Pursuing the allure of combat: an ethnography of violence amongst Iraqi Shi’I combatants fighting ISIS

ABSTRACT

The social sciences speak of violence through its meaning, performances, manifestations and representations; however, the inner workings of violence are less explored. In order to suggest a different mode of seeing violence, I explore the inner workings of violence through the pleasures of and fun among Shi’i volunteer combatants. I apply Walter Benjamin’s motion of pure means to explain how violence becomes self-referential and non-representational via combat-zone ethnography amongst Iraqi Shi’i militants who fought against ISIS in Iraq. I address the fine line between pleasure and fun in order to highlight the inner workings of violence during combat and to encourage a fresh bottom-up anthropological perspective in assessing the parameters of the persistence and resilience of volunteer combatants. My approach advocates moving beyond recruitment and ideological interpolation by questioning the allure of combat through an ontological framework that includes combatants’ perspectives and narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• Pleasures of violence
• fun
• ISIS
• Shi’i militancy
• combat-zone ethnography
• subjectivity
• Iraq

Martyrdom and battlefield delights

Do you know the 240 mm canon? … I just love its fury. … I am an artillery guy. Artillery is the real fun.

Salim continued talking about the features of the 240 mm canon while he excitedly packed his bag before leaving for the battle of Mosul. He was a 21-year-old young man from the small city of Hillah but he knew much more about artillery than his seasoned combat-experienced father who served in the Iraqi Army during the reign of Saddam. Salim was a volunteer combatant who divided his time between university and fighting alongside the Shi’i forces against ISIS in Iraq. His jubilance and constant smiles enabled me to ask further questions of him every time I met him. I was impressed that his smile never vanished while he spoke of battlefield memories, even though he lost his brother in the battle of Fallujah. I never heard words such as “martyrdom”, “Allah” or “Islam” from him whenever he spoke about the combat despite his firm dedication to Shi’i Islam. After months of frequent conversations with him I sensed that the war, the combat, the gun and death were always humorous tropes of his stories. He spoke of combat with such a delight that I sometimes doubted his experiences and how much I should trust him. The battlefield was such a playground for him that his own martyrdom seemed like an impossible joke that he played on me when I saw the poster that said “The martyr of the battle of Airport, Salim Abu Niazer, age 21”.

The question is: What was so much fun for Salim and what was the allure of combat for him in spite of the fact that he was injured twice and lost his older brother? He never spoke of a sacred calling or showed any interest in going to heaven and mating with the promised heavenly virgins! Therefore, I ask: What is the allure of combat and how can anthropology speak about the persistent determination of militants to fight and to what extent can we address their commitment to religious violence without limiting our academic framework to radicalisation and religiosity? I suggest that anthropology and the critical study of militancy need to give an account of violence and acts of killing with regard to when the meanings are suspended and nothing is conveyed except the act itself. I therefore approach militancy and religious violence by way of what Walter Benjamin (1921) calls “pure means” in order to highlight how violence in the battlefield is also a mode of suspension of seriousness, meaning-making, signification and othering.

In other words, instead of looking at motivations, aims and goals directly, I focus on the ontological authority of acts of violence and killing. I frame my ethnographic stories to argue that acts of violence are not merely means and modes of expression used by militants to justify their actions and produce desired ends for them. However, these acts of violence also remain and are acted as pure means that convey nothing except the act themselves (Benjamin 1921, 237). This is an invitation to reverse our theoretical approaches towards violence and combat motivations. By assessing the scope for violence and the areas of its competence and performances, we can see how pleasure and fun are experienced during combat by volunteer combatants and the militia. Chasing down these acts of violence as pure means by way of pleasure and fun serves my greater attempt to stress the persistence and tenacity of combatants by highlighting the inner workings of violence instead of reducing the volunteer combatants and militia to fellowships of passionate, religio-politically and sometimes financially motivated individuals. My argument advocates a fresh approach that emphasises how the resilience of the volunteer combatant is built through the texture of violence rather limiting my inquiry to recruitment processes and indoctrination (Hoffman 2006) and the learning process among militants (Forest 2006).

I explore the pleasures of violence through an ethnography of Iraqi Shi’i combatants between January 2016 and March 2017. I attempted this ethnography while the battle of Mosul raged on; I wrote down combattants’ tales of becoming violent and having fun with transgressions while the fury of battle has subsided but the smell of blood and burned flesh still lingers in the air. The article is organised in three parts: firstly, I explain the background politics of the mobilisation of Iraqi Shi’i combatants in post-invasion Iraq, with details on its structure and fighting regiments. The second part explains the methodology, clarifying my access to the combatants and the anthropological choices that I made while conducting the fieldwork in order to orient my theoretical approach towards the pleasure of violence. Finally, I expand on my theory and continue with my ethnographic narratives to debate how pleasure and fun differ when combatants craft and enact their subjectivities in the midst of conflict and direct experiences of violence.

Fall, rise, then March ahead

Echoes of fear, terror and chaos have overwhelmed Iraq for decades now and have become more disturbing since the American invasion in 2003, the fall of Saddam and, recently, the rise of ISIS in the northern regions of Iraq. The invasion opened a new chapter in Iraq’s history which has encouraged scholars to focus their research and anthropological curiosity on “post-invasion Iraq” (Green and Ward 2009; Al-Mohammad 2010; Al-Mohammad and Peluso 2012). However, Iraq al-Jarih¹ (wounded Iraq) felt the rise of darkness when Mosul was occupied by ISIS forces that intended to form an Islamic caliphate that would be bigger and better than any before. Their desire to put their notion of Islam first, combined with their commitment to violence and brutality, concerned many. Consequently, Grand Ayatollah Sistani, one of the highest Shi’i religious leaders, issued a decree and called all able-bodied men to join the fight against the enemy.

His spokesperson, Abd-ul-Mahdi Karbalayee, read out the decree during Friday prayers on 14 June 2014 in Karbala, where the shrine of Hussain, the prophet’s grandson, is located. Every scholar, analyst and journalist refers to that occasion as the moment of inception of the Hashd ul-Sha’abi (Hashd; Popular Mobilisation Forces). Hashd brought together the “able-bodied men” under the single flag sanctioned by the central state and that flag stood above all other banners and staffs that were raised both before and after the invasion. It seems to most scholars and analysts that the lives of those “able-bodied men”, under the banner of Hashd, had been divided into qabl-e-al-fatwa (before the decree) and baad-e-al-fatwa (after the decree) (Haddad 2015; Al-Tamimi 2015; Mansour 2016). However, most of the “able-bodied” men recalled the beginning of Hashd differently: they had become Hashd moqatels (fighters) at the battle of Jurf Al Skahar in central Iraq. The battle was no more than an hour’s drive from the “holy” shrine of Hussain, whose martyrdom defined Shi’i notions of salvation. They remembered the battle rather than the decree when they shared tales of combat with me. Either they had become seasoned fighters after three years of fighting, or they had already been familiar with weapons as a result of various conflicts in Iraq.

Hashd emerged from a grassroots mobilisation that is fighting for Iraq. Recently, however, many international diplomats, Iraqi statesmen, analysts and policy advisors have been talking about and pondering the fate of Hashd after the conflict, because of the partial liberation of Mosul and visible signs of the organisational demise of ISIS. Hashd is now either hated or loved: it is hated because of the overwhelming presence of Iraqi Shi’is and because the hand of Iran is visible in its formation and support; it is loved because it stands against a vicious enemy at a time when everyone is disenchanted with Iraq’s security forces and the presence of international coalition forces. The debate around Hashd has turned into a platform for discussion of the sectarian divide and Iraq’s future relationship with Iran. Hashd is seen as the largest counterterrorism agenda of Iran (Esfandiary and Tabatabai 2016) or the fighting hand in the proxy war on behalf of Iran (Thurber 2014; Stepanova 2016).

Hashd brings together more than 60 officially registered fighting regiments of volunteers under the authority of the Office of the Prime Minister, who is the commander-in-chief of the Iraqi forces. Each regiment, brigade and company has its own flag, insignia and local leader, indicating its religio-political affiliations. However, most current research and ponderings on Hashd treats it as a single entity influenced by Shi’i notions and Shi’i combatants, without considering the intriguing peculiarities of Hashd, which now has more than 100,000 combatants. When speculating on the fate of post-ISIS Mosul, Abdulrazaq and Stansfield (2016) speak of Hashd and the fear of what its Shi’i combatants will bring to the Sunnis in Mosul. They speak of the fear that has been deeply rooted in the sectarian divide between Shi’i and Sunni ever since these Islamic sects were founded following the death of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The authors posit that there will be further upheaval and the possible re-emergence of a new version of Islamic fundamentalism after ISIS, and that Hashd may accelerate that re-emergence. However, they do not believe that Hashd cannot be regarded as a monolithic Shi’i entity despite its “heavily documented” (Abdulrazaq and Stansfield 2016, 17) mistreatment of Sunnis. There are rare cases of analysts who believe that the internal differences between regiments and other formations can explain the frictions amongst them and analysts offer suggestions for the future of Hashd after the fall of ISIS. Knights and Mello highlight these frictions to show how the internal divides and clashes may give ISIS an opportunity to exploit “Iraq’s sectarian tinderbox” (Abdulrazaq and Stansfield 2016, 6) and regenerate in another region after the liberation of Mosul by Iraqi forces. In an interview in 2016,² Haddad pointed to how the frictions have turned the regiments into factions that try to “out-Hashd” each other because of their political ambitions and their desire to participate in state formation after the demise of ISIS. Even those research projects, policy advisory papers and ponderings which, with good intentions, consider the intricacies and heterogeneity, disregard the combatants. They define the fighting forces through the insignia and the religio-political affiliations under which they are placed. Warnier reminds us that “fighters are not dummies to which one attaches different uniforms and weapons depending on the army they belong to” (Warnier 2011, 373).

Sensing the battlefield from below

Approaching Hashd from an imperious and top-down perspective disregards the lives that remain simultaneously shattered and configured, and neglects the subjectivities that are crafted while death is in the neighbourhood and the armed conflict is an everyday reality. I therefore speak of Hashd by way of an ethnography of Shi’i combatants to highlight life as it continues to crawl along despite the ongoing conflict, and return to human actors amid the blood, gore and learning to kill. I seek the pleasure where “we don’t expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense” (Butler 2004, 151).

The issue of the pleasures of war and violence has been debated in international relations studies, war studies and military sociology (see Dawson 1990; McDonald 2012; Åhäll and Gregory 2015). Bourke’s (1999, xiv) seminal book explores the letters and writings of soldiers who served in WWI, WWII and the Vietnam War in order “to put killing back into military history”. Furthermore, she stresses that “killing had a spiritual resonance and an aesthetic poignancy” (Bourke 1999, 2) for the combat soldiers. Bourke scrutinises the literature and memoirs to link the “pleasures of killing” with “carnivalesque games (such as the humorous manipulation of corpses) and other rites of immorality (such as taking and leaving souvenirs). Through such grotesque acts, men were able to confront and even enjoy the horror” (Bourke 1999, 360). Basham (2015) finds these expressions of combat as “gender-conforming” because they are circulated and talked about to support the “salient beliefs about men making the best warriors” (Basham 2015, 12). She draws from stories of serving British soldiers to “consider how the mundaneness of everyday life on the base and the exhilaration of the combat mission can shape the lives of soldiers in particular” (Basham 2015, 2).

The ethnographic stories that follow in the next section adhere closely to the framework proposed by Åhäll and Gregory (2015) in an edited volume titled Emotion, Politics and War. Åhäll and Gregory stress that the war cannot be understood fully if “we are unable or unwilling to pay attention to the sensual experiences of those affected” by it (2015, 2). My stories cover issues of gender, masculinities, the body, corpses and pain (see Whitworth 2008); however, they remain the subtext of my argument and not what I intend to focus mainly on. I proceed with these studies in various ways: first, most of my work is based on the ethnography of combat zones and not on interviews behind the frontlines or analysis of historical writings and memoirs. Second, I focus on militia and volunteer combatants; they differ from military personnel, whose subjectivity and professional roles are shaped and crafted through extensive training, experimental drills, rules of engagement and a very different combat and command ethos. Third, I unpack the complexities of pleasure in the battlefield not by social construction, epistemological measures or symbolic interpretations such as gender roles, masculinity or the militarisation of society and the politics of emotion. I take a different approach, via an ontological turn I ask what the contingent elements of pleasure are and what happens when all that is assumed by anthropological thinking – such as end-oriented means/actions, meanings and senses – are suspended. What happens when pleasures are mere fun which carries no quality and only “communicates itself” (Benjamin 1921)? How do we speak of insurgency, militia or organic violence when the act of killing or the indulgence in the spectatorship of combat is only a means-in-itself and nothing else?

I advocate shifting the perspective away from what occurs because of violence to how violence occurs by using an ethnography of processes of violence and redirecting the incessant focus on ends and beginnings. In other words, we need to pursue the Kantian “purposiveness without a purpose” (Kant 2000, 35) or final without end through the lens of Benjamin’s “pure means” in order to understand volunteer militants’ combat motivations beyond the recruitment stages and religiosity. I recount tales about some of the fighting regiments and moqatels (combatants) that I heard while at their training centres and front lines to trace how their subjectivities are crafted during the conflict, regardless of sectarianism and religio-political affiliation. My attempts at combat-zone and conflict ethnography prioritises the subjectivity of combatants and maintains a bottom-up approach towards understanding combats and conflicts. I ask how combatants shape acts of war in order to move beyond questions that analyse militancy based on attractions of ideologies, value systems, religiosity and fixity in the framework of recruitment rather than tracing the process after the recruitment. I highlight the parameters of combatants’ persistence in fighting, despite the pain, blood and gore of combat, by applying anthropological perspectives that speak of the larger scale of conflict based on the latter’s inner workings and focusing on individuals and human perspectives. Identifying the parameters of persistence enables us to take a clearer direction when speculating on the fate of post-conflict societies or devising ways to rehabilitate and reintegrate combatants into life after weapons.

Pleasure under fire

Hashd is administered and controlled by the central government, which makes gaining access to its fighting units a tedious bureaucratic process. I therefore tried to access brigades and companies through informal ways, knowing that people operate the system and not the other way round. I was able to gain access by cultivating contacts in regimental recruitment offices in Karbala. The city of Karbala, where the shrines of Hussain and his brother Abbas are located, is the epicentre of Shi’i religiosity. The city and the sense of religiosity that engulfs it and its history have turned martyrdom and Shi’i pilgrimage into an organic and everyday component of its culture and politics.

The city and those who worked in the regimental offices reminded me of the three advantages that I have over other anthropologists who may have similar interests. My sociocultural capital took me closer to the access while I remained stubborn in the face of refusals throughout my fieldwork. First, my background, which became my cultural and religious currency amongst militants: being an Iranian Shi’i was the most important key to turning the bitter frown of most militants into a welcoming smile. Second, my publications, which were proof that my curiosity was an academic one: my previous ethnographic study (Saramifar 2015, 2018) of Lebanese Hezbollah evidenced my appreciation of Shi’i armed resistance in the eyes of the regimental leaders. Finally, persistence: I was politely turned away many times and asked to bring a letter of introduction from the Iranian Embassy or the Revolutionary Guard. However, I was adamant that I wished to remain independent and did not extend my social capital further into the research.

Access was granted after months of constantly visiting offices, the failure of one contact after another and the cultivation of yet more contacts. For instance, Abu Al-A’la, the head of the Badr Brigade’s cultural centre, was pleased to hear that an Iranian Shi’i who works at a European university wanted to write about the Badr Brigade and its martyrs. He promised me access but his deputy changed his mind and my access was blocked a few hours before I headed to Imam Hassan Mo’asqar (Imam Hassan cantonment) in Karbala, where most southern combatants were trained. By sheer luck, Shaykh Hassan Modaresi, the head of the political bureau of Munazamat Amal al-Islami made one phone call and sent me to the same cantonment to meet Lieutenant Colonel Abu Howara Al-Bareidi, who was in charge of training and deployment programmes and schedules. Modaresi has spent years in Iran and was enchanted by Europe, which he had recently visited as part of a political delegation. Therefore, my background assured him that I intended no harm and my association with Europe turned me into someone with whom he could share his experiences and travels. Modaresi spoke of his own experiences while he Googled my name to check my publications and associations. His phone call caused a domino effect that reached all the way to the combat zones and front lines of Mosul.

Accessing the Badr Brigade was not enough, however, because it would be a limited ethnographic sample. I wanted to access Lewa Ali Akbar (LAK), the regiment administered by the shrine of Imam Hussain, then Firqat ul-Abbas Qetaliah (FAQ), the legion of Al-Abbas fighters under the shrine of Abbas, and finally the most infamous of all Hashd, As’ab Ahl Haqq (AAH). LAK and FAQ propagated the rhetoric that they represent Ih’ya al-tarikh (the revival of history) and that Shi’i fighters are marching to avenge Hussain and Abbas, who were killed by the ruling caliph in a battle in 680 AC. AAH is a splinter group of Sadrist fighters who are feared by everyone for their reckless fighting and killing sprees. Some Iraqis, who enjoy satellite TV and have watched WWII films, compared AAH brutality to that of the Nazi SS. These groups were my primary research groups because their politics and combat strategies made them attractive to Shi’i fighters and I was interested in how fighters used these platforms on the front lines. I persistently visited the FAQ office in a bid to meet Shaykh Meisam, who commands the forces; however, he remained elusive. His deputy, Sayed Heidar, was unsure about authorising my access despite his familiarity with Abu Howara, who became a good friend and a helpful contact. Sayed Haidar would never say “No” and I would ask if I could return the next day to see if there were an answer. I returned so many times that the security guards got to know me and let me in without asking for permission over the two-way radio. Once, one of the guards took pity on me while I was waiting under the blazing sun and asked me to drop into the office of estekhbarat va estetla’ (intelligence and reconnaissance) and meet a compatriot. I met Abu-Abas, an Iranian Arab from the southern region of Iran, who was the head of intelligence affairs and was more than happy to assist me – after he had checked my passport. Abu-Abas was a mine of information and granted me access in the absence of the highest commanding officer. Abu-Abas claimed that he understood the necessity to have an “insider”, like me, to do the research that I wanted to do.

I share the narratives of my participants not only to render transparent my methods and position but also to make explicit how arbitrary associations can produce serendipity in the midst of a war. The unexpected turn of events that made access possible for me confirms why we need to ask how people shape systems, structures and violent conflicts, instead of the other way around.

The unexpected is part of combat-zone ethnography and of combat in general. It is the unknown turn of events that invites one to include the larger sociocultural parameters within combatants’ lives and the dynamics of the everyday life of combatants that reveal the allure of violence for them. For instance, Lieutenant Colonel Kilcullen (2009) explains the unexpected factor that encouraged some Afghan youths to participate in a battle and turn into “accidental guerrilla [fighters]”. He mentions how a Special Forces patrol engaged with almost 200 Taliban fighters in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, and how the battle became surprisingly challenging because of the “behaviour of local people” (Kilcullen 2009, 40). A group of local farmers living as far as five kilometres away joined the battle against the Special Forces even though they had no link with the Taliban and had, in fact, previously cooperated with American forces. Later, after the “accidental guerrillas” had been arrested and interrogated, it became apparent that they were only a group of teenagers who had been bored out of their minds. They said to the Special Forces’ investigator: “How could we not join in?” and asked “Did they understand how boring it was to be a teenager in a valley in central Afghanistan?” (Kilcullen 2009, 40, emphasis in the original). These Afghan teenagers were merely keen to tap into the pleasure of violence when they heard the sound of gunfire, regardless of who was at the other end of their gun barrels. Therefore, I call for elements other than cognitive processes to explain the allure of violence and the finding of pleasures in combat while gunfire erupts all around.

Some anthropologists speak of the pleasures of violence. Allen Feldman (1991) traces the lived experience of violence in his detailed ethnography of IRA fighters in Northern Ireland. He finds the pleasure that is “inexpressible outside the sensory encompassment of violence” (Feldman 1991, 405). Oscar Verkaaik (1999) departs from the parameters that Feldman defines for violence (with its own ethics, aesthetics and authority) when discussing how political violence became an accepted part of political action in urban Sindh, Pakistan. Verkaaik emphasises euphoric violence and “how fun did not necessarily cease to be fun when it became violent. In fact, the jang [war] could at times be hilarious” (Verkaaik 1999, 165). Verkaaik was inspired by Joseba Zulaika (1988), who compares the leisurely activities and sports of Basque men with the activities of ETA, the region’s nationalist militants. Zulaika highlights the undertone of competition between men who project masculinity to show how the man who pushes the accepted limits and dares to elicit pleasure from violence is able to take the leading position (Zulaika 1988, 209–230). I went one step further, through my ethnography of Hashd fighters, to explore the pleasures of violence – not to stress the emergence of violence and its modes of emergence, but to emphasise the contingency of violence, pleasure and discrete movements between them when subjectivity is crafted. In this way, I hope to show how desiring systems that seek pleasure amid violence and conflict can be interrupted by disturbing that contingency. The desiring systems that emerge from locally configured subjectivities shape wars through world-making practices within tangible terrains of life, and I trace those systems without conjuring up any transcendence and “inexpressible[ity]” (Feldman 1991, 495) which render pleasures opaque and intangible. Hence, I follow the clear trends in combat-fighting attitudes, weaponry and corpses of the enemy to distinguish between fun and pleasure in the experiences of Iraqi Shi’i combatants.

Defining pleasure then finding fun

Kivland (2014) offers an anthropology of pleasure on the streets of urban Haiti by explaining what constitutes “hedonopolitics, or critical expression of pleasure and political power” (Kivland 2014, 694). She explores urban Haiti to find “the affective intensity … to incite pleasure, articulate manhood … and fortify political standing” (Kivland 2014, 694) at street parties, soccer tournaments and beach parties that are organised by neighbourhoods but supported by the state. Kivland stresses that, in an uncertain political world, these programmes become the pleasure-inducing platforms that allow Haitian young men to momentarily find the opportunity to “become a force in the zone” and enact some sort of “sovereign power” (Kivland 2014, 694). Similarly, I speak of pleasure as it is interlinked with power (but microphysics of power and necessarily political power); however, I still wonder how to offer a sound notion of pleasure without leaving it as implicit between stories and at the mercy of the readers. Foucault’s straightforward assertion that “[p]leasure – nobody knows what it is” (1980) does not make the task any easier. I will sidestep the Freudian pleasure principle in order to remain within the anthropology and sociocultural workings of pleasure instead of seeking the determinants of gratification, the death drive and the life instinct. For a similar reason, I do not include the development of the notion of pleasure into jouissance in the works of Jacques Lacan. However, I find that Foucault’s interest in pleasure within biopolitics, Deleuze’s notion of desire and Portilla’s idea of the suspension of seriousness could serve ethnographic narratives much better.

Foucault’s notion of pleasure is developed within his approach to biopolitics. Dean (2012) explains that, for Foucault, “pleasure is not antithetical to power but inextricable from it” (Dean 2012,10) as he interlinked pleasure with power, body and sexuality. In his history of sexuality, Foucault (1980) discusses pleasure in reference to sexuality but his attempt to speak about the body, pleasure and power alongside each other is to “counter the grip of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibilities of resistance” (1980, 157). In other words, Foucault encourages us to search for the moment and thresholds where pleasure brings about resistance and boundary experiences within a “perceptual spiral of power and pleasure” (1980). This spiral exposes the pleasure derived not only from wielding and exercising power, but also from evasion of the power. The pleasure emerges from the frictions, encounters and correspondence with some forms of power, whether the encounter is resistance or evasion. Therefore, his Foucault’s emphasis on the entanglement as well as the different twists and turns to power do not consider the pleasure, in whichever way it emerges, without the meanings and operation of the microphysics of power.

Foucauldian pleasure does not consider pleasure as “pure means” because his overemphasis on entanglement misses the moments when the pleasure withdraws and conveys nothing except the enjoyment that arises from the action. Owing to this point, Deleuze states that “I can scarcely tolerate the word pleasure” (cited from Dean 2012) because he saw that “pleasures are echoes” (Schuster 2016,105) which are just the repetition of the same sensation and desire that delays differences and changes in the spiral of power. Deleuze explains that pleasure is a tautology of a signifying pursuit that repeats certain patterns of othering and practices of boundary-making. Therefore, he stresses the workings of desire as a to-and-fro movement between an individual and the larger social milieu in which they are placed. His notion of desire highlights the subtle movements and yoyo effect of subjectivity in Foucault’s spiral of power and pleasure rather than just fixing individuals’ subjectivity in the grip of the spiral. It is in this difference between pleasure and desire that I try to explain the fine line between the pleasure and the fun of violence. I suggest that pleasure conveys meanings such as gender, masculinity and othering, while fun conveys nothing beyond the enjoyment that is felt in the moment.

I bring together these approaches by going along with Foucault to the extent that the pleasure is serious, representational and highlights the workings of power and the emergence of the other. Deleuze’s notion of desire then becomes handy to show how the suspension of seriousness and the mere indulgence in desire point at fun that suggests nothing but itself. I borrow the suspension of seriousness from Jorge Portilla, who explains how in Mexico a man of relajo chooses freedom for nothingness (Sánchez 2012). Portilla shows how relajo (a sort of losing hold of oneself) and the enjoyment of letting loose arise from a purely negative freedom that simply disengages with seriousness, workings of power and the apretado (the serious man), who embodies and appears to be an “impenetrable block of valuable being” (Sánchez 2012). Rutsky and Wyatt (1990) also stress that “fun serves an autonomous space that resists and in fact levels, the presumed superiority of seriousness” (Rutsky and Wyatt 1990, 16). It is this suspension of the seriousness and refusal to convey any meaning which highlights the subtle differences when the pleasure of violence is no longer gender-confirming, self-preservation or racist but rather a pure means that communicates nothing except itself (Benjamin 1921).

I state this, against all the odds, through the strength of an ethnographic method that goes beyond interviews and observations and it is situated in the affective bond that the researcher and his or her familiars form during long-term fieldwork. MacLeish highlights the importance of such an ethnography of war because “it can make sense of novel forms of life that would seem otherwise extreme, startling, or unfathomable” (MacLeish 2015, 20).

There is a theoretical gap in the way in which fun with violence and the pleasure of violence have been explored within the social sciences; I therefore zigzag from Foucault to Deleuze and then to Portilla and Rutsky and Wyatt in order to explain pleasure as a performative indulgence and enjoyment that remains representational and conveys meanings. I then note fun as a pure means and enjoyment that is neither representational nor meaning-conveying. It is an act that refers to itself while generating an enjoyment that conveys nothing even for those who initiate it. It is fun that arises and dies in the suspension of seriousness in the midst of conflict and protracted violence.

I trace the pleasures of violence in their operations across the hierarchies that they establish depending on who is at the receiving end of the pleasures. It is in these operations and movements amongst the hierarchies that power becomes tangible and “it is precisely this basis in power that makes pleasure serious” (Rutsky and Wyatt 1990, 9). Power lurks within the sensorium of combat and we should follow its microphysics and fragmentations that imply exclusions and hierarchies of worth; it bestows privileges. Therefore, the pleasures of violence and their seriousness should be traced through power, othering and representationality. However, fun undercuts power and turns itself into an empty shell by refusing to ever take a critical or serious position. Fun pursues no meaning and occurs without trying to project any performance or representation. I highlight seriousness and the embedded power as the fine line of distinction between pleasure and fun in the first three narratives, and then I progress to how they feed each other by addressing fun as the limit of seriousness.

Calling after pleasures

On many occasions during the war, the fighting forces of Hashd operated as holding forces: international coalition forces, Iraq’s security forces, Iraq’s federal police and the Golden Brigade moved in and broke ISIS’ defensive line of fire before the area was handed over to Hashd forces, which tracked down ISIS fighters who were hiding in the various neighbourhoods among civilians and sharpshooters who were holed up in abandoned buildings. Tahyeej (encouragement and excitement) was part of their hunting strategy. They ridiculed and make fun of the ISIS fighters in hiding until the latter finally made a mistake and revealed themselves. However, the entertaining process of hunting and provoking excitement does not always end up without casualties.

I arrived the day after LAK had reached Albusif – which is due south-west of Mosul’s airport – during a two-day lull in the battle to liberate the airport. LAK was assigned the left tail of offensive lines towards Mosul’s airport and FAQ the right tail. Ahmad Mosharafawi, a man in his mid-twenties who worked with LAK’s propaganda unit and fighting squads, was responsible for showing me around and simultaneously controlling me and the questions from combatants. Ahmad was too distracted to worry about me as he rushed from building to building, corpse to corpse, searching for a two-way radio left behind by ISIS forces. The next day, he found one and could then listen to the communication between ISIS fighters, and I assumed he was collecting information. He suddenly pressed the button and began to salute Shi’i saints in the midst of interactions between ISIS fighters. ISIS forces replied by calling him a heretic and other, more colourful, names. Half a day was spent smoking, drinking tea and laughing round the radio, while Ahmad and his friends tried to think up the most creative and colourful derogatory terms for the ISIS fighters who had replied to them. These latter replied angrily to Ahmad that, if they found his mother, they would remind her of what happened in Kubani.

This appeared to be a harmless prank, something to enjoy during the lull in the fighting, but I realised that it was a strategic effort to track the ISIS fighter, who responded while in hiding. The LAK team would wait till they heard gunfire or an explosion over the radio while the ISIS fighter was responding. Then they would track the movement in the area where the assumed explosion or exchange of fire had occurred. However, Ahmad and his unit waited one more day, even though they had a very good idea of where the enemy was hiding. They insisted that the ISIS fighter would not go anywhere and that, if they caught or killed him, they would not get to laugh and enjoy deriding him, as the fighter was a Syrian who did not understand Iraqi slang. Finally, the squad surrounded the building where the ISIS fighter was hiding and began name-calling again to provoke him into making a mistake.

The squad was afraid of entering the building in case it was booby-trapped, so they attempted tahyeej by using creative, religiously inspired, abusive language, which made them roll about with laughter. One of the men ranted on for a minute, suggesting a painful sexual position involving the hand of God, the fighter’s bottom and the mother of Abu Bakar Baqdadi, the caliph of ISIS. Everyone was creased up with laughter and Baqer, who was the youngest of the squad, fell backwards. His fall increased the laughter and the ISIS fighter saw his chance and shot Baqer, who had revealed himself as he fell. The laughter did not stop and Ahmad continued “We are children of Hussain! We, the fighting force of his shrine, we laugh at the face of death!” and the laughter continued. For 15 minutes the exchange of fire was too loud to hear anything else. Then, a LAK sniper shot and killed the ISIS fighter and Ahmad’s squad dragged the body into the street, burned the corpse and ran over it with a car. I could sense their anger at the loss of their friend, but Ahmad shouted “Yes do it! Yes do it! Crash it, grind it, treat it in the way they treated the body of our master in Karbala!” He was agitated and recalled the story of the sword men of the ruling caliph of seventh-century Iraq running horses over the corpse of Hussain after they had beheaded him at the battle of Karbala.

There was more than aggression in the act; war and religious history overwhelmed their attitude during the combat. Similarly, the laughter of the squad and the mutual derision between the squad and the enemy were neither only a strategy nor only pleasure. Bursting into laughter, the desperate searched for a radio, sitting together and thinking up creative abuse that was humorous and involved God, the slow execution of the strategy and the intense look that Ahmad had on his face each time there were negotiations, shaped the fighting attitude and the conduct of the fighting. The power play was veiled behind the pleasures that made it possible for them to accept that they would be returning one man short.

Bodies and images of death

MacLeish (2015) expresses his disenchantment with military institutions through his critical approach to the lives that are exposed to death during the war. War appears as a medium for him “through which humanity-as-war’s author, object, and victim imagines and acts upon itself, with soldiers and battlefield civilians’ bodies serving as its surrogates and lab animals” (MacLeish 2015, 19). The story of Howsi, a 25-year-old combatant, showed a different side of MacLeish’s statement by highlighting how militant subjectivity arises from the limitations of being a militant. In other words, there are traces of intentionality and effectiveness within the precarious lives of those engaged in war. Every fighter seeks some sort of pleasure, exhilaration or entertainment amidst the fighting and mayhem. The pleasure of taunting the enemy over the radio or getting a thrill from the sound of falling mortars are not devoid of meaning but, rather, fashion meanings. The pleasure becomes a hysterical re-enactment of power; it turns the power that lurks within subjectivities into a tangible, staged theatricality. There are those fighters who enact their revenge and manifest a threat to the living by mutilating and violating the corpses of enemies. The recording and the sharing of these staged theatricalities was enabled by mobile phone technologies.

After I had finished an interview and turned off my voice recorder, I would ask those with whom I had built up a rapport to show me their photos in order to keep the conversation going and to learn more. The usual subjects were dead ISIS fighters, headless and decomposing corpses, weaponry, flags and military equipment. However, the content of Howsi’s smartphone was macabre, gut-wrenching and difficult to bear. He worked for the propaganda unit of AAH and introduced himself as 25-year-old Ab-maku-Abu (Fatherless Father). His father had fought with Hashd in Al-Anbar district and had been killed two days after the birth of his grandson. Howsi proudly showed me his fancy smartphone and said that he had bought it so that he could record the moments of vengeance with a better camera. He had a folder labelled amwat ul jorsan (corpses of rats) that was filled with photos and videos of the corpses of ISIS fighters in every shape and form, state of dress and undress, mutilated and intact, and of various nationalities and ethnicities. He showed me the videos and explained the mon’ash (exhilarating and refreshing) moments. There were two clips – one of him jumping on corpses till the ribcages cracked and the other of him dragging corpses around liberated areas.

He was happy to fight with AAH because they intimidated people who were living amid conflict in recently liberated areas by hitching corpses to the back of a pickup truck and driving through the streets. Laughing fighters behind the truck shouted Nahno anasar ul Hussain, ja’a mowt va zahaq al-batel (We are the soldiers of Hussain, death came and the heretics left!). The corpses left the message of threat and advertised the pain that they did not feel for the living, to teach them a lesson and encourage them to hand over those who had collaborated with ISIS. Howsi smiled when the clip ended: “I like AAH. They have hearts of steel, but they are mufrahoon [delightful] while fighting the enemy”. There was an arresting sadistic pleasure in his way of combat. He was seriously pleased not by the adrenalin intensity but by being able transgress the norms, elicit fear and generate threats while avenging his father.

It is the seriousness of pleasure that fuels the theatre of violence in which combatants enact subjectivities. Therefore, it is “the bearer of violence [who] maintains an intense subjectivity … as he comes back to life in a new social and political space” (Wieviorka 2003, 43). However, it is not always meanings and performances that are projected: there are occasions when fun emerges and violence becomes disconnected from everything and everyone. Even the one who inflicts it does not register its occurrence. It is fun that “is disconnected from any meaning other than enjoyment that it procures; it can only be understood in reference to itself” (Wieviorka 2003, 45). The following stories stress how far fun extends itself within acts of violence.

It’s just fun. I’m not killing him!

There were occasions that were empty of seriousness and conveyed nothing except the occurrence. One such occasion was when a group of Hashd fighters used a prisoner for target practice. On a relatively calm day, a few young FAQ fighters reached a checkpoint controlled by Company 92, which is part of the federal police, to deliver food. They were surprised to see some AAH fighters standing around laughing while fighters from Company 92 used an ISIS prisoner for target practice with an airgun. The Chechenia ISIS prisoner was in pain but he had been so badly beaten that he could not shout, resist or run away, even though he was unshackled. Raqed, the driver of the food supply truck, got out, walked over to the prisoner and shot him. The AAH fighters and the federal police, angry that their fun had been spoiled, turned their weapons on Raqed and told his friends that they would kill him if he did not surrender his weapon and leave. That evening, Raqed and his friends decided that they would return in strength, but Abu-Abbas (the head of intelligence and reconnaissance) heard about their plan. He stopped them and demanded the return of their weapons through Hashd’s central command, which repositioned groups of fighters to prevent gunfights breaking out between them.

After the event, AAH was limited to southern Mosul and the entire upper eastern side of Mosul became FAQ territory, which it shared with LAK. The repositioning delayed the upcoming operation, which led to casualties on various fronts. I recognised those who had been laughing during the target practice. I had spoken to them while spending time at the AAH office in Karbala. Amir Riaz, the 30-year-old son of a farmer from an impoverished rural area of Kut, was one of them. He left the national army in 2010 and then joined AAH because he missed his sadiq ul awal (“foremost friend”). I assumed his friend had been killed by ISIS, but later he showed me photos of him and his friend posing in front of a camera and I realised that his “friend” was the Tabuk sniper rifle. I asked about the story and he insisted that it was a misunderstanding because they had not wanted to harm him (the ISIS prisoner): “It was nothing serious. We were simply having fun and killing time till lunch”. He was still angry at Raqed, because apparently FAQ fighters try to be “more Muslim than others”. Before leaving, he added: “He [the prisoner] was a young non-bearded ferchah, and there was no pleasure in killing him”. A ferchah is what those with a sexual interest in young boys call pre-adolescents who are incapable of offering sexual pleasure. It seemed that killing a ferchah was not as serious or as pleasurable as killing a man whose putting to death is pleasant for other men. The story of Amir’s fun may indicate to us a complexity of masculinity and gender but, for Amir, who actually indulged in the fun of the act of violence, it was not anchored in anything.

The violence remained an empty gesture towards someone deemed worthless. To him, the entire experience was self-referential violence, despite the sexual undertone of his statement. The fun held no meaning for them but we may claim that there was some form of power at play because they considered the prisoner to be worthless and his life disposable. However, their careless behaviour and ambivalent way of laughing, rather than brute ways of enjoyment, showed no meaning to anchor in the experience. Amir and the others found the target practice rudimentary and banal, but claimed that the pointing of guns at each other and the killing of the prisoner were interesting turns of event. It was fun that pointed at the limits of seriousness; the seriousness of killing, power-play and taking pleasure in it, but torturing someone out of boredom remained mere fun.

Laughing at the dead

Howsi recorded his mischief with corpses as though they were war trophies but there were times when recordings and photographs remained fun with no notion to convey in their circulation across social media. High-speed mobile internet has made social media available across Iraq even in provinces where there is no clean drinking water. Therefore, social media such as Facebook, Telegram, imo, Viber and WhatsApp are basic parts of everyday communication. ISIS propaganda units use these platforms to provoke Shi’i fighters by spreading videos of beheadings, the humiliation of prisoners and the mutilation of the corpses of Shi’i combatants.

Hashd regiments react accordingly through their Ea’lam (propaganda) units, which record and prepare video clips and teasers about the progress of the war. Hashd combatants also use social media platforms to upload their own raw and unedited adventures. This has brought about a frenzied circulation of images of dead bodies, assorted weaponry, prayers and combatants informing each other about the latest martyrs, sometimes sooner than the regiment’s administration. The abundance of images and videos encourages those who upload them to become more creative, more witty, more brutal and sometimes more crude. I was amazed when Sa’id, a 22-year-old electronics engineer who had fought with the Badr Brigade in both Iraq and Syria, showed me pictures of his exploits in Syria. However, he was more proud of a picture that he and his friends enjoyed sharing with their WhatsApp group. The members of this group shared their “funny” pictures from the front lines with each other and the one with the “funniest” picture would not need to pay his share when they next ate out together. The latest picture was of two charred corpses lying beside a car that had been hit by a mortar. Sa’id and his friend were giggling, but I did not understand what was funny about burnt, mangled corpses till Sa’id zoomed in the photo: one of the corpses had an erection.

The jokes and attempts to fabricate stories about how the erection had come about continued for some time. Their comfort and jubilant mood encouraged them to show more pictures of ISIS corpses in positions that, with a little bit of imagination, could be seen as pornographic. The unpleasant part was that some of the pictures were of corpses not of ISIS fighters but of Shi’i combatants disrespected by opposing forces. I recognised the pictures because I keep track of the circulated images and videos of both sides of the war. Also, careful zooming in on details can reveal the insignia on the uniforms. The plenitude of images, social media posts, recurring death and corpses has numbed any pleasure in viewing these images – if there ever was any. Film critics and scholars of cinema find these vaporous instances of pleasure among fans of horror movies. Rutsky and Wyatt (1990) situate the link between violence, pleasure and fun in cinematic imageries and they stress that “the viewing of fun cannot be figured in terms of depth. It slides over the surface … never staying fixed for long, never ‘anchoring’ itself in depths of meaning, character identification or imagistic fascination” (Rutsky and Wyatt 1990, 11). The combat, the prisoner, those who deemed unworthy and sometimes trench-mates become mere fun that begins from nowhere and goes nowhere. It is this state of transgression that represents nothing; it takes from itself and gives to itself. It is its own reference; an empty fragile shell that falls out of meanings and challenges the desiring machine and flows of becoming.

By way of conclusion: Zalmah, Dalileha Allah! (it is darkness and god knows better!)

I spoke of the subjectivity of militants when seeking pleasure amid violence and encountered fun. My intention was to stress how the combatants shape war, and not the other way round, by highlighting different qualities of life in the midst of conflict. There is no better story to end my article and make my point with than the one about why the battle for Mosul’s airport was delayed for a week. Hashd’s contribution to this vital battle is decreasing, despite the propaganda. Its volunteers and fighters believe that fighting to liberate the areas of Iraq where Sunni communities live is beyond the call of Sistani’s decree. Meanwhile, in the absence of seasoned earnest fighters, those who seek indulgence in violence and pursue transgressions more than others appear on front lines and regenerate the sectarian divide that initially enabled the development of ISIS.

FAQ greatly contributed to operations on both the eastern and the western side of Mosul, but suddenly withdrew from the river side of Mosul and moved to Samarra. Meanwhile, LAK was deployed to replace FAQ during the operation aimed at ending the battle for Mosul. AAH is almost absent now from the battle and other companies have been minimally present in these last phases of the war against ISIS on Iraqi territory. The simple interpretation is that many of the regiments and fighting units are linked with politically motivated groups and are occupied with upcoming elections in various governorates of Iraq. However, let me add another reason: the lack of interest and commitment of the fighting forces.

Many fighters have ignored the call to arms since the operation for Mosul began. They believe that the shrines are safe and there is no reason to risk their lives for Sunnis. AAH offices in Karbala and Najaf bluntly refuse to deploy fighters, despite the calls from Baghdad. However, there were fighters who did join the deployment, for two main reasons: to teach Sunnis a lesson by making an example of ISIS. They said that they were going to show Mosul’s Sunnis who the Shi’is are and teach them a lesson in fear, while saving them and keeping them in our debt. However, the fighters under the command of Ahmad Asadi, who joined forces with LAK, were excited: “Let’s go!”, they said. “It will be fun like Fallujah!” In 2015, while fighting alongside AAH in Fallujah, they had created so much mayhem that the rest of Hashd avoided allying with them, because they had damaged the national reputation of Shi’i fighting forces. These fighters changed regiments because they understood that they would not be able to stay with AAH after the war thanks to the stigma of their mayhem in Fallujah. They joined forces with LAK, but the memory of Fallujah remained a motivation to seek that pleasure again.

I asked many Southern Iraqi who were seasoned religiously devoted combatants of FAQ, AAH and Badr why they had remained in their hometown, Karbala, instead of fighting in Mosul. They repeatedly said that there was darkness ahead and only God knows better. They could not position themselves within the politics of Hashd, Iraqi nationalism and ongoing violence, and their withdrawal opened the door to those who sought other dimensions of conflict and violence. It is in a disarray of desires, nationalism, religiosity, revenge, anger, sectarianism and personal motivations that “violence establishes social relationships … marks and makes bodies … it constitutes subjects as it renders them incomplete” (D’Cruze and Rao 2004, 503). It is Hashd combatants who will enable or disable the end of the war by their ways of combat; when those who find darkness and the unknown ahead turn away, then those who seek pleasure and fun in violence step forward. Hence, I stress that it is fighters’ subjectivities that shape the act of war.

Hashd U Sha’abi and its fighting regiments and combatants have remained central to my discussion. I situated the concern that asks what the fate of Hashd after ISIS will be. I then elaborated further on how, historically, there are common players in armed mobilisation against those who have threatened Iraqi Shi’is and the shrines in Karbala. I continued on from the annals of history to the tales of pleasure and fun that combatants experience during the conflicts to highlight the thin line between the seriousness of pleasure and the non-representationality of fun. I stated how fun meets the limits of seriousness held in the pleasure, and then showed how seriousness operates within hierarchies of othering and consequently highlights the power that lurks in the emergence of subjectivities.

The mechanism of pleasure and the suspension of seriousness that unsettle the assumed value system bring the combatant to the platform where they can craft, forge and enact a “militant subjectivity” for themselves. It is the interaction between self-confirmation – via hierarchies of power conveyed by pleasure – and self-dismissal – via the suspension of seriousness – that establishes the moments of enjoyment in non-representational fun that inscribe a militant subjectivity. The elements such as fun indicate qualities of militant subjectivity beyond explanations like sectarianism and revenge. The mechanism of pleasure and eruptions of fun address the darker sides of life, the shadows and edges where combatants negotiate and craft subjectivities. It is in this darkness, in these shadows and edges, where they challenge the seriousness of pleasure via fun just to transgress and nothing else. Just to have fun but not really to kill!

The “nothing else” is not a “delirium operating in the half-light of trance” (Virilio 1989, 7), but the tangible parameter of the persistence to fight placed “in the heat of action … [when] all escapes attention” (Robben 2006, 377). I believe that speaking of pleasure and fun enables us to demystify the heat of combat, delirium and all that escapes attention. The combatants of my story spoke of those moments of pleasure and fun via the materiality of life found in weaponry, corpses, social media and pictures. The materiality of life that, in reference to it, we can strip away superficial meanings of the pleasures of violence (and fun by association) and only maintain their seriousness as the warning sign for generations to come. We – the scholars, the analysts and the activists – should pursue the parameters of combatants’ persistence by asking how one act becomes representational and another turns self-referential, and finally how people operate those acts. These questions open up the intensity of pleasure and speak of the pain of others on both sides of violence beyond the language of transcendence, religiosity, sacrality, sectarianism and politics. Thus, pleasure and fun are the serious questions that bring about an approach to speaking of the pain of others and understanding the life operated in the heat of moments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Younes Saramifar

Younes Saramifar is a lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He conducted an ethnography of Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon. Nowadays, he researches the texture and contours of violence among Shi’i militants in Iraq and Syria. His latest publication in the Journal of Material Culture is titled “Enchanted by the AK-47”.

Notes

1. Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim, who was assassinated in 2003, referred to Iraq as the “wounded country” when I interviewed him in the summer of 2000. I met him while he was visiting a special programme for religious and military training of Iraqi adolescents from Iraqi refugee families who had joined the Badr Brigade (Baq Abrisham, Isfahan, Iran, June 2000).

2. “Will The Hashd Al-Shaabi Change the Face of Iraqi Politics? Interview with Fanar Haddad.” In Musing On Iraq. Online at http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.nl/2015/05/will-hashd-al-shaabi-change-face-of.html (last accessed 21 December 2017).