Over the past few months, Iraqis from all walks of life have mobilized against their beleaguered, sluggish government, in protests that harken back to the heyday of the Arab Spring. The demonstrations started on October 1, inspired by mounting frustration with corruption, unemployment, and a dearth of public services. Many protesters blame this dysfunction on Iraq’s byzantine, American-devised political system—a cynical spoils system designed to account for the country’s complex sectarian framework. The Iraqi Security Forces’ often brutal response to the protests, which has led to more than 300 deaths, is doing little to reinforce the protesters’ already-faltering confidence in the competence of Iraqi authorities. Meanwhile, Iran’s well-publicized role in the cronyism of the Iraqi state has given the demonstrations a nationalist flair.
Less well-publicized, however, is the role of an Iraqi war hero by the name of Lieutenant General Abdel-Wahab al-Saadi, adored by many in his country as the Iraqi face of counterterrorism and seen by some as a bulwark against pervasive Iranian influence. The Iraqi government’s move to dismiss al-Saadi in all but name earlier this year served as the straw that broke the camel’s back, convincing thousands of al-Saadi’s compatriots that their politicians amounted to nothing more than Iranian stooges. Today, protesters carry his picture as they march through cities across Iraq, using photographs of al-Saadi as a reminder of why the latest demonstrations began. In an ironic twist, this once-obscure veteran first made a name for himself by avoiding politics—though not the wars that shape them.
Before I arrived in Iraq in June 2016 to cover the Third Battle of Fallujah for the Daily Beast, I never expected to meet al-Saadi. In fact, I only heard of him after I got there. Though al-Saadi, the architect of the month-long Iraqi operation to recapture Fallujah, commanded the respect of many Iraqis for his commitment to his country’s national security, he was far from a household name in the United States. Nonetheless, al-Saadi soon found himself at the center of the American strategy to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS).
Al-Saadi, who became an Iraqi national symbol in 2015 after leading his troops to decisive victories at the Battle of Baiji and the Second Battle of Tikrit, earned further respect for the deftness with which he navigated the ceaseless tug of war between Iran and the United States over Iraq’s peripatetic campaign against ISIS. While Iran armed, funded, and trained many of the factions that composed the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), an umbrella organization of militias that provided much of the manpower at the heart of the anti-ISIS effort, al-Saadi had no problem refusing Iranian support during his successful bid to retake Baiji lest he appear aligned with the foreign policy of officials in Tehran.
At the same time, the general rarely hesitated to express his frustration with Iraq’s fickle American patrons, once complaining to the news media, “Sometimes, they would carry out airstrikes that I never asked for, and at other times I begged them for a single air strike and they never did it.” In a country where foreign allegiances could make or break military and political careers, al-Saadi’s refusal to take sides made him one of a kind in Iraqis’ eyes.
When I interviewed al-Saadi on the outskirts of Fallujah over three years ago, he was once again trying to shield his soldiers and himself from the consequences of the American-Iranian rivalry in Iraq. The Third Battle of Fallujah, however, presented an even greater challenge than Baiji or Tikrit had. As a motley coalition of Iraqis—American-backed commandos, Iranian-linked police officers, and Iranian-sponsored militiamen—surrounded Fallujah in May 2016 in a bid to expel ISIS militants from a stronghold less than an hour’s drive from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, the Sunni-majority city’s thousands of residents expressed fears that the Shi‘a militias aligned with Iran would subject them to ethnic cleansing. The concerns of Fallujah’s inhabitants seemed well founded, given that the same notorious Shi‘a factions had faced many accusations of war crimes elsewhere in Iraq, including in campaigns that al-Saadi had led.
According to a landmark report by Human Rights Watch, “militia forces looted, torched, and blew up hundreds of civilian houses and buildings in Tikrit and the neighboring towns of al-Dur, al-Bu ‘Ajil and al-Alam along the Tigris River, in violation of the laws of war,” and “unlawfully detained some two hundred men and boys, at least 160 of whom remain unaccounted for and are feared to have been forcibly disappeared.” Many of the militias to which the human rights group had attributed these abuses were also participating in al-Saadi’s attempt to retake Fallujah. I had even embedded with a few, including the American-designated terrorist organization Kataib Hezbollah, just a couple days before my meeting with the famous general and the other soldiers of the raqi Counterterrorism Service (ICTS).
Though a Shi‘a himself, al-Saadi felt little love for the militias that reported to him on paper but in practice acted at the behest of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a resourceful paramilitary charged with enacting the will of Iran’s Shi‘a theocracy at home and abroad. In fact, al-Saadi had even fought against the IRGC and its Iraqi collaborators during the Iran-Iraq War as a soldier in the military of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Sunni dictator until 2003. Because the general saw himself first and foremost as an Iraqi, not an Arab or a Shi‘a, he distinguished himself as one of the few public figures in Iraq free of the divisiveness that has plagued the country’s military and politics for so long. This quality made him the perfect choice to recapture Fallujah.
As the second in command of the ICTS, al-Saadi oversaw a unit of commandos recruited from a variety of ethnic groups and religious denominations. Whereas many of the PMF’s Iranian-backed militias restricted their membership to Iraqi Shi‘a, the ICTS and its best-known member sought to represent Iraqi society as a whole. To prevent the kind of backlash that had followed the PMF’s involvement in Tikrit and other campaigns, Iraqi officials decided that al-Saadi and ICTS commandos, supported by units from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, should spearhead the operation to breach ISIS’s defenses in Fallujah while the PMF’s militias remained on the outskirts of the city to secure the rear and sustain the siege. Iraqi leaders hoped that this arrangement would keep the PMF far away from the city’s fearful population and make al-Saadi, already a minor celebrity in Baghdad, the face of Fallujah’s eventual liberation.
Sitting with al-Saadi and his aides on the roof of a half-finished building overlooking Fallujah’s burning skyline, I had no difficulty seeing why a general who was receiving little attention from the Western press had begun to dominate Iraq’s national consciousness. All the Iraqis whom I interviewed—even members of Kataib Hezbollah and other militias that had made a point of killing Americans during the Iraq War—had more or less treated me with respect, but al-Saadi displayed a particular kind of hospitality. While many a soldier of his rank and stature might have regarded a 20-year-old freelance journalist bumbling around Iraq on his own as an oddity at best, al-Saadi answered my questions for hours, assigned several soldiers to protect me, and served me food even though he and most of his commandos were observing Ramadan.
Just as al-Saadi had imprinted himself on the minds of Iraqi Arabs, Kurds, Shi‘as, and Sunnis as a war hero devoid of the geopolitical and sectarian baggage that had defined so many other public figures, the charismatic Iraqi general who enjoyed a stroll across the frontlines in his signature baseball cap and green sweatshirt proved my most memorable interviewee. Nevertheless, I had no inkling that he would become the inspiration for destabilizing protests three years later.
Just days after I departed Iraq in late June 2016, Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi Prime Minister at the time, announced that al-Saadi had defeated ISIS and freed Fallujah. Despite two notable hiccups—namely, one PMF militia kidnapping Sunni civilians from a village bordering the city and another Iranian-linked faction entering the city against al-Abadi’s direct orders—many analysts viewed the ICTS operation in Fallujah as a success. For his part, al-Saadi had liberated Mosul, the biggest city held by ISIS and once the second largest in Iraq, by July 2017. These two victories cemented his reputation as a commander without peer, yet al-Saadi’s military accomplishments had done little to quell Iraq’s political turmoil.
In the summer of 2018, violent demonstrations swallowed the southern Iraqi city of Basra before spreading across the country. Iraqi protesters complained about issues as varied as the extent of Iran’s influence over Iraq’s military and political system and Iraqi officials’ lackluster response to environmental issues. Al-Abadi’s inability to contain the protests, during which demonstrators went as far as torching the Iranian consulate in Basra, undermined his constituents’ confidence in his government. The economist Adil Abdul-Mahdi replaced al-Abadi as Iraqi Prime Minister on October 25, 2018, yet the new administration did nothing to address the mounting concerns that preceded al-Abadi’s downfall. If anything, Iran’s already substantial sphere of influence in Iraq grew under Abdul-Mahdi as political parties tied to PMF militias became kingmakers in the wobbly coalition government that he assembled. At best, most Iraqis felt disappointed.
At the same time, Iran and its Iraqi proxies were starting to view al-Saadi as a threat. His rare combination of popularity and neutrality stood in stark contrast to the ever-growing hostility with which Iraqis regarded the constellation of militias and political parties beholden to Iran. In late September 2019, Abdul-Mahdi moved al-Saadi from the ICTS to an administrative post in the Iraqi Defense Ministry. Though a technical promotion, many analysts viewed the transfer as an Iranian-orchestrated bid to sideline al-Saadi, who maintained a cordial relationship with Iran’s American rivals. A number of moderate Iraqi politicians, including al-Abadi, criticized the move as an insult to Iraq’s war heroes. Al-Saadi, meanwhile, said at one point that he preferred prison to working within the Iraqi bureaucracy, but he acquiesced to the new job in the end in the name of preserving stability. Even so, Iraqi demonstrators seemed to have far different ideas.
Protesters never had a shortage of grievances to begin with, but the government’s decision to sideline a beloved national symbol proved the final straw. Many of al-Saadi’s admirers viewed his removal from the ICTS as the latest example of feckless Iraqi politicians capitulating to Iran. In no time, Iraqis carrying flags adorned with his face and chanting slogans against their government took to the streets.
What began as demonstrations against the mistreatment of a popular Iraqi war hero with about a thousand attendees swelled into protests of hundreds of thousands demanding a wide range of reforms to the Iraqi state as a whole. Though al-Saadi’s dismissal at the apparent behest of Iran represents only one episode in the decades-long international struggle over the future of Iraq, his downfall reminded Iraqis of how little their government’s actions aligned with their desires. “Our anger is because they removed Abdel-Wahab al-Saadi, a person who sacrificed many things for Iraqis and liberated Mosul from ISIS,” one Iraqi protester told a Turkish news agency. “The government must honor him instead, not punish his service.”
In many ways, al-Saadi embodied what Iraq might have become under better circumstances. He commanded American-trained soldiers, cooperated with Iranian-backed militias, and served on the same front lines as dozens of American and Iranian advisors without ever tying himself to one camp or the other. Unlike his counterparts in the PMF, he stayed away from politics, respecting the will of whichever Iraqi government was giving him orders—even the one that fired him from the job that he loved. Al-Saadi also led a unit of commandos transcending Iraq’s ethnic groups and religious denominations, and Shi‘as and Sunnis alike revered him for his military feats.
In effect, al-Saadi symbolized that Iraqis could overcome their political and sectarian differences, contrary to the claims of pundits who consider the Iraqi state a misguided neocolonial project. The protests that he triggered demonstrate that al-Saadi’s compatriots want the kind of country that he personified. On the other hand, his fate shows just how far Iraq still has to go.