Hearts and Minds...and eyeballs and fingers

John Lee Anderson of the New Yorker has written a great article, Inside the Surge, which examines why violence has ebbed in recent months. The three main reasons are the increased presence of American soldiers (which cannot be sustained), the decision by Sunni Tribesmen to turn away from Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia for security (which hopefully lasts), and the Madhi Army's six month freeze on violence ordered by Moqtada al-Sadr (which ends in about two months).

One of the reasons is that ethnic cleansing seems to have been completed in some neighborhoods so there's no one left to kill.

Most of the articles details the revenge spree of a man named Amar against the Madhi Army for killing his brother. Many would resolve themselves to find the perpetrators, but Amar thinks big. Like, Uma Thurman in "Kill Bill" big.

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.

He goes on to murder fathers, brothers, and friends of the killers. He works with the occupation Army and turns over militia men, who think he is sympathetic to them. Other times (with the help of Karim) he abducts them or has them over for conversation and tea, which he drugs. “They fall asleep, then I shoot them in the head.”

All of this goes on with the mother's enthusiastic support. The mother, Um Jafaar, isn't satisfied with a simple report of the killings--she demands body parts be cut off the victims and delivered to her.

Um Jafaar went on to tell me that she took the body parts of Amar’s victims, wrapped in cloth, to his grave, in the holy city of Najaf, and buried them there. “I talk to my son, I tell him, ‘Here, this is from those who killed you, I take revenge.’ ” Moving one hand in a horizontal circle, she said, “I put them around the grave. So far, I have taken one hand, one eye, an Adam’s apple, toes, fingers, ears, and noses.” (Karim told me that the hand had made the house stink for days.) I asked her how many Mahdi men Amar had killed. “I don’t know: eighteen, twenty? But still my heart hurts. Even if we kill all of them, I won’t have comfort,” she said.

With men like Amar working with coalition forces, it's hard to understand how we are winning hearts and minds. His mother is literally collecting hearts. Millions with the means to leave Iraq have done so. They are the doctors, lawyers, teachers, and others needed to form a civilized country.

On helping with the killing of 20 or so people, Karim employs a Bushian logic saying, "We had to kill these guys, because they were killing too many people."