IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 2009 THAT I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THINGS were changing in Iraq. The civil war was over. There was no group that could overthrow the government. The Iraqi Security Forces had monopolized power, even if it wasn’t pretty. I felt this most intensely one day when I was driving down Baghdad’s Saadun Street with Captain Salim from Washash and a couple of friends. Salim was dressed in civilian clothes, with a pistol tucked under his shirt. A man in a black sedan tried to cut us off, but my friend behind the wheel aggressively sped up and prevented him from doing so. A war of angry faces and waving hands ensued until we were stopped in traffic just before Tahrir circle, at a checkpoint manned by armed men. The driver of the sedan emerged and blocked our path. He was tall, with thick shoulders, a big belly, and a mustache—the Iraqi security look. He had a shaved head and a pistol on his waist. He demanded that we get out of the car. Salim told him to leave us alone, that he was an officer. Where was he an officer? the bald man insisted.
“I’m with a very dangerous ministry,” warned Salim, “you don’t want to know.”
As armed guards looked on, they stood shouting at each other—each demanding to see the other’s ID cards and each refusing, not knowing who was, in fact, more powerful. As I sat in the car, I was getting more and more nervous. But after ten tense minutes they embraced and kissed. It turned out they knew each other. This was fortunate, because the bald man was an officer with the puissant Office of the Prime Minister, and he trumped Salim, who was a mere army officer. A friend later commented that the standoff reminded him of Iraq under Saddam, when a plethora of security agencies competed with one another.
Six years after the fall of Baghdad, it felt as if the Iraqis were occupying Iraq. Roads were no longer blocked by aggressive American troops but by aggressive Iraqi Security Forces in military, police, or civilian attire, waving their weapons, shouting. They were just as intimidating as their U.S. counterparts. They manned ubiquitous checkpoints throughout the city, stopping cars, searching them. They had brought a measure of security to the war-torn capital, but the price was a heavily militarized society. Even if the overt sectarianism of the security forces had been tempered—they no longer slaughtered Sunnis—their Shiite identity was apparent and made Sunnis who were stopped at checkpoints nervous.
On a different day I was driving with a friend in a car that belonged to a third friend of ours. We were stopped at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint. The policeman asked for the car’s registration. When my friend told him that it was not in his name, the policeman became hostile. He demanded my friend’s ID. He read his name out loud, “Hassanein,” an obviously Shiite name, and his demeanor changed. He smiled and waved us on our way. When I visited government buildings and police stations, the walls were often festooned with posters of Hussein, a clear sign that they were dominated by Shiites. On the concrete barriers outside the National Assembly, there was a large mural of Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala. These displays created a sense among Sunnis that the state and its security forces were Shiite, that they did not belong.
Not that the Americans had withdrawn. One friend working with the American military in Baghdad’s Yarmuk and Qadisiya districts told me he knew of twenty or twenty-five innocent Iraqis who had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. One old man approached his door when he heard American soldiers coming so that he could open it for them. He was shot in the head. Shots to the head or shots to the chest were common at the slightest provocation, my friend complained.
According to the Baghdad morgue, every day there were ten to fifteen political murders in Baghdad alone, but this was far lower than the hundreds it received every day in 2006, when Iraqi women had to search through disfigured corpses to find their husbands and sons. But if the levels of violence had gone down, many still had not recovered. “During the last years we faced death many times,” a doctor from Sadr City told me. “We became numb. We don’t have feelings anymore.”
But now it was possible to talk about post-American Iraq. And there were many worrying signs. “It will be like the Republican Guard,” one American official told me. “[Maliki] has an extralegal counterterrorism force that answers to him.” Maliki had empowered the Office of the Prime Minister and placed under its command thousands of elite soldiers capable of operating without American military or logistical support. Trained by American special operators, they were dominated by Shiites but loyal to Maliki, not the institution. Like their American trainers, they justified their above-the-law status with the mantra of counterterrorism; when they operated, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries were never informed. Sunnis and Kurds complained to the Americans that Maliki had become the new Saddam of the Shiites.
The random and indiscriminate violence had subsided. This was most evident in the conspicuous displays of wealth. Baghdad’s roads were full of H3 Hummers and other expensive and large vehicles that cost tens of thousands of dollars in cash. New expensive restaurants catered to a new elite, or one that was in hiding. The girls in Baghdad’s universities were dressing more fashionably than ever before, and young men were adopting the fashion trends of Lebanon. For years this would have been impossible to see. Anybody with any money would have been a target for kidnappers. Women immodestly dressed could have been killed. Men in clear Western fashions could have been beaten. Bars were back open, which was at least a sign that vigilante extremists had stopped blowing them up. Playgrounds were full of children, young men played soccer in new fields, people were no longer afraid to leave their houses. But none of it felt completely real.
One night I strolled along Abu Nawas Street with my friend Hussein. Couples walked by the river, children played. Nothing special there, no great achievement in returning normalcy and stability to a place that had both before America took them away, but still hard to get used to after the past few years of occupation, civil war, and terror. Hussein told me his children played games where they lay improvised explosive devices against each other, to blow each other up. He pointed to the security patrols that went by in the park. “All this is a lie,” he gestured at the people. “If it was safe they wouldn’t need a security patrol.” Al Qaeda and other Sunni militias were just lying dormant, he said, as was the Mahdi Army. I expressed skepticism. He stopped a couple walking by. “Excuse me,” he said. “My friend is a journalist. Do you feel safe now?” The young man did not hesitate: he said no and kept on walking.
The Americans rated the Iraqi National Police “the most improved security force,” according to a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. “It used to be a death squad,” he said. “Now the worst officers have been fired or transferred to where they can do no harm.” But even if the overt sectarianism had receded, it was still there. I met up with Captain Adil from the INPs in Dora. After Adil refused to arrest Sunnis without warrants, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim had transferred him north to Mosul, a much more dangerous assignment. Adil was then accused of stealing cars and held in a secret prison on the second floor of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Affairs Committee office. He told me he had been framed and that his accuser was a Mahdi Army commander in Abu Dshir.
Twenty-seven people were held in a small cell he described as three meters by two meters in size. They slept standing up. All the other men were Sunni. The torture started at midnight. “I was handcuffed and blindfolded and beaten like in movies,” he told me. He was placed under a cold shower for many hours. A policeman named Gafar, who worked with the Mahdi Army in Dora and knew Adil, beat him so badly he urinated blood. “When Americans came they would make us shut up or threaten us,” he said. “When they beat me they said, ‘Why do you hate the Mahdi Army?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me this? It’s not about cars.’ ‘You are a collaborator,’ they said. ‘You worked with the Americans against the Mahdi Army, you know why you are here.’” Adil’s fellow prisoners were there without their families’ knowledge. They cried and wailed at night, he said, and the prisoners could hear Shiite religious songs on their jailers’ cellphones. After twenty-two days, his captors demanded twenty thousand dollars for his release, but he negotiated it down to seven thousand, which his brother-in-law handed to a police captain outside a restaurant.
Adil resigned after he was released. “I served my country,” he told me, but now he felt betrayed. He still supported Maliki, though. “He is a real nationalist,” he told me. “Everybody likes him.” He was very pleased with Maliki’s moves to include former Baathists in the government. “Nuri al-Maliki is the best leader I saw in my life,” he said. “He doesn’t know about this prison. The Americans don’t know.”
Adil wasn’t the only person I knew who was feeling punished by the new order. In late 2008, two weeks after the Americans handed authority over Dora’s Awakening groups to the Iraqi National Police, Osama’s comrade Abu Yasser was arrested by the INPs. Osama told me that Abu Yasser was taken to General Karim’s headquarters, hung from his arms, and tortured. To end the torture he confessed to murders he hadn’t committed but wisely confessed to killing people who were still alive. Then he was moved to the INP prison in Kadhimiya. He had already paid twenty thousand dollars, Osama told me. “They can’t release him without money—everything costs money.” Abu Yasser was worried that Al Qaeda men in prison with him would find out that he was an Awakening group member and kill him.
Soon after, Osama and Abu Yasser’s fellow comrade Abu Salih arranged a lunch for Eid. He invited locals, including the local American unit. Abu Salih had become famous for helping many Shiite families come back and protecting them. The head of the Baghdad Operations Command, Abud Qanbar, came to shake his hand, and it was shown on Iraqi TV. But after lunch the Americans left, and a different American unit showed up and arrested him. He was taken to the major crimes unit of the Iraqi police and accused of terrorism. He too was tortured and hung by his arms, and had trouble walking afterward. Abu Salih also paid about twenty thousand dollars, Osama said, and his family expected him to be released when more money was paid.
“They torture and wait for them to confess; they don’t use evidence,” Osama said. At least eight other men I knew from Osama’s group had been arrested since the INPs took over. His young deputy Hussein had managed to abscond safely. There was also a warrant out for Osama, and he could not return to Dora to visit his parents. Abu Yusef—Osama’s former ally—had switched allegiances and joined with Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s old nemesis. But Kashkul was arrested by the Americans and taken to the prison at Camp Bucca. Abu Yusef fled before he could be arrested. Now a fat man called Abu Suleiman was in charge of Osama’s old area. “He’s not a good guy,” Osama said. He felt betrayed. “The Americans were only with us when they needed us,” he said. He called the Americans when Abu Yasser was first arrested, but they told him it was an Iraqi affair and that they couldn’t do anything for him. “The SOI [Sons of Iraq] was never supposed to be an amnesty program,” one American Embassy official in Baghdad told me defensively when I recounted this story to him.
The British special operators Osama and some of his men worked with also rotated units. “The new guys were assholes,” he said. They warned Abu Yasser that the Americans would arrest him if he did not help them arrest Al Qaeda men. In his one year working with the British, Abu Yasser helped them arrest several senior Al Qaeda men, including an explosives expert called Abu Maryam. The British gave sources one hundred dollars per visit, but Osama refused to take their money. “I said I am not a source, I’m working for my country,” he told me.
Dora had changed dramatically since Osama and I had toured its devastation in 2007. I got an introduction to the new Dora with Adil Adnan, a round man with a gray mustache, and his son Maher. For the past five years Adnan had been the Education Ministry’s supervisor for seventy-six schools in southern Baghdad. Before that he had been a school principal for twenty-four years. He drove me down Dora’s Masafi Street. “This street, you couldn’t drive on it,” he said. “It was empty. The concrete barriers helped a lot, even if it was annoying.”
Adnan was originally from Arab Jubur. “I didn’t visit for three years because it was unsafe,” he said. “The Awakening saved the area.” Adnan took me to his house in Dora’s Jumhuriya area. He had a green yard and a small garden under a skylight in his living room, which he proudly told me was in a Spanish style. “In 2005 the resistance got strong here,” Adnan said. “Then Americans brought random groups to run the government in 2006 and 2007.” That’s when sectarianism started in the Education Ministry. Adnan knew at least five Shiite and Sunni school principals who were killed and twenty or twenty-five teachers who were killed, including a Christian physical education teacher. Militias came into schools and ordered teachers to give certain students good grades. Many children whose parents were wealthy were kidnapped.
In 2006 Maher was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army. “They took me to the Kadhimein Husseiniya and beat me with pistols,” Maher told me. The cleric interrogated him. They told him he had killed Imam Hussein. Maher protested that his father was Sunni but his mother was Shiite. They called him a tali (lamb), as the Mahdi Army refers to victims about to be executed. Maher asked for a glass of water. “What do you think this is?” they taunted. “The Sheraton?” They put him in the trunk of the car and drove him to be executed, but he kicked it open and managed to run away.
“There was no sectarianism before,” Adnan recalled, but now “there are still bad people talking about sectarianism. Even in the worst times I had seven Shiite headmasters who stayed in Dora. Some were transferred so Shiites took salaries to Sunnis and Sunnis took salaries to Shiites. Sunni teachers from elsewhere would come, and I would give them jobs.”
Adnan had a principal’s impartiality and viewed all sides in the conflict as responsible. “Who was killing if everybody says it wasn’t me?” he asked dismissively. “The Awakening, the police, the Mahdi Army—all say it wasn’t me.” Then there was a change in the American behavior. “The Americans got better, they started to know the area, they spread out more, had more patrols.” Unlike most Iraqis I met, Adnan wasn’t worried about the impending American withdrawal. “Let the Americans leave,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”
Maher drove me around the neighborhood. He pointed to a young girl. “Al Qaeda killed her father and brother,” he told me. Not far away some Shiites had returned and put up the religious flags traditional Shiites raise above their homes. Some people viewed it as a provocation and threw a concussion bomb at the house.
On a different day I met Maher again, and we drove to Arab Jubur, where his family originally hailed from. The banks of the Tigris, an idyllic rural area, had been the scene of some of the worst Al Qaeda violence of the war. We passed empty fields where Al Qaeda used to dump the bodies of Shiites they captured on the highway. “They would take whole Kia buses full of people,” he said. “Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigade, the Army of the Mujahideen, Al Qaeda, were all here.” There were numerous checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers and Awakening men every few hundred meters. We drove past fields from where Al Qaeda had launched an attack on Abu Dshir. The road was scarred by IED craters that had been filled with dirt. On our left was the bank of the Tigris. Maher pointed to destroyed houses on the side of the road. “This one was Al Qaeda,” he said. “This one was a slaughterer.” Many homes had been destroyed by American airstrikes during the surge. The violence had destroyed the farms and roads. Most people in the area were farmers, and earning a living was much harder now. There were no services, no drinking water, no clinic.
In the schoolyard I found an eighteen-year-old boy watching younger children playing. In 2008 he lost his hand when an IED went off. His brother had lost a leg from an IED in a different incident. On the road I found a small boy on his way to school, leaning on a crutch. He was missing an arm and had a prosthetic leg. One day in 2008 he was tending his sheep when an IED went off. On the side of the road a man called Sami Adnan stood by his hardware. Like many, he had fled the area when the situation was at its worst. “The Americans used to bomb randomly every day, and there were terrorists,” he said. His house was burned and destroyed when he was away, but he didn’t know who was responsible. He attributed the improved security to the Awakening men. “Even the Americans got better after the terrorists left,” he said.
At a checkpoint I spoke with two Awakening men wearing blue uniforms. They had joined the Awakening a year and a half earlier to protect their area, they told me. Their salaries were two months late. “When the Americans were here, we got salaries every fifteen days,” one of them said. Until now none of them had joined the ISF, though they had all applied. “It’s only promises,” they said. As we left Maher told me that both men were former members of the Army of the Mujahideen.
A local boy got in our car and directed us to the home of the Awakening boss, Amer Abdallah Khalal al-Rabia, of the Jubur tribe. “It became normal to see dead bodies here on the side of the road,” the boy said as we drove. We turned off the road and drove several hundred meters through dense foliage and palm trees.
Amer was not home, but we met his twenty-five-year-old brother, Tahsin, who had joined the Awakening in 2007. He had been one of the first to join in all of southern Baghdad, he told me. In May 2007 he went to Mahmudiya to give the Americans information about Al Qaeda. His family had battled Al Qaeda even before the Awakening groups were formed, and Al Qaeda had killed three of his brothers. Another brother was killed after they established the Awakening group. In the early days of the occupation Islamist militants killed their tribe’s sheikh, Khalid Dawud al-Rabia. “They accused him of collaborating and working with Chalabi,” Tahsin told me, “but he was trying to open a police station here, and he wasn’t working with Chalabi. A group of men belonging to Dr. Fatthi Yusuf Saleh al-Juburi, a local veterinarian, was responsible for the murder.” Dr. Fatthi was the biggest terrorist in southern Baghdad, Tahsin said; his group distributed papers to schools saying girls can’t attend.
Amer finally showed up wearing a loose-fitting suit, with a pistol tucked in his pants. A twenty-four-year veteran of the Iraqi army, he explained that he was responsible for the areas of Zunbaraniya, Uleimiya, and Beijia. Under the Americans he had commanded 629 men, but once authority for the Awakening shifted to the Iraqis, the Iraqi government fired fifty or sixty of his men every month. He now commanded only 490 men, not one of whom had joined the Iraqi Security Forces.
When two of Amer’s men captured two Al Qaeda men, they turned them over to General Karim’s national police in Dora. But General Karim had Amer’s men arrested as well, and they had already spent three months in the serious crimes prison in Dora. “Our relationship with the Iraqi army is not good,” Amer said. “They don’t respect the Awakening. The Iraqi National Police don’t like the Awakening.” One month earlier Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of Amer’s men because he did not salute them. Now that the Iraqi army paid them, many negative things were happening. Salaries had been reduced. Amer’s salary was halved. Now he received the same amount as his men: about three hundred dollars. “The Americans used to come here to pay us,” he said. “Now we have to go to the Iraqi army battalion and wait on long lines. Some people wait for two or three days. We are treated with disrespect. For the last two months, there is no salary. It was all false promises. We are targeted by Al Qaeda and we have no protection.”
Amer spoke of a new trend: families of slain Al Qaeda men were filing charges against him and Tahsin. “They made fake death certificates,” he said. “They said we killed people the Americans killed, and now there is a warrant for me in Baghdad.”
Seven hundred and eighty-two families who had fled the area because of Al Qaeda had now returned. One factor limiting returns was the destruction of many homes. Sectarianism remained, but it was now more covert. The Americans were releasing terrorists from imprisonment in Camp Bucca, and there were rumors that the Awakening program would end in June. “Why did terrorism happen?” he asked me. “Because of the vacuum. If they don’t put the Awakening men in the Iraqi army or Iraqi police, problems will happen.”
“Metrics” to determine “progress” in Iraq have always been difficult to determine. The American surge was meant to give space for Iraq’s politicians to achieve a modicum of reconciliation and progress. This had not happened, but it was an American-imposed standard. How did Iraqis feel about the situation? “The refugees are the best ones to determine the temperature on the ground, the best at keeping the pulse,” UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) head Stefan de Mistura told me. “If they return, the situation is normalizing. If they don’t, then there is a reason. They have returned but not in substantial numbers.” This was a contrast to other crises where he had worked. “In Kosovo we had two million people return,” he said. “We were delighted but overwhelmed.” After the January 2009 elections the changes became apparent: “We saw that the city of Baghdad changed its color. There was a cleansing.”
Back in Baghdad I went to the Jihad district’s Mukhabarat area and met Ibrahim Saleh, also known as Abu Abdallah Hamdani. He was the local Awakening leader there; he was not pleased with Iraq’s new course. His area was walled off and the entrance was guarded by INPs and a tense Awakening man who barked at all strangers entering. I drove by a large lake of sewage and garbage, on a dirt road to Ibrahim’s large house, which was being built atop a hill. Hundreds of families had fled the area to the Anbar and elsewhere because mortars were falling on their homes. Ibrahim’s wife was among the victims of these mortars. The displaced started to return after the Awakening was established.
Ibrahim took charge of 160 men in August 2008 after the INPs arrested his brother Taher, the previous leader. He and his brother joined the Awakening because there were no jobs and because they wanted to help protect the area. “Al Qaeda and the special groups were fighting each other, and the Friendly Forces [as he called the Americans] came to us and asked Taher to protect the area and give information. The Awakening was established here in July 2007.” He claimed Taher had a good relationship with the INPs, but one day Taher invited them to lunch, and after they finished eating they arrested him. “He was taken to the Fifth Brigade of INPs. They accused him of murder and stealing. In the beginning they beat him badly. He passed out for two days.” He was now in prison in the Shaab district. Both Taher and Ibrahim had been in the military before the war.
Ibrahim claimed that both Al Qaeda and Shiite militias had tried to assassinate him. Two weeks before I met him, one of his Awakening men was arrested and beaten until he confessed to murder. An Awakening commander in the nearby Furat district was arrested in October 2008. I told Ibrahim it seemed to me that the Awakening groups were used and disposed of. “This is the reality,” he said. “I will be arrested, 100 percent. As soon as they finish with me, they will arrest me.” He too felt betrayed. “We were with the government of Iraq and the Americans. The arrests can’t happen without the permission of the Americans.”
Jihad was a desperate area. Most young men had no jobs, Ibrahim said, and there were a lot of widows. There were many poor people and IDPs who didn’t get any compensation. “You have to spend a lot of money to register,” he told me. The Americans used to control the area firmly, he said, but since the Status of Forces Agreement took effect in January 2009, the Americans stopped coming around much, and whenever Ibrahim contacted them they told him he should talk to the Iraqi government. Although people started to return after security improved, once the arrests started again some fled anew. “People felt like it was a plan to make us come back and arrest us,” he said. “It’s only Sunnis being arrested.” I met him alongside two members of the local council for Jihad and Furat, which had a total of twenty members. They all believed the Iraqi government was still sectarian and that when the Americans left the Iranians would occupy the country and fighting would resume. Only those loyal to Iran wanted the Americans to leave, they told me. Despite all this, Ibrahim had a positive view of Prime Minister Maliki.
Across Baghdad, I met other Awakening leaders who were experiencing the same frustrations that Ibrahim had. In Adhamiya I met Abu Omar, or Khalil Ibrahim, one of the Awakening leaders in the area. It was the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the first time I had ever seen a festive mood and celebration in a Sunni part of the country, yet Abu Omar was not in a festive mood himself. I found him chatting with American soldiers across the street from the mosque. When he finished with them, he took me to sit with him on plastic chairs in the square by the mosque. Abu Omar had dark red skin, a bulbous nose, small eyes, and a large belly. As we sat and drank tea, small boys ran around us. One of them, whose father was a slain Awakening fighter, played with a plastic pistol, shooting at us. The main square was adorned with pictures of slain Awakening fighters, including two of Abu Omar’s sons. I worried about suicide bombers, since several of Adhamiya’s Awakening leaders had been killed by them. And it was a Yemeni suicide bomber who killed one of Abu Omar’s sons.
Adhamiya was the last Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad. “If the Awakening wasn’t here, then in twenty years the Iraqi army and U.S. Army wouldn’t be able to come in,” Abu Omar said proudly, bragging that “this was the third-hottest area in Iraq.” He was also proud that Saddam had made his last appearance in his neighborhood. Abu Omar fought the Americans on that day as well. “There were eleven Syrians [foreign fighters], God have mercy on them,” he said. “They were martyred here.” I asked him how he could collaborate with his former enemies. “The Americans are leaving, but the Iranians are staying,” he told me.
In November 2007 Abu Omar joined the Awakening in his area with thirteen other family members. “Two previous groups tried but failed,” he said. “They sat and would watch the killers.” Most of the killers were from outside Adhamiya, he said. Abu Omar had been a noncommissioned officer in Iraqi army intelligence, with nineteen years of service. He claimed that after the war he was jobless and sold gasoline on the black market. “We saw the killing and kidnapping,” he said, and wanted to put an end to it. The Americans approached them through the Sunni endowment. After an initial confrontation with Al Qaeda, Abu Omar and his men seized the Abu Hanifa Mosque. A comrade called Abu Muthana got on the mosque’s loudspeakers and issued a statement to the people of Adhamiya, announcing the establishment of their Awakening group and their aim to rid the area of Al Qaeda. (Abu Muthana had since been arrested by the Iraqi authorities.) After Abu Muthana’s statement, Al Qaeda men in nearby buildings opened fire on them, and one of Abu Omar’s men was killed. Abu Omar says his men captured many Al Qaeda members and handed them over to the Americans.
Sheikh Ahmad al-Taha, the son-in-law of Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai and the deputy of Harith al-Dhari from the Association of Muslim Scholars, was now the imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque. “All bad things come from this mosque,” he said, pointing to it. Al Qaeda used to keep prisoners inside it, he said, and one day five IEDs were placed next to the mosque on the street. He did not believe they could have been placed without the cognizance of people in the mosque. The mosque graveyard was an IED factory, he claimed, and his men had found RPGs and explosives in the mosque.
At first Abu Omar’s men clashed with the Iraqi army, and he once waged a three-hour gun battle with them. “We don’t accept the Iraqi police here,” he told me. “They can only come with the army. We don’t like them—they’re all militias.” He too was apprehensive about an American withdrawal, telling me that the civil war would resume. A friend of his called Abu Karar, who was a member of Iraqi intelligence, had joined us at the table. “I disagree with you, Abu Omar,” he said. “Nothing would happen if the Americans left.” I asked Abu Omar why he did not unite with other Awakening leaders to form a stronger front. “We tried in 2008,” he told me. “Awakening leaders couldn’t join together because they couldn’t agree among themselves.”
This failure to unite would become painfully obvious on March 28, 2009, when clashes erupted in Baghdad’s Fadhil district after the Iraqi army arrested Adil al-Mashhadani, the head of the local Awakening group. Mashhadani’s men staged a two-day uprising, and the U.S. Army ended up rescuing its Iraqi counterparts. The clashes provoked speculation that the surge in American troops, to which the dominant narrative attributed the drop in violence, was unraveling or that the civil war might restart. I had been hearing about Mashhadani from Shiites since 2007. Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, in particular, were upset that someone like Mashhadani—who, they believed, used to slaughter Shiite civilians—had been empowered by the Americans. One U.S. national security official told me that the Americans had held information on Mashhadani for years but considered him one of the first insurgents to see which way the wind was blowing. They had wanted him arrested at one point, but the Iraqi army was not ready yet. The official had been concerned that other Awakening groups would rise up; he was relieved to see that none did.
In fact, the ill-fated uprising in Fadhil was best seen as confirmation that the civil war between Sunnis and Shiites was over and could not begin again—not because of any reconciliation process or political settlement, neither of which had happened, but because the Shiite victory was definitive and the Sunni militias were crushed. The cleansing of Sunnis from much of Baghdad left Sunni insurgents with no sea of people to swim among. Shiites had numerical superiority and the growing strength of the state and its security forces, which they dominated, along with the support of the world’s only superpower.
Following the clashes between the Supreme Council and the Mahdi Army, and then Prime Minister Maliki’s assault on Shiite militias, there was no longer a unified Shiite bloc but instead a central government confident in its victory and eager to assert its full authority. One Iraq expert from the U.S. Army who worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when Shiites realized they had won and Sunnis realized they had lost. Both sides had now come to those realizations. Advocates of the surge hoped that following the drop in violence a political settlement could be reached between Iraq’s warring factions. But this wouldn’t happen, and it wasn’t necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki, could simply continue to expand its power. The more Maliki became a new Saddam, the more popular he became among Iraqis. But he actually had to earn support and provide services, because he answered to the Shiite majority. And his power was checked by other factions and by an energetic Parliament that controlled the purse strings.
In November 2008 the Americans handed authority over nearly one hundred thousand Awakening group fighters to the Iraqi government. But few were hired. Although in 2008 the Iraqi government agreed to integrate these men into the security forces or government ministries by the end of 2009, it had to push that back until mid-2010. But in April 2010 the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction reported that only 37,041 had been integrated, even though the Iraqi government claimed the number was fifty thousand. But the Iraqi government declares an Awakening man integrated once he has been offered a job, regardless of whether he accepts it.
Senior Awakening leaders and many of their men were systematically arrested. Others were simply removed from their posts and told to go home. It was a quiet and slow process, but one that continued to emasculate the last groups that could compete with the state for authority. There was nothing the Awakening groups could do. As guerrillas and insurgents, they had been effective only when they operated covertly, underground, blending in with a Sunni population that was crushed in a brutal Shiite-led counterinsurgency campaign, which depopulated Sunni areas. Now the former resistance fighters were publicly known paid guards—their names, addresses, and biometric data possessed by the Americans and Iraqis. They could not return to an underground that had been cleared, so they were cornered. They had failed to unite, and many were on the run. Some had left the country, and others were being tried in court for killing the very Al Qaeda men the Americans had originally wanted them to kill.
The failed uprising in Fadhil was a symptom of the Sunni inability to unite. Although the Awakening groups were a formidable force when they were established, in retrospect it seemed that many of the former insurgent leaders had miscalculated. For the most part they had not been incorporated into the political system or the security forces. They were hated or mocked by members of the Iraqi Security Forces, who had their own nicknames for the men of the Awakening, or Sahwa, in Arabic: they called them Sakhla, meaning “sheep,” or Shahwa, meaning “horniness.”
“The Sahwa were always going to get screwed,” Major Gottlieb told me. “In the fall of 2007, the Interior Ministry began demanding their names, addresses, family members, employment history, etc. from the Americans. To their credit, the units in our sector dragged their feet on providing the information. I suspect that the various, purposefully unsuccessful drives to vet Sahwa for Interior Ministry employment were designed to gather this information. Everyone turned in forms, but no one ever seemed to get hired.”
In truth, the Awakening men were not the only ones who found it difficult to get jobs. Everybody in Iraq had this problem. Nobody could get a job with the security forces unless they were affiliated with a political party, which often also required a family connection. The alternative was to pay a bribe that amounted to several months’ salary. But former Shiite militiamen had much less trouble integrating into the security forces than their Sunni counterparts.
A new, Shiite-dominated order was being established in Iraq. The cleansing of Sunnis had sufficiently weakened enemies of the Shiite state, and Sunni civilians needed not fear as long as they accepted the new order. Shiites had nearly succeeded in clearing Sunni areas from future threats. The occasional Al Qaeda-inspired suicide attack could kill masses of civilians, but it had no strategic impact. The drop in violence was complex and primarily a symptom of Iraqi dynamics, though the concrete walls built by the Americans and the increased American presence in neighborhoods at a time when the Americans were less aggressive and considered by Iraqis to be the least of all evils were also essential.
The surge strengthened Maliki and his security forces: it neutered the Sunni militias and allowed Maliki to weaken the Shiite militias. These Shiite militias were the initial storm troopers of the civil war, the ones who cleansed Sunnis from Baghdad and paved the way for the Shiite victory, but following that they only stood in the way of Maliki as he consolidated his control. There were still many battles left to be fought in Iraq, and when the Americans departed a new phase of violence and factional fighting would likely begin, but the war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites appeared to be over.
DESPITE THEIR MANY GRIEVANCES, the Sunni militias were holding their fire. I was curious to discover if the Sadrist militias were similarly conflicted, having been thrashed by Maliki, with American help, in the spring of 2008, during Operation Charge of the Knights. I met up with Muhamad, who worked in the Sadr Current’s social affairs group in Shaab. Abul Hassan of the Mustafa Husseiniya, whom I had spent time with in previous years, had been arrested by the Americans with three other men one night in late 2008. Sayyid Jalil now worked in the main Sadrist office in Sadr City. The Shurufi Mosque had shut down after weapons were discovered inside it. Prayer was forbidden. Instead, about five hundred men sat on mats on the street beside it. Iraqi National Police were posted around the men, watching lazily. Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Saedi of the Suwaed tribe from Amara stood before them on a podium. Most of his audience was young. I spoke with Muhamad as the sheikh discussed religion. Muhamad’s brother was killed by the Americans in May 2008. Many civilians were killed in Charge of the Knights, he said, and the Americans were still arresting people. Muhamad told me that Maliki was negotiating with Sadrists: if they joined his coalition he would release Mahdi Army prisoners.
Someone stood up and shouted a hossa. “We will keep the Friday prayers that Muhammad Sadr started regardless of what America and Israel or Britain say!” For Sadrists the Friday prayers had once been identified with defying oppression. Now the grievances were more mundane. Sheikh Abdel Karim’s sermon was a litany of complaints about inflation, money laundering, immorality, homosexuality, alcohol, lack of food, lack of housing, and corruption. Now that security had improved, where were the service improvements? He complained. Where was the large budget people had been promised?
Although I paid little attention to his comment on homosexuality at the time, soon after, Sadrist militiamen began brutally slaughtering men suspected of homosexuality. One staff member in Sadr City’s Chuwader hospital said he saw four corpses of suspected homosexuals brought in. One of the bodies was found in a garbage dump while the others were on the streets. Two of them were found with superglue clogging their anuses. This happened to many others. He said the victims were tortured to death in the area’s garages. In some cases the victims’ tribes were said to be complicit in the murders. Sadrist sermons were said to call for the “disciplining” of homosexuals. The Mahdi Army’s militia activity was frowned upon, but in conservative areas like Sadr City nobody would condemn them for killing homosexuals. Women with “bad reputations” were also killed, their bodies thrown in garbage dumps.
After Friday prayers ended a man took me to his neighbor’s home. The Americans had raided it the night before. The door had been blown up with plastic explosives. All the glass on the doors and windows was broken. All the furniture was overturned, closets were dumped, items seemed gratuitously broken. Five brothers were arrested. Their relatives complained that the Americans came with a Sudanese translator and an Iraqi informer who wore a mask. The Americans often searched homes in the area, they said, but they had never done this before. This time they ransacked the house and took the family’s gold, forty thousand dollars (the brother had just sold his house), cellphones, and the computer’s hard drive, and smashed the computer screen.
The next day I went to the Qiba Mosque in Shaab, which I had first visited in March 2004 after the twin Ashura bombings, when I encountered a nascent militia that nearly killed me (see Chapter Two). This time Iraqi soldiers stood guard outside and in the mosque’s courtyard. There was a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr’s father on the gate. Two brothers, Abu Ali and Abu Riyadh, took care of the mosque and cleaned it. They told me that Sheikh Walid had fled north to Salahaddin. His house was now occupied by IDPs from Diyala, who said they would leave when Sheikh Walid returned. Not far away men were fixing the Sunni Al Haq Mosque as well. Sayyid Nasr of the Sayyid Haidar Husseiniya, along with the head of the local Shiite Awakening group, had told them eight months earlier to open the Qiba Mosque. Now the Sunni endowment was helping to fix the mosque. The day before about sixty people had attended the Friday prayers, they told me. As I left with my friends I saw that many young men from the area had gathered around the mosque and were looking at us ominously.
The next week I attended Friday prayers in Sadr City. Driving to Martyrs’ Square, I saw boys playing billiards and table soccer (Foosball) on the side of road. Men worked in their garages, traffic was heavy—it was not like Friday prayers of the past, when Sadr City’s streets were deserted. We drove past a poster honoring Hizballah’s slain hero Imad Mughniyeh. I was searched by young men from the Sadrist office who wore badges with the image of Lebanon’s Imam Musa Sadr on them, something I had never seen before in Iraq. I walked past an animal market: chickens in cages, sheep being slaughtered, pools of blood collecting by the curb. A large mural of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr stood in the center of a large traffic circle. Thousands of mostly young men sat on mats or even cardboard. The cleric spoke from a podium next to the Sadrist headquarters. The sermon, on Shiite eschatology, had little to do with politics. The imam spoke about Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr’s twenty-five predictions about the arrival of the Mahdi. Infidels would gather against Muslims, the cleric warned. But then he turned to the Status of Forces Agreement. It was permissible to make peace with infidels, he said, but the SOFA took more from Iraq than it gave, and it was more about protecting the Americans than helping the Iraqis. At the end of the sermon he led the crowds in chants of “Go out, Americans,” “Yes, Muqtada,” and “Yes, hawza,” but the chants seemed tepid, almost indifferent, lacking the passion of the past.
A local tribal sheikh called Karim al-Muhamadawi told me the thousands of men praying were inactive Mahdi Army members. After prayers we went to his house for a lunch of rotisserie chicken. He had a thick mustache and wore a black dishdasha. The Americans had put Sheikh Karim in charge of one sector of Sadr City and asked him to provide fifty men, who would each get three hundred dollars a month. “We don’t call it Awakening here in the City,” he said, referring to Sadr City in the abbreviated way its residents do. Instead they called the men night guards. Nine sectors of Sadr City were firmly under government control, with concrete walls surrounding them—together they were known as the Golden Square.
Sheikh Karim’s family came to Baghdad from Amara in 1951. In 1961 Abdul Karim Qasim, the prime minister of Iraq, built this area for government employees, Karim told me. He remembered when the fedayeen and different state security bodies stormed into Sadr City in 1999 and killed demonstrators, following the death of Muqtada’s father. When the Mahdi Army took control of Sadr City, the area became off-limits to other parties. The Sadrists destroyed the Communist Party headquarters and then the Supreme Council headquarters, and because they didn’t let other parties into the area, anything bad that happened there was blamed on the Sadrists. After Charge of the Knights, though, other parties such as Dawa had become active in Sadr City, and the Sadrists lost popularity, Karim told me. But the Sadrists were still the most popular movement in Sadr City.
“Muqtada was popular because of his father, and he was the only one opposed to the Americans,” Karim said. “In the beginning the Sadr Current was just and helped the poor,” he continued. “Then gangs infiltrated and even Muqtada didn’t know. When they heard people were doing bad things in their name, the Sadrists punished them. But the Mahdi Army was not organized; it was a mess. The City is big, and Muqtada was in Najaf and couldn’t control it.” The men who controlled gas stations and extorted from shops were far from the Mahdi Army, he said. “They were gangs.”
The Mahdi Army was still in Sadr City, but it was moribund. After the Iraqi and American armies entered the area, services improved. The gangs were sidelined, and the prices of benzene and cooking gas went down. The Americans built solar-powered street lights, increased electricity, and improved water and sewage. Many people were hired to clear garbage. The Americans handed control of the services to the Iraqi government. “Even Sadrists here voted for Maliki,” Karim told me. “People like going out at night without being bothered.”
Washash, in western Baghdad, had also improved greatly in the year since I had visited. The concrete walls were still up, but cars could now drive into the market, and the Mahdi Army had been expelled. I met again with Abu Karar, head of the Washash Tribal Council, who had helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army. I asked him if the government was now active in Washash. “We don’t have a state,” he said. “It was all autonomous, unilateral. We depend on ourselves and our sons.” He proudly lifted up his arm and squeezed his own bicep. “If we see anything, we call the army or police, because the state can’t enter every area. They protect the entrance and exits. The American army stopped entering Washash.” Abu Karar told me that he expected the militias to try to make a comeback. “We want the walls still up. The walls are 60 or 70 percent responsible for the success of the security. Why did we find twenty-seven bodies in Washash? Because they couldn’t go out? Now the market is good because there is security. This whole story in Washash is over. The state didn’t thank me. They never asked how I pay or feed those eighty young men protecting the streets. Militias call me and threaten me.”
Some of the fiercest battles in the civil war occurred in southwestern Baghdad, in areas like Seidiya and Bayaa. The area was now under the control of the local police and the national police. I drove down a road formerly known as the “Street of Death.” An Al Qaeda sniper had targeted everyone on this road—women, children, even cats. The Omar Mosque on the main road was one of the only ones that had reopened. Its location made it relatively safe, but it was still guarded by police—and there was a police station next to it, just in case. Some Sunnis were praying there as we passed. Nearby was a destroyed house that had belonged to a Shiite family who were all killed when Al Qaeda blew it up. The Sunni Hamza Mosque in Turath had been converted into an INP station. In Maalif, I drove alongside garbage dumps and sewage canals. Maalif, possibly the poorest neighborhood in the area, had attracted many IDPs from Abu Ghraib, Haswa, Mahmudiya, Radwaniya, and Amriya. There were so many new students in the local elementary school that caravans were being used as classrooms. Many IDPs squatted in empty lots alongside vast piles of sewage and trash. Flies swarmed around my face when I stopped to talk to several young men. One of them, Safa Hussein Jumaa, was displaced from Haswa in April 2006 after Al Qaeda attacked his family, he explained. They chose Maalif because it was a cheap area and they had relatives there. They owned their house in Haswa but dared not go back, even to sell it. “We heard people go back and their house gets blown up,” he said. Large groups of jobless young men loitered on the sides of Maalif’s unpaved roads. Immense piles of garbage separated homes, with lakes and canals of sewage around them. The Neighborhood Advisory Council estimated that Maalif had grown from fifty thousand people in 2004 to one hundred and fifty thousand in 2009. The Sunni Ali Assajad and Mustafa mosques had both been converted into INP stations. I drove by a garbage dump where some enterprising IDPs had built a home entirely of disposed air-conditioning units. Dozens of them were piled atop one another and in rows to form walls covered by a tarp.
Amriya was harder than ever to get into. The Iraqi army had assumed more authority; the Awakening men were weaker and more obedient. After the army denied my request to enter, Um Omar—who had been my point person during my years in Iraq for the Sunni humanitarian situation—called a representative and persuaded him to relent. I found her in her office. Security had improved a lot, she said, attributing it to the Awakening men who had joined the Iraqi Security Forces. In Amriya the police were better than the army because of the presence of many Awakening men.
Abul Abed had caused problems for her. “He killed many people after he became head of the Awakening,” she told me, and he had personally threatened her, forcing her to move from Amriya to Adil. “We found tens of dead bodies after Abul Abed left,” she said. Her priority now was helping orphans. Twenty percent of the displaced families registered in Amriya went back to their homes, and about 20 percent of the area’s displaced Shiites had returned. But six months before I met her, the house of a Shiite family that had come back was blown up, she said, and an elderly Shiite man was killed in a different house. The problems in Amriya started with the displaced persons, she told me. Many were young men without work. “If they took your house, you have endured violence, you don’t have a home, you will be violent and listen to anybody who gives you money,” she said. “Young men stopped going to school, they are angry, they are promised stuff by a man who gives them a car, money, and weapons. They are still here, though the violence is over.”
The army helped returnees a lot, she said, but there were problems with returnees who “returned with force,” backed by the army. This was why some of them were killed. “If there was a balance with people returning to Amriya and people leaving Amriya, then there would be less problems,” she said.
In July 2009 an internal memorandum written by Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, was leaked. Reese urged the Americans to declare victory and go home: “Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the Shia violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission.” Since the Status of Forces Agreement was signed with the Iraqis, and the June 30 handover of security to the Iraqis took effect, it was clear to Reese that the Americans were no longer wanted. “Prime Minister (PM) Maliki hailed June 30th as a ‘great victory,’ implying the victory was over the U.S.,” Reese wrote. He worried that the longer the Americans remained, the more likely violence would break out between them and the Iraqi government that could “rupture the current partnership.” Reese then detailed the “general lack of progress in essential services and good governance,” including widespread corruption and the refusal to follow commitments to integrate Sunnis into the system.
“The GOI and the ISF will not be toppled by the violence as they might have been between 2006 and 2008,” Reese wrote. Shiite violence could be controlled and Al Qaeda’s influence was insignificant except “when they get lucky with a mass casualty attack.” The Americans were now being targeted in order to send messages to Maliki. Violence was part of a political competition, but “there is no longer any coherent insurgency or serious threat to the stability of the GOI posed by violent groups.” Reese called for an early withdrawal of all American troops by August 2010.
The memo was a strange epitaph for a failed occupation. The Americans were able to defeat Saddam’s army in 2003, but they could not establish control. Militias took over instead. As the country descended into civil war, the Americans devolved power to Iraqi security forces little better than death squads. It was only in 2007 that they finally conquered Iraq, with the help of stronger Iraqi Security Forces, but chiefly thanks to the Shiite defeat of the Sunnis in the civil war. The American surge of troops came at just the right time, and they proved flexible enough to take advantage of events on the ground. The subsequent relative decline in violence was meant to lead to political reconciliation, but it never happened. Instead, the Shiite-dominated government merely asserted its control and marginalized or co-opted its opponents. Iraq would hold, even if it remained corrupt and authoritarian. The puppets installed by the occupier were increasingly recalcitrant, and American officials complained about losing their “leverage” or being treated with hostility by the Iraqi government and its security forces. Just as they weren’t welcomed with flowers and candies, as the advocates of the war predicted, so too will their departure be ignominious.
One day in late February 2010, a few weeks before the March 7 elections in Iraq, I drove south from Baghdad to Iskandariya to see my friend Hazim, a jovial NGO worker, whom I had met on a trip to the town a year earlier. Iskandariya, a majority-Shiite town straddling the key road leading south to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, had been hammered especially hard by the violence of Iraq’s civil war: pilgrims headed to Karbala were often ambushed on the road through town, and the area had seen fierce battles between Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army.
Hazim recalled the worst phases of the civil war: “People couldn’t go out of their houses. When Al Qaeda was strong, Shiites couldn’t go out on the street. Then the Shiites got strong, and Sunnis couldn’t go out on the street.” But all that was now in the past. Iraqi and American forces had arrested members of armed groups in the town during Operation Fard al-Qanun (Rule of Law), the Iraqi name for what Americans called the surge. “The state is strong here now,” Hazim told me. “The government is strong. You can’t even fire a shot in the air now; the police will come in two minutes.”
A year earlier Ali Zahawi, Iskandariya’s chief of police, made an interesting observation to me. “Iskandariya is a small Iraq,” he said. “It connects south to north. It went through very hard times: Al Qaeda was the first phase; then militias who did the same thing as Al Qaeda, killing and displacement; and the third stage was operation Imposing Law [The Surge].” Now he warned of a fourth stage in the battle. Al Qaeda and Mahdi Army men, he said, were falsely implicating their enemies to the courts and getting them arrested.
There were still active militias in Iraq, and the level of violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign analysts and reporters—that the civil war was merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks or an unfavorable election result—were overblown. The threat of civil war no longer seemed to loom; the country was decidedly not “unraveling,” as many continued to suggest. Armed militias had not been eliminated, but they had been emasculated: they carried out assassinations with silenced pistols and magnetic car bombs, but they were no match for the Iraqi Security Forces, which had shed their reputation as sectarian death squads and appeared to have earned the support of much of the public. Apart from the occasional suicide bombing, Iraqi civilians were no longer targeted at random—and even the more spectacular attacks had little to no strategic impact.
As worldwide attention returned to Iraq in the run-up to the March 7 elections, a new chorus of concerns emerged. Many worried that the corrupt maneuvering of some Shiite parties—which banned prominent nationalist and secularist candidates under the thin pretense of de-Baathification—would lead to a Sunni boycott and then renewed sectarian violence and war. But just as the dismantling of the Sunni Awakening groups in 2009 failed to produce the disaster many analysts predicted, the results of the elections seemed unlikely to stoke the embers of a new insurgency.
The continued sectarian exhortations of Iraqi politicians were met with cynicism by the public, whose support for religious parties had diminished considerably. Iraqis were still “sectarian” to a degree: most Shiites preferred the company of Shiites and Sunnis the company of Sunnis. The vitriol and hatred of the war had faded, but a legacy of bitterness and suspicion remained. Gone was the fear of the other—and it was this fear that led to the rise of the militias and sectarian religious parties.
A year later, during my travels in Iraq that February—in the capital and, more important, in the surrounding provinces of Diyala, Babil, and Salahuddin—I found Sunnis and Shiites alike talking of the civil war as if it were a painful memory from the distant past. Just as the residents of Northern Ireland refer obliquely to “the Troubles,” Iraqis spoke of “the Events” or “the Sectarianism”—as in, “My brother was killed in the Sectarianism.” Uneducated Iraqis might even say, “When the Sunni and Shiite happened.”
The looming election—signposted in the foreign media as a critical “turning point” liable to wreck the fragile gains of the previous two years—seemed to be of little interest to most Iraqis, who were disenchanted with the pitiful performance of their political leaders and the tired rhetoric of sectarian religious parties.
In Shuwafa, a Shiite village alongside a canal west of Iskandariya, I met a schoolteacher named Akil, who had led a Shiite Awakening group that battled Al Qaeda after the ethnic cleansing of the village in 2006. He and his men had laid down their weapons the year before—after a portion of their salaries had been siphoned off by official corruption—but he said the security situation had improved dramatically. “The Awakening is over,” he told me. “The Iraqi army is here, with two Hummers, so we feel safe. And nearby there is an army base.” Akil had returned to teaching biology to children.
Like many Iraqis, Akil seemed indifferent to the approaching elections. “People don’t like the religious parties anymore,” he said. Many believed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, head of the religious Shiite Dawa Party, had transcended his sectarian affiliation. “He is not considered to be from a religious party anymore,” Akil said.
Reconstruction proceeded haltingly in Shuwafa: fifty families of the hundreds who had fled to Karbala to escape Al Qaeda had returned, but few had the funds to rebuild their homes or repair their farms. In the nearby village of Malha, where well-fed sheep were grazing on dark green grass around the rubble of destroyed houses, the situation was much the same. Only two homes were being rebuilt, and the majority of the village’s residents had not yet returned. Those who came back survived by working in a local Shiite Awakening group—earning only two hundred dollars a month, barely enough to replace a single one of the hundreds of sheep that had been killed or stolen by Sunni insurgents when they fled. The lives of Iraq’s millions of internal refugees remained bleak, and the country’s humanitarian crisis was grave. But the restoration of some semblance of security had bolstered the authority of the state and the prime minister. “The Awakening, the Americans, the Iraqi army, and the tribes made it safer here,” one man in Malha told me. “Everybody here is with Maliki.”
In the town of Shat al-Taji, northwest of Baghdad, I drove past orange groves, palm trees, and boys in school uniforms walking home on the side of the road alongside schoolgirls wearing pink backpacks and holding hands. The majority-Sunni town, which stretches along the Tigris River, had been the site of brutal conflict in the civil war. I walked along the banks with Abu Taisir, a small man with a pistol tucked into the side of his trousers who was the deputy head of the local Awakening group. “Al Qaeda used to behead people and dump them in the river right there,” he said, pointing over the tall reeds to a spot on the shore.
Abu Taisir took me to meet Abdulrahman Ismail, a Shiite neighbor who was displaced from Shat al-Taji in October 2006 but had since returned home. After a series of death threats—and the murder of four of his cousins, who were beheaded and tossed in the river—”we feared for our children and went to Kut,” Ismail said. But after security improved in the town, he continued, the Awakening men contacted the displaced Shiite families to tell them it was safe to return. Ismail found that his home had been taken over by an Al Qaeda man who was later killed; his family’s belongings and livestock had been stolen. “We feel safe now,” he said, “but we still feel a little scared.”
Abu Taisir’s outfit had arrested eighty-five Al Qaeda suspects, he told me; ten of his men had been killed in the fighting. Abu Taisir himself had been shot twice, most recently in November. Some of the Al Qaeda men were still in town, he said, but they hadn’t been arrested because nobody would testify against them. “They have roots here like us,” Abu Taisir said. Both men agreed that there was a new balance of power in the town—the remnants of the insurgency were overwhelmed by the Awakening men and the Iraqi Security Forces. “Now if we call the police, they come,” Abu Taisir said.
He had commanded 360 men, but only eighty-two were offered jobs in the government, and low-ranking ones at that. Many felt betrayed. “We’re fighters,” he said. “We brought peace to this area, we fought Al Qaeda. Now we are janitors?”
The failure to integrate the Awakening men into government security forces had been widespread, and many feared the consequences of the continuing disenfranchisement of Iraq’s Sunnis. But they had been disenfranchised since 2003, in part thanks to their own miscalculations. Iraq’s new order was dominated by Shiites, and that was not easily undone: the government was soundly in Shiite hands; the only question with regard to the upcoming elections, then, was whether it would remain in Maliki’s comparatively reliable hands or pass into those of his more divisive and inflammatory Shiite rivals. At the time of my visit to Shat al-Taji, the de-Baathification committee had just banned the leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, from the elections. Outside observers worried that excluding him could agitate Sunnis, but his removal was met with barely a whimper; even other Sunni politicians failed to unite to support him. “People here are upset about Saleh al-Mutlaq,” Abu Taisir said, “but they saw from the last elections that the people they voted for weren’t sincere, so they don’t care for politics.” The other Awakening men we met had been impressed by Maliki; he was an effective strongman. “We want secular people, nationalist, not religious parties,” Abu Taisir averred.
In Baghdad a few days later, I saw Omar al-Juburi, a leading Sunni member of Parliament and a former adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. He was now living in a gaudy mansion in the Yarmuk district. I first met Juburi in 2006, when he presented me with detailed files demonstrating that Sunnis had been killed by Shiite death squads and Iraqi police. Since then, he said, “the minister of interior has expelled sixty thousand bad policemen; today the police is better than the army.” The Sunni presence in Iraq was now stable. “The storm has passed,” he said. But there were 2.4 million unemployed Iraqis, he warned, and no job opportunities.
Compared with their actions during the early years of the occupation, Iraq’s Sunnis seemed downright docile. A little angry, yes, and bitter and wistful, but there was no fuel for a return to the fighting, and the Sunni community lacked even a single charismatic political figure with real appeal. In Baghdad I went to the Ghazaliya neighborhood to visit the Um Al Qura Mosque. This was once the most significant “proresistance” mosque in the city; the neo-Baathist Association of Muslim Scholars used to broadcast calls to jihad against the Americans from its loudspeakers. Now it was a massive construction site, with housing complexes, hotels, and party halls being built. Plastic trees with lights lined the stone path leading to the mosque. Sunnis who had been killed by Shiite death squads used to be brought there; now a senior sheikh was showing me the numerous certificates of appreciation that American forces had bestowed on him. He did continue to insist, however, that Sunnis were really the majority in Iraq, while two of his bodyguards complained loudly that Saddam was a better leader than Maliki. I thought, It’s no surprise that some Shiites still think all Sunnis are Baathists.
I had been hoping to meet Abu Omar, the Awakening leader in Adhamiya. Just a year earlier, he and I had been drinking tea together in the main square, but he was now keeping a low profile, and he sent his son to meet me at the tea house. His son and I walked down the main street for a few minutes, then turned left into an alley with short, bullet-ridden buildings that had shops on the bottom floors. Abu Omar was standing at the bottom of a stairwell, still wearing the same brown tracksuit as last year, with a pistol holster strapped around his shoulder. We sat on a nearby bench and had sweet Iraqi tea. Abu Omar lamented the loss of his American patron, who had been protective of him. He now lived anxiously, looking over his shoulder, worried about revenge attacks from Al Qaeda or arrest from the Iraqi Security Forces. His Awakening men had been granted the most menial and demeaning jobs—they were the cleaning staff in government offices—so many had quit.
Three days before my visit to Adhamiya, Saleh al Mutlaq’s local office had been bombed. “This is because the Awakening is less,” Abu Omar told me; it was not able to control the street. He recommended I visit Adhamiya’s Kam neighborhood but explained it was too dangerous for him to go there with me. In Kam I found an entire building taken over by squatters. The displaced families had been assigned apartments by members of the resistance and Awakening.
One woman, called Kifah Hadi Majid, had been expelled from Haifa Street by the Mahdi Army after they killed her son three years earlier. Her son Mutlab, who wore an Iraqi army uniform, was in the local Awakening group. A gang had killed his wife for jewelry. “The Awakening were given jobs with the Baghdad sanitation, and we fought the terrorists,” he said. “It was better before. We controlled the street. Nobody could talk to us—not the army, nobody. We communicated directly with the Americans. Now nobody respects us, and payment is a problem.” They hadn’t been paid in fifty-eight days.
I told an Iraqi army intelligence officer that Awakening men were complaining about the lousy jobs they were given. “What education do the Awakening men have?” he asked. “If you don’t have an education, of course you will be a cleaner.” He had arrested three Awakening men whom the army had warrants against for working with Al Qaeda. He didn’t think Abu Omar was a bad man, he told me, just corrupt.
In Washash Abu Karar was still in charge of the tribal council. But one of its members, Sheikh Amer Asaedi, had fled the area after someone blew up his car. I met up again with Abu Karar’s cousins Hassan and Fadhil Abdel Karim, who helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army in Washash. They told me their nemesis, Ihab al-Tawil, had recently been released from prison. A few months before I met them, their brother Ali was shot and killed in his home nearby, his wife wounded. Ali’s killers came around 7 p.m. and announced, “We are the Mahdi Army!” The children, who saw their parents shot in front of them, were still in shock.
“We became victims,” Hassan told me. “We get threatening calls warning us we will be killed.” I asked him why he didn’t leave. “If we leave, then the whole neighborhood will leave,” he said. “We cleaned the mosques that militias used, we made Sunnis pray together with Shiites. Now I can’t go out. I stay home in my brother’s house in the back room.”
Friday prayers were less important, no longer a symbol of defiance. How could Sadrists defy the state when they were represented so well in ministries and Parliament? How could they be anti-establishment when they were part of the establishment? Friday prayers at the main Sadrist office in Sadr City were tamer than I had ever seen; the only hint of politics was a prayer for the release of prisoners. In Ur I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya, once a Mahdi Army hub. “People don’t come here anymore,” said the young man who guarded it. “They are scared since all the arrests.” Abul Hassan, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s former caretaker, who had been my guide in the area, was still in prison, and his assistant Haidar had absconded. Sheikh Safaa, its former Imam, was still safe in Qom, Iran.
In Amriya I visited Um Omar’s NGO again. Several days earlier Sheikh Muhamad, of the nearby Hassanein Mosque—with whom Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile claimed he had worked closely—had been killed. “He was our friend,” she told me. “The killers were teenagers.” Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque and his old friend Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque had absconded, fearing both the government and Al Qaeda. Thirty-five Sunni sheikhs had been killed in Baghdad in the past month. “Al Qaeda is killing all the sheikhs who stood against them,” she said. Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid of the Amriya Council—who was seen by both Gentile and his successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, as a decisive figure in defeating Al Qaeda in the area—had been jailed in October of 2009. He was accused of terrorism, a deliberately vague charge, but he was said to have had a role in bombings against Shiite areas in 2006. He was also alleged to have belonged to the Islamic Army of Iraq.
Most local Awakening leaders were either dead or arrested, Um Omar said, and the Awakening was now very weak. Abul Abed’s successor, Muhamad, had survived several assassination attempts. “The Awakening project was a lie, an American lie,” she said. “They said, ‘Come in, throw your weapons, join the Awakening, fight Al Qaeda,’ to discover the identity of the resistance.” The Americans came around now only when there was an arrest to be made.
Six days before my visit, all of Amriya had been closed off as American and Iraqi Special Forces raided the area. Three local children were kidnapped for ransom. There were also assassinations with silencers. Um Omar’s brother-in-law had been killed in 2009; he had been head of the Amriya Neighborhood Advisory Council.
Sheikh Khalid was a bad man, Um Omar insisted; he used to provide the fatwas for Abul Abed to kill people, and he had his own court for killing people. Sheikh Walid was like Sheikh Khalid too. But Sheikh Hussein was good, she said; he never killed people.
“In the time of displacement,” as she called it, five thousand families fled to Amriya, while 1,800 families fled from Amriya. Since violence had subsided, 559 families had returned. But ten months earlier the returning Iraqis had stopped coming because of intimidation. In January a bomb was placed under one Shiite returnee’s car. Most returnees were Shiites, but only about one-third of them returned to stay. The rest sold their homes.
Al Qaeda men in Abu Ghraib had recently threatened Um Omar’s local office there, accusing it of being a “Jewish organization.” Um Omar was forced to close her local school as well as her vocational training for women in tailoring. A year earlier she had gone to Abu Ghraib with her husband and some engineers. She called the resistance and told them she was coming, but as soon as she arrived armed men with masks put guns to their heads. She started shouting at them angrily, “I’m Um Omar!” and her husband told her to relax. They were taken to a destroyed house in a remote area, separated, and interrogated. She was accused of being Shiite. The men from the resistance made phone calls and then released the couple once they established their identity and apologized to the mayor.
Um Omar still had 225 needy children in her school, and she also ran a successful program finding husbands for the many widows while continuing to assist IDPs. Amriya was now so crowded that displaced families would share houses. Government schools had more than sixty children in each class. I met Um Ala, who was displaced from the Jihad district. Um Omar had found a widow to marry one of Um Ala’s sons. Her family fled to Amriya with three others, and now they shared a house. Um Ala’s husband was “killed in the sectarianism,” she told me, and her sister was also a widow. They had owned their house in Jihad but were too scared to go back. Now a Shiite family lived in it and paid a nominal rent. In Amriya one of her sons and a nephew had been killed by Al Qaeda. “Things can’t go back to how they were before,” her son said about Iraq. “There was blood, vengeance.” They heard a Sunni from the Mashhadani tribe was killed after he tried to return to Hurriya. “Every Sunni who returns to a Shiite area and gets killed,” her son said, “they say he was a terrorist or Baathist.” I asked if the relations between Sunnis and Shiites could ever go back to the way they were. “Impossible,” they all said. “Every displaced person says it’s impossible,” Um Omar said with disapproval. “I don’t think it’s impossible.”
After listening to thousands of traumatized Iraqis, I had become inured to the stories of heartbreak that I had heard. But when Um Omar took me to Amriya’s squatter settlement, on a sandy lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood, it was as if I was twenty-five years old again and taking my first footsteps in Iraq.
Behind the squatter settlement, a large wall divided Amriya from an American military base. Guard posts with tinted windows and rotating sensors towered above the shacks. Most of the squatter families here were from Amil, and as we explored the settlement Um Omar was visibly uncomfortable and warned me not to speak English. She worried about Al Qaeda supporters among the displaced who came in, she said, and tricked poor people who wanted to be mujahideen. Sixty-eight families lived in makeshift shacks, and in one of them I found a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a cold room, bare except for a mattress Um Omar had provided. She had rented a home with her daughters in the Amil district. “When the Sunni and Shiite started,” she said, Shiite militiamen told her to leave or they would take her daughters. She started crying as she told me this, and I was suddenly reminded of my mother, whom she resembled, and I got tearful. As I left, I tried to fix the corrugated iron shield that was protecting her hovel from the cold, howling wind, but the wind kept knocking it down.
“THE SITUATION CANNOT go back to how it was,” said Captain Salim, the Iraqi army intelligence officer I had known in Washash. “We have a strong government; you can use the law.” I had joined him and his Sunni lieutenant for lunch at their base in Baghdad—a Saddam-era palace in Adhamiya. Both men insisted that the era of sectarian division within the armed forces and the police was over. “The army was not built on a sectarian basis,” the captain said. “It was built by the Americans to serve Iraqis, and it was strong in the fight against Al Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army.”
The Mahdi Army was finished now, Salim continued, though it was still killing Iraqi army officers in a campaign of targeted assassinations; more than five officers who had taken part in the operation to crush the Mahdi Army in Sadr City had been killed in Baghdad in the past two months. In the past, they said, armed groups could easily attack police and army checkpoints; they had the firepower and the quiet support of the civilian population. “Before people would say that they didn’t see anything after an attack,” the Sunni lieutenant said. “Now they call us before anything happens.” Anonymous tips, he added, were leading to numerous arrests. “We can’t work without the people’s help, and the calls help a lot.”
Salim told me that he had detained “bad” Awakening leaders and that he was waiting until after the elections to arrest even more, in order to avoid any destabilizing effects. His main challenge was obtaining arrest warrants. “The judge asks for more evidence,” he said. “The prisons are full of innocent people, so they want more evidence. They don’t want random arrests like in the past.” Though Salim had once feared his police counterparts for their associations with Shiite militias, now, he said, the police were good, and Iraqi Security Forces were continuing to arrest Mahdi Army men.
Neither man thought it possible that the civil war could resume. “The people understand now,” Salim said. “Before Shiites loved the Mahdi Army, but the Mahdi Army worked for its own interests, for the interests of Iran. The Sunnis supported Al Qaeda because they didn’t trust the government, but then the Awakenings were established.” In the army, they said, most officers supported Maliki or the secular former Baathist Ayad Allawi—and Salim said he worried only about the Shiite Alliance leader, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom many blamed for the intensification of the civil war that occurred under his watch. “Only he can bring sectarianism back,” Salim said.
Salim was confident the Americans would not leave Iraq because of their conflict with Iran and because of their continued support and training of the Iraqi army. Although the Americans had saved the Iraqi Security Forces from humiliation during the battles with Shiite militias in 2008, “Now we have engineers, intelligence, armor, 120-millimeter mortars, helicopters, good logistics,” he boasted.
I asked if the army was stronger now than it was before the overthrow of Saddam. As a fighting force it was, he said, “but before, when you fought, you had trust that the government had your back. Now, you don’t know. If Sadrists win the elections, they will find a way to fire us. The army has no relation with the government. We weren’t Saddam’s army either.”
Ironically, for all Salim’s talk about the improving security situation and the strength of the state, like many of his colleagues, he had moved his family to Suleimaniya, a Kurdish city in the north, for safekeeping. The Iraqi Security Forces were more confident and less sectarian, it seemed, but still vulnerable. Having their wives up north also freed the men to attend parties with liquor and prostitutes, called gaada.
After lunch Salim invited me to join him for shooting practice—which I did. He also invited me to join him and other officers for a gaada—which I did not. We descended to their shooting range by the river. Saddam’s initials were etched in the tiles on the walls. Some of his men were shooting fish in the river with shotguns. I observed that Salim had lost weight since I had last seen him. He smiled and told me that he had stopped eating rice and started running. Salim gave me his American M4, which had a laser scope. I went through several magazines firing it.
In Diyala, a majority-Sunni province northeast of Baghdad, I met with Dhari Muhamad Abed, head of the government’s Returnee Assistance Center. “Now sectarianism is completely over,” he said. “Security is good.” Indeed, as we drove through villages in Diyala where numerous atrocities had taken place, we found that Iraqi police and soldiers were pervasive, as was the case almost everywhere I traveled in Iraq, no matter how rural or remote. The security forces were no longer hiding their identities to avoid being killed by Al Qaeda, and they were no longer acting as death squads, though arbitrary detention of suspects remains the norm. Human rights abuses persist in Iraq, but they can no longer be described as sectarian; the state has achieved security in part by returning to its authoritarian roots.
More than thirty-seven thousand families had been displaced in Diyala—about 25 percent of the province’s total population—and eighty-five villages were destroyed during the civil war. Only one-third of the refugees have returned. With the end of the civil war and the establishment of a security infrastructure, the refugee crisis remains Iraq’s most serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are homeless and landless, squatting on government property. A senior United Nations official put the figure at half a million, calling it “an acute humanitarian crisis.”
In Baquba, the provincial capital, seven hundred Sunni families are squatting at Saad camp, on the grounds of an army base on the outskirts of the city. They were driven from their homes shortly after the American invasion in 2003 by Kurdish militias eager to seize territory in the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam.
I asked one man if he would like to return to his home. “Who will protect us if we go back?” he asked. The police regularly raided their camp, arresting men and telling the people they would have to leave. “Where will we go?” one old man asked me.
Similar scenes can be found across the country. In the Abu Dshir district of Baghdad, an immense and sprawling squatter camp houses thousands of Shiites who fled rural areas around the capital; they live in tents and makeshift shelters built from scrap metal and mud. The enormous Sadrein camp, in Baghdad’s Sadr City, contains more than 1,500 families, who live on a rubbish dump with the choking stench of sewage clotting the air. Most of the men I met were unemployed. Children played in mountains of rubbish. Like most poor Iraqis, the squatters depended on the state rations, known as the Public Distribution System, for survival. “If they decide to remove the squatters, there will be an uprising and chaos,” said the leader of one compound in Hurriya where hundreds of families were living. “No one can remove the squatters,” Captain Salim told me. “We have to solve the problem first, give them land. The government only builds housing for its workers, not the poor citizens.”
SUNNIS LARGELY did not take part in the January 2005 parliamentary elections. They voted in the October 2005 constitutional referendum but resoundingly opposed the majority’s support for the Constitution. The December 2005 parliamentary elections enshrined the new sectarian order and empowered a Shiite-dominated government, leading to the civil war.
But the January 2009 provincial election results showed that Iraqis were tiring of the overtly sectarian parties: they repudiated incumbents throughout the country, punishing them for their failure to perform. The results signaled that the civil war was over. People felt secure enough to look for new representatives and to begin to demand the provision of services and proper governance. The January 2009 votes by Arab and other non-Kurdish Iraqis were in favor of a strong centralized government that was not openly sectarian. In 2009 explicitly sectarian and religious parties were rejected, but Shiites still voted for Shiite parties and Sunnis voted for Sunni parties, and it seemed Iraq’s elections had crystallized internal differences, entrenching sectarianism.
Between August 2009 and January 2010 Baghdad suffered four major coordinated terrorist attacks. The August 2009 bombings were spectacular and devastating. At the foreign ministry three hundred people were killed or wounded from a local staff of five hundred. Maliki blamed Syria and created a diplomatic scandal. Iran offered to intervene and act as intermediary, but Iraq chose Turkey as the intermediary instead. The Iraqi government failed to convince anybody that Syria had played a role, but the effort was seen as an example of the government strategy of deliberately picking fights with neighbors. Despite these violent attacks, the political arena was the main front for disputes. And despite the sectarian competition for power, there were other divides and cross-sectarian alliances, especially in Parliament.
Maliki, for instance, had a particularly acrimonious relationship with the Parliament, which was the strongest one in Iraqi history, able to check the power of the executive. In 2009 Parliament charged Abdul Falah al-Sudani, the trade minister, who came from Maliki’s Dawa Party, with corruption. The Integrity Committee subjected him to fierce questioning, which was broadcast on television. Interestingly, the head of the Integrity Committee was from the Shiite Fadhila Party, which showed that politics in Iraq didn’t necessarily rotate on a Shiite-Sunni axis. Parliament also cut funding for Maliki’s Tribal Support Councils.
Maliki’s Dawa was still an elitist party without grassroots support and with no ability to mobilize the street. Despite relative improvements in security, Maliki had failed to deliver notable improvements in services. In both the 2009 and 2010 elections, Iran tried and failed to unite Maliki with the Sadrists and the Supreme Council, but Maliki spurned them because with them he had no guarantee of occupying the prime minister’s position. Maliki tried and failed to reach a nonsectarian alliance with Allawi and Mutlaq in the months leading up to the 2010 elections.
The Supreme Council included more women on its list, even unveiled ones. The parties were forced to mature; even the sectarian ones turned to technocrats as candidates. They were responding to pressure from the 2009 elections, when sect and religion were discredited as sufficient to win elections.
In 2008 a new de-Baathification law was passed—this time by the Iraqis—and a new commission was supposed to be established, with new staff and new rules. But this never happened, and the same people who were appointed by Paul Bremer’s CPA in 2003 remained in control—including the director, Ali al-Lami (whose origins were exposed in Chapter Two), and the postwar Sadrists from Ur, who allied with the ubiquitous chairman of the committee, Ahmad Chalabi.
The de-Baathification Committee, now renamed the Accountability and Justice Commission, announced in January 2010 that it was banning 511 candidates from the elections for being former Baathists. The Independent High Electoral Commission approved the decision, as did Maliki. Curiously, Accountability and Justice Commission leaders such as Lami and Chalabi were candidates in the March elections as well. The timing made it clear that the committee was politicized, as did the massive list of candidates who were banned.
While many of the banned candidates were secular Shiites, the best known were Sunnis, and it was the nonsectarian parties that suffered the most from the decision. Candidates with a Sunni base were especially targeted, regardless of whether they were Sunni or Shiite. In Iraq secular Arab nationalism is often wrongly identified by sectarian Shiites to be Sunni and Baathist. The ban was also a great way for the weakened religious Shiite parties to eliminate their rivals. Mutlaq was the most prominent victim, but even Abdel Qader al-Obeidi, the defense minister and an ally of Maliki who was running on his list, was targeted.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, as well as Christopher Hill, the American ambassador, played on Iraqi fears by accusing Lami and Chalabi of working on behalf of Iran, hoping to ruin Chalabi’s long ambition of becoming prime minister. As the Americans’ former anointed one, Chalabi had better access to them than any other Iraqi in 2003 and 2004, and he benefited from them more than any other politician. According to a CIA source, he certainly would have had secrets to sell. But even Chalabi was not a proxy or tool; it was possible to be a sectarian Shiite actor in Iraq without being controlled by the Iranians. Iran had pawns in Iraq but not proxies. It had groups who were poor and desperate but did not willingly do Iran’s bidding. Even then the Supreme Council hated Iran. Its members remembered the humiliation of being looked down upon by Iranians for being Arabs. When they were in Iran all the Supreme Council men wanted was to get out of Iran. If the so-called pro-Iranian groups took power they would not need Iranian support. They would have access to their own resources and power. As long as the Americans were in Iraq then Iran had an existential interest in undermining American efforts. The rise of Turkey as a regional actor with influence and popularity among Arabs counterbalanced both Iran and Saudi Arabia, creating a third pole. The Turks wanted to turn the Kurdish regional government in the north into a Turkish vassal state. Meanwhile the Turkish ambassador in Baghdad was so active internally that he was called in to the foreign ministry twice for them to issue formal complaints about his meddling.
Prime Minister Maliki had cultivated an image as a nationalist with a petrostate agenda: a powerful leader spreading Iraq’s oil wealth. He had even flirted with ex-Baathist Sunni candidates in the past. The de-Baathification moves by Chalabi and his allies were designed to force Maliki back into the sectarian camp. If he supported the decision, he would lose support among Sunnis and nonsectarian Shiites. But if he opposed it, he would lose support among many Shiites.
Maliki’s candidate in Diyala, Muhammad Salman, explained that Maliki still had his base of Shiite voters and that he could not reach out to or defend ex-Baathists like Mutlaq at their expense, lest he lose Shiite voters. Because of this Maliki quickly backed the de-Baathification move, even though his ally Defense Minister Obeidi was on the list. With false rumors of a Baathist coup and the recent bombings, the environment was ripe for targeting opponents under the pretext of anti-Baathism. The campaign took a sectarian turn thanks to the de-Baathification crisis. Anti-Sunnism masqueraded as anti-Baathism, with gruesome posters of mass graves and different Iraqi TV stations, each controlled by a political party, showing videos of Baathist torture and executions. Former Prime Minister Jaafari warned on his posters that he would not give space for the return of the Baathists.
President Jalal Talabani condemned the ban and questioned the committee’s legal existence. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden rushed to Baghdad to try to pressure the Iraqi government to resolve the crisis, with the support of the European Union and the United Nations. But the Americans had lost their leverage, as they often said starting in 2009, when Maliki grew more confident of his ability to survive without them. The appeals committee decided that there wasn’t enough time before the election to review the appeals, so it postponed decisions about them until after the elections—meaning candidates who won could still be banned after the fact.
Then Maliki made the appeals committee overturn its decision to delay matters and review some of the candidates immediately. Two dozen decisions were reversed, including the one banning Obeidi but importantly not the one banning Mutlaq. The election commission then approved all this maneuvering. Allawi, in turn, threatened to boycott the elections, and Mutlaq initially called for one (though he later changed his mind, probably because he would have been ignored anyway). Meanwhile, beyond the Green Zone, candidates throughout Iraq were being intimidated and blown up, including allies of Maliki, who may have been targeted by the Mahdi Army.
Since the beginning of the Iraq War, American planners and observers had been preoccupied with the consequences of decisive singular events—from the arrest of Saddam Hussein to the battle for Falluja and the previous rounds of national and provincial elections. At each easily identifiable juncture, exaggerated claims were advanced by those in search of a turning point, whether for the better or for the worse.
The elections of March 7 were the first to be held in a formally sovereign Iraq, and they did represent a milestone in the country’s political evolution. Maliki remained a popular candidate, supported by Iraqis for having crushed both Sunni and Shiite armed groups, but his list came a close second to Allawi’s Iraqiya list, which was a surprise after his dismal performance in 2005. Even though Allawi is a Shiite, he was a secular candidate par excellence, capturing the Sunni vote and a sizable Shiite vote, signaling that many Iraqi voters were craving the secular nationalism of old. But it also signaled that the Saudi-Iranian competition in the region dominated Iraqi politics just as it did in Lebanon and even Palestine. Allawi could not have achieved his victory without the tremendous backing of Saudis, financially and in the media.
But regardless of the outcome—Maliki contested but could not overturn the vote count—the elections would not precipitate a return to the civil war. The state was too strong, and there was no longer a security vacuum. The security forces took their work seriously—perhaps too seriously. The sectarian militias had been beaten and marginalized, and the Sunnis had accepted their loss in the civil war. But in the United States, there was considerable trepidation about the election result, and suspicions of Iranian influence still clung to Maliki—an echo of the tendentious Sunni notion that an Arab cannot have a strong Shiite identity without being pro-Iranian. In the elections Maliki was the most popular individual candidate, with Allawi a distant second. Maliki wanted a coup but it would not succeed. Most Shiite parties and candidates did not want Maliki to be prime minister. The debate in Baghdad political circles is how to get rid of Maliki. But Allawi could not form a coalition. Regardless of who became prime minister, Iraq would become increasingly authoritarian. Oil revenues will not kick in for several years so there will not be an immediate improvement in services. Even when revenues reach Iraqi coffers, they will have to initially go to cover the infrastructure costs. The fact that the government cannot provide better services means it will have to become more authoritarian. It will use democratic methods and a façade to seem less authoritarian.
Maliki and his allies, after all, like many other Iraqis, were extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They believed Iraq was the only democracy in the region, better than its neighbors, and they zealously wanted to secure their control over a sovereign and increasingly powerful nation. Those who warned of Iranian interference in Iraq ignored Saudi, American, and other foreign involvement. And they too often assumed that Iran was a negative actor in the region that had to be countered, and that only Sunni dictatorships could do that. Indeed, having overcome its fear of Iraqi Shiites, Egypt signed a strategic agreement with Iraq. Egypt could see the shifting alliances in the region and was hedging its bets, an American intelligence official told me: “Iraq is a major opportunity. Iraq will be the number-one or -two oil producer in the world.”
Some pundits, including several leading neoconservatives, had begun to argue that the United States should keep a larger number of troops in Iraq than was previously agreed—but this risked undermining America’s partnership with the Iraqi government. “You want Iraq to be pro-Western and to invite you in,” an American intelligence official told me. “So you build that relationship by strictly adhering to the agreement you signed.”
By 2011 the Americans are expected to reduce their provincial presence to Basra, Erbil, Mosul, Diyala, and Kirkuk, with an eye on the restive fault line between Arabs and Kurds that runs from Iran to Syria. Were it not for the American presence along the so-called disputed territories between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, it is possible that war would have broken out already. Kirkuk has long been described as a powder keg, but of late, Nineveh province has become equally dangerous. Its governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, campaigned in the 2009 election on a rabidly anti-Kurdish platform. Whenever he traveled into areas that the Kurds claimed were theirs, even if they were outside the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government, Kurdish security forces harassed him, even drawing their guns. As a result he traveled with a U.S. Army escort, since he was the governor and had the right to go wherever he wanted in the province, even if he was merely being provocative. In February 2010 Kurdish security forces drew guns on him and the Americans, even firing at their convoy. With American backing, the Iraqi Security Forces arrested three Kurdish men; the next day the Kurds arrested five ISF members.
The Kurds were getting jittery, realizing the Americans really were leaving. But even if the Kurdish star was fading, the Kurds were more than likely to play the kingmaker in the long process of assembling a government after the elections, and anyone forming a government would have to make concessions to them if they wanted to avoid dependence on Shiite rivals. The lack of a unified sectarian bloc in Iraq was a positive development, militating against future conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. “U.S. strategic interests are best served when Shiites of Iraq are divided,” an experienced American intelligence officer explained to me.
FROM THE BEGINNING of the occupation, the U.S. government and media focused too much on elite-level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the atmosphere of the “street,” neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war—and now, perhaps for the same reason, many were worried that there was a “new” sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. But the U.S. military was no longer on the streets and could not accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists were busy covering the elections and the de-Baathification controversy but not reporting enough from outside or even inside Baghdad. Just as they didn’t understand the power of militias in the past, now they did not understand the power of the Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqis were no longer so scared of rival militias or being exterminated, and they no longer supported the religious parties so vehemently. Another thing people would have noticed, had they cared to look, was that the militias were weaker than ever. The Awakening groups were finished, so violence was very limited in scope and impact. Politicians might have been talking the sectarian talk, but Iraqis had grown very cynical.
But even though Iraq’s elections may have been transparent, Iraq remained colonized by tens of thousands of American soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement deprived Iraq of its full sovereignty. Part of it was “legally” confiscated by the continuing UN mandate, and the rest was denied by the United States. Throughout the occupation major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq had been made by the occupiers with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, all the way to the control over airspace and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects of all this will likely linger for decades. While the Americans have mostly, if not totally, withdrawn from the population centers, no occupying army ever wants to be present in the daily lives of citizens if it can have local clients do the job. In the early twentieth century, the British had no presence in the daily lives of Iraqis until Iraqis misbehaved and had to face the wrath of the Royal Air Force. Britain colonized Iraq with fewer than four brigades, most of which were based behind the walls of Habbaniya. But in 1941 they defeated the Iraqi army and occupied the whole country with two brigades.
The presence of the U.S. Army forecloses many options for Iraqis, drawing the parameters within which they can act. There are varieties of colonialism and occupation, and they depend more on the financial interests and strategic aims of the colonizers than their wish to grant independence to their vassals. The continued American military presence in Iraq was still a constant implied threat. The Americans could stay on their bases if the Iraqis behaved, or they could emerge and kill whomever they wanted, as they once had. Moreover, Iraq was still burdened by several UN sanctions dating back to the Saddam era. It was forced to pay 5 percent of its oil revenues in reparations, mostly to the Kuwaitis. The Chapter VII resolutions denied Iraq full sovereignty and isolated it from the international financial community. In addition, with Saudi and Iranian interference and money in post-Saddam Iraq, as in Lebanon, it is impossible to have true democracy or sovereignty.
The Bush administration had tried to implement an “80 percent solution,” based on the notion that if Kurds and Shiites could reach agreement, then Sunnis could be ignored. But Sunni frustration can still lead to destabilization. Sunnis might not be able to overthrow the new Shiite sectarian order, but they can still mount a limited challenge to it. According to Iraqi political scientist Ghassan Atiyyah, the Kurds, with only the mountains as their friends (to paraphrase a Kurdish proverb), were able to destabilize Iraq for eighty years. Sunni Arabs are present in much more of the country and have allies throughout the Arab world who can supply them well enough to destabilize Iraq more than the Kurds ever could. It is not only Baathists and Al Qaeda supporters who oppose the new order. There are Sunnis who see themselves as Iraqi nationalists and worry that Iraq is falling under Iranian control. They see signs of this when much of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite leadership goes to Iran to negotiate political deals and work out the postelection order. But Shiites and Kurds cannot reach agreement without the Sunnis. It is Sunnis who dominate the border area between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. And as long as the Iraqi state insists on its Shiite identity, there will be Sunnis willing to undermine it.
While violence was down even in Baghdad’s worst-hit neighborhoods, and many Sunnis and Shiites strived to rebuild old friendships, Iraqi social relations were deeply wounded. I visited my friend Maher in Dora once again. He took me to the home of his old schoolmate Ra’fat Abid Alwan, a young Shiite man. Ra’fat had once owned a successful local curtain shop. In 2005 his family received a threatening letter. Then his brother was shot in the head and killed in the Dora market. Another brother was kidnapped later that year by an Interior Ministry vehicle. He was released three weeks later for a ransom of eighty thousand dollars, and the family fled to Syria. But they didn’t like Syria. They’d had a nice life in Iraq and didn’t want to end up working as bakers in Syria. So in August 2006 they returned to Baghdad’s I’ilam neighborhood, buying a new shop for curtains. They lived in I’ilam for a year. “Sectarianism started,” Ra’fat told me. “We saw bodies on the street,” so they returned to Syria again. In their absence Dr. Nabil, the local Al Qaeda boss, had taken over their home and given it to a Sunni family. The Americans discovered IEDs in the house and took it over, and then handed it over to the Iraqi army. While they were away four Shiite neighbors in Dora were beheaded. Ra’fat paid twenty-three thousand dollars to be smuggled from Syria to Turkey to Greece to Sweden in late 2007. After a year the Swedes told him Iraq was safe again and sent him home. His family returned to Iraq from Syria, and he joined them in December 2008.
In April 2009 nine houses in Dora belonging to Shiites were blown up. One belonged to Ra’fat’s brother. “It’s wrong to stay here, they blew up his house,” he told me. “We are not comfortable emotionally,” Ra’fat’s mother told me. Now they were trying to sell their house and move back to I’ilam. “Most of the neighborhood is gone,” Ra’fat said. “People only come back to sell homes.” I asked if relations could go back to the way they were. “Impossible!” they said. Ra’fat and Maher laughed at the notion. “This was the prettiest area of Dora, people knew each other,” Maher said. “We could enter each other’s homes like family.” I asked them how people could turn on one another like that. They blamed the Al Qaeda men who were mostly from the rural areas adjacent to Dora. “They wanted Dora for themselves,” they said. “It was criminally motivated.” Both Ra’fat and Maher agreed that there was still a lot of hatred.
A NEWSWEEK ISSUE in March 2010 declared U.S. victory in Iraq. But for Iraqis there was no victory. Since the occupation began in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. Many more had been injured. There were millions of widows and orphans. Millions had fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men had spent years in American prisons. The new Iraqi state was among the most corrupt in the world. It was often brutal. It failed to provide adequate services to its people, millions of whom were barely able to survive. Iraqis were traumatized. This upheaval did not spare Iraq’s neighbors, either. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees languished in exile. Sectarianism increased in the region. Weapons, tactics, and veterans of the jihad made their way into neighboring countries. And now the American “victory” in Iraq was being imposed on the people of Afghanistan.
Seven years after the disastrous American invasion, the cruelest irony in Iraq is that, in a perverse way, the neoconservative dream of creating a moderate, democratic ally in the region to counterbalance Iran and Saudi Arabia had come to fruition. But even if violence in Iraq continues to decline and the government becomes a model of democracy, Iraq will never be a model to be emulated by its neighbors. People in the region remember, even if those in the West have forgotten, the seven years of chaos, violence, and terror, and to them this is what Iraq symbolizes. Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other failed U.S. policies in the Middle East, the U.S. had lost most of its influence on Arab people, if not the Muslim world—even if it could still exert pressure on Arab regimes. At first some Arab elites thought they could benefit from Bush and the neoconservatives, but now reformists and the elite want nothing to do with the U.S., which can only harm their credibility. Every day there are assassinations with silenced pistols and the small magnetic car bombs known as sticky bombs; every day men still disappear and secret prisons are still discovered. In Sunni villages Awakening men are being found beheaded. And although some militiamen have been absorbed into the security forces, others have turned to a life of crime, and brazen daylight robberies are common. But despite this, the worst might be over for Iraqis. On my trips to Iraq in years past, I had made a habit of scanning the walls of Baghdad neighborhoods for bits of sectarian graffiti, spray-painted slogans that were pro-Mahdi Army, pro-Saddam, anti-Shiite, or pro-insurgency. This time, however, there were almost none to be found. The exhortations to sectarian struggle had been replaced with the enthusiasms of youthful football fans: now the walls say, “Long Live Barcelona.”