Mick Hartley

More from Michael J. Totten in Iraq:

Can you describe what Al Qaeda did here?” I said.

“The Al Qaeda organization is the enemy of Iraqis and of Americans,” Mahmoud said. “We are Muslims. Sunnis. Al Qaeda came through Islam and used it to enter Iraqi lands. They are killers, insurgents, they don’t respect humanity. They don’t belong to Islam or have religious beliefs. They have no kind of religious beliefs.”

Don’t assume Mahmoud is dissembling when he says this. It may appear that some Muslims are being overly defensive by saying Osama bin Laden is not a real Muslim, but there is a solid case to be made that radical Islamism is, in fact, a totalitarian cult unhinged from the religion as it is actually practiced by the majority. It is they, after all, who blow up mosques in Iraq. I know of at least one mosque in Ramadi that is considered “blackened” because insurgents used it as a base. No one will set foot in it now.

Shia mosques are not the only Islamic houses of worship desecrated by the likes of Al Qaeda. Zarqawi had ruthlessly seized control of the Sunni town of Biara in Iraqi Kurdistan before the group he was then attached to – Ansar Al Islam – was pushed into Iran by American Special Forces and Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga. He and his men squatted in the town’s mosque and used the shrine there as a toilet.

I asked the caretaker of that mosque how he felt about the fact that Americans bombed it to get Ansar Al Islam out. “I don’t know,” he said, as if he had never even pondered the question. “It’s okay, I suppose. I am grateful. If they had not done it this place would still be a toilet.”

Every mosque in the Fallujah area – and there are more than 200 of them – broadcast pro-American messages from minaret loudspeakers. The messages inside the walls are as pro-American as the ones outside. The Marines have fluent Arabic-speakers listening in so they can keep their ears close to the ground of public opinion. If the mosques turn against Americans again, the Marines need to know.

When Mahmoud says Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam, he is not speaking theologically. I’m afraid Al Qaeda does belong to Islam if you look at it that way. But he is right that Al Qaeda does not belong to Islam as it is currently lived by the people in his community.

“In Western Iraq we have been a part of this big game,” Mahmoud said. “The Sunnis here are very simple people, very innocent people. It is easy to win their hearts. Al Qaeda tried to go through the religion to earn their affection. People can get enrolled in those types of Islamic organizations for that reason.”

“The Al Qaeda organization is like a mafia or any other secret organization in the world,” Ahmed said. “If you enroll in that organization, that’s it. You’re gone. Nobody can get you out of that business. You’re lost. It’s a matter of trapping the man after letting him in. Then he’s trapped, he’s lost forever. He cannot go back because the Al Qaeda organization will get him.”

They are not just like a mafia. They are also like a murderous cult. […]

According to the conventional narrative, Al Qaeda was rejected by Iraqis because they murdered Iraqis. They were far more vicious and hateful than the Americans they vowed to expel. The narrative is correct, as far as it goes, but Al Qaeda is detested for more than mere thuggery. Other armed groups have been able to maintain at least some popularity even though they also murder Iraqis. None of the others, though, violent though they may be, are so thoroughly totalitarian, so alien to the traditions of Iraqi culture, and so hostile to its centuries-old social fabric. Al Qaeda in Iraq tears at Iraq’s traditional culture as viciously as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia.