Nation Building at Gunpoint
SAMARRA, Iraq—There’s only one way in and out of this predominantly Sunni Muslim city: through the checkpoints of the Saraya al-Salam, one of Iraq’s most fearsome Shia militias. Samarra gained notoriety in 2006 as ground zero of Iraq’s sectarian civil war, and more recently as the hometown of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State.
In recent years, however, a remarkable calm has taken root here. The city’s restive tribes have put aside historic feuds. Security forces have foiled Islamic State terror plots while preventing revenge attacks against ISIS sympathizers. The Askari Shrine, one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites, has been restored, after a 2006 attack, and is attracting more pilgrims than ever. Tourists from all over Iraq snap selfies at the Malwiya Tower, an Abbasid minaret that resembles a tiered wedding cake and is one of Iraq’s most famous monuments.
A visitor is hard-pressed to reconcile today’s orderly Samarra with the war zone it has largely been since the American invasion in 2003. The current calm is the product of the city’s unique experiment in nation building, or rebuilding, Iraqi-style.
The cleric Moqtada al-Sadr dispatched the Saraya al-Salam, his widely feared militia once called Samarra in 2014, as ISIS forces bore down on the city. Sadr has unparalleled stature among Iraqi politicians because of his huge and enduring popular following—and because he has embraced a rhetoric of anti-sectarian nationalist unity, one that belies his militia’s record of sectarian killing during the country’s civil war, which ended in 2008.
