It was not only the golden-domed mosque in Samarra that lay in ruins. His strategy of building a broad-based government of national unity in Iraq was suddenly threatened by the prospect of civil war.
Since the bombing last Wednesday up to 200 Iraqis have lost their lives in an outpouring of sectarian revenge. The ambassador has barely slept. “It’s been a marathon of intensive meetings with every leader of every group, literally since the moment it happened,” an American official said.
At every turn Khalilzad has been urging Iraqi leaders that “everything that needs to be done must be done to avoid a civil war”. He wants the defence and interior ministry portfolios to be awarded to Sunnis and the power of Shi’ite militias to be curbed. But he is meeting fierce resistance from Shi’ite leaders reluctant to relinquish their power.
Yesterday President George W Bush weighed in, speaking to seven Iraqi political leaders in an extraordinary round of telephone diplomacy aimed at getting talks restarted about forming a permanent government.
Within hours of Bush’s intervention leaders of Iraq’s main factions appeared together at a televised news conference, condemning the violence and pledging to resume coalition talks.
“The Iraqi people have one enemy; it is terrorism and only terrorism,” said Ibrahim Jaafari, the prime minister. “There are no Sunnis against Shi’ites or Shi’ites against Sunnis.”
Influential figures close to the US administration have long been emphasising the dire consequences should sectarian divisions escalate into all-out conflict. Andrew Krepinevich, a Pentagon adviser who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a military think tank, warns that if civil war breaks out “the outcome may be that we help the rise of another Saddam Hussein who is ruthless enough to deal with the problem”.
Krepinevich is one of the architects of the “clear, hold and build” strategy recently adopted by the US military in Iraq. It means killing insurgents in hotspots while persuading Iraqis — through reconstruction and peacekeeping — that they are better off without them.
Today Krepinevich fears those efforts may be running out of time. “The view from 50,000ft is that we are making progress, but is it quickly enough? Are the forces of disorder progressing faster than the forces of order?”
Much depends on the negotiating skills of Khalilzad, a Muslim born and raised in Afghanistan who first moved to America as an exchange student in secondary school. As a neoconservative who called for regime change in Iraq, Khalilzad has risen to the challenge.
“He’s the one irreplaceable American,” said Krepinevich. “A lot of people are hoping he will pull a rabbit out of a hat.”
Khalilzad’s strongest card is that the Americans have the money and the military boots on the ground. “Behind closed doors, he can say that if there is a civil war, because of our military power we can decide who comes out on top — and leave it open as to who might emerge the victor,” Krepinevich said.
It is, he added, a warning to all sides that “we can make life really miserable for you”.
Officially, talk of civil war is frowned upon in Washington. “We don’t believe we’re there,” a senior American defence official said. “We’re watching closely to see if the Iraqi forces are going to disintegrate under pressure. It’s so far so good. Iraqi leaders have shown their ability to stay together in the face of strong provocation.”
If they do not, a vicious sectarian conflict could spread to other parts of the Arab world. In a report to be published tomorrow the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based security think tank, warns that nations should begin planning for the “next Iraq war” — the one after the country falls apart.
“Failure to anticipate such a possibility could lead to further disasters,” it claims.
ABU FADEL was closing his front door on his way to work in Samarra early on Wednesday when he was shaken by a huge explosion. “It was the largest blast I had ever heard in Samarra,” he said. “I had to hold on to the door to stop it from being blown away.”
His home is 200 yards from the perimeter of the golden mosque. As he was catching his breath, Abu Fadel saw people pouring out of their homes and rushing towards it. Smoke was billowing from the dome.
“Men and women were running barefoot shouting, ‘Allahu akbar’ [God is greatest]. It was a terrible scene. The holy shrine was in flames and destroyed.”
The reprisals began within minutes. By this weekend 22 Sunni mosques had been damaged or destroyed. Scores of bodies — mainly those of Sunnis — were found in predominantly Shi’ite neighbourhoods, bound by the hands and shot.
In the worst revenge attack, 47 bodies were discovered in a ditch in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. One witness said several white Opels and BMWs of the kind favoured by the Mahdi army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric, were “being driven around with about 40 blindfolded men”.
Several Sunni clerics were abducted and killed, including an imam, Nizar al-Duleimi, who lived in a mosque northeast of Baghdad with his wife and four-year-old child.
Al-Duleimi worked mornings in a shop selling car parts. While he was out, men with machineguns drove to the mosque and blew open the door, according to Sheikh Ahmad al-Rawi, a witness. “They threatened his wife and ordered her to leave.
“When the imam heard the news, he rushed to the mosque and took his wife and child to a safe location before returning to collect a few belongings,” the sheikh said. But the men returned in a military truck and abducted him. He was shot and his body delivered to a morgue on Friday.
Iyad Allawi, the former interim prime minister, warned that the situation was critical. “We are slipping into a chaotic period and if we do not reverse the situation then real civil war will break out in Iraq,” he said. “Now people have seen the magnitude of what happened between the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, we can only pray that nothing else like this or even the assassination of a prominent religious leader takes place — because the next time Iraq will certainly blow up.”
An all-day curfew imposed for Friday prayers was extended into the weekend in four troublesome provinces. But about 60 people died violently yesterday, including 14 commandos in a battle with Shi’ite militiamen in Baghdad. A car bomb in the Shi’ite city of Karbala claimed eight lives.
The violence has brought home how little power Iraq’s politicians have compared with the clerics. Many Iraqis refused to heed prime mnister Jaafari’s appeal for calm, while Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani appeared to call on sectarian militias to protect religious sites.
Previous pleas for restraint by Sistani have been heeded, but his ability to control Shi’ite radicals appears to be waning and the country has faced a dangerous power vacuum since elections last December.
For the Americans the disorder presents an opportunity as well as a threat. “It could be a wake-up call to all of the leaders that they had better get on with things and form a broad-based government,” a Pentagon official said.
The message was vigorously reinforced by Bush in yesterday’s telephone talks with leaders including Jaafari and Allawi, both Shi’ites, and Hajim al-Hassani, the Sunni president of the Iraqi national assembly.
By last night there were some signs of progress. One of the top Shi’ite leaders, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim — whose party is linked to the Badr Brigade militia — warned Iraqis not to be provoked by the Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who is widely blamed for the attack at Samarra.
Sunni and Shi’ite clerics also agreed to ban attacks on each others’ mosques. But the head of the Badr organisation, Hadi al-Amari, has issued a challenge to Khalilzad. “We have decided to incorporate militias into the Iraqi security forces and we are serious about this,” he said. He warned security portfolios must remain in the hands of a Shi’ite.
US officials are racing against two clocks: one in Iraq, the other in America. A Gallup poll on Friday showed that fewer than one in three Americans believe their country is winning in Iraq, the lowest figure to date.
Advances in training an Iraqi national army have been slow. The Pentagon announced on Friday that the number of Iraqi battalions able to operate independently of US forces had fallen from one to none.
Krepinevich believes 2006 is a crunch year for American public opinion. “If we haven’t made any significant progress four years after the invasion, it will be hard to persuade the public that it’s worth sticking with,” he said. In the event of a civil war Americans might “want to wash their hands of Iraq”.
Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff at the state department, shares Krepinevich’s view that a new Saddam could emerge. “If a civil war were to break out, we would be faced with a difficult choice. Do we enclave ourselves in Iraq and hope and pray the violence is short-lived or do we throw our weight on one side?”
In Wilkerson’s scenario, emergency powers would be granted to a political leader, much as they would be in any threatened democracy. Allawi could be a potential candidate. The Americans would make sure there were “checks and balances” to the leader’s authority, but they might not last.
“If you put someone in who is extremely powerful at the top, the key is whether that person turns into another Saddam Hussein,” Wilkerson said. “After a year you might see the political apparatus around him disappearing and he’s there for life.”
The alternative could be a war that engulfs the region and leaves Iraq as a haven for terrorism. According to Allawi, if Iraqi politicians fail to agree on a secular government with the power to dismantle the sectarian militias, “the situation will be catastrophic and civil war will break out”.
“If this were to happen, it will not be limited to the borders of Iraq but will most certainly spill over and affect a lot of neighbouring countries,” he warned.
Last autumn, Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, argued that a civil war “would finish Iraq for ever”.
“The Iranians would enter the conflict because of the [Shi’ite] south, the Turks because of the Kurds and the Arabs . . . will definitely be dragged into the conflict.” Their prime motivation would be to prevent an Iranian-backed “Shi’ite crescent” forming across Lebanon through Syria to Iran, Iraq and the Gulf.
In its report, the International Crisis Group cautions that Sunni Arab nations, especially Saudi Arabia, would be alarmed by the emergence of an “Iranian-influenced entity in southern Iraq sitting on more than 80% of the country’s oil”.
So would the West. Krepinevich argues it would be better if any future despot were an ally of the Americans rather than the Iranians or Syrians. That, too, could encourage America — despite its hopes for democracy — to seek out a strongman.
