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New Paths to Power Emerge in Iraq
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Jabbouri shook his head. "His ambition stretches beyond the sky," he said grimly.
Speaking Like a Candidate
"The fight now is the fight over the finger," Khalil said over a lunch of roast lamb and rice, grilled fish, okra and more lamb, after delivering his sermon.
He meant the coming election and the indigo stain Iraqis receive after voting. He meant, too, that he himself planned to run for parliament, hoping to represent Thuluyah.
These days, Khalil is a man about town. He got married and got respectable. He mixes easily with worshipers, his fighters and the workers renovating his mosque. Even in January, nearly a year before parliamentary elections, he sounds like a candidate.
Through his intervention, he said, the Americans have funded 20 projects for the town, from paving 10 miles of roads to bringing clean water for thousands of families. He still oversees salaries for the Sons of Iraq. He has found 400 people jobs in the army and police. He has secured compensation for 1,500 people who suffered injuries in fighting.
"I have a lot of credit from the people at this point," he said.
Across from the mosque, Shihab Khaled watched a butcher slaughter a sheep, dragging the knife along the belly of the animal as it hung from a meat hook.
"They used to massacre people like this, and it was ordinary," he said under his breath. Al-Qaeda in Iraq killed his brother Zahid, a policeman like him, in August 2007. He himself never wore his uniform in public. "It's all over now. It's passed like a dream."
He said he thanked God first, "and second, the efforts of Mullah Nadhim."
But there is something familiar about the reluctance of many others to talk.
"He who is scared stays peaceful," goes a proverb sometimes uttered in the town. It was often pronounced after Hussein's fall, in the ensuing anarchy. But it holds truth today, too. There is fear here, the sense in places where law is arbitrary that fewer words are better.
"He still needs time to build trust," said Suleiman Kanoush, a 43-year-old government employee. "We still need time to give him our trust again."
Trust, though, is not Khalil's power.
