Trial rekindles Shiite anger toward the U.S.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

BAGHDAD — It was one of the bloodiest episodes in the long, brutal rule of Saddam Hussein: With Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait ahead of advancing U.S. troops in 1991, Shiite Muslim rebels took control of cities in Iraq’s south and advanced on Baghdad.

Then, with Shiite rebels just 60 miles from the capital, Saddam’s forces retaliated. In the next months, tens of thousands of Shiites were rounded up and executed, their bodies pushed into mass graves with bulldozers, like dirt.

This week, 15 former officials of Saddam’s regime, including the notorious “Chemical Ali,” Ali Hassan al-Majid, went on trial for the mass killings, reopening old wounds in the now dominant Shiite community. But the anger wasn’t aimed at just the former officials, who include some of the most notorious Saddam henchmen. It was also aimed at the United States for what Shiites still remember as a betrayal.

“Those who fought Saddam and threw him out of Kuwait for his criminal acts — killing people, looting possessions and destroying the country of Kuwait and Iraq ... within a minute, they became his supporters and stood beside him to kill the Iraqi people,” said Imam Saleh al-Haidiri in a sermon Friday at the Khilani mosque in central Baghdad. “And he killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the most hideous ways.”

No gratitude

Ibrahim Jaafer, 48, a merchant, also linked the United States to the wanton killings, which claimed his father and two brothers, whose bodies were pushed into a common grave. Jaafer fled and lived in Iran until the U.S. toppled Saddam in 2003. But there’s little gratitude.

“Saddam is an agent for the Americans,” Jaafer said. “It’s known that America, Saddam and the Takfiris [Sunni extremists] are on the same side.”

Those feelings help explain why the United States has found Iraq so difficult to navigate. Neither Sunnis who backed Saddam nor Shiites who were his victims fully trust the United States as a friend.

Shiites are especially concerned that the recent U.S. policy of aligning itself with former Sunni insurgents willing to fight al-Qaida in Iraq will create a Sunni force capable of striking out at the Shiite-led Iraqi government — a view endorsed by a U.S. intelligence community report released Thursday. That report warned that alliances with the Sunnis could undermine the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Shiites trace their anger at the United States to the first Gulf War, when the United States amassed a huge force in Saudi Arabia to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which Saddam had seized in August 1990.