John Davison

Read full article

On Feb 8, two powerful men – one a cleric, one a soldier, both fellow Shi’ite Muslims – met to discuss the future of Iraqi politics and the dominant role here of neighbor Iran.

It didn’t go well.

Iranian Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani visited the home of Muqtada al-Sadr, the prominent Iraqi cleric and former battlefield foe of American troops during the U.S. occupation here.

Once a partner of Tehran, Muqtada al-Sadr has rebelled against Iranian political interference in Iraq. After Sadrists defeated pro-Iran parties at the polls, tensions between Shi’ite camps have stalled government and, some fear, could spur violence.

Read full article

The political movement of nationalist Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has quietly come to dominate the apparatus of the Iraqi state. This could pose problems for the United States and Iran.

On a tense February night, thousands of militiamen loyal to Shi’ite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took to the streets of Baghdad and southern Iraqi cities, parading in gun-laden pick-up trucks while state security forces stood by. It was the biggest show of force by the populist cleric since the mid-2000s, when his followers battled the U.S. occupation and inflicted thousands of American casualties.

After years on the fringes, Sadr is back. On the streets and in the corridors of power. This story charts how his supporters took command of key positions that control wealth and patronage networks – what Iraqis call the “deep state.”

Read full story

KERBALA, Iraq, Dec. 2, 2020 - Reuters

Iran is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into developing Shi’ite shrines in Iraq. In doing so it is binding its neighbour closer.

In September, a senior Iranian commander made an unannounced visit to one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest sites in the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. Hassan Pelarak, a U.S.-sanctioned officer in the Revolutionary Guards’ elite Quds Force, was checking in on a $600-million construction project that his firm, run by the Guards and linked to Iran’s Supreme Leader, is overseeing in this Shi’ite centre of power.

The expansion at the shrine of the Imam Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, will swell the capacity of what is already the world’s largest annual pilgrimage, dwarfing the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s Mecca. For Iran, it provides soft power and a sanctions-evading trade outlet.

Read full story

MOSUL, Iraq, June 11, 2020 - Reuters

Three years after the war against Islamic State, a different contest is playing out in Mosul. It pits allies of Iran against those who favour the West. The people of Mosul are the losers.

As Iran and the United States use Iraq as a battleground for influence in the Middle East, Mosul lies largely in ruins. Traffic snarls across battered bridges and disabled war victims sell tissues, cigarettes and tea at junctions - the kind of misery that Iraqi officials fear is the perfect breeding ground for Islamic State to reemerge.

Read full story

NAJAF, Iraq, Dec. 16, 2019 - Reuters

In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 28, after Iraqi demonstrators set the Iranian consulate in the southern holy city of Najaf ablaze, the killings began.

By the end of that day, Iran-linked militiamen in Najaf and Iraq’s elite Interior Ministry forces in Nassiriya farther south had shot dead scores of mostly unarmed demonstrators with assault rifles and machine guns. It was the single bloodiest episode of Iraq’s two-month-old anti-government uprising.

The next day Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said he would quit.

Reuters interviews with protesters, paramedics, security officials and politicians in Najaf, Nassiriya and Baghdad revealed how the brutal actions of police and militiamen led to the prime minister’s resignation.

Read full story

RAQQA, Syria, Oct. 6, 2017 - Reuters

The ancient mud brick walls circling Raqqa’s deserted old city are almost the only structure still intact. Inside, shops and homes spill crumbling concrete onto either side of the narrow roads, block after block.

Fighting between U.S.-backed militias and Islamic State in the jihadist group’s former Syria stronghold has peppered mosques and minarets with machine-gun fire while air strikes flattened houses. No building is untouched.

“The old clock tower could be heard from outside the walls once. It’s damaged now. It’s silent,” a militiaman native to the ancient Syrian city.

Read full story

BAGHDAD, Feb. 11, 2020 - Reuters

Shortly after Iran’s Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, Tehran-backed Lebanese Hezbollah urgently met with Iraqi militia leaders, seeking to unite them in the face of a huge void left by their mentor’s death.

The meetings were meant to coordinate the political efforts of Iraq’s militias, which lost not only Soleimani but also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a unifying Iraqi paramilitary commander, in the attack at Baghdad airport.

Sources in a pro-Iran regional alliance say Hezbollah, which is sanctioned as a terrorist group by the United States, has stepped in to help fill the void left by Soleimani in guiding the militias.

Read full story

AL-HOL CAMP, Syria, April 11, 2019 - Reuters

Even when U.S. coalition air strikes and artillery paused for people to evacuate during lulls in fighting, the killing did not stop in Islamic State’s final enclave.

Snipers in areas controlled by Syria’s government near the village of Baghouz picked off women and children fetching water from the river or climbing the small hill to seek medical help in Kurdish-controlled territory, survivors said.

People died from their wounds and children starved.

The Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate ended in the eastern Syrian desert in what survivors described as a bloodbath.

Read full story

BAALBEK, Lebanon, May 3, 2016 - Reuters

The war in Syria is not just reshaping Middle Eastern borders. It is creating thousands of stateless children.

Seven-month-old Nour lives in a tarpaulin tent pitched on a muddy patch of earth in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. The tent, one of a dozen in a small refugee camp, contains a metal stove, a prayer mat and worn rugs on the floor. A leather jacket and a plastic mirror hang from nails hammered into its wooden beams.

Swaddled in a faded pink blanket against the cold, Nour is the first of her Syrian parents’ three children to be born as a refugee.

Without a birth certificate, Nour could join a fast-growing generation of children who are stateless.

Read full story

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 29, 2019 - Reuters

After armed men raided the home of Hussein Adel al-Madani and his wife Sara Talib last year, they spent months of self-imposed exile in Turkey, changed address upon returning home and ceased participating in protests, according to two friends of the couple.

But a day after anti-government demonstrations erupted in Baghdad in October, gunmen shot the couple dead in their home in the southern city of Basra. Sara was several months pregnant.

“It was a message. No matter who you are, how peacefully you object - if you go out and demonstrate, you’ll be threatened, locked up, or killed.”

Read full story

FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 11, 2018 - Reuters

At Baghdad’s grand but half-empty railway station, a single train is sputtering to life. It is the newly revived daily service to Falluja, a dusty town to the west once infamous as a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

The driver and conductor assure that the tracks running through Anbar province are now clear of mines planted by Islamic State and of collapsed bridges the group blew up when it marauded through western and northern Iraq in 2014.

The revival in July of the daily service, once a feature of an extensive rail network dating back to the Ottoman empire, is a vivid example of Iraq’s attempts to recover from decades of unrest.

Read full story

HAZIMA, Syria, Sept. 7, 2017 - Reuters

The few bullet-marked schools Islamic State did not flatten or booby trap around its former Syrian stronghold of Raqqa are buzzing for the first time in years with the sound of children learning.

In the village of Hazima, north of Raqqa, teachers gave ad-hoc alphabet lessons to crammed classrooms on a recent summer’s day before the start of term.

Schools around Raqqa will teach a new curriculum that is based on old textbooks but erases the Baathist ideology of President Bashar al-Assad, a decision agreed on by Arab and Kurdish teachers alike.

Read full story

Al-QAIM, Iraq, Dec. 12, 2018 - Reuters

From a desert hillside guarded by Iraqi Shi’ite paramilitaries, commander Qasim Muslih can spot Islamic State hideouts across the frontier in Syria. But he also keeps a wary eye on U.S. warplanes soaring overhead.

“The Americans are spying on us,” he said, squinting skywards. “But we can hold the borders. We’ll fight whoever lays a finger on Iraq and its holy shrines.”

The fighters Muslih commands are part of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), a grouping of mostly Shi’ite militias backed by Iran, which the United States regards as the biggest threat to security in the Middle East.

Read full story

HASAKA, Syria, April 7, 2019 - Reuters

The paramedics’ log at al-Hol camp in eastern Syria lists the injuries and ailments of infants rushed from the battlefield to its crowded, dirty clinic: malnourishment, stunted growth, broken leg.

Those in critical need – mostly emaciated babies born in war to the wives of dead Islamic State militants – are taken to the nearest hospital, a bumpy two-hour drive away. Other people cram into a waiting room with a tin roof in a growing queue for basic medical treatment.

An exodus of more than 60,000 people fleeing fighting in Islamic State’s final redoubt is overwhelming Syrian medical staff.

Read full story

MOSUL, Iraq, Feb. 13, 2019 - Reuters

The wrecks of vehicles used by Islamic State militants as car bombs and other metal debris left by the war in Iraq are now helping fund their Iran-backed enemies, industry sources say.

Militias that helped Iraqi forces drive the IS out of its last strongholds in Iraq have taken control of the thriving trade in scrap metal retrieved from the battlefield, according to scrap dealers and others familiar with the trade.

Scrapyard owners, steel plant managers and legislators from around the city of Mosul described how the militias make millions of dollars from the sale of anything from wrecked cars and damaged weapons to water tanks and window frames.

Read full story

BAGHDAD, April 1, 2020 - Reuters

In February, an Iraqi militia commander trained by Iran took over the empty office of his slain superior, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed weeks before alongside Iranian military mastermind Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike.

Many pro-Iran militiamen hoped this was the answer to their problems: the experienced commander Abdul Aziz al-Mohammedawi might replace Muhandis as overall leader of Iraq’s paramilitary groups, scattered after the killing of their two mentors.

Instead, it has led to new splits.

Read full story

NAJAF, Iraq, Feb. 11, 2019 - Reuters

On a backstreet in Iraq’s holy city of Najaf, Iranian pilgrims shuffle in and out of a small doorway, making a short but important detour. They have come to see where the leader of the Islamic revolution once dwelled in exile.

The former home of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led an uprising that ousted the Shah of Iran, is bustling with tourists on the 40th anniversary of the birth of the Islamic Republic.

Escaping for a moment Najaf’s crowded Shi’ite Muslim shrine nearby, teenagers take selfies in rooms where he studied, prayed and developed his ideas for the establishment of an Islamic state.

Read full story

RAQQA, Syria, Oct. 26, 2017 - Reuters

The morning after Islamic State’s defeat in Raqqa, a local militia fighter stood in a square in the ruined, deserted city center. “There will be more problems here,” he said.

The 19-year-old, who gave his name as Moro, was one of few Raqqa natives to witness the aftermath of the battle for the Syrian city. Victory celebrations by Kurdish forces felt muted - there were no civilians left. It was the “liberation” of a ghost town.

“Daesh is to blame for this,” said Moro, an Arab who joined the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces militia alliance after fleeing Raqqa two years before.

“Not everyone will see it that way. If destruction remains, people will blame the coalition, and maybe us.”

Read full story

KERBALA, Iraq, Aug. 7, 2019 - Reuters

The match should have been cause for young Iraqis to celebrate. Their national team beat Lebanon 1-0 in the first competitive international hosted by Iraq for years in the holy city of Kerbala, complete with an opening ceremony of music and dance.

Instead, the event drew high-level criticism which many of the city’s youth say shows the gulf between them and the political and religious establishment.

Read full story

BAGHDAD, July 2, 2020 - Reuters

Iran’s financial and military support for Shi’ite paramilitary groups in Iraq, a linchpin of its regional foreign policy, has been dramatically disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic and U.S. sanctions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Interruptions caused by the virus, including border closings to prevent its spread, have drastically cut Tehran’s cash supplies to militia groups in recent months, said three Iraqi paramilitary group commanders and a regional official familiar with Iran’s activities.

The funds from Iran are typically allocated for operations related to paramilitary activities such as fighting Iran’s opponents, including attacks against U.S. targets.

Read full story

AL-HOL CAMP, Syria, May 23, 2019 - Reuters

Iraqi farmer Shaker Salih says he feared Islamic State, but feared its defeat even more. His problem is persuading people to believe that he did not support the jihadists.

He now lives in the sprawling, guarded al-Hol displacement camp across the border in Syria, where among 70,000 fellow Iraqis, Syrians and others, there are thousands of die-hard IS supporters.

When Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from his home in Iraq, Salih left with the Sunni extremist group. He stayed as long he could in its shrinking, self-declared caliphate.

Some are passengers in his car, which he uses as a taxi to make a living by charging one dollar a trip.

Read full story

BEIRUT, April 17, 2017 - Reuters

Mothers Noha, a Shi’ite, and Samira, a Sunni, were besieged for nearly two years on each side of Syria’s civil war. At the weekend they finally escaped the suffocating blockades under an evacuation agreement - but their ordeal was not over.

As they waited at two transit points miles apart outside Aleppo, a bomb attack one convoy killing 120 people. New buses arrived and the two convoys eventually reached their destinations - one in government and the other in rebel territory.

In the hours leading up to the attacks, the two women spoke about the split families they left behind and the likelihood they would never return home.

Read full story

KOBANI, Syria, Oct. 15, 2017 - Reuters

Almost three years after Kurdish fighters defeated Islamic State in the Syrian town of Kobani, residents still mourn the dead and feel abandoned by their foreign allies as they struggle to rebuild.

Islamic State’s defeat in predominately Kurdish Kobani in early 2015 helped turn the tide against the ultra-militant group and marked the start of a more open U.S. military relationship with the Kurdish YPG militia.

But much of the town near the border with Turkey was destroyed, leaving it facing a huge reconstruction challenge and in need of help from the allies that had supported the fight to defeat Islamic State, including the United States.

Read full story

NASSIRIYA, Iraq, Dec. 6, 2019 - Reuters

A short distance from a bridge in southern Nassiriya where Iraqi security forces gunned down their friends, young women and men set out rows of mock coffins, each draped in an Iraqi flag with pictures of the slain protesters taped on.

Murtadha Jodeh, a 25-year-old demonstrator who witnessed the killings that took place before dawn on Thursday last week, walked between more than 40 coffins laid out in three lines on the tarmac.

“This man, Mohammed, was killed by a bullet to the neck. Karar was shot in the side of the head. That other man in the heart,” he said, pointing at each picture he recognized.

“They killed the last of my friends I’d protested with since October. I’m the only one left.”