Why would a handsome, fun-loving man from Birmingham, newly possessed of British citizenship, sell his profitable business and return to his native Iraq to die in a hail of bullets? Muhammad Hussein, never known as particularly religious, recently sold his barber shop in Moseley and took his wife and two-year-old son to a settlement near Najaf, where he was probably killed when Iraqi and US forces stormed the compound of the Soldiers of Heaven cult in late January. Muhammad's charred British passport was found among the wreckage. In the final tally, 263 cult members were killed.
Before leaving, Muhammad told a Rivers of Babylon source over a couple of beers in a Birmingham nightclub: "I am going off to do humanitarian work in Iraq," where "the Mahdi is about to emerge." Many of the dead in the Soldiers of Heaven compound were found chained to each other, and it is possible that Muhammad did not know he was being recruited for battle.
Shia Islam is beholden to the notion of messianic expectation, and its history is rife with false claimants to the role of the Mahdi—the twelfth Shia imam, whose return to earth will bring the age of justice. This latest fit seems to be connected to a prophecy; it is said that just before the advent of the Mahdi, an army will sweep over Jebel Sinam, on the Kuwait-Iraq border, and the people will witness "mountains of fire and a mountain of food." The US ground invasion was launched from Kuwait, and the two mountains have been explained as America's military might and its economy.
When the Soldiers of Heaven were attacked there was confusion over their identity, for several Shia messianic movements now operate in Iraq. One, the Musta'ajiloon (or "Hasteners") advocates theft and abduction to hasten the advent of the Mahdi. The Soldiers of Heaven were allegedly plotting to take over the city of Najaf—the Shia Vatican—and execute top clerics, beginning with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, thus fulfilling another prophecy, whereby the Mahdi massacres 70 Shia clerics who rejected him.
In mainstream Shiism, the Mahdi came into this world by natural birth just like the other Shia imams. With so much evil in the world, he went into periods of hiding, or occultation, the last of which has lasted 11 centuries. The Mahdi was last seen in 939AD going down a well in Samarra, which as a result was turned into one of the major shrines of Shiism. It was this shrine's destruction by Sunni jihadists a year ago that precipitated Iraq's current sectarian convulsions.
The Shia establishment has come up with elaborate prophesies and impossible conditions for the Mahdi's appearance, trying to forestall false claims. Yet still the pretenders come. Their destruction is usually accompanied by tales of sexual licence and deviancy. The Soldiers of Heaven were dismissed by the governor of Najaf as members of the Sulukiyya sect, mystics whose ecstatic rituals allegedly end in orgies. A cleric associated with Sistani's office was more understanding. "They were led astray," he told me by phone from Najaf, "as simple people are wont to be."
A fishmonger's son
The Soldiers of Heaven, and the other Shia cults in Iraq, should be seen as permutations of the Sadrist movement. Muqtada al-Sadr inherited the mantle from his father, Muhammad al-Sadr, whose major work was a four-volume account of the Mahdi's occultation and the signs of his imminent return. When Muqtada formed a militia he called it, perhaps inevitably, the Mahdi army. For now the Shia mainstream must tolerate these zealots, confident that they are too weird to gain the upper hand. Thus when the Samarra shrine was blown up, Sistani called for calm while the Mahdi army plunged into reprisal killings that left thousands of young Sunnis dead. Many of the killings bore the macabre signature of the mysterious Abu Dera, a kind of Shia Zarqawi who is among the coalition's most wanted men in Iraq—if he is still in the country.
Abu Dera's real name is Ismael Hafidh al-Hilfi. He was born and raised in the southern town of Amara, the illiterate son of a fishmonger. He served as a master sergeant in the Iraqi army and saw frontline action during the Iraq-Iran war, before being discharged after injury left him with a slight limp. He rose to prominence in Sadr City as a projectiles expert during the second round of clashes between US forces and the Mahdi army in autumn 2004. After the Samara bombing, Abu Dera consolidated his role as "protector" of Sadr City, and his gang has been responsible for a disproportionate amount of the sectarian reprisal killing against Sunnis, many with his signature weapon: the electric drill. Abu Dera's excesses show how hard it is for the al-Sadr hierarchy to control the strands of millenarianism, revenge and street brutality that claim legitimacy in the name of the Mahdi army. The al-Sadr hierarchy refuses either to acknowledge Abu Dera as one of their own or to include him on their lists of renegade members. He has been hiding in Iran since early November, according to a source who knows him.
