son. He agreed.
Their first concern was to make sure that the Mahdi militiamen didn’t suspect them. During Jafaar’s funeral procession, they shouted angry denunciations of a Sunni tribe that lived nearby. Word soon spread that Jafaar’s family and friends blamed the Sunnis for his death.
Karim and Amar also decided that it would be easier to carry out the killings if they had help from the American army. Karim volunteered to be an informer and even refused their money: “If I take it, it makes me a spy, and I am a gentleman, not a spy.’”
Karim directed the Americans to a house where two of the gunmen were staying. One of gunmen was only 15 or 16, but had killed five or six people. “He was just starting out,” Karim said. They were imprisoned by the Americans.
“Then the killing started,” Karim told investigative reporter Jon Lee Anderson. Their first victim was the father of the younger gunman. When Anderson asked him whether the father had anything to do with Jafaar’s killing, he looked nonplussed, and said no, but that the man had been an intelligence officer under Saddam, and had probably killed people, too. (In Iraq’s tribal vendettas, male relatives are often seen as legitimate targets.) The father was now working as a taxi-driver. A relative hailed his cab and asked to be taken to a remote area. Karim and Amar ambushed him there. Amar had a pistol with five exploding bullets (dumdums) and four normal bullets. A single dumdum would have been enough to do the job, and Karim warned him to save some bullets in case they got in trouble. Amar emptied the pistol into him, using every last bullet. Afterward, he apologized. “I couldn’t help it. I became crazy.”
Next, they went to a Sunni sheikh whom Karim knew, whose brother was in the insurgency. The brother and his men kidnapped six Mahdi militiamen, including four who had been in the group that killed Jafaar. They took the militiamen to a house in a Sunni district where Karim and Amar beat them severely. (Karim said that Amar got out of control but Karim did not.) Under torture, the men said the brother, Jafaar, had been killed inadvertently and that Sayeed was the main target because he was with a rival militia and cooperated with Americans. Amar didn’t believe it – their real motive was that that they were jealous of Sayeed because he was rich, and he didn’t respect the Mahdi militia.
The next day, Amar greeted Karim with a kiss and told him he had left three bodies near the train track, and two in Canal Street. When Karim asked about the sixth one, Amar said the Sunni sheikh’s brother took him because he thought he killed his cousin.
The killing continued. After fifteen days, they went to Um Jafaar, Amar’s mother. “I told her who was dead and who was in jail. She was very happy,” Karim said. “Then she said, ‘Do you want me to be completely comforted?’” Um Jafaar asked them to bring her parts of the dead men’s bodies. Amar did what she asked. “One man, he cut off his ear when he was still alive,” Karim said. “But I swear that Amar has never killed anyone who was innocent.”
Karim said that Amar had killed eighteen or twenty men. “After a while, I told Amar to stop this. My wife, also, was angry with me. I didn’t like to do this, either, but we had to. We had to kill these guys, because they were killing too many people. When some of them were killed, my neighbors celebrated — sometimes even the Mahdi Army guys did.” The Americans suspected nothing.
Amar told Karim that he would not stop killing until he reached his goal of a hundred victims. “He is hungry for killing now,” Karim said. “Sometimes I think maybe he HAS gone a little crazy.”
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Adapted from the article “Letter From Iraq: Inside The Surge” by Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker magazine, Nov. 19, 2007, pp. 64-65. The names of the Iraqis had been changed for the article.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5530]