The Iraqi's Stories: In a Land Without Order, Punishment Is Power

YUSUFAN, Iraq -- A year or so ago, just one poster adorned Sheik Adnan Aidani's wall. It was a portrait of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's faded but still preeminent cleric, whose stern visage glared down on visitors to the tribal sheik's house along a forest of date palms in the southern Iraqi countryside. Today, there are perhaps a dozen posters with new faces. The names blur, but together they represent the power, beyond appeal, of men with guns.

Aidani smiled, a little sheepishly, as he surveyed the posters. Gifts, he called them, the kind you don't return.

"Everyone's on his own," he explained.

Far from the killing fields of the capital, Baghdad, and a half-hour drive from the southern city of Basra, which has been racked by thousands of assassinations, Aidani has an unenviable task in his warren of mud brick, cinder block and concrete: keeping order in a land without it, where society is fracturing, crumbling, even disintegrating.

There is a saying in southern Iraq today, "No one pays respect to the saint who won't mete out punishment." Violence is the cadence of the country. To navigate the chaos, Aidani tries to draw on centuries-old traditions honed by Bedouins in the desert, rules built on honor, respect and reciprocity. He relies on the intimacy of a village where every neighbor knows the other. But in the end, the threat of punishment secures respect for Aidani. That same threat gives power to militias, gangs and criminals who now hold sway even in the streets of a village like Yusufan.

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