It was not, however, until 1985 that the elder al-Umari received his just reward. This prize came in the form of position, a chair on the Revolutionary Command Council, which carried with it control of the southern provinces of Muthanna and Qadisyah. It could scarcely have been a better gift. For Karim al-Umari, the oil-rich land offered an irresistible opportunity. He borrowed heavily against his company’s assets to purchase several refineries, and as with all his business ventures, it proved to be a successful gamble. It was al-Umari who first adopted Western extraction techniques, and al-Umari who proposed the construction of a pipeline to the Red Sea port of Jeddah. When his plan was implemented in 1989, his newly created Iraqi Southern Oil Company saw an immediate 30 percent boost in profits. One year after Iraqi oil started winding its way across the Saudi Arabian desert, Karim al-Umari’s personal net worth exceeded one billion U.S. dollars, and his position within the party was rivaled by only the chairman himself.
The al-Umari oil conglomerate endured the occasional setback, of course. The first gulf war was extremely costly; Rashid’s father lost tens of millions over the course of the following decade, including the cost of repairing a bomb-shattered refinery south of Basra. In truth, though, Karim al-Umari barely noticed those losses; by the late 1990s, his considerable power was worth more to him than any amount of money. Unfortunately, that power also made him a target, and with the American invasion of 2003, it all came crumbling down.
In the thirty-six months since the bombing that claimed the lives of his mother, father, and twelve-year-old sister in the Iraqi capital, Rashid had worked to align himself with the insurgency. It was difficult, at first; it was a world he did not understand, and his connections were tenuous at best. Ironically, it was the demise of Karim al-Umari that provided his only son—the sole heir to the al-Umari oil empire—with the means to make contact. In those early days, Rashid’s contributions were limited to his rather generous donations, most of which found their way to the Mahdi Army in Sadr City. Because of his ties to the former regime, the trust was hard won. He was forced to labor for months in the background, offering support from a distance, working his way into their confidence. The test, when it came, arrived in the form of information: the time and location of a meeting involving several high-level officials. When the empty building was not razed by a surgical airborne strike, it was believed that he was true to the cause, that he did not belong to the West, but to Moqtadr al-Sadr himself. With the trust came a place in the organization and the friendship of the most senior commanders. And then, on a frigid morning in late January, three days after he’d flown in from London via Amman, he’d been introduced to the German.
No one seemed to know exactly where Erich Kohl had come from. More uncertain still was his role in the organization, though the fact that he rarely left the sheik’s side said much in itself. Some suggested that he’d been aligned with the Red Army Faction in the early nineties; others, that he had worked for the Stasi—the East German secret police—before the wall came down in ’89, though al-Umari had quietly pointed out at the time that the German appeared too young to have taken part in those events.
In time, his interactions with the foreigner became more frequent. Their alliance was a strange one, born more out of their status as outsiders than anything else. Despite their respective ties to al-Sadr, Kohl remained an infidel, Rashid nothing more than the wealthy son of a Sunni power broker. Over the course of many conversations, al-Umari gradually revealed the depths of his frustration, the impotence he felt when the greatest victory they could claim was the lives of a few young soldiers on the road to Najaf. During these discussions, Rashid never noticed that the German’s words were few and far between; al-Umari did the talking for both of them, but he was never dissuaded, never brushed aside.
Despite his rhetoric, the arrangement was largely satisfactory to Rashid al-Umari. He was doing his part, and in private moments, he could concede the truth: that no matter what he felt, that despite the terrible thoughts that drove him, he was content to speak with his money. He was a student of science, an academic…It was not in him to lift a weapon against his enemy, to find a man in his sights and squeeze the trigger. With this distinction in mind, the view from the periphery was enough to feed his inner rage; he felt no particular need to take the next logical step.
All of that began to change on a cool, still night in late May. It was Rashid’s third trip to Sadr City in as many months, and although he took meticulously planned, circuitous routes out of London, he could not help but fear that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service—better known as MI6—would eventually take an interest in his movements. This concern had been expressed to Kohl in hushed tones, along with his displeasure at having to leave so early in the ongoing offensive, despite its undeniable lack of success. It was a familiar refrain, but the German did not offer his usual sympathetic ear. Instead, he spoke quietly of another path. He murmured of men in the north who were waiting to act, and the names he used were instantly recognizable to al-Umari. Some were dated names that went back to his childhood, while others could still be found on every watch list in North America and Western Europe. Here, at last, was the possibility of a real victory. Rashid al-Umari listened intently for two hours and, the following morning, left Sadr City for the last time. He was not sorry to leave it behind.
Since then, his meetings with the foreigner had been extremely limited, their last conversation coming ten days earlier in a musty apartment on the west side of Baghdad’s Jadriya district. In that meeting he’d been given the travel arrangements and the necessary papers, which might or might not have gotten him through an IPS checkpoint. Al-Umari was all too aware of the changing attitude in government service; the American-trained security forces could no longer be counted on to accept a generous bribe in return for safe passage, but as it turned out, he had not been forced to face that particular risk. In fact, the whole trip—including the border crossing south of the al-Maze military airport—had been astonishingly easy. The German had suggested that this might be the case, but that had not stopped him from delivering a seemingly endless litany of security precautions. The foreigner’s words were still clear in his mind, but Rashid al-Umari was a young man with a young man’s stubborn mentality, and the Old City of Aleppo was not without its charms.
The Aleppo souq, one of the oldest in the north and the best outside of Damascus, was somewhat crowded in the early evening. Old women and young wives, most wearing the traditional chador, others daringly clothed in Western attire, ventured out of their homes as the heat finally dropped to bearable levels. It was dark beneath thick canvas draped over stone archways, the individual stalls lit only by crude iron lanterns dangling precariously overhead. Rashid al-Umari turned left on Souq al-Zarb and began making his way through the city market, moving slowly in an attempt to take it all in.
It was truly a wondrous sight. It had been many years since he had seen such an array of goods; it seemed as though there was little one could wish for that could not be found in these crowded streets. Headscarves and jalabiyyas, the long robes worn by men and women alike, could be found in every size and color imaginable. He passed stalls bearing perfumes and spices, fresh meats and vegetables. He turned his head to gaze down one narrow hara and saw row after row of gleaming yellow metal. Another corridor was lined with stands heaped with antique silver jewelry. The sights of the bazaar battled only with the sounds; al-Umari was assaulted from every direction by the calls of Syrian vendors and the guarded replies of their potential customers. The steady sound of passing traffic to the east fought to drown out the tinny whine of an American pop song, which was emanating from a child’s battered radio. It was, Rashid thought, completely chaotic, and yet, there was also something strangely controlled about the whole scene, for these were a people separated only by the worn counters over which they traded.
Certainly, it could not be compared to his own city. One could hardly turn around in Baghdad without seeing another American patrol. The superior smiles were always evident on those clean-shaven faces, despite the vast