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By Root 339 0

sharp glances. When we met American soldiers he drew back and let me do the talking. But he studied them, stood perfectly still and stared with wide, respectful eyes behind his glasses. And later, when we got back in the car, he’d tell me excitedly about the American soldiers, what they’d said and done, repeating their names as if I had not been there with him, watching too. Raheem never sold the Americans out, not even years later, when the war slithered into his house and broke his heart for good. He felt he had no right to complain about what had come, because he had been in favor of the war from the start.

Raheem woke up before sunrise and spent the early morning hours chatting with the people in the hotel lobby or out in the market. I’d find him when I stumbled down, deep in conversation, twirling prayer beads from his fingers in a stream of morning sunlight. He’d already sauntered down to the souk, bought a sack of fresh-baked bread and processed cheese. “Coffee,” I’d croak to the man behind the desk. “You want some, Raheem?”

“No, thank you,” he would say crisply. “I have had my breakfast.”

As soon as we were alone, he’d tell me the pieces of gossip he’d gathered, the scraps of ideas for stories, the leads we could investigate. He brought them out confidentially, proudly, and spread them out between us like seashells he’d stuffed in his pocket.

One day, during a long, bleak desert drive, we pulled up behind a truck crammed with sheep. “Look at all those sheep!” I said.

Raheem laughed, raised his arm in the air, and wiggled it around, making a scooping motion with a thumb. The skinny shepherd signaled back, scarf flapping wild around his head. “He is going to sell the sheep in Saudi Arabia, because the price is better there,” Raheem announced.

“What? How do you know?”

“He has just told me.”

“But, how?”

“You know, we have these signals …” Raheem seemed muddled now, as if I’d asked him to explain something as instinctive as breathing. “I said with my hand, ‘Are you going to take them over there?’ And ‘over there’ means Saudi Arabia. He said, ‘Yes, it’s better.’ And he means the price.”

He turned his face back to the desert.

American and British soldiers roamed the roads, but the Iranian-backed Shiite clerics were in charge. They had posted orders on the door of Imam Ali’s shrine in the holy city of Najaf. “A Declaration to Keep Peace,” the announcement said.

Do not receive or sell any looted goods.

Protect government buildings from looters.

Maintain unity among the Shiites.

Kill any members of the Baath.

Don’t spy on people.

Unite all Shiite Muslims of all types and origins to allow American forces to settle in this part of Iraq.

Support the creation of an Islamic government.

A body drifted past, borne on bony shoulders. There was no coffin, only a wooden crate, and the lid bounced as the men marched, wafting the death smell into the afternoon. The massive Shiite cemetery on the outskirts of town had halted burials during the war. Now, I saw, the Shiites were back in business.

When I set off to drive through southern Iraq, I expected to find plain stories of liberation and jubilation, open torture chambers and religious pilgrimages. There was an expectation among U.S. officials that Shiites would emerge as the natural allies of the Americans, who had stormed in and freed them from Saddam. But the days among the Shiites were strange from the start. Families draped black banners over their gates to announce the death of people who’d been gone for years. Men crept to the bombed shells of intelligence offices where they’d been tortured to paw in the dirt for documents, kick the rubble in rage, revisit the site of a torment they’d been forced to keep silent about—and to see that site broken and defunct. Gangs hung handwritten lists of suspected Baathist collaborators in town squares, vigilante death sentences. The marshes and farms convulsed with catharsis.

Underneath the top layer of joy, there welled a pool of disappointment, abandonment and disillusionment too deep to dry. Something dark, strong, and