BY LATE 2006 IRAQ SEEMED LOST, A FAILED STATE, HEADING TOWARD Rwanda and threatening to provoke a regional conflict. There was finally a sense among Americans in Baghdad that things were going wrong. The First Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army—known as the “First Team”—took over the headquarters of Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B), the major U.S. military unit responsible for the city of Baghdad, in November 2006. Before its arrival, military policy was directed to handing over more authority to the Iraqi Security Forces. As one embedded planner with the Fourth Infantry, who were previously in charge of Multi-National Division Baghdad, told me, “[We were] struggling to control violence when the prime directive was to downsize and turn over responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces as fast as humanly possible. Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army filled the void and were trying to ‘cleanse’ the opposing sect from their perceived areas of influence.” But the Iraqi Security Forces were hugely compromised. I was told that every new Iraqi army unit being deployed to Baghdad would first spend two weeks in the Bismaya range in Diyala to train. While training there, the Mahdi Army would contact these units and tell them to leave them alone. “The Iraqi army couldn’t do the right thing if they wanted to, because politicians would pressure them,” one deputy brigade commander told me.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, commander of the First Cavalry Division, who in November 2006 became the commanding general of MND-B, told a subordinate in September 2006, “I don’t know what we are going to do in Baghdad. I do know we are not going to keep doing what they’re doing.” “We were all very vested in Baghdad,” a key author of the change in American strategy from the First Cavalry told me. “First Cav felt very possessive of the place and realized it was burning and that the old ways weren’t working.”
The new priority was to focus on protecting the Iraqi population from violence and slow down the transition to the Iraqi Security Forces. The increase in troops that would become known as the “surge” would be much more than an additional thirty thousand American troops. It heralded a change in doctrine and tactics. The Americans would live in the neighborhoods, not merely in massive Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) cordoned off from the general population, from where they would “commute to work.” They would implement population-centric counterinsurgency, designed to secure, or control, the population and win their allegiance at the expense of rival guerrilla forces.
Before the surge the Americans would take Iraqi National Police (INP) units offline for extra training, including on the rule of law and human rights. It was called a “reblueing exercise,” but it never worked. The Americans would go in and clear an area, leaving the INP there. In operations such as Together Forward I and II, from 2006, the American unit would report that it cleared one thousand houses and twenty mosques, and confiscated twenty AK-47s. Then they would leave the INP, and violence would get worse, as happened in Ghazaliya. It took Zarqawi to push the Iraqi Security Forces to take their work seriously, and they did this with the help of power drills and death squads, punishing Sunnis en masse until the will of the resistance was broken. It wasn’t in the counterinsurgency manual, but it worked.
Baghdad was the sine qua non for everything the Americans were trying to do, but at the National Security Council they realized it was falling apart. Brett McGurk, the NSC’s director for Iraq, was writing daily reports for President Bush about security in Baghdad, arguing that the military strategy was not working. In August 2006 National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley asked McGurk and Meghan O’Sullivan to work on a review of Iraq policy. All the Iraqis McGurk knew from his time in the country in 2004 were fleeing, hiding in the Green Zone, or dead. The son of one Iraqi judge he was friends with was killed right outside the Green Zone.
McGurk looked at past similar civil wars and concluded that it took a neutral force to provide a presence and stabilize the country, but the ISF wasn’t neutral (and neither, of course, were the Americans). McGurk believed that the Americans did not have enough troops to achieve their ends, that their mission was not properly resourced. In the summer of 2006, he made his position clear to the president. Hadley knew that McGurk and O’Sullivan were advocates of a troop surge, but he didn’t want the media to say the NSC supported such a surge, because it would immediately form antibodies before they could even do a review. He told them never to use the word “surge.” Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, was opposed to an increase in troops, as were Secretary of State Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
McGurk and O’Sullivan challenged Abizaid’s assumptions. They saw that in battles during 2005, in the mid-Euphrates, in Al Qaim, Tal Afar, Heet, Haditha, and elsewhere, whenever the U.S. military stayed, the population turned against the insurgency and became cooperative. The Marines told them that mayors of towns had asked them not to leave. The pair were also skeptical that the Iraqi Security Forces could handle the levels of violence in Iraq, and proved that they couldn’t. The Interior Ministry was mistrusted, and the Iraqi army was at risk of fracturing or disbanding, as it had in 2004, when the Americans had to restart it.
In the spring of 2006 President Bush gave a speech highlighting Nineveh province’s Tal Afar to show that American strategy was working, but Tal Afar—where the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment had cleared, held, and built—was not part of the American strategy; it was an exception. McGurk and O’Sullivan were cynical that political reconciliation could end violence. People on the street were not fighting each other because the Iraqi Parliament could not agree on an oil law, they argued. They felt they could show empirically that more U.S. forces, with a different strategy, could stabilize the country and lead to security. They spoke to old Iraq hands at the CIA and saw that the agency’s findings supported their position. To them a troop surge was not intended to open a space for political reconciliation; it was about building up the Iraqi Security Forces so they could hold the line and allow politics to take its course. Although many CIA analysts thought a surge would be throwing good money after bad, and was coming too late to be effective, McGurk and O’Sullivan were zealous about the need for more troops.
By the end of the summer of 2006, Bush was finally focused on changing course in Iraq. He no longer trusted Casey and Abizaid, and he wouldn’t defer to the generals anymore. Although Bush was briefed every morning by a CIA official about events around the world, he asked for a special briefing by the CIA every Monday only on Iraq. But he didn’t want his regular briefer from the agency; he wanted a young analyst. It was unusual for a young analyst to have that kind of access to the president. A typical analyst was a geek in an argyle sweater who was terrified by the idea of briefing the president, especially since an analyst might approach Iraq as an intellectual challenge, while Bush often flaunted his anti-intellectual credentials. When he was briefed about how the Mahdi Army was providing services to its supporters and beginning to resemble Lebanese Hizballah in its early stages, Bush was not curious and did not inquire how and why. Instead he asked, Should we kill Sadr? And what do we do to stop it? But Bush was also beginning to understand Iraqi political dynamics. He talked to Maliki regularly, one on one, through a translator. He gave Maliki advice. Bush wanted to build a special relationship with Maliki, as one leader to another leader. Others in the administration said he should not engage so frequently because he would lose leverage.
In November 2006 Bush met with Maliki in Amman. He told Maliki he would send more troops to stabilize Baghdad, but he needed his Iraqi counterpart’s support. U.S. military leaders were skeptical of Maliki. They said he was sectarian and knew what was going on in the streets. But McGurk sympathized with his position; he knew Maliki would lose if he took on the Mahdi Army. Maliki wanted to work Shiite politics and weaken the Shiite militia before taking them on. The Iraqi prime minister gave Bush his commitment.
EVEN THOUGH THE SURGE was controversial at its inception, its success would become something of a proverbial truth, and the proponents of the new counterinsurgency strategy—known by its acronym, COIN—would soon become very influential over the American defense establishment. Gen. David Petraeus, with whom the surge would become identified, had spent the course of 2006 reshaping how the U.S. military thought about counterinsurgency. He effectively had a yearlong graduate course in COIN while based at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (USACAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served as commanding general. There, along with Conrad Crane, John Nagl, Marine Gen. James Mattis, and others, he wrote the U.S. military’s manual on COIN. According to the manual, called FM 3-24, the purpose was to “relearn the principles of counterinsurgency,” create better learning organizations in the military, and change the Army and Marine Corps. It was not just about winning Iraq and Afghanistan; it was written “to help Army and Marine Corps leaders to conduct COIN operations anywhere in the world” [emphasis added].
Some in the CIA and the National Security Agency were wary when Petraeus was appointed to run the war in Iraq. In 2004 he had been in charge of training the Iraqi Security Forces. The Iraqi army had performed poorly in the battles of Najaf and Falluja, even though Petraeus was still briefing the U.S. government about how great the Iraqi Security Forces were. Battalion-level commanders were complaining that 80 percent of the Iraqi army were absent without leave and that the ones who did show were incompetent. Petraeus was considered a liar by these figures within the CIA and NSA—typical military, refusing to admit there was a problem. But Petraeus could be candid among his fellow military officers, so it was likely that in his briefing to civilians he was constrained by Rumsfeld’s worldview, which obstinately refused to see the reality of disaster in Iraq.
Petraeus was not one to publicly undermine policy. He would be hailed as a “warrior scholar,” but in 2004 he was still part of the “stay the course” school. In fact, in 2004 he wrote an optimistic op-ed in the Washington Post about the war in Iraq, which was perceived to be entering the political debate during an election year, something usually taboo for someone so high in the chain of command. In the op-ed, titled “Battling for Iraq,” he listed the numbers of recruits and graduates from the Iraqi Security Forces. “I see tangible progress,” he wrote. “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. . . . Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously.” Though he admitted there were setbacks, he insisted there were “reasons for optimism.” “Iraq’s security forces are, however, developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition—and now NATO—support, this trend will continue. It will not be easy, but few worthwhile things are.”
Perhaps a clue to Petraeus’s real thinking is the fact that by the end of 2005 he was back in the United States working on the new counterinsurgency manual, which turned out to be a scathing critique of how the military had been fighting the war in Iraq. Similarly, between 2003 and 2004, he had opposed Bremer’s de-Baathification, dismissal of the Iraqi army, and free-market reforms in Iraq. He e-mailed his men, telling them to ignore Bremer, basically urging insubordination. Petraeus wanted to provide stability in Iraq and knew Bremer was destabilizing the country.
Petraeus was a masterful bureaucrat. He took an Army that was focused on fighting a conventional war—whose standard practice, in the words of a State Department official I spoke to, was to place their boots on the heads of Iraqi men they were detaining—and got it to “turn on a dime to fight an insurgency.” Petraeus would become the most influential U.S. general since George C. Marshall. The surge would also be seen as a panacea to U.S. problems in Afghanistan. The story I tell in the next chapters is more complicated than both Petraeus’s hagiographers and critics claim.
ALMOST ON ARRIVAL in February 2007 Petraeus headed straight to Ramadi, capital of the Anbar province, to see Col. Sean McFarland of the First Brigade, First Armored Division. McFarland’s brigade had been in Ramadi since June 2006. Before that they had been in Tal Afar, where soldiers were practicing an approach called “clear, hold, and build” and living in combat outposts (COPs) with the townspeople. While these outposts initially suffered heavy attacks, in battle the Americans usually dominated, and attacks fell after the first summer.
(Capt. Robert Chamberlin believed the real reason Tal Afar was pacified was the cleansing of its Sunnis and the tacit American support this received. After serving in Tal Afar he wrote an article in Military Review in 2008. “Shiites now dominate a community that was formerly 70 percent Sunni,” he explained. “Shiites made up 98 percent of the applicant pool in a July 2007 recruiting drive for the local police. The Sunnis moved to nearby villages and sought shelter with families and tribes, but they still think of Tal Afar as ‘their’ city.”)
Living in COPs allowed the Americans to have greater access to Ramadi’s infrastructure and to reach out to local leaders. In the early days of the U.S. invasion, these leaders had generally supported the resistance. They eventually turned against Al Qaeda, but their attempts to expel the group in 2005 failed. The tribes were crushed, killed, and forced to flee. This time they had American support; that made a difference.
McFarland initially found a city dominated by Al Qaeda-linked groups with almost no Iraqi Security Forces. He set up tribal militias called provisional auxiliary police and stationed them so they could protect their own area. The Americans protected the homes of collaborating tribal leaders. Instead of warning that they would soon be leaving, the Americans promised to remain as long as it took. McFarland believed it was his attempt to recruit thousands of locals to the Iraqi police that led to what would be called the Sons of Iraq program—known in Arabic as Al Sahwa (the Awakening)—in which previously antagonistic Sunni militias began to cooperate with the Americans. Brutal Al Qaeda retaliatory attacks on police and the tribal leaders who backed them increased local hatred of the group.
The Americans found a young “sheikh” called Sattar Abu Risha. He was not exactly a tribal leader, and he was not exactly fighting for freedom, but he was willing to fight Al Qaeda in return for American support. Unlike past rebellions against Al Qaeda, this time the Americans propped up their new ally. They had two Marine battalions in downtown Ramadi, and they parked a tank in Abu Risha’s front yard and visited him twice a day. In September 2007 Abu Risha held a conference establishing the Anbar Awakening. More and more tribes in the area joined. When Awakening tribes were attacked, the Americans provided air and armor support and rescued them.
“The enemy overplayed its hand and the people were tired of Al-Qaeda,” McFarland wrote in a 2008 article in Military Review. “A series of assassinations had elevated younger, more aggressive tribal leaders to positions of influence. A growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias made these younger leaders open to our overtures. Our willingness to adapt our plans based on the advice of the sheiks, our staunch and timely support for them in times of danger and need, and our ability to deliver on our promises convinced them that they could do business with us. Our forward presence kept them reassured.” Petraeus supported the introduction of the Awakening phenomenon elsewhere. Paying people who used to shoot at Americans was a radical step, but he did not consult his chain of command. “Petraeus did what he wanted to do and sought approval after, and he had enough clout to do it,” an American intelligence official told me.
IN DECEMBER 2006, when Washington began to push new troops to Baghdad, General Casey, the head of Multi-National Forces Iraq (MNF-I)—the U.S. military formation that provided overall command and control for operations in Iraq—summoned the Iraqis and laid out the new “surge” plan with Prime Minister Maliki, Defense Minister Abdul Qader Muhammad Jassim, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, and the First Cavalry team. The Americans called it the Baghdad Security Plan, while the Iraqis called it Fard al-Qanun (Imposing the Law). Maliki approved the concept and committed to bringing in more Iraqi troops and letting the Americans “target all criminals,” which included Shiite militias and Sadrists. It was a momentous step for Maliki, whose collaboration with Shiite militias was viewed by the Americans as an obstacle to their goals.
Proponents of counterinsurgency obsessively study the history of so-called “small wars,” such as the British war in Malaya, the American war in the Philippines, the French war in Algeria, and the wars in Vietnam. Their doctrine emphasizes using the least amount of violence against the enemy, becoming familiar with the occupied country’s culture, and working to remove support for the insurgents. While this requires killing those who cannot be “reconciled,” it also requires creating local proxy forces and finding political solutions that the civilian population can see as a better alternative to backing insurgents. Proponents of COIN strategy realized that American tactics in Iraq had until then relied on brute force and killing.
COIN theorists never answered (or even asked) questions such as, Should the Americans have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place, or should they be occupying other countries? Instead they focused on practical matters such as implementation. To them the American reliance on brute force was counterproductive, and the numerous “decapitation operations” in which insurgent leaders were assassinated were not useful. They exhorted less violence, fewer “kinetic operations,” which only alienated people. They urged military and civilian agencies to collaborate and to understand the concerns of the people and address them, providing security and responding to their grievances.
American casualties peaked when their forces were involved in clearing insurgents from the belts. Once they transitioned to the hold-and-build phase, U.S. casualties declined drastically. But the extent to which the Americans protected the Iraqi population during the surge has been romanticized. American airstrikes killed more than 250 civilians in Iraq in 2006 but more than 940 in 2007 and another 400 in 2008. Thus, Americans killed more civilians in 2008 than in 2006, at the peak of the civil war—this despite the fact that the much-lauded scripture of the military’s COIN manual states, “The employment of airpower in the strike role should be done with exceptional care. . . . Even when justified under the law of war, bombing a target that results in civilian casualties will bring media coverage that works to the benefit of the insurgents.” In addition, artillery was used often during the surge for the purpose of “terrain denial,” even when that terrain was a populated area. This must not have felt very population-centric to the population.
On January 11, 2007, the “Crisis Committee” had its first meeting in Baghdad, at which the Baghdad Operation Center was set up and Lieut. Gen. Abud Qanbar was designated as its commander. The BOC was formed to give the Americans a counterpart in the battle of Baghdad, to be Maliki’s face in Fard al-Qanun.
Initially, the Americans didn’t want the BOC to be under Maliki’s direct control; they wanted it to be under the Defense Ministry’s command. Nor did they want Qanbar to lead it at first. The Iraqi general seemed too Soviet in his style and was too close to Maliki, but Qanbar proved flexible and able to learn. Brig. Gen. John Campbell, deputy commander of the First Cavalry Regiment, mentored Qanbar and also played a vital role in the success of the Awakening. He took Qanbar to meet some of the Awakening men, and Qanbar realized he knew them from the Saddam-era military. “Brigadier General Campbell had exceptional rapport with our Iraqi partners,” observed Maj. Andy Morgado, who served as a division maneuver planner and later as a combined arms battalion operations officer.
Multi-National Forces-Iraq—headed by General Casey at the beginning of the surge, then by General Petraeus, and then by Gen. Raymond Odierno—was the overall strategic headquarters for U.S. coalition forces. Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I), the tactical unit responsible for command and control of operations in Iraq, was supposed to coordinate the actions of its subordinate divisions: Multi-National Division-Baghdad and Multi-National Division-Center, which was responsible for area south of Baghdad.
Lieut. Col. Steve Miska, who served as a deputy brigade commander throughout Baghdad during the surge, told me that the additional soldiers provided a greater density of troops for more effective partnership with the Iraqi Security Forces. But another factor was important. In Baghdad, before the surge, none of the boundaries separating American forces matched those used by Iraqi forces, and none of those boundaries matched the political lines of baladiyas (local municipalities). As a result it was difficult to synchronize with local politicians or security forces, and there was little American integration or coordination with the ISF. The surge realigned the military boundaries with the political boundaries. “That allowed for sustained relationships between the Iraqi army, coalition forces, and political leaders,” Miska explained. “It restored confidence among the populace in many cases. The overall surge strategy realigned the Iraqi army boundaries to match the district boundaries in Baghdad. We did the same for the U.S. boundaries. The effect was that now the same U.S. and Iraqi commanders would work with the same local politicians to resolve issues.”
The lines for the ten Baghdad “security districts” were drawn on a map by Lieut. Col. Douglas Ollivant, chief of plans for MND-B, and Major General Ali of the Iraqi Ministry defense staff, who had studied at Sandhurst (in 1971), the Indian Staff College, and the NATO staff college in Italy, and who spoke English well. Each of the districts would be under the authority of an Iraqi army or Iraqi National Police headquarters. This was a key meeting, where strategic boundaries were being drawn, and yet nobody from Corps, as Odierno’s staff was called, was present except for a very junior major who was there only as a note-taker. The surge plan was drawn up by Brigadier General Campbell, Colonel Toby Green, and Lieutenant Colonel Ollivant with little guidance from Multi-National Corps-Iraq. General Casey was present, however, giving very specific guidance. It was Casey who suggested creating joint security stations in Baghdad.
In addition to the role played by McGurk and O’Sullivan, two outsiders played a crucial role in the push for more troops. Fred Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane are controversial figures: the former is a neoconservative military historian with no experience or specialization in the Middle East; the latter an imposing and intimidating retired general with a forceful personality. But they were effective because they provided a public voice arguing that a troop surge could work. While working on this book I met American officials who loved them or hated them, who attributed the whole surge to them or denied they had any significant role. “Success has many fathers,” one lieutenant colonel explained, and the surge was the only positive development anyone could point to in America’s catastrophic occupation of Iraq.
In 2006 there were many voices calling for either an American withdrawal or an increase in American troops. Colin Kahl of Georgetown University and then the Center for New American Security visited Iraq in the summer of that year. Based on his experience he called for more troops or for a withdrawal, but he was ignored as an outsider and a Democratic partisan. (President Obama would later install him as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.) There was a joint push for more troops coming from the NSC and the Keane/Kagan duo. Keane, who looked at Iraq from a purely military view, was the most consistent and longstanding advocate of a troop increase. “He was always poking,” one NSC member told me. J.D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, hosted an Iraq review in December 2006. He convened small groups in which he appeared neutral, but he steered skeptics to the surge—and then convinced his boss, Stephen Hadley. One lieutenant colonel involved in the surge described Kagan as “just a blowhard who could be counted on to give the party line in print when he returned from each of his Petraeus-sponsored trips.” But another lieutenant colonel described him as a brilliant and rigorous thinker. “Kagan is the main guy behind the push for more troops, and Keane is an idiot,” he told me, adding, for good measure, that Casey and Fil were also idiots. Although neoconservatives have traditionally been advocates of increased reliance on airpower, Kagan broke with this neoconservative predilection for “shock and awe” tactics. Instead he believed that war was about influencing people on the ground, and thus required more troops. Kagan provided Bush with an alternative to the Senate’s Iraq Study Group report, which advocated a reduction in troops.
An internal NSC review and Keane’s force of will persuaded the president to change course in Iraq. The push out of Washington for more troops was then utilized by Multi-National Division-Baghdad, with some oversight from General Casey, to secure Baghdad. General Odierno had a very different concept, his critics told me. “He wanted to use the troops out in the ‘Baghdad belts’ to go kill Sunnis,” one senior American officer said. Odierno’s role was “totally blown out of proportion,” according to one of the architects of the surge in Baghdad, “and I don’t think he really figures in the picture.” Major Morgado strongly disagrees: “Though Baghdad was a large problem set, it was not the only problem set,” he said.
There was a serious and heated internal debate among the Americans in Baghdad, both between different headquarters and within them, over whether they should focus on population security or continue to capture and kill. Advocates of the latter approach, of which Odierno apparently was the champion, saw which way the wind was blowing, aped the new COIN language, and called their method “clearing,” as in “clear, hold, and build” or “clear, control, and retain.”
But Morgado disagreed with this description of Odierno’s philosophy. “Maliki wanted to go and kill Sunnis,” he told me. “By putting a larger American presence in the belts, it stopped Maliki from pursuing this aim, and it allowed Americans to effectively interdict lines of communication and thereby stop accelerants of the violence. The Awakening would have been hard-pressed to happen if Maliki was allowed to unleash a one-sided assault on the Sunnis in the belts.”
General Petraeus and the bulk of MND-B were focused on providing security to the Iraqi population. Odierno and some other elements—most notably the Third Stryker Brigade combat team, Second Infantry Division, under the command of Steve Townsend—wanted to keep “clearing,” the most violent part of the “clear, hold, and build” process. Odierno tasked the Third Infantry Division to lead the organization of Multi-National Division-Central and facilitate the fight in the belts outside Baghdad. As airpower advocates have noted, more bombs were dropped in 2007 in MND-C’s area of operations than at any time earlier in the war. While Baghdad was focused on population security (despite some internal dissidents and occasional lapses), MND-C was still killing and capturing until much later, when the Awakening groups were established there too.
Odierno wanted to reduce the influence of MND-B (the major institutional proponent of executing the surge) and transfer terrain to the other units that shared his focus on killing and capturing. Odierno could never directly say, “Don’t secure the population,” since Petraeus would overturn that, but he could nibble away at MND-B’s influence. (Morgado denied that his old boss had any obsession with killing. “I believe General Odierno sensed weakness in General Fil,” he said. “Odierno used to talk about reconciling with various parties back in 2003 to 2004. This was not a new concept for him.”)
Most interlocutors I dealt with from the military and National Security Council agreed that Odierno was neither a visionary nor a strategist. “Petraeus is an A who hires A-pluses,” one American intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq told me. “Odierno is a B who hires Cs.” Petraeus also had the star power to handpick whomever he wanted, which led to the creation of a coterie of West Point graduates and within that a smaller group of graduates from West Point’s social sciences department. Petraeus made COIN the universal policy, and thanks to his status he was able to sell an increase in troops to the American people and Congress despite their growing antiwar mood.
Though the surge was Baghdad-oriented, the increased troop numbers also allowed the Americans to operate in the “belts” that surrounded the city. Odierno’s role in the belts was a key element. He took the concept of the surge and decided where to put troops. “He is not a bright guy, and he didn’t have bright guys around him, but he figured out how to fight the battle of Baghdad,” one insider told me. If Doug Ollivant and others at First Cav were the architects of the surge, Odierno was the builder, the operational realizer. Morgado served in Balad, north of Baghdad, between July and November 2007. “Al Qaeda in Iraq had freedom of maneuver in the belts,” he explained. “This gave them unlimited opportunities to marshal resources in the hinterlands, use multiple avenues to infiltrate supplies and weapons into Baghdad, and conduct attacks. Al Qaeda, with this latitude, was free to conduct attacks on Shiites and act as an accelerant for retribution by the Mahdi Army or other Shiites.
“While U.S. and Iraqi forces kept the Shiites under control in Baghdad, U.S.-led efforts in the belts kept the Sunnis/Al Qaeda off-balance. Both efforts depended on the other, but the belts clearly supported the efforts within Baghdad. I thought it was critical for U.S. forces to lead in the belts. We stood up the Sons of Iraq and brought the Sunnis into the ‘good guy’ side of the ledger. I don’t think this was feasible or desirable by a Maliki-led effort. His solution to the Sunni problem would have been ‘Kill them all’ and only would have exacerbated the problem. Though the Sons of Iraq pose a political problem now and in the future, these are much better conditions.”
Balad is a Shiite-dominated town surrounded by rural Sunni communities. By the time Morgado arrived in Balad, the Mahdi Army had been largely put down, while most Sunnis within the town had been chased out or killed. Morgado’s principal threat remained Al Qaeda in Iraq and associated groups. “We were tight along the Salahaddin/Diyala fault line,” he said. “Their lines of communication ran from Samarra and Anbar in the west, from Baquba in the east, and Mosul to the north. In turn, they would use the Balad area to stage attacks in Baghdad/Taji area in the south.”
The first Sons of Iraq group was “stood up” in Balad in August 2007. Morgado’s battalion cultivated six of these groups, putting about 200 individuals on the payroll. “They were extremely effective. Once these groups stood up, Al Qaeda went after them hard, but they remained resilient. With largely Sons of Iraq influence, we began capturing or killing every major high-value target we had, and attacks in our zone decreased dramatically. It was clear with the Sons of Iraq that part of their motivation was monetary, but largely they were tired of the violence. Their allegiance with Al Qaeda only brought them death and instability. By working with us, they realized they could stabilize the community. Knowing that we were providing support to these groups, monetarily and operationally, gave them a lot of confidence.”
When Bush announced his surge in January 2007, I thought it was too late for the Americans to make a difference. I had spent four years writing about the oppressive nature of the American occupation, and I didn’t see how enlarging it could make things better. General Petraeus himself asserted that military gains would be ephemeral if Iraq’s factions did not reach political deals. It seemed as if more troops might only provoke further resistance, or if not, that a few thousand more troops couldn’t possibly halt the civil war and affect the situation in Iraq strategically. But the addition of more American troops also forced other armed factions in Iraq to change their plans and actions.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Miska, the introduction of combat outposts, smaller bases inside neighborhoods, and joint security stations where Americans lived and worked with Iraqi security forces allowed the Americans to integrate the Iraqi army, Iraqi police, and U.S. forces into an overall security plan. “We were commuting to work, but an insurgent lives among the people, so you must do it too,” he told me. “We started doing this in Ghazaliya before the surge. Ghazaliya was a killing field. The Mahdi Army was attacking from Shula and the north, Al Qaeda was attacking from the south. The first combat outpost we put in was on the sectarian fault line between the two sides. We set it up with the Iraqi army, and within a week some stores opened up, people came in. We were there in a sustained presence and wouldn’t leave them. It helped set up Sons of Iraq; people realized Americans could be an ally.”
Miska said that the Sons of Iraq were originally organized to fill a gap in local security, predominantly because the local police would not provide security to the Sunni population areas. During the surge, the Americans started placing combat outposts (COPs) and joint security stations ( JSSs) along the sectarian fault lines and right in the Sunni areas because the need was greatest there. “Al Qaeda held the Sunni population hostage in neighborhoods like Amriya, where the flagpole of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia was planted,” he said. “I think part of the reason the Sons of Iraq came to us in Amriya and Ghazaliya was that they saw the Americans were committed to protecting the Sunni people. Nobody else had a stake in the game—not the police, not the Iraqi army or the Iraqi government.”
More than the surge itself, the declaration of the surge forced armed factions in Iraq to change their calculations. Sunni militias who resented Al Qaeda or were already in conflict realized that the Americans were no longer aiding the “Iranians” whom Sunnis saw as their fundamental enemy. Instead they saw the Americans acting to limit Iranian influence. They saw that the Americans would back them against Al Qaeda and would not abandon them, as they had previously done with Sunni collaborators. Controlling the Anbar province and cutting it off from Sunni strongholds in western Baghdad denied Al Qaeda some of its strategic depth and access to its hinterland. This weakened it and allowed Sunni groups opposed to Al Qaeda to take advantage of the opening. These Sunni groups might have been more skeptical of the Americans had they not seen the success of their Anbari brethren, who began collaborating with Americans against Al Qaeda groups in the summer of 2006 and helped turn one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq into one of the least violent.
There had always been infighting between Sunni resistance groups, but they tried to minimize these publicly to maintain the appearance of a united front. Al Qaeda tried to Iraqify itself after the death of Zarqawi, with Iraqis as its official leaders, controlling the Mujahideen Advisory Council. The increased sectarian violence and aggressive Shiite push forced Sunni groups to rally together and work with Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda members acted like gang leaders, terrorizing local populations more than fighting the occupier. Local religious, tribal, and traditional leaders, as well as educated elites, were either killed, co-opted, or expelled. Often the population followed them out, turning areas into ghost towns.
In October 2006 Al Qaeda announced the creation of its Islamic state in Iraq. It was not about liberating Iraq from the occupation; it was about a larger global war. But most of the Iraqi resistance had no appetite for this sort of global jihad. Resistance groups began to feud with Al Qaeda, as leaders were assassinated. In 2007 the Islamic Army of Iraq publicly broke with Al Qaeda, condemning its tactics and claiming that thirty members of the Islamic Army had been killed by Al Qaeda. These clashes began in Amriya. That year three leading resistance groups established the Jihad and Reform Front, which condemned Al Qaeda’s tactics (such as targeting civilians) and goals.
Al Qaeda men condemned tribal traditions for being un-Islamic, and actively undermined or usurped traditional authority. This alienated local communities. During the modernizing era of the 1970s, tribes were marginalized as the state asserted itself. But in the ’80s tribes were co-opted and armed in the war against Iran. Tribalism was used by the regime, and tribal leaders who proved loyal servants were empowered. Although tribal leaders were initially ignored by the occupation, the Americans also began to co-opt and collaborate with them during the surge, empowering them to rebel against Al Qaeda.
Sunnis in Anbar might have opposed the occupation, but they also wanted stability, and Al Qaeda brought only chaos. The Sunni tribal “Awakening” began in Anbar, led by Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha. Soon other tribal leaders joined him. Many were not important or powerful until the Americans empowered them. Abu Risha himself was widely known as a highway robber, operating on the highway between Baghdad and Amman. His conflict with Al Qaeda might have had more to do with a dispute over looted goods than ideology. But when Al Qaeda killed his tribesmen, a blood feud between it and the tribes started. Al Qaeda taxes on smuggling also made tribal leaders chafe. The explicit American shift in emphasis from killing the enemy to protecting the population allowed it to be more subtle when dealing with resistance groups. By the end of 2006, the Syrians had also cracked down on illegal border crossings, closing some of the routes Al Qaeda relied on for personnel and supplies. As for Sheikh Sattar, shortly after meeting President Bush, he was blown up outside his home in September 2007, which was probably convenient for both the Iraqi government and the Americans, who now no longer had the problem of disposing of him once he outlived his usefulness.
At the same time, the Sadrists were facing a backlash from fatigued Shiites who saw them as an onerous gang. An increase in American troops focusing on Baghdad was guaranteed to lead to a crackdown on the Mahdi Army, and Muqtada al-Sadr always retreated before the Americans could defeat him, a lesson from his 2004 experience in Najaf. But if his people could lie low and wait for the Americans to reduce their troops once more, they could emerge unscathed and even benefit by letting the Americans cull his ranks of disobedient and criminal-minded elements, strengthening his control.
By the summer of 2007, tension between Maliki and the Sadrists had increased. Though the Sadrists had backed Maliki’s rise to power, they now withdrew from the government, hoping to weaken him. Maliki went so far as to compare Sadrists with Baathists. On the other hand, many of the Sadrists in the government were viewed as corrupt and brutal, so it is also possible that Muqtada withdrew them to clean his movement’s image. The year 2006 was supposed to be the year of the police, according to the Americans. Instead it was the year the police and Mahdi Army became one. The rank and file were dominated by Sadrists. Officers were terrified of their own men. The Mahdi Army took for granted its authority over certain areas. Nobody could challenge the Sadrists—not the Iraqi Security Forces and not the Americans. Just like Sunni criminals using fatwas to justify their crimes under the guise of Al Qaeda, so too did Shiite criminals profit from the booty they seized from Sunnis under the guise of Mahdi Army activities. As a result of its criminal activities, seizure of Sunni property, and control over essential services such as gas and benzene distribution, the Mahdi Army was well funded. Its wealth also allowed it to provide social services so as to maintain and even increase its base of support from urban youth to the many families it now assisted, especially among the displaced.
Control over its men was always a concern for the Mahdi Army leadership. As leaders were arrested, younger, less-disciplined fighters gained more control. Different Mahdi Army units fought each other. As Mahdi Army territory increased, its leadership lost control over local units. Splinter groups terrorized and preyed on people in the name of the Mahdi Army. Even supporters of the Sadrists began to resent the Mahdi Army.
In the summer of 2007, six months into the surge, the Mahdi Army was still cleansing Sunnis in areas like Hurriya. Although Hurriya was majority-Shiite, its Sunnis were well organized and strong. Shiites were initially on the defensive, with many of their civilians killed on a daily basis. To defeat the threat of Sunni militias, the Mahdi Army systematically cleansed all the areas and began to encroach on the nearby majority-Sunni Adil neighborhood. The assassination of businessmen and religious leaders struck fear into the community, weakening it and facilitating its flight. Following attacks on Shiites, the Mahdi Army would pile Sunni corpses on streets in revenge. Amriya and Ghazaliya were the last two neighborhoods in western Baghdad still fully in Sunni hands. Dora was still contested. In eastern Baghdad, only Adhamiya remained in Sunni hands.
In late August 2007, Mahdi Army men clashed with opponents from the Supreme Council in Karbala. About one hundred people were killed and much property was destroyed while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were in the city to mark the Mahdi’s birthday. An outraged Maliki, who considered Karbala his town, flew down and made it clear he was the boss, wearing a pistol and giving orders to his special forces to secure the city and arrest Mahdi Army men, in some cases leading his own men into neighborhoods. Maliki realized that the Mahdi Army could threaten his authority. On August 29 Muqtada declared a tajmid (freeze), ordering his army to halt its operations for six months. Soon after he turned on unruly members of his movement, killing or expelling them.
The Mahdi Army cease-fire was the most important factor in the decline in violence. Until the freeze, eight months into the surge, the civil war was still raging and Sunnis were being cleansed from Shiite neighborhoods that had already been walled off. The militias were still advancing on the west side of the Tigris, far from their base in the east, until the freeze halted their advance all at once. The freeze would cost the movement dearly, because in a way its expansion was its purpose. Sadrists had few firm principles except being opposed to the occupation and federalism. The movement represented the angry, dispossessed poor, and it had to express their anger in some way. By the time of the freeze the sectarian killings were beginning to decline. But now the Mahdi Army was in control of areas where it did not have a natural constituency, such as with middle-class or better-educated Shiites. With the increase in American troops and change in their tactics, the Mahdi Army was also less necessary for self-defense, and its excesses were harder for Shiites to tolerate.
A lesser-known element in the new counterinsurgency approach was increased attacks against the Mahdi Army’s key nodes, support zones, and capabilities. Protecting the population through bases inside neighborhoods and erecting concrete walls were the most obvious and essential elements. But the Americans also increased their offensive action against the Mahdi Army both inside and outside Baghdad. This was a key reason for Muqtada’s cease-fire. From February to August 2007, the Americans and their allies arrested an average of one thousand suspected Mahdi Army men per month, and killed many as well. This had a chilling effect on the Shiite militia. The Mahdi Army cease-fire held despite attempts by the Supreme Council and other rivals to provoke the Sadrists into confrontations.
According to Miska, the cease-fire was not declared because Muqtada had a change of heart about the United States. “He did it because most of his militia was fragmented and out of control,” he said. “In order to regain control, he issued the cease-fire. Any elements that did not obey the cease-fire would be subject to discipline. Discipline was sometimes doled out by elements we called ‘Golden JAM’ [U.S. military used the acronym JAM—for Jaish al-Mahdi—to describe the Mahdi Army] coming from Najaf to kill rogue leaders and elements. Sometimes the U.S. forces collaborated with the Golden JAM to get the same targets. We also coordinated with moderate members of JAM against more extremist elements. The majority of JAM would never admit this, but it did happen in very subtle and discreet ways. There are many different flavors of the Mahdi Army, its many different members acting for different motives, using the name of the organization.”
Not all factions were so cooperative. Miska described a 2007 battle by the shrine in Kadhimiya in which the American unit called Iraqi Security Forces for help but none of them came. A Sadrist Parliament member, Baha al-Araji, was sitting in the Iraqi brigade commander’s office telling him not to assist the Americans. “The next day Araji introduced a resolution in Parliament to prevent Americans from coming within a certain radius of the shrine to create a sanctuary for JAM to operate,” Miska said. “It didn’t pass, but it set back American relationships.”
Mahdi Army fighters from different areas would come in to place explosively formed penetrators (EFPs)—a more powerful type of IED—targeting the Americans and the Iraqi general in charge. Normally they would warn civilians to leave beforehand. “There was one particular period after a firefight with the Mahdi Army in Kadhimiyah in April 2007,” Miska said. “Prior to the firefight we did not have an IED in six months in the neighborhood. After the firefight we were getting banged with EFPs right outside our gates. We were able to prevent most of the attacks, but some still achieved success. The people were very frustrated about all of the Mahdi Army attacks in Kadhimiyah. But Mahdi elements played on the fears that the infidels were threatening the sanctity of the shrine. Finally in August, my truck got hit with an EFP during a combined patrol. Eleven people hit the ground wounded when the bomb went off. Eight ambulances pulled up to the scene within thirty seconds of the blast. Casualties were quickly hauled away. No U.S. or Iraqi soldiers were wounded. The backlash from the people was quick. A senior leader approached us and asked to broker a deal. If we would agree to bring a former Mahdi Army leader back from hiding in Iran, he would promise to keep the ‘bad’ Mahdi Army out of Kadhimiya. We gave the former leader thirty days to make a difference. He lived up to his end of the deal, since no further Iranian bombs [EFPs] went off in Kadhimiya. We promised not to detain him as long as he did not conduct extremist activities against the Iraqi people or our forces.”
Unlike the Mahdi Army, Al Qaeda took longer to change its calculations. Its ranks were reduced as the Americans targeted them with better intelligence, the Iraqi security forces attacked them, Awakening men turned on them, and they outstayed their welcome in most Sunni areas. American commanders on their third tour of Iraq were beginning to figure out how to do things better; crucially, they demonstrated an improved ability to take advantage of social dynamics in Iraq. The increase in troops also allowed them to take more action without the same limitations. “It’s unclear if the surge would have worked a year earlier,” John Nagl told me. “Sunnis didn’t realize they had lost and the American military wasn’t ready.”
The Americans called these new Sunni militias neighborhood watch groups, concerned local citizens, Iraqi Security Volunteers, or Critical Infrastructure Security guards. These groups were paid by the U.S. military and operated in much of the country, employing former fighters and often empowering them, to the fury of the Shiite-dominated government as well as the Shiite militias, who thought they had defeated the Sunnis, just to see them trying to regain power through the backdoor. The Americans euphemistically called it “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.” General Petraeus paid these former insurgents without first getting approval from Washington. Control over the war had devolved to the field.
Another key dynamic that was fortuitous for the Americans was the success of the sectarian cleansing operations. Militias had consolidated their control; clear front lines were developing. Many Sunni neighborhoods were depopulated. There was nowhere for Sunni militias to hide. The majority of the Iraqi refugees abroad were Sunnis. The Shiites had won the civil war. In 2007 the Bush administration and the U.S. military stopped talking of Iraq as a grand project of nation building, and the American media dutifully obeyed. Any larger narrative was abandoned, and Iraq was presented as a series of small pieces. Just as Iraq was being physically deconstructed, so too was it being intellectually deconstructed, not as a state undergoing transition but as small stories of local heroes and villains, of well-meaning American soldiers, of good news here and progress there. But it was too early to tell if the whole was less or greater than the sum of its parts.
I decided to visit those parts to find out for myself. In December 2007, I took advantage of the lull in Iraq’s civil war to visit areas that had been no-go zones a year earlier. Baghdad’s neighborhoods were walled-off islands, but Iraqis could now visit areas outside their own for the first time in a year or two. The checkpoints manned by the Iraqi Security Forces were no longer as feared, but a foreign journalist was still a tempting commodity. Iraqis knew to make jokes when stopped, to assess if their interlocutor was a Sunni or Shiite, and to use the right kind of slang. For $250 in Baghdad’s Sadr City I purchased two fake Iraqi National Identity cards: one Sunni name and one Shiite name. It was something many Iraqis had done as the “killings over identity” got worse.
I started in Dora, one of Baghdad’s most fearsome neighborhoods. Dora was a formerly mixed area in southern Baghdad with a majority-Sunni population. It was once a good place to live, with many expensive villas; but their prices had fallen dramatically since 2005, when Sunni militias began to expel Shiites and Christians. The Sunni militiamen who cleansed much of Dora lived in the surrounding rural areas, such as Arab Jubur and Hor Rajab. Criminal gangs took advantage of the chaos to target anybody with money for kidnapping and ransom. As the Iraqi Security Forces strengthened and were populated by supporters or members of sectarian Shiite militias, Sunnis from the Shiite areas of southern Baghdad were cleansed. Soon Sunni and Shiite areas exchanged volleys of mortars, and front lines were drawn between neighbors and friends. Shiites moved into empty Sunni homes and Sunnis moved into empty Shiite homes, creating a further incentive for violence that was part criminal and part sectarian. As Sunni militias radicalized and became more anti-Shiite, Sunnis grew to depend on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq’s fighters for protection against the Shiite militias. Motivated less by nationalism or any interest in the notion of Iraq, and more by grander Manichaean ambitions to fight the West or establish an Islamic emirate, these radical jihadist groups became a golem, terrorizing the very Sunnis looking to them for protection and often acting like criminal gangs. Dora was easily accessible from the southern belts of Baghdad, allowing Al Qaeda to cross the Tigris and enter Karada and other Shiite areas. Dora was also on the highway to Baghdad from the south and adjacent to the still-contested Seidiya neighborhood.
Dora was undergoing a radical transformation that I could not clearly see when I visited in late 2007. Much of Dora, it seemed to me, was a ghost town. I walked down Sixtieth Street in an area called Mekanik with one Sunni militia. Tall concrete walls built by the Americans divided parts of it, separating warring factions. Lakes and rivers of mud and sewage choked the streets, with mountains of trash dividing them. Most of the windows of the one- or two-story homes were broken. The wind blew through them, whistling eerily. House after house and block after block were deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open. Many were emptied of furniture; in others the furniture was covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Apart from our footsteps, there was complete silence.
My guide was a thirty-year-old man called Osama, who grew up in this neighborhood. He pointed to shops he used to go to, now empty or destroyed, a barbershop that had belonged to a Shiite man, a hardware store that had belonged to a Sunni man. “This is all my neighborhood,” Osama told me. He wore jeans, a sweater, and a baseball cap, and had a slight baby face concealed by stubble. The previous U.S. Army unit had not been active in his area, he told me. “They were really cowards,” he said. “They let Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army fight.”
We passed by the Ibn Sinna elementary school, which had served as a dividing line between Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. We continued and he showed me a Shiite mosque that in previous incarnations had been a cafe and before the war a Baath Party office. He pointed to the destroyed mosque. “The Mahdi Army was killing people here,” he said. “They were torturing people and the people destroyed it. They were shooting on our neighborhood. The Americans raided it; it was a great day. If I find somebody from the Mahdi Army I would kill him right away, not give him to the coalition forces.”
Osama had lost many friends and relatives in the civil war. When we drove past the nearby district of Baya, he pointed to the gas station. “The Baya fuel station is all Mahdi Army,” he said. “They killed my uncle here. He didn’t accept to leave. Twenty guys came to the house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him, and killed him.” The Mahdi Army also targeted men with Sunni names. “I have three friends called Omar,” Osama told me, “all killed.”
Osama said the Mahdi Army freeze was “bullshit.” In the nearby area of Seidiya, he said, “two days ago they blew up the Sunni Ibrahim al-Khalil Mosque. The Mahdi Army is still killing people. Twenty days ago they killed three Sunni civilians who came back because they heard it was safe.” The Mahdi Army was Iran, he told me, the Quds Force. “The Mahdi Army is not listening to Muqtada and Muqtada is lying,” he said. “The Mahdi Army made Al Qaeda come here to defend people, but then Al Qaeda was worse. The government sucks; you know they are all corrupt. Then after a few months Al Qaeda became corrupt.”
Osama had been a translator working with the Americans; then he had moved on to sign lucrative construction and sanitation contracts with the American company KBR. Al Qaeda got wind that he worked as a contractor for the Americans, and he felt threatened. He and a network of friends of his in the neighborhood started acting as sources for the Americans, sometimes riding along in U.S. Army vehicles with their faces masked to point out suspects.
Osama and his men were first contracted by the American military under Lieut. Col. Jim Crider, who commanded the First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry of the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division (1-4 Cav), during the surge in 2007 and 2008. They took over the East and West Rashid security districts in January 2007. In May 2007 they took over the northeast sector of East Rashid and attempted to apply the principles of the new counterinsurgency field manual.
“Anyone who was openly Shiite was already gone by the time we got to Dora,” Crider recollected. “We found a few people who were Shiite but posed as Sunni for their own protection. It was common for our troops to find three military-aged males with no furniture living in a house. That is not good enough evidence to detain them, so we would demand that they produce a legitimate rental contract within seventy-two hours or move out. More often than not, we would revisit the house to find it empty again.
“The government of Iraq back then was very sectarian. They were terrified that Sunnis would take back what they had gained.” Crider cited the installation of Dr. Bassima al-Jadri as head of the government’s reconciliation committee as one example. Jadri was a thirty-eight-year-old former senior official in Saddam’s military industry ministry, where she had worked on improving Iraq’s conventional weapons capacity. Even then she was connected to the Sadrists, and after the war she was in Parliament allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Her formal relationship with the Sadrists began in 2004, when their opposition to Bremer intensified. They sought her out, and she agreed to advise them, meeting with religious and tribal leaders. She later established a relationship with the Dawa Party and became close to Jaafari and then Maliki. By this time her bodyguards had split off from the Sadrists. She was very suspicious of Sunnis and Americans, believing that neither wanted to allow Shiites to rule Iraq. She was very forceful, and when Maliki established his office of the commander in chief, meant to advise him on military matters, Jadri was put in charge of it, in part because of her fierce loyalty to him.
Under her the office developed a fearsome reputation for issuing secret sectarian orders, advising Maliki on military matters and overruling the Defense and Interior Ministries, circumventing the chain of command to order officers to attack targets. She helped Maliki create his own praetorian guard. Jadri wanted to purge all nonsectarian officers and those not loyal to the ruling Shiite parties while promoting sectarian officers by removing Sunni names from lists of recruits to the army and police. She viewed all Sunnis as Al Qaeda supporters. When Maliki established a national reconciliation committee, the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation, Jadri was put in charge of it.
IN ITS FIRST MONTH in Dora the 1-4 Cav was attacked fifty-two times. Sunni militias used deep buried IEDs to destroy American armored vehicles. In response, starting in June 2007 Crider initiated a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week presence in his area. This curtailed Al Qaeda’s ability to move about freely. People began to stay outside later into the night.
A fellow officer was reading David Galula’s 1964 treatise Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which “emphasizes the importance of conducting a census right away,” Crider said. The 2-12 Infantry, from whom Crider adopted the idea, called it Operation Close Encounters. “I knew a good idea when I heard one,” he said, “so we began to conduct this operation daily in order to map out who lived in our neighborhood, what they thought, and who was not supposed to be there.”[1] The goal was also “to build a real relationship with the population one family at a time,” he would later explain in an article he wrote for Military Review. “We found that while people would not talk to us on the streets, they would often speak freely inside their homes. Since we went to every home, no one felt singled out. Galula points out that a census can serve as a ‘basic source of intelligence.’ We found that it was a tremendous source of intelligence that gave us an in-depth understanding of how people felt. We came to understand that Al Qaeda in Iraq was supported only by a small minority of the population. We discovered issues around which we could build an alliance based on a relationship of trust and respect. We could shape our talking points, information operations, and psychological operations to have the effect we wanted because we knew our target audience well.”
The 1-4 Cav visited every home in the area, talking at length with every family. Using handheld biometric data collection tools, the Americans were able to document who lived in every house and made it difficult for the Al Qaeda men to know who was informing on them. By June and July of 2007, the 1-4 Cav was able to use local sources and terminate Al Qaeda cells that dispatched car bombs and planted IEDs. The removal of these cells allowed for the Awakening men to begin operating in the area.
Although an occupation is always onerous, the 1-4 Cav and other units that implemented COIN did not conduct mass arrests in which all men were targeted randomly, as had units before 2007. Officers from the 1-4 Cav visited families of arrested men, explaining to them what evidence they had. In August Al Qaeda men from Arab Jubur infiltrated Dora, bringing their families so that they would appear to be internally displaced persons. As the 1-4 Cav cooperated with the American unit in Arab Jubur, they were able to arrest the Al Qaeda men, frustrating the group’s attempt to reinvigorate itself.
Crider insists that the twenty-four-hour presence in the neighborhoods produced immediate results, with IEDs and murders dropping off significantly. He also suggested that because his unit was made up of young soldiers who were in Iraq for the first time, they were not encumbered with the attitude that the Iraqi people were the enemy. “A platoon would go out and do an eight-hour patrol, handing out microgrants, cutting loose wires, talking to Iraqis,” Crider said. He was struck at the familiarity his lieutenants developed with the neighborhoods and local families. Using a computer program called Tigernet, they could plot the information on who lived in every house, their job, skills, ability to speak English, and other details into every location on the satellite maps of his area.
Back then the only concrete barriers in Dora were smaller “Jersey” barriers around the Mekanik area. “They didn’t stop movement as good as we wanted to,” Crider said. “We were trying to get walls as soon as we could. It forces the population to funnel through checkpoints and protects from gunfire. It took three or four months to put up the walls. Dora was the first place in southwest Baghdad that got walls. There was one protest when walls went up by guys we believe were involved in the insurgency. The insurgents hated those walls. Over the course of a few weeks we saw the impact.” The farmlands that had been used to smuggle weapons or fighters into his area were now cut off.
In September 2007 there was a murder campaign in Dora, with more than nineteen killings. The first victim was Haji Sattar, a local council member. His killers entered the District Advisory Council in broad daylight and asked for him by name. Then they shot him in the head and walked out. “The murder campaign was an attempt to shake up the neighborhood,” Crider said, “They were trying to kill people who they thought were sources for us.” It briefly succeeded. Haji Hashim, the deputy head of the Rashid district council and a close ally of the Americans, fled for three months. “Sattar’s death got Hashim shaken,” Crider told me. Hashim had been collaborating with the Americans since 2003 but had managed to stay alive and stay respected by many people in Dora. “Hashim would give us tips: ‘Don’t drive down this street for a couple of days,’” Crider said.
By July 2007 Crider’s men had cultivated thirty-six new local Iraqi sources. “In August the number of detentions skyrocketed, and soon enemy activity fell down,” Crider said. The last attack that killed one of his soldiers happened on September 9. “The last IED was September 27. When Shiites returned to Dora in early 2008, there was some increase in violence but no killings.” Crider’s unit arrested more than 250 Al Qaeda suspects, with 80 percent of them sent on to long-term detention, although most never faced any court or due process to establish their guilt.
Nick Cook, a captain serving under Crider in Dora and the neighborhoods south of it, helped set up the first Awakening groups in his areas. “In Dora we were approached by a guy named Zeki, an old source of ours, who wanted to help stand up the SOIs,” he told me. They wanted their headquarters set up along the boundary between his troop and the other American troop in Dora. Cook was introduced to Zeki and his partner, who stated emphatically that they had hundreds of fighters ready to take up arms against Al Qaeda. A lot of their members had come from Arab Jubur. As Cook got to know Zeki’s group, it became clear that many had relatives living in Dora, and that they wanted to help their families.
At first it seemed that the group was making little difference in Dora. At the beginning of Ramadan in 2007, however, Zeki’s group received information that the mosques were going to be attacked by Al Qaeda. They asked permission to set up security. “About two dozen guys in red and black jogging suits took to the streets,” he said. No incidents occurred during that time, and the “neighbors seemed happy to see their sons taking to the streets.” From then on the Sons of Iraq were a constant presence. Many members of the group told Cook that they had joined resistance groups right after the invasion because they wanted to get the Americans out of Iraq. Later, though, they felt disenfranchised and identified the selfishness of the groups as the cause.
Cook was also the one who first established a relationship with Osama. “Osama came to me in April of 2007,” he said. “He had run into me the day before, and I had given him my phone number.” The father of one of Osama’s friends had been kidnapped that night, so Osama decided to bring his friend to the combat outpost in Mekanik. Cook met with Osama and heard his friend’s story. Then he immediately directed a patrol to try to find where the father had been taken. Unfortunately, the search was unsuccessful. But Cook said that Osama never forgot the encounter.
About two weeks later, an IED hit and destroyed a Humvee, killing one soldier in Cook’s troop and badly injuring two others. Three days later Osama called Cook and told him he was parked outside a house; inside it, he said, the man responsible for the IED was having lunch. A patrol was sent to investigate immediately. When the troops arrived Osama guided them to the house and pointed out the insurgent. Once the man was brought back to Forward Operating Base Falcon, the unit discovered that he was one of the top-ten “high-value individuals” for a cavalry regiment a little to the south of where Cook was stationed.
From then on, the unit forged a close relationship with Osama and relied on his intelligence. He even helped a patrol surprise a couple of insurgents emplacing an IED in the middle of the night. When Cook and his troops were moved north into Dora, they handed Osama over as a source and friend to the unit that replaced them. But the new unit did not manage the relationship well, and Osama started calling Cook’s fire support NCO to tell him how he was tired of working with them. He said he was planning to start the SOI in Mekanik because he hated what Mekanik had become.
At the beginning of August Cook’s Tactical Humintelligence Team received a phone call. Approximately sixteen members of Al Qaeda were being held by Osama and his fighters in Mekanik. This was no longer Cook’s area of operation, but the unit whose jurisdiction it was said they could not help. So Cook’s troop received permission to go and link up with Osama’s fighters. They joined forces and later transferred the sixteen men into U.S. custody.
Col. Jeff Peterson commanded the 1-14 Cavalry Squadron, which was attached to the 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team. He was in Baghdad from July 2006 until September 2007, operating both in Haifa Street and areas in the neighborhoods of Saha, Mekanik, and Abu Dshir, just south of Dora proper. Peterson worked with the regular police and the national police in East Rashid. “They were over 90 percent Shiite and infiltrated with Mahdi Army members or at least sympathized with them,” he told me. “I had evidence that their leadership compromised our missions, and I suspected they at least cooperated with the enemy attacking our forces. Some members of the national police were guilty of sectarian violence, and we arrested some officers. The Sunni population was so distrustful of the national police that I built a barrier around the Mekanik neighborhood and didn’t allow the national police in the area.
“The security situation improved somewhat. There was significant improvement to the national police as we more effectively partnered with them down to platoon level. Additionally, the commander was replaced and we arrested several officers that we think were the primary source of corruption in the battalion. Over time they became much more competent, professional in their behavior, and successful in their operations. They also began gaining the trust of the local population.
“The biggest challenge I faced was the sectarian nature of the Shiite-dominated local government structures. They had significant influence over the decisions about resource allocation and controlling essential services like benzene, propane, and kerosene distribution, and medical clinic and school re-sourcing. They gave priority to the Shiite neighborhoods and neglected the Sunni neighborhoods. This made it very difficult to build legitimacy in the eyes of the Sunnis who were being marginalized by their local government. In general, the Shiites, in conjunction with the national police, would attempt to displace Sunnis from their homes and then take physical control of the vacant house. In response, the Sunnis would defend their homes or counterattack into Shiite areas. I never sensed the Sunnis were trying to expand; it was the Shiites that were trying to take control of more area.”
Something I was told by Capt. Jim Keirsey, who served in East Rashid between October 2006 and December 2007, confirmed the endemic sectarianism of the Iraqi Security Forces. “A large number of the national police brigade and battalion charged with securing the population of Dora persecuted the population,” Keirsey said. “They were often very antagonistic toward the population of Dora. It became a vicious cycle. Extremists within Dora would attack Shiite residents to drive them out. The national police would execute reprisal detentions or allow Shiite extremists to attack Sunnis in Dora. Or they would detain Sunnis from Dora outside of the community. Dora Sunni extremists would then seek additional reprisals, perhaps capturing a passing taxi driver and beating him near death. Then the national police, enraged, would charge into the mahala en masse with little fire discipline, terrorizing the populace.”
As I walked the desolate streets in December 2007, it was hard to know if things were improving. But with few killings occurring in Dora, the conflict seemed frozen in place. A man and his daughter walked hurriedly by. I asked them why the area was empty. “It’s a good neighborhood,” they assured me. “People left because there is no electricity.” In another home I found a man shaving a friend. They told me there had not been electricity in the area for a year and a half. The Mahdi Army controlled the electrical station in the area, they explained. “People will come back when electricity comes back,” they said. “We’re afraid to go out at night.” The Mahdi Army fired mortars at this area from the nearby Shiite neighborhood of Abu Dshir, people told me, and launched attacks from there, engaging Al Qaeda in firefights in Dora. I asked one man why he had not fled like everybody else. “Where will I go?” he asked me. Many Shiite homes in Dora were burned down, to prevent the owners from ever returning. Poor Sunnis who were expelled from Hurriya and Shaab or other poor Shiite areas had moved into the homes of better-off Shiites who had been expelled from well-to-do Sunni areas such as Dora, Ghazaliya, and Amriya.
Osama ran three hundred Iraqi Security Volunteers but resented the restrictions placed on him by the Americans. In Seidiya, Adhamiya, Amriya, Ghazaliya, and other volatile Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, ISVs were allowed to patrol freely and carry heavy-caliber machine guns. “We use our own guns,” Osama told me. “The Americans didn’t give us anything.” Osama had a contract to provide a certain number of men at ten dollars per day. He was paid every other week, and he paid his men and provided uniforms and whatever else they might need.
“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” Adam Sperry told me when I visited his office in Forward Operating Base Falcon. A bright twenty-three-year-old who majored in creative writing in college, Sperry was an Army intelligence officer from the Second Squadron, Second Cavalry Regiment. Capt. Travis Cox, his colleague, explained to me that at higher levels a lot of money and time was being spent trying to figure out how to transition the ISVs into other jobs. “To a large extent they are former insurgents,” Cox admitted.
The 2-2 SCR was patrolling Osama’s area in Dora when I visited. The unit’s Major Garrett had to figure out what to do with all these militiamen. He placed his hopes on vocational training centers that offered instruction in automotive repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, electricity repair, and English. But adults who were part of a militia were not likely to want to abandon their weapons. “At the end of the day they want a legitimate living,” Garrett told me. “That’s why they’re joining the ISVs.” I didn’t think anybody was working for a paltry ten dollars per day merely for a legitimate living. These were men who had fought the American occupation as well as the Shiites of Iraq. They had not done so for profit, as the Americans insisted. “The ideological fight, forget about it,” Captain Dehart, the unit’s senior intelligence officer, said when I suggested this to him. “We bought into it too much. It’s money and power.” Peace would come to Iraq “if they just realized they would make more money with us through construction contracts than fighting us.”
In Dora the Americans were the government, building electrical power stations because the Shiite-dominated government didn’t care about supplying electricity or other services to Sunnis. The 2-2 SCR was spending thirty-two million dollars on construction contracts signed with Iraqis and on salaries for Sunni militiamen they hired to be ISVs. They spent twelve million dollars alone building walls around neighborhoods. Sperry complained that American counterinsurgency strategy “is to spend millions of dollars and build walls to make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” But his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Reineke, felt very strongly about building walls around neighborhoods and didn’t care if some people were cut off as a result. He was frustrated that a wall he was paying local contractors to build around Mahala 860 was taking too long. The wall was meant to keep Al Qaeda fighters out and cut off arms smuggling routes. Some locals left outside were upset that they were not being included inside the walls. Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy Iraqis off temporarily, and they distributed “microgrants” of three thousand dollars to all the shop owners in their area.
I WONDERED what would happen when this massive influx of American money stopped pouring in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the ruling Shiites even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been trying to exterminate until recently? Sunnis they believed had been trying to kill them? The British occupation of Iraq in the early twentieth century was described as “colonialism on the cheap.” The British did not spend much money on the occupation, and relied on the use of airpower as an alternative to a large standing army. The British bribed tribes and tried to mold the political system in a way that benefited their local allies and enriched them, turning them into feudal lords. This was nothing compared to the billions of dollars the Americans were throwing into Iraq. Adding up all the men employed by the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the other security branches, the Awakening militiamen, and others working for private security companies that contracted with the American departments of State or Defense, there were more than a million Iraqi men in the security sector. This was more than Saddam had. But for the Americans, spending billions of dollars bribing Iraqis was a pittance compared to how much they spent per year just keeping their military in Iraq or the cost of repairing their damaged vehicles, let alone the cost of injured soldiers. But loyalty that can be purchased is by its nature fickle. Would these maneuvers lead to a real or stable political process in Iraq?
Osama was the English-speaking diplomatic face, but behind him were tough men of the resistance. One, called Salah Nasrallah, or Abu Salih, had dark reddish skin, a sharp nose, and small piercing eyes. The Americans required that each mahala have two ISV bosses, so Osama gave half of his three hundred men to Abu Salih’s control. (“We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq,” an American Army officer from the area told me.) The day I met Abu Salih he was wearing a baseball cap with the Iraqi flag on it. Turning off Sixtieth Street we walked up to the Batul School for Girls. A soldier with the 2-2 SCR had been shot in the throat and killed in front of this school, presumably by Al Qaeda. Abu Salih explained that the Mahdi Army kidnapped Sunni girls from the school and that during final exams they had attacked it and shot it up, then looted it. Osama blamed the Mahdi Army but added, “When I say Mahdi Army I mean the Iraqi National Police.” Abu Salih picked up Korans and other religious books that were strewn about the dusty floors.
A thick muscular man called Amar, or Abu Yasser, was the other brawn behind the operation. Handsome and jovial, Abu Yasser wore a green sweatshirt and matching sweatpants with a pistol holstered his under arm. “Amar is the real boss,” an American Army intelligence officer from the area told me. “That guy’s an animal, he’s crazy.” Osama explained that nobody from Mahala 832 knew that he was in charge of the ISVs in the area. “They think Abu Salih and Abu Yasser are in charge, because my family is still there.” He added that they were still arresting Al Qaeda infiltrators from among the ISVs. Osama was trying to arrange for Abu Yasser to manage his own ISV unit in the nearby Mahala 834, where he actually lived.
Abu Yasser had worked for the General Security Service until 1993 and then joined the Iraqi military industry. In 2004 he joined the Army of the Mujahideen, a resistance organization operating in Mosul, the Anbar province, and southern Baghdad. Although he claimed to have joined to protect Sunni areas from the Mahdi Army, in 2004 that Shiite militia was still cooperating with the Sunni resistance and was not targeting Sunnis. In fact, he had fought the American occupation, operating mostly out of Arab Jubur, he said, where the organization “was young people, mostly to defend the area.” He had not resigned from that organization, he added, but decided to work with the Americans and the ISVs “because of Iranians getting more power in Iraq,” he told me. “They are occupying Sunni areas. They are the bigger enemy.” Like many others, Abu Yasser admitted that Sunnis had made a strategic blunder by boycotting the Iraqi political process in the early days of the occupation, and Sunni clerics had made a mistake issuing fatwas prohibiting Sunnis from joining the nascent security forces the Americans were creating.
Abu Salih had belonged to the 1920 Revolution Battalions. He had decided to work with his former enemies the Americans and join the ISVs because of the Iraqi government. “It’s an Iranian government,” he said, “and the people are its victims.” A colleague of his, Abu Yusef, averred, “Maliki is Iraqi, but he lived in Iran a long time, he works for them.” Referring to Maliki’s political party, Abu Salih added, “The Dawa Party is the first enemy of Iraq.” Unlike some of his associates, Abu Salih did not think it had been a mistake for Sunnis to boycott the security forces. “If Sunnis had joined they would have been killed or fired,” he said. Abu Salih admitted that some men from Al Qaeda joined the ISVs so that they could have the identity card as protection should they get arrested. If the Iraqi government did not allow the ISVs to join its security forces, “it will be worse than before,” he said.
Abu Yusef, who was sitting with Abu Salih, was a former investigator for Saddam’s Special Security Service. Like all members of the security forces, he had been fired when former American proconsul Paul Bremer issued an edict dissolving them in May 2003. Many joined the resistance after that, though Abu Yusef denied having done so (but he told me he fought the Mahdi Army and killed many of them). The Mahdi Army killed twenty-seven members of his family, he said, adding that on one day, earlier in 2007, forty-seven Sunni corpses were found next to the nearby Sunni Tawhid Mosque, presumably murdered by the Mahdi Army. He denied being anti-Shiite, though. His wife was Shiite, and many of the officers he worked with in the security service were Shiites from throughout Iraq.
The Hero House—the sobriquet the Americans gave to Osama’s headquarters—was located behind a tall concrete wall that stretched the length of a highway the Americans called Route Senators. The Americans paid Iraqis to build these walls, Osama said. Before they were erected, he said, the Iraqi National Police had fired on the neighborhood from the highway. Now his guards manned a checkpoint at a gap in the wall that allowed vehicles to enter the area. The house belonged to Abu Yasser’s cousin, a doctor living in Britain. It was also surrounded by concrete barriers and manned by men in civilian clothing casually slinging Kalashnikovs. Inside the mostly empty house was a room with mattresses and another with some chairs, a desk, and a large satellite image of Dora that the Americans had given Osama. As we drank tea in the office, one of Osama’s sources entered and pointed to a spot on the map where an Al Qaeda agent was residing. The suspected Al Qaeda man was called Walid. “He is harmful to people,” Osama told me. “I just want to kill him. Now he is back in the area. His cousins are Al Qaeda also.” But he said he would watch him instead, to see who he worked with. The Americans had recently required the ISVs to wear uniforms, and Osama was annoyed that most of his men were still in their civilian attire.
Inside I met Hussein, a lanky twenty-one-year-old wearing a blue tracksuit. He was one of Osama’s original partners, though he was from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. He was working as a guard in a local Sunni mosque when the Mahdi Army, backed by the Iraqi National Guard, expelled his family and other Sunnis from the area. They killed his uncle and cousin. His family fled to Arab Jubur, but Al Qaeda pressured him to join them and came to his house looking for him, so his family told them he had gone to Syria, and he started to work with Osama in Dora. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are the same thing,” he told me, “two faces of the same coin.”
Hussein was the fourth-ranking member of Osama’s unit, after Abu Yusef and Abu Salih. He took me with him as he drove through the area to inspect the twenty checkpoints their men were maintaining. We drove through the mostly deserted neighborhood, with its shattered homes. Most of the graffiti on the walls had been painted over, but some still said, “Long Live the Mujahideen.” On various corners two or three men stood or sat with their Kalashnikovs. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army destroyed a lot here,” Hussein said as we surveyed the devastation, but he added that “Al Qaeda destroyed the area, not the Mahdi Army.” We were stopped at the checkpoints, and though some of the men recognized Hussein, many cautiously gripped their weapons and questioned us. “We’re a patrol from the central headquarters,” Hussein told them. Some of the men were teenagers, others were in their fifties. One of them covered his face menacingly with a red checkered scarf. The local market, previously shut down, was partially reopened, and as ISV checkpoints were being established some of the Sunnis who had fled the area, though none of the Shiites or Christians, were returning. “Clean Shiites can come back,” Osama told me. While I was there a Sunni family from the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, arrived at the checkpoint. They hoped to stay in one of the homes in the area. The ISV men questioned them and demanded copies of the identity cards of all the people who would live in the house. “Anyone else I will arrest,” said Osama. A woman approached the gate to ask for information about men who had been arrested, but the guards could not help her.
One of the men prepared lunch for us: mushy cooked tomatoes; mushy fried potatoes; and kibbe, ground meat fried in dough. Osama called an American sergeant from a nearby base. “Your guys detained this guy,” he said. “He is seventy years old. What’s wrong with this guy, is he bad? Oh, he’s fifty? They told me he was very old. If you know for sure he is Al Qaeda, then fuck him.” Then he asked about a series of men who were detained and warned about an Iraqi who worked with the Americans. “He is a bad guy,” he said. “He threatens people.”
Osama received a phone call from representatives of the Awakening Council boss Ahmad Abu Risha in Ramadi, the brother of the slain Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, summoning him and his men to a meeting. He was very excited and hoped to discuss what would happen in six months, when the ISV program was scheduled to end. He wanted the Awakening groups and the ISVs to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, “because the Iraqi government doesn’t do shit.” If the U.S. Army left or once more took to remaining within their FOBs, he said, violence in the area would return.
Haji Hashim was the deputy head of the Rashid council who had collaborated with Crider. In 2003 Hashim and others volunteered to set up the local council. Before the war he had been in the Ministry of Education. “I spoke in mosques,” he said, “and said we have to work with the Americans. Dora became very bad in 2005. We were considered collaborators.” Al Qaeda came in, he said, and then it became dominated by locals and was joined by other resistance groups. “Then sectarianism started,” he said. “Al Qaeda killed Shiites, the Mahdi Army and Badr killed Sunnis and former officers. Things got worse after Samarra. Most police were supporters of the Mahdi Army, and Dora was a target for the Mahdi Army. In Shiite mosques they spoke out against Dora. Many Sunnis were killed in Abu Dshir.”
The people of Dora collected their government-provided propane tanks in Abu Dshir. In 2006 “Sunni agents from here went there to get them, and four were killed,” he told me. “After that nobody could get propane, so people had to use wood to cook. So American patrols went to collect the propane, and now it’s better, but there are still lingering fears about being attacked.” Hashim was shot in the head once when he left the house to collect his propane. The Americans took him to the hospital in the Green Zone, but he lost his vision in one eye.
“I have seen dogs eating dead bodies,” Hashim told me. “Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq killed any Shiite, any government employee, and Shiites killed any Sunni. The Iraqi National Police used to shoot randomly when they were attacked. The leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces was sectarian at the time. They made random arrests, would shoot randomly and kill innocent people. The Rafidein Brigade of the INPs made random arrests. They took sixty-eight people from shops, and after that we found their bodies in Abu Dshir. Police shot at electrical stations so people wouldn’t have power.”
One especially vindictive unit came through with PKCs (heavy-caliber machine guns) and shot up the area the day before they were replaced. “They had a strong hate,” Hashim explained. “Anybody who crossed the street was shot. Only cats crossed the street.” He attributed the improved security to the Americans. “One of the most important things they did was walling off the areas,” he said. “It’s true it bothered people, but it worked.” The Americans also helped release innocent Sunnis who had been arrested by the Rafidein Brigade.
A new commander took over the Rafidein Brigade and improved relations with the people, Hashim told me. But the commander was later replaced by another who “did bad things, made random arrests, he made problems instead of solving them.” This one was later punished and transferred to the traffic police. “Then the Wolf Brigade came in 2007,” said Hashim. “They arrested people in mosques right away, tortured people. Boys from the area fought the Wolf Brigade. I asked them why they were fighting. They said, ‘It’s better to die fighting than to end up arrested with holes drilled in our bodies.’”
ONE DAY I ACCOMPANIED men from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, a unit based in the nearby FOB Falcon, on a mission as they met up with Osama and his men as well as Hamid, or Abu Abdel Rahman, head of the Hadhir Neighborhood Advisory Council (NAC). Hamid had been in the Iraqi army for twenty-two years. Now he represented the six mahalas in his area. The Americans were establishing NACs and DACs (District Advisory Councils), institutions separate from the Iraqi government and funded by the U.S. military. Three Sunnis of the ten members in Hamid’s council had been assassinated. Five others had fled the area to avoid death. Hamid explained that because Sunnis had boycotted the elections for the provincial councils, Shiites dominated them and were trying to appoint Shiites to the local councils. The members of the Baghdad provincial council were mostly from Shiite neighborhoods such as Sadr City, Shaab, and Karada, he said. The NACs and DACs were an American attempt to compensate for the electoral disparities, though as with the Awakening and the ISVs, they were creating separate independent institutions that did not answer to the central Iraqi government. NACs and DACs were loosely tied, and though they were only meant to “advise” the Americans, the goal was to get them to “implement.” Hamid knew Osama and had helped him receive the ISV contract.
The Americans met up with Hamid, Osama, Abu Salih, Abu Yasser, and Abu Yusef at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint and walked down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by their Stryker armored vehicles. The Tawhid’s Sheikh Abu Muhammad wore a green dishdasha with a brown vest. An older, bearded man, he had thick glasses and wore a white cap, topped by a red scarf. Shawn Spainhour, a civil affairs officer with the unit, asked the sheikh what help he needed. The mosque’s generator had been shot up by armed Shiites, and the sheikh asked for three thousand dollars to fix it. Spainhour took notes. “I probably can do that,” he said. The sheikh also asked for a NAC to be set up in his area, “so it will see our problems.” Two bearded middle-aged men in sweaters walked up to the Americans in the mosque and gave them a tip on a Mahdi Army suspect. The soldiers quickly got back into the Strykers, as did Hamid, Osama, and his men, and the Stryker vehicles drove up to a street in Mahala 830, where they found a group of young men with electrical cables. Some of the men ran away when the Americans showed up. Those who stayed were forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wore flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit guarded them and took their pictures one by one. “Somebody move!” shouted one soldier. “I’m in the mood to hit somebody!” Another one pushed a prisoner against the wall. “You know Abu Ghraib?” he taunted him. Unlike in the nearby Shiite area of Abu Dshir, in majority-Sunni Mekanik it was standard practice to arrest all “military-age males” for “processing.”
As other elements of the American unit raided nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the unit came up to me, thinking I was the Americans’ translator, and explained that the men in the courtyard were Sunnis and that some belonged to the Awakening. Some of the men had been involved in tipping off the Americans to the Mahdi Army suspect down the block. I tried to tell the soldiers, but the electrical wires on the ground caused the Americans to think the men had been trying to lay an IED, so they blindfolded and handcuffed all eleven of them. “If an IED is on the ground, we arrest everybody in a hundred-meter radius,” I was told, though here it was only an electrical cable, and most likely the men had been trying to connect a house to a generator. In the house the two tipsters had identified, the soldiers found Mahdi Army “propaganda” and arrested several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or “Sabrin the Cruel,” an alleged Mahdi Army leader.
The Strykers took the prisoners to the nearby COP Blackfoot. Inside, Hamid and the Sahwa men drank sodas and ate muffins. Osama and Abu Salih shook hands with the Americans and thanked them for arresting Sabrin, who they said had a lot of blood on his hands. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided were released, three of them being taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructed them to list who did what, what they did, where, when, and how. Abu Salih walked by and quickly told the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in some attack. None of the Americans noticed this coaching. Osama met with a sergeant from the unit and asked him if he could put a PKC on top of his pickup truck. “No,” the sergeant said. “But we can hide it,” Osama pleaded. Sabrin was soon moved to a “detainee holding facility” at FOB Prosperity. “We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad Mahdi Army guy,” said an American Army intelligence officer. “He was involved in EJKs,” or extra-judicial killings, a euphemism for murders.
Osama’s main competition for contracts with the Americans was another local Sunni power broker called Muhammad Kashkul, or Abu Tariq. A former bodyguard for Saddam, he was now a contractor too. “He knows that when security is stabilized contracts will come in,” Captain Cox said, explaining Kashkul’s motivation for collaborating with the Americans. In one meeting with the Americans, Kashkul bragged that while working as a bodyguard for Saddam he had slept with 472 women. “Is that a lot in America?” he asked. Kashkul and Osama tried to play different American units against one another, but Cox helped arrange a meeting where the two were forced to work out what he described as “their turf war.” Osama was not convinced. “Coalition forces like Kashkul, so I have to be his friend,” he said. “They told me I have no choice. I have to be his friend. For two years they were looking for him. Showing his picture. Then they arrested him, took him to Blackfoot, and released him after two hours and said, ‘He is working with us.’”
The Americans were obsessed with the concept of “reconciliation,” which Cox defined as “Agree to quit fighting and talk about problems and get U.S. contracts.”
“Osama hates reconciliation,” Sperry told me. “He doesn’t feel that he has anything to reconcile. He hates that these other guys get contracts.” Osama had recently lost face when he accidentally discharged his Glock pistol and nearly hit an American soldier while in a meeting. Some of his men were proving unruly as well. “A couple of Osama’s guys were caught outside their sector,” the officer told me, “so we detained them and brought in the leaders. Abu Salih was really pissed.” When I was visiting Falcon FOB to discuss the ISVs, a major stuck his head through the door. “Are you tracking that the Heroes beat some guy up?” he asked Captain Dehart. “The Heroes’ usefulness is almost over,” Captain Dehart grumbled. He defended the reconciliation process. “It’s an overt process,” he said. “You can’t be in the shadows. We take mahalas, the Critical Infrastructure Security guards, the local leadership, provide us names.” As a result, he said, the men with real power in the area emerged from the shadows. “I’ve heard them tell me, ‘I will give you a hundred men, you give them weapons, and you will have no problems.’” But the process they called reconciliation required some community vetting in theory. It seemed that the Americans were turning themselves into a commodity sought after by Iraq’s warring factions. The Americans were a way to obtain contracts, influence, weapon licenses, identity cards. “They love ID cards,” joked one Army intelligence officer.
When Osama drove me home from Dora we stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint near Qadisiya. He noticed a familiar Audi parked on the street and then saw a man he knew as Naseem walking past the soldiers. Naseem was Al Qaeda, he said, and was responsible for many attacks against civilians and the Americans. Osama put his cap on and called a soldier over. The soldier had a green bandanna masking all but his eyes as though he were a bank robber. “That guy is called Naseem, he is with Al Qaeda,” Osama said. The soldier seemed annoyed and I was worried that he would arrest us instead. “I’m with the Awakening,” Osama said, he showed several badges he had been given by the Americans. The soldier told him to keep going but Osama insisted. “What do you want me to do?” the soldier asked. Osama tried to convince them, but the soldiers were indifferent. Frustrated, he drove away.
Osama’s part of Dora, which included Mahalas 830, 832, 834, and 836, was called Hadhir. Though each mahala had its own ISV unit, Osama hoped that eventually all of the Sunni Awakening militias would be united under one leader so that they could attain political power too. We were in Mahala 830. The Mahdi Army used to attack from Mahala 832. Iraqi National Police, who cooperated with the Mahdi Army, would drive up to Sixtieth Street and spray houses with gunfire, Osama told me as we walked by a solitary INP checkpoint. “I want to kill them,” he said, “really, but the Americans make us work together.” Since his men had been granted legitimacy by the Americans they were taunting the national police, telling them that just days before they were shooting at them.
“There was definitely a link” between the INPs and sectarian forces, Nick Cook told me. “I am not sure how deep it went, but you could tell the INP definitely treated the Sunni neighborhoods with a lot of indifference and disdain. Many times I heard the national police refer to the neighborhood as lived in by dogs or criminals, referring to the residents. To the national police every person was a suspect. I never did see outright prejudice, but when you moved from Mekanik, a Sunni area, to Abu Dshir, a Shiite area, you definitely saw a change in personality with the national police.” Captain T recalled, “I remember several instances of units in predominantly Shiite areas actually catching [INPs] in the act of planting IEDs.”
Lieutenant Colonel Miska was based in Kadhimiya’s Forward Operating Base Justice. It had three detention centers in it: the Kadhimiya prison; the Ministry of Justice prison, where the government executed condemned people; and an Iraqi army detention center. Miska worked closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, and at one point he had six brigades’ worth of Iraqi National Police or army men working with him. I asked him about the abuses he saw. “The Kadhimiya prison run by the national police was the most notorious,” he said. “This was Saddam’s former military intelligence facility. Senior members of the national police reportedly tortured, extorted, and killed prisoners, mainly Sunnis. The prison was made to hold about 350 prisoners. They had about 900 there when we first began putting pressure on the NP. At first we would conduct inspections and bring in teams that would write reports. The NP would complain that all the Americans talked about was human rights. They would also do a good job of stonewalling the investigators and making it difficult to gain entrance. We eventually started cycling reporters into the facility and getting front-page stories to embarrass the NP. The prisoner population quickly dwindled as a result.”
One of Miska’s closest colleagues was an Iraqi army brigade commander who was going after both the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda. As a result, he was put under intense political pressure. Miska accompanied him to numerous meetings with senior Sadrists and other politicians who were trying to get him to back down. But every time he would keep the heat on. The Iraqi commander eventually left Iraq after four attempts on his life, and Mahdi Army hit squads were hunting for his family. “It took me eight months to finally get through the bureaucracy of immigration, UNHCR, and other agencies to help him relocate to the U.S.,” Miska said. “Today his family is safe and living much more comfortably than they did in Iraq.”
The Iraqi government, it seemed, would come up with every possible excuse not to send help to Dora. “When we would go to the Green Zone and ask ministers and deputy ministers to help out, they would claim that Dora was too dangerous,” Captain T said. “We would protest and say that we would take them there to see it themselves and would, of course, protect any government workers or contractors who were working in the area. To them, this was impossible because the area was unsafe!
“It was ridiculous dealing with the Iraqi government. This was particularly clear when we were setting up the Iraqi Security Volunteers as paid security forces in our area. We were attempting to integrate them into the Iraqi security forces, but the government stonewalled this at every turn. They would ask for ridiculously detailed information from the ISVs, which they were, in turn, unwilling to provide to a government they didn’t trust. The government would demand that the ISVs meet standards far above what the ISF themselves had to meet.
“Dr. Bassima al-Jadri was a particular problem in this regard, as she was extremely sectarian. She saw the ISVs as the armed forces for the Sunni political parties. We tried our hardest to make sure that the ISVs were security oriented, not politically motivated. In fact, this led us to deny a small group of low-level informants our sponsorship as ISVs. They turned against us and went ‘rogue.’ They were sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party. We eventually had to detain several of them to convince them that we would not permit the politicization of our ISVs. Anyway, Bassima saw the ISVs as a threat to Shiite domination and would try to throw every possible obstacle in our path against ISV integration into the ISF. And this woman was the [government’s] lead on reconciliation!”
Saddam Hussein designed Baghdad with a circle of loyal neighborhoods around it. With its many officers, Seidiya was a place he could count on. But it had become a vital battleground during the civil war. Sunnis and Shiites both wanted it, since it opens up into Sunni strongholds like Dora. Shiites wanted to block whatever was coming in. It was located between Shiite-dominated Amil and Sunni-dominated Dora, and it was on the important road that Shiites took to go south to Karbala and Najaf. The Mahdi Army rained mortars down from the Baya district and destroyed Sunni mosques. The neighborhood was originally 55 percent Sunni and 45 percent Shiite, but by the end Shiites would have the upper hand. Seidiya went from being a relatively peaceful middle-class neighborhood to a deserted and broken wasteland, all under the Americans’ watch. Most of the residents had fled, and abandoned homes were used by militiamen and insurgents.
“The Shiites were definitely winning,” said Captain Noyes, a platoon leader in Seidiya. “They were on the offensive and the local Sunnis were on the defensive, but it was a very violent and contested battle. The Shiite groups were attempting to kick Sunnis out of Seidiya and move Shiites in. The Sunnis were attempting to defend themselves, but some of them had Al Qaeda ties and were targeted by coalition forces, so they were fighting a two-front battle.” Most of the murder victims he remembered encountering were Sunni. “Many were killed with a single shot to the head, and signs of torture were on their bodies. The bodies were placed in areas to intimidate locals. Sometimes IEDs were placed under the bodies targeting whoever tried to recover the body. The Shiites were more effective and organized. They were part of the government, Ministry of Interior, the IP, and INP working there. Sunnis were isolated.”
Noyes lived and worked with the 321 INP, or the Wolf Brigade, which was responsible for Seidiya. “They were extremely sectarian, regularly involved in and committing crimes,” he said. “The Wolf Brigade and Iraqi police were an arm of Shiite extremists, filled with Shiite militia members. I frequently found the Wolf Brigade involved in outright sectarian activities in cooperation with Shiite militias. The Iraqi police were so often tied to attacks on coalition forces and locals that it went beyond complacency or incompetence.
“Eventually an Iraqi Army battalion took over Seidiya, but they were still under the INP brigade command responsible for West Rashid. We got 321 INP kicked out over a long period of documenting and reporting their crimes against the people of Seidiya. Their battalion commander was LTC Haidar. At one point we found him and General Mundher stealing furniture from an abandoned apartment. They claimed it was General Mundher’s apartment and they were moving it out.”
The Americans arrested more than seventy members of the Wolf Brigade, who had been found expelling Sunnis and moving displaced Shiites into their homes. The Wolf Brigade was replaced by the Iraqi army’s Muthana Brigade, itself feared by Sunnis, and the Muthana Brigade clashed with the Seidiya Guard, the Awakening Group established by Noyes and his team. “The Seidiya Guard were by far superior to the INP as a counterinsurgency force. Their leaders were much more competent,” Noyes observed. “They conducted operations to win the support of the population; the INP did the exact opposite. The Seidiya Guards captured people occasionally. They would then turn them over to ISF or CF. Shiites that they handed over to INP were usually released. They understood their legitimacy was on the line, and so they were careful in how they handled people they captured. I encountered only support for the Seidiya Guard with the local populace. However, their relationship with the INP was horrible. They each viewed each other as illegitimate sectarian actors, and probably rightly so. The Seidiya Guard was disbanded after I left, under Iraqi government pressure.”
Not everyone was happy about the new militias being created by the Americans, especially the Shiite-dominated ISF. More a paramilitary force than a team of street cops, the Iraqi National Police resembled the National Guard in the United States, compared with the more local Iraqi police. Both types of police units were dominated by Shiite supporters or members of the Mahdi Army or Badr militia and had fought in the civil war, often targeting Sunni civilians and cleansing Sunni areas. I accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Reineke of the 2-2 SCR to a meeting at the headquarters of the INP’s Seventh Brigade, in the former home of Ali Hassan Majid, the notorious Chemical Ali. It was now a joint security station ( JSS), staffed by Iraqis and Americans. This station was feared by Sunnis, who were often kidnapped by the national police and, if they were lucky, released for ransom. It was rumored to be a Badr militia base for torturing Sunnis.
Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim, the INP brigade commander, sat behind a large wooden desk surrounded by plastic flowers. Behind him was a photograph of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. To his side was a shotgun. Karim controlled three INP battalions and was the senior Iraqi security official in the area. Even the Iraqi army officers in his area were under his authority. Lieut. Col. Jim Crider was partnered with Karim’s Third Battalion, Seventh Brigade, or 372. “Every time we went on patrol with them, we got shot at,” Crider told me. “Every time we patrolled with national police, we were introducing an irritant” into the Sunni neighborhoods. Sometimes Sunni militiamen would let the Americans pass, only to blow up the INP vehicles. Although Crider’s men at the JSS with Karim always had a list of all the prisoners held there and inspected the jails, Crider admitted that abuses probably still took place outside his men’s gaze. Iraqis were relieved when they learned that the Americans, and not the INPs, had detained their sons. “In the context of the surge, our policy was not to turn prisoners over to the INPs,” he said. “I remember Karim as very sectarian. I hated being around him. I once brought an Iraqi army commander from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, to our JSS to show him our setup. Karim was furious and brought us all into his office, where he sat and stared at the wall. It was weird, so I got up and left. I could tell he was a sectarian stooge from a long way away. Guys like him are the greatest threat to the stability of Iraq. They push regular Sunnis into a corner and then are surprised when they fight back.”
In December 2007 the delegation of Americans led by Reineke was greeted warmly by Karim and his men. Five or six of his officers were with him, all Shiites. Reineke acted with exaggerated deference, saying “naam seidi” (yes, sir) repeatedly when addressing Karim. They discussed where they would place checkpoints and conduct joint patrols. Karim sought assurances that the ISV recruits had been properly vetted by local leaders, the Iraqi National Police, and the U.S. Army. Reineke mentioned that General Mustafa, a local ISV leader from Arab Jubur, had requested to open an office at the JSS. Karim grew tense. “The Awakening is a path for these individuals to get recruited by Iraqi Security Forces for jobs in the government,” he said. “More than that we don’t agree, the government is worried that these groups will be a militia or will be used by political groups.” Reineke tried to assure him that “the volunteers are only a short-term solution until they find jobs in the government.” Karim responded that “we have information that the Baath Party and Al Qaeda have infiltrated the Awakening. It’s very dangerous.” Reineke mentioned that in nearby Seidiya, the Awakening had opened an office. “The Awakening in Seidiya was killing people,” Karim said. “They are not yet in the government. We don’t accept that the Awakening will open an office. There is only one government. Those who qualify can join the police or the government, but the Awakening is temporary. There are two commands in this area: American and Iraqi. We won’t accept another.” The Iraqi general won the showdown.
A stern man named Abu Jaafar had been observing the exchange. Wearing a dark suit and a dark shirt buttoned up, with no tie, he had two thuggish companions in leather jackets who were very friendly with Karim. A Shiite known to the Americans as Sheikh Ali, Abu Jaafar had his own ISV unit of about 100 men in southern Dora’s Saha neighborhood. The Americans said he was unofficially in charge of that area. He was also a Neighborhood Advisory Council representative for Mahala 828. “He may not be Mahdi Army, but he has a lot of Mahdi Army friends,” Maj. Jeffrey Gottlieb whispered to me. He also had a lot of access to Karim’s headquarters.
“We’ve got a sectarian fault line in the Saha area,” Captain Cox explained to me that night, back at his base, drawing a line on the satellite image on the wall. “Saha was a battleground between [Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army]. We took over on September 8, 2007. The drop in violence is thanks to our unit moving in and patrolling every day.” Sunnis had been forced to rely on Al Qaeda for self-defense, he explained, and though northern Saha had been “an absolute killing zone before,” rich Sunnis were now trying to return.
Victims of sectarian killings were down by half since the 2-2 SCR had arrived, Cox said. “We can have meetings and agreements between prominent Shiites who had ties to militias and prominent Sunnis who had ties to AQ.” He sounded triumphant, but I couldn’t help noticing myself that attacks against Americans were also down to nearly zero when I was there.
But not far away, in Mahala 836, Cox admitted, a Shiite man was murdered when he went to check out his house after hearing it was safe to go back. The 2-2 SCR also noted a spike in criminal killings, they told me. I wondered how they could distinguish. The Mahdi Army cease-fire and the withdrawal of Al Qaeda forces to northern Iraq in order to avoid the surge created a power vacuum that allowed criminals to operate more freely.
A few days later I returned to meet with Karim without the Americans present and found him talking to several senior Shiite army officers about the forced displacement of Iraqis and what to do with the displaced. An Awakening member was living in a house that the original owner had sold to somebody else, and now the Awakening man refused to relinquish it to the new owner. “We need a mechanism to solve these problems,” one officer said. A colonel called Najam who spoke with a Shiite southern Iraqi dialect worried that displaced Sunnis had taken over former homes of Shiites in Dora. “We need to bring back the Shiites, but the Sunnis are in the houses,” he said. “This battle is bigger than the other battles—this is the battle of the displaced.” Eavesdropping, I could hear Najam angrily condemning somebody, presumably the Awakening. “They are killers, terrorists, ugly, pigs,” he said.
Karim’s phone rang, and he spoke with a superior officer about a clash the previous day between the Awakening and armed Shiites. “American officers took Awakening men to a sector where they shouldn’t be,” he said. “Residents saw armed men not in uniforms and shot at them from buildings. Four Awakening were injured. My battalion was called in to help.” In truth, they had clashed with the Mahdi Army, but Karim downplayed their role and blamed an American captain for establishing an ISV unit in an area where he should not have. “Yes, sir,” he said, “the Awakening will withdraw from that area. They started the problem.”
Gen. Abdul Amir, another man present, was the commander of the important Sixth Division of the Iraqi army. He warned that men were joining the Awakening for political purposes. “They want to be prominent in their neighborhood so that they will get elected. The prime minister said, ‘I don’t want this to be about politics, I want this to be about security.’”
The sectarian Shiite parties ruling Iraq worried about the Awakening becoming a pan-Iraqi movement. If it succeeded in being nonsectarian, it could displace them from power. Najam joked that 98 percent of the Awakening was Al Qaeda. Just then a U.S. Army major walked in and met with Karim outside the office. An embarrassed Karim returned and said he’d been informed he could not talk to me.
“Gen. Abdul Karim was a completely sectarian individual who was more interested in consolidating Shiite influence and power via his police than in really solving the problems that plagued the area,” an American captain confided to me. “He was also incompetent in that he did not at all understand how to run operations or how to collect and use intelligence. People were fairly scared of him, especially his own subordinates, which suggests he was connected to one Shiite militia or another, though this was never confirmed. I think it was unlikely that he was intimately involved in any particular militia, but only because that might create a problem for him. I remember once, while visiting our AOR [area of responsibility], his personal security detachment, a ridiculous thirty-plus policemen, provoked our ISVs into a confrontation and hauled several away to the INP HQ. It was a near nightmare getting them released, but the event was indicative of Karim’s belief that he controlled Dora and that only he would influence the security situation there.”
I returned on a different day to meet Abu Jaafar, who suggested Karim’s headquarters as a good location. Karim showed me a plaque on his wall that he said was an award from Prime Minister Maliki for being nonsectarian, and he pointed to medals on his desk that the Americans had given him—also, he said, for being nonsectarian. Next to them were a couple of traditional rings worn only by Shiites.
Before the war he had owned some minivans, he said. After the war he built the Shiite Imam al-Hassan Mosque in Saha. “When terrorist activities started in the area, I wasn’t involved,” he said, because it was not clear who was responsible. “When things got clear I saw that people needed somebody to lead them and command them according to God.” He explained that his men had taken the homes of “bad Sunnis” (meaning Al Qaeda) and inventoried their contents. “They don’t want to come back because they were killers,” he said. Problems in his area had started two years earlier, he said, with random assassinations. “My cousin was a school principal and a local council member, and he was shot to death walking home. And others were killed, and we didn’t know why or who killed them. After a while I knew that my neighbor was informing for the killers. Most of the dead were Shiites. I talked to the young men in our area and said, ‘If we don’t cooperate, we will be killed one by one.’ We started to guard our area.” Abu Jaafar and his militia used old refrigerators, cinder blocks, and earth to wall off their area. His enemies—Al Qaeda but also the 1920 Revolution Battalion and the Army of the Mujahideen—were, he claimed, these same people in the Awakening. Shiites did not need an Awakening. “We are already awake,” he said, smiling icily.
Abu Jaafar pulled out a list of forty-six people from Saha. “Criminals in the Awakening,” he said. “For two years I was naming these people.” He singled out Hamid, the Neighborhood Advisory Council boss in Hadhir. “Shiites could not join the local council,” he said. “They would be killed.” He blamed Hamid for dividing Saha in two, with Shiites controlling the south and Sunnis controlling the north. But in fact Shiites had pushed Sunnis out of northern Saha, and that area became a key front line in the civil war. Abu Jaafar pointed to two other names. “The Americans told me, ‘If you see these two men, you can kill them or bring them to us.’ Now they are wearing the Awakening uniform in Mahala 828. They said they have reconciled. I have to be patient. We are awake and our eyes are open.”
Al Qaeda had changed its name and now called itself the Awakening, Abu Jaafar insisted. He claimed that Sunnis were acting weak so that they could attack once they regained strength. I asked him about Awakening Council founder Sattar Abu Risha, who had incurred the wrath of Al Qaeda. “He was just a robber in the street, and they made him a leader,” Abu Jaafar said dismissively. I told him that many Awakening members claimed they were fighting Al Qaeda. “How did they fight Al Qaeda?” he scoffed. “Fight themselves? Fight their brothers? And where is Al Qaeda? Did it evaporate overnight? We know everything, but we’re just waiting.” I asked him how he knew Karim so well. “General Karim is a good guy,” he said. “During the battles I was here every day.”
I visited JSS Cougar at the Walid INP station, where the First Battalion, Seventh Brigade, Second Division (172 INP Battalion) worked with a U.S. Army National Police Training Team (NPTT). This team, led by the cynical Major Gottlieb, covered the area of Baghdad the Americans called East Rashid. I turned up dressed very casually, in a T-shirt and jeans. Seeing this, American officers from the 2-2 SCR admonished me to wear my body armor to protect myself from accidental INP discharges. “I did convoy security in the Sunni Triangle and was hit by numerous IEDs, complex attacks, small arms, but I never felt closer to death than when I was working with Iraqi Security Forces,” joked Captain Cox.
A tall and lanky tank officer, Gottlieb underwent about seventy days of training with his men to prepare for this mission. “We don’t know as much as we could know because we don’t know Arabic,” he said. “The INPs here are almost all Shiites. Orders from their chain of command are usually to arrest Sunnis, not Shiites. But they don’t go on ‘Sunni hunts’ like the Second Brigade in Seidiya and a lot of other brigades.” The battalion he worked with was mostly from southern Iraq, especially Basra, and many were more loyal to the Badr militia. “At first they were encouraged to resign or given dangerous missions and were replaced by guys from Sadr City.” I asked him if he had any evidence of Sadrist sympathies among the men. “Today I was sitting in the office and the brigade finance officer’s phone rang, and the ring tone was a Sadr song,” he said. Pointing to the newly painted walls, he said, “It’s all cosmetic. They know if everything has fresh paint and looks squared away, we’ll think they’re squared away.” Local Iraqi National Police were resettling displaced Shiite families in empty Sunni homes in this area. Gottlieb called them “United Van Lines missions”: “The national police ask, ‘Can you help us move a family’s furniture?’ There are people coming back, and we don’t know if they were originally from here. Official U.S. policy is, we do not take part in any resettlement activity. I could make up a deed.”
Gottlieb conducted an inventory of the weapons that were supposed to have been assigned to the base. Five hundred and fifty weapons were missing, including pistols, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Guys take weapons when they go AWOL,” he explained. “It was funny how they always expended four hundred rounds of ammunition. They would have fake engagements and transfer the ammunition to militias.” There was also a problem of “ghost police,” he said. Although 542 INP men were assigned to his JSS on paper, only about 200 would show up at any time. Some would be on leave and some simply did not exist, their salaries pocketed by officers. “Officers get a certain number of ghosts,” he said. He looked at an American soldier nearby. “I need some ghosts. How much are you making?”
I accompanied the NPTT on a joint raid with the INPs. Captain Adil, a trim thirty-year-old with a shaved head and sharp gaze, led the raid, despite his rank and position as a battalion staff intelligence officer, because only 25 percent of the INP’s officer positions were full. As a result, INP officers end up doing a lot of things that American noncommissioned officers do. Adil briefed his men on the mission using cardboard and Styrofoam on the floor to replicate the vehicles. All the men wore the same blue uniforms, but with a variety of helmets, flak vests, and boots. “Today we have an operation in Mahala 830,” he said. “Do you know it? Our target is an Al Qaeda guy.” Adil would be riding in the Reva, a South African armored vehicle. The rest would follow in Hummers and pickup trucks. His men repeated the instructions; he ordered them to shout the answers.
The targets were two brothers, Salah and Muhamad, suspected of working for Al Qaeda. They occasionally visited their family in their brother Falah’s home. Falah was known as Falah al-Awar, or Falah the Blind, because he had lost an eye. He belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq and had been arrested two weeks earlier by the Americans. Under interrogation he revealed that his brothers were involved in similar actions, attacking the Americans, kidnapping, and killing. “He dimed his brothers out,” an American officer said.
Thirty-five Iraqi National Policemen took part in the raid. The INPs climbed over the wall and broke through the main gate. They burst into the house, ordering the women and children in one room while tying the hands of two young men with strips of cloth. One of them was Muhamad, one of the brothers they were looking for. The other young man was Mustafa, Muhamad’s young brother. He wasn’t on the target list but was picked up anyway. Salah was nowhere to be found. Mustafa started crying. “My father is dead,” he said. Adil reassured him, holding the top of his head with his hand, as if he were palming a basketball. Seated in the living room, the women asked how long the two would be taken for. Adil told them they were being taken for questioning, and explained where his base was.
Then it was over. The INPs sped away. The Americans followed, surprised at the hurry. “We just picked up some Sunnis, we’re getting the fuck outta here,” joked one American sergeant. “Yeah, the moral ambiguity of what we do is not lost on me,” said Gottlieb jocularly in response. “We have no way of knowing if those guys did what they say they did.” Gottlieb later said that the Interior Ministry “uses ‘Al Qaeda’ as a scare word for Americans,” describing all Sunni suspects in this way.
Back at the base Muhamad and Mustafa were seated on the floor in the operations room, blindfolded, with their hands in plastic zip ties. Sergeant Costa, an American, high-fived Adil’s deputy, Lieutenant Amar. The names on the prisoners’ ID cards were compared to what Costa and Major Fox had on a printed document of their own. Both were brothers from the Harfush family. These were the guys they wanted. Their pictures were taken, including of their front and rear torsos, to look for scars or wounds and to compare their physical condition then with how it might end up later, in case of future abuse. The older brother had a leg injury, which they photographed. The two were then separated. The older prisoner sat in Adil’s office, which had a locker, a plastic table, two beds, and a television playing an old Egyptian film. Costa and Fox sat on one of the beds with a translator. The prisoner, Muhamad Abdallah Harfush Gertaini, of the Garguri tribe, wore a blue tracksuit. After his blindfold was taken off, he was taken outside to throw up. He came back shivering. “Why are you shivering?” Adil asked with a smile. He gave him Amar’s jacket to stay warm. Adil showed him a picture and asked him who it was. “My cousin Qasim,” he said, and gave his address in the Mekanik neighborhood. “But he was arrested a few months ago.” Qasim was being held in an American prison. “This family, all of them work for Al Qaeda,” Adil said with a laugh.
Adil began a long lecture. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said. “You’re an Iraqi citizen and you want to serve your country and repent. . . . How many checkpoints were bombed? How many of our men were martyred? We are the state, we put the law above all else regardless of sect. Why didn’t we go after your neighbors, why you?” Muhamad denied any wrongdoing. “I have four sources,” Adil said. “I know everything. I’ll advise you right, I have people I trust who told me about you and your brother. A source saw you with his eyes.” Adil showed him a picture of another man and asked who it was. Muhamad answered and told him that the man had been martyred. “Martyred?” shouted Adil. “He was a terrorist!” Adil showed him a picture of a one-eyed man. “He is my brother,” Muhamad answered. Adil listed people his brother had killed. Both brothers had volunteered for the Awakening. “The Awakening won’t help you,” he said. “I’ll get all of you. You’re a liar. Four sources swear against you.” Muhamad meekly protested. “Ask people,” he said. “I did ask,” said Adil. “I know you. I have a source who will talk for a whole hour about how you were injured in your leg. This is your last chance . . . you have until the morning.” He asked about Muhamad’s brother Salah, who they failed to find on their raid, and called Muhamad a liar when he said he had gone to work in construction up north.
Mustafa was brought out. He had long matted hair and wore matching jeans and a jacket. He stretched uncomfortably. “My hand,” he winced in pain. “My haaand,” Adil mocked him, and asked him about Salah. Mustafa said he worked in a bakery in the north. Adil believed he was in Baghdad. Mustafa was taken out, and Muhamad was brought back, his blindfold removed. “Good morning,” Adil said. “Do you know your religion? You guys are always talking about Islam.” He lectured about Islam and quoted Condoleezza Rice. “These guys are destroying Islam,” he told us, and looked back at the prisoner. “You say we are Iranian. We are Iraqis, we are building your country.” The brothers were accused of expelling Shiites and killing civilians. “No criminal will say, ‘I am a criminal,’” Adil said. “They all say, ‘I’m innocent.’” Adil’s source claimed that Mustafa was wounded while attacking an INP checkpoint.
The next day Sunni leaders from the area met with the American soldiers and claimed the brothers were innocent. Hamid, the Hadhir NAC boss, would not vouch for them, however. When the 2-2 SCR first arrived they had imposed discipline on the 172 INP Battalion, some of whom had gone on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians. “We arrested a whole checkpoint, nineteen guys, in the beginning, from the 172,” Captain Dehart told me, “so they don’t use checkpoints as staging points, so there will be no more shenanigans.” Still, some local Sunni leaders asked that the two brothers be transferred to American custody.
I met with Captain Adil several times in 2007 and 2008, and we became friends. Adil had been an army infantry officer before the American occupation. His father was a Shiite former Army officer and his mother was Sunni. Adil’s sister married a Sunni man and they fled to Syria, because she feared Shiite militias would kill him. Adil’s wife was Sunni. He had lived in the majority-Shiite and Mahdi Army-controlled eastern Baghdad district of Shaab, but he moved after the Mahdi Army threatened him for refusing to obtain weapons for them. He paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but was cheated and denied the job until a friend helped. “Before the war it was just one party,” he said. “Now we have one hundred thousand parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back to service. First they take money, then ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good. The army is not sectarian. I dream to get back to the army. In Saddam’s time nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he said. He rejected the notion that most officers had been Sunni or that most of the Baath Party had been Sunni. “If someone tells you, ‘I was not in the Baath Party,’ he is a liar. All Iraqis were in the Baath.” The Americans made a mistake by dissolving the Iraqi army and security services, he said. In Dora the army had a good reputation, and there were many stories told about how soldiers helped people go to the hospital and get through roadblocks.
Typical of an officer who graduated from the military academy before the American occupation, Adil viewed the new sectarianism that dominated inter-Iraqi relations as anathema. The Iraqi army was the least sectarian force in Iraq, he said. In the Seidiya district it had battled the police, and at Dora’s Thirtieth Street checkpoint Iraqi soldiers came to blows with local INPs and IPs from the Balat station in Saha, Mahdi Army men who had gone through the Police Academy. Some of these Mahdi Army policemen were involved in the recent clashes with the Awakening men in the Kifaat area of Mahala 828. A U.S. Army intelligence officer told me that from a Sunni perspective, the Balat station was “problematic.” It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Muhamad and Sergeant Ali Faqr. Muhamad had his hands tied; a Mahdi Army leader had entered his office and threatened him with a gun to his head. Muhamad asked the Americans to arrest Mahdi Army suspects for him.
Adil admitted that attacks against his people had gone down since the establishment of Awakening units. “The Awakening has the right to join the Iraqi Security Forces,” he said, “but they should be cleaned so we won’t have terrorists inside government. Just like we were cleaning the INPs, they are cleaning up the Awakening.” But he was also suspicious of the Awakening members. “Awakening in Dora is the same people who used to be attacking us, and now they taunt us, saying, ‘We used to attack you.’” He told me that Abu Salih was a former insurgent who had made IEDs. He suspected Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s rival, of working with Al Qaeda and helping the group to infiltrate the Awakening. I asked him about Osama’s men. “All these people before were shooting us,” he said. He admitted that INPs from the Sixth Brigade had shot at Sunnis in Dora, but not his INPs. He accused Hamid of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. “I have an order from the Ministry of Interior to arrest him,” he said.
The Americans were pressuring him to target the Mahdi Army as well as Al Qaeda. “It’s better if the Americans go after the Mahdi Army,” he said. “If we arrest them, then the chain of command will release them. The sectarian issue is powerful.” Adil did not trust his own men. “Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army,” he said, locking his door before we spoke. “Sadr and Badr officials controlled the leadership of the INPs, and the Iraqi police—all of them are Sadr.” Although the Interior Ministry’s leadership was dominated by the Badr militia, he said, the majority of its employees were still Sadr supporters. Adil’s best friend and lieutenant, Amar, was Sunni. “I was fighting to get him,” he told me, and was threatened as a result of their friendship. “An officer is a brother of an officer. I want to work with something not for Sunnis or Shiites, just for Iraq.”
Adil was repeatedly threatened by the Mahdi Army. He dismissed the freeze. “No one cares about Muqtada,” he said. “A week ago Mahdi Army guys threatened an INP checkpoint . . . and then sniped at the checkpoint, so the INPs arrested three of them.” The men worked for a Mahdi Army leader called Wujud, who lived in Sadr City. Wujud worked with another Mahdi Army leader called Amar al-Masihi, and together they fired mortars at Adil’s base after the arrests. In nearby Abu Dshir he warned that the Kadhimayn Mosque was an office for the Sadrists, and it ordered the people of Abu Dshir not to join the ISVs. The Americans wanted Adil to go after the Kadhimayn Mosque, but he could not do it.
Adil was summoned to meet Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, the former brigade intelligence section commander. Wujud and another Shiite militiaman were there. “They stole our vehicles and weapons,” he said, “and Wujud told INPs to be careful because you give Americans information. In front of Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, Wujud told me, ‘Adil, be careful, we will kill you.’ My boss was sitting there and didn’t do anything.” I asked him why he had not arrested Wujud. “They know us,” he said. “They know where we live. I’m not scared for myself, but I’m scared for my family.”
Wujud worked with Ziyad al-Shamari, a leader of what the Americans called a “special group” because of a poor translation of what may be better termed a “private group,” as Iraqis called Shiite militias and gangs not loyal to Muqtada. Adil added that a man called Abu Yusuf, a contractor who was working with the Americans in Combat Outpost Blackfoot, also worked with Wujud and owned the car used in a recent attack. Adil warned that Wujud and Abu Yusuf stole cars and might blow them up to make it look like Al Qaeda was responsible. Wujud once lived in Dora but now lived in eastern Baghdad’s Ur neighborhood, and he was in charge of dispatching men to Iran for training. General Karim was also from Ur. “He is Mahdi Army,” Adil said, claiming Karim had cleansed Sunnis from other parts of Baghdad and its surrounding towns when he was with the Fourth Brigade. “No one can talk about the Mahdi Army in our battalion or police or in the Ministry of Interior.”
Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Majid. Majid asked Adil to collect the ransom for a Sunni man whose release had been ordered by the Iraqi courts. “He was not Al Qaeda,” Adil said. Majid wanted four thousand dollars, but the prisoner was related to Lieutenant Amar, and his family told him. Like most officers accused of pro-Shiite sectarianism, Majid was promoted out of the position where he caused trouble and moved from division to brigade. “No orders come to us to arrest Shiites, but many gangs from the Mahdi Army are kidnapping people for money,” Adil said, “If he is Sunni, they take money and kill him.”
“Our command,” he said, referring to General Karim, “wants to work with the Mahdi Army.” Karim praised the Mahdi Army when the Americans were not around, he said, and complained when others criticized them. Adil knew Karim’s friend Abu Jaafar as well. “Abu Jaafar is a bad guy,” he said. “He has groups fighting in Mahala 828. He knows Ziyad al-Shamari. He always puts his nose in our operations and tells our commanders where to open checkpoints. Abu Jaafar was a mechanic before the war, so how is he a sheikh? He worked with special groups and made deals with them to fight. Abu Jaafar calls every Sunni Al Qaeda.” Adil believed Abu Jaafar worked for the Badr militia. “Badr came here [from Iran] and took the government and assassinated former Baathists, officers, and pilots,” Adil said.
One day I met Adil in his neighborhood. Though it was not far from where he used to live and still dominated by the Mahdi Army, he was less known there. He grew nervous as we approached an INP checkpoint. He didn’t want them to know who he was, in case his men had informed the Mahdi Army about his attitude, which could make him or his family a target. At home his two boys watched television in his small living room. “I have decided to leave my job,” he told me. “No one supports us.” Lieutenant Amar, a former Republican Guard officer, also wanted to quit; together they would try to join the army. He was feeling pressure from his chain of command, and had been accused of being Sunni. A few months earlier he was accused by the Interior Ministry’s internal affairs department of selling cars to terrorists, and five days before I met him he heard rumors that the ministry had issued an order to fire him. When I mentioned Adil’s concerns to Gottlieb, he said that Adil was always threatening to quit.
I visited Shaab, Adil’s old neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, to attend Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque, a center for Muqtada’s followers. My friend Firas picked me up, the same friend who a year earlier had been too scared to let anybody at the Mustafa Husseiniya know that he knew me. To avoid certain checkpoints we drove through a former Iraqi air base that had been looted after the war and was full of indigent Shiite squatters. It was called the Hawasim neighborhood by locals, a reference to looting. Small children with matted hair played barefoot in mounds of garbage. Sewage flooded the roads. Donkeys and sheep dug through trash searching for something edible. “Long live Asa’ib al-Haq,” said graffiti on a wall, referring to a Sadrist resistance group that split from the Mahdi Army. My friend put a cassette of Mahdi Army songs in his stereo. As the chanting and wailing began, he joked, “Now we are Mahdi Army.” The song was a refutation of rumors that Muqtada fled to Iran when the surge started. “He prefers death over leaving his home,” the men sang.
We drove past local Shiite ISVs the Americans had hired to pressure the Mahdi Army. The men wore masks to conceal their faces and avoid retaliation, and they were protected by Iraqi police manning the checkpoints with them, defeating the purpose of having them there. Graffiti on the walls called for death to the Awakening men.
We arrived before the noon prayers so we could talk to the imam and listen to the sermon. I met Sayyid Jalil Sarkhi al-Hassani in a green guest room. He was seated on the floor reading a religious book. He had a beard with no mustache and wore wire-framed glasses and a brown cloak. As we spoke his men prepared him for his sermon, placing a white funeral shroud around his shoulders, a symbol that he was ready for martyrdom. On one side of the room was a large painting of Muqtada’s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was Sayyid Jalil’s teacher. Sayyid Jalil lived in Sadr City and normally ran a mosque there, but for the past year he had led Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque.
When I spoke to him, he denied that the reduction in violence was the result of the Mahdi Army freeze. “That might mean that the Mahdi Army was the cause for the violence, and that’s not true,” he said. “The political situation is not in the hands of the government, it’s in the hands of the Americans. The American forces needed some security. They can increase the violence or decrease it. The Mahdi Army froze because of rumors that it is the source of violence and the Mahdi Army is the reason for the sectarian fighting and the fighting between Shiites, especially after the Karbala incident. That’s why Muqtada saw that it is necessary to re-educate the army and keep them away from the field, and despite this the violence is still occurring and the fighting between Shiites is still occurring. After the Mahdi Army freeze it appeared that they were not responsible for the war among people, so now we see that the Mahdi Army is working on education and leadership. Muqtada ordered his people to pray, to worship, to read, and to preach to general education so that they will show the real picture of the Mahdi Army.” He stressed that the Sadrists opposed injustice and were nationalists. In truth, however, the significant decrease in violence immediately following the Mahdi Army cease-fire belied his assertion and proved just how responsible the Sadrists were for the fighting.
Inside the mosque was painted light green. About five hundred men sat on straw mats. Fluorescent lights and fans hung down from the ceiling. There was a curtained-off section for women. The dome of the mosque was still damaged from a 2006 car bomb attack. The first hossa (slogan) that was shouted asked the men in the crowd to pray for Muqtada, for the release of prisoners, and for death to the Americans and their agents. Another one asked God to grant victory to Muqtada and the Mahdi Army. “Death is an honor to us, arrest is honor to us, resisting the Americans is an honor to us!” went another. Most of the sermon dealt with religious matters and the upcoming month of pilgrimage to Mecca. Sayyid Jalil asked his followers to “pray for other Muslim people in Palestine, Afghanistan, and in all the world, and curse the occupier and the Israelis, and grant victory to all Muslims, to get rid of the Americans, of dictatorships and secularism.” He asked the people to raise their hands in prayer “for victory for all mujahideen in the world” and for freedom.
After the sermon and the prayer that followed, lunch was brought for Sayyid Jalil and other mosque staff. Firas and I were offered food by a famous Mahdi Army IED maker. As Sayyid Jalil walked to his office, men came in and said that an American patrol was in the area and he was ushered away. As we left several young men in the courtyard asked us to join them for lunch. After my friend returned me to Mansour, his friends from the Mahdi Army asked him suspiciously if I was a foreigner and a friend of his. He said I was. They asked him if I drank alcohol, and he said I did not. They asked him if I slept with Iraqi women, and he said I did not. Apparently, they wanted to kidnap me and were looking for a proper pretext to justify it.
We ended up having lunch that day at Mustafa Husseiniya in Ur. Its imam, Sheikh Safa, had fled to Iran to avoid arrest and had not returned. I sat with the caretaker, Abul Hassan, and his assistant, Haidar, in Abul Hassan’s home. (Haidar had been expelled by Sunni militias from the town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. His brother was killed working as a policeman.)
Born in Sadr City in 1972, Abul Hassan, whose real name was Adil, was a muscular and voluble man. He had a raspy voice, permanent stubble. He was jocular and warm and spoke in colloquial Iraqi Arabic because he lacked education. His grandfather had moved to Baghdad from the south when Abul Hassan’s father was still a child, and President Abdul Karim Qasim gave the family land in Thawra (Revolution) City, which would become Saddam City and later Sadr City. Abul Hassan did not attend high school, and after his military service he worked a number of odd jobs, like driving a taxi and small trade. He had always been a Sadrist, he said with a smile, and had followed Muqtada’s father. Following the elder Sadr’s murder, Abul Hassan and his friends established a small underground armed resistance cell but failed to engage in any successful operations. After the war he and Sheikh Safa took over the Baath Party office and were the ones who converted it into a husseiniya. Now Abul Hassan informally led the Ur district.
The Mustafa Husseiniya, which had been demolished after the previous year’s raid, was now being rebuilt. Abul Hassan maintained his office in an adjacent one-room structure, where he sat on the floor behind a desk and received guests and supplicants. The mosque still provided help to poor families and IDPs. “Only Sadrists help the displaced,” he said. They also helped families of martyrs and other needy people, giving them bags with basic requirements such as milk, oil, rice, sugar, and similar items. “The government doesn’t do it,” he said.
The Mahdi Army in the area assisted the families of one thousand martyrs and three thousand prisoners with stipends, the size determined by whether they were married, Abul Hassan said. The family of an unmarried Mahdi Army martyr received seventy five thousand dinars a month (about sixty dollars), as did the family of an arrested man; and the family of a married Mahdi Army martyr received twice as much. Most of the displaced families they helped lived in other people’s homes, he said, but many still lived in tents in the nearby Shishan (Chechen) neighborhood, thus named because Iraqis thought Chechnya was very poor.
Haidar brought lunch in: mushy cooked tomatoes with kabob and bread. As we ate, two women in abayas came in and asked for bags of supplies and children’s clothes. Haidar went to fetch them.
Already in December 2007, before the March 2008 clashes, Abul Hassan was comparing the Supreme Council, which dominated the government, with Saddam Hussein. “Why did Saddam kill Shiites?” he asked. “He was also afraid of Shiite masses. The Supreme Council wants a secular Islam; they don’t reject occupation or even talk about it.” Under Saddam supporters of Muqtada’s father walked to Karbala for pilgrimages. Abul Hassan complained that people walking to Karbala were still targeted because they were viewed as Sadrists. “The Sadr Current represents 75 percent of Iraqi Shiites and is a popular movement,” he said. “Only the Sadr Current helps the poor and represents them.”
Some materials and labor were donated to help with the mosque’s reconstruction, but the government-run Shiite religious endowment was controlled by the Supreme Council. “We always have problems with the Supreme Council,” he complained. “They always instigate it. The Supreme Council are untrustworthy and just want power.” Abul Hassan was suspicious of the Sunni Awakening militias. “There is an Awakening group in the Fadhil neighborhood,” he said. “There is a man called Adel al-Mashhadani, he killed hundreds of Shiites, he beheaded many Shiites. He is well-known by people for his terrible crimes. Later they put him as head of the Awakening in that neighborhood. He is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. This is not logical.”
Since members of the Mahdi Army had committed to the freeze, he observed, they had been arrested, their families displaced and their savings stolen. “Now the freeze is ongoing and the arrests continue. I think it’s better to lift this freeze,” he said. “With things happening like the night raids, I don’t think the freeze will continue. The followers of the Supreme Council displace the families of arrested Mahdi Army members in the city of Diwaniya.”
I told Abul Hassan that Sunnis accused Sadrists of being Iranians. “This is nonsense,” he said. “We are Iraqis. Did you see Iranians or hear us talking the Iranian language? We are the followers of the first and the second martyred sayyids.”
The Golden Group—Golden JAM, in U.S. military parlance—was established, composed of trusted Mahdi Army men led by Abbas al-Kufi. The group was tasked with cleaning up the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and killing rogue militiamen. Shiite militias called assassins sakak, the equivalent of “ice men,” maybe because corpses were put on ice. Sak meant to “get iced.” (“Ahmed sak Hassan” means “Ahmed iced Hassan”—or, if he was in New York, “Ahmed whacked Hassan.”) While the ice men were doing their job, it was not clear if Muqtada had miscalculated with his freeze, allowing his Shiite and American rivals to gain the momentum. On the other hand, he may not have had a choice but to flee to Iran, as he did in 2007. “We would have killed or arrested him if he had stayed,” one National Security Council Iraq expert told me.
But the cease-fire was allowing the Mahdi Army to reorganize. In Baghdad it was split into two commands: eastern and western Baghdad. Eastern Baghdad had three subcommands: north, east, and Sadr City. They were further divided into sub-subcommands, each consisting of about three hundred men. At the top of this chain of command was a council in the southern town of Kufa, near Najaf, which Muqtada chaired. In Shaab there were about three thousand Mahdi Army fighters, led by a man called Adil al-Hasnawi. They were required to be devout, lest they be expelled. They did not receive a salary or training; instead they manned checkpoints, attended Friday prayers, protected pilgrims traveling to holy cities such as Karbala, cleaned the streets, and guarded mosques.
Nominally the Mahdi Army responded to Muqtada or his designated representatives. But there were highly criminalized elements that were displaced from Sunni areas and occupied Sunni houses in Hurriya; these elements resorted to a protection racket in order to support themselves and their families. “This was done at the behest of the community civil leadership and clerical leadership to protect against Sunni incursion and attacks,” noted a major who served with the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Airborne Division. But then, according to the major, there was the Mahdi Army sent from Najaf—the so-called Golden JAM—to clean up the criminalized elements and bring them in line with Muqtada’s office. At the same time the Iraqi Security Forces leadership either worked in conjunction with the Mahdi Army or independently to conduct offensive actions against coalition forces and sectarian cleansing of Sunnis. The ISF was an “institutional sanctuary” for Mahdi Army members; the Shiite-majority police and national police in that area were actively targeting the Sunni population. Furthermore, the major said, the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr conducted its own census by collecting ration cards, effectively forcing Sunni displacement by preventing Sunnis from receiving goods and services within Hurriya and sending displaced Shiites into evacuated Sunni houses. The Office and Mahdi Army elements funded operations by intercepting propane shipments and conducting their own delivery operations, raising the price of propane and preventing delivery to Sunnis. At the same time, clerical and tribal leadership meddling into socioeconomic affairs allowed the Mahdi Army to become criminalized and terrorize the Sunni and Shiite population. “Most of the Sunni population had been displaced to the district south of the Hurriya DMZ [demilitarized zone], so to speak, when my company arrived in Hurriya,” the major told me.
“There were some Sunnis who lived there, but were mostly women without husbands and lived pretty low-key. My southern border was lined with bullet-riddled and burned houses that distinguished the line between Shiite Hurriya and the Sunni district south of Hurriya.”
The major told me about Operation Seventh Veil, which was aimed at targeting the Shiite militias, no matter the political risk. Dagger Brigade initiated an operation to investigate, track, and detain “radical or criminal ISF leadership to disrupt this longstanding government sanctuary.” Many were confronted with evidence of their criminal links and warned to behave. A major coup resulting from this operation was the arrest of Ghazaliya’s police chief as well as officers from the Iraqi army.
By June 2007 Golden JAM had killed or captured rogue Mahdi Army elements, and the major’s battalion had disrupted the militia’s lines of communications, resources, and leadership, denying them sanctuary and killing “high-value individuals.”
In Dora, the main headquarters for the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army was the Kadhimayn Mosque in Abu Dshir. Its loudspeakers were within listening reach of Falcon FOB, where the 2-2 SCR was based. According to that unit’s senior intelligence officer, Captain Dehart, “We are actively targeting rogue elements of Shiite extremists that have not complied with Muqtada’s cease-fire and the remnants of Al Qaeda.” When Dehart first came into this area, it was Al Qaeda’s top stronghold in Iraq; but after successful clearing operations the leadership fled and the ones left were low-level thugs, young Sunni males with nothing better to do than to call themselves Al Qaeda, string together fellow thugs from the neighborhood, and try their hand at extortion and murder.
On a map Dehart showed me Saha and Mahala 828, or Kifaat, in northern Saha. He pointed to southern Saha, the majority-Shiite area ruled by Abu Jaafar, General Karim’s ally. It had large government-built apartment complexes. The north had villas he said had belonged to mostly Sunni government officials. “In the last few months Shiite militias moved up. Now the north is largely abandoned; it has a 10 percent occupancy rate. That’s where the fault line was. We called it ‘the arena.’ Sunnis from Mahala 830, or Hadhir, would come across and Shiites would come up and fire mortars into Sunni Mahalas 822 and 824 and randomly kill people. We have been able to cut that a lot. I can’t even say we—the surge, as Iraqi institutions have started to stand up and get more efficient. And it comes down to the people too, tired of the violence. We’ve had only one indirect fire incident in the last two weeks, directed at the FOB. It’s been a month and a half since we’ve had anything shot neighborhood to neighborhood. When we first got here it was several times a week. We specifically targeted that, and captured or killed mortar teams on both sides.”
First Lieut. Adam Sperry was Dehart’s tactical intelligence officer. Walking back from the chow hall to the tactical operations center one night, we heard celebratory gunfire and a speech blasting from the Kadhimayn Mosque’s loudspeakers, which he called “the propaganda phone.” Sperry said it was for the death of the Ninth Imam.
A week before my visit three Shiite NAC members who led three mahalas in Abu Dshir had been kidnapped just as ISV recruiting was set to begin in the area. They were taken to the Kadhimayn Mosque and released within twenty-four hours. The mosque’s previous imam, Sheikh Majid, had been arrested a year earlier but was later released. I asked why he was arrested. “Because he was a scumbag,” Sperry said. “The mosque was raided eight months ago. Weapons and a torture chamber were found. We should have raided that mosque a month ago.”
Sperry described Ziyad al-Shamari as the bane of his existence. “He’s the rogue special groups commander of Abu Dshir, responsible for EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] that have killed lots of our soldiers. This guy is not, nor was he ever, a Sadrist. He is funded entirely by Iran.” Sperry explained that Shiite militias did not attack the Americans in Abu Dshir, because it was their command-and-control location. “They don’t want to fight there or draw attention to themselves,” he said. Instead, they placed EFPs in other parts of Dora.
“Abu Dshir is stable,” Sperry said. “We don’t want to disturb that by breaking down doors. The guys we target in Abu Dshir are transiting there.” (The night before 2-2 SCR had gone on a raid to pick up two Mahdi Army suspects. When they showed up, one man drank a few gulps of motor oil and the other swallowed three pills of Viagra and passed out.) Thanks to the cease-fire and reconciliation, Sperry was having a hard time doing his job. “It’s impossible to determine who is good or who is bad,” he said, explaining that the only men the 2-2 SCR targeted were those who attacked the Americans after the cease-fire. “We can’t target anyone based on any evidence before that date.”
In December 2007, on my first Friday with the 2-2 SCR, an imam called Sayyid Abbas spoke at the Kadhimayn Mosque. He condemned killings and expulsions of people. “We are all brothers,” he said, and explained that Muqtada had imposed a cease-fire on his men “to correct all the mistakes and remove the bad members who joined the Mahdi Army without knowledge or religion. “They are just killers and thieves,” he said, “so if you know of somebody from the Mahdi Army trying to do something bad in the name of the Mahdi Army, please tell the mosque. We will take care of him by reporting his name to Kufa, and we will let the government know.” The government would arrest the renegade men, he said, granting the Iraqi Security Forces the Mahdi Army’s approval. The American forces were infidel forces, he said; they were trying to provoke a civil war, and Iraqis had to fight that. “We can’t kill our own brothers and our own people just because they are Sunni and Shiite,” he said. Not long after that, the Americans and Iraqi National Police raided the mosque again and found IEDs, mortars, and rockets.
Mahdi Army leaders were livid about the attempts to recruit Shiites for the Awakening and used the mosque to conduct investigations. They posted a “final warning” on the walls addressed to “the good people of Abu Dshir” and in “honor of the blood of our noble martyrs,” asking people to protect the souls of their sons and not join “the conspiracy known as the Awakening.” Abu Dshir’s main street, known as Rashid al-Tijari (the Americans called it Market Street), was lined with signs on light poles that bore pictures of Muqtada, his father, and various Mahdi Army “martyrs.” A slogan said that not all men were real men, which implied that these really were. A faded poster on one light pole said, “Bush and Saddam, two faces on same coin” in English. Graffiti on the walls warned takfiris that the Mahdi Army would declare them infidels deserving of death.
Sunni militias from the nearby Arab Jubur area had fired mortars at the Shiites of Abu Dshir. Walking through the neighborhood I found a man called Hisham working on his house. He had lost two brothers to the violence. Mortars from Arab Jubur had also landed on his neighbor’s house. “If it wasn’t for the police and the Americans, Al Qaeda would have destroyed us,” he said. “We are poor people, we just go to work and come back. We had no problems with our Sunni neighbors—it was all Al Qaeda.” People expelled from Arab Jubur and the Furat district had settled in the area. Muqtada’s local office and the Kadhimayn Mosque were providing assistance to them, including homes (emptied of Sunnis) and a stipend. Locals complained that the Mahdi Army freeze had hurt them. The militia had guarded the neighborhood and provided propane and kerosene, which they had trouble getting now. I asked who was protecting the area. “Its people,” I was told. “People sit in front of their homes.”
In Dora the Mahdi Army was under the command of the Karkh, or western Baghdad Brigade. The leader for western Baghdad and many of his local commanders were recently replaced for ignoring the freeze, and the Sadrists were trying to provide social services and help local municipalities. Some Sunni families who had been displaced by Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur were received by the Sadrists in Abu Dshir and provided with assistance. Mahdi Army men complained that the cease-fire was paralyzing them and causing them to lose respect or authority in their areas. In the nearby Bayya district, the Sadrist office was furious when an unknown corpse turned up on the street; several days were spent investigating whether somebody had disobeyed Muqtada’s orders. But the Mahdi Army was unable to control the rogue groups; sometimes, in fact, they received help from them.
In Abu Dshir the Mahdi Army relied on lookouts who watched for the Americans on rooftops and street corners. They also released pigeons from coops when American patrols approached. In the past this had led Americans to shoot innocent pigeon keepers. Apart from going on raids in Abu Dshir, the Americans conducted “presence patrols” in which they walked through the streets and interacted with people. I followed a platoon of soldiers from the 2-2 SCR around Market Street and spoke to the local shopkeepers about them. Flocks of sheep were herded through the streets, a common sight in the city. The Americans walked past furniture shops, waved to shopkeepers, and bought roasted chicken and fresh bread at inflated rates. “The Americans don’t have a strategy,” one local observed. “They don’t know who is with them or who is against them, and they’ve been here for four years.” I asked a group of men if Muqtada was powerful in this area. “It’s a Shiite neighborhood,” one said, as if it were obvious. “JAM has lookouts on streets dressed just like that,” an American officer said, pointing to a young man in a matching tracksuit. “It’s funny, you can look at these guys and know that they’re bad and have nothing to detain them for.”
Shopkeepers whose shops were destroyed during the fighting were supposed to receive money from the Americans. “Why did some get money and some didn’t?” I was asked by men who assumed I was a translator for the Americans. A group of men called the American officer over to show him an old man’s leg that was injured in an explosion. “Can’t anybody help him?” they asked. Another man asked if the Americans could help his unemployed son find a job in the security forces.
Platoon leader Lieutenant Cowan decided to visit a random house and ordered his men to “clear” it. Uninvited, they pushed open the outer gate and the door to the house. As the translator was elsewhere with Cowan, I had to explain to a frightened and bewildered woman and her two sons that the officer merely wanted to talk to them and they needn’t worry. The younger boy clung to his mother’s abaya and whimpered in terror. A soldier gave him some candy, and he stopped crying. “I feel bad walking on these people’s carpets with my shoes,” one major said. “My wife would kill me.” He went back outside. Cowan came in with his Iraqi translator, who wore a mask and sunglasses. He asked the woman how much electricity she received per day, about her water and sense of security. Cowan asked her if she knew who Ziyad al-Shamari was and how much influence the Mahdi Army had over the area. She laughed sheepishly with her older son. “We don’t go outside, we close the door,” she said. “You don’t hear rumors?” asked Cowan. “You don’t hear whispers? Do you know if there is JAM activity in the Kadhimayn Mosque?”
In a different home Cowan encountered an old man in a wheelchair who was a retired Iraqi colonel. “All Shiites here love the U.S. Army,” the man told him. “Yeah, well, we love you,” Cowan said with a smile. “In the beginning the Mahdi Army protected us from Al Qaeda,” the old man said. “Then they joined the police, they are all police. They protect us from mortars, Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur.”
One day I accompanied twenty-two-year-old platoon leader Rob Johnston as his men took two masked Iraqi “sources” from the Badr militia to identify Mahdi Army suspects. The Americans had been collaborating with this militia since 2004, when they teamed up with Jalaluddin al-Saghir, the Supreme Council cleric and politician. Saghir would send his security chief, known as Haji Dhia, to the Americans. Haji Dhia would wear a ski mask, point out the house, and tell the Americans what they would find there. He once escorted an American unit to a house at 2 a.m. They found an arms bazaar inside, with more than one hundred Kalashnikovs laid out in neat rows around the walls, along with ammunition, Glock pistols, and two MP-5s. Though at first the information was directed against Sunnis and helped the Americans arrest Al Qaeda cells, the Supreme Council provided information about the Sadrists as well, especially during the 2004 fighting in Najaf.
That morning in December 2007, the Americans descended from their vehicles and entered the main covered market in Abu Dshir. People tried to navigate around the large soldiers, looking at them quizzically as they squeezed through the tight alleys of the market. The Iraqi sources stayed in the vehicle. As women bought vegetables, fish, and clothes in various stalls, the soldiers rounded up all the men in the market, as well as those entering or leaving, pushing them back and holding them by their shoulders, ordering them to obey. One by one they led dozens of men to the street so the sources could identify them. One young boy started crying. A man hurrying back to his stall was halted. “Fish, fish,” he said in Arabic.
I wandered off to buy some popcorn from a stand. As I returned men warned me to go in a different direction because the Americans were stopping people. Sergeant Bowyer, charged with carrying out psychological operations, distributed an Arabic-language newspaper published by Americans and asked people inane questions. “So, how is everything here?” he asked one man. “What’s your sense of the people? Are people really happy in regards to reconciliation?” “Do you think JAM feels threatened by reconciliation?” he asked another. “When JAM tries to influence the people in Abu Dshir, how do they do it?” he asked another. “We can’t talk about this openly,” one man replied. “I’ll take that as a sign that it does happen,” Bowyer said. His vehicle was equipped with speakers, and as he drove through Market Street it blasted an announcement in Arabic calling on the people to continue with reconciliation and ignore those who would “take them back.”
The men raided a house and found some bewildered men working. “We’re laborers,” the men protested as they were taken to be identified by the sources, who had pointed out the house. They were pushed against the walls. One soldier held one of them by the back of the neck. The three men were quickly interrogated one by one. “What do you think of the way he talks,” the lieutenant asked me. “Do you think he’s honest?” Their stories were consistent with the obvious—they were mere laborers. “Can I go?” the last man asked me. “They’re not taking me away?” As I said no, he smiled and kissed my cheek. “We appreciate the time you gave us,” Lieutenant Johnston told them.
Children chased after the soldiers asking them for candy and teasing them. When they learned I spoke Arabic, they pointed to the pigeons that were flying above homes. They had been released by Mahdi Army lookouts. All the children liked Muqtada. “The Americans are dogs and Muqtada will defeat them,” one boy said. “The Americans are donkeys and the boys who take candy from the Americans are donkeys,” another boy said. “When they are here we say, ‘I love you,’ but when they leave we say, ‘Fuck you,’” he told me. Another boy showed me his watch, which had a picture of Muqtada’s father on its face.
Johnston’s platoon raided Abu Dshir one night. The soldiers broke down the gate of a home and rushed into the house. “We are not Mahdi Army, we are in the Iraqi army,” an old man protested. “We are not Mahdi Army or anything.” It was a middle-class home with no overt signs of religiosity and none of the typical things associated with Muqtada’s supporters. The five women and one child were herded into the living room as three men were interrogated. “Mister, I am no Jaish al-Mahdi,” one man protested in English. “Okay, okay, uskut, shukran” (be quiet, thank you), said a soldier. “We hate the Mahdi Army,” said an old woman, “believe me.” Thinking I was a translator, the residents looked at me and begged me to explain that none of them had anything to do with the Mahdi Army. The women were made to stand, empty their pockets, and pat themselves down, starting with their arms, down their chests to their legs.
One man, it turned out, was a laborer who had signed up for the Awakening. Another worked in their father’s pastry shop. Their father was seventy years old, and a brother who was absent was in the Iraqi army. The men’s pictures were taken. They were shown pictures of Mahdi Army suspects and asked to identify them, but they recognized none of them. “We are not terrorists,” the old man said. “We like the government.” Most of their protests went untranslated. “Why do you think automatically I’m looking for the Mahdi Army?” Johnston asked. “Because you have been arresting people and accusing them of being Mahdi Army lately,” the man replied. He was handcuffed and complained that they were too tight. Johnston put his finger between the cuffs and the man’s wrists. “If I can fit one finger, it’s okay,” he said. The two sons were also handcuffed, and they were all taken away. Their phones, computer, and cash were also taken, as were their personal papers, CDs, and other objects of interest that had Arabic writing on them. “They probably got some propaganda in there,” a sergeant explained as he carried off a hard drive.
Neighbors who rushed into their homes when the Americans arrived provoked American suspicion, and they too were brought in for interrogation. One old man started crying, fearing the Americans would take his son away. On the way back the tired soldiers bantered in the Stryker. “You know what I hate most about detainee duty? Watching those motherfuckers shit,” one complained. “I bet there’s an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us,” another said.
In Virginia, sometime after my trip to Iraq in December 2007, I met P.J. Dermer, a former Special Forces aviator who had been a Middle East foreign area officer in the U.S. Army since the late 1980s and had traveled independently through much of the region. In 2003 he worked with the Iraqi army; subsequently, he returned to work under Petraeus. “Sunnis realized they were in trouble—we were killing ‘em, the Shiites were killing ‘em,” Dermer observed. “As we saw the Awakening develop, we realized we can’t kill our way out of this. But some guys were afraid to come out, and we had to make sure Maliki was soothed.”
Even in 2004 and 2005 American commanders established relationships with Sunni tribal leaders who were tired of the Al Qaeda presence in their area. But there was no systematic approach to transition these temporary alliances on the battlefield into a normal relationship with the Iraqi government. In July 2007 Petraeus established the Force Strategic Engagement Cell (FSEC). Its task was to reach out to the resistance and “reconcile” them with the Iraqi government. Typical of the military, the unusual name for talking to resistance leaders was “key leader engagement.” According to Petraeus, the goal of KLE was “to understand various local situations and dynamics, and then—in full coordination with the Iraqi government—to engage tribal leaders, local government leaders, and, in some cases, insurgent and opposition elements.” This was a challenge for the military, which needs a formula or system for everything it does, even building relationships. Petraeus formalized KLE because developments like the Awakening were occurring with little involvement or support from the Iraqi government. As a result the government was very suspicious of the Awakening and the Americans’ motives. In addition, Petraeus had no body of his own through which to coordinate these local developments or approach them strategically.
“You cannot kill or capture your way out of an insurgency,” Petraeus said. He hoped to establish a dialogue between members of the resistance, or at least influential supporters, and the Iraqi government. This would facilitate the American and Iraqi forces’ takeover of areas controlled by the resistance without requiring combat in village after village. Of course, those in the resistance, whether Sunni or Shiite, who were “irreconcilable” would be killed or captured. FSEC was composed of a few dozen mostly military officers, although the American ambassador appointed a civilian from the State Department to work with them. “Engagers” working for FSEC developed “lanes” to reach out to the Iraqi government and resistance.
“We gave insurgents a place to come see us, to realize we weren’t ogres,” Dermer said. “The Awakening was also a movement within Sunnis at large, but they didn’t realize what they wanted. Some wanted to take over from the Shiites, others just wanted to go back to normal life. We were getting deeper and deeper [with the Sunni resistance], further up the hierarchy, and having more success. But Sunnis were way too divided.” Dermer met leaders of the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna, the Jihad and Reform Front, and some people connected to the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
Dermer would meet these resistance men in Jordanian hotels. In Jordan and Syria he also met with Iraqi businessmen and expatriates who were in touch with the resistance but were not driving it. In 2003 he had been involved in the creation of the new Iraqi Defense Ministry. Many of the former military officers he had met then were now influential in the resistance.
The Iraqi government’s Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), led by the notorious Dr. Bassima al-Jadri, was set up by Maliki to work on “reconciliation” issues with the Americans and to deal with the Awakening movement. “The Awakening wasn’t a reconciliation with the Iraqis but with the power to be in the battlefield,” Dermer explained. “The purpose of Maliki’s reconciliation committee was also to thwart whatever we wanted to do. The reconciliation committee was all Shiite except for a couple of token Sunnis. They did a good job of making us believe we were making progress. It was clear to me from dealing with the Iraqi army, Bassima, Adnan [a Shiite former intelligence officer under Saddam], that they [the Awakening] were doomed from the beginning. We kept a nice face on it with all this talk about jobs, yeah yeah, blah blah. The Iraqi government was flabbergasted when we told them how many [Awakening men] we had on the payroll. But it worked. It settled down the killing to a manageable degree. Abud Qanbar hated tribal sheikhs. He’s urban. ‘They had their chance,’ he said. The Iraqis wanted to arrest all the Awakening leaders, and the minute space developed they went after them. Maliki was smart; he created the reconciliation committee. He was building tribal councils, the mirror image [of the Awakening] but Shiites. Bassima and Adnan were involved in building the tribal councils. You could get something done if you had a good relationship with Bassima and Adnan. The tribal support councils were meant to manipulate tribes to be on Maliki’s side, like the Ottomans and Saddam. Bassima was Maliki’s watchdog to mitigate the Awakening and the Sunnis. Some senior insurgent guys were FREs [former regime elements], generals I met in 2003.”
Though Jadri was a friend and confidante of Maliki, everybody else around her hated her. “Bassima had issues being a woman in a man’s world,” Dermer told me. “Iraqi generals kissed her ass.” Jadri and Adnan wanted to meet the Awakening men, so the Americans brokered it. “Sunnis wouldn’t engage with the Iraqi government without American interlocution,” Dermer said. “The Shiites wanted us out of the way. We brought in Raad from Ghazaliya, Abul Abed from Amriya, and Abu Azzam al-Tamimi from Abu Ghraib.” These were important Awakening leaders in Baghdad. “We brought them into the palace to meet Bassima and Adnan,” he said. “It took a lot of work.”
Dermer mocked the notion of “key leader engagement,” which in practice meant trying to have as many meetings as possible and using that as a measure of progress. FSEC was originally led by Graeme Lamb, a British general who was Petraeus’s deputy and who had experience establishing a dialogue with armed groups in Northern Ireland. “Lamb was replaced by an idiot British general and an idiot State Department guy,” Dermer complained bitterly. “The guys in charge of FSEC didn’t get it. It takes very unique people for this office. These fuckers are killers. You can’t be a starry-eyed thirty-year-old or Harvard grad, but it was a lot of PowerPoint briefings, six-month rotations—it was bureaucratic. People hated success, like getting high in the insurgency. The agency [CIA] fought us, State [Department] hated us. Once you put it in a bureaucracy, it won’t work. It was a brilliant idea, but we didn’t know what we were doing.”
FSEC also saw the prison population as a group with potential to be “reconciled,” and also as a possible source of intelligence on the resistance. Some prisoners were resistance leaders and could actually encourage their supporters outside to reach an accommodation with the Americans or the Iraqi government. In American prisons Dermer and his colleagues met with leaders of the Mahdi Army and special groups.
Throughout the American occupation the majority of Iraqis seized and imprisoned by the Americans were innocent, even innocent of conducting attacks against the Americans. Few of the tens of thousands of Iraqis detained in the American-run gulags were ever even charged with anything. Few Americans question whether they had a right to invade a foreign country and arrest scores of its men every day on scant evidence. When the men were eventually released, the Americans staged shows of fanfare and magnanimity.
In December 2007 the 1-28 Infantry Division, which controlled the Jihad district, staged one of these slightly absurd “reconciliation” ceremonies when it released fifteen Shiite men. Col. Pat Frank of the 1-28, who supervised the ceremony, explained to me that Jihad was part of what the Americans had named Northwest Rashid, and was about 42 percent Shiite and 58 percent Sunni. There were a little over 1,800 ISVs in Northwest Rashid. There were also 985 Shiite police recruits and 834 Sunni police recruits; 850 of them came out of the ISVs. “Moderates have gained the momentum in the area and overtaken extremists,” Frank said.
Frank’s men staged a reconciliation accord between Sunnis and Shiites as a gesture and requested a list of local men they had imprisoned that the district’s leaders wanted to be released. “They were suspected of Shiite militant activity,” Frank said, but were screened by the Americans and Iraqi government before their release. “Some people on the list were rejected at senior levels” by the Americans, he told me. Only fifteen men had been approved. The Americans built a “reconciliation hall” for the “Reconciliation Committee.” Frank showed neighborhood leaders charts in which he gave them red stars or green stars depending on whether violence had gone down in their area. He gave a metal emblem of the black lion, which symbolized his unit, to a female American correspondent in case she ever had problems. “The Iraqis know us and love us,” he said. “Just show it to them and you’ll be fine.”
The fifteen prisoners were brought in to the building in handcuffs. The few journalists present were ordered not to take pictures until the cuffs were removed. The event was clumsily choreographed. Journalists, council members, and local dignitaries were herded into a separate room and guarded by soldiers. Tahsin Ali Samarai, of the Reconciliation Council’s security committee complained that they had given the Americans a list of 562 prisoners from their area that they wanted released. The Iraqi army colonel in charge of the area told me that all the men were innocent. Another tribal sheikh agreed. “The Americans arrest people randomly,” he said, adding that some of the men had been imprisoned for nearly two years. Sheikh Awad Abdul Wahel, also known as Abu Muhammad, was president of the tribal sheikh council, which had submitted seven hundred names of prisoners from the Jihad district alone. “I serve my people, not the Americans,” he said. “They were never accused or found guilty,” Sheikh Hussein Karim al-Kinani said. “American accusations and arrests are random.”
Outside one angry young woman called Leila waited with her two children. Her husband, Muhammad, was arrested sixteen months earlier while sleeping on his roof to avoid the summer heat. A neighbor was shot and Muhammad was rounded up with all the other men of military age in the area. Their son was born while he was in prison. Leila blamed the Americans for the civil war and did not want to talk about reconciliation. One woman in an abaya came because she heard men were going to be released. Her son was captured by Abul Abed, the notorious Awakening leader in the Sunni district of Amriya.
Inside the prisoners were boisterous. They were seated in alphabetical order, and behind them sat “guarantors” for a “bond” they would have to sign. “It’s not an oath on the Koran,” Frank explained. “It’s on their honor. A guarantor is a mentor, just like in the U.S., when an individual runs in trouble with law and somebody steps up to mentor them. The reconciliation committee wants to see these fifteen men do well.” The Iraqis seemed uninterested and amused by the American show. They endured speeches given by Frank and Captain Ducote. “We want to make this a special event,” Frank said, and asked the men to quiet down. “Thank you for being patient, but this is for you.” Prisoners and guarantors got up pair by pair to each sign their “bond.” The Iraqi colonel played his part. “The government is in control now,” he said, “not like before. There is a state and there is law.” He told them to join the police or the army. Frank was uncertain how to describe the prisoners. He could no longer call them detainees. “We will now ask each individual to stand,” he said. “Guarantors stand too. You raise your right hand. Guarantors put your left hand on the shoulder of the individual.”
“I acknowledge that recent signings of the Reconciliation Agreement have ushered in an era of peace and partnership between Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Christian, the Mahdi Army, Iraqi Security Forces, and American Forces,” the oath said somewhat optimistically. Interestingly, the only militia that was mentioned was the Mahdi Army, though the Americans were granting it a role as a legitimate actor. “Based on my arrest record, Iraqi Government and Coalition Force leaders have agreed that my immediate release would be beneficial to the Reconciliation process. I pledge to not commit any violations of the Reconciliation Agreement’s 12 points, violate Iraqi Law, or attack Coalition Forces.” The men were not told what those twelve points were. “As a proud Iraqi citizen living in Northwest Rashid, I will become a contributing member of the community in the historic effort to rebuild this proud nation.” The Iraqis might have wondered where Northwest Rashid was, since they never used this designation. They might also have considered that they were rebuilding a proud nation the Americans had helped destroy. The guarantors took a similar oath stating that they were “bound by honor” to notify American or Iraqi authorities if the “individual” violated the oath. “As an Iraqi living in Northwest Rashid, I am proud to guarantee the mature and peaceful future actions of this citizen,” they said.
Then Frank spoke. “The coalition would like to welcome all the members of the free Jihad community,” he said. “The area of Jihad has been changed a lot. Violence has been reduced tremendously, and this reconciliation is proof.” He did not explain who the men were reconciling with. “With your release from detention we expect that you will become part of the reconciliation, and we look forward to working with you and the guarantor, the person behind you. All the citizens of Baghdad are watching Jihad now.” It was unlikely that any of them were, because the only Iraqi journalist present was a lone freelance cameraman. “Welcome back,” said Captain Ducote. “Jihad is not the same place that you left. You were released based on your ability to join the reconciliation process. I look forward to seeing you on the streets as we patrol.”
It was a reconciliation between the Americans and the Iraqis, not between Iraqis, just as the Awakening was a reconciliation between Sunnis and the Americans. By December, up to eighty thousand men were part of the ISV program in eight Iraqi governorates. Nearly all were Sunnis, though there were a few thousand Shiites as well, in separate units. The Awakening program peaked at about one hundred thousand men. Though it was meant to compensate for the sectarian imbalance resulting from Sunnis’ boycotting the security forces and being black listed by the Shiite government, the creation of new Sunni militias seemed to be promoting sectarianism and a fissiparous future. The drop in violence resulting from the decision of Sunni militias to cooperate with the Americans, the Mahdi Army’s decision to regroup, and the “surge” in American troops was meant to buy time for reconciliation between Iraq’s warring parties and bickering politicians, but there was no political progress. Apart from the security forces, the Iraqi government was nonexistent outside the Green Zone. The Americans were the government. Walls created small fortress neighborhoods in Baghdad, preventing militias from fighting one another directly. Shiite militias battled one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Everybody waited for the civil war between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen to start in the north. Sunnis and even some Shiites had quit the government, which couldn’t pass laws or provide services anyway. The prime minister’s office circumvented Parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that Parliament opposed.
Iraq was still under a foreign occupation. American soldiers were not mere policemen walking their beats on patrol, helping old women cross the street and working on reconstruction and beautification projects.
A foreign military occupation is a systematic imposition of violence and terror on an entire people. When I visited Iraq during the peak of the surge, at least twenty-four thousand Iraqis languished in American prisons. At least nine hundred of them were juveniles. Some were forced to go through a brainwashing program called the “House of Wisdom,” in which American officers arrogantly arranged for prisoners to be lectured about Islam—as if a poor understanding of Islam, not the occupation itself, was the cause of the violence. The Americans were supposed to hand over prisoners to Iraq’s authorities, since it was officially a sovereign country, but international human rights officials were loath to make this recommendation because conditions in Iraqi prisons were at least as bad as they were under Saddam. One American officer told me that six years was a life sentence in an Iraqi prison, because that was your estimated life span there. In the women’s prison in Kadhimiya female prisoners were routinely raped.
Conditions in Iraqi prisons worsened during the surge because the Iraqi system could not cope with the massive influx. Prisoners arrested by the Americans during the surge were supposed to be handed over to the Iraqis. They often were not, but those were the lucky ones. Even in American detention, Iraqis did not know why they were being held, and they were not visited by defense lawyers. The Americans could hold Iraqis indefinitely, so they didn’t even have to be tried by Iraqi courts. A fraction were tried in courts where Americans also testified. But observers were yet to see an Iraqi trial where they were convinced the accused was guilty and there was valid evidence that was properly examined, and no coerced confessions. Lawyers did not see their clients before trials, and there were no witnesses. Iraqi judges were prepared to convict on very little evidence. If Iraqi courts found prisoners innocent, the Americans sometimes continued to hold them anyway after their acquittal. There were five hundred of these “on hold” cases when I visited in early 2008. Often the Americans still arrested all men of military age when looking for suspects.
As politics and power became more and more local in Iraq, the Iraqi state itself seemed as though it were an American protectorate. As long as the new militias and security forces in Iraq fought Al Qaeda, they had the backing of the United States, much as dictatorships during the cold war enjoyed U.S. support as long as they fought communism, regardless of human rights abuses they might commit. The same logic applied to dictatorships in the Muslim world that collaborated in the war on terror. For sure, violence in Iraq was down, but there were still at least six hundred recorded attacks by resistance groups every month and about six hundred Iraqi civilians being killed in violence related to the civil war and occupation as well as more Iraqi soldiers and police. Since the surge began, nearly a million Iraqis had fled their homes, mostly from Baghdad, which had become a Shiite city. One reason fewer people were being killed was because there were fewer people to kill, fewer targets for the militias (which was why they turned on their own populations). The violence was not senseless; it was meant to displace the enemy’s population. And if war is politics by other means, then the Shiites won. Opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis blamed the Americans for their problems and wanted them to leave. American officials tried to put a positive spin on this, explaining that at least it united Iraqis, but Iraqis had opposed the American occupation from the day it began.
In early 2008 I met Captain Adil again. The Americans were threatening him, saying he would lose his value to them if he didn’t pursue the Mahdi Army more actively. His chain of command wanted to fire him for the feeble attempts he had made to target the Mahdi Army. He picked me up in his van, and for lack of anywhere safe and private we sat and talked as he nervously scanned every man who walked by. He complained that the Americans called every Shiite suspect Mahdi Army and every Sunni suspect Al Qaeda, and that the Awakening was raiding houses without the permission of the Americans or Iraqi Security Forces. Now the Mahdi Army worried that the ISVs and Awakening were a new force meant to target them, he said, and that they would replace Al Qaeda. He worried that the Mahdi Army could start fighting again out of fear of the Awakening. “No one can control these guys. Abu Jaafar, the ISVs—the coalition must be tough with them. The situation won’t get better. If someone kills your brother, can you forget his killer? You work hard to build a house and somebody blows up your house. Will they accept Sunnis back to Shiite areas and Shiites back to Sunni areas?”
Early in the morning on February 2, 2008, I joined Osama’s comrades Abu Salih, Abu Yusef, and other ISV leaders from their area as they gathered to depart for Ramadi, the national seat of the Awakening Council, the political movement led by Abu Risha. They hoped to translate their military success into political power, but rivals from Dora had pre-empted them and appealed to Abu Risha to grant them recognition. We left in a three-car convoy. Abu Salih drove the car I was in. He explained that he named his son after his uncle Salih, who was killed by the Mahdi Army. Close to the Hero House we were stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier ordered Abu Salih to open the trunk. “I’m Abu Salih,” he said. “Open the trunk,” said the soldier. “Dog, son of a dog,” Abu Salih muttered. “They have shitty manners.” We passed by workers putting up new concrete walls. “They closed off Baghdad, but they didn’t close the Iranian border,” he complained.
Driving west, we entered the Anbar province. Looking at the desolate flat desert with a few trees, Abu Salih said, “Iraq is beautiful.” Past the town of Abu Ghraib we saw a pickup truck with a large Russian anti-aircraft gun called a Dushka affixed to its back. The Dushka was often used as a heavy-infantry machine gun. Somali warlords had made it famous by placing it on their “technical” vehicles. “Now that’s the Awakening,” Abu Salih said, wistfully gazing at the Dushka. “How can we stand up to Gen. Abdul Karim with only Kalashnikovs?” We drove by more Awakening Council men with American Hummers and Russian PKCs, or belt-fed machine guns. “Ooh, look at that PKC,” Abu Salih said.
We drove by the large yellow Awakening Council flag. The flag bore the Bedouin coffee pot as its symbol, stressing the group’s Bedouin origins, of which some Sunnis were proud. Some Shiites, in turn, prided themselves on a settled farmer heritage. “Hopefully we will have this flag today,” said Abu Salih. We were meticulously searched before entering the Awakening Council headquarters, our pens checked, our candy squeezed. Inside a large opulent guest hall, supplicants sat on long sofas lining the walls. Abu Risha, brother of the slain founder of the movement, sat on an ornate throne under a picture of his brother Sattar. We were served tea by Bangladeshi servants, and he ignored us. Eventually he turned to our group and asked, “How is Dora?”
We followed him into a smaller office, where three of the rival men from Dora were sitting. They referred to Abu Risha with deference, calling him “our older brother” and “our father.” It was a strange phenomenon, urban Sunnis from Baghdad pledging their allegiance to a desert tribal leader, looking to the periphery for protection and representation, a reversal of past roles. But the Americans had empowered Abu Risha, and Baghdad’s Sunni militiamen hoped to unite with him to fight their Shiite opponents.
Abu Husam, one of the rivals, told Abu Salih that his men were merely guards, not the Awakening. “You are military and we are political,” he said. Abu Jawdat, the elderly leader of ISVs in an area adjoining Abu Salih’s, bristled. “We are a political entity,” he said. “We are not mercenaries.” Abu Risha’s political adviser attempted to calm the increasingly loud men. “Dora is big and can’t have one leader,” he said. “Are we in the time of Saddam Hussein?” He explained that the Awakening Council was preparing for national elections and that they should have elections in Dora as well to decide who will represent the Awakening there.
“Who fought Al Qaeda in Dora?” demanded Abu Yasser. “We all fought,” said Abu Husam. “No, you didn’t,” Abu Yasser snapped. “I fought and I won’t let somebody who I was protecting and was behind me come in front of me and say he fought. I was in the Army of the Mujahideen.”
Abu Husam stood up and accused Abu Salih of having been an Al Qaeda member. Abu Salih turned red and waved his arm over his head. “Nobody lies about Abu Salih!” he shouted. One of his companions jumped to his defense and explained that he belonged to the 1920 Revolution Brigades and was wanted by the Americans. “No, he wasn’t,” laughed Abu Husam. All the men spoke with respect of the resistance and jihad. To them this was merely a hudna (cease-fire) with the American occupation while they fought the Iranian enemy, meaning Iraq’s Shiites.
The men who fought Al Qaeda believed they deserved to be the new leaders. Abu Yusef explained that he had defended Dora’s Tawhid Mosque from the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi National Police. “I won’t let somebody who was behind me come in front of me,” he said. He was backed by Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s former rival and a former officer in Saddam’s feared intelligence service. Kashkul fought alongside several resistance groups in the area, and still clashed with his American paymasters over his hatred for the local INPs.
Abu Salih was forced to kiss Abu Husam, but in the end Abu Salih and his men, and not their rivals, left with the Awakening Council flag. They would be the new political bosses for their area. On the way back they listened to Bedouin music about Arabs standing together even when the whole world confronts them. Abu Salih recited the songs. In one of them a guy swore he would get in his GMC and use his PKC and marry an Iraqi woman.
The previous night Osama received a phone call from the Americans. They had decided to appoint him head of a new tribal advisory council, something Maliki had just created, even though the makeup of the councils was vague. Osama didn’t know he was even a candidate, and he was not sure he wanted the added responsibility, though he knew it would help him protect his men. He explained that he made good money as a KBR contractor and that his wife wanted him to quit this Awakening business. In December he only made one thousand dollars from the ISV contract, and in January he made two thousand dollars. It was not a lot, he explained. He was also increasingly frustrated with the Americans. They were one week late paying him, and his men were agitated. Some suspected that he had been paid but kept the money for himself. A few days earlier Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim’s men had opened fire on Osama’s neighborhood and beat some of his men with their rifles. When the Americans did nothing, Osama threatened to quit and withdraw all his men. He argued with Lieutenant Colonel Reineke. “Reineke keeps telling me Abdel Karim is a good guy, he is the government,” Osama said. “I said, ‘Fuck the government. If I leave Al Qaeda will take over Dora.’”
Amriya, in western Baghdad’s Rashid district, was one of the first neighborhoods to feel the full blast of civil war and mass population displacement. Long a resistance stronghold, it soon became as fearsome as Dora. The Samarra bombings of February 2006 accelerated this, as Shiites in Baghdad, particularly those in the Iraqi Security Forces who were linked to the Shiite militias, saw Amriya—with its large Sunni population, former links to the Baath Party, and current links to Al Qaeda along with Sunnis from Anbar—as a prime target for attack. The Sunnis, in turn, fought back ferociously. As it turned out, Amriya was the first place in Baghdad where the Awakening phenomenon of the Anbar was replicated. American collaboration with Sunni militiamen—many of whom were former resistance fighters—succeeded in radically changing the neighborhood.
Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile’s squadron had been based in the west of Rashid district since January 2006. He and his men were among the first squadrons to go through the newly created COIN Academy in Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad. “The week course was essentially a course in Galula 101,” he told me, in reference to the French theorist of counterinsurgency. “We used what we learned at Taji often in the months ahead. I never thought that more troops were needed, since I concluded early on that there were limits to what American combat power could accomplish and at some point Iraqis had to take over for the destiny of the country.”
Gentile had been leading counterinsurgency operations with a primary focus on transitioning security responsibilities to the Iraqi Security Forces. However, after the Samarra bombings, it became clear to him that their primary purpose was to try to arrest the violence and protect the local population.
Gentile began to grasp after the Samarra bombings that the orgy of violence unleashed by it was actually a civil war. “The Sunnis regarded the government as their mortal enemy,” he said, “and in many respects, they were correct. For the first half of 2006, when we were in West Rashid, we worked only with national police and the local police. After Samarra, within days, their links to Shiite militias and sectarian killings became clear. We did our best to curb this, but it was very difficult to do so.”
In June 2006 he moved up to northwestern Baghdad—principally Amriya, Ghazaliya, Shula, Mansour, Kadhimiyah, Khadra, FOB Justice—and took over from an infantry battalion from Tenth Mountain Division. “It was an exceptionally large area,” he said, “but I focused on Ghazaliya, Khadra, and Amriya, with the latter being the primary focus. This move was part of the Casey drawdown plan [General Casey’s plan to transition power to Iraqi Security Forces], which was in full swing until things fell apart in Baghdad in July 2006.”
The expanding sectarian warfare was made evident with the daily dumping of dead bodies on the streets of the district. The Iraqi army battalion commander who served with Gentile speculated that the bodies were Sunnis, killed elsewhere in Baghdad and then dumped on the streets of Amriya to intimidate the Sunnis there. “I saw it differently,” Gentile said. “They were mostly Shiites who were still living in or coming into Amriya, and the Sunnis killed them as a way of ‘cleansing’ their district. Any semblance of trust had broken down completely between Shiite and Sunni, and the Sunnis in Amriya, I believed, saw any remaining Shiite in the district as a threat and link to marauding Shiite militia that could still enter the district and kill, since they were aligned with Iraqi Security Forces.
“The Iraqi army battalion in Amriya had turned Route Cedar, the main market street, into a kinetic civil-war attack zone,” Gentile said. The Iraqi soldiers had two checkpoints on either end of the street and fighting outposts on roofs and inside buildings on nearly every block. The constant fighting, IEDs, suicide bombs, and car bombs had shut down all the businesses. Gentile thought that he could win “local hearts and minds” if he improved conditions on the road. He was authorized to remove the two checkpoints and the other outposts. He stationed one of his cavalry troops on the street and focused on reopening businesses. In mid-August 2006 he started building short concrete barriers—Jersey barriers, in American military parlance—around the entire district, with a single entry point run by the Iraqi army. “I initially started to build it in order to try and prevent Sunni insurgent infiltration into the district bringing in IED, car bomb materials, etc., from Ghazaliya to the north and Abu Ghraib to the west. But after it went up—especially the southern wall, which isolated Amriya from the Shiite-dominated West Rashid to the south of it—I found that the locals actually liked it because it prevented marauding Shiite militias from entering into it.” All of this led to a much-improved state of security for the local Sunnis, Gentile said, but the increased security for Sunnis made the area more lethal for the remaining Shiites because it gave the Sunni militias greater freedom of movement. They no longer had to fear Shiite militias.
This was the beginning of the massive population transfer: Sunnis from areas of Baghdad being taken over by Shiites were moving to Amriya. Any family moving out from Amriya was Shiite. “I knew it was going on, but there was no way to stop it,” Gentile said. “We tried through moral suasion, but the locals and their leaders denied to us that it was happening. We tried driving bans, but that became impractical. How does one stop a civil war at the barrel of a gun with only a seven-hundred-man cavalry squadron in a district of close to a hundred thousand people?”
I spoke to Gentile some time after his tour in Amriya. I was curious to know what difference the new counterinsurgency doctrine made. “People like Tom Ricks will tell you that during the surge, units operated differently and adopted new COIN tactics. That just did not happen. What was decisive and made the fundamental difference in Amriya was the co-opting of our former enemies—the non-Al Qaeda Sunni insurgents who became known as the SOI, the Sons of Iraq.”
Amriya came to be seen as a critical piece of terrain because it physically linked the western parts of Baghdad with eastern Anbar. It was also important because it was so close to the Baghdad International Airport and a relatively easy and safe trip for Sunni leaders coming back to Baghdad from the west. “But for the Sunnis in the area, after I built the wall around the place, and after we got the main market street back up and running, and after I established close operations with the Iraqi army battalion, it did actually get better,” Gentile says.
Gentile says he had enough troops to “secure Amriya” but that he was challenged by an enemy that was a mix of Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups. But since he did not have the Sons of Iraq on his watch—they would emerge later, after Gentile left Baghdad—he never had the local intelligence to discover who set off an IED or fired a sniper round. His efforts were also complicated by the fact that Sunnis were using their increased security to attack the remaining Shiites in the district. The Sunnis also saw the Iraqi army battalion that Gentile was partnered with as an enemy.
Although Gentile was in Baghdad before the surge, he insists he was using the COIN principle already and that every time he was visited by Admiral Giambastiani and Generals Abizaid, Casey, and Chiarelli, he briefed them on how he was using “clear, hold, and build.” “The notion that method started with the surge of troops in Baghdad is hokum,” he says.
The Iraq army battalion Gentile’s squadron partnered with in Amriya was “an exceptionally strong outfit,” he said. “The battalion commander, a Sunni and a professional army officer who served in Saddam Hussein’s army for twenty years prior, was highly competent, professional, and principled. Tactically the battalion was effective too: it could move, shoot, and communicate, and had competent leaders. Yet the problem with it was that aside from its battalion commander and a handful of soldiers, it was almost completely Shiite.” Gentile never believed that there were active links between this battalion and Shiite militias, unlike the police units he had worked with in West Rashid, where the links were clear. “But one could not get away from the fact that they were Shiite and when you boiled it all down with them, especially at times when they were angry over a killing or attack, they saw every Sunni resident in Amriya as their mortal enemy. How would a more robust MITT [military transition] team, more combined patrols with me, more parts for their Humvees, change that basic condition?”
Though Gentile was skeptical that COIN was a cure-all, he knew that he could not kill his way out of the problems he was facing in the district either, so he started fraternizing with local religious leaders, even those with strong links to insurgent groups. He met regularly with Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque, Sheikh Khalid of the Abbas Mosque, and the imam of the Hassanein Mosque. “I spent a lot of personal time with them, and I think it made a difference in terms of how we were perceived in the area,” he says. “I actually became close to them and considered them my friends.” He even visited two mosques—close to where his battalion was often pounded by IED strikes—that were considered to be strongly influenced by Al Qaeda and befriended Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque.
“Sheikh Walid and Sheikh Khalid both were extremely important to me and my squadron. I did not consider them anti-American at all. Both of them became key conduits for me for information in the area and in resolving problems.” Khalid’s influence and importance in the area became clear to Gentile. He spent many hours in discussion with Khalid, to the extent that Khalid began to start hinting to him that things were slowly changing. “It was becoming clear to the Sunnis in Baghdad that the Americans were finally starting to understand their position. He and Walid and I had agreed on the opening of an Amriya police station that would be manned by local Sunnis from Amriya,” Gentile said. The problem was getting this approved by the Shiite government. This plan was clearly a forerunner of what would become the Awakening.
In October 2006 Sheikh Khalid said something to Gentile that caught his attention at the time and that he has never forgotten. “For some reason I asked him about insurgent attacks in the area and about Al Qaeda,” Gentile said. “He then pulled me off to the side a bit, out of earshot range of his mosque guards, and my troops knew what to do by placing themselves between me and the imam and his guards. He then very breezily dismissed Al Qaeda as an important factor in the future of the area and the country. I thought that odd at the time, since AQI seemed to be behind so much of the violence. But it later occurred to me that what he was essentially saying and reflecting were the early and fundamental changes that were occurring in Anbar with the Awakening and his sense that it would very possibly be soon spreading to Baghdad.”
As it turned out, Sheikh Khalid was a key player in the eventual link of U.S. forces in Amriya with the Sons of Iraq. Gentile’s successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, commanded the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, in Amriya from November 2006 until January 2008. “Amriya was pretty violent when we got there, as was Khadra just to the north,” he told me. “Soon after we took over the entire Mansour Security District, which includes all of Mansour area except Ghazaliya, which 2-12 Cav was responsible for. Most of the violence seemed to be directed at the Iraqi Security Forces, especially the Iraqi police. They could not come into Amriya without getting attacked. A lot of violence was also directed at the populace, especially against the Shiites. Kidnapping was also common. The going rate for ransom was between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand dollars. Civil society had completely broken down. I think many people responded with random and vengeful violence. However, I also believe that JAM special groups working with elements within the Iraqi government were trying to push the Sunnis out of Baghdad. I also think that AQI and other extremist groups were trying to establish a Sunni enclave to stop the JAM encroachment.”
It was Kuehl’s first deployment in Iraq, but he was well schooled in counterinsurgency. He had written his master’s thesis on civilians on the battlefield in the Korean War and had studied Mao Zedong’s theories on guerrilla warfare. Just before taking command of the 1-5 Cav, he read Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam by Lieut. Col. John Nagl. Nagl had been his roommate at West Point and would go on to play a crucial role in writing the U.S. Army’s new manual on counterinsurgency. Nagl’s book emphasized the importance of the military becoming a learning organization, adapting to the needs of a different type of war. “Of course, prior to deployment we had a number of leader teaches and seminars to discuss the fight we were going into,” Kuehl said. “This study culminated with the COIN Academy in Taji, which I thought was an excellent course.”
The first large IED to hit one of Kuehl’s patrols occurred one February morning in Khadra. The IED was planted at an intersection and tore off the driver’s door. The driver lost both legs. After securing the site Kuehl took his patrol to a nearby street and started questioning locals. He talked to one man who asked him if the patrol was a combined one with the Iraqi National Police. “I told him it was not, it was a U.S.-only patrol. His response was a bit startling. He said, ‘That is not supposed to happen.’ I pressed him to explain. He just repeated that our patrols were not supposed to get attacked. He also asked why the INP observation post on a nearby bridge did not see the IED go in. It should have been able to. He was a bit upset himself, showing a piece of shrapnel that landed in his yard where his daughter was playing.”
Kuehl left him to see for himself, passing through the same intersection that had just been bombed. Just as he was looking up to see the window from the observation post that overlooked the intersection, his vehicle was hit by another IED. “It flattened a couple tires and took some chunks out of our windows, but everyone was okay. From this incident I realized that there were definitely different insurgent groups working in the area. The locals knew what was going on with at least one of these groups, and it sounded like they were not targeting U.S. troops. But this other group definitely was.” He did not know it then, but this was the start of Al Qaeda flexing its muscles in the area. They had been pushed out of other areas, like Haifa Street and Anbar, and were trying to take over Mansour. Compounding this was the influx of displaced people from Hurriya to the north and Amil and Jihad from the south. “Locals kept complaining that the violence was coming from people outside the area. We kept dismissing this, but to a large extent I think they were correct,” Kuehl said.
At the COIN Academy in October 2006, General Casey informed Kuehl and his team that the goal was to hand security in Baghdad over to the ISF by the summer of 2007 so that the Americans could depart as soon as possible. This was based on the not-unreasonable notion, advocated even by Centcom commander General Abizaid, that the American presence in Iraq was the cause of most of the violence in Iraq. But once in Baghdad, Kuehl was convinced that Casey’s goal was unrealistic because of the sectarian violence and the sectarian nature of the government and ISF. He began to focus on protecting the population, even before General Petraeus arrived and formalized the new approach.
Previous attempts had been made to rid Amriya of Al Qaeda, such as Operation Together Forward in August 2006 and Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 in April 2007. Yet in May 2007 Amriya was even more violent. According to Kuehl, previous operations had failed because of poor intelligence, which led to imprecise targeting. Once an area was cleared of Al Qaeda there were not enough troops to hold it, and Sunnis did not trust the ISF. During Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 Al Qaeda men fled or blended into the population, avoiding the operations. As a result of the Americans’ inability to provide security, they could not move on to rebuild the area. When Kuehl and his men changed their focus from handing over authority to the ISF and instead tried to protect the population, he said they began to see gains in security.
In January 2007 the Mahdi Army seized the Hurriya neighborhood and moved on to the Amil and Jihad districts. “We couldn’t do anything and the Iraqi Army chose not to do anything,” Kuehl later wrote. “Instead, we watched helplessly as thousands of Sunnis were forced out of their homes getting pushed into Mansour.” Sunni militias were forced to collaborate with Al Qaeda to protect their areas from the Mahdi army, but the Americans offered an alternative that, in the short term at least, proved more tempting. Kuehl hypothesized that Al Qaeda controlled Amriya but only as an active minority that intimidated the neutral majority. In February 2007 he began to have clandestine meetings with clerics in Amriya late at night. Sheikh Walid was already organizing against Al Qaeda, but he was not ready to act. That month Kuehl also met with community leaders and assured them of his commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and protecting Amriya from Shiite militias.
Kuehl inherited Gentile’s wall around Amriya, but it was too short and had a lot of holes in it. “We fought to keep it closed, and AQI fought to keep it open,” he said. “Our first casualty was a sergeant killed while trying to put one of these barriers back in place.” Kuehl spent a couple of days in personal reconnaissance figuring out how to get from Abu Ghraib to central Baghdad without running into a checkpoint. It was all too easy, he found. One evening he traced out this route to his boss, Colonel Burton. From there the brigade developed a plan to wall off a good portion of northwest Baghdad, starting with Route Sword, south of Ghazaliya. Then they built blast walls along the airport road. By June Amriya was closed up. “The final point was establishing the entry control points into Amriya,” he said. “I knew they would be targets, so I wanted to make it look formidable, like the Green Zone.”
A similar approach had proved useful in the rural Anbar province, which had been dominated by Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. American Special Forces reintroduced a tough police chief whose tribe was disliked and feared, and they built a vast earthen berm around the city, restricting all vehicles.
At first the locals of Amriya did not like it, “but they grew to appreciate the security that it helped to bring,” Kuehl said of the walls he built. “I especially had trouble with the shop owners at the entrance to Amriya. We were able to accommodate some of their concerns, but I left them up. I did want to open up Amriya to more vehicle traffic through the checkpoint, but I met resistance from many of the locals. This was not completely resolved before we left.”
The local police were also a hindrance to Kuehl’s ambitions to improve the security environment: they were, he said, “incompetent, poorly led, poorly trained, poorly equipped.” Stationed in Khadra, its leadership was Sunni and, to make things even more difficult, may have had Al Qaeda links. The lower ranks were filled by Shiites, generally from outside Baghdad. “No one was local, which was one of the biggest drawbacks to the police,” Kuehl said. “They pretty much spent most of their time in the station and collected reports and statements from people who came in. We would take them with us in patrols in Khadra, but they could not come into Amriya without getting shot at.”
The Iraqi National Police were another problem, Kuehl said, lacking strong leadership skills. “It was like having three hundred privates, no sergeants, and only a dozen officers. They were not equipped as well as the Iraqi Army, which was a challenge given the lethality of the environment. We conducted joint patrols with them, but their primary focus was on conducting checkpoints, which was a sore point with the locals.” The INPs were also known to do the sectarian bidding of their political superiors. Kuehl recalled being approached by a group of imams because ten Sunnis were suddenly detained after someone from the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry turned up at a couple of checkpoints with a list of people to detain. When Kuehl went to the local police headquarters to find out what was going on, no one could produce the list. Eventually Kuehl managed to get a copy of the names of all the men detained. He went to the holding cell and talked to each one. “A couple months after their arrest I inquired on their status,” Kuehl said. “It took over a week for someone to figure out that they were still being held. I finally was able to get their families to be able to see them. I suspect this was all sectarian-driven. They were then pushed up to the jail at FOB Justice, an ironic name, and were still being held when we left over six months later.”
The Iraqi army, Kuehl said, was the most competent of the security forces they worked with. Of the army battalions he worked with, Second Battalion, First Brigade, Sixth Division, was the most competent. But, he added, the battalion “went through a string of commanders, and their performance directly correlated with the quality of battalion commander. The first commander I worked with was Colonel Ahmed, a Sunni. Very competent, I really respected him. Although his formation was mostly Shiite, I think they respected him.” Ahmed was being targeted by Al Qaeda, though, and after his sons were attacked, he requested and received a transfer. “The guy who replaced him was basically honest but not a great commander. He was replaced in May by Colonel Sabah, who was previously in Ghazaliya. He had a terrible reputation among the Sunni population, and there was a lot of concern about him. He was basically competent, but he was ruthless and crooked. We suspected him of extortion, coercion, and rape. We got the reports on Sabah from people in Iraqi Family Village, which was just outside of Liberty. Sabah kept an apartment there. We got a lot of reports on him. Must caveat to say that none were proven, just lots of reports.” Another regarded him as “the worst Iraqi battalion commander I have ever seen. He clearly had a sectarian agenda and was implicated by locals in a weapons-selling scheme where he would sell weapons found in weapons caches, potentially back to the Shiite militias.” In contrast to Sabah, Lieutenant Wael, his replacement, was a true professional, according to Kuehl. “He was smart yet lacked the arrogance I saw in most Iraqi officers. Initially he was a bit wary about working with the SOI, but I think he quickly saw how effective they were. Wael was a solid officer and another Sunni, which was a plus to the area. I do not think Brigadier General Ghassan [a local Iraqi army commander in western Baghdad] liked him working so close with Abul Abed [the founder of the Sons of Iraq in Amriya], so he got transferred to Washash, and Lieutenant Hassan was brought in from there in December 2007, just before we left. Hassan was okay, but not as smart and creative as Wael.”
IN FEBRUARY 2007 there was an effort by the Iraqi Security Forces to go after some of the Sunni leadership in Mansour. In a forty-eight-hour period three of the top Sunnis Kuehl was working with were targeted by the Iraqi army. This included Adnan Dulaimi in Adil, a powerful politician belonging to the Iraqi Accord Front who lived along the border between Hateen and Yarmuk, and Sheikh Khalid in Amriya. Part of the problem with the politicians, as Kuehl recalled, was that they had well-armed security detachments and the Iraqi army was very suspicious of them. One night Kuehl had to position himself between Dulaimi’s security force and the army to prevent a confrontation. Soon after he was called to an incident at another politician’s location, where he kept him from getting arrested. Two days later the 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion raided Khalid’s mosque in Amriya.
After these incidents Kuehl met Ghassan and his commanders at his headquarters in the Green Zone. “I told them that I thought they needed to be a little more aware of the appearance of their actions to include excessive detentions and the targeting of these political figures. The commander responsible for Yarmuk took offense at my remarks and did not like me interfering with his operations. We got into a nice little shouting match, and he later stormed out. Ghassan did not appreciate this, and our relationship was never the same.”
Staff sergeant “Yosef ” (his preferred nickname) was an American soldier who served in the First ID, Second Brigade Reconnaissance Troop (Second BRT), which was outsourced to Kuehl’s 1-5 Cav. Under their platoon leader, Capt. Brian Weightman, the troop set up a joint security station in an abandoned shopping mall in the Adil neighborhood in February 2007, at a point where two freeways met close to Dulaimi’s home. Yosef worked with Dulaimi’s bodyguards, a variety of Iraqi Security Forces, and eventually with the Awakening group in Amriya.
On one occasion, Yosef recalled, he was on the roof of a police station in a Sunni neighborhood, talking with a police guard who spoke great English but initially didn’t want anything to do with him. Yosef managed to establish a rapport with him. The guard confided that every policeman at the station was off-duty Mahdi Army. This made sense to him.
On another day Yosef ’s patrol group heard a loud exchange of gunfire. They got a report that a police truck had been blown up on the ramp, just southwest of the mall they were patrolling. When Yosef’s men showed up, “the police were shooting the shit out of an apartment building.” Under a colonel’s direction, the police seemed to be systematically shooting along every story of the apartment complex, story by story. “He was standing out in the middle of the street, pointing and yelling to gun trucks that were more or less on line with one another, pumping the building full of rounds. When we asked him if he needed any help, he kind of blew us off,” Yosef said. When the group asked the colonel what the police were doing, the colonel reported they had taken fire from the building and were returning fire, but it seemed to Yosef’s men that they were just shooting the whole side of the building up.
“We inquired where he was taking fire from, and he answered with a kind of a grin and said that they had it under control,” Yosef said. This was at a time when the military were harping on Iraqi Security Forces taking responsibility, so Yosef ’s men left the scene, knowing there were probably no insurgents in the building.
Like Kuehl, Yosef was impressed by the professionalism and nonsectarianism he found among some who served in the Iraqi army. Yosef told me of a lieutenant called Mustafa, who epitomized this. He was, Yosef reported, a physical giant, with the physique and face of an old boxer: strong legs, big belly, broad shoulders, and a beat-up face with a crooked, mashed nose. He was a Sunni who had been in Iraqi Special Forces before the war. He spoke perfect English, but never around his men or other Iraqis. He carried a short AK-47 with a hundred-round drum.
“We patrolled with him on and off for a couple of months,” Yosef said. “One day he found something my whole platoon passed up: a nervous-looking taxi driver in a long line of cars waiting for gas, who had an IED initiator under his driver’s seat. Mustafa choke-slammed the poor dude with one hand and calmly restrained him under one of his heavy boots pressed down on the dude’s back.” His techniques in the neighborhood worked well—perhaps too well, Yosef suggested. Under Mustafa’s leadership the neighborhood had become relatively peaceful, but he wasn’t arresting enough people to satisfy his command. They had him moved into another neighborhood.
When Yosef next saw him, a few months later, he was further north, in a demilitarized zone between Shiite forces in Ghazaliya to the north and established Sunni forces in the south. Yosef was with his boss, Captain Weightman, when they joined Mustafa in his office, a barren room in a large house on a block of other large houses looking north from Mansour. He told them that his name had been leaked to some Al Qaeda forces near his home, and they had kidnapped his brother and tortured him extensively to get to him. “He showed us the pictures of his brother’s back with lashings and his brother’s battered face,” Yosef said. “In the end they accepted a ransom from Mustafa for his brother. I think the amount was ten thousand dollars.” Mustafa told them that when his command had moved him up to the neighborhood, they removed all of his Humvees, so he had to patrol his neighborhood on foot. “It was obvious that his good intentions weren’t appreciated by his command. But Mustafa didn’t hide, and he was out on foot with his men every day,” Yosef said. Observed Weightman, “We worked well together, and he genuinely tried to help the people of the areas he was assigned to. He was not sectarian. He couldn’t get promoted above second lieutenant.”
ONE DAY, EARLY ON in their deployment, Yosef and his men were the first to the scene of a devastating vehicle-borne IED strike on an army checkpoint at the intersection of what the Americans called Phone Card Road and Route Huskies, just southeast of Adil. The blast was so large that it destroyed two Humvees, took the front off three stories of two buildings, and sent another Humvee deep into the coffee shop in the same building. The planners of the VBIED had timed it to explode as the army unit was changing guard. Seventeen soldiers were killed. Yosef discovered that that the son of Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi was a VBIED builder in the area of the bombing and was suspected of being involved.
Dulaimi was the leader of the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament at the time. He had been living in Hurriya but had left—along with thousands of other Sunnis—because of Mahdi Army intimidation and killings of Sunnis, and moved to Adel. Before Kuehl’s company established a combat outpost in Adel, Dulaimi’s thugs prevented sectarian killings of Sunnis in the area by their mere presence. His house—modest by an Iraqi politician’s standards, protected by low concrete barriers, with a small yard in the front—sat in the center of the neighborhood and provided a good view of the area.
At this time Kuehl’s company was stretched thin and thought Dulaimi could be co-opted because of his participation in government. “We just couldn’t be there all the time with such a large area, having only three platoons, and the active portion of the insurgency that was combating our troop in Jamia.” But Dulaimi was known, in the words of an American major, to be a “sleazeball,” even though Kuehl’s company had no specific evidence to detain him. “Even if we did, politicians had complete immunity with respect to U.S. forces. We weren’t allowed to search his house,” the major said.
Dulaimi’s compound was right down the street from the joint security station established at the Adil mall. It was there that Yosef tried to establish a relationship with the guards stationed outside the compound. Yosef ’s company had moved into the deserted five-story mall with the hesitant approval of Dulaimi, who remembered the help Weightman’s platoon had offered a few months earlier when they responded to a firefight on his street between Mahdi Army forces and Dulaimi’s guards and helped repel the Mahdi Army.
Soon after they were settled at the new joint security station Yosef was out patrolling with Weightman in a convoy of four Humvees when Uday, Dulaimi’s head bodyguard, requested a meeting. At the time Dulaimi was having trouble with the Iraqi police patrolling the neighborhood. There were accusations from the police that Dulaimi was harboring insurgents among his staff and that his family members were attacking police checkpoints and patrols. However, there were also allegations that the police were behaving aggressively toward Dulaimi’s neighbors and arresting innocent people.
During the conversation with Weightman, Uday became angry and stated, “If by the next night, you don’t convince the IP to get out of the neighborhood, then all you have done here will be ruined!” Weightman’s response was measured and without anger. “I think this impressed Uday. Even though Uday had pressure on him from the extremists among his ranks to go to war with the Americans living in their neighborhood as well as to continue their open war with the Iraqi Security Forces, Captain Weightman’s response diffused the situation, and we ended up having a relatively safe, although sometimes rocky, working relationship with Uday and Dulaimi’s compound security forces.”
One day Yosef, who was building a rapport with Uday, accompanied him as his guard and escort on a visit to a prison. While there he witnessed one of the most disturbing manifestations of sectarianism when he realized that 90 percent of those jailed were Sunni. The prison was so full, Yosef speculated, because the police “had rounded up every male in the neighborhood of fighting age.” Uday was using the cover story that he was visiting the prison as a humanitarian observer. In reality, Yosef noted to himself, “he’s just trying to track down his brother and the other eight members of Dulaimi’s bodyguards who’ve been arrested and lost in the system.”
The prison was a vision of bedlam. The cells were so crowded that half the prisoners had to stand while the other half sat or lay down. The paperwork documenting the accusations against some of the prisoners was said to be lost. Other prisoners had been in jail for up to six months without a trial. The legal system was swamped. Sexually transmitted diseases were rampant, often spread by the guards. Guards were providing condoms and medical care to the detainees only if the detainees either paid them money or submitted sexually. In his notes from his visit, Yosef observed, “I don’t care if 90% of those Sunnis are Al Qaeda. When all of the guards are Shiite, and most of those Shiites are in the Mahdi Army, it gets ugly.”
“There are reports of released prisoners mysteriously dying shortly after their release, perhaps by poisoning,” Yosef recorded in his notes. “Some prisoners’ records show ‘transferred’ next to their name, but no mention where to. In-processing records are recorded in a book, and inaccessible to public. Once they have a trial they are recorded into a data base and that is accessible to the public. This means that when they get arrested, they virtually disappear from their family and friends.”
There were three big rooms where the prisoners were crammed in like slaves. Yosef noticed some of the guards silencing the prisoners when Uday came by. So when they went to the maximum-security wing, “with its short dead-end corridors and lazy guards,” Yosef and two fellow soldiers filled the doorway and spoke loudly so Uday could discreetly ask questions and take notes about the guards’ abuses. “The guards finally caught on after a couple of wings, but we were late for Uday’s next meeting, so we took off,” Yosef said.
CAPT. BRENDAN GALLAGHER initially served in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra, which was where Kuehl initially set up his first combat outpost alongside the Iraqi police. “In April and May 2007 at our first combat outpost—the Khadra police station—we would have IEDs hit us as soon as we left the main gate,” Gallagher said. This happened repeatedly over the course of weeks. The IEDs would strike them within one hundred meters of a local police defensive position. “The police on guard should have been able to see the IEDs being emplaced,” he said. “They were in plain view of his position. This was infuriating to me, because it seemed so evident that at least some of the guards were in collusion.”
When Gallagher confronted the police chain of command, they were generally dismissive of his concerns. He began to suspect that they were either incompetent or collaborating with insurgents. “In retrospect, I believe some of them were probably being pressured by AQI to keep quiet and passively let us get attacked,” Gallagher said. Soon after that, he decided to move his company’s combat outpost to a different part of Khadra, co-located with 2/5/2 National Police. “When I told the local police I had decided to move, they practically begged us to stay,” he said, but by that point he had lost confidence in them.
A month later Gallagher’s company was reassigned to Amriya. Most residents there thought that the Shiite-dominated government was conspiring against them, intentionally denying basic services to an area dominated by Sunnis. “There appeared to be a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this,” Gallagher said. They heard reports that the national police or the army was forcibly removing people from their homes because the inhabitants were Sunni.
By early 2007, Khadra and Amriya were overwhelmingly Sunni, yet the Khadra police had Shiites throughout their ranks. “This helped create a significant credibility gap with the Sunni population,” Gallagher said. “If the police had been exceedingly competent they might have been able to overcome that obstacle, but that was hardly the case.” In early 2007, the Khadra police essentially refused to patrol on their own because they were prime targets for the insurgents. “Police inherently symbolize stability and order, and for that reason Al Qaeda wanted them dead. The fact that that many of these IPs were Shiites only made things even more dangerous for them,” Gallagher said.
To make matters worse, their vehicles had almost no armor. Therefore the police tended to stay in their headquarters at the center of Khadra. “We tried to get them to investigate murders and other crimes that were happening on a regular basis, but it was like pulling teeth to get them to leave their HQ building. They would only leave the police station when we personally escorted them, and even then they were little value-added,” Gallagher said.
“There was serious sectarianism and collaboration throughout some sectors of the *ISF,” he said. “However, there were also many good and honest Iraqi soldiers and policemen who were doing the best they could. The challenge was determining who was who. In some ways it was like trying to play poker with many different players at the table, all with varying motives (some good, some not so good), and we were trying to figure out what was going on. But unlike poker, this was not a game—lives were on the line.”
As had been the case with Lieutenant Mustafa, some of the most effective people working in the Iraqi Security Forces could be punished by their superiors, or face the wrath of insurgents, if they seemed to be working too well with the Americans. “One of the most effective 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion commanders had his family threatened,” Gallagher recalled. “He was forced to leave his post and depart the area as a result. This was a setback for us, because he was extremely competent, impartial, and nonsectarian. He was only able to stay in command for a relatively short duration.”
One Iraqi army commander that Gallagher met with, who was responsible for the Hurriya and Adil neighborhoods at the time, admitted that if it came down to fighting for their country or the Mahdi Army, most of his soldiers would fight for the Mahdi Army. He was a Sunni commander. People were extremely fearful that the security forces were collaborating with Mahdi Army operatives to carry out assassinations, either by letting them through checkpoints or providing information or other assistance.
The process of sectarian cleansing started before the 1-5 Cav got on the ground in Amriya, Gallagher told me. “Within the first few months of our deployment, virtually all of the Shiites had effectively been driven out or killed,” he said. “Once the Sunni volunteers stood up, things eventually started to calm down in our area of operations.”
The Iraqi Security Forces maintained checkpoints outside Amriya to avoid being attacked. Consequently, the walls that trapped Al Qaeda in Amriya also meant they focused their attacks on the Americans, since they were deprived of other targets. Kuehl moved forces from elsewhere in Mansour to focus on Amriya, and he asked for more troops, which allowed for more patrolling. He also increased the concrete fortifications around Amriya and imposed curfews and bans on vehicles.
But just as he was trying to establish a permanent combat outpost in Amriya, close to the Maluki Mosque, an IED attack on May 19, 2007, killed six of his soldiers and one interpreter. Kuehl called Sheikh Walid that night and demanded his help in getting rid of Al Qaeda. He was convinced that the sheikhs of Amriya knew who the Al Qaeda men were but were too scared to act. In the past American soldiers had retaliated brutally after suffering such losses, and there were many soldiers who wanted to “do a Falluja” and respond with extreme violence. But Kuehl restrained them. Locals, also expecting the Americans to “do a Falluja,” were apparently impressed when they didn’t. Sheikh Khalid later said that this restraint was a key factor convincing locals of the Americans’ good will.
According to Kuehl, the Awakening men in Amriya approached him first. “I think it was something the Sunni leadership had been setting up for some time, and I had been encouraging them to work with us,” he said. “I just did not think it would happen in this way. I believe many of them were former insurgents. Looking back, I think one of the imams was hinting at it for a while but was a bit secretive in our discussions. I figured that there were things going on in the background that I could not see. Sheikh Walid called me on the night of May 29 to tell me they would attack Al Qaeda the next day. We had a heated discussion for about twenty minutes. I was trying to convince him to give us the intel and let us take care of it. He insisted that they had to do it themselves.”
Kuehl warned him that if they threatened American soldiers or civilians in any of their operations, they would be shot; then he ordered his men to back off and let events transpire. The next night Sheikh Walid called Kuehl up to tell him of their success, and the next day Al Qaeda responded.
“They were pretty cocky after the initial success, but Al Qaeda came after them hard on the second day, which is when they asked for my help.” The Americans responded quickly, driving to the Fardus Mosque to back up the rebels. Dead and wounded fighters lay sprawled in the mosque. The Americans also lost one soldier in the battle.
In a letter sent home to family and friends later that year, Staff Sergeant Yosef wrote, almost wistfully, of the time in May 2007 when Abul Abed, a charismatic and enigmatic Sunni militia leader previously unknown to the Americans, entered their midst. “Abul Abed saw some Al Qaeda men placing a roadside bomb on the side of the road near his house,” Yosef wrote. “He confronted them and asked why they were placing it so close to his house. Adul Abed told them, ‘That is a big bomb. It could kill me and my family.’ Their reply? ‘It’s okay if you die. This is jihad.’ Abul Abed walked directly back into his house and did what I hope any of us would have done under the same circumstances: he grabbed his AK-47, walked back outside, and shot the three men to death in his front yard.”
Abul Abed was a former officer in Saddam’s army. “After that event, he feared for his life,” Yosef wrote. “He did have connections though, useful connections, connections with guns. They consisted of Iraqi Sunni men, who up until then, had been fighting ‘American invaders.’”
Yosef empathized with these men, even though some of them had fought in Falluja against comrades in Yosef’s platoon. “Last May these local men from Amriya decided that they couldn’t live with Al Qaeda anymore,” Yosef wrote, “and since they couldn’t rely on the Shia-run government for help, they called us and literally asked us if we would allow them to start a war against Al Qaeda. We said yes. When my platoon first got the word that we had been selected to work with the ‘Freedom Fighters’ of Amriya, we couldn’t believe it. We had just finished a five-month mission living out of a four-story abandoned mall at the intersection of two highways in Western Baghdad. We were exhausted, and I remember one of my Army friends saying, ‘Great, now we’re going to train more terrorists.’”
In early June Yosef ’s platoon went into Amriya for the first time. They took five Humvees and about twenty men. “So, there we were driving slowly down a narrow Amriya neighborhood road, trash and rubble on either side,” Yosef wrote. “No one was around. We made it without incident to the temporary headquarters of the AFF [Amriya Freedom Fighters] at an abandoned school. A few of their men met us at the gate. They all had guns. We really didn’t know what to expect. We left our Humvees with drivers and gunners in them. We had about ten dismounted soldiers when we went inside the compound.”
The school, as Yosef describes it, was situated in the middle of a fairly upscale Iraqi neighborhood, complete with the familiar abandoned two-story houses, electrical wires bunched together and hanging low from telephone poles, and trash on the side of the streets. Yosef ’s company commander, his interpreter, and two other soldiers went into the main meeting room with Abul Abed, the AFF leader. Yosef, his platoon leader and his section sergeant walked into a room next to the main meeting room.
“At the end of an outer corridor was Abul Abed’s office, one door short of his office was another classroom with some sofas, and tables. Both rooms had fans, and since it was the beginning of June, CPT Weightman, SSG Kirk, and I waited in the other room while CPT Mitchell and Abul Abed introduced themselves, and started planning. It was in this other room, short of Abul Abed’s office, where I met Ali, and Muhamad. Ali was younger than me, in his early twenties—a short skinny dude, with thick well kept hair, sly eyes and a smile that probably drove women wild. He wore a t-shirt, sweat pants, and interestingly enough had a hand grenade in his pocket.
“Muhamad on the other hand was in his late teens, tall, with a sharp strong jaw, and big eyes. He wore a tank-top, had on shorts and carried a thick sheep herding stick. He too had a grin on his face, and unlike Ali, Muhamad could speak English. They seemed comfortable enough with us, and so we started joking around with them. We already had our helmets off, which was disarming in and of itself. But something was bothering me. The hand grenade that Ali had in his sweat pants pocket, he kept on taking it out and rolling it around in his hands. I, being the most uptight of the three Americans, was kind of worried and asked if Ali would let me see the hand grenade. He seemed slightly taken aback by my worry, but he handed it to me none-the-less. I looked at it. Sure enough it was a Russian made fragmentation grenade, slightly less powerful than the American made ones, but still deadly especially in a confined space such as this room. I showed it to CPT Weightman, who was much less impressed with it and told me to give it back to Ali. I did, and we continued our light hearted exchange of jokes and jabs.
Mitchell picked up on Yosef’s ability to build a rapport with Iraqis early and assigned him to gain intelligence on the different men in Abul Abed’s group. Yosef did this by hanging out with them whenever they were there. Some of the younger AFF, like Muhamad, still attended school, and then patrolled with the AFF when they were out of school. The relationship, as Yosef reported, developed from caution to common respect and friendship. “Watching Abul Abed lead his men was educational. It showed me the reality of the old saying, ‘A company is the long shadow of a single man.’ They were professional because he was professional. If there were lapses in some of his soldiers’ performance, it was because they were moonlighting as AFF, when in fact they worked for other forces in the neighborhood.”
A few months later Al Qaeda came for Muhamad at his high school. They raided his school while he was in class, bribed the school guards and took him away from his classmates. They kidnapped him, kept him for the afternoon, and tortured him. They ended up beheading him and leaving his head in a tree. Two years later, when I spoke to Sergeant Yosef about this, his anger was still raw. In a note to his family, soon after Muhamad’s death, he wrote: “ I feel slightly guilty for Muhamad’s death. I thought at the time, and still think that there was an Al Qaeda spy within the AFF who fingered Muhamad. Perhaps by befriending Muhamad, and encouraging him to be friendly with me I effectively made him a target. Perhaps they kidnapped him out from his high school and beheaded him, specifically so that other young AFF would understand that being friends with American soldiers was a sin punishable by death. Any fear Al Qaeda was attempting to instill in the AFF was trumped though by Abul Abed’s swift vengeance. I don’t want to be too specific, but I’ll say this, Mohamed’s death was avenged at least 4-fold within a day. The practical result of this brought confidence back to the AFF as quickly as it had wavered.”
AFTER THE INITIAL SUCCESS of establishing Abul Abed and his men, Kuehl found that the harder part was working out a longer-range partnership and then maintaining it. “There were a couple of things I wanted to ensure,” he told me. “First, we had to work with the Iraqi army. Second, I wanted to have some civil control of this movement. Getting the Iraqi army on board was the first challenge. I met with Brigadier General Ghassan for about two hours trying to convince him this was a good idea. He had already helped by providing Abul Abed’s men ammunition, but he was a bit hesitant to get directly involved. He finally agreed to meet with Abul Abed, who was cooling his heels outside along with another leader. This was probably the most important negotiation I ever had to do.”
“I don’t think Abul Abed and the Iraqi army relationship was ever good,” Sergeant Yosef added. “I remember Colonel Sabah, who Abul Abed was supposed to work with. The first time I saw them butt heads was one night when the AFF and the Iraqi army were supposed to do a patrol together. Colonel Sabah wanted to head the patrol, with the AFF acting as neighborhood advisers. Abul Abed refused. He wanted the patrol to be conducted by AFF, with the Iraqi army acting as observers, because there had been accusations by the neighborhood residents that the Iraqi army had been too aggressive. The other issue was that Colonel Sabah didn’t want Abul Abed on the ground with his men. Colonel Sabah wanted to be in command of all the men, both Iraqi army and AFF.”
This argument took place in Abul Abed’s office at AFF HQ. Colonel Sabah had two other officers with him, one younger and one very gray one, who would take turns trying to persuade Abul Abed to play by their rules. Abul Abed’s skill as debater was apparently brilliant, said Yosef. He would listen to Colonel Sabah and officers yell until they were exhausted, and then he would quickly answer with sharp responses.
“After about fifteen minutes, the oldest of the three Iraqi army officers basically gave up,” Yosef reported. “He had a look on his face like, ‘This really isn’t my fight.’ Then the younger one slowly sputtered out of steam. It was obvious that this Iraqi army officer was not very intelligent. Abul Abed really didn’t even acknowledge him. Colonel Sabah ended up nudging him out of the argument. Finally, it was Colonel Sabah against Abul Abed. Colonel Sabah laid all his cards down with what he thought was the final blow. He said the following, and I remember because I asked my interpreter what he said: ‘If you don’t patrol under my command, then you will be considered an enemy force, and I will arrest you and your men.’ Abul Abed stood there for a minute thinking, then took his pistol belt off and threw it into his closet and said, ‘Fine, if I have to patrol under your command or else get arrested if I command my patrol, then I will not patrol, and neither will my men. You are on your own,’ and then he walked to the door, as the three Iraqi army officers stood there dumbfounded, and yelled to his men, ‘No one is going anywhere tonight!’ Colonel Sabah and his guys stormed out infuriated, and some heated words were said with lots of pointing and angry eyes.
“Abul Abed was obviously furious. But he knew that Colonel Sabah wouldn’t do the patrol alone. Abul Abed knew where the enemy forces were hiding. It was his AFF intelligence on Amriya that had gathered the Iraqi army and even the Americans here tonight. If Abul Abed didn’t go out, then the Iraqi army would be blind. Colonel Sabah came back, he compromised, and said that it would be a joint command that night. During the patrol, if I remember correctly, the AFF and the Iraqi army men worked well together, but the rift between Abul Abed and Colonel Sabah grew greater as the night went on. I was on patrol so I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I remember hearing afterward that they continued to argue throughout the patrol. It makes sense, too. Abul Abed was about Colonel Sabah’s age, and Abul Abed was an officer under Saddam. These two men should have been peers in the same army, but one was excluded from the mainstream security forces, and the other was not.”
The relationship between the Iraqi army and Abul Abed’s Awakening group was always contentious, especially at the leadership level. Gallagher said that they always had to a walk a tightrope to maintain the support of the Iraqi army. There was one incident that nearly shut down the whole effort. Four bodies had been found in the southeast corner of Amriya. Gallagher was in Sabah’s office at the time, and Sabah was convinced that Abul Abed was behind it. This was on a day when a number of local contractors had been invited to Abul Abed’s HQ to start generating projects to repair the infrastructure and get some money flowing in the community.
When Sabah arrived at Abul Abed’s headquarters, he started shouting at the Fursan (as the AFF were called, taking their name from the Arabic word for “knights”) while ten of his security detachment formed a tight, protective circle around him. Sabah’s men had weapons drawn on the Fursan, and the Fursan had weapons drawn on them. Gallagher managed to get into the center of his tight circle with his interpreter. “Sabah was yelling that there was only one army in Amriya and that it was either Abul Abed or him. It turns out that some knucklehead in the Fursan had refused Sabah’s security detachment entry into the HQ building.”
Yosef was also present, filming with his video camera. “I guess the day before the IA wouldn’t let one of Abul Abed’s food trucks into Amriya and then called the AFF ‘sons of animals.’ When the Iraqi army showed up at the AFF HQ, Abu Bilal, one of Abed’s lieutenants, ordered his men to get their guns and grenades and get ready for a fight, and they all started running out to the gate with their AK-47s.”
Abu Bilal apparently was in a terrible mood. His brothers had just been kidnapped by Al Qaeda. But when Abul Abed emerged from his building, he was furious as he tried to stand down his men, especially with Abu Bilal. “I set my camera on the gate’s wall and videotaped the whole thing,” Yosef noted later. “Major Daniels came running out into the street from his meeting with Abul Abed, without any armor or helmet, just sunglasses. He and his men positioned themselves between the IA trucks and the AFF at the gate. It was a zoo. Finally, the IA left. Luckily, before I turned my camera off, I recorded Abu Bilal striding out after them, with his shirt untucked. His shirt is never untucked. In the video, it’s apparent he’s got multiple weapons under his shirt. I wonder if he ever caught up with the IA patrol and took some pop shots at them.”
“This incident,” Gallagher said, “set us way back, and I spent the next forty-eight hours dealing with the fallout. From this incident we hammered out a written agreement between us, the Iraqi army, and the Fursan. While it put more restrictions on the Fursan, they were generally positive and a step toward rule of law. It also placed more emphasis on the Iraqi army to conduct joint operations with the Fursan.”
Kuehl’s own relationship with the Awakening men in his area was tentative at first, but eventually they grew close. “For a long time I was not sure how far I could trust Abul Abed,” he said. “I knew he was a bit of a hothead. Some members of the group were just thugs. I believe some were brought in by Abul Abed and Sheikh Khalid to gain local political support for the movement. There were times where I had to discipline members of the group. At one point I arrested one of the leaders of one of the factions. I never trusted the guy because we suspected him of pushing people out of homes and stealing their furniture. I had even detained him and three of his brothers during an operation just before the Fursan came forward. One brother we kept, the others we released due to lack of evidence. I ended up detaining this guy after we connected him to an attack on Abul Abed and excessive use of force. I think we also got some other incriminating evidence on him.”
Over time Kuehl developed closer relationships with the Awakening men at his level and also at subordinate levels. Abed’s men were brought into the planning and targeting process along with the Iraqi army. “In a sense, each of us gave legitimacy to the other,” Kuehl said. “Not everyone trusted the Fursan, nor did everyone trust us or the IA. When we did operations together, complaints went down.” Initially Abed’s men, who could move easily within the population and were not burdened with heavy equipment, conducted missions with U.S. oversight. They identified five targets on their first mission. Kuehl provided an outer cordon with his D Company, consisting of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. These vehicles were fitted with great optics so they could keep a close eye on what was going on, even at night.
Abul Abed and his men went in and captured their five targets without firing a shot. They questioned them and turned two over to Kuehl. “They wanted to release the other three, which is an interesting part of this,” Kuehl said. “In our negotiations Sheikh Khalid asked for the ability to give amnesty. He said many of the AQI fighters were the young boys of the community. He wanted to release them after they signed an oath to not fight for Al Qaeda and for their parents to also sign for them. I thought this was a great idea and agreed. I think this did a lot to undermine AQI’s base.”
The other part of destroying Al Qaeda involved local civil oversight, which was also risky. Kuehl saw Sheikh Khalid as the most legitimate local leader. The Neighborhood Advisory Council was seen to be ineffective and had links with AQI and corruption. On the other hand, Kuehl suggests, Sheikh Khalid seemed to be respected by many in the community. Sheikh Khalid was a strong critic of the Maliki government. He shared the perception with many in Amriya that the Maliki government was intentionally denying services to Sunni areas. He was fairly soft-spoken, but despite his quiet exterior he had strong opinions and definite influence in the community.
Sheikh Khalid’s mosque was located next door to Gallagher’s company’s combat outpost, which helped facilitate communication. He would provide recommendations to Gallagher on how the locations of concrete barriers should be less obtrusive to the local pedestrian traffic, particularly for Iraqi children who walked to the nearby school. “We therefore adjusted the barrier locations to meet his request. I believe following through on such reasonable requests helped sustain a positive working relationship, which in turn helped sustain our credibility and respect in the area,” Gallagher said.
Abul Abed seemed to respect Khalid. “I tried to get Khalid to sign the security contract we were establishing, but he kept delaying,” Kuehl said. “He never said no, but there was always some new demand. I think he was also getting pressure from other people behind the scenes. After months of haggling I finally made the decision to have Abul Abed sign the contract. In retrospect, I think Khalid wanted to keep out of direct involvement. Still, I thought it important that we get some voice of the people. We asked Khalid to organize the local leaders within the community. He formed a local council from the community to include tribal leaders, former military officers, and other professionals. He took great risk in doing this since it would have no official government legitimacy. However, he was politically connected, and I think he did a great job of adding legitimacy to the effort. One group that never really got on board was the Iraqi Islamic Party. They were jealous of the power that this movement was gaining, and I think they saw it as a threat.”
“Money was not the primary motivator for Abul Abed,” Kuehl later wrote, noting that Abed’s men were not paid for the first three months. When they did get paid in September 2007, Kuehl described the sum as a “pittance” compared with the risk they were taking, much less than what Al Qaeda were paying their men. “[Abed] was driven by a desire to protect his family and bring stability to the Sunni areas. While he was very much against [the Mahdi Army], I would not label him as sectarian. Several of his closest aides were Shiites. I would classify him as a nationalist if anything.”
Over time restrictions had to be put on the Fursan’s operations. All operations had to be conducted with the Iraqi army. The problem was that the army had difficulty keeping pace with the Fursan. But multiple security outposts were established throughout Amriya with the Fursan, protecting key infrastructure in the community. “Between their outposts, the Iraqi army outposts, and our two combat operation posts, you could not move two blocks in Amriya without running into someone involved in security,” Kuehl said. “Violence dropped significantly.”
With Abul Abed’s intelligence as well as information coming from other sources, Kuehl was able to map out the insurgent network. “The information provided by Abul Abed and his men allowed us to target much more accurately,” he said. “We had names and in some cases pictures. We posted wanted posters that proved very effective. Tips from locals increased significantly. We hit Al Qaeda pretty hard, detaining some, killing others. Those that remained fled. Civilian deaths pretty much ceased.”
Other than a couple found dead in their home in August, Amriya did not have any other murders until Christmas Day. IED attacks dropped off completely, as did small-arms fire and indirect-fire attacks. The last IED, a deep buried one that went off on August 6, ended up killing the driver of a Bradley. Within thirty-six hours of the attack, Abul Abed and his men were able to determine that it had been carried out by a cell from an insurgent group that was brought into Amriya for a joint operation. “We had never been able to do this before,” Kuehl said.
Like many I spoke to, Gallagher characterized the initial relationship between the Americans and the Fursan as tenuous; many U.S. soldiers were skeptical of working with men who had been their enemy. “Some of the volunteers had almost certainly been emplacing IEDs against my soldiers just a few months earlier,” he said. But trust was built over time. Gallagher described a turning point for him and his men: “We were conducting a company cordon and search in northeastern Amriya, Mahala 630. We received a report that there was an IED just a few meters from one of our Bradleys on an exterior blocking position. I began to call up EOD [Explosive Ordinance Disposal] to destroy it,” Gallagher recalled. But before anyone could react, one of the new volunteers, a daring young nineteen-year-old named Ali, got out his small pocketknife, walked over to the location, unearthed the IED with his bare hands, and disconnected it. “He came back with a smug look of contentment on his face. To this day, this still strikes me as fairly crazy. Obviously he knew what he was doing, but at the same time it was extremely reckless. Events like this demonstrated that the volunteers were technically competent. It also demonstrated that they were not afraid to risk their lives to defeat AQI and gain our confidence.”
But there were strains and rivalries within Abul Abed’s organization. One of his lieutenants, Abu Sayf, operated mainly in Mahala 634. Gallagher’s team began hearing reports that he was acting far too aggressively. He was alleged to have been stealing people’s belongings, stealing cars, forcing people from their homes. This culminated in a brief power struggle with Abul Abed in September and October. “One day Abu Sayf pulled me aside at his operational post and started making wild accusations against Abul Abed. His underlying implication was clear, that Abul Abed needed to go away and he should be the rightful leader of the volunteer organization. He asked me not to tell anyone about what he had just told me. However I felt I could not keep that a secret from my battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl, so I informed him.” The battalion was able to substantiate the rumors that Abu Sayf was corrupt and had been stealing property. His suggestion that he should replace Abul Abed caused him to lose even more credibility. “We rapidly detained him,” Gallagher said, “and Abul Abed kicked him out of his organization.” Some of Abu Sayf’s comrades, led principally by his brother, threatened to quit if he was not released. The brother was subsequently expelled from the organization.
KUEHL BELIEVED THAT Abul Abed was controversial because he was a charismatic leader who inspired others. “He had kind of a Robin Hood reputation within the populace and became quite popular in a short period of time. I think his rise in popularity was seen as a political threat both by the government and by the Iraqi Islamic Party. Overall he did pretty well with the press. Part of the controversy is his shadowy past. I know he was in the Iraqi army before the war—still not sure what rank, either major or captain. He claims to have been a sniper during Desert Storm. I believe he was in intelligence. His family lived in Baghdad and owned some bakeries. The biggest thing that concerned me about his behavior was his volatile temper and his violent tendencies. He used to beat his subordinates when they crossed him.”
The Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad wrote an article about his time with Abul Abed. “I think Ghaith embellished a bit, but the behavior he describes was a concern for me,” Kuehl said. “We got a lot of reports about his behavior, and it is true we were not with him 24/7. But we were with him a lot, and he came to rely on our presence to ensure that he was not targeted by the government. In some cases we could deny reports because I had someone with him at the time he allegedly did something. In general his behavior was pretty consistent with what I saw from IA officers. I saw him on several occasions work to get Shiite families back into Amriya. Over time I think he learned that he had to tone down his image, since he had become a public figure. I think he grew with the increasing responsibility he gained from leading a large organization.”
In late July 2007 a captain serving under Kuehl wrote to his father, reporting that within two months the Fursan had virtually eliminated Al Qaeda from Amriya—an area, as the captain observed, that had been declared “the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq” two months earlier. “These guys are from the neighborhoods, they know the people, and they are primarily concerned with making their neighborhoods safe again,” the captain wrote. “They conduct joint operations with us and the Iraqi Army. Unlike the IA, these guys are actually a pleasure to work with. Most of them are ex-military from the Saddam era and several are former captains, majors, or lieutenants. They have discipline and know how to plan and execute a mission. The month before the movement started, we lost fourteen American soldiers in Amriya. In the two months that the movement has been going, we have lost zero American soldiers in Amriya.”
The captain noted that people all the way up the chain of command had visited to see the project. Everyone realized the strategic importance of the Fursan, even the Maliki government, which was wary of the Sunni militias. But when Fursan members were seriously injured, their options were limited: “They are paying a heavy burden for their relentless pursuit of AQIZ,” the captain said, using a common acronym for Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq. “We can only treat them at U.S. facilities if they are in danger of losing life, limb, or eyesight. Otherwise, they must be treated at an Iraqi facility. This works just fine for the ISF, which are predominantly Shia. The Ministry of Health is dominated by the Sadrists. I have personally been in the three hospitals that these guys would be treated at and all have pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr hanging on the walls. If I send my Freedom Fighters to these hospitals, they will not last a day. Obviously, my only option to maintain the fighting force is to get these guys seen by Americans. To this point, we’ve been unable to provide these guys much in the way of legitimacy, money, or weapons, but we have been able to care for them. They are doing the work that we could not do and they are paying the price for it. Knowing that they will be properly treated if they get injured is an incredible morale boost for them, not unlike any warrior. I can’t emphasize enough how this whole endeavor could go either way at this point. In three years of doing this, this is the first endeavor that’s actually given me hope.”
According to a major who served under Kuehl, “An unsung hero of this entire time period was the commander of the combat support hospital in Baghdad. More than anyone else he kept our sometimes tenuous relationship with the SOI on good standing, simply by admitting their casualties to his facility and treating them. The rules on this were somewhat in the gray area, and lesser men or those who did not see the strategic situation would have been justified refusing care and turning them away. I had one such conversation with a doctor on Camp Liberty who was discussing the practical reasons for not treating them, that they wouldn’t have enough beds for the American casualties. I told him that if he wanted to quit treating American casualties altogether, all he had to do was to treat these SOIs when they were injured.”
From August 7, 2007, until Kuehl’s battalion departed in January 2008, there were no serious attacks in Amriya. In the second half of 2007, the murder and kidnapping rate dropped from at least thirty a month to four. By the time Kuehl left, two hundred shops had reopened. Kuehl does not credit the surge itself for the reduction in violence, nor does he think that violence dropped because the battalion paid off a Sunni militia. But the increase in troops let him defeat Al Qaeda in his area and halt the Mahdi Army advance into north-west Baghdad. The joint security stations and combat outposts that Kuehl set up in neighborhoods, increased foot patrols, improved understanding of the communities his men patrolled, construction of concrete barriers, as well as improved cooperation with the Iraqi Security Forces were all factors that helped reduce the violence, Kuehl believes.
In September the captain wrote once again, reflecting on the contribution played by Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha of the Anbar Awakening and Abul Abed, his Baghdad counterpart. He noted that both were charismatic leaders, uncompromising in their beliefs and corresponding actions—the types who start movements, excite people, and bring them together. But he cautioned: “They burn bright and they burn fast.” Up until the end of July, he noted, if they had lost Abul Abed, the movement in Baghdad would have died. “If he’d died before that point, I believe that many of his men would have gone out to Anbar and fought with their brothers there, while the locals would have gone back to what they were doing before . . . attacking the Iraqi Army, and us occasionally, and trying to figure out a way to feed themselves and their families.” But once Amriya was rid of Al Qaeda and the Awakening was legitimized, Abul Abed’s role seemed, paradoxically, less vital. “At this point, the show will go on with or without him.” The traits that the captain identified in Abul Abed were central to his success and what made him “such a joy to work with”: the honorable warrior, his charisma, the passion and principle that “rubbed off on his men . . . don’t necessarily lend themselves to usefulness in the current environment.” The same could have been said for Sattar Abu Risha, whose death, the captain suggested, was a “blessing in disguise, as now there’s a martyr for the cause.”
“Unless they topple the current regime, they’re going to have to compromise,” the captain explained. “They’re going to have to work with others. They’re going to have to follow principles like due process. It’s not efficient, but that’s the point. Democracies are messy and slow and they put an emphasis on negotiation and accommodation. Those aren’t really traits that Abul Abed possesses. That’s why I like him.”
“As we handed over eastern Amriya upon our departure in January ’08,” Captain Gallagher said, “I told my replacement that this would be his number-one challenge: to ensure the volunteers were formally integrated into the security framework. I did not want to see us, or the Iraqi government, turn our backs on these men, because the blowback could be significant.”
I returned to Amriya in December 2007. My friend Hassan pointed to a gap in the concrete walls the Americans had built around the Sunni bastion. “We call it the Rafah Crossing,” he joked, referring to the gate to besieged Gaza that another occupying army occasionally opened. Iraqi National Police loyal to the Mahdi Army had once regularly attacked Amriya, and Sunnis caught in their checkpoints, which we drove through anxiously, would have once ended up in the city morgue. Police had recently put up Shiite flags all around western Baghdad, which the residents of Amriya viewed as a provocation. Our car lined up behind dozens of others that had been registered with the local Iraqi army unit and were allowed to enter and exit the imprisoned neighborhood. It often took two or three hours to get past the American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, or the Fursan (most people called them the Thuwar, or revolutionaries). When it was our turn, we exited the vehicle while Iraqi soldiers searched it and an American soldier led his dog around the car to sniff it. I was patted down by one of the Sunni militiamen, who asked me if I was a bodybuilder. Not knowing I was American, he reassured me: “Just let the dog and the dog that is with him finish with your car and you can go.” He laughed, and we laughed with him.
We drove past residents who were forced to trudge a long distance in and out of their neighborhood, past the tall concrete walls, because their cars had not been given permission to exit. Boys labored behind pushcarts, wheeling in goods for the shops that were open. One elderly woman in a black robe sat on a pushcart and complained loudly that the Americans were to blame for all her problems. Cars could not enter Amriya after 7:30 p.m. Once inside, we drove along roads scarred by massive IEDs.
I met with Um Omar, a stern woman who ran the Ethar Association, an independent NGO that provided aid, housing, and education to vulnerable families. She wore a tight head scarf and gloves on her hands as a sign of modesty. Um Omar had a degree in chemistry but had been a housewife before the war. “After the invasion, there were many needs,” she said. “My sister’s husband was killed and two of my uncles were killed. My sister’s husband was killed by random American fire. One of my uncles was killed by an American tank, which drove over his car while it was driving on the wrong side of the road, so he crashed into it. My other uncle was killed by the mujahideen during the battle of Falluja while he was providing aid to Falluja. The mujahideen suspected he was a collaborator with the Americans because they saw him talking to the Americans when they stopped him at the checkpoint and let him through.” Um Omar’s husband was a former Awakening man affiliated with the Islamic Party. He had been arrested by the Americans and was in a feud with Abul Abed, and so he lived outside Amriya.
Kuehl knew Um Omar. “If you have already talked to her, I am sure she had an unfavorable opinion of me,” he told me. “Her husband, Abu Omar, was one of Abul Abed’s lieutenants from the start. The two had a bit of a love/hate relationship, and we had to step in on a couple occasions. I had to counsel Abu Omar once for excessive use of force, and he was also arrested outside Amriya with a couple of weapons in the vehicle he was in. He was held for a couple days and then released. From the start I was convinced that Abu Omar was representing some other faction. For a while I had even considered him as an important counterweight to Abul Abed. However, he also happened to be the brother of Hajji Salman, our primary AQI target.”
The confrontation came to a head when the Americans, acting on a tip from a rival Fursan member, found a large weapons cache behind a false wall in Abu Omar’s house, Abu Omar claimed that they were put there by his brother. After he was arrested, the Iraqi Islamic Party pressured Kuehl for his release. Community leaders, including Um Omar, asked to meet. “I knew of her through her charity work but had not met her up to now,” Kuehl said. “She was pretty impressive. She was obviously well educated and passionate about getting the release of her husband. After about two weeks he was eventually released. Part of the condition for his release was that he would no longer work for the Fursan. Through this I pretty much determined that his affiliation was with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had been trying to take control of the movement from the start.”
Um Omar’s main office was in Amriya, but the NGO also operated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Samarra, and Nasiriya. Most of its funds came from generous Iraqis. In Iraq a child was considered an orphan even if he or she had lost just one parent. The organization had registered 4,317 orphans. In Amriya alone it had 2,034 orphans. Before 2006 it had only 600 to 800 orphans in Amriya. “Their fathers were killed, their houses were burned,” Um Omar told me, “some of them were left without either parent.” Most of Amriya’s Sunnis were too scared to go to the Yarmuk hospital outside Amriya. “It’s a sectarian hospital,” Um Omar told me. “By sectarian, I mean this hospital has militias in it and people are afraid to go there. If you live in Amriya, you have to go to private hospitals, which are expensive for orphans, widows, and displaced families.”
When I first met Um Omar in January 2008, she had three thousand displaced families registered with her in Amriya alone. They were supposed to receive payments from the government, but she knew of no one who had. The Ethar Association had once received help from the Red Crescent, but now that aid was going to the local Awakening group. Since Amriya’s security was improving, many Sunnis who had fled to Syria were coming back, even if some of them were not originally from Amriya. At least 50 percent of the families in Amriya could not access their monthly rations, and Um Omar knew of families who had not received any rations at all during the previous year. “We experienced the most difficult five years,” she told me. “Iraq went through wars, the Iran war, the Kuwait war, the sanctions, but it wasn’t as hard or unmerciful like the days of the occupation. The number of orphans is so high, and as much as we find some people to adopt them, we see there are more orphans coming. We have many children whose fathers were arrested, and it’s been a long time that nobody knows where they are. There are the families of detainees: the husband has been arrested for three or four years, and nobody knows where he is. The Americans are easier in providing information and allowing contact with the detainee. In the first days of the occupation the detention by the occupation forces was ugly, as you saw in Abu Ghraib, but in the last year and now it’s preferable to be in the custody of the occupation forces than the MOI [Ministry of Interior].”
Ethar provided orphans with rations, blankets, and heaters for the winter—and medical care, thanks to volunteer doctors. Orphans also could attend their nursery school and subsequent education. Widows received medical care and vocational training as well as educational assistance, including university tuition. Ethar had a kitchen project where widows made pastries and sold them in local markets.
Um Omar took me to her nursery school. Among the orphans was a boy whose mother was killed beside him in cross fire. At first he did not talk to other students and remained isolated, but the teachers succeeded in making him more social. Um Omar had books full of files and photos of children in need of medical assistance, from a two-year-old bloated from cancer to a teenager who was shot by Americans and paralyzed. One seven-year-old girl called Hadia Abdallah had lost both her parents. Her father was killed by random American gunfire and then her mother was killed when Iraqi National Guardsmen opened fire indiscriminately. When the mother was shot she dropped Hadia on the ground, and the child was paralyzed from the waist down. Of the two thousand orphans Um Omar had registered in Amriya, 60 to 70 percent had lost a parent to fire by occupation forces, she told me. The rest were killed by terrorists.
Uday Ahmad was shot in the jaw. The boy’s jawbone was shattered, and he needed a simple operation so that he would not have to be fed through a plastic tube, but his family was afraid to visit hospitals because of the threat from Shiite militias. Another boy in her album was shot below the eye by the Americans.
“Every day I listen to the widows and see their tears, and I can’t get them enough help,” she said. “This morning a widow came in, her donor stopped providing help. Some donors get killed or got arrested and some of them got displaced. So they stop paying the help. She was waiting until the end of the month to come here to get paid. She came crying, saying it has been a month that she is feeding her children soup only. She did not buy fruit or vegetables for a month. She said yesterday the children were crying, ‘We don’t want soup anymore,’ and her neighbor heard their cry and gave them a plate of food. This is one case out of thousands of widows.”
Two weeks earlier she delivered school uniforms to orphans in Abu Ghraib. “A little boy came to me shivering, without a coat and shoes,” she said. “I can’t explain now how I managed to stop myself from crying, and the look in his eyes and his happiness while I was putting the new clothes on him, and he was looking at the new bag and new books.”
I told Um Omar that I could see the children were still afraid. “How do you want them not to be afraid after they saw the terrorist militias raiding their areas, killing their fathers, killing their brothers, and destroying their houses? I know a displaced woman who told me that she saw two of her neighbors being dragged away just because they were Sunnis. She said they dragged the father and his son and killed them. How do you expect the young children to forget them easily? Obviously these kind of things have more impact on the spirit of children than they do on older people, and I don’t think that it will just go away and the wounds will heal quickly.”
Um Omar complained that Amriya’s population had once been prosperous and very educated: a neighborhood for lawyers, doctors, and teachers. She estimated that 40 percent of those educated people had been displaced. The families who replaced them in Amriya were less educated and from poorer neighborhoods.
Since 2006 Um Omar had registered 5,520 displaced families in Amriya, and they hadn’t yet returned to their homes. “They are not willing to return because their areas became 100 percent Shiite areas, and their houses were either destroyed or burned, and their sons were killed. They can’t return anymore though they want to return home.” They would never be able to return, though Shiite families had returned to Amriya, she said.
Um Omar admitted that there had been some security improvements, but she did not attribute it to American efforts. “It happened by the Awakening’s efforts. The tribal men’s efforts were the reason for improving the security. In the past, our areas were always raided by the militias and interior commandos, arresting many of our guys and taking them to unknown destinations. This is not security, right? We couldn’t stop the militias from doing this. I think security was improved when the Awakening guys joined the security forces.”
Forty percent of Amriya’s homes were abandoned, their owners expelled. More than five thousand Sunni families from elsewhere in Iraq had moved in, mostly to Shiite homes. Of those who had fled to Syria, about one-fifth returned in late 2007 when their money ran out. The Ministry of Migration, officially responsible for displaced Iraqis, did nothing for them. The Ministry of Health, dominated by sectarian Shiites, neglected Amriya or sent expired medicines to its clinics. Like elsewhere in Iraq, the government-run ration system, upon which nearly all Iraqis relied for their survival, did not reach the Sunnis of Amriya often, and when it did most items were lacking. Children were suffering from calcium shortages as a result.
Seventeen-year-old Ahmad Maath was a student who helped support his family by leaving Amriya and collecting people’s rations and fuel for them. Amriya’s citizens were afraid of the INP who guarded the fuel station. “They are with the militias,” he said. “They say, ‘Fuck you, Sunnis, you are pimps’—you know, such silly things. But what can we do? We tolerate that because we want to feed our families.” He and his friends would bring the tanks at night and wait until the morning to collect the government-supplied kerosene. One day Ahmad saw the Mahdi Army surround the station and take ten thousand liters of kerosene and one hundred and fifty cooking gas cylinders without paying. They said they needed it to cook for the Muharram ceremonies.
I had heard of corpses being dropped at garbage dumps, where dogs would feed on them. Twelve-year-old Abudi, my friend Hussein’s son, had seen many corpses in one of the main squares. “I saw people executed by Al Qaeda,” Abudi told me. “I saw a woman here being executed. I felt scared from them. I feel afraid from both, the Americans and Al Qaeda. They attacked my father, a car rushed and shot my father. I felt sad. My father got injured and he was bleeding, but he is okay now. The Americans killed a child in Amriya because he was playing with a toy gun.”
I visited Abudi’s elementary school in Amriya. It was overcrowded because of the many displaced children. Its population had grown from 400 to about 769 students. Each class contained fifty-five students, with three to four students to a desk. One boy lost his father in Amriya when a bomb landed on their house. There were children displaced from Jihad, Shuhada, Furat, Shula, Turath, Amil, Hurriya. The teacher asked them if they wanted to go back home. “We can’t,” a child said. “We are threatened by gangs.” Sabrin was a small girl whose father was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the Muhamin neighborhood of Amriya. Abdurahman was a sixth-grade boy from New Baghdad. The Mahdi Army had threatened his family and kidnapped and killed his brother. His family’s house in New Baghdad was occupied; now they were renting a home in Amriya. To help support his family Abdurahman worked in restaurants and sold black-market gasoline on the streets. When Al Qaeda still controlled Amriya, one of his brothers was arrested by the Americans because a mujahid came to his shop to change the oil in his car, and his brother was accused by the Americans of working with them. One boy’s father was killed by the Mahdi Army in the Jihad district.
“When the children first came here they found themselves in a different environment than the one they used to live in,” the school principal told me. “The way they behave and the way they are is all different. Gradually, they started to adapt to here. Of course, they were very afraid as a result of what they had seen in their areas. Some of them wake up at night. When they hear gunfire they just keep screaming. When a Hummer passes by they scream, even when they are inside the class. They are hurt from the inside. But you know they are children, so they occupy their time with playing and other stuff.”
The school guard, who had not been paid in months, told me neither the Americans nor the Iraqi army brought security to Amriya. “Let us be realistic,” he said, “our brothers from the Thuwar secured us. They are better than the army and the Americans. The Americans don’t do anything when you go complain about something. They just put it down on a paper, while the Awakening, when you go complain to them, they do something. They go to those who did wrong and punish them. They are our sons, from the same area and we know them well, while the Americans and the army are not.”
Um Omar took me to visit the family of Saad Juma, who had been displaced from the Amil district by Shiite militias more than a year earlier. I found them in the burned-out house of a Shiite family that had fled with only their clothes. When Saad and his family moved in, the house was torched and dirty, full of tires and other flammable items that had been used to burn it. The Shiite militias had expelled all the Sunni families from the area using loudspeakers on police cars to warn them. They cursed Sunnis and said they would kill anyone they saw on the street. “I remember one of our neighbors who lived nearby was killed there,” Saad said. “They killed him immediately. Another one was killed with his two little children in his garden. The militias called him by his name and shot him with two, three shots in the head, and they left the house after that.”
Saad insisted that before the war, relations between Sunnis and Shiites in his area had been good. “We were like one family. Those militias came from outside, not from our area. Maybe from Shula or from other areas. They might come from the other side of the city.” Um Omar added that “the militias knew who the families were, and they knew the area well. They must be helped by the others in this area.” Saad agreed, adding that the local Sadrist office was near their area.
Saad owned his previous house and had shared it with ten other relatives. He was a construction worker before he was displaced, but now he relied on the Ethar Association for food and aid. “The government is busy with itself,” he said. “It doesn’t care about people. It only cares about itself.” I asked him if he wanted to go back home. “Is there anyone who doesn’t wish to return to his home?” he asked me. But he didn’t think it was safe enough.
Abasya Aziz was from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe. She and her family were expelled from the house in Hurriya they had lived in for thirty-five years. For two days Shiite militiamen shot at their house and called on them to leave. The men left to find a new house, but the women stayed another four days until one was found. “We were very scared alone,” she said. “I was scared to take all the furniture at once. So every day I take some of the furniture, and I also had to leave some furniture there.” Their new house had no electricity, so she had to show me around with a flashlight. The landlord originally wanted rent to be 350,000 dinars but because they were poor he reduced it to less than 250,000. “I wish to return [to Hurriya] and live a stable life,” Abasya Aziz said. “That’s what we are looking for. Now we can’t go back there because it is not safe. Also, I am afraid for my other sons. I can’t go back. It has been one year, and it’s still not safe there.”
On the outskirts of Amriya, on a muddy field, I found a Sunni family in a makeshift brick home. I spoke to twenty-two-year-old Haidar, who lived there with eleven other family members. He told me that they were expelled from Amil by the Mahdi Army in 2006. His eighty-three-year-old grandfather had owned their house in Amil. Now Mahdi Army men were living in it. Haidar was on crutches, his legs amputated after a car bomb exploded too close to him when he was working as a mechanic in Bayaa. “Honestly, I don’t wish what happened to us even on my enemy,” Haidar told me. “We were displaced from our area. We left our house without any reason. It was a big house with two floors. We don’t have issues with anybody. We left our house and came here to live in this dirty house while they came and lived in our house. We suffered lots of damages. Before I used to go with my brother and sell gas to earn a little money. Now I can’t anymore.”
I returned often to Amriya and saw a lot of Um Omar. Of the 104 students in her school, ten received free education, fourteen were orphans, thirteen had fathers in detention, and most of the rest had been displaced within the past year. “It is a very bad life,” Ms. Rasha, one of the teachers, told me about her students. “Our students, especially last year, we told them to study and focus on their school, especially the ones in the last year of the high school. They say, ‘What is the benefit? Let’s say we got into a good university, can we go study in that university?’” The students couldn’t go to university because of security problems and bombs, she told me, but also sectarianism. “Most of our students are named Omar. They say, ‘My name is Omar. When the teacher reads my name on the exam papers, they will mark it as failed and throw it away.’ Last year they canceled the results of the final high school examinations. Specifically they canceled the results of the students of Amriya, they didn’t mark their exam papers. The students made a second attempt on the exams and even a third attempt, but they’ve never received their results back.”
ABUL ABED WAS KNOWN for his brutality. He was a short, thin thirty-five-year-old who had broken his knuckles beating prisoners and suspected members of Al Qaeda. He destroyed the homes of Al Qaeda men and hung pictures of their dead bodies on the walls of Amriya. He claimed four of his brothers had been killed by Shiite militiamen, and he kept pictures of their broken and tortured bodies on his phone. He and his men blasted through Amriya, letting everybody know they were its new rulers. According to some stories, Abul Abed had been working with a network of informers for the Americans, targeting Al Qaeda and Iranian spies, finally infiltrating Al Qaeda in Amriya. Abul Abed also had a good relationship with politicians Saleh al-Mutlaq and Ali Baban, a Sunni Kurd who was minister of planning and who had been expelled by the Islamic Party. Many of Abul Abed’s men were displaced Sunnis from Mahdi Army-controlled areas like Hurriya, yet he claimed he helped seventy-five Shiite families return to Amriya.
I first met with Abul Abed in what looked like a school or ex-Baath Party headquarters that had been converted into an office, and I later interviewed him several times in his lavish home. (One morning I found him drinking a can of nonalcoholic beer.) The street where he lived was manned by his guards, who stood at roadblocks. He traveled in convoys of pickup trucks and SUVs with his men hanging out of windows, their rifles and pistols waving about, sirens blaring, a pale imitation of the Blackwater style. He was a former military officer and leader in the Islamic Army of Iraq, but much of his biography was apocryphal, and he had labored to construct a heroic legend about himself.
He claimed that in 2006 he and others from the Islamic Army decided to fight Al Qaeda, which had declared the Islamic State of Iraq and was trying to control other Sunni groups, insisting that they pledge allegiance to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who would be the future caliph, and demanding a portion of their loot. The Islamic Army refused, and Abul Abed and his men began a clandestine war on Al Qaeda. The conflict started with assassinations but soon escalated into open warfare. Abul Abed claimed he had spent months collecting intelligence on Al Qaeda fighters who had sought sanctuary in Amriya after fleeing from other parts of Baghdad or the Anbar.
In May 2007, fourteen American soldiers were killed in Amriya. Until then Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl had lost only three men in Amriya. On May 29 Sheikh Walid of the Fardus Mosque called Kuehl up and told him Abul Abed’s men would be attacking Al Qaeda in Amriya. They attacked an Al Qaeda base at the Maluki Mosque, and the next day Al Qaeda men struck back at Tikriti Mosque. Sheikh Walid contacted the Americans, who sent Stryker vehicles to assist Abul Abed’s fighters. The Americans helped defeat Al Qaeda in that battle and then provided medical assistance to Abul Abed’s wounded men. That first week Abul Abed and his men, along with the Americans, killed about ten Al Qaeda suspects and captured another fifteen.
The official name for Abul Abed’s Awakening group, the first of its kind in Baghdad, was the Fursan (Knights) of Mesopotamia. But Abul Abed and his men referred to themselves as the Thuwar (revolutionaries). Part of Kuehl’s deal was that he would help Abul Abed’s men if they did not torture prisoners or kill people who were not from Al Qaeda. They would be allowed to hold prisoners for only twenty-four hours. Kuehl knew that as an American, he would never know the area or its people as well as the local Awakening men. At first Kuehl’s men asked the Fursan to wear white headbands and sit in the American vehicles to identify Al Qaeda locations. But soon Al Qaeda men took to wearing white headbands. Riding along with the Americans also didn’t work because the windowless vehicles left the Fursan disoriented and unable to locate targets. The Fursan were given special reflective armbands that the Americans could see as well as handcuffs and flares to help send signals to the Americans. Kuehl collected their biometric data and agreed to provide them with some weapons.
At first Abul Abed believed he could spread his control into other Sunni areas in western Baghdad. When Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, of the Sunni Islamic Party, visited Amriya without coordinating with Abul Abed, the Fursan leader was furious and nearly clashed with Hashimi’s bodyguards. Abul Abed felt threatened by the Islamic Party, and that same night he raided the home of Abu Omar, Um Omar’s husband, and a subordinate commander who was allied with the party. Shots were fired and civilians were threatened. Abu Omar was not home, but Abul Abed arrested several of his men.
In November 2007 Abul Abed was interviewed by the London-based, Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper. Al Qaeda had turned into Iraq’s biggest enemy, he said, and so he had to ally himself with his erstwhile enemies, the Americans, against whom he claimed he had once fought “honorably.” He claimed to have six hundred men under his control, each of whom got paid about $360 a month, and three hundred of whom had become Amriya’s police force. He called for further integration of Awakening men into the government.
When I met him again in early 2008 he had switched from wearing military uniforms to suits. “The situation is different now,” he said. “We have destroyed Qaeda. It is safe now, and it is very good for me—I am number one on the hit list of Qaeda. Just after the assassination of Sheikh Sattar, the next primary goal for Qaeda became me. If my fate is to die, then that is okay.” He repeated his claim that he had six hundred men in Amriya, and many outside. I asked where. “All of Baghdad,” he said. I asked how many; he said “a lot.” His main target was anyone who broke the law, he said, whether they were Al Qaeda or not. “We are against criminals, against killers, against the ones who make bombs and against the ones who destroy.” In the past his men had clashed with the Mahdi Army as well.
“Our areas and our sect were marginalized, which is what Al Qaeda used to initiate a sectarian war. Now we are working on fixing this and rehabilitat[ing] our areas in order to take our real positions in the government and in the country.” He would not run in elections, he said, but Iraq’s national security adviser had taken the surprising step of offering Abul Abed a position in the government. “I have been offered many positions from different big political parties. But I refused them. I explained from the beginning to the journalists that I didn’t come for money, nor for political reasons. I know lots of scornful people who put themselves in front of others and step on people’s shoulders to go up the ladder and take a chair or a position in the government. This is not my goal, and I have explained that to the channels that visited me. I am not running for any position, not going to take part of the political process. I have a goal that I would like to achieve, not only in Amriya but in all of Baghdad: reinstate the security in our areas and save innocent people’s lives. Only when I achieve these goals I will leave.
“Everybody knows how Al Qaeda used to control our areas. They destroyed the area, they killed civilian families, they filled the streets with bombs. Their work became barbaric, killing people for their identity, on suspicion. They started by killing Shiites, then they started killing Sunnis, then finally they started killing Christians with the excuse of establishing the Islamic State of Iraq. They said, ‘Since you are a Christian, you must pay a ransom.’ If the man had money to pay the ransom, he paid and lived in his home. If he didn’t, they killed him and threw his corpse in the trash. People advised them that this is destruction and far away of jihad, so they killed the ones who gave such advice. They acted like a gang—they kill and steal, and they look for new modern cars. They killed people under the name of jihad.”
Abul Abed told me that jihad had four conditions: to preserve the religion, the land, the honor, and the money. “These are four conditions, all of which Al Qaeda breached. Qaeda claimed that they are fighting the occupation. If you fight the occupation, why would you kill civilians? If you are fighting occupation, why would you steal the water pumps? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you take down the mobile telecommunications towers? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you steal from the shops of the Muslims? They did that with the excuse, this is Shiite and that is Christian. Did the Prophet do that? The Prophet had a Jewish neighbor, and he never did that to him. Is taking rich people’s money a form of jihad? Is this against occupation? No, it is not.” Al Qaeda, he said, is a dirty gang using the cover of Islam. They dragged people from their cars and filled the streets of Amriya with corpses. The smell of these bodies was everywhere, but people were prohibited from removing them because IEDs were placed just underneath them. “This is not jihad, this is destruction!” Abul Abed said. “All the shops were closed, food never entered the area because people were afraid to come into the area. If a man looks at them in a strange way, they killed him, and many other issues that we can’t count. The garbage accumulated and made mountains two meters high in the streets of Amriya. The government was about to attack Amriya. Day after day they said, ‘We must attack Amriya, we must bomb Amriya.’
“It started when Al Qaeda kidnapped two young guys from the Dulaimi tribe in Amriya. The father of the two guys came into the mosque and was crying. Two days earlier Sheikh Walid was passing by the Munadhama Street when he saw a very old woman. She was a Christian, white, and she was wearing a skirt that was not long, and she was fat. The woman’s husband was taken by Al Qaeda, and his body was in the back of their car and his leg was outside the car. The woman was holding her husband’s leg, not letting it go. The woman was on the ground and they were hitting her with their pistols. The sheikh and I were asking if this was jihad. No, this is not jihad. We knew then that fighting these people is the jihad itself, in order to protect people from them, to protect their money and to protect their honors. Al Qaeda destroyed people’s lives.”
What actually sparked the war between the Islamic Army fighters and Al Qaeda in Amriya was the murder of an Islamic Army leader called Zeid, or Abu Teiba, who was a good friend of Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. Abu Teiba was a law school graduate who also provided security for the Maluki Mosque. Sheikh Hussein had been detained by the Americans, and Al Qaeda had taken over his mosque. Al Qaeda men captured Abu Teiba and brought him to the mosque, where they filmed his torture and accused him of being an infidel. “Zeid, he was one of the best guys in Amriya,” Abul Abed told me. “He was an Arabic teacher, he was teaching the Koran, he was teaching Islamic religious beliefs and Islamic religious law, he was popular in mosques, he was popular in the area. They tortured him until he died. He was in the Maluki Mosque, he was in the house of God. When I started the fight, Zeid used to always protect the mosques. We have a video of him being tortured, tortured according to the Sharia law. A guy from the Islamic State of Iraq was slapping him while he was bleeding. He was not allowed to discuss why they tortured him because in their view he was an apostate. They were telling him, ‘You are a criminal. Abul Abed told you to fight the mujahideen.’”
Abul Abed was in the Dubat neighborhood of Amriya, supplying his men with weapons and vehicles, when one of his men told him about Sabah, the so-called “white lion,” who led Al Qaeda in Amriya. Sabah was standing on a corner with his assistant. Abul Abed walked to him accompanied by three or four of his men, carrying his charged pistol. They stood face to face.
After Abul Abed challenged him, Sabah stepped back, pulled his pistol, and shot at him, but his weapon didn’t work. Abul Abed pulled his pistol too. He shot Sabah, and Sabah ran. While he was running he charged his weapon again and pulled the trigger, but again it didn’t work. He was using Iraqi bullets. Abul Abed kept shooting at him until he fell; then he took his gun. “I always carry it with me,” Abul Abed said. “I replaced the bullets with good foreign bullets.”
Abul Abed recited the names of other Al Qaeda leaders he had fought and killed. “Let me tell you one point. They have announced themselves as an Islamic country. They all came up as leaders. Some of them presented themselves as a minister of defense, minister of interior, and mosque leaders, and security and intelligence and army and patrols. They were all known to the people of Amriya. We knew their names and their faces. We knew them all. They were not working only secretly but also publicly. They didn’t even cover their faces. The Iraqi and national forces were unable to enter the area.” Abul Abed told me his unit lost about twenty martyrs in the battle of Amriya. The day before I met him the Iraqi National Guard and the Thuwar raided a home and confiscated weapons.
Abul Abed no longer bragged about being a former resistance fighter. He had become more cautious after Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s controversial profile of him appeared in the Guardian. I told him that everybody said he was in the Islamic Army of Iraq. “Is this something to be ashamed of ?” he asked. “Allow me to let you know that we have corrected the attitudes of many of the jihadist battalions. Many of them have put their guns down and said, ‘Enough.’ Some media are trying to make this a point against us, to make a problem between us and the Iraqi government.”
I told him that the government maintained that the Awakening men were former insurgents and that it did not trust them. “Let’s say I am strong and you are also strong and I want to fight you but you can’t fight me, and I have caused you so many injuries, and made you dizzy, and you can’t win the fight with me despite your capabilities,” Abul Abed said. “And then I tell you I won’t fight you anymore and give you my hands. I ask you to put your hands in mine, and I say, ‘Let’s build Iraq and forget our problems.’ If you are a nationalist and love your country and don’t have loyalties to neighboring countries, you would accept me as a friend, not because you are weak. But if you are loyal to a neighboring country and you have an interest in this fight, when I give you my hand you will beat my hand. That is fine, let’s fight again. This is Iran’s interest. I’m giving an example that if there were, as they say, armed resistance groups who offered their hands to the government, the government should accept them. If I push the resistance groups in the corner, they will give up and become more violent than before.”
I asked him if Al Qaeda was the only threat to Iraq. “Not only Al Qaeda,” he said. “We have the Mahdi Army. I think the Mahdi Army has a very short life.” I asked him if he trusted the Mahdi Army cease-fire. “No,” he said.
Abul Abed believed there was an Iranian occupation in Iraq. “The American occupation in Iraq is 20 percent, and the Iranian occupation is 80 percent in Iraq. We started being terminated. I experienced this during the time when Bayan Jabr Solagh was the minister of interior. I saw fifty police cars equipped with big machine guns. They entered Amriya from 4 a.m. till 7 a.m. They took my four older brothers. Since then they said they are in the ministry for interrogation. We went there and found their names in the detainee list. We went there more than once. After a while we heard there were more than twenty-one bodies found in the Iraqi-Iranian border in a town called Badra wa Jasan. When they transferred the bodies to the morgue, my four brothers were among the corpses. Their arms were cut, their eyes were taken out, their fingers were cut, their skin was burned with acid. Why? This is a question that I always direct to the Iraqi government. I say, Why? Because they are Sunnis, they always accuse us of being terrorists. If we were terrorists, what have we done? Why were my relatives terminated? Because Iran wants to terminate us.”
I asked him if he was accusing the Iraqi government of being Iranian. He smiled. “I never said the government. I said Iran has the bigger hand in Iraq. . . . I am not accusing the journalists, but journalists often make problems for us with the government, and there are some parties in the government who want these problems. I am sure you understand my concerns. Journalism is a two-edged sword: one edge that can cut with it and the other edge might cut the user. I have been visited by a journalist from the Guardian, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. I hosted him for four days in my house with my family. He ate my food, I satisfied all his wishes, and then in his article he said I am a mafia man. He made a big mess for me.”
When I mentioned the walls that Kuehl had erected in Amriya, Abul Abed denied that the walls made it like a prison. “Keep in mind that it is not only our area that is walled. Amriya is walled, Khadra is walled, Dora is walled, Hatin is walled, Adhamiya is walled. If we take off the walls, you will see how many car bombs will attack civilians. Qaeda attacked children and women in Ramadi with massive trucks filled with chlorine.” But he expected that the walls would shortly come down. “We are planning to open a police station manned by local inhabitants of this area. An official police station. Khadra police station is manned by Khadra people, Adhamiya police station is manned by Adhamiya people. Dora the same, and Fadhil the same.”
Of his 600 men only 333 received salaries under the American contract, he said. “We are not here for the money. Ask any soldier of the Awakening if they have come for money. Is he risking his life, his family’s life, his children’s life, his wife’s life, for two hundred dollars? He might get killed, slaughtered, killed in car bombs for this simple amount of money. No, he is here for his beliefs and his principles.” Abul Abed told me that he planned to open a police station in Amriya. Only 233 of the 600 candidates he had offered to the police academy had been accepted. He complained that his men were abused there. “The officers in the training center take our guys every night at about 2 a.m. into interrogation rooms. It’s like they were in a detention center, not a training center. The officers tell our guys that Abul Abed is a criminal and a terrorist. They ask them, ‘What did you do before coming here? Why did you sabotage Iraq?’ They harass our guys a lot. Yesterday I paid a visit to the center and met with the guys. They were afraid to talk to me in public, and the majority of them said, ‘We want to leave this country.’ A first lieutenant from the national police who works in the center goes into their room every night and takes four or five of them and keeps interrogating them until the morning. The guys were asking me if they were detainees. We have very deep wounds. Let me tell you something, if you see all these fighters, every one of them has lost his brother, his uncle or his father, most of the guys have lost members of their families.”
I asked him how he could work in a government that was made up of the same militias that killed his brothers. “This is a very complicated subject. Iraq has gone through bad conditions in the past, much worse than this. Is the government going to last forever? The answer is no. There will be another stage where there will be other elections, so if we abandon our roles in Iraq, falsification will happen again in the elections, and we won’t enter the elections because of the destruction, the fighting, and this will be a success to Iran, primarily. I follow the law. We have lots of supporters, even including Shiite brothers. Yesterday we had a meeting with the tribes of the south. We are dealing with each other as Iraqis. The strife that happened between Shiites and Sunnis is being reconciled now. Yesterday we had a visit here in Amriya from tribal leaders of the south, from Yusifiya, Mahmudiya, Mahawil, Karbala, and Hilla. We had tribal leaders of big Shiite tribes. They were our guests, and we even had reconciliation between towns and neighborhoods, Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. Is this bad for the government? If Iraq doesn’t get a professional government that is not sectarian, that doesn’t belong to only one sect, then this county will fail.”
Abul Abed appeared on television and called for Shiites to return to their homes in Amriya. “My first principle is reconciliation, stopping the sectarian fighting across Baghdad neighborhoods. We wanted to make a model for others to follow, and we wanted the others to do the same initiatives, but unfortunately, this didn’t happen. There was a Sunni family from Amriya that went back to the Amil neighborhood. The day after they got there, the father, the mother, and two sons were killed. One of the brothers survived and gave me his mother’s phone number, so I called. A man answered the phone. I said, ‘Hello, how are you, my brother?’ The guy said, ‘Hello, who are you?’ I said, ‘I am Abul Abed, the leader of the Thuwar in Amriya.’ He said, ‘And what do you want?’ I said, ‘My brother, our area was a red zone. Shiites used to be killed in our areas, and we took the responsibility of returning Shiite families into their homes in our areas, and now we protect them. This is an innocent family. Why did you take them? What did they do?’ He said, ‘We are the Mahdi Army, there can only be killing between you and us.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you something, if you are a real man, the brave man and the real soldier who considers himself a brave fighter doesn’t kill a woman, nor does he kidnap a family. I am a soldier, and I only fight the ones who carry weapons against me. I fight men. This is a manly point of view, and if you want the Islamic point of view, the Prophet said, “Don’t cut a tree, don’t kill an animal, don’t kill a woman, and don’t kill an old man, this is if you were a Muslim.”‘ He said, ‘You are filthy, and there can only be blood between you and us.’ I hung up the phone. The next day the surviving brother was told that all his family were killed.” Abul Abed said that similar things happened to many Sunnis who returned to Hurriya.
“I am a Sunni. I’m sure that 80 percent of Shiites are not satisfied with the United Iraqi Alliance. I have Iraqi friends from Sadr City—they visited me with presents, they cried for the good old days when we were all together. The politicians are the reason for this problem, whether they are Sunnis or Shiites. Neither the Sunnis in the government represent us and help us, nor did the Shiites in the government help the Shiite population. People got tired from the situation. They want to breathe and go out freely. Two bombs exploded by my house targeting me, planted by Al Qaeda to kill me. I was transferred to an American hospital and had operations and survived. One of my sons was burned, and the other was injured.”
After I last saw him, Abul Abed began to seek alliances with other Awakening men in preparation for the upcoming provincial elections. This attempt to become legitimate might have been his undoing. In April a bomb targeting Abul Abed in Amriya wounded him, and he went to Jordan for medical treatment. In June 2008 while he was at a reconciliation conference in Sweden, his house in Iraq was raided on the suspicion that he had been involved in sixty murders or abductions. He never returned to Iraq, settling in Jordan instead. Al Qaeda’s predictions that the Awakening leaders would be disposed of after they served their purpose were proven correct, he said. Abul Abed blamed the Islamic Party, with whom he had a longstanding feud (as Um Omar’s husband could attest). Abu Ibrahim, Abul Abed’s former close aide, took over for him and was perceived by many as a stooge for the Iraqi army who arrested anybody who opposed him.
“I am aware that Abul Abed is in Jordan,” Kuehl told me. “I have had contact with him from time to time and am concerned about his safety as well as that of his family. I am hoping that he will be able to come to the U.S. at some point under refugee status. I do not know the details of why he had to leave. I am pretty sure it was politically motivated.”
Staff Sergeant Joe Hartman had expected Abul Abed to rise in Iraqi politics. “I never thought that he would be betrayed. However, after reading some of the reports about his disrespect for current political leaders when they tried to visit with him, it seems to me that any political savvy he once had was corrupted by the tough military work he performed in Amriya. I can’t imagine anyone remaining unaffected after having to defeat such a ruthless enemy as Al Qaeda, all the time still being persecuted by the Iraqi army for his past. He must have slept with one eye open every night. I hope he finds some peace.”
AMRIYA WOULD BECOME a battleground again, but this time it involved senior U.S. officers, long after they served in Iraq, who quarreled over the efficacy of the surge doctrine. Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, who preceded Kuehl and went on to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, became the most strident and outspoken voice within the military decrying the cult of counterinsurgency.
Gentile admitted that violence in Amriya had dropped precipitously starting in July 2007. “But the primary condition for that lowering of violence in Amriya was the deal cut with Abed and the SOIs,” he maintained. “Was Dale Kuehl instrumental in that role? Yes, most certainly he was. Might another battalion commander less savvy to the area have missed that opportunity? Sure. But did the opportunity arise because Dale and his battalion were doing things in terms of COIN tactics and methods that were fundamentally different than mine? No. The COPs [combat outposts] didn’t go into Amriya until after the deal had been cut.”
Kuehl was unwilling to criticize Gentile publicly, but he believed that his time in Amriya during the surge did involve new and innovative tactics that led to success. “In general they were doing COIN operations,” he said of Gentile and his men, “but we did change some things based on training and lessons learned that were pretty standard throughout the Army during our preparation, [placing a] heavy emphasis on COIN. Some of the criticism Gian has received is a bit unfair. He and his men were not hiding out on the FOB [Forward Operating Base], and they were patrolling every day. However, Gian’s assertion that we did nothing different is false. He cites a lieutenant in my battalion who says that we had not really changed anything. At the platoon level, it may not have been much different, but I think it was different at the battalion and brigade level.”
The two men had admirers and detractors. I spoke to one captain who served under both in Amriya. He described Gentile as “an intelligent, thoughtful, and caring leader who lost a lot of soldiers and took each of their deaths very, very personally. He was a pleasure to work for, and in the short time I worked for him, for two months, he took the time to mentor me. Unlike many of our senior leaders, he actually had some useful knowledge to pass on. I believe that his current arguments hold merit, but I wish he would quit responding to everything like it was an ad hominem. I truly believe he took his command so personally that he feels underlying guilt for the deaths of his soldiers, and this is the manifestation. He takes it personal now and is poor at conveying his beliefs, which is sad. Violence didn’t go down under Kuehl until the SOI. May 2007 was the most violent month in the war in that area, as I recall. Gentile and Kuehl both kept lines of communication open with the extremists and local insurgents. Gentile was more conventional when I got there, but it was a conventional high-kinetic fight. He understood the concept of COIN, but the timing and resources weren’t there to execute it.”
This captain told me that Kuehl was “an arrogant though intelligent ass” who “did not understand the fight until late, if at all. He was very, very concerned that any misstep by Abul Abed’s guys would have ramifications on his career . . . not its effects on his soldiers, Iraqis, or the outcome of the war. He was able to act dispassionately and rationally despite all of the losses his unit faced because he did not care about his men. I also believe that General Petraeus understood his sector better than he Kuehl did . . . he probably spent more time there.”
On the other hand, Capt. Brendan Gallagher told me, “That is an extremely harsh and unfair criticism of Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl. I am not sure who said it, but I can verify it is 100 percent false. I can say with absolute confidence that Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl cared extremely deeply for each and every soldier in 1-5 Cav. I have nothing but positive things to say about him. I think in combat he was willing to accept certain risks in order to achieve success, which is what any good commander must do. If you take zero risks, you hunker down your forces in extreme force-protection mode, then you will not succeed in this kind of war. Consider for a moment: if you follow the bunker mentality to its logical conclusion, then you might as well not even leave the FOB at all—or better yet, never even deploy to Iraq in the first place. That way you are guaranteed not to incur any casualties. However, you also are guaranteed not to accomplish any of your strategic objectives. I think this marks perhaps the most important way in which we blazed a new path in Amriya. We were willing to take calculated risks into unchartered waters in order to make progress. Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates said it best himself: we cannot kill or capture our way to victory. If we focus only on killing the enemy and force protection as our overriding objectives, then we effectively ignore history and disavow counterinsurgency doctrine. Dismounted patrols, the establishment of COPs, getting out on the ground and gaining the trust of average Iraqis—all these things involve inherent risk. But if we take prudent steps to mitigate each risk, we stand the best chance of success. Compare the security situation in Amriya when we departed [in January ‘08] to the security conditions previously. The results speak for themselves.”
According to a major who served under Gentile, “Despite Lieutenant Colonel Gentile being depicted in the media as a ‘conservative’ who only wants to focus on high-intensity conflict, he set the groundwork for Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl extremely well in one of the most important aspects of counterinsurgency. COIN is about people, and people are about relationships—especially in Arabic and Muslim culture. Gentile spent all of his time, in the very brief time that I saw him, talking, negotiating, and working with the local imams in Amriya. Kuehl, the beneficiary of this initial relationship building, continued the relationship and allowed the SOI to emerge with the support of the local imams.”
I asked Gentile what he thought Kuehl did differently from him. “Other than rightly capitalizing on the changed conditions that presented to him the opportunity to cut a deal with the SOIs, not much,” he said. “His organizational structure as a combat battalion was a bit different than mine, since I was an armored reconnaissance squadron—which meant that he had a greater dismounted capability, which might have produced more dismounted patrols. But in terms of tactics, I don’t believe there was much difference at all, although I am sure he would disagree with that statement. My outfit did dismounted operations, we engaged with the local population, etc. The notion that I ‘commuted’ to the area and stayed inside my vehicles as put forward by the surge zealots is a chimera. Dale did not put his first combat outpost in until late May ‘07, and it was a tactical one in the sense that its purpose was to facilitate movement into and out of the area. The first Galula-like COP did not go into the district until late June. So the notion that during the first five or six months of the surge—which arguably was the decisive period—that he was doing things on the tactical level radically different from me is not correct. What happened is that after the violence began to drop, and American soldiers and marines stopped dying in large monthly numbers, folks looked back onto the first period and superimposed the coherence of [the COIN manual] FM 3-24 that they believed was there at the time but actually was not.”
“Probably the biggest difference,” Kuehl said of his approach as opposed to Gentile’s, “was in taking a broader, long-term perspective of the problem. One of the things that was highlighted in our staff training was the need to develop a ‘campaign plan’ at the battalion level. This plan is intended to be long-term, with objectives six months to even a year out. In contrast, the campaign plan I got from Gian looked out about two weeks and really was nothing more than a patrol schedule.
“I visited Gian’s squadron in July 2006, and they were stretched pretty thin. If other parts of Baghdad were like his area, I am sure it looked like there were barely any U.S. soldiers on the ground. To be fair, I do not think that this type of planning or creating of a vision was part of the train[ing] Gian would have had, so [it is] not necessarily surprising that they did not have one. Even now we continue to adapt, and units that are there now are probably doing things I never thought of. There were two long-term projects that Gian left me with. The first was the Amriya Bank, which he laid the groundwork for. The other was the establishment of a police station. This second one did not happen until after we left.”
Gentile wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal called “Eating Soup With a Spoon,” the title being a reference to John Nagl’s influential book on COIN, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. In the article Gentile criticized the COIN manual and especially the paradoxes of “Tactical success guarantees nothing” and “The more you protect yourself, the less secure you are.” Kuehl would later write accounts of his time in Amriya in part as a response to Gentile’s criticism. “I think in this article Gian underestimates the abilities of our officer corps to use the manual as it is intended, as a guide as opposed to dogma,” Kuehl told me. “I think the article also provides some insights into Gian’s way of thinking. In his mind the new manual takes the enemy out of the equation and tries to make COIN sound easy by winning over the populace. I think one quote by Gian is relevant: ‘I was angry and bewildered because the paradoxes, through their clever contradictions, removed a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency warfare that I had experienced throughout my year as a tactical battalion commander in Iraq: fighting. And by removing the fundamental reality of fighting from counterinsurgency warfare, the manual removes the problem of maintaining initiative, morale and offensive spirit among combat soldiers who will operate in a place such as Iraq.’”
I asked Gentile about this. “I don’t think that a center of gravity, theoretically, even if there can be such a thing, should be predetermined and turned into a rule for any type of stability or counterinsurgency operation,” he said. “In modern counterinsurgencies certainly the population is an important consideration, but the American Army has turned the notion of the people as a center of gravity into an immutable rule, which then determines a prescribed set of tactics and procedures, which ultimately calls for large numbers of American combat soldiers on the ground. This kind of approach might be the right choice in certain circumstances, but it should not be the only way. If it is, then we can expect many more adventures at nation building to come.”
Kuehl told me that “Gian tried to maintain the initiative while maintaining the morale and fighting esprit by his men by doing periodic large-scale cordon-and-searches to keep them focused. He also established small kill teams in houses, some of them occupied by residents. These teams generally consisted of a six-man team, usually including a sniper, emplaced to counter enemy IED efforts. I remember Gian telling me that many of these operations were to maintain the morale of the unit. What baffled me was that they served no real tactical purpose. In fact, I think in some ways they hurt the effort because they were not focused on good intelligence, so we were stumbling around inconveniencing the local populace.
“I banned the use of occupied homes for small kill teams right after we took over. I read a couple patrol reports from Gian’s unit that made clear to me that these operations were not going to win over the populace. We continued with the cordon-and-search operations (we called them ‘block parties’) for a while. However, as we gained more intel, we relied less on them and focused more on targeted raids and eventually did away with them altogether.”
I asked Gentile if he thought his cordon-and-search operations and small kill teams had been counterproductive. “Well, this is certainly the stock question that any population-centric counterinsurgency expert would ask,” he said. “Sure, they can be, but we should not assume a priori that they will be all the time.”
These operations could serve a purpose that outweighed their potential to alienate the population, he said. “It depends on the situation and what strategy has been created as the political object of war and the necessary military means to accomplish it. In other words, if you are a New American Army Way of War proponent, then the absolute and unequivocal answer to the question is that they are never productive and can never work in any counterinsurgency operation. But depending on the policy objective and a realistic approach to strategy, such methods might be effective. And arguably, during the critical months of the surge, it was just these types of operations that reduced Al Qaeda, fueled by the former Sunni insurgents who we bought off.”
Kuehl found it ironic that Gentile focused on offensive operations to maintain the initiative and morale, he said, because “Gentile did not have the initiative when he turned over the area to us. The initiative belonged to the insurgents. Gian’s patrols would not go on the two main streets in town due to the IED threat, and there was one area where they would not dismount due to the sniper threat. He had very little information on the nature of the threat in the area. While there were perhaps a dozen individuals that they were looking at, there was no clear understanding of the nature of the insurgency. At least none that he passed on to me.”
Kuehl’s operation officer, Lieut. Col. Chris Rogers (who was then a major), wrote a response to Gentile in the January 2008 issue of Armed Forces Journal titled “More Soup, Please.” “Gian had been criticizing the surge and the change in focus for some time,” Kuehl said. “To be honest, it really pissed me off. Here we were trying to make this work, and he, a commissioned officer, was openly critical of the effort. I found this very unprofessional on his part. Furthermore, not once did he ask my opinion on what had changed and how we were trying to do things. In fact, he never once contacted me while we were in Iraq. I think he took some of my comments in the press as personal criticism of how he did operations, which was never my intent.” (Gentile responded in Armed Forces Journal with an article titled “Our COIN Doctrine Removes the Enemy From the Essence of War.”)
“Several times I have heard Gian say that we had done nothing different from his formation,” Kuehl told me. “He uses a platoon leader from my battalion as a source to back up his argument. This platoon leader said that he did not think we did anything different, and he was critical of my decision to put an outpost in northwest Amriya. I am pretty sure I know who this was, and he was not exactly one of my stellar performers. It seems a bit odd that Gian would rely on the opinions of a lieutenant who had a lieutenant’s view of operations, as opposed to the experiences of the commander and XO of the formation, who had a broader perspective.”
I asked Gentile if he might have been stretched too thin. “Not in Amriya from August until the end of November—I made the conscious choice to concentrate almost all of my squadron in Amriya, because it was such a critical district. The notion that the surge brigades greatly increased the amount of combat power on the ground does not work in Amriya. In fact, what Kuehl brought into the area was roughly the same with what I had there. Kuehl did not increase the overall amount of combat power relative to what I had there, so the premise to this question is flawed based on actual conditions.” Gentile did not have a strong presence in other parts of Baghdad that were technically under his authority, and as the next chapter, on Washash, will show, the paucity of troops did allow militias to operate without hindrance.
Kuehl ended up expanding the area under his control. “Shortly after taking over, we expanded our area to include all of Mansour,” he said. “This gave me a broader perspective, since we had a much larger area to be concerned about. Gian was focused almost exclusively on Amriya, with one company in Khadra. The rest of Mansour was under the control of a Stryker unit for a couple months, but they were not permanent. The expansion to include all of Mansour under our responsibility allowed me to see the problem of Al Qaeda and other insurgent movement more clearly. Along with intelligence I was getting I was able to trace the infiltration routes used by Al Qaeda into western Baghdad. One of these was along the road to Abu Ghraib. AQI could easily bypass all the checkpoints and get into central Baghdad. The result of this was the improved walls along this road as well as around Ghazaliya, Khadra, and Amriya. This severely restricted the movements of AQI. Gian did put walls around Amriya, but it was very ineffective, consisting only of the shorter Jersey barriers. Insurgents could easily move them, go over them, or around them. The barrier we put up was much more comprehensive and effective.”
I VISITED SHEIKH KHALID AL-OBEIDI, president of the Council of Notables, so vaunted by U.S. occupation forces. I found him in a large hall receiving a long line of supplicants seeking food or help with medical problems or with finding missing loved ones. In another office I saw a similarly occupied Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. I was curious to hear Sheikh Khalid’s views on why security in Baghdad had improved. “The U.S. Army has given the chance for these areas to be protected by their own,” Khalid told me. “Thus many people of these areas have volunteered to protect their own areas. This has helped to impose better security in the areas. This experience was successful to a large extent, but it needs a further investment, and we are afraid it might fail at the end. What pushed the people to accept such a project and even pushed the U.S. forces to support and allow it was the resistance operations against the U.S. forces. The U.S. forces need the people in order to protect themselves and protect the people. The people were suffering from militias in these areas in addition to the military operations in these areas. People have been asked to help and have been given the chance to protect themselves. In terms of future outlook, this is not going to help build a government, but in the meantime, people feel it is safer now than then, since they have the opportunity to protect themselves.”
But Sheikh Khalid was extremely cautious about the future. “The Iraqi people find themselves passing through a time much worse than any other time,” he said. “Much worse because nothing has changed for the better. Iraqi people have no life. They are insecure and incapable, even to leave their house safely. They have very few sources to earn money and even the political elite that came now didn’t bring anything better than the previous one. There is no real project that helps people. Iraq is a very vital place for the security of the entire world. A stable Iraq means stable oil prices and a stable economy. An unstable Iraq means a bigger Iran that imposes its control over the Gulf region and threatens all neighboring countries. Help will only come through reconsidering the political process and giving a better chance to Iraqis to choose who represent them. The political project in Iraq didn’t start right from the beginning. It was built on a sectarian basis, and thus some parties have gained control of decision making in Iraq. They have marginalized lots of skilled people, those who would have helped to shape and lead the Iraqi state. In order to let Iraq exit its ordeal, we all need to reconsider the political process and give an opportunity to the Iraqi people to choose their government without the pressure factors that were used in the previous elections. The current changes in Iraq’s security situation have shown the American administration that peace has only been gained with the people’s help and the help of the key figures—only through the help of Sunnis. If the same marginalization stays in Iraq, I think it won’t be good for anyone at the end, and the political and democratic process in Iraq that the West is hoping to achieve won’t be accepted in our communities because people won’t believe in it.”
ONE DAY IN EARLY 2008, I WAS ON PALESTINE STREET IN EASTERN Baghdad, heading to a meeting at the Interior Ministry. My driver stopped to buy some black-market gasoline from a man selling containers on the sidewalk not far from where a national police pickup truck was parked. I gave the man a twenty-dollar bill, but he thought it was fake, so he took it to the police to see what they thought. They saw my beard in the distance and the American money, and so they came to my side of the car to ask for my ID. Upon hearing my foreign accent they panicked; then I showed them my American passport and the press ID the U.S. military had given me, and they panicked even more, unable to read English but aware I was a foreigner. Pointing their rifles at me, they ordered me out of the car and tried to handcuff me. One of them poked me in the ribs with his rifle, searching for a suicide vest. I asked them if I could call my friend at the Interior Ministry, who would tell them who I was, but they worried I would detonate my bomb with the phone. We struggled as I refused to let them handcuff me, afraid that they were members of a militia who would kidnap me. My driver told them I was Iranian. When they heard that, they relaxed somewhat and swore on Imam Ridha that they would not harm me. “We are the state,” they told me. “We are all Shiites.”
Eventually, I told them I would go with them, but not if they handcuffed me. They put me in the back of their truck, and we drove to their headquarters. The officer stared at my IDs for several minutes, not saying anything. He was probably worried about having to deal with all the officials I was naming in case I was telling the truth, and in the end he let me go. His men told me to shave my beard so I wouldn’t look Saudi. In retrospect, despite my fear, they were not abusive. It was a change, a sign that they took their role as “the state” more seriously. I would see more and more of this in the next two years.
I waited for my friend at an Interior Ministry safe house. Inside, a barber agreed to give me a “Mahdi Army”-style shave. Televisions were all tuned to Shiite religious channels showing Muharram processions. In the lobby of the ministry itself, and in the minister’s reception area, the Shiite TV channel Al Furat was showing live images of religious processions in Karbala. My friend, who was the minister’s secretary, showed up late and explained that as he was driving to the office he saw men in a pickup truck belonging to the Facility Protection Service (FPS) stop on the street, grab a young man, blindfold and handcuff him, and throw him in the back of their truck. The FPS was a government militia that protected ministries and other Iraqi government offices but was notoriously lawless and loyal to sectarian Shiite militias. My friend complained that it was impossible to control these FPS guys. As I left I saw that Shiite religious flags were placed on the roof of the Interior Ministry across the street.
The televisions in the lobby and waiting room at the Interior Ministry were tuned in to the Shiite religious channels. Shiite religious music blared from radios of police vehicles. Shiite religious banners hung on the walls of the Interior Ministry and other ministries, while Shiite religious flags waved in the wind above the nearby Oil Ministry and other government buildings. It may have seemed harmless, but it made Sunnis feel like they did not belong and were not wanted. It was a way of letting them know that the state now belonged to sectarian Shiites. But while Shiites seemed to be firmly in control of the establishment, one group that had been marginalized by Saddam was beginning to feel similarly marginalized by the new order. The angry, poor revolutionary Shiites who found a political voice in Muqtada al-Sadr and whose influence peaked during the civil war had found that their power had started to wane after the Mahdi Army cease-fire.
Like many mass movements, the Sadrists were misunderstood and reviled. Muqtada was often mischaracterized as unintelligent or boorish, despite surviving a Baathist regime that killed his father and brothers and an American occupation that swore to kill or capture him. The Mahdi Army was often described as a militia, but it was also a people’s army. All Iraqi men have at least a rifle and some ammunition in their homes, and Muqtada’s force was composed of such volunteers, who could never be fully demobilized or disarmed because they armed, and in many cases mobilized, themselves. At one time the Sadrists were probably also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing sustainable assistance to more Iraqis (albeit Shiites) than anybody else. No other movement or leader in Iraq had such devoted and inspired followers. In a volatile and fissiparous Iraq, the Sadrists were there to stay. Muqtada represented the anger of many people. He was oppressed and angry like them; he had suffered like them. He did not lead them; they led him. He was only as popular as he was angry, and when he stopped being angry, stopped being “anti,” his popularity went down. After he ordered his militia to freeze, it was common to hear Mahdi Army men say, “Assayid jundi wasarahna” (the sayyid [Muqtada] is a soldier, and we have relieved him of his duty).
In February 2008 I revisited Abul Hassan’s office in the Mustafa Husseiniya. When I had last seen him he had been brooding over the efficacy of the Mahdi Army’s cease-fire. But now he seemed absorbed by more mundane pressures of sustaining the social welfare network that the Sadrists had built for their base of supporters in the slums. During one of my visits I found him distributing, in his rarely empty office, bags of clothes and rations to poor women in black abayas, many of whom were from displaced families, expelled by Sunni militias. Most Iraqis had depended on the Public Distribution Service, an extremely efficient ration system that provided essential staples for all Iraqi families under the former regime. But the system had stopped functioning because of security problems, corruption, and sectarianism. Most families did not receive even half of what they used to, and displaced Iraqis, especially Sunnis, received nothing at all. The Sadrist movement was supplementing the rations for Shiites as well as it could, although some of that assistance may have come from extortion and other militia activities.
When I visited Abul Hassan another time, his office was still crowded. Two young men from the Iraqi Security Forces were among those visiting him. One was a member of the FPS; the other belonged to the Iraqi National Guard. Both proudly told me they were also members of the Mahdi Army. “We want you to know that most of the Sadrists are working for the government,” said the FPS member. They listed their many friends who had been killed by Sunni militias. “Many of my friends got killed in Adhamiya, Sleikh, and Bab al-Muadham when they were heading to their work,” he told me. “One of my friends got killed, and they burned his body. His body stayed in the street for two days. It was only when the security forces intervened that his family was able to get his body.” “I’m a soldier in Iraqi army, the Iraqi National Guard, for three years,” said his friend. “We saw that none of the political parties or movements are working for the benefit of the people except this movement. The Sadrists are devoting their time and effort to help Iraqi people. I thought the best way to help the people is by joining them.”
One man had absconded to Abul Hassan’s office because the Americans were looking for him. “They came to our house,” he told me. “They arrested my brother after destroying our furniture. They said that I’m wanted by them. They took him because he is my brother. If they do not find the one they are after, they will take the brothers. Sometimes they take the father.” Several men were seated on the floor awaiting Abul Hassan’s arbitration services. He was to adjudicate a legal dispute over real estate. “We can’t reach the registration directorate,” they told me, because it was in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold. “We might get killed if we go there because of the sectarian problems.”
Abul Hassan’s faithful assistant, Haidar, was always present. He had the dark skin of southern Iraqis. He was thin and muscular, and always wore a cap. He sedulously did Abul Hassan’s bidding, and was in charge of feeding the guests and making tea for them. Haidar and his family had lived in Abu Ghraib. He insisted that there had been no sectarian tensions in the area before the war, and said he had played soccer with Sunnis. Things got worse after the battles in Falluja in 2004, he said, when foreign radical Sunnis killed people they accused of being spies and threatened to slaughter Shiites. In 2006, because of these threats, he and his family were forced to leave Abu Ghraib and come to Shaab.
I persuaded Haidar to show me his new home in Shaab and introduce me to his family. His mother told me about the fraught circumstances that led to her family’s flight. “Abu Ghraib was a Sunni area,” she said, reflecting on her old neighborhood, “the Sunnis are good people. After one of my sons joined the police, we were told to leave the area, but there was nowhere to go. I accepted my son joining the police because we needed money. His father was a police sergeant, and after the war there were not enough jobs. Seven months after he took the job, we were one of about seventeen houses that received letters threatening us to leave the area. My two sons came to Shaab and found us a house to rent, and we stayed for a year there. My other son, the policeman, was killed during the course of duty. That house was not good enough for us.”
“This house belonged to a [Sunni] terrorist,” said Haidar, who joined the Mahdi Army soon after the American invasion. “He became a takfiri and was killed. Then the house was given to the Sadrist Current. There were a lot of takfiris here, and they committed a lot of killings in the area. Then the Mahdi Army came and finished them. There are no Wahhabis in the area anymore.” Three other families also shared the house; the home received about thirty minutes of electricity a day from the national grid, so they paid to receive more from a local generator.
“I wish peace will be upon everyone,” Haidar’s mother said. “We are getting tired. We just need a decent house to live in and decent food to live off of, and that America gets out so the Sunnis and the Shiites get back together without any differences. I wish for my sons to get an education and to be teachers or lawyers, and for the girls to grow up and get marred with a good future. I am a believer in God, and to die in dignity is better than another kind of death.”
“I don’t think I’m able to go back,” Haidar said of his old home, “because the tribes there now are against Shiites.” Although the Anbar province was more stable because of the powerful Awakening militia there, Haidar and his family, like other Shiites, did not feel reassured. “The Awakening are the same,” he said. “They were with the terrorists before, and they are the Awakening.” He told me he would like to take revenge for his brother’s death.
Haidar took me to the nearby Saddah area on the outskirts of the city, where hundreds of impoverished Shiite Iraqis, many of them displaced by Sunni militias, lived in makeshift homes. There were about three hundred such homes in the area, with ten to twenty residents in each one. Locals complained that they were harassed by the Americans. The only help they received was from the local Sadrists.
Jasim Muhamad was an Iraqi army veteran who was wounded during the American invasion of 2003. He and seventeen of his relatives, including eight children, now lived in three adjacent shacks. They were from Haswa, near Falluja. They said that no one had returned to Haswa since some women went there to transfer their children’s school papers to Baghdad and were killed. “No one from the family tried to get us back to our homes,” said Jasim’s wife. “If I go back, I will get killed.” Up to three thousand families from Haswa were displaced, they told me, their homes looted. The Iraqi army had told them to leave Haswa because it was unsafe. They believed that the Awakening members were the ones who had expelled them and that these same militiamen would threaten them if they dared to return.
Previously Sunnis and Shiites had lived together in the area. Jasim and his family blamed outsiders for instigating the problems. They received a letter from the Tawhid Brigade, stating that because Sunni families had been killed and expelled in Baghdad, infidel families (meaning Shiites) had five days to leave or face death. Those who ignored this warning were killed, including Jasim’s brother-in-law, whose body was never found.
The Ministry of Displacement provided Jasim and his family with beds, blankets, and a small kerosene cooker, but nothing else. After one year of trying, they succeeded in transferring their ration cards from the Public Distribution Service, but they received rations only every few months, and only a small share of what they used to receive. The Sadrist movement provided them with food such as rice, flour, and sugar. There was no running water in the area, so they relied on a nearby well. Although they had been connected to the national power grid, they rarely got electricity. They had to break apart a bed to use it for firewood because they had no cooking gas or kerosene. On some days they had no food. Jasim was unable to register for his pension as a wounded veteran because the ministries were not functioning properly.
Jasim’s brother found an occasional job working in the sewage system, and he would sometimes bring money to the family. Only their older children attended school. The family members had voted in the most recent elections for the Shiite Iraqi Alliance list, but they complained that they had not received anything from the government, not even security. “My message to the American people after five years,” said Jasim’s wife: “They destroyed us and didn’t help us, they didn’t reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily, while now there is nothing. Now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets, and there is no life. Strangers come to our homes and threaten us. I feel life is miserable now and our country is destroyed.”
The neglect in Sadr City and other neighborhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad was shocking. But Washash, in central Baghdad, was stark for its contrast to the upscale Mansour district adjacent to it. Of course, much of Mansour was deserted when I visited because of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, but the district’s clothing stores and restaurants were once packed, its shopping boulevard and ice cream parlors open until late at night. The streets of the majority-Shiite Washash remained unpaved dirt, many flooded with water or sewage. It was quiet and removed from the nearby bustle.
Washash was a staging point for Mahdi Army attacks against Al Qaeda and forays into the Mansour district. It was one of the few Shiite neighborhoods I saw that was surrounded by concrete walls, with only one road left open for cars, guarded by Iraqi soldiers. Elsewhere a few narrow openings between the concrete blocks allowed pedestrians to enter one at a time. About five thousand families lived in Washash, but most of its Sunnis had fled or were slaughtered, and the Mahdi Army men there were notorious, even among other Mahdi Army units, for their brutality. In Washash I saw more posters and banners in honor of Muqtada and his father than anywhere else in Baghdad.
When I first visited Washash in April 2003, sewage flooded the streets and there was a thriving arms market nearby. About sixty thousand people lived in an area not much larger than one square kilometer. When American vehicles approached, the weapons dealers would hastily conceal their wares. The revenge killings started in Washash soon after Baghdad fell, and it didn’t take long for the murders to take on a sectarian tone. In October 2003 three Sunnis were killed in Washash: Sheikh Ahmed Khudeir and his brother Walid Khudeir were killed along with a teenage assistant as they walked home from the Sunni Washash Mosque after the morning prayer. The three were riddled with bullets. Locals believed militiamen from the Badr Corps had killed them. Hospital officials reported seeing many similar cases in the area. In August 2004 a police chief and a patrolman were killed in an explosion in Washash. In December 2004 several members of a Sunni Salafist group in Washash were killed, and Sunni gunmen tried to kill a Shiite sheikh called Razaq; they missed Razaq but killed his wife and wounded his son, who remained paralyzed. Following the killings, Sunni and Shiite clerics issued a joint edict banning sectarian fighting. By the summer of 2005, sectarian violence was a common occurrence. Sectarian violence targeting Sunnis was so bad that in July the Sunni waqf (endowment) complained about the targeting and arrest of Sunnis.
Washash and the nearby Iskan were located in northeast Mansour on an important sectarian front line between Shiite-controlled Hurriya and Kadhimiya and Sunni-controlled Khadra, Jamia, Adil, and Mutanabi. In October 2006, during Operation Together Forward II, American soldiers raided a house in Washash while searching for a death squad and found documents recording the cleansing of Sunnis from the area. The documents included a list of nearly seventy homes where Sunni families had been expelled and Shiite families were brought in to replace them. There was also a list of “good” families who would not be expelled. American soldiers discovered letters threatening Sunnis as well as DVDs with the same message from the Mahdi Army, with images of exploding houses and threats to kill a male of the house. That month Washash notables asked the Iraqi government to intervene in a crime wave that had led to the discovery of sixty corpses and the threatening of many families by militias. In November a journalist working for the state-run Al Sabah newspaper was killed in Washash. In December, gunmen assassinated a news editor for an Iraqi radio station as he left his home to go to work. In April 2007 four women accused of being informants for the Americans were killed in Washash.
In the summer of 2007, as American forces pushed the Mahdi Army out of Hurriya, some members of the militia moved to Washash, resulting in an increase of militia activity and murders. In July of that year Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi publicly accused Shiite militias of cleansing hundreds of Sunni families from Washash and added that soldiers from the Iraqi army’s Sixth Division had cooperated with the militias. Dulaimi’s bodyguards had clashed in the past with men from the Sixth Division, and Dulaimi accused the division’s Colonel Rahim of an attempted assassination. That same month, Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the Islamic Party and the Sunni vice president, complained about Shiite militias in Washash. In August a car bomb exploded close to a coffee shop in Washash. Later that month the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment, set up a combat outpost nearby. A Sunni Arabic teacher at the local secondary school was shot on the street. Men were killed for drinking alcohol. In September a U.S. airstrike during clashes with the Mahdi Army killed between fourteen and thirty-one residents, some of whom were civilians. Several homes were destroyed, including one that belonged to an expelled Sunni family whose teenage son had been murdered earlier that summer (they had moved to Ghazaliya).
Later that month gunmen assassinated Washash’s notorious Mahdi Army commander, Hamudi Naji, along with two of his associates, leading to reprisals against Sunnis. (Several months earlier Naji and his men had struck a truce with Sunnis in Washash.) Locals believed that two of the assassins were from the Iraqi Islamic Party. Some blamed the small Ugaidat clan; others said Naji was killed by the relatives of a man he had killed two years earlier. Hundreds of Sunnis fled Washash after the reprisals. Many were killed, including whole families, and several homes were destroyed. One car carrying a fleeing Sunni family was hit by an RPG before they escaped. Many Sunnis who fled to nearby Adil complained that American and Iraqi forces had facilitated their displacement by directing them to the highway and escorting them. That month a car bomb exploded in Washash and killed two civilians. The Mahdi Army manned checkpoints and kidnapped Sunnis without American interference.
In the fall of 2007 the bodies of murder victims were often found in Washash. In October more than one thousand men marched to protest the new wall the Americans were planning to build around the area. Their chants rejected the wall and America. Small Jersey barriers were already up, but the Americans were constructing a larger wall that would seal the neighborhood more effectively. In clashes with the Iraqi army after the protest, two locals were injured. That month the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi army fought openly in Washash.
In November four Mahdi Army commanders were killed in Washash. It was suspected that the Mahdi Army itself might have been responsible for the assassinations, and that the four were negotiating with the Americans to establish a Shiite Awakening group. In late 2007 Mahdi Army men from Washash declared that they were operating independently of the militia’s hierarchy as a result of disagreements with the local leadership, based in Shula.
In 2006 Washash was technically a battle space “owned” by Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, but from July to November of that year he did very little there because he was concentrated in Amriya. Gentile told me that no other American combat unit conducted systematic COIN operations there in 2006—the result of low troop numbers, perhaps. By the time an American unit eventually got there, a brutal Shiite militia was running rampant. Lieut. Col. Ed Chesney commanded the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor, Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia. They arrived in late May 2007 and controlled their area of operations from June 15, 2007, to July 3, 2008. The battalion’s area of operations encompassed a large portion of the Mansour district, including the neighborhoods of Khadra, Jamia, Adil, Iskan, Washash, Mutanabi, Andalus, and Mansour. Chesney was on his third deployment to Iraq; he had been an executive officer in Bayji from 2003 to 2004 and a deputy brigade commander in eastern Baghdad from July 2005 to January 2006.
“The battalion and our brigade prepared for the deployment by focusing on our core war-fighting fundamentals and skills,” Chesney said. “We did not focus on COIN until late in our preparation. Most of my senior NCOs and officers had at least one Operation Iraqi Freedom deployment as experience, and we used the collective experience.”
“Washash was the poorest area we were responsible for,” Chesney said. “It was also heavily Shia, with the neighborhoods to the south being mixed to heavily Sunni. The walls were not in place, other than some Jersey barriers on some of the streets. The area was dominated by a criminal JAM element under the control of Hamudi Naji. The Sunnis to the south were petrified of him and his element and did not trust the army. What police there were in the area were from the Kadhimiya district, which did not engender trust in the Sunni population. There had been sectarian killings and intimidation in the mixed and Sunni areas around Washash; all of this was attributed to Hamudi’s group. There was no JSS [joint security station] close to Washash.
“By this time there were not a lot of mixed neighborhoods,” Chesney continued. “Consequently, when the army arrested people in Washash they were almost always Shia, so the people thought they were sectarian. But in Jamia, they arrested all Sunnis and were sectarian. When there was sectarianism it usually took the form of disrespect to the people or had a criminal aspect to it. Also, at times the Iraqi junior leaders performed poorly and were afraid to confront either JAM or Al Qaeda elements—this fostered the notion of sectarianism. The army around Washash, especially the rank and file, was sympathetic to JAM. . . . Lieutenant Colonel Hassan, the battalion commander, did not trust them to conduct cordon and searches properly if U.S. forces weren’t there to watch over them. We suspected corruption in many areas but were unable to prove it.”
Because it was so dangerous for outsiders, my driver, whose cousin lived there, arranged for us to be met by the head of the local tribal council, Sheikh Kadhim Khanjer Maan al-Saedy, who guaranteed my safety. A Sadrist, he introduced me to Mahdi Army men who surrounded us as we strolled through his neighborhood’s dirt streets. Many displaced Shiites from wealthier majority-Sunni neighborhoods had been forced to flee to Washash and work where they could. “We are helping the people who have been displaced from other cities,” he said. “Some of the help is with stipends, salaries, or places to live in. Also we are trying to provide gas and kerosene as much as we can.” Graffiti on the wall behind him said, “Long live the hero leader Muqtada al-Sadr.” The men told me that Ahmad Chalabi had visited the area and promised to help. “He only sat for thirty minutes, drank his Pepsi, and left,” a sheikh told me.
I met one man displaced from Dora. “Shiites were the minority there,” he said, “and they started killing them in their houses. They did not get my son because he was at his college, and we came to this area because it has a Shiite majority.” One month after fleeing to Washash, he said, “the Americans and the Iraqi army came to our street, and they blew up the door to our house, and they arrested us and some of our neighbors, we don’t know why. I was arrested by the American army with my son for eleven months and six days—without any charges. They accused me of being a terrorist, and they don’t have any proof. They released me and they kept my son, and we don’t know for which reason. If anybody says the Americans came to liberate the country, we say it is not true. If they came to liberate us, they should show some respect to us. There are no human rights.”
Sheikh Kadhim introduced me to an elderly man in a head scarf whose home had recently been raided by the Americans. “At 11:30 p.m. they raided our house after breaking our doors,” the man said. “They beat the men, women, and my daughters-in-law. We asked them, ‘What do you want?’ but they said nothing. We don’t know what they wanted.”
As Sheikh Kadhim and I walked down the street, we were surrounded by throngs of Mahdi Army men and other residents of Washash desperate to voice their anger. “As you know, we consider the Iraqi army to be our sons and brothers,” Kadhim told me. “Unfortunately the army unit here which is surrounding the area is giving false information about us. They said we are doing many bad things and the neighborhood is unsafe. When the Iraqi army raid houses, they steal the mobile phones and money, attack the elderly people, and falsely accuse people. For example, some of our young guys were accused of planting bombs. After the investigation, they discovered it is not true. Some of them were accused of killing people; they said such and such killed ten or fifteen. After the investigation they released him. So there are false accusations against those innocent people.”
Kadhim and the people of Washash spoke of the Iraqi army unit in charge of their area much the way Sunnis spoke of the Iraqi police. “They are dealing with us in a sectarian way,” Kadhim said. “Most of the prisoners are Shiites, most of the arrests are of Shiites.” The Iraqi police were different, he said. “The Iraqi police can come without weapons and see if anyone would shoot one bullet. We will be responsible for them as the tribal leaders council. . . . The police are peaceful people. If anyone files a complaint they will respond to him properly. We don’t have any problem with the police.” I would soon find out just how close they were with the police.
We passed men wheeling in goods for sale on pushcarts, and at an intersection I found a tractor used as a garbage truck to clean the streets. “Our sons collect trash with this car,” one tribal leader told me. “The Sadrist Current collects the trash,” a man corrected him.
On the corner sat many women in abayas by dozens of colorful jerricans. They were waiting for kerosene that the Mahdi Army was supposed to bring in, but, they claimed, the Iraqi army was besieging their area and preventing the kerosene from coming in. The women had been waiting for four days.
I approached the women hoping one might agree to talk to me on camera and was surprised by how eager they all were. “My dear,” said an elderly woman with tribal tattoos on her chin, “we don’t have electricity, kerosene, or gas, and we are surrounded and we have been insulted. Where should we go? To whom should we complain? We are waiting for a month to get some kerosene, but we got nothing. Only the Mahdi Army used to bring us kerosene, but now the Iraqi army is not allowing them. It is not true that the Mahdi Army are terrorists,” she said. A tribal leader interrupted her. “The Americans are the real terrorists,” he insisted. “They are bringing Al Qaeda and the terrorists to Iraq!”
A younger woman explained to me that “without the Mahdi Army, our women or girls could not go outside. We are under a lot of pressure. They are defending us like they are defending their own sisters.” She and her daughters had been expelled from the majority-Sunni town of Mahmudiya, she told me, after two of her sons were murdered. “The Mahdi Army are the only ones who gave me a shelter, and they are protecting me and my daughters. The terrorists killed my sons with a car bomb. One of them was married, and he left behind four children, and I have twelve people to look after. May God bless the Mahdi Army. Now I feel safe to go to the market. We are going out only with the protection of the Mahdi Army. Anyone who says they are terrorists is lying.”
Another young woman, holding her baby, told me that “the Americans are ruining people’s lives. We don’t have electricity, and we don’t receive our rations. They are raiding the houses every night. What we have done? The Americans and the national guards are raiding our houses every day, and our sons are not sleeping there at night. Tell me, what we have done?”
A thick, muscular Mahdi Army man explained that an Iraqi army captain named Salim was preventing the kerosene truck from entering the neighborhood. Another man insisted Salim was a Sunni and was punishing them for sectarian reasons. I found out later that he was, in fact, a Shiite.
“We haven’t had electricity in Washash for four months,” one man told me. “Sewage floods, and there is no water, no electricity, and we are surrounded. It is like a prison inside Washash. Tell me, what is the difference between here and prison? We are surrounded by a wall that prevents us from going to other neighborhoods. Our sons and daughters can’t go to the schools in the Arabi neighborhood, which is the closest area. Our conditions are very bad, and there are random arrests. The services we have are only through the help of the Sadrists, may God bless them. They are cleaning, they are helping the ones who need some money. They are bringing the kerosene and giving it to families.”
A tribal leader warned, “If it is going to be like this for a long time, the young men will lose their minds. Maybe we will too. We can’t control our sons. It will be very bad. We can’t keep our sons quiet anymore.”
“We receive electricity for half an hour a week,” another tribal leader told me. “What about shops, factories, and workers? What is the reason? They should say it clearly on TV: ‘This neighborhood is a target. We don’t want to give them services; we want to humiliate them.’ The other neighborhoods around us all have electricity. We were bombed by aircraft. More than fourteen houses were destroyed.”
One man who had served in the Iraqi army’s special forces for twenty-three years said the Iraqi army had just raided his home. “They insulted me and my honor!” he shouted at me. “An Iraqi soldier came with an American standing beside him. He said to me that I am the brother of a whore! I have only one AK-47, and he took it. Why did he take it? It was only an AK-47 with thirty bullets. They destroyed my furniture and stole my money. My son has a lung problem and I don’t have money to buy kerosene, and the soldier is calling me the brother of a whore! I spent eight years fighting in the war with Iran, and a soldier came to me yesterday and called me the brother of a whore! If there is security, as Mr. Bush is saying, then American or Iraqi soldiers wouldn’t come at seven o’clock and shoot randomly. We lost many people because of those injuries.”
A tribal leader led me to the rubble of a home the Americans had bombed two months earlier. Seven of his relatives had been killed there, some of them children. “What do they want?” he demanded. “Do they want us to fight? We don’t mind. If you try to strangle a cat, it will scratch you. We are trying to control our sons, and each one of us has seven to eight sons. If the situation continues like this, we will have to make a decision. We are losing our patience.”
They led me through the market, which had once served the neighborhoods around Washash. “We are paying rent and we don’t have work,” one shopkeeper told me. “This wall ruined our life and our business,” another said. “Would you accept to walk in this mud?” a man asked me. “People are holding their sons in order to cross the pools of water on their way to the schools. It’s as if Washash is not on the map. Even the government doesn’t care about it.”
They showed me more shops without customers. “The policy of walls is wrong,” a tribal leader told me. “The Americans think that they are providing security for the people. Even if they achieved that, what is the use of safety if a man is hungry? When they closed the area people lost their living.” We approached the walls that separated Washash from Mansour. “We are like Palestine,” one of my guides said. They showed me the narrow opening between the barriers. Behind it was an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier spotted me filming and began to approach. “He won’t dare come in,” one of the men said of the soldier. “We will fuck him.”
Nevertheless, I was ushered away by Mahdi Army men, who consulted one another about what to do with me before the Iraqi soldiers came looking. One offered to drive me to a different opening in the back of the neighborhood, where there was a friendly Iraqi National Police checkpoint. He assured me that the police were “good,” and I got in his car alongside another Mahdi Army member, who then led me through a fence to a gap in the barrier. “They are from our group,” he said of the police, meaning they were with the Mahdi Army. As I waited for my driver to circle around and come pick me up, he explained to the police officer what had happened, and the police protected me from the Iraqi army.
I returned the next day to resume filming in the area, spotting unarmed Mahdi Army men sitting on steps and standing on street corners. As soon as I began, men from the Mahdi Army told me that someone had alerted the Iraqi army and a patrol was looking for me. We snuck past them again, avoiding the vehicles that slowly searched the streets.
I MET WITH SALIM, the Iraqi army captain so loathed by the Mahdi Army supporters who guided me through Washash. He was an intelligence officer in Mansour, thirty years old, with a round face and a short military haircut. I told him the men in Washash had accused him of being a Sunni and targeting them for sectarian reasons. “I’m a Shiite,” he replied with a laugh. “How can I be sectarian?”
Before the war Salim had been an artillery officer living in Bayaa. In September 2003 an American lieutenant colonel based in Camp Falcon, asked Salim about his job. The American, who also happened to be an artillery officer, asked Salim to join the new Iraqi army. He became an officer in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, commanding a company in charge of the airport road.
In early 2004 the Americans established the Defense Ministry and Salim became part of the new Iraqi army. “At the time there was only Al Qaeda, not Mahdi Army,” he said. “We confiscated a lot of weapons and car bombs. This was before the sectarianism started. I was trained to be an intelligence officer.” When Salim joined the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, there were very few Sunni officers, he said. “Sunni officers were afraid because they were worried that the Americans think Sunnis are terrorists, but Americans judged people on whether they were good.” On the night of the Samarra shrine attack in 2006, Salim’s unit had orders to protect all Sunni mosques and the Islamic Party headquarters. “But the Iraqi army, not all of it was clean,” he said, “and some officers told their soldiers to let the Mahdi Army operate freely, especially in Rusafa [eastern Baghdad]. Samarra made officers sectarian, but even before that the Iraqi National Police was infiltrated with militias. Most officers were in a dilemma: if you act like a real officer and be a patriot, you will lose your family and your house, because you live in a Shiite area—this happened to me.”
Salim first clashed with the Mahdi Army in Washash when it was commanded by Hamudi Naji. Much of the government supported the Mahdi Army and had access to good information, he said, so Hamudi managed to obtain Salim’s phone number. “In the end of 2006 we captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys,” he said. “But we got orders from the prime minister’s office and Baghdad Operations Center to release them. Once we captured four armed Mahdi Army guys with Glocks—they had masks. It was next to the Buratha Mosque. An army lieutenant captured them. He was punished, and they were released an hour later. So the officer requested to be transferred to Iraqi special forces.”
“I was on patrol next to Maamun College in the Iskan neighborhood, on Street Twenty-three, and I saw two guys with a pistol and MP5 take a man and put him in the trunk of their car. We went after them. The men ran away and left their weapons. The man in the trunk was Sunni. His family came to get him, and we kept the vehicle and guns.” This was when Salim’s conflict with the Mahdi Army began. Hamudi Naji called him. “You are Shiite, one of us,” Hamudi said, according to Salim. “We don’t want anything from you—just return the car and the weapons.” Salim responded that if Hamudi gave him the name of the two fugitives, then he would return the car. “These men are in the Mahdi Army,” Hamudi said. “How can I give them to you?” Hamudi used religious language and appealed to Salim as a Shiite. “I said I am secular,” Salim told me. “I don’t care if you’re Sunni or Shiite or Hindu—I have orders.”
In 2007 Salim and his men stopped a government vehicle at one of their checkpoints that was leaving Washash and heading to Sadr City. The men wore tracksuits and had two Glocks with three magazines each. The Americans said they were Mahdi Army leaders and detained them. One of the suspects was called Ali Kadhim. The Americans had a picture of him wearing a turban. Hamudi Naji called Salim again and demanded their release. Salim told him that they were wanted and that the Americans had them in their custody. “You arrested them, so you bring them back to us,” Hamudi said. “You have twenty-four hours to get them back to me.” Hamudi called Salim again that night. “What have you done about them?” he asked. “You’re crazy,” Salim replied. “The Americans have them.” I expressed surprise at the Mahdi Army’s audacity. “The state was on their side,” Salim said. “We were afraid of the Mahdi Army; they weren’t afraid of us.”
Hamudi Naji arranged for Mahdi Army men in Bayaa to join with members of the Iraqi National Police Fifth Brigade and go to Salim’s house. They mistakenly went to the house of his neighbor Anas, who was an army captain as well. The Mahdi Army men insisted that Anas was Salim with a fake ID card and put him in the trunk of their car. Hamudi called Salim’s phone and was surprised to hear Salim answer. “Who are you?” he asked. “Salim,” the captain replied. “So who is the lamb we have here?” Hamudi asked, referring to Anas as a victim about to be killed. Anas was released after being terribly beaten. Salim sent his family to Hilla and his wife and children to Egypt. “For one year I visited them every two months,” he told me. “It was very expensive.”
A week after the failed raid on Salim’s house, the Mahdi Army killed his uncle in the Amil district. “I decided to terminate the Mahdi Army in Washash,” he told me. The Americans had a new captain and colonel in the area, and in mid-2007 they had a meeting with Salim about the Washash, Iskan, and Tobchi neighborhoods. The Americans brought their intelligence officer, and Salim gave him all his information.
The Americans, Salim told me, decided it was time to rid the area from Amriya to Mansour of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. The Iraqis and the new American troops worked on a plan. The colonel told Salim he had heard good things about him and that his captain would give Salim whatever help he needed. They built the walls around Washash and set up a joint security station next to it, with a quick reaction force to counter the Mahdi Army. The previous American base had been too far away. Salim met with the American platoon leaders and NCOs, and introduced them to his team. He suggested that they first target Al Qaeda so that locals wouldn’t think that they were only going after the Mahdi Army. The first target was Abu Zeinab, an Al Qaeda leader in Mansour. “Too easy,” the Americans replied.
“I had strong intelligence sources in Mansour,” Salim told me. “It was a great operation. We found a car bomb and an IED factory. The intelligence was all ours. The Americans were new and had no sources.” Abu Zeinab wasn’t there, but the Americans gained crucial information from the ID cards they found in his house and arrested him in Bab al-Muadham one month later. The next week Salim’s source told him about a Mahdi Army weapons depot. He told the Americans, who set up a decoy mission to a Sunni area in Mansour and then sent a small force to Washash to get the real target. In a garden behind the house they found four explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), two sniper rifles, as well as PKC machine guns. But there were no people in the house, which belonged to displaced Sunnis. Salim told the Americans that this was a great opportunity; they turned the house into an Iraqi army base and used it to conduct night missions. During one of them they detained the sakak (assassin) Ihab al-Tawil. After he was interrogated, he led the Americans to six or seven houses with a total of nine buried bodies belonging to Sunni and Shiite victims. One of the victims was a six-year-old boy whose father was Sunni and whose mother was Shiite. The killers couldn’t find the boy’s father, so they killed him instead.
The day after the raid, an Iraqi soldier named Hussein Naas was killed by Muhamad Karim Muhamad, a sniper from Washash, while on a foot patrol. Muhamad was a former Iraqi National Police officer who had been trained by the Americans. A source gave Salim his location, and a force of Iraqi and American soldiers closed off the area for five hundred square meters, conducted dismounted raids, and captured the suspect while he was in bed with his wife. At first he denied killing Naas, but Salim showed him all their evidence. He, in turn, led them to a house with four sniper rifles, sticky bombs, rockets, IEDs, and ammunition.
During Ramadan in late 2007, while Salim was visiting his family in Egypt, he learned that a small team of American and Iraqi special forces had ambushed Hamudi Naji and killed him. Mahdi Army guys were up very late, eating and loudly playing games. An Iraqi member of the team called Hamudi Naji and pretended to be a neighbor complaining about the late-night noise. Hamudi came with three of his security men to see what his men were doing. The Americans killed him and one of his guards. Salim told me that Hamudi’s body was riddled with sixty bullets. After this ambush, the Americans increased their raids in Washash and Iskan.
At that time the Mahdi Army was at its peak, according to Salim. Two people in the prime minister’s office supported the Mahdi Army, he explained. One was Maj. Gen. Adnan al-Maksusi, an intelligence officer, and the other was the notorious Dr. Bassima al-Jadri. “They used to fire all officers who were against the Mahdi Army or who arrested the Mahdi Army,” Salim told me. “Petraeus told Maliki, ‘Either you fire these two people or we fire you.’” The Mahdi Army was taking over Sunni areas, Salim explained, “so the Americans came up with the Awakening—former insurgents but officially armed, so it created a balance. We knew the Awakening men, we had their names, we knew that they were wanted. The first time I heard about it I was against it, armed men on the street. The Americans said, ‘Cooperate with them, use them now, and we’ll arrest them later.’ The Awakening created a balance between Shiites and Sunnis in early 2008.” I told him about my Awakening friends in Dora being arrested. “It’s just like what they did in the Jamia district and Amriya,” he said. “Every Humvee that went to the airport road, Abul Abed would place an IED against it—so later they arrested the bad Awakening men. We found dead bodies of Shiites in Abul Abed’s house in Amriya.”
With Hamudi Naji gone, Salim’s campaign against the Mahdi Army began in earnest. There were orders to arrest all Mahdi Army leaders, he told me. The Iraqi army closed off the Iskan, Tobchi, and Washash areas for four days. “In Washash we arrested over seventy men,” he said. “In Iskan we arrested twenty men. In Tobchi we arrested twelve senior men with weapons.” Naji was replaced by his nephew Hikmat Hussein Maan. Hikmat, known as Hakami, had a brother called Hossam al-Awar, or One-eyed Hossam, who was the main sakak in Washash. These two men escaped to Rusafa in eastern Baghdad. “The Mahdi Army freeze is a lie,” Salim told me. “It’s just information operations, like when the Americans said they stopped operations in Falluja but they continued them.” Hakami fled to Ur, which was outside Salim’s area of operations, but the young captain was determined to get him.
Salim had a female source in Washash. The Mahdi Army had killed her husband and left her with six children. Hakami had been in love with her, Salim told me. Salim arranged to meet her at a restaurant in Mansour, “like civilians,” he said. “Next we met in an apartment, but nothing happened,” he joked. He told her he wanted her to resume her relationship with Hakami, and she called him in Ur. “They met in Najaf and fucked,” he told me. The next time they met in Zafraniya at her friend’s house. The third meeting was arranged to take place in Karada. Salim called a military transition team (MTT, pronounced “mitt”) whose captain he liked. “Hakami had been in Iran the week before,” he told me. “He got six thousand dollars and the names of a cell to organize in Shula. It was to be an assassination cell.”
Salim met the American intelligence officers in charge of his area. They wanted Hakami too, but Salim’s source did not know the Americans were involved; she thought it was only the Iraqi army. Salim agreed on the plan with her the day before, but he didn’t tell her that U.S. Special Forces in civilian clothes would arrest Hakami. On the day of the meeting in Karada, she would be wearing an abaya and carrying a yellow government file so that she could claim to be going to a ministry. She would meet Hakami at her friend’s house at 7 a.m. She would write a text message but send it only when she saw Hakami.
“The Americans don’t trust anybody, so they came at midnight,” Salim told me. They had a Lebanese translator with them and told Salim to wear civilian clothes. They drove in a black GMC and covered Salim’s eyes with black goggles so he couldn’t see. He was offended, but one of the American intelligence officers said he would wear them too. After driving around for thirty minutes, they took him to a room with two beds and a couch and removed the goggles. American Special Forces men with beards came in. One spoke Arabic. Then Iraqi special forces came in. Salim told them the details. They left him at 3 a.m. and came back with more questions, as well as food and drinks. At 5 a.m. they told him that they could not conduct the operation because they didn’t have enough information. “Special Forces didn’t trust anybody,” he said. “They thought it was an ambush for them.” Salim was frustrated. He asked them if they could at least give him permission to operate in Karada. They told him they would send regular forces and he could sit with them in a Humvee.
At 6 a.m. they blacked out his eyes again and drove him to the checkpoint, where he found the MTT team and an African American lieutenant waiting for him along with four Humvees. They gave Salim an American uniform and a pistol. The interpreter working for the Americans did not speak English well, he recalled. They waited for the woman’s message at the Jadriya JSS. She called at 7 a.m. to say that Hakami had not yet appeared. The convoy of Americans acted like a normal patrol in Karada and stopped in Dalal Square. At 7:20 a.m., the message came: Hakami had arrived.
The Americans came very fast. They arrested Hakami and the woman. The MTT team was very pleased, Salim recalled. “Hakami thought I was an interpreter because I was wearing an American uniform,” Salim said. “He said to me, ‘Please, brother, help me, it’s not me.’ I said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Captain Salim.’ He started crying.”
In detention in Washash, Hakami revealed his bases and arms depot. The Americans then took him to Camp Bucca. Hossam al-Awar was never caught, but it was widely rumored that he worked as a bodyguard for a general in the Interior Ministry in Kadhimiya.
“Many people were deceived by the Mahdi Army,” Salim said. “We Iraqis are not well educated. The Mahdi Army manipulated.” Salim insisted that I had to distinguish between the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist Current. “The Current defended Shiites from Al Qaeda,” he said. “The Mahdi Army used bad guys for personal gain. Al Qaeda was the same. They said, ‘We have to protect your area from the Mahdi Army and the Americans,’ and then they turned on the people and harmed the area. But we good people were the victims.”
One hundred and forty Sunni families returned to Washash, he told me. Salim also returned sixty-four Shiite families to Mansour’s Dawudi area, formerly an Al Qaeda stronghold. IDPs took their papers and identification cards to the returnee center in the Harthiya district. When they received a letter approving their return to their house, they gave it to the local unit in charge of the area. The family occupying the house had three days to leave, he told me. “If they don’t leave, they are treated like terrorists,” he said. “They must go back to their house.” Some families had agreed to exchange their houses.
The Mahdi Army was finished, he said, but its supporters were still in the government. Salim was jailed for two months, he claims because of his aggressive pursuit of the Mahdi Army. “They made fake charges against me,” he said. “They accused me of killing Shiites.” Others say Salim beat a Mahdi Army suspect to death. He told me that he paid thirty thousand dollars in ransom to the man’s family and he was released. But he was kept off active duty for several months as a result, which he viewed as additional punishment.
SALIM ALSO BELIEVED that Gen. Abdel Karim in Dora was associated with the Mahdi Army. He told me that the Badr Corps had been active only for the first two years of the occupation. “Their first goal was to kill Iraqi pilots and high-ranking Baathists, Saddam supporters, Iranian targets,” he said. “Then they worked with the government.” Salim believed that men who had fought the Americans were also criminals. “The Americans didn’t come to destroy the country,” he said. “If it wasn’t for the resistance, the Americans wouldn’t have stayed even for one year. We are all afraid—if the Americans go, who will fill the vacuum? Maybe the Iranians. Sectarianism is still there. An officer targeting Sunnis is promoted, but if he is targeting Shiites they will harm him or wait until the Americans leave. Shiites have power in the government and know they will take over Iraq. Sunnis want to overthrow the government and have Sunnis in power. Nobody can do anything now because the Americans are here.”
Capt. Clarence “Wes” Wilhite worked closely with Salim. Wilhite was the Commander of D Company (nicknamed the Black Knights), of the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment. Wilhite’s battalion arrived in Iraq in late May 2007 and departed in July 2008. He took over as the commander of D company in August 2007 and served throughout his deployment in that position. His area of operation included Washash, Iskan, Arabi, Dur Sud, Mutanabi, Hai Draq, Mansour, and Andalus. This put him on the eastern side of the battalion’s area. Unlike much of the 1-64 AR’s terrain, his area had not only an Al Qaeda presence but also Shiite militias, and in much of the area, these militias were the main threat.
“Dur Sud was where we established the JSS on August 25,” Wilhite said. “This became known as the Sunni-Shiite ‘fault line’ for most of our battalion meetings. For lack of a better analogy, this was our line in the sand, where we wanted to prevent JAM expansion to the south. To the south of these areas, we faced the Sunni-insurgent threat, AQI. This area was unique because it was not necessarily as disputed as Amriya or Jamia. Often patrols encountered the deep-buried IED threats in Amriya and Jamia; however, this threat was not present in Andalus. Primarily, I saw this as a support zone where AQI used to facilitate operations in Amriya and Jamia. In the vicinity of the Grand Mosque was another interesting problem due to the high number of displaced persons, embassies, abandoned dense market areas, and high-level foreign officials in the area. Al Rawad Square had just suffered a vehicle-borne IED [VBIED] strike following a soccer game that killed over forty Iraqis in late July 2007.”
I asked Wilhite what the area was like when he first arrived. “‘Desolate’ was the one word that came to mind,” he said. “My first patrol over eastern Mansour prior to assuming command of D Company was an eye-opener. I had hopped on a few patrols with my battalion commander’s security detail, but actually having the opportunity to walk the streets of these places and getting a back brief from some of my platoon leaders really opened my eyes. As I look back at my notes and video, specifically on Washash, the smell of raw sewage running through the streets in 105-degree heat, sights of Muqtada al-Sadr pictured everywhere, Naji graffiti everywhere, few people in sight, and young guys in tracksuits watching us at every corner and disappearing around the next corner come to mind. At the time, it was a nightmare, but an opportunity.”
Wilhite explained that among his challenges were getting the Iraqi army to buy in to their plan and the persistent image of security in his area. “In July, prior to taking command of D Company and establishing the JSS, the company arrested one of the company commanders in the IA [Iraqi army] battalion who was actively working with Naji in Washash. We identified the IA company commander as being complacent and facilitating JAM operations in Washash and Arabi. He was detained and replaced.”
Iraqi army cooperation with the Americans in the fall of 2007 prevented further collaboration with the Mahdi Army, he said. “Seeing the pure dissatisfaction and anger in their face at having to dig up their own people from shallow graves, having JAM kill a few of their soldiers or attack their checkpoints, affected their leadership—which, in turn, directly influenced their soldiers. Also, the IA’s first battalion commander we had to work with was terribly ineffective. The establishment of relationships, much like with any person in Arab culture, was absolutely critical. The relationship I had with Captain Salim and his second battalion commander, Lieutenant Wael, was a great one. Whenever we had good information, we shared it. When we detained someone, we made sure we both got the information from questioning. We made it a point to have all of our subordinate patrol elements do every patrol possible together after January. We took IA patrols to their FOB and did training exercises on dismounted patrolling techniques, marksmanship, vehicle search, home search (we actually learned more from them on this one), and room clearing. We made it a point to bring all of the leadership, IA officers and NCOs, to our planning sessions and patrol briefs. Often IA checkpoints would get in brief firefights with JAM. We always made it a point to get a patrol there as soon as possible to support them.”
Another problem was the lack of effective local government leaders, Wilhite said. “There was no one—at least, very few. Literally, everyone had stepped down, fled the area, or been killed as a result of AQI attacks in the south, JAM in Mutanabi and Washash. When we didn’t have leaders we (us and the IA) asked around and made them to eliminate the perception of an area under martial law. I inherited a company that had great, ambitious small-unit leaders, but the vision and direction of where we were going was not clearly articulated. I wanted to compartmentalize the different lines of effort against Sunni and Shia insurgents and the effort to support the Iraqi population.”
There were many different kinds of Iraqi police in Wilhite’s area, such as traffic, local, regional, and a quick reaction force. “Most of them were useless and corrupt,” he told me. “The local ones based out of the Yarmuk area for the Mansour district were by far the most reliable. Our liaison in our JSS proved very helpful at times during the Sons of Iraq integration.” With respect to the Iraqi army, he said, “competence varied here considerably, but collectively they were and became the most reliable, active, and trustworthy of the whole lot. This was, along with all ISF organizations, very officer-centric—the opinions, actions, and demeanor of the battalion commander drove the pulse of the whole organization. Our first battalion commander struck me as wishywashy, lethargic, and not a strong leader. He rarely provided us good feedback or buy-in about his area and was reserved to let the IA company commanders do what they saw fit with little back briefs. Lieutenant Colonel Wael came in with great ideas, a strong personality, and an open mind. A few commanders out there, I would go so far as to trust my soldiers to be led by them. Others should have been rooted out and fired. Sectarianism was present in their ranks.
“The Sons of Iraq turned out to be an excellent gamble yet arrived with a lot of baggage. Inspired from the Anbar Awakening and the success of Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl’s integration of the neighborhood watch in Amriya with 1-5 CAV, we adopted a program for recruitment of the concerned local citizens program, later known as the Sons of Iraq program, to support the Iraqi army security efforts in the area. The ability to get these guys on checkpoints inside the mahala and regularly talking to their neighbors increased the effectiveness and saturation of security in the area threefold and completed the ‘oil spot’ of security in the area. Being able to add upwards of three to six checkpoints and a constant patrol walking inside the mahala during this critical time of transition helped everyone out. At its peak we had enrolled over four hundred local residents in this program.”
Wilhite’s area “was less of an Al Qaeda stronghold and more of a transitory meeting area based on the terrain,” he explained. “In the fall, mainly in Dawoodi and Andalus, we would usually use just one platoon with an IA company and conduct meet-and-greet ‘soft knock’ patrols.” Most of the area was abandoned or had Sunni IDPs moving into the area. By searching abandoned homes for explosives and engaging local religious leaders, Wilhite’s troops kept a pretty good pulse on the situation. For the most part, except for some questionable embassy areas that were off-limits, things remained quiet. Typical insurgent tactics remained ineffective—they used “soda pop” IEDs (which had little or no effect against U.S. vehicles) and murdered government officials to little avail. “Our biggest worry,” Wilhite told me, “was that AQI would attempt to turn the area into a mini Amriya and Jamia.” This was doubtful, however. By that time most AQI fighters had fled from Baghdad because of pressure in those areas. Winter was very quiet. In the spring insurgents regrouped and began using different tactics. The standard IEDs became slightly larger and targeted only the Iraqi army, not U.S. forces. Insurgents began intimidating new markets that were popping up in the area by creating a diversion (usually an argument), leaving behind a satchel on time delay, and blowing up a store. They also began using stationary VBIEDs to target passing convoys and busy market areas.
In light of the shifting tactics, Wilhite said the Sons of Iraq provided vital intelligence. A few found out information about Al Qaeda cell meetings and even possible attacks in the area. “As you can guess,” Wilhite said, “Salim had a personal stake in running these guys down. Some informants led us to higher-level folks.” But, he said, he had been barred from discussing the details of these cases. AQI’s most effective attack targeted one of Wilhite’s dismounted patrols at a marketplace in southeastern Mutanabi. It was a suicide attack—the first and only time this method was used in the area.
Expulsion, displacement, and intimidation had been rampant before the JSS was built, but AQI’s ability to dump bodies and intimidate the populace decreased as U.S. forces established themselves in the area. Wilhite said they monitored the return of many families through the neighborhood council in the winter and spring of 2008, as conditions improved. The process for expulsion and displacement was fairly simple. Families were made to pay protection and rent to the Mahdi Army. If they didn’t pay, they were evicted, and if they didn’t leave, they were killed. Additionally, the Mahdi Army controlled propane, heating gas, and fuel in and around the mahala by forming a monopoly on the services provided to the populace. Local Shiite government complacency and corruption enabled this to occur.
Wilhite said he would characterize the Washash tribal leaders as Sadrists, or “White JAM.” They had full knowledge of the killings that occurred in 2006 and 2007 but did not act on this knowledge for fear of their own lives and well-being. During his tenure in eastern Mansour, Wilhite said, he always considered the Washash sheikhs’ council fairly useless and ineffective. “When they showed up at the neighborhood council meetings it was, ‘I want,’ ‘We need,’ ‘Give me this,’ ‘We are important,’ ‘No, there is no JAM in Washash,’ ‘No, I will not commit to anything,’ ‘Tell Americans to stop coming into Washash.’ Pretty frustrating.” U.S. forces eliminated the Mahdi Army’s influence by putting the pressure on early. They were assisted in this effort by the assassination of Mahdi Army militiaman Hamudi Naji, and by other counter-measures such as the construction of the wall to restrict movement, the establishment of Sons of Iraq to the south to prevent further expansion into Mansour, and the IA’s desire to patrol the area. Hakami’s indecision also helped—most reports showed him growing paranoid over not wanting to end up like Naji. “In the end,” Wilhite said, “I think JAM was dissolving when we left, not necessarily directly because of our actions but also because of the situation.”
Wilhite explained that he erected the walls around Washash in order to isolate the neighborhood and the Mahdi Army there from the rest of the population, and to prevent them from moving south. “We occasionally told Washash folks that the walls were to keep Al Qaeda out. Usually, we pushed this information campaign when AQI would detonate a car bomb in a Shia neighborhood. We told the people, ‘See, the walls keep you safe!’ We would say, ‘There are only two ways in, and the IA will not let a car bomb through the checkpoints. ’” Concrete was the order of the day during that time; walls went up around Khadra, part of Jamia, and Amriya. “If I was a cement contractor,” Wilhite said, “I’d be rich.” He ended up using concrete in Iskan, Dur Sud, Arabi, and part of Mutanabi as well. Wilhite felt that the walls were effective. Some Washash businessmen complained about losing customers, but he viewed this complaint skeptically. Iskan, Arabi, and Dur Sud all had cheaper prices and, Wilhite said, better products than Washash in the first place. He asked around about where folks went for food in the areas adjacent to Washash Market area.
Hamudi Naji had owned “Black JAM,” and it owned Washash, Wilhite reported. Naji’s men had their hands in everything. They had systematically taken over almost every Sunni home in Washash and rented it out to a Shiite family. Sunnis were given three options: pay an exorbitant amount of protection money and live there until Naji’s men told you to leave; leave in the next twenty-four hours to avoid being killed; or lose your house and your life immediately. Wilhite’s troops later found Sunni families murdered and buried in their backyards in different states of decomposition.
Naji’s group patrolled Washash much like a mafia gang. They had lookouts, and when the Americans would come on patrols or late-night raids, they used their own observation posts to describe the activity. When Wilhite’s group got too close, Naji’s group would often attempt to distract them with runners, gunfire, or distant explosions. Wilhite said his initial strategy was to stop focusing on Naji the individual (the agent of terror, the small-time warlord) and more on his apparatus (the organization itself). All intelligence always pointed to Naji, and Wilhite saw this as a liability. However, applying Petraeus’s COIN strategy to Dur Sud seemed new and made a lot of sense.
In Washash, numerous raids had failed to capture Naji. Wilhite wanted to weaken Naji’s network instead of constantly trying to catch the one guy who would supposedly make everyone’s problems go away. He attempted to identify all the unknown midlevel managers taking orders—weapons traffickers, IED makers, financial supporters, shift managers (including sergeants of the guard)—and used a JSS hot line to get information from Iraqis. Wilhite said his troop would sometimes take informants out with them and conduct raids to get information about a Naji-led killing. For the most part, they were successful.
“I remember,” Wilhite said, “after a raid, an old man even gave us a big smile and a thumbs-up sign. I felt we were starting to gain momentum because the population of Washash saw us pulling these guys off the streets.” Whenever possible, they also tried to bring the Iraqi army out with them too, though initially “buy-in” was difficult. Then, on the night of September 20, Naji was killed on the streets of Washash and all hell broke loose. Immediately, there were a few retribution killings of Sunnis. Elements of Wilhite’s Red Platoon drove headlong into a firefight while attempting to gather information on what had transpired. The next three days were “days of madness,” he recalls.
The Iraqi army moved three companies into the area and left them there to keep the peace. Those loyal to Naji wanted to kill and provoke every Sunni left in Washash and everyone connected to them. Several Sunni families piled everything they could carry and attempted to leave the first day. “I remember on the third day JAM attempted to intimidate anyone from leaving the area by detonating an IED on a group of males trying to leave the mahala,” Wilhite said grimly. “For the next eight days, we patrolled Washash heavily until a balance was restored.”
“In the fall of 2007,” he continued, “we continued our strategy of attacking JAM’s network.” His troops did more raids, captured more low-level guys, and started building the wall around Washash. The purpose of the wall was to prevent them from having free access in and out of the mahala without submitting to searches at IA checkpoints. It also served as a physical barrier to contain Mahdi Army movements south into Mahala 615. After they completed building the walls in Mahala 617, they began building in Mahala 615 to measure the effects of the sectarian violence and Shiite expansion into mixed areas. They were also waiting to see who would emerge as the “next Naji.”
The last Black JAM assassination was carried out in early November of that year. “An Iraqi army soldier had actually stopped a kidnapping from occurring and killed one of the midlevel managers of the Washash JAM network,” Wilhite said. “Unfortunately, he was killed in the process. What we were missing was a persistent presence in the area that could remain on the streets.” On the national level, the Awakening movement came to full steam. U.S. forces began recruiting Sons of Iraq in eastern Mansour. “Ultimately,” Wilhite explained, “the constant presence of the Sons of Iraq working with the Iraqi army in Dur Sud and Arabi prevented any more JAM movement into these areas to the south. Additionally, it motivated many families to work with our local neighborhood council members to bring displaced families, Sunni and Shiite, back into the communities.” At that point, the Mahdi Army was effectively contained through physical barriers and the presence of security in the southern mahalas.
Wilhite’s low-intensity campaign against the Mahdi Army operations continued until Muqtada al-Sadr’s “falling out” with the government in late March and early April 2008, when Prime Minister Maliki declared full-scale war on the Mahdi Army. “At this point, things transitioned very rapidly to a kinetic fight, and for a few brief moments all hell broke loose,” Wilhite said. On March 27, the Mahdi Army began attacking symbols of the government of Iraq (like Iraqi army safe houses and checkpoints), and verbally threatened and intimidated workers in several government buildings in the area. Just about every predominantly Shiite community experienced a skirmish of some kind that day. At midday the Third Company safe house was attacked with small-arms fire and three RPGs from inside Washash. Wilhite’s company teamed up with their attached military transition team and the remainder of the Iraqi army to respond. Unlike previous engagements that were short in duration, this one continued even after U.S. forces moved in to support the Iraqi army. “By the end of the day,” Wilhite said, “all four of my platoons, the ‘mitt,’ my sniper assets, and half of the IA battalion had been involved in what turned into a five-hour engagement.” Under orders from his Iraqi army superiors, Wael, the local IA commander, was prevented from entering Washash to root out pockets of resistance. As the Mahdi Army drew short on ammunition and it got dark, the firefight petered out. Similar to the September 2007 operation in which Naji was killed, this one continued with persistent security operations for several days after the fighting subsided, with no new contacts except for when a Mahdi Army sniper killed an IA soldier the first night. It was a turning point—Wael and the Iraqi army wanted the Mahdi Army out of the area for good.
Naji had operated in a very brutal manner, freely using torture and aggressive intimidation tactics to hold on to power. He had used contacts in Kadhimiya, Shula, and Sadr City to assist and support his operations in the first few months of the U.S. presence in the area. For the most part, under Naji, the Mahdi Army operated fairly independently from a “higher headquarters.” There were occasional clashes within the Sadrist community, but outside Washash, no real divisive internal disputes were monitored. By the time Hakami replaced Naji as leader, his power base was not nearly as extensive and his ability to expand to the south was limited.
“Salim never saw Naji’s body, nor did I,” Wilhite said. Word on the street was that he had been killed by rival members of the Ugaidat tribe from another mahala. With everyone fixated on Naji, Wilhite found it strange that Salim had recorded conversations with him on his cellphone. Some questioned whether Salim was actually colluding with JAM, though it became clear, as Wilhite got to know him and his family situation, that he was not. “He walked a thin line in the beginning,” Wilhite said. “He dove pretty far into the deep end to find out critical information. He often got in trouble with his brigade, division, or Ministry of Intelligence for his actions. I have to say, he was keenly aware of second- and third-order effects of what we were doing at the time. I am happy to see he came out fairly unscathed.”
THE CONSTANT HARASSMENT by U.S. forces was putting pressure on the Sadrists, and in early 2008 Baha al-Araji, the Sadrist member of Parliament, privately complained that “we lost our respect on the streets. We can’t stay like this anymore with everybody attacking us.” It was the holy month of Muharram when I spent much of my time with Abul Hassan in the Ur district. During this month Shiites commemorate the singular event in their history, when Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, and his followers were slaughtered by the hated Yazid. Ceremonies culminate on Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram, the anniversary of Hussein’s martyrdom in Karbala. Shiites continue to lament Hussein’s martyrdom and view his battle as a struggle against injustice and tyranny. Ayatollah Khomeini declared the Shah of Iran to be Yazid before the Iranian Revolution and Shiite militiamen declared Israel to be Yazid following its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Abul Hassan and his followers now agreed that America was even worse than Saddam. He compared Hussein’s battle against Yazid with the Sadrist battle against America. “They rejected what we reject today,” he explained, reminding me of the expression “Every day is Ashura and every land is Karbala.” “In every time there is a Yazid and a Hussein,” he told me, adding that America, Israel, and Great Britain were the new Yazid.
I revisited the Shurufi Mosque after Ashura in February 2008. It was a Friday, and straw mats were placed outside for the overflowing crowds. I saw a pistol partially covered by one man’s prayer carpet. Fans hung down from the ceiling. Hundreds of men strolled in. Many were fit young men in tracksuits, members of the Mahdi Army. As they sat to listen to the sermon, men would periodically stand up and shout a hossa in hoarse voices, to which the audience would respond, “Our God prays for Muhammad and his family!” One man called for freeing the prisoners from American prisons. Another shouted, “Death to spies and the Americans!” Other hossas I heard were: “He sacrificed his life for us, death is an honor for us, arrest is honor for us, resisting the Americans is honor for us!” and “Pray for Sadr, release of all the arrested people, and in a loud voice, death to the Americans and to their agents!” and “Pray in a loud voice, please God, give victory to Sadr’s son and the Mahdi Army!”
After the prayers I spoke to Sayyid Jalil, the imam of the Shurufi Mosque, and asked him to explain the importance of Imam Hussein and the story of Ashura. “Hussein was the father of freedom and free people, who defended the rights of the working class and poor people,” Sayyid Jalil told me.
“Today’s Yazid is Bush and those who follow Bush,” he said. “They are all Yazid. There is a Hussein and Yazid for every era. Everyone who oppresses people, steals their freedom, and forcibly shuts their mouths is Yazid. Anyone who attacks people, occupies their land, and claims he came to free them is Yazid. Yazid’s wish was for everyone to kneel before him so he could keep his seat forever.” Muqtada had said no, Sayyid Jalil told me, which was exactly what Imam Hussein had said, “and also what our father and the father of all Muslims, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, had previously said—he said no to Saddam. This word came from Hussein when he said no to Yazid. This impressed people and attracted them to the leader.” Unfortunately, some politicians were supporting the occupation, he said, and therefore were supporting Yazid. “The leader,” as he called Muqtada, was popular because he opposed the occupation and supported Hussein’s revolution. I asked him how Muqtada could lead without the proper religious degree. Muqtada was a Hojatullah, he told me, a clerical rank that entitled him to lead “the biggest group in the Iraqi nation,” meaning the Sadrists. Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanese Hizballah was a great leader, but he didn’t have a high religious degree either, Sayyid Jalil told me. “A degree is not necessary to make a leader,” he said. “Many leaders don’t have degrees, and that doesn’t make them unpopular.”
“We have not seen anything of this alleged democracy,” he continued. “We have seen destruction, we have seen pain. Now our young sons are living under the force of occupation, they are suffering the pain of prisons, not for any guilt they have but because they said, ‘Allah is our God.’ This is something that everyone should have the right to say. The occupation doesn’t want that. They don’t want anyone to say no to the Great Satan. If the occupation came for the sake of Iraq and Iraqis, we wouldn’t see these massacres that are carried out in the name of freedom, humanity, and democracy. In fact, we would have seen the opposite of that. We view Hussein’s revolution as a revolution for all humankind. It includes old people, children, and young people who are filled with passion and believe in their cause. Every honest man should believe in the revolution of Hussein if they oppose occupation, oppression, and slavery.”
FIVE YEARS AFTER a war launched allegedly to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American planes bombed Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad and Basra while dispatching their weak Iraqi proxy forces in a failed attempt to crush the Sadrists. Curfews were imposed and American snipers killed Iraqi civilians. The fighting between Muqtada’s supporters and rival Shiite militias backed by Prime Minister Maliki’s Dawa Party, as well as the large Iranian-created Badr Organization of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI), signaled the end of the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites.
Until 2007 the Sadrists had tacitly cooperated with the Badr Organization to purge Sunnis from Baghdad and the Iraqi state. There had been exceptions, as the two groups were rivals and represented different classes among the Shiites. But during the civil war, the tacit alliance between the two Shiite factions was very effective, and that success was one of the main reasons violence was down in Iraq. There were fewer people dying because there were fewer people to kill; the cleansing had nearly been completed, with Sunnis and Shiites inhabiting separate walled enclaves run by warlords and their militias. The security gains American officials bragged about were largely the result of the expulsion of millions of Iraqis from their homes and the construction of walls to divide or imprison them. But the inter-Shiite fighting opened up the possibilities of cross-sectarian alliances between Shiite nationalists opposed to the occupation and federalism and Sunnis who had virtually the same goals. The one factor militating against such an alliance was the deep hatred many Sunnis felt for the Sadrists after two or three years in which the Mahdi Army slaughtered Sunni civilians without discrimination. At a minimum, Sunni militiamen could sit back and enjoy watching their Shiite opponents getting weaker. The peak of cross-sectarian unity was in the spring of 2004, when Sunni and Shiite militias collaborated in fighting the occupation in Falluja and the south. Tragically for them, sectarianism divided them and weakened resistance to the occupation, ending in a costly civil war that tore Iraq apart. In February 2008 leading Sadrists warned that the freeze would not be extended later that month, but Muqtada did extend the Mahdi Army freeze.
Between the winter of 2007 and the winter of 2008, Maliki’s premiership transformed. Maliki won the trust of many Sunnis by making a surprise move and targeting Shiite militias. The Mahdi Army had overextended itself; Muqtada was not in control, and many Shiite militias had become mere criminal gangs. Nowhere was this more true than in the southern port city of Basra. Not only is Basra Iraq’s second-largest city; it is also where most of the country’s oil is concentrated, and it is from there that most of the oil is exported as well. A variety of Shiite militias and gangs controlled it, imposing an extremist reign of terror and letting the city and its port fall into the hands of mafias as the British, who nominally occupied the city, did little. In late March 2008 Maliki launched Operation Sawlat al-Fursan, or Charge of the Knights, dispatching fifteen thousand soldiers to Basra. There they attacked Mahdi Army fighters in the Sadr City-like slums of Hayaniya, Gzeiza, Jubeila, and Jumhuria, hoping to arrest those they described as criminals. Similar operations occurred throughout the south. Maliki described the targets as outlaws, not mentioning the Mahdi Army by name. Muqtada did not lift his cease-fire, but he did not tell his men to disarm either, and fighting spread throughout Shiite parts of Iraq. Iraqi Security Forces were unable to defeat the various Shiite militias in Basra, and it seemed as if they might even be repelled by the well-armed fighters. American armored vehicles and airstrikes were necessary to rescue the beleaguered ISF. Maliki’s seventy-two-hour deadline for the Mahdi Army to disarm was extended by several days, and his government even announced a weapons buy-back program. Maliki himself flew down to oversee the operation. Curfews were imposed in Shiite towns throughout the country, and the security forces acted with brutality. Up to 1,500 members of the ISF refused to fight, while about one hundred surrendered their weapons to the Mahdi Army. Rockets and mortars fell on the Green Zone in Baghdad. Many Iraqi civilians were also killed in the American airstrikes in Basra and Baghdad. The fighting spread to Washash, where the Mahdi Army fought the ISF for five days before deciding to abandon the neighborhood. The next month a few Sunni families returned to the area.
Before the operation was initiated, Hassan Hashem, secretary to Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, carried a personal message to Muqtada in Iran, telling him to evacuate his people because they were about to get hit. But Maliki’s decision to target unruly Shiite militias, regardless of his motivations, was one of the most important factors ensuring the civil war would end. Sunnis like my Awakening friend Osama in Dora suddenly changed their mind about the prime minister and started supporting him.
Maliki’s move was also a surprise for the Americans. A British general in Basra complained to me that the Iraqis had appropriated a British military plan for attacking the Shiite militias in the city, but he may have been looking to restore a wounded ego. “Charge of the Knights was a British-inspired plan,” he told me eight months later. “It caught everybody by surprise. We were going to do it later. Charge of the Knights was written by the Royal Marines, but it was predicated on the Iraqi military being where they are now.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus had only twelve to twenty-four hours’ notice of the offensive. “It is an open secret that it did not go well in the first few days and only turned around when the U.S. started to provide support, mostly intelligence, airpower, and planners,” a senior American military official working on Iraq told me. “But I think Maliki started to realize that if his security forces didn’t control the country, then he wasn’t really the leader. I think it was a purely institutional move to assert the primacy of the prime minister. How Maliki became a nationalist is a long story that I don’t totally understand myself. I think part of it was just growing into the job. I also think that there was a seminal moment in Basra when his personal bodyguard—and I understand the two were close—was killed by a Sadrist round.”
An American intelligence official dealing with Iraq told me that the Mahdi Army’s attempt to take over Karbala had affected Maliki, especially when Mahdi Army rockets landed too close to Maliki’s house. “The Basra offensive caught us by surprise,” the official told me. “He had no logistics, no plan, only General Mohan [Mohan al-Freiji, Maliki’s chief of security in Basra]. No food, no place for them to sleep. Petraeus and Crocker took advantage of it and saved his ass. Maliki also wanted to go to Sadr City and Maysan, but the U.S. felt he wasn’t ready. Maliki realized he could be a nationalist leader.” Importantly, it was Iran that brokered the cease-fire between Maliki and the various Mahdi Army groups.
The Iraqi decision to go into Basra was made independently; the Americans heard of the operation only after it started, when Maliki flew down with the key leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces to oversee it. Petraeus and Crocker were extremely worried when Maliki did this, but Bush, apparently, was supportive and said, “He’s finally doing it.” “Maliki goes to Basra and takes on Iranian-backed stooges,” an American intelligence official told me. “He is the one Arab leader who has taken on with force an Iranian-backed group.” But there was a tense seventy-two-hour window during which Maliki’s forces were surrounded. When Americans came to Basra, with Navy SEALs and air support, they came in lightly, but they turned the tide. But once the Americans helped swing things in favor of the ISF, “they gave us the finger,” Lieut. Col. P.J. Dermer complained to me. Dermer worked closely with the Iraqi army; even when the Americans were rescuing them, he said, the Iraqis just did whatever they wanted. “Maliki committed his men to battle knowing there was an American corps on the ground,” Dermer told me. “What Maliki did [seizing the initiative against the Shiite militias] was brilliant, but his guys sucked. We bailed them out, so when [Gen.] Abud [Qanbar] entered Sadr City, he entered without a shot being fired at them.”
Having the Americans come to the rescue may have seemed like a failure at first, but it won Maliki the support of more Iraqis, who saw it as a move against sectarian militias and demonstrated that he could take the initiative. He capitalized on his success by establishing tribal support councils throughout the south whose members benefited from his largesse and often acted as Maliki’s own Awakening councils, even arresting Mahdi Army men. It was a naked attempt to steal support from Shiite groups that had a deeper grassroots base than the prime minister, and it worked. Maliki was beginning to expand and assert his control. He was at once targeting Sunni areas and Shiite areas. Following his successful challenges of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and Basra, albeit with substantial U.S. support, he turned to Mosul. At the same time, he was consolidating control over the Shiite Maysan province and planning to target Al Qaeda in Diyala. The American victories in Najaf and Falluja in 2004 taught Iraqi groups that they could not remain for long under American bombardment, and it was better to disperse. Following Maliki’s American-assisted victories, he wisely adopted a key element of counterinsurgency theory and tried to establish the credibility of his government as the nonsectarian group that could protect the population.
Dermer lived in the Baghdad Operations Center (BOC), working with General Abud Qanbar every day. In the beginning, the Americans led the briefings, but by the spring of 2008 the Iraqis had taken them over and would ask the Americans if they had anything to add only at the end. “Abud was a good man,” Dermer told me, “great for Iraq—a nationalist above religion. He ran his shop single-handedly; everything had to go through him. He didn’t rely on his staff enough. But he learned the importance of the media. Abud’s primary staff guy who handled the media was Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta. Abud called him first thing in the morning and last thing at night—what other military commander in the Middle East focuses on media so much?”
One morning Dermer was with Abud in the BOC. Abud saw an announcement on the news that the Sadrists were going to hold a demonstration in Baghdad in response to the battle in Basra. “I’m not going to let this stand,” Abud said, according to Dermer. “I won’t allow it. The militias have to be stopped.” Dermer had hoped to contain the demo, but Abud said, “No, I’m going to stop it.” Dermer asked him if he needed Maliki’s permission. “I’m the commander of Baghdad,” Abud said. “I don’t need anybody’s permission.” Dermer realized Maliki had not given him guidance and that Abud was going to war.
Without telling the Americans, Abud started moving battalions to the site of the demonstration. He knew he had Maliki’s blessing, but he was making the plan up by himself. Dermer and the American leadership were taken aback. “I have a core patch,” Dermer told me, “with a direct line to Petraeus, and I have battlefield responsibility with General Hammond [of the Fourth Infantry Division, which replaced the First Cavalry Division]. I have to translate this to the coalition, so I have to let Petraeus know.”
Dermer persuaded Abud to sit down with the Americans and come up with a plan. Maliki then gave permission for the Americans to shoot into Sadr City, Ur, Shaab, and other areas, but the Americans were not allowed to enter Sadr City. Sadr City, and to some extent the Sadrists, had been off-limits to the Americans. In 2004 the Americans were about to kill Muqtada in Kufa, but he was with Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, so the American canceled the hit. Later Maliki would prohibit the Americans from operating in Sadrist areas or targeting the Mahdi Army. During the surge Americans had to get Maliki’s permission to kill or capture Mahdi Army men. Sometimes they wouldn’t tell him whom they were targeting because they were worried his people would inform the targets. Later there would be full coordination with the Iraqis about the target lists. In March 2008 the Americans were granted permission to use snipers and helicopter gunships, even if they couldn’t bring troops inside these areas.
But the National Security Council’s Brett McGurk and other Americans were worried. Sadr City was home to three million people. Maliki assured them he knew the street, and it turned out that he did, which created a sense that the ISF could handle security. American sniper teams positioned on the edges of Sadr City proved to be very effective in the battles, though many civilians were also killed.
“As a military Middle Eastern guy, Abud couldn’t fathom a militia,” Dermer told me. “Under Saddam he had despised the fedayeen [Saddam’s guerrilla force]. The Iraqi army is fighting to regain their honor. It’s not about fighting skills. Iraqi fighting skills were terrible. It’s about regaining their place in society. We lost a lot of American lives because of Iraqi incompetence. The Americans wanted to take over the operations during the Battle for Baghdad but didn’t. We were telling the Iraqi army what to do, and they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t pair with us in the battlefield. When it was time to advance up an avenue or cross a line, the Iraqis didn’t; the Americans did, so American soldiers got killed. They wanted our logistics, Apaches, and ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance]. We tried to get them to use their own shit, but why would they when they had our shit? We had to prevent them from failing so we won’t look like we failed.”
After one battle Dermer and the Americans visited an apartment building in Ur that the Iraqi army had just destroyed. “It was a bloody mess,” he told me; the Iraqis had opened fire on the entire building, but the Americans had no choice but to tell them they did a good job.
“IEDs scared the shit out of them,” Dermer said of the Iraqis he worked with, “so our guys would go down the road and they wouldn’t. We lost two majors. We were having heated arguments in BOC, yelling and shouting. We would plan for two hours and then they wouldn’t execute. Iraqi commanders were not being held responsible. Abud finally fired the Rusafa commander, but nobody would replace him, so Abud rehired him. We had one or two Iraqi brigades disappear off the battlefield, but that’s not bad out of five or six divisions in Baghdad.” I asked Dermer what made some units good. “It was the personality of the commander and his relationship with the American commander that determined whether a unit was effective,” he said. “Abud was good at building civil infrastructure after the fighting,” Dermer added. “He would take the minister of electricity, of water and power, of education—anybody in charge of building stuff, they wouldn’t go without him. Abud didn’t want the Iraqi military leading the effort; he wanted Iraqi civilians to do it.”
The American and Iraqi surge, along with Charge of the Knights, emboldened Iraqis to resist militias. While Captain Salim attributed the improved situation in Washash to his efforts, and not the Americans’, Abu Karar, a leader in the Khazali tribe, also claimed responsibility. When I met Abu Karar he had big Shiite rings on his fingers. He was a large, grave man with dark reddish skin and a stain on his forehead from praying. He worked as an accountant in the Housing Ministry.
Before 2006 there was no displacement in Washash, Abu Karar told me, and no explosions. Until that year the Mahdi Army was an army of principles and creed that fought the occupation. “They did a good job, and everybody liked them,” he said. “They improved Shiite areas. Before Samarra, I supported them. But after the Samarra explosion, their way of thinking changed. They became gangs, they took money from people, and each house in Washash paid five thousand dinars a month. If you didn’t pay, they blew up your house. Only Mahdi Army families didn’t have to pay. When militias took over, displacement started, and all the Sunnis left. Shiites came here from Ghazaliya, Dora, Jamia. Some stayed in empty Sunni houses, some paid rent. The pious IDPs paid rent to the Sunni owners, while militias also charged IDPs rent for the houses they were squatting in. There were no Sunnis left and they started to kill Shiites.”
On August 14, 2008, Abu Karar led a “revolution” in Washash, he told me. As he describes it, his tribe coordinated with the Iraqi and American armies and carried weapons with their permission. They attacked the Mahdi Army at 6 a.m. “We had an intifada,” he said. “We knew where they stayed, and we arrested sixteen of them. I arrested [Mahdi Army leader] Ihab al-Tawil with my own hands. After the arrests, we found twenty-seven bodies, and twenty-five were Shiites.” I suggested this sounded like the way the Awakening groups started, and he bristled. “We don’t believe that,” he said, dismissing the Sunni resistance. “Most Sunnis supported Al Qaeda and turned on them because of pressure from the government.” To him the Awakening was made up of former Al Qaeda men, but he was not a former member of the Mahdi Army. “When did Ramadi start to resist?” he asked me, answering that it was when the governing council gave Shiites more seats than Sunnis.
Soon after his uprising against the Mahdi Army, Abu Karar was elected to head the local tribal council. “My service to the area caused me to be elected,” he said. In the eight months since Charge of the Knights began, nobody was killed in Washash, he bragged. Five days into the campaign, Abu Karar met with the representatives of forty Sunni families from Washash in the nearby Arabi neighborhood. “It was my personal effort and my tribe’s effort,” he said. “I told them, ‘We want your return to be peaceful, without vengeance. Use the law or come to me to do it the tribal way, and anybody carrying weapons will be expelled again.’” The forty families returned. But Sunni areas were still dangerous, he said. “Sunnis are safe coming back to Shiite areas. But Shiites are not safe to come back to Sunni areas. Shiite IDPs have not left Washash to return to their homes. Some Sunnis can’t come back to Washash; they are wanted for crimes. We have four or five wanted families. They killed more than thirteen people from my tribe, and we will avenge them.”
Hassan Abdel Karim and his brother Fadhil Abdel Karim were cousins of Abu Karar who also lived in Washash and were popular in the area. Both were thick and muscular. Hassan was a boxer. “Militias wanted us to work with them and carry weapons, but we rejected it,” he told me. “My wife is Sunni. My neighbor is Sunni.” One evening Mahdi Army men knocked on his door and asked him to go knock on his Sunni neighbor’s door; his neighbor trusted Hassan and would open it. But Hassan refused. He warned his Sunni neighbors, who were from the Zowbaei tribe, that they were in danger. He told them he too would be leaving. But they insisted on staying. Three brothers from that family were killed. He also warned neighbors from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe, and they fled. After this, Mahdi Army men shot at his house and accused him and his brothers of being spies. He fled with his brother, his wife, and daughters to Syria, where they lived in Damascus’s Seyida Zeinab area. After they had fled, Mahdi Army men opened fire on their home, damaging it with hundreds of rounds and later charging the family for the expended bullets.
Hassan remained in Syria for two years and nine months. In 2008, after Charge of the Knights, his cousins called him and asked him to return. “Let’s fight the Mahdi Army,” they told him. “They are killing Sunnis and Shiites. The people are strong but scared, and you are popular here, so they will follow you.” Hassan returned and initially joined an Awakening group in the Mansour district. After the Mahdi Army threw a grenade at his cousins’ house, Hassan and his brother captured Ihab al-Tawil, he told me. “The neighborhood was with us,” he said. “We gave Ihab to Captain Salim. We had an intifada against them in Washash.” A Mahdi Army member called him up angrily, demanding to know why he did this and why he was letting Sunnis return to Washash. “We began to uncover bodies and weapons,” he told me.
“Mahdi Army members called me up to tell me because they didn’t want the army to raid their homes and get their families in trouble.” The Badr militia of the Supreme Council asked him to join them, he said, but he refused. “We rejected to carry weapons,” he told me.
IN DECEMBER 2008 I flew Royal Jordanian from Amman to Basra. Most passengers were Iraqis. Because of the Muslim holiday Eid, embassies were closed; we did not have time to get visas, but a contact in the British military promised to obtain them upon arrival. The Iraqi customs officials did not take kindly to the violation of procedure and were offended by the British presumption, but a letter from the British commander persuaded them to relent. The Iraqi officials made it clear they were doing us and the British military a favor. Five Iraqi policemen stood at the exit examining all luggage. My colleague had a copy of Patrick Cockburn’s excellent book on Muqtada, and when they saw Muqtada’s glaring visage on the cover, they turned giddy. They were amazed that a foreigner would have a book in English all about their beloved cleric. One of them kissed the cover and asked if he could keep it. My friend agreed. I was surprised, not by the sentiment but by the comfort in which the men publicly expressed it.
The Iraqi translator accompanying the Royal Marine who met us at the airport dismissed Muqtada’s supporters as merely poor and uneducated. It was the same mistake the occupiers had made from their arrival but was equally typical of middle- and upper-class Iraqis. After years of war and devastating sanctions imposed on Iraq, most Iraqis were poor and uneducated. But so what? Did this delegitimize the Sadrists or in any way reduce their popularity? On the contrary. Unfortunately, the man expressing it this time was the personal translator and adviser to the British commander in Basra, and sequestered as he was in Basra’s airport, he was getting scant information about Basra’s realities. The British commander had never heard of Thar Allah, one of the most lethal Iranian-backed militias in Basra. And when I asked him about the Mahdi Army, he was confused; he knew them only by their American-designated acronym, JAM.
I found a city largely under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces, with little sign of the British presence except for the occasional patrol. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. A trickle of Sunnis had returned. Over and over again, when I spoke to civilians they told me the same thing: “Now sectarianism is finished in Basra.” I spoke to officials of the once-formidable Communist Party. They blamed the Americans and British for introducing chaos into Basra. “Any foreign army is not good,” one official told me. “The British army is less violent than Americans, but they let militias rule and made deals with them.” The Communists also backed the prime minister. “Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist,” they told me. “He went from being a man of a party to a man of state. He said only the state can have weapons.” They agreed with me that the Sadrists were still the most popular movement among Shiites and worried that the Mahdi Army had sleeper cells. “The sectarian project failed in Iraq,” one of them told me. People in Basra spoke of “before March” and “after March” to describe their lives, and in the city’s middle-class areas, the Charge of the Knights campaign won only praise.
I attended a conference in a large auditorium at the local chamber of commerce that had been planned by local officials to explain how they spent the hundred million dollars Maliki had given them after Charge of the Knights. There were no foreign soldiers there, and I was the only foreigner. Representatives of local businesses, civil society, and the local media attended. The conference was a hosted by a woman and started with a prayer and recitation of the Koran. The national anthem was played, and everybody stood up. The host and others read poems. The conference had a decidedly Shiite tone: every time the host asked the crowd to pray for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, as was the Shiite way, the crowd responded loudly. Grandiloquent speeches about Basra and Iraq followed. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a postoccupation Iraq.
I met with Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic Party in Basra. The party’s previous headquarters was destroyed after Samarra with the help of local police, and it was now based in an unmarked building across from police headquarters. The Islamic Party had sixty-eight martyrs in Basra, he told me. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. Sunnis began returning after Charge of the Knights, he said. Although the security forces in Basra had been closed to Sunnis, there were currently about four hundred Sunnis in the local police and army. “Now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra,” he said.
In stark contrast to downtown Basra were the slums of Hayaniya. They were far removed from the heart of the city, as if the population was segregated, and surrounded by sewage and garbage dumps. Streets were unpaved, and many houses were made of mud. An Iraqi army brigade surrounded them and had bases inside. The brigade, a mixed unit of Sunnis and Shiites that was headquartered in Ramadi and trained by the Americans, had arrived in Basra on April 13. I visited a school they were occupying in Hayaniya and met with two officers: one was a Sunni from Falluja, and the other was a Shiite from Baghdad’s Shaab district. They sat on beds in a room with no door. Their men played volleyball in the yard. “The enemy was anybody illegal,” they told me, “anybody carrying weapons.” They had clashed mostly with the Mahdi Army and Thar Allah, but now the city was quiet, they said, adding that “we don’t need help from the British.” Hayaniya had the most problems, they explained—it was like Sadr City. The officer from Falluja joked that in the upcoming elections, the Saddamists in his city would win because the Awakening groups backed them. Both officers praised the Awakening’s Abu Risha. “Petraeus is wrong,” the Sunni officer told me. “The Americans caused the problems. The army and the people and the Awakening brought peace.” His Shiite friend agreed. “We are the highest authority,” he said. Many locals complained that the Iraqi army’s occupation of schools and heavy presence in their neighborhood was oppressive and made them feel occupied.
One evening I met with four Mahdi Army men in the Gzeiza slum, adjacent to Hayaniya. One commanded one hundred fighters, one commanded forty fighters, and the other two were mere fighters. Their more senior commanders had fled to Iran. They had all taken part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam and a smaller one in 1999. They insisted that both uprisings had been influenced by the Sadrists. There were about 1,500 houses in Gzeiza, they told me. The Iraqi army occupied four schools, they said, complaining that soldiers mistreated children, wore shorts, and were inappropriately dressed in front of women. The army also stole from homes and harassed people, they said. They still supported Maliki despite his crackdown, but they insisted that Muqtada was popular throughout Basra. The Sadrist Current was under extreme pressure from the British forces, the Iraqi government, and the ISF, they said, but added that the Sadrists had no problem with the people or the government. They didn’t think that the Americans would leave Iraq. “The Mahdi Army is not weak,” one of them told me. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says we do, and he said, ‘Don’t fight the government.’ We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity. Before Charge of the Knights the Mahdi Army controlled Basra. We can be more than the army. We can get rid of them in two days. There is pressure from the government now. There are provocations, but we were ordered not to have arms on the street.”
The men conceded that killings were down, but they still complained about crime. “We are sitting on oil, and we don’t have electricity,” one of them said. “In the summer for an hour or two. Now it’s three hours on, three off.” The Mahdi Army was loyal only to Iraq, they told me, which was the same thing the two Iraqi army officers had said. The street in Iraq was Sadrist, they said, and the Mahdi Army was the muqawama (resistance). “The Mahdi Army made the government strong,” one said. “Baghdad had terrorism, but the Mahdi Army and the government got rid of it together. There is resistance of the pen and resistance of the gun. After the occupation the Mahdi Army will be cultural. The government is now arresting people randomly. Now all countries pursue their interests in Iraq.” Thar Allah had no links to the Mahdi Army, they said, but belonged to the Supreme Council, and the Supreme Council belonged to Iran. They blamed Thar Allah for the expulsion of Sunnis and Christians. Elections were coming up soon, and I asked whom they would vote for. “A week or two before the elections in the Friday prayers they will tell us who to vote for,” one of them told me.
On my last day in Basra, a British armored vehicle was stoned by a group of local men. One brave man climbed on top of it and was persuaded to go down only when a British soldier emerged and pointed his weapon at him. There was little sign after more than five years of occupation in Basra that the British had built or improved anything in the vast slums where most of the population lived. And when the British tried to encourage the local government to increase services in Hayaniya and similar areas, the local officials said that these poor Shiites didn’t belong in Basra anyway, since they were from Amara, from the marshes. British officers told me the provincial council had a condescending attitude toward the residents of Hayaniya and its neighboring areas, and that they were desperately trying to get services to these areas. Little had been learned after five years. The poor Shiite majority was still neglected, just as it was under Saddam. Only Muqtada carried their voice.
In late December 2008 I visited an Iraqi Christian family in East Beirut that had fled Baghdad only two weeks earlier. A small Christmas tree was in the corner of the room. “My husband couldn’t go to his shop, the children were without school because of the bad situation,” the mother explained. There were less kidnappings in Baghdad now, she admitted, but there were still explosions. “It’s difficult to be away from my country,” she said, switching back and forth between the Lebanese and Iraqi dialect. I told her about the book I was working on, a project about Bush’s legacy in the Middle East. Bush had only brought them war, not freedom, she said bitterly. “Why should I thank Bush?” she asked. “For the war we experienced in Iraq? For our displacement from our homes? For the year we couldn’t send our children to school and the year my husband couldn’t go to his shop to work? Why will I thank him? We just now left Iraq. Where is the democracy? Where is the security?”
When the family moved into their small apartment in Beirut, they found a pencil drawing of Saddam Hussein on their wall, beneath which was written “the brave martyr.” The mother said she kissed it when she saw it. “I love him,” she said. “In Saddam’s time Iraq was safe. We could go to school and work safely—there was no displacement. We were Christians living with Sunnis and Shiites, one next to the other. Since Bush came, the Sunnis left their homes. We have not seen any changes in Iraq. We don’t expect change because of Obama. He’s American.”
I asked Saramand, another Iraqi Christian, the same questions. He had arrived in Beirut six months earlier and now worked in a local church whose congregation was made up entirely of Christian refugees. Two weeks earlier forty families had arrived, he told me. “Before, if there were five or six people in a house and one worked, they could live,” he said. “Here they all work just to survive. Work is not allowed, but people work.” He too blamed Bush for his plight: “What do you expect to happen in an occupation? The democracy that Bush sent us is killing, theft, settling of scores. Where is the democracy? Where is the freedom? Where are the promises he made? Garbage has reached up to our heads in Iraq. Children are dying every day in Iraq—for what? If there was no Bush, I would not be here. If you see a refugee laughing, it’s a lie. Inside, he is full of memories.”
IN MARCH 2007 the surge was still nascent, but the legal basis for the American occupation was expiring. United Nations resolutions effectively let American troops do whatever they wanted, but the Iraqis wanted that to end. The Americans needed a bilateral agreement to anchor their presence in Iraq. Bush wanted a policy to hand to his successor, knowing he would be under a lot of pressure to leave. In the spring of 2007 the Americans began to discuss their options. The U.S. military said it needed a Status of Forces Agreement, but civilians in the government were skeptical that a typical SOFA could be passed.
In the Middle East, most American SOFAs are secret, their terms hidden from the population, because the governments the Americans deal with are dictatorships. If citizens from these countries knew what was in a typical agreement, they would be outraged. But Iraq was sort of a democracy, and the SOFA would have to go through Parliament and be made public. The 1948 Treaty of Portsmouth, between Iraq and Britain, was on the minds of many Iraqi politicians. When the terms of Portsmouth became known in Baghdad, there were massive protests led by a movement known as Al Wathba (The Leap). The treaty was abandoned. President Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 treaty with the Shah of Iran was also on Iraqis’ minds, since Iranian anger at the treaty helped lead to the rise of Khomeini. Most SOFAs grant immunity to American military personnel. But the Iraqis were afraid that immunity could fuel the Mahdi Army and the resistance. It would look like the politicians were giving Iraq away.
The fall 2007 declaration of principles signed between Maliki and Bush set the atmosphere. It described cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties and laid out the terms of the partnership and security relationship. “It was very hard,” an American official told me. “Maliki didn’t want to sign. He was timid politically, and the other parties would stab him for it even if they agreed with it. Bush wanted him to sign it in the U.S., but he balked, so they signed it via video conference.” In February 2008 the State Department hired Ambassador Robert Loftis, a senior basing negotiator and an expert on drafting SOFAs, but who had no Iraq experience. His draft gave the Americans full authority and control. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and NSA’s Brett McGurk said it wouldn’t work, it was an impossible dream. The terms leaked, the Sadrists protested, and Maliki opposed it. This was not what he got on board for.
The Americans fired the entire SOFA team. McGurk arrived in Iraq in mid-May and worked directly with Maliki, meeting him twice a week and also working with Maliki’s close advisers. It was a small American team: McGurk, Crocker, and David Satterfield. They had a direct line to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and President Bush. The timelines set by the SOFA were very controversial within the U.S. military. It set a June 2009 withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities and a full American withdrawal by 2011.
The Iraqis were making maximalist demands, but the Americans assumed Maliki was just posturing because of domestic politics. The Iraqis rebranded it the Withdrawal Agreement because the original draft had so poisoned the atmosphere. Immunity for troops was the hardest issue, but eventually the two sides came up with a hypothetical situation that was impossible to imagine. Perhaps if an American soldier went to a bar and raped an Iraqi woman or committed some other unlikely but egregious act, then he would be prosecuted under Iraqi law. Otherwise the Americans would try him. “During the SOFA they played us like fiddles,” an American official told me. “The prime minister’s office got exactly what they wanted, a presence in the country that protects them and which they have oversight over and which they can use as a stick against opponents.”
Maliki’s Law and Order campaign against militias resonated with the middle class. His confrontation with Kurds galvanized Iraqi nationalist support, and the SOFA poured water on the Sadrist flames. There was now a timetable for withdrawal; it looked like the occupation would end. But a different iconic moment will be forever associated with the trip Bush took to Baghdad to sign the SOFA.
THE YEAR 2008 ended with Muntadhar al-Zeidi reminding President Bush and the world for only a moment about the Iraqi victims. During a press conference on Bush’s last visit to the country, Zeidi spoke for the masses in the Arab world and beyond when he shouted, “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” as he threw his first shoe at the American president. Zeidi was a secular, left-leaning Shiite from Sadr City whose work as a reporter for Baghdadiya television had won him local acclaim because of his focus on the suffering of innocent Iraqis. He had been arrested twice by the American army and kidnapped once by a militia.
He remembered, as did all Iraqis, that the American occupation had not begun with the surge. The story of the American occupation was not one of smart officers contributing to the reduction of violence and increase in stability. That was only one chapter in a longer story of painful, humiliating, sanctions, wars, and bloody occupation. Those with short memories, such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, might remember the American occupation as “a million acts of kindness.” But to Iraqis and anyone else sensitive enough to view them as humans, the occupation was one million acts of violence and humiliation or one million explosives. There was nothing for Bush to be triumphal about during his farewell press conference. Even the surge had exacted a costly toll on Iraqis. Thousands more had been killed, arrested, thrown into overcrowded prisons, and rarely put on trial, their families deprived of them. The surge was not about a victory. With a cost so high, there could be no victory. COIN is still violence, and the occupation persisted, imposing violence on an entire country. As Zeidi threw his second shoe in a last desperate act of defiance, he remembered these victims and shouted, “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!”
Another soldier told me: “I spent a lot of time thinking about COIN prior to leaving the U.S. I read U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, as well as books by David Galula, Roger Trinquier, and Sir Frank Kitson, and thought long and hard about how to apply these lessons to our area of Baghdad, especially in terms of how intelligence was central to successful COIN. Of course, once we arrived in Baghdad, a lot of this was put aside, unfortunately, as we were taken away by events. Soldiers were being injured and our area seemed to be out of control, so the emphasis shifted from applying good COIN techniques to just responding to what was happening. We never really gained the initiative in that first area. Indeed, it took us about sixty days or so to really get back to the COIN basics that we had read about. Once we began to apply these lessons, things changed in our favor, and never turned back.”