and enemies had both suffered the murderous violence of its rule and had no wish to repeat the experience. An organisation as ruthless as Isis isn’t going to seek popular approval before it acts, but it can’t rely wholly on intimidation to gather recruits for a new campaign: it needs to retain some sympathy among the Sunni community at large. More important, it has always thrived on chaos: with its rivals at one another’s throats, it could exploit the vacuum of political and military power. For much of this year, chaos seemed to be on the way out, as normal life gradually returned to former battle zones in both Syria and Iraq—unpropitious conditions for Isis. But in October, the situation changed.
I was in Baghdad on the evening of 1 October, staying at the Baghdad Hotel near Tahrir Square in the city centre. I was planning to visit Diyala Governorate, north of Baghdad, the following day. The area had once been an Isis stronghold, and I wanted to see whether it was making a comeback. From my hotel, I heard the distant sound of shots. They could have been in celebration of a wedding, or victory in a football match, but the gunfire went on too long for those things to make sense, so I went down to the lobby to find out what was happening. As I reached the front door, a man came in from the street to say that the security services were shooting at protesters; ten of them had been killed. Later in the evening, I got in touch with a doctor at Medical City, a hospital complex not far from Tahrir Square, who said that ten dead was an underestimate and that he himself had seen four bodies. Meanwhile, the government was claiming a death toll of one.
Nobody had been expecting violence. By Baghdad standards, it was a small protest—some 3,000 people on the streets—and it was motivated by social and economic issues: unemployment, government corruption, and inadequate electricity and water supply. I had been told about it the previous day by a group of young men demonstrating opposite the foreign ministry, where they were demanding jobs appropriate to their status as university graduates. They said they had been camped out there for forty-three days and were intending to go to the rally in Tahrir Square, but they didn’t seem to be expecting trouble. Street protests have become a familiar part of Iraqi politics over the last few years. In 2016, demonstrators broke into the Green Zone and ransacked parliament and the prime minister’s office. Last year in Basra, protests over water and electricity shortages led to the setting ablaze of government and party offices, though only twelve people were reported killed.
Last month in Baghdad, the response of the security forces was very different. And, as it turned out, not only of the security forces: also patrolling the streets were the pro-Iranian factions of the predominantly Shia paramilitary Hashd al-Shaabi, or Popular Mobilisation Units. When the protesters tried to cross the al-Jumhuriya bridge leading from Tahrir Square towards the Green Zone, they were met with live fire.
The next day I drove through Tahrir Square, where protesters and soldiers were eyeing each other nervously during a lull in the demonstrations. A man was lying on the pavement on a slip road leading up to the square, but I couldn’t see whether he was injured or dead. Shortly afterwards the government declared a twenty-four-hour curfew in Baghdad, a city of seven million people, as well as in towns and cities in the overwhelmingly Shia southern part of Iraq. It cut off access to the internet in the hope of making it impossible to organise protests—but the effect was that smaller rallies began popping up all over Baghdad. My contact in Medical City reported that his hospital had been invaded by pro-Iranian Shia paramilitaries—members of either Kata’ib Hezbollah or Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq—who were beating injured protesters as they lay in their beds. He complained to one of the paramilitary commanders, who hit him with a baton and told him to mind his own business.
News of the protests was being broadcast by local media. In an attempt to put an end to the publicity, members of a group called Saraya Talia al-Khurusani invaded TV stations, wrecking studios and smashing equipment. In the streets, riot police fired heavy-duty tear gas grenades directly at protesters, inflicting serious and, in some cases, fatal injuries. According to surgeons who treated the wounded, paramilitary snipers were aiming for the head or chest. The government announced that these tactics were prohibited and would not be repeated—but it was clearly no longer in control of the way the protests were being policed. The use of maximum force proved counterproductive since, over the next few days, the demonstrations gathered in size, but whoever was issuing the orders was apparently determined that this was the only way to deal with them.
That person was reportedly the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, head of Iran’s elite al-Quds Brigade. Soleimani had flown into Baghdad airport on 2 October and taken a helicopter to the Green Zone to chair a security meeting—taking the place of the usual chair, Iraq’s prime minister. There could be no plainer demonstration of Iranian power over Iraqi policy, or of the arrogance with which it has been exercised. Soleimani is the architect of Iran’s regional security policy, determined to maintain Iranian influence by every means available as the US struggles to realise Trump’s declared ambition of containing it. In recent confrontations, Soleimani, who has a reputation for being a skilled commander, has repeatedly outmanoeuvred the US and its Gulf allies. But success appears to have gone to his head. At the meeting in the Green Zone, he made clear his belief that there was only one way to respond to the protests. “This happened in Iran and we got it under control,” he is reported as having said. He was presumably referring to Iran’s successful repression of the Green Movement that sprang up there in 2009—but then there had been no indiscriminate shooting into crowds, or singling out of movement leaders by snipers. By the end of October, the strategy as implemented in Iraq had resulted in the deaths of at least 250 protesters—the actual figure is probably much higher—with no sign of the demonstrations slowing. What’s more, they have taken an increasingly anti-Iranian turn: on 3 November, protesters set fire to the Iranian consulate in the Shia holy city of Karbala.
Like so many security chiefs down the centuries, Soleimani has helped fuel the revolutionary situation he was trying to prevent. As an Iraqi friend told me, “shooting people isn’t going to work because too many of them have nothing left to lose.” Repression on this scale was unexpected, as well as unwise. In the days before the rally that led to the first shootings, I spoke to the commanders of several of the pro-Iranian paramilitary groups, none of whom seemed to be anticipating a crisis. I asked them how they thought the US-Iran face-off would affect Iraq. Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, was confident that in Iraq as elsewhere, Iran knew how to handle tensions in a way that would stop short of full-scale military confrontation. There would be no war, he said, “because Trump does not want one.” Abu Ala al-Walai, the leader of Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, was more apprehensive: a recent drone attack, which he blamed on Israel, had destroyed fifty tonnes of arms at al-Saqr, a base under his command on the outskirts of Baghdad. I went to see it; evidently, a giant blast had torn the place apart. “The big new development,” Abu Ala said, “is that Israel has come to Iraq.” But the reaction—the overreaction—of the Iranians and their paramilitary allies to the protests in Baghdad may be a sign that they interpret events on the ground in the light of their struggle with the US. At the end of October, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, declared that “the US and western intelligence agencies, with the help of money from regional countries, are instigating unrest in the region. I advise Lebanon and Iraq to make it a priority to stabilise these security threats.”
Mass protests erupted in Lebanon on 17 October after the government tried to introduce a tax on the use of voice messaging systems like WhatsApp and FaceTime. As in Iraq, economic and social grievances have gradually escalated into generalised opposition towards a corrupt and dys-functional political system. As in Iraq, pro-Iranian militias—in this case, supporters of Hezbollah—have used force against demonstrators, attacking protest camps in central Beirut. In both Iraq and Lebanon, Iran and its Shia allies feel that the political status quo they have fought for is at risk. Paranoid that the US may be playing its part in encouraging dissent, they have opted for repression. If sustained for long enough, this strategy may succeed, not because force will necessarily win out but because in neither Iraq nor Lebanon have protesters given much indication that they have any concrete ideas about how to replace the present discredited system—or with what.
As these events were unfolding
