Eyewitness to a Siege: Life among the snipers and the worshipers

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Eyewitness to a Siege
Life among the snipers and the worshipers in a holy city held hostage
By Scott Johnson
Newsweek

Aug. 30 issue - A portrait of an angry Moqtada al-Sadr greeted visitors to the Imam Ali Mosque in the holy city of Najaf. The militant Shiite cleric and hundreds of armed followers were effectively holding the gold-domed shrine—and the city around it—hostage last week. U.S. forces didn't dare get too close for fear of damaging one of Iraq's most sacred sites. The area inside the American cordon, nearly a mile across, was a virtual no man's land. One of the few Western journalists to venture there was photographer Laurent Van der Stockt, on assignment for NEWSWEEK. He filed this report:

Most of the inhabitants have fled. The few remaining civilians take to the streets when the shelling pauses, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch, although snipers make the open areas unsafe. Some people here are friendly; others curse me as a Westerner. Occasionally they get into screaming arguments about me.

My driver/fixer and I came to no man's land on Sunday. We left the Coalition sector of Najaf in a hurry after the city's chief of police ordered us out of town—for our safety, he explained. We were forced to abandon our car part of the way in, and we traveled the rest of the way by donkey cart and on foot. At night we sleep at a shuttered hotel that caters to pilgrims in ordinary times. The owner and his staff have fled. You can't buy food here; the souk has been destroyed, and every cafe is closed. We survive on a stash of canned goods and whatever else we can scrounge. At least the place still has running water.

Townspeople make their way to the mosque at all hours, night and day, for prayers and companionship. They generally seem calm and comfortable, even when the shelling outside is heavy. At night, festoons of colored lights cast a carnival glow on the men who stand and chat in the mosque's vast courtyard. During the day—between gun battles, anyway—the place almost resembles a big cookout, when huge stew pots are set up in the rubble outside the south gate beneath a canopy of fallen electrical lines, and plates of rice with tomato sauce are served to all comers.

Off to one side of the shrine, a small room has been turned into a makeshift field hospital with four beds and two mattresses on the floor. A couple of poorly equipped doctors and a few nurses treat the wounded; about 10 injured fighters and two or three dead are brought in every day. Others can't get here from the front lines.

At times the insurgents act as if the siege is practically a street party. One afternoon I met a dozen or so guerrillas a few blocks from the shrine, racing east through the deserted neighborhood toward the U.S. line. The group's leader, just out of his teens and built like a wrestler, was running barefoot, apparently not bothered by the shrapnel that covered the pavement. He said his name was Ali; he and his men had traveled from the far northern city of Mosul to join al-Sadr's revolt. They were going to attack an American armored vehicle. Almost within sight of their target, they were greeted by other pro-Sadr fighters from Nasiriya and Karbala. The youngest of the group, spotting a poster of al-Sadr on a nearby wall, asked me to photograph him with it. At that, the whole bunch broke into a wild dance, bouncing and chanting: "Moqtada! Moqtada!" Then mortars began hammering the area, and I left for safer ground. I haven't seen Ali since.

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