Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East

by Kim Ghattas

Hezbollah was only gaining in stature, and after the Israeli withdrawal, it now controlled even more territory in southern Lebanon: miles of craggy hills overlooking northern Israel, villages and towns that its men in black could patrol on their motorbikes, more walls on which it could plaster pictures of its martyrs,

The Lebanese state, unable to impose itself where Hezbollah held sway, was mostly absent from a region in dire need of help after years of occupation. Hezbollah had millions it could spend every month, courtesy of Iran and rich Shia supporters from the diaspora. Imam Khomeini schools and Mahdi scout groups sprung up; more husseiniyyas were built. Ashura commemorations became bigger, bolder, and longer. In an effort to maintain constant mobilization of its followers, Hezbollah emulated Iran’s growing number of religious commemorations. Ashura extended over more days.

The weight of the party had already changed the Shia community, and now it was weighing down the country.

By 2004, Rafiq Hariri was beginning to resent the arrangement that had first brought him to power in 1992. The Syrian occupation and Hezbollah’s adventures were thwarting his ambitions for Lebanon.

Nasrallah and Hariri met for the last time on February 11, 2005. They ate more fresh fruit and chatted into the early hours of the morning. It was their last supper. On February 14, Hariri was dead. The accusing fingers immediately pointed at Syria. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all faiths and sects descended onto the streets of Beirut, protesting for weeks and demanding that Syrian troops leave the country.

wave of assassinations followed: progressive intellectuals, longtime defenders of the Palestinian cause, communists, members of parliament, Christians, Sunnis, and Shias. This time the assassins reached beyond the Shia community, which had already been decimated by the wave of targeted killings in the 1980s.

Even as they were trying to thwart America in Iraq (allowing jihadis to cross through Syria, propping up Shia militias), or perhaps precisely because they were doing so, Damascus and Tehran had been feeling vulnerable, both wondering whether they were America’s next target. After 9/11, Iran had helped the United States by sharing intelligence about al-Qaeda and the Taliban. President Khatami was hoping for a thaw in relations. Instead, in 2002, President George W. Bush lumped Iran into the “Axis of Evil” along with North Korea and Iraq.

While Iran worked to overpower Iraq, Assad and Hezbollah needed to make sure Lebanon remained theirs, and Hariri was getting in the way.

With the killing of Hariri, Iran had unofficially declared war on Saudi Arabia, just as the kingdom itself was feeling fragile, grappling with the wave of al-Qaeda bombings.

But Iran was getting increasingly bolder in Iraq: the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) was funding and arming militias, evading US sanctions by siphoning off Iraqi oil, and planting their friends in key positions in ministries.

On June 7, 2006, at 6:15 p.m., two American F-16s launched a missile strike against a house surrounded by palm trees, fifty-five miles northeast of Baghdad. The aircraft dropped two 500-pound laser-guided bombs on the house. Six people were killed; one of them was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq had had a new prime minister since May, leader of the first full-term government since the fall of Saddam Hussein. For the first time in Iraq’s history, the country’s top leader, chosen after an election, was a Shia. Nuri al-Maliki

By then, Zarqawi had not only beheaded Western hostages and blown up the UN headquarters and the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, he had also sent suicide bombers into four-star hotels in Amman one December night in 2005, killing sixty people and injuring more than a hundred. Zarqawi was so bloodthirsty that even al-Qaeda had kept its distance from him, criticizing his gruesome videotaping of the beheadings and counseling him against the wanton killing of fellow Muslims, including Shias. Even Zarqawi’s mentor Maqdissi had never condoned the killing of Shias. But Zarqawi wanted a civil war in Iraq;

Now he was dead. The Americans had killed him, but a Shia prime minister promised this was only the beginning. “Today Zarqawi has been terminated,” said Maliki. “Every time a Zarqawi appears we will kill him. We will continue confronting whoever follows his path. It is an open war between us.”

“Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!” The men below were taunting him, calling out the name of the hothead cleric leading the Mahdi army. “Long live Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr,” others chanted, referring to the cleric that Saddam had executed in 1980. “Moqtada? That’s [how you express] your manhood?” snarled Saddam.

One man in the audience had filmed the dictator’s last moments on a cell phone. The video aired without sound on Iraqi television. But the grainy footage leaked beyond official hands and the taunts were heard by all. Everyone had a different interpretation. Many Sunnis saw an older Sunni statesman heckled by a Shia mob, deprived of dignity in his last moments. Many Shias were relieved, vindicated in their long wait for justice.

Perhaps he had done it on purpose, a spiteful man eager to show his mettle and determination to avenge all those who had been brutally killed or had disappeared in the darkness of Saddam’s republic of fear. Saddam issued pardons on holidays, but he also delivered body bags. Every holiday, families grew anxious, never knowing what a knock on the door would bring: reunion with a loved one, bruised and gaunt but alive, or the heartbreaking confirmation of their death. “We have become Saddam,” thought Jawad. “We have become him. We have adopted his ways.” Jawad thought back to the decades of history of Shias as a minority, always in the opposition, rarely in power, always seeking justice from oppression. Now, at this key moment in their history, they had failed the test of magnanimity, the very test that Imam Hussein would have passed. They had become the oppressors.

The death of these three Sunni men between 2005 and 2006 reverberated beyond Iraq and Lebanon, beyond the Arab world itself. They each represented a very different Sunni outlook on the world. Hariri had friends and fans all the way in Pakistan. Saddam’s hanging provoked protests in Sri Lanka and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Zarqawi was a hero in a minority circle.

In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011. The Quran is immutable, and all it does is tell believers to respond to blasphemy with dignity.

Few dared to protest against those who killed in the name of Islam, afraid they would meet the same fate. Everything

a few years, the crowds would reemerge, tens of thousands of Pakistanis swarming the cities, shutting down traffic, to mourn the killer put to death by a justice system that felt it had no choice but to condemn him, though it likely would have preferred to spare him, if only to avoid creating a martyr. The apostate, the murdered man, was Salman Taseer, the nephew of Alys Faiz, the wife of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the poet of love, the same Taseer who had continued to protest against Zia in the streets of Lahore during the 1980s, even after he had spent time in the dictator’s dungeons.

He seemed confident that he had secured his place in heaven by ridding Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, of a man who had committed a double sin: defending a Christian who had committed blasphemy and a woman at that.

Zia had succeeded beyond his own expectations in transforming Pakistan. The result was not a model Islamic society, but a country full of zealots.

One of the rebel groups was an Islamist outfit, Jabhat al-Nusra, the Front of Support for the People of the Levant. In battle, they were one of the most successful. The United States had designated al-Nusra as a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaeda.

leader of all Muslims. At around the same time, May 2013, Hezbollah sent hundreds of its top fighters into Syria to help Assad’s forces recapture the small border town of Qusayr.

“Syria is the front line of the resistance. We will support Syria till the end,” Suleimani declared. For him, the Assad regime and Syria were part of his grand ambition to build his own borderless empire, just like Baghdadi, except this one would be loyal to the wilayat al-faqih. Iran was again pursuing “war, war until victory”—even if victory looked like devastation on someone else’s land.

As elite members of the Quds force and Hezbollah fighters fanned out across Syria, al-Nusra set up a shari’a court in Raqqa.

Slowly but ruthlessly, Baghdadi’s men seized control of Raqqa, even taking over most of al-Nusra. In April 2013, Baghdadi announced that a new organization was formed: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Most of the men in black with guns and long beards were foreigners: Iraqis but also Tunisians, Saudis, Egyptians, even Europeans. They walked around like they owned the city.

On August 21, 2013, Yassin almost lost Samira forever. The Syrian regime forces had launched an attack with chemical weapons against Eastern Ghouta, the opposition-held area outside Damascus that included Douma. Up to fourteen hundred people died. The sight of children gasping, foaming at the mouth, and whole families killed in their sleep galvanized world opinion again—two years into the rebellion. But only briefly.

The message seemed to be that he could kill his people with any weapon he wanted, except chemical weapons. Samira and her friends had witnessed everything and they had survived. That episode was an inflexion point for Syria and the world. Assad had broken international law with no consequences; left to die by the world, sensing that Assad would feel emboldened, thousands more Syrians fled the country, on foot

Assad’s allies, Russia and Iran, would now pour even more effort into shoring him up, and by 2015 Russia would intervene militarily with air strikes and special operations forces on the ground to help Assad further.

Early on in the revolution, Sarout, the Syrian goalkeeper, had joined the ranks of the Free Syrian Army. But the FSA was disintegrating. There were no good options for good men. So Sarout joined an Islamist rebel group. He grew a beard. He stopped singing.

When the mosque was completed in 2004, it was not just the largest Shia shrine in Syria, bedecked in beautiful, Persian blue tiles, but also an Iranian outpost in the Sunni hinterland, complete with portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei. Raqqawis had tried to stop the construction—these were their saints, their pilgrimage sites. The complex deprived them of their traditions and collective memory. There were no Shias anywhere nearby, but Iranian pilgrims began to flock to the site, clerics from Hezbollah spoke at the mosque, and the Iranian cultural center in Aleppo organized rallies there.

In January 2014, ISIS declared Raqqa the capital of the new caliphate. In March, ISIS blew up the Iranian outpost in Raqqa. It had long been desecrated, with graffiti on the walls declaring it a Sunni mosque; the portraits of Khomeini and Khamenei were removed and destroyed. After the explosions, Hezbollah and Iran could justify their involvement in the war in Syria by claiming they had to protect Shia shrines. Groups like ISIS and other Islamists could brandish sites as proof that Iran was trying to take over Sunni land. A religious war had been invented by men hungry for power, land, and guns.

Raqqa had never seen public violence of this kind; no one in Syria had. Even Assad conducted his torture and executions behind walls. ISIS wanted to instill fear so extreme as to elicit obedience.

That spring and throughout the summer, Baghdadi and his men launched a spectacular offensive that took the world by surprise—especially President Obama and his administration, who had dismissed ISIS as a minor player on the scene, thereby justifying America’s lack of intervention.

In Iraq, ISIS freed some five hundred prisoners, many of them from the Zarqawi days, men who would swell the ranks of a rapidly growing force. Baghdadi fueled the flames with a wave of shocking bomb attacks that would drive Sunnis into the arms of his organization, seeking protection as the state continued to fail them. The big offensive began on June 5, from Baghdadi’s hometown of Samarra. Within days, columns of men, packed onto the back of pickups, or driving military vehicles stolen from the Iraqi army, overran land from Mosul in northeast Iraq across the border and into Syria. The Iraqi army collapsed as Baghdadi’s men took town after town, seizing control over territory that stretched from just outside Baghdad all the way up to the Turkish border. It was a stunning defeat: several thousand lightly armed men facing down a national army twenty times larger, much of it equipped by the Americans. The loot was worth millions. The control over oil fields brought in even more. But victory in the name of a caliphate was invaluable for the zealots; it was a victory against history.

Iraq and Syria, cradles of ancient civilizations, were losing not only their future but also their past. In Mosul, ISIS burned down or ransacked centuries-old libraries, destroying invaluable manuscripts and maps. In the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, a pneumatic drill was used to gouge out the eyes of a nine-ton winged bull statue, once a symbol of the power of Assyrian kings. In Syria, ISIS destroyed an ancient Greek settlement that included the world’s oldest known church and synagogue.

There is always looting and wanton destruction in war, but this was purposeful, ruthless, and relentless vandalism. ISIS justified these brutal acts by claiming it was fighting polytheism and idolatry. Baghdadi was also turning his back on the long tradition of caliphs who had encouraged art, history, and literature.

Not since the founding of the modern Saudi state had there been such a cultural rampage in the Middle East, such bizarre, misguided obsession with breaking statues and shrines. And not since the days of Muhammad ibn Abdelwahhab and the first Saudi state had there been such fanatical zeal in eliminating those who were outside the narrow confines of an extremely puritanical worldview.

Jamal looked at ISIS and he saw Wahhabism untamed, in its purest form. Indeed, members and supporters of the group wrote pamphlets describing Baghdadi as walking in the footsteps of Ibn Abdelwahhab, continuing his mission of upholding extreme monotheism while fighting idolatry and imposing Islamic law on seized territory.

was true that Saudi Arabia had neither funded nor armed ISIS, and it was also true that ISIS had the kingdom in its sights—but this was because the zealots believed the House of Saud had strayed from the true mission of Ibn Abdelwahhab. ISIS was Saudi progeny, the by-product of decades of Saudi-driven proselytizing and funding of a specific school of thought that crushed all others, but it was also a rebel child, a reaction to Saudi Arabia’s own hypocrisy, as it claimed to be the embodiment of an Islamic state while being an ally of the West.

And he cared nothing for Saudi Arabia’s efforts to distance itself from ISIS—the kingdom may not have directed the rise of this cult of fanatics, but it had done more than enough to feed the various Islamic nihilists who were hijacking the revolution and destroying Syria.

The leader of Jaysh al-Islam was Zahran Alloush, son of a Salafist preacher from Douma, who had trained in Saudi Arabia, where he remains to this day.

When it became clear at the end of 2013 that the United States would not intervene on behalf of Syrian rebels, Saudi Arabia decided to throw its weight and checkbook behind Alloush,

Money was flowing to Syria from other Gulf countries, like Qatar and Kuwait. Instead of working together toward a common goal, rivalries emerged among the Gulf countries as they fought for influence in Syria. America’s disinterest in helping bring down Assad continued to function as a rallying cry: hundreds of jihadists and wannabe jihadists, but also losers of all kinds, flocked to Syria.

exile, Yassin watched as these foreigners laid claim to his country and stole the Syrian revolution, not just the Sunni ones but also the Shias—the biggest group of foreign fighters was in fact on Iran’s side. Iran

They were Iran’s very own transnational army. Iran was also chipping away at its project to build a contiguous area of influence from Iran through Iraq into Syria and all the way to Lebanon.

Hezbollah was using the template that had served so well in Lebanon to build a “resistance society” in Syria, setting up Islamic Mahdi scouts, offering public services, and caring for families of martyrs.

In a few more years, Yassin’s hometown and vast areas of Iraq, including large parts of Mosul, would be little more than a pile of rubble, devastated by a US-led bombing campaign to defeat ISIS. The destruction would defy belief, with whole city blocks flattened.