I met with Captain Adil several times in 2007 and 2008, and we became friends. Adil had been an army infantry officer before the American occupation. His father was a Shiite former Army officer and his mother was Sunni. Adil"s sister married a Sunni man and they fled to Syria, because she feared Shiite militias would kill him. Adil"s wife was Sunni. He had lived in the majority-Shiite and Mahdi Army-controlled eastern Baghdad district of Shaab, but he moved after the Mahdi Army threatened him for refusing to obtain weapons for them. He paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but was cheated and denied the job until a friend helped. "Before the war it was just one party," he said. "Now we have one hundred thousand parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but n.o.body lets them get back to service. First they take money, then ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good. The army is not sectarian. I dream to get back to the army. In Saddam"s time n.o.body knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he said. He rejected the notion that most officers had been Sunni or that most of the Baath Party had been Sunni. "If someone tells you, "I was not in the Baath Party," he is a liar. All Iraqis were in the Baath." The Americans made a mistake by dissolving the Iraqi army and security services, he said. In Dora the army had a good reputation, and there were many stories told about how soldiers helped people go to the hospital and get through roadblocks.
Typical of an officer who graduated from the military academy before the American occupation, Adil viewed the new sectarianism that dominated inter-Iraqi relations as anathema. The Iraqi army was the least sectarian force in Iraq, he said. In the Seidiya district it had battled the police, and at Dora"s Thirtieth Street checkpoint Iraqi soldiers came to blows with local INPs and IPs from the Balat station in Saha, Mahdi Army men who had gone through the Police Academy. Some of these Mahdi Army policemen were involved in the recent clashes with the Awakening men in the Kifaat area of Mahala 828. A U.S. Army intelligence officer told me that from a Sunni perspective, the Balat station was "problematic." It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Muhamad and Sergeant Ali Faqr. Muhamad had his hands tied; a Mahdi Army leader had entered his office and threatened him with a gun to his head. Muhamad asked the Americans to arrest Mahdi Army suspects for him.
Adil admitted that attacks against his people had gone down since the establishment of Awakening units. "The Awakening has the right to join the Iraqi Security Forces," he said, "but they should be cleaned so we won"t have terrorists inside government. Just like we were cleaning the INPs, they are cleaning up the Awakening." But he was also suspicious of the Awakening members. "Awakening in Dora is the same people who used to be attacking us, and now they taunt us, saying, "We used to attack you."" He told me that Abu Salih was a former insurgent who had made IEDs. He suspected Muhammad Kashkul, Osama"s rival, of working with Al Qaeda and helping the group to infiltrate the Awakening. I asked him about Osama"s men. "All these people before were shooting us," he said. He admitted that INPs from the Sixth Brigade had shot at Sunnis in Dora, but not his INPs. He accused Hamid of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. "I have an order from the Ministry of Interior to arrest him," he said.
The Americans were pressuring him to target the Mahdi Army as well as Al Qaeda. "It"s better if the Americans go after the Mahdi Army," he said. "If we arrest them, then the chain of command will release them. The sectarian issue is powerful." Adil did not trust his own men. "Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army," he said, locking his door before we spoke. "Sadr and Badr officials controlled the leadership of the INPs, and the Iraqi police-all of them are Sadr." Although the Interior Ministry"s leadership was dominated by the Badr militia, he said, the majority of its employees were still Sadr supporters. Adil"s best friend and lieutenant, Amar, was Sunni. "I was fighting to get him," he told me, and was threatened as a result of their friendship. "An officer is a brother of an officer. I want to work with something not for Sunnis or Shiites, just for Iraq."
Adil was repeatedly threatened by the Mahdi Army. He dismissed the freeze. "No one cares about Muqtada," he said. "A week ago Mahdi Army guys threatened an INP checkpoint . . . and then sniped at the checkpoint, so the INPs arrested three of them." The men worked for a Mahdi Army leader called Wujud, who lived in Sadr City. Wujud worked with another Mahdi Army leader called Amar al-Masihi, and together they fired mortars at Adil"s base after the arrests. In nearby Abu Dshir he warned that the Kadhimayn Mosque was an office for the Sadrists, and it ordered the people of Abu Dshir not to join the ISVs. The Americans wanted Adil to go after the Kadhimayn Mosque, but he could not do it.
Adil was summoned to meet Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, the former brigade intelligence section commander. Wujud and another Shiite militiaman were there. "They stole our vehicles and weapons," he said, "and Wujud told INPs to be careful because you give Americans information. In front of Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, Wujud told me, "Adil, be careful, we will kill you." My boss was sitting there and didn"t do anything." I asked him why he had not arrested Wujud. "They know us," he said. "They know where we live. I"m not scared for myself, but I"m scared for my family."
Wujud worked with Ziyad al-Shamari, a leader of what the Americans called a "special group" because of a poor translation of what may be better termed a "private group," as Iraqis called Shiite militias and gangs not loyal to Muqtada. Adil added that a man called Abu Yusuf, a contractor who was working with the Americans in Combat Outpost Blackfoot, also worked with Wujud and owned the car used in a recent attack. Adil warned that Wujud and Abu Yusuf stole cars and might blow them up to make it look like Al Qaeda was responsible. Wujud once lived in Dora but now lived in eastern Baghdad"s Ur neighborhood, and he was in charge of dispatching men to Iran for training. General Karim was also from Ur. "He is Mahdi Army," Adil said, claiming Karim had cleansed Sunnis from other parts of Baghdad and its surrounding towns when he was with the Fourth Brigade. "No one can talk about the Mahdi Army in our battalion or police or in the Ministry of Interior."
Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Majid. Majid asked Adil to collect the ransom for a Sunni man whose release had been ordered by the Iraqi courts. "He was not Al Qaeda," Adil said. Majid wanted four thousand dollars, but the prisoner was related to Lieutenant Amar, and his family told him. Like most officers accused of pro-Shiite sectarianism, Majid was promoted out of the position where he caused trouble and moved from division to brigade. "No orders come to us to arrest Shiites, but many gangs from the Mahdi Army are kidnapping people for money," Adil said, "If he is Sunni, they take money and kill him."
"Our command," he said, referring to General Karim, "wants to work with the Mahdi Army." Karim praised the Mahdi Army when the Americans were not around, he said, and complained when others criticized them. Adil knew Karim"s friend Abu Jaafar as well. "Abu Jaafar is a bad guy," he said. "He has groups fighting in Mahala 828. He knows Ziyad al-Shamari. He always puts his nose in our operations and tells our commanders where to open checkpoints. Abu Jaafar was a mechanic before the war, so how is he a sheikh? He worked with special groups and made deals with them to fight. Abu Jaafar calls every Sunni Al Qaeda." Adil believed Abu Jaafar worked for the Badr militia. "Badr came here [from Iran] and took the government and a.s.sa.s.sinated former Baathists, officers, and pilots," Adil said.
One day I met Adil in his neighborhood. Though it was not far from where he used to live and still dominated by the Mahdi Army, he was less known there. He grew nervous as we approached an INP checkpoint. He didn"t want them to know who he was, in case his men had informed the Mahdi Army about his att.i.tude, which could make him or his family a target. At home his two boys watched television in his small living room. "I have decided to leave my job," he told me. "No one supports us." Lieutenant Amar, a former Republican Guard officer, also wanted to quit; together they would try to join the army. He was feeling pressure from his chain of command, and had been accused of being Sunni. A few months earlier he was accused by the Interior Ministry"s internal affairs department of selling cars to terrorists, and five days before I met him he heard rumors that the ministry had issued an order to fire him. When I mentioned Adil"s concerns to Gottlieb, he said that Adil was always threatening to quit.
I visited Shaab, Adil"s old neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, to attend Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque, a center for Muqtada"s followers. My friend Firas picked me up, the same friend who a year earlier had been too scared to let anybody at the Mustafa Husseiniya know that he knew me. To avoid certain checkpoints we drove through a former Iraqi air base that had been looted after the war and was full of indigent Shiite squatters. It was called the Hawasim neighborhood by locals, a reference to looting. Small children with matted hair played barefoot in mounds of garbage. Sewage flooded the roads. Donkeys and sheep dug through trash searching for something edible. "Long live Asa"ib al-Haq," said graffiti on a wall, referring to a Sadrist resistance group that split from the Mahdi Army. My friend put a ca.s.sette of Mahdi Army songs in his stereo. As the chanting and wailing began, he joked, "Now we are Mahdi Army." The song was a refutation of rumors that Muqtada fled to Iran when the surge started. "He prefers death over leaving his home," the men sang.
We drove past local Shiite ISVs the Americans had hired to pressure the Mahdi Army. The men wore masks to conceal their faces and avoid retaliation, and they were protected by Iraqi police manning the checkpoints with them, defeating the purpose of having them there. Graffiti on the walls called for death to the Awakening men.
We arrived before the noon prayers so we could talk to the imam and listen to the sermon. I met Sayyid Jalil Sarkhi al-Ha.s.sani in a green guest room. He was seated on the floor reading a religious book. He had a beard with no mustache and wore wire-framed gla.s.ses and a brown cloak. As we spoke his men prepared him for his sermon, placing a white funeral shroud around his shoulders, a symbol that he was ready for martyrdom. On one side of the room was a large painting of Muqtada"s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was Sayyid Jalil"s teacher. Sayyid Jalil lived in Sadr City and normally ran a mosque there, but for the past year he had led Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque.
When I spoke to him, he denied that the reduction in violence was the result of the Mahdi Army freeze. "That might mean that the Mahdi Army was the cause for the violence, and that"s not true," he said. "The political situation is not in the hands of the government, it"s in the hands of the Americans. The American forces needed some security. They can increase the violence or decrease it. The Mahdi Army froze because of rumors that it is the source of violence and the Mahdi Army is the reason for the sectarian fighting and the fighting between Shiites, especially after the Karbala incident. That"s why Muqtada saw that it is necessary to re-educate the army and keep them away from the field, and despite this the violence is still occurring and the fighting between Shiites is still occurring. After the Mahdi Army freeze it appeared that they were not responsible for the war among people, so now we see that the Mahdi Army is working on education and leadership. Muqtada ordered his people to pray, to worship, to read, and to preach to general education so that they will show the real picture of the Mahdi Army." He stressed that the Sadrists opposed injustice and were nationalists. In truth, however, the significant decrease in violence immediately following the Mahdi Army cease-fire belied his a.s.sertion and proved just how responsible the Sadrists were for the fighting.
Inside the mosque was painted light green. About five hundred men sat on straw mats. Fluorescent lights and fans hung down from the ceiling. There was a curtained-off section for women. The dome of the mosque was still damaged from a 2006 car bomb attack. The first hossa (slogan) that was shouted asked the men in the crowd to pray for Muqtada, for the release of prisoners, and for death to the Americans and their agents. Another one asked G.o.d to grant victory to Muqtada and the Mahdi Army. "Death is an honor to us, arrest is honor to us, resisting the Americans is an honor to us!" went another. Most of the sermon dealt with religious matters and the upcoming month of pilgrimage to Mecca. Sayyid Jalil asked his followers to "pray for other Muslim people in Palestine, Afghanistan, and in all the world, and curse the occupier and the Israelis, and grant victory to all Muslims, to get rid of the Americans, of dictatorships and secularism." He asked the people to raise their hands in prayer "for victory for all mujahideen in the world" and for freedom.
After the sermon and the prayer that followed, lunch was brought for Sayyid Jalil and other mosque staff. Firas and I were offered food by a famous Mahdi Army IED maker. As Sayyid Jalil walked to his office, men came in and said that an American patrol was in the area and he was ushered away. As we left several young men in the courtyard asked us to join them for lunch. After my friend returned me to Mansour, his friends from the Mahdi Army asked him suspiciously if I was a foreigner and a friend of his. He said I was. They asked him if I drank alcohol, and he said I did not. They asked him if I slept with Iraqi women, and he said I did not. Apparently, they wanted to kidnap me and were looking for a proper pretext to justify it.
We ended up having lunch that day at Mustafa Husseiniya in Ur. Its imam, Sheikh Safa, had fled to Iran to avoid arrest and had not returned. I sat with the caretaker, Abul Ha.s.san, and his a.s.sistant, Haidar, in Abul Ha.s.san"s home. (Haidar had been expelled by Sunni militias from the town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad. His brother was killed working as a policeman.) Born in Sadr City in 1972, Abul Ha.s.san, whose real name was Adil, was a muscular and voluble man. He had a raspy voice, permanent stubble. He was jocular and warm and spoke in colloquial Iraqi Arabic because he lacked education. His grandfather had moved to Baghdad from the south when Abul Ha.s.san"s father was still a child, and President Abdul Karim Qasim gave the family land in Thawra (Revolution) City, which would become Saddam City and later Sadr City. Abul Ha.s.san did not attend high school, and after his military service he worked a number of odd jobs, like driving a taxi and small trade. He had always been a Sadrist, he said with a smile, and had followed Muqtada"s father. Following the elder Sadr"s murder, Abul Ha.s.san and his friends established a small underground armed resistance cell but failed to engage in any successful operations. After the war he and Sheikh Safa took over the Baath Party office and were the ones who converted it into a husseiniya. Now Abul Ha.s.san informally led the Ur district.
The Mustafa Husseiniya, which had been demolished after the previous year"s raid, was now being rebuilt. Abul Ha.s.san maintained his office in an adjacent one-room structure, where he sat on the floor behind a desk and received guests and supplicants. The mosque still provided help to poor families and IDPs. "Only Sadrists help the displaced," he said. They also helped families of martyrs and other needy people, giving them bags with basic requirements such as milk, oil, rice, sugar, and similar items. "The government doesn"t do it," he said.
The Mahdi Army in the area a.s.sisted the families of one thousand martyrs and three thousand prisoners with stipends, the size determined by whether they were married, Abul Ha.s.san said. The family of an unmarried Mahdi Army martyr received seventy five thousand dinars a month (about sixty dollars), as did the family of an arrested man; and the family of a married Mahdi Army martyr received twice as much. Most of the displaced families they helped lived in other people"s homes, he said, but many still lived in tents in the nearby Shishan (Chechen) neighborhood, thus named because Iraqis thought Chechnya was very poor.
Haidar brought lunch in: mushy cooked tomatoes with kabob and bread. As we ate, two women in abayas came in and asked for bags of supplies and children"s clothes. Haidar went to fetch them.
Already in December 2007, before the March 2008 clashes, Abul Ha.s.san was comparing the Supreme Council, which dominated the government, with Saddam Hussein. "Why did Saddam kill Shiites?" he asked. "He was also afraid of Shiite ma.s.ses. The Supreme Council wants a secular Islam; they don"t reject occupation or even talk about it." Under Saddam supporters of Muqtada"s father walked to Karbala for pilgrimages. Abul Ha.s.san complained that people walking to Karbala were still targeted because they were viewed as Sadrists. "The Sadr Current represents 75 percent of Iraqi Shiites and is a popular movement," he said. "Only the Sadr Current helps the poor and represents them."
Some materials and labor were donated to help with the mosque"s reconstruction, but the government-run Shiite religious endowment was controlled by the Supreme Council. "We always have problems with the Supreme Council," he complained. "They always instigate it. The Supreme Council are untrustworthy and just want power." Abul Ha.s.san was suspicious of the Sunni Awakening militias. "There is an Awakening group in the Fadhil neighborhood," he said. "There is a man called Adel al-Mashhadani, he killed hundreds of Shiites, he beheaded many Shiites. He is well-known by people for his terrible crimes. Later they put him as head of the Awakening in that neighborhood. He is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. This is not logical."
Since members of the Mahdi Army had committed to the freeze, he observed, they had been arrested, their families displaced and their savings stolen. "Now the freeze is ongoing and the arrests continue. I think it"s better to lift this freeze," he said. "With things happening like the night raids, I don"t think the freeze will continue. The followers of the Supreme Council displace the families of arrested Mahdi Army members in the city of Diwaniya."
I told Abul Ha.s.san that Sunnis accused Sadrists of being Iranians. "This is nonsense," he said. "We are Iraqis. Did you see Iranians or hear us talking the Iranian language? We are the followers of the first and the second martyred sayyids."
The War Inside the Mahdi Army.
The Golden Group-Golden JAM, in U.S. military parlance-was established, composed of trusted Mahdi Army men led by Abbas al-Kufi. The group was tasked with cleaning up the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and killing rogue militiamen. Shiite militias called a.s.sa.s.sins sakak, the equivalent of "ice men," maybe because corpses were put on ice. Sak meant to "get iced." ("Ahmed sak Ha.s.san" means "Ahmed iced Ha.s.san"-or, if he was in New York, "Ahmed whacked Ha.s.san.") While the ice men were doing their job, it was not clear if Muqtada had miscalculated with his freeze, allowing his Shiite and American rivals to gain the momentum. On the other hand, he may not have had a choice but to flee to Iran, as he did in 2007. "We would have killed or arrested him if he had stayed," one National Security Council Iraq expert told me.
But the cease-fire was allowing the Mahdi Army to reorganize. In Baghdad it was split into two commands: eastern and western Baghdad. Eastern Baghdad had three subcommands: north, east, and Sadr City. They were further divided into sub-subcommands, each consisting of about three hundred men. At the top of this chain of command was a council in the southern town of Kufa, near Najaf, which Muqtada chaired. In Shaab there were about three thousand Mahdi Army fighters, led by a man called Adil al-Hasnawi. They were required to be devout, lest they be expelled. They did not receive a salary or training; instead they manned checkpoints, attended Friday prayers, protected pilgrims traveling to holy cities such as Karbala, cleaned the streets, and guarded mosques.
Nominally the Mahdi Army responded to Muqtada or his designated representatives. But there were highly criminalized elements that were displaced from Sunni areas and occupied Sunni houses in Hurriya; these elements resorted to a protection racket in order to support themselves and their families. "This was done at the behest of the community civil leadership and clerical leadership to protect against Sunni incursion and attacks," noted a major who served with the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Airborne Division. But then, according to the major, there was the Mahdi Army sent from Najaf-the so-called Golden JAM-to clean up the criminalized elements and bring them in line with Muqtada"s office. At the same time the Iraqi Security Forces leadership either worked in conjunction with the Mahdi Army or independently to conduct offensive actions against coalition forces and sectarian cleansing of Sunnis. The ISF was an "inst.i.tutional sanctuary" for Mahdi Army members; the Shiite-majority police and national police in that area were actively targeting the Sunni population. Furthermore, the major said, the Office of Muqtada al-Sadr conducted its own census by collecting ration cards, effectively forcing Sunni displacement by preventing Sunnis from receiving goods and services within Hurriya and sending displaced Shiites into evacuated Sunni houses. The Office and Mahdi Army elements funded operations by intercepting propane shipments and conducting their own delivery operations, raising the price of propane and preventing delivery to Sunnis. At the same time, clerical and tribal leadership meddling into socioeconomic affairs allowed the Mahdi Army to become criminalized and terrorize the Sunni and Shiite population. "Most of the Sunni population had been displaced to the district south of the Hurriya DMZ [demilitarized zone], so to speak, when my company arrived in Hurriya," the major told me.
"There were some Sunnis who lived there, but were mostly women without husbands and lived pretty low-key. My southern border was lined with bullet-riddled and burned houses that distinguished the line between Shiite Hurriya and the Sunni district south of Hurriya."
The major told me about Operation Seventh Veil, which was aimed at targeting the Shiite militias, no matter the political risk. Dagger Brigade initiated an operation to investigate, track, and detain "radical or criminal ISF leadership to disrupt this longstanding government sanctuary." Many were confronted with evidence of their criminal links and warned to behave. A major coup resulting from this operation was the arrest of Ghazaliya"s police chief as well as officers from the Iraqi army.
By June 2007 Golden JAM had killed or captured rogue Mahdi Army elements, and the major"s battalion had disrupted the militia"s lines of communications, resources, and leadership, denying them sanctuary and killing "high-value individuals."
In Dora, the main headquarters for the Sadrists and the Mahdi Army was the Kadhimayn Mosque in Abu Dshir. Its loudspeakers were within listening reach of Falcon FOB, where the 2-2 SCR was based. According to that unit"s senior intelligence officer, Captain Dehart, "We are actively targeting rogue elements of Shiite extremists that have not complied with Muqtada"s cease-fire and the remnants of Al Qaeda." When Dehart first came into this area, it was Al Qaeda"s top stronghold in Iraq; but after successful clearing operations the leadership fled and the ones left were low-level thugs, young Sunni males with nothing better to do than to call themselves Al Qaeda, string together fellow thugs from the neighborhood, and try their hand at extortion and murder.
On a map Dehart showed me Saha and Mahala 828, or Kifaat, in northern Saha. He pointed to southern Saha, the majority-Shiite area ruled by Abu Jaafar, General Karim"s ally. It had large government-built apartment complexes. The north had villas he said had belonged to mostly Sunni government officials. "In the last few months Shiite militias moved up. Now the north is largely abandoned; it has a 10 percent occupancy rate. That"s where the fault line was. We called it "the arena." Sunnis from Mahala 830, or Hadhir, would come across and Shiites would come up and fire mortars into Sunni Mahalas 822 and 824 and randomly kill people. We have been able to cut that a lot. I can"t even say we-the surge, as Iraqi inst.i.tutions have started to stand up and get more efficient. And it comes down to the people too, tired of the violence. We"ve had only one indirect fire incident in the last two weeks, directed at the FOB. It"s been a month and a half since we"ve had anything shot neighborhood to neighborhood. When we first got here it was several times a week. We specifically targeted that, and captured or killed mortar teams on both sides."
First Lieut. Adam Sperry was Dehart"s tactical intelligence officer. Walking back from the chow hall to the tactical operations center one night, we heard celebratory gunfire and a speech blasting from the Kadhimayn Mosque"s loudspeakers, which he called "the propaganda phone." Sperry said it was for the death of the Ninth Imam.
A week before my visit three Shiite NAC members who led three mahalas in Abu Dshir had been kidnapped just as ISV recruiting was set to begin in the area. They were taken to the Kadhimayn Mosque and released within twenty-four hours. The mosque"s previous imam, Sheikh Majid, had been arrested a year earlier but was later released. I asked why he was arrested. "Because he was a sc.u.mbag," Sperry said. "The mosque was raided eight months ago. Weapons and a torture chamber were found. We should have raided that mosque a month ago."
Sperry described Ziyad al-Shamari as the bane of his existence. "He"s the rogue special groups commander of Abu Dshir, responsible for EFPs [explosively formed penetrators] that have killed lots of our soldiers. This guy is not, nor was he ever, a Sadrist. He is funded entirely by Iran." Sperry explained that Shiite militias did not attack the Americans in Abu Dshir, because it was their command-and-control location. "They don"t want to fight there or draw attention to themselves," he said. Instead, they placed EFPs in other parts of Dora.
"Abu Dshir is stable," Sperry said. "We don"t want to disturb that by breaking down doors. The guys we target in Abu Dshir are transiting there." (The night before 2-2 SCR had gone on a raid to pick up two Mahdi Army suspects. When they showed up, one man drank a few gulps of motor oil and the other swallowed three pills of v.i.a.g.r.a and pa.s.sed out.) Thanks to the cease-fire and reconciliation, Sperry was having a hard time doing his job. "It"s impossible to determine who is good or who is bad," he said, explaining that the only men the 2-2 SCR targeted were those who attacked the Americans after the cease-fire. "We can"t target anyone based on any evidence before that date."
In December 2007, on my first Friday with the 2-2 SCR, an imam called Sayyid Abbas spoke at the Kadhimayn Mosque. He condemned killings and expulsions of people. "We are all brothers," he said, and explained that Muqtada had imposed a cease-fire on his men "to correct all the mistakes and remove the bad members who joined the Mahdi Army without knowledge or religion. "They are just killers and thieves," he said, "so if you know of somebody from the Mahdi Army trying to do something bad in the name of the Mahdi Army, please tell the mosque. We will take care of him by reporting his name to Kufa, and we will let the government know." The government would arrest the renegade men, he said, granting the Iraqi Security Forces the Mahdi Army"s approval. The American forces were infidel forces, he said; they were trying to provoke a civil war, and Iraqis had to fight that. "We can"t kill our own brothers and our own people just because they are Sunni and Shiite," he said. Not long after that, the Americans and Iraqi National Police raided the mosque again and found IEDs, mortars, and rockets.
Mahdi Army leaders were livid about the attempts to recruit Shiites for the Awakening and used the mosque to conduct investigations. They posted a "final warning" on the walls addressed to "the good people of Abu Dshir" and in "honor of the blood of our n.o.ble martyrs," asking people to protect the souls of their sons and not join "the conspiracy known as the Awakening." Abu Dshir"s main street, known as Rashid al-Tijari (the Americans called it Market Street), was lined with signs on light poles that bore pictures of Muqtada, his father, and various Mahdi Army "martyrs." A slogan said that not all men were real men, which implied that these really were. A faded poster on one light pole said, "Bush and Saddam, two faces on same coin" in English. Graffiti on the walls warned takfiris that the Mahdi Army would declare them infidels deserving of death.
Sunni militias from the nearby Arab Jubur area had fired mortars at the Shiites of Abu Dshir. Walking through the neighborhood I found a man called Hisham working on his house. He had lost two brothers to the violence. Mortars from Arab Jubur had also landed on his neighbor"s house. "If it wasn"t for the police and the Americans, Al Qaeda would have destroyed us," he said. "We are poor people, we just go to work and come back. We had no problems with our Sunni neighbors-it was all Al Qaeda." People expelled from Arab Jubur and the Furat district had settled in the area. Muqtada"s local office and the Kadhimayn Mosque were providing a.s.sistance to them, including homes (emptied of Sunnis) and a stipend. Locals complained that the Mahdi Army freeze had hurt them. The militia had guarded the neighborhood and provided propane and kerosene, which they had trouble getting now. I asked who was protecting the area. "Its people," I was told. "People sit in front of their homes."
In Dora the Mahdi Army was under the command of the Karkh, or western Baghdad Brigade. The leader for western Baghdad and many of his local commanders were recently replaced for ignoring the freeze, and the Sadrists were trying to provide social services and help local munic.i.p.alities. Some Sunni families who had been displaced by Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur were received by the Sadrists in Abu Dshir and provided with a.s.sistance. Mahdi Army men complained that the cease-fire was paralyzing them and causing them to lose respect or authority in their areas. In the nearby Bayya district, the Sadrist office was furious when an unknown corpse turned up on the street; several days were spent investigating whether somebody had disobeyed Muqtada"s orders. But the Mahdi Army was unable to control the rogue groups; sometimes, in fact, they received help from them.
In Abu Dshir the Mahdi Army relied on lookouts who watched for the Americans on rooftops and street corners. They also released pigeons from coops when American patrols approached. In the past this had led Americans to shoot innocent pigeon keepers. Apart from going on raids in Abu Dshir, the Americans conducted "presence patrols" in which they walked through the streets and interacted with people. I followed a platoon of soldiers from the 2-2 SCR around Market Street and spoke to the local shopkeepers about them. Flocks of sheep were herded through the streets, a common sight in the city. The Americans walked past furniture shops, waved to shopkeepers, and bought roasted chicken and fresh bread at inflated rates. "The Americans don"t have a strategy," one local observed. "They don"t know who is with them or who is against them, and they"ve been here for four years." I asked a group of men if Muqtada was powerful in this area. "It"s a Shiite neighborhood," one said, as if it were obvious. "JAM has lookouts on streets dressed just like that," an American officer said, pointing to a young man in a matching tracksuit. "It"s funny, you can look at these guys and know that they"re bad and have nothing to detain them for."
Shopkeepers whose shops were destroyed during the fighting were supposed to receive money from the Americans. "Why did some get money and some didn"t?" I was asked by men who a.s.sumed I was a translator for the Americans. A group of men called the American officer over to show him an old man"s leg that was injured in an explosion. "Can"t anybody help him?" they asked. Another man asked if the Americans could help his unemployed son find a job in the security forces.
Platoon leader Lieutenant Cowan decided to visit a random house and ordered his men to "clear" it. Uninvited, they pushed open the outer gate and the door to the house. As the translator was elsewhere with Cowan, I had to explain to a frightened and bewildered woman and her two sons that the officer merely wanted to talk to them and they needn"t worry. The younger boy clung to his mother"s abaya and whimpered in terror. A soldier gave him some candy, and he stopped crying. "I feel bad walking on these people"s carpets with my shoes," one major said. "My wife would kill me." He went back outside. Cowan came in with his Iraqi translator, who wore a mask and sungla.s.ses. He asked the woman how much electricity she received per day, about her water and sense of security. Cowan asked her if she knew who Ziyad al-Shamari was and how much influence the Mahdi Army had over the area. She laughed sheepishly with her older son. "We don"t go outside, we close the door," she said. "You don"t hear rumors?" asked Cowan. "You don"t hear whispers? Do you know if there is JAM activity in the Kadhimayn Mosque?"
In a different home Cowan encountered an old man in a wheelchair who was a retired Iraqi colonel. "All Shiites here love the U.S. Army," the man told him. "Yeah, well, we love you," Cowan said with a smile. "In the beginning the Mahdi Army protected us from Al Qaeda," the old man said. "Then they joined the police, they are all police. They protect us from mortars, Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur."
One day I accompanied twenty-two-year-old platoon leader Rob Johnston as his men took two masked Iraqi "sources" from the Badr militia to identify Mahdi Army suspects. The Americans had been collaborating with this militia since 2004, when they teamed up with Jalaluddin al-Saghir, the Supreme Council cleric and politician. Saghir would send his security chief, known as Haji Dhia, to the Americans. Haji Dhia would wear a ski mask, point out the house, and tell the Americans what they would find there. He once escorted an American unit to a house at 2 a.m. They found an arms bazaar inside, with more than one hundred Kalashnikovs laid out in neat rows around the walls, along with ammunition, Glock pistols, and two MP-5s. Though at first the information was directed against Sunnis and helped the Americans arrest Al Qaeda cells, the Supreme Council provided information about the Sadrists as well, especially during the 2004 fighting in Najaf.
That morning in December 2007, the Americans descended from their vehicles and entered the main covered market in Abu Dshir. People tried to navigate around the large soldiers, looking at them quizzically as they squeezed through the tight alleys of the market. The Iraqi sources stayed in the vehicle. As women bought vegetables, fish, and clothes in various stalls, the soldiers rounded up all the men in the market, as well as those entering or leaving, pushing them back and holding them by their shoulders, ordering them to obey. One by one they led dozens of men to the street so the sources could identify them. One young boy started crying. A man hurrying back to his stall was halted. "Fish, fish," he said in Arabic.
I wandered off to buy some popcorn from a stand. As I returned men warned me to go in a different direction because the Americans were stopping people. Sergeant Bowyer, charged with carrying out psychological operations, distributed an Arabic-language newspaper published by Americans and asked people inane questions. "So, how is everything here?" he asked one man. "What"s your sense of the people? Are people really happy in regards to reconciliation?" "Do you think JAM feels threatened by reconciliation?" he asked another. "When JAM tries to influence the people in Abu Dshir, how do they do it?" he asked another. "We can"t talk about this openly," one man replied. "I"ll take that as a sign that it does happen," Bowyer said. His vehicle was equipped with speakers, and as he drove through Market Street it blasted an announcement in Arabic calling on the people to continue with reconciliation and ignore those who would "take them back."
The men raided a house and found some bewildered men working. "We"re laborers," the men protested as they were taken to be identified by the sources, who had pointed out the house. They were pushed against the walls. One soldier held one of them by the back of the neck. The three men were quickly interrogated one by one. "What do you think of the way he talks," the lieutenant asked me. "Do you think he"s honest?" Their stories were consistent with the obvious-they were mere laborers. "Can I go?" the last man asked me. "They"re not taking me away?" As I said no, he smiled and kissed my cheek. "We appreciate the time you gave us," Lieutenant Johnston told them.
Children chased after the soldiers asking them for candy and teasing them. When they learned I spoke Arabic, they pointed to the pigeons that were flying above homes. They had been released by Mahdi Army lookouts. All the children liked Muqtada. "The Americans are dogs and Muqtada will defeat them," one boy said. "The Americans are donkeys and the boys who take candy from the Americans are donkeys," another boy said. "When they are here we say, "I love you," but when they leave we say, "f.u.c.k you,"" he told me. Another boy showed me his watch, which had a picture of Muqtada"s father on its face.
Johnston"s platoon raided Abu Dshir one night. The soldiers broke down the gate of a home and rushed into the house. "We are not Mahdi Army, we are in the Iraqi army," an old man protested. "We are not Mahdi Army or anything." It was a middle-cla.s.s home with no overt signs of religiosity and none of the typical things a.s.sociated with Muqtada"s supporters. The five women and one child were herded into the living room as three men were interrogated. "Mister, I am no Jaish al-Mahdi," one man protested in English. "Okay, okay, uskut, shukran" (be quiet, thank you), said a soldier. "We hate the Mahdi Army," said an old woman, "believe me." Thinking I was a translator, the residents looked at me and begged me to explain that none of them had anything to do with the Mahdi Army. The women were made to stand, empty their pockets, and pat themselves down, starting with their arms, down their chests to their legs.
One man, it turned out, was a laborer who had signed up for the Awakening. Another worked in their father"s pastry shop. Their father was seventy years old, and a brother who was absent was in the Iraqi army. The men"s pictures were taken. They were shown pictures of Mahdi Army suspects and asked to identify them, but they recognized none of them. "We are not terrorists," the old man said. "We like the government." Most of their protests went untranslated. "Why do you think automatically I"m looking for the Mahdi Army?" Johnston asked. "Because you have been arresting people and accusing them of being Mahdi Army lately," the man replied. He was handcuffed and complained that they were too tight. Johnston put his finger between the cuffs and the man"s wrists. "If I can fit one finger, it"s okay," he said. The two sons were also handcuffed, and they were all taken away. Their phones, computer, and cash were also taken, as were their personal papers, CDs, and other objects of interest that had Arabic writing on them. "They probably got some propaganda in there," a sergeant explained as he carried off a hard drive.
Neighbors who rushed into their homes when the Americans arrived provoked American suspicion, and they too were brought in for interrogation. One old man started crying, fearing the Americans would take his son away. On the way back the tired soldiers bantered in the Stryker. "You know what I hate most about detainee duty? Watching those motherf.u.c.kers s.h.i.t," one complained. "I bet there"s an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," another said.
The Reconciliation?
In Virginia, sometime after my trip to Iraq in December 2007, I met P.J. Dermer, a former Special Forces aviator who had been a Middle East foreign area officer in the U.S. Army since the late 1980s and had traveled independently through much of the region. In 2003 he worked with the Iraqi army; subsequently, he returned to work under Petraeus. "Sunnis realized they were in trouble-we were killing "em, the Shiites were killing "em," Dermer observed. "As we saw the Awakening develop, we realized we can"t kill our way out of this. But some guys were afraid to come out, and we had to make sure Maliki was soothed."
Even in 2004 and 2005 American commanders established relationships with Sunni tribal leaders who were tired of the Al Qaeda presence in their area. But there was no systematic approach to transition these temporary alliances on the battlefield into a normal relationship with the Iraqi government. In July 2007 Petraeus established the Force Strategic Engagement Cell (FSEC). Its task was to reach out to the resistance and "reconcile" them with the Iraqi government. Typical of the military, the unusual name for talking to resistance leaders was "key leader engagement." According to Petraeus, the goal of KLE was "to understand various local situations and dynamics, and then-in full coordination with the Iraqi government-to engage tribal leaders, local government leaders, and, in some cases, insurgent and opposition elements." This was a challenge for the military, which needs a formula or system for everything it does, even building relationships. Petraeus formalized KLE because developments like the Awakening were occurring with little involvement or support from the Iraqi government. As a result the government was very suspicious of the Awakening and the Americans" motives. In addition, Petraeus had no body of his own through which to coordinate these local developments or approach them strategically.
"You cannot kill or capture your way out of an insurgency," Petraeus said. He hoped to establish a dialogue between members of the resistance, or at least influential supporters, and the Iraqi government. This would facilitate the American and Iraqi forces" takeover of areas controlled by the resistance without requiring combat in village after village. Of course, those in the resistance, whether Sunni or Shiite, who were "irreconcilable" would be killed or captured. FSEC was composed of a few dozen mostly military officers, although the American amba.s.sador appointed a civilian from the State Department to work with them. "Engagers" working for FSEC developed "lanes" to reach out to the Iraqi government and resistance.
"We gave insurgents a place to come see us, to realize we weren"t ogres," Dermer said. "The Awakening was also a movement within Sunnis at large, but they didn"t realize what they wanted. Some wanted to take over from the Shiites, others just wanted to go back to normal life. We were getting deeper and deeper [with the Sunni resistance], further up the hierarchy, and having more success. But Sunnis were way too divided." Dermer met leaders of the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna, the Jihad and Reform Front, and some people connected to the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
Dermer would meet these resistance men in Jordanian hotels. In Jordan and Syria he also met with Iraqi businessmen and expatriates who were in touch with the resistance but were not driving it. In 2003 he had been involved in the creation of the new Iraqi Defense Ministry. Many of the former military officers he had met then were now influential in the resistance.
The Iraqi government"s Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), led by the notorious Dr. Ba.s.sima al-Jadri, was set up by Maliki to work on "reconciliation" issues with the Americans and to deal with the Awakening movement. "The Awakening wasn"t a reconciliation with the Iraqis but with the power to be in the battlefield," Dermer explained. "The purpose of Maliki"s reconciliation committee was also to thwart whatever we wanted to do. The reconciliation committee was all Shiite except for a couple of token Sunnis. They did a good job of making us believe we were making progress. It was clear to me from dealing with the Iraqi army, Ba.s.sima, Adnan [a Shiite former intelligence officer under Saddam], that they [the Awakening] were doomed from the beginning. We kept a nice face on it with all this talk about jobs, yeah yeah, blah blah. The Iraqi government was flabbergasted when we told them how many [Awakening men] we had on the payroll. But it worked. It settled down the killing to a manageable degree. Abud Qanbar hated tribal sheikhs. He"s urban. "They had their chance," he said. The Iraqis wanted to arrest all the Awakening leaders, and the minute s.p.a.ce developed they went after them. Maliki was smart; he created the reconciliation committee. He was building tribal councils, the mirror image [of the Awakening] but Shiites. Ba.s.sima and Adnan were involved in building the tribal councils. You could get something done if you had a good relationship with Ba.s.sima and Adnan. The tribal support councils were meant to manipulate tribes to be on Maliki"s side, like the Ottomans and Saddam. Ba.s.sima was Maliki"s watchdog to mitigate the Awakening and the Sunnis. Some senior insurgent guys were FREs [former regime elements], generals I met in 2003."
Though Jadri was a friend and confidante of Maliki, everybody else around her hated her. "Ba.s.sima had issues being a woman in a man"s world," Dermer told me. "Iraqi generals kissed her a.s.s." Jadri and Adnan wanted to meet the Awakening men, so the Americans brokered it. "Sunnis wouldn"t engage with the Iraqi government without American interlocution," Dermer said. "The Shiites wanted us out of the way. We brought in Raad from Ghazaliya, Abul Abed from Amriya, and Abu Azzam al-Tamimi from Abu Ghraib." These were important Awakening leaders in Baghdad. "We brought them into the palace to meet Ba.s.sima and Adnan," he said. "It took a lot of work."
Dermer mocked the notion of "key leader engagement," which in practice meant trying to have as many meetings as possible and using that as a measure of progress. FSEC was originally led by Graeme Lamb, a British general who was Petraeus"s deputy and who had experience establishing a dialogue with armed groups in Northern Ireland. "Lamb was replaced by an idiot British general and an idiot State Department guy," Dermer complained bitterly. "The guys in charge of FSEC didn"t get it. It takes very unique people for this office. These f.u.c.kers are killers. You can"t be a starry-eyed thirty-year-old or Harvard grad, but it was a lot of PowerPoint briefings, six-month rotations-it was bureaucratic. People hated success, like getting high in the insurgency. The agency [CIA] fought us, State [Department] hated us. Once you put it in a bureaucracy, it won"t work. It was a brilliant idea, but we didn"t know what we were doing."
FSEC also saw the prison population as a group with potential to be "reconciled," and also as a possible source of intelligence on the resistance. Some prisoners were resistance leaders and could actually encourage their supporters outside to reach an accommodation with the Americans or the Iraqi government. In American prisons Dermer and his colleagues met with leaders of the Mahdi Army and special groups.
Throughout the American occupation the majority of Iraqis seized and imprisoned by the Americans were innocent, even innocent of conducting attacks against the Americans. Few of the tens of thousands of Iraqis detained in the American-run gulags were ever even charged with anything. Few Americans question whether they had a right to invade a foreign country and arrest scores of its men every day on scant evidence. When the men were eventually released, the Americans staged shows of fanfare and magnanimity.
In December 2007 the 1-28 Infantry Division, which controlled the Jihad district, staged one of these slightly absurd "reconciliation" ceremonies when it released fifteen Shiite men. Col. Pat Frank of the 1-28, who supervised the ceremony, explained to me that Jihad was part of what the Americans had named Northwest Rashid, and was about 42 percent Shiite and 58 percent Sunni. There were a little over 1,800 ISVs in Northwest Rashid. There were also 985 Shiite police recruits and 834 Sunni police recruits; 850 of them came out of the ISVs. "Moderates have gained the momentum in the area and overtaken extremists," Frank said.
Frank"s men staged a reconciliation accord between Sunnis and Shiites as a gesture and requested a list of local men they had imprisoned that the district"s leaders wanted to be released. "They were suspected of Shiite militant activity," Frank said, but were screened by the Americans and Iraqi government before their release. "Some people on the list were rejected at senior levels" by the Americans, he told me. Only fifteen men had been approved. The Americans built a "reconciliation hall" for the "Reconciliation Committee." Frank showed neighborhood leaders charts in which he gave them red stars or green stars depending on whether violence had gone down in their area. He gave a metal emblem of the black lion, which symbolized his unit, to a female American correspondent in case she ever had problems. "The Iraqis know us and love us," he said. "Just show it to them and you"ll be fine."
The fifteen prisoners were brought in to the building in handcuffs. The few journalists present were ordered not to take pictures until the cuffs were removed. The event was clumsily ch.o.r.eographed. Journalists, council members, and local dignitaries were herded into a separate room and guarded by soldiers. Tahsin Ali Samarai, of the Reconciliation Council"s security committee complained that they had given the Americans a list of 562 prisoners from their area that they wanted released. The Iraqi army colonel in charge of the area told me that all the men were innocent. Another tribal sheikh agreed. "The Americans arrest people randomly," he said, adding that some of the men had been imprisoned for nearly two years. Sheikh Awad Abdul Wahel, also known as Abu Muhammad, was president of the tribal sheikh council, which had submitted seven hundred names of prisoners from the Jihad district alone. "I serve my people, not the Americans," he said. "They were never accused or found guilty," Sheikh Hussein Karim al-Kinani said. "American accusations and arrests are random."
Outside one angry young woman called Leila waited with her two children. Her husband, Muhammad, was arrested sixteen months earlier while sleeping on his roof to avoid the summer heat. A neighbor was shot and Muhammad was rounded up with all the other men of military age in the area. Their son was born while he was in prison. Leila blamed the Americans for the civil war and did not want to talk about reconciliation. One woman in an abaya came because she heard men were going to be released. Her son was captured by Abul Abed, the notorious Awakening leader in the Sunni district of Amriya.
Inside the prisoners were boisterous. They were seated in alphabetical order, and behind them sat "guarantors" for a "bond" they would have to sign. "It"s not an oath on the Koran," Frank explained. "It"s on their honor. A guarantor is a mentor, just like in the U.S., when an individual runs in trouble with law and somebody steps up to mentor them. The reconciliation committee wants to see these fifteen men do well." The Iraqis seemed uninterested and amused by the American show. They endured speeches given by Frank and Captain Ducote. "We want to make this a special event," Frank said, and asked the men to quiet down. "Thank you for being patient, but this is for you." Prisoners and guarantors got up pair by pair to each sign their "bond." The Iraqi colonel played his part. "The government is in control now," he said, "not like before. There is a state and there is law." He told them to join the police or the army. Frank was uncertain how to describe the prisoners. He could no longer call them detainees. "We will now ask each individual to stand," he said. "Guarantors stand too. You raise your right hand. Guarantors put your left hand on the shoulder of the individual."
"I acknowledge that recent signings of the Reconciliation Agreement have ushered in an era of peace and partnership between Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Christian, the Mahdi Army, Iraqi Security Forces, and American Forces," the oath said somewhat optimistically. Interestingly, the only militia that was mentioned was the Mahdi Army, though the Americans were granting it a role as a legitimate actor. "Based on my arrest record, Iraqi Government and Coalition Force leaders have agreed that my immediate release would be beneficial to the Reconciliation process. I pledge to not commit any violations of the Reconciliation Agreement"s 12 points, violate Iraqi Law, or attack Coalition Forces." The men were not told what those twelve points were. "As a proud Iraqi citizen living in Northwest Rashid, I will become a contributing member of the community in the historic effort to rebuild this proud nation." The Iraqis might have wondered where Northwest Rashid was, since they never used this designation. They might also have considered that they were rebuilding a proud nation the Americans had helped destroy. The guarantors took a similar oath stating that they were "bound by honor" to notify American or Iraqi authorities if the "individual" violated the oath. "As an Iraqi living in Northwest Rashid, I am proud to guarantee the mature and peaceful future actions of this citizen," they said.
Then Frank spoke. "The coalition would like to welcome all the members of the free Jihad community," he said. "The area of Jihad has been changed a lot. Violence has been reduced tremendously, and this reconciliation is proof." He did not explain who the men were reconciling with. "With your release from detention we expect that you will become part of the reconciliation, and we look forward to working with you and the guarantor, the person behind you. All the citizens of Baghdad are watching Jihad now." It was unlikely that any of them were, because the only Iraqi journalist present was a lone freelance cameraman. "Welcome back," said Captain Ducote. "Jihad is not the same place that you left. You were released based on your ability to join the reconciliation process. I look forward to seeing you on the streets as we patrol."
It was a reconciliation between the Americans and the Iraqis, not between Iraqis, just as the Awakening was a reconciliation between Sunnis and the Americans. By December, up to eighty thousand men were part of the ISV program in eight Iraqi governorates. Nearly all were Sunnis, though there were a few thousand Shiites as well, in separate units. The Awakening program peaked at about one hundred thousand men. Though it was meant to compensate for the sectarian imbalance resulting from Sunnis" boycotting the security forces and being black listed by the Shiite government, the creation of new Sunni militias seemed to be promoting sectarianism and a fissiparous future. The drop in violence resulting from the decision of Sunni militias to cooperate with the Americans, the Mahdi Army"s decision to regroup, and the "surge" in American troops was meant to buy time for reconciliation between Iraq"s warring parties and bickering politicians, but there was no political progress. Apart from the security forces, the Iraqi government was nonexistent outside the Green Zone. The Americans were the government. Walls created small fortress neighborhoods in Baghdad, preventing militias from fighting one another directly. Shiite militias battled one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Everybody waited for the civil war between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen to start in the north. Sunnis and even some Shiites had quit the government, which couldn"t pa.s.s laws or provide services anyway. The prime minister"s office circ.u.mvented Parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that Parliament opposed.
Iraq was still under a foreign occupation. American soldiers were not mere policemen walking their beats on patrol, helping old women cross the street and working on reconstruction and beautification projects.
A foreign military occupation is a systematic imposition of violence and terror on an entire people. When I visited Iraq during the peak of the surge, at least twenty-four thousand Iraqis languished in American prisons. At least nine hundred of them were juveniles. Some were forced to go through a brainwashing program called the "House of Wisdom," in which American officers arrogantly arranged for prisoners to be lectured about Islam-as if a poor understanding of Islam, not the occupation itself, was the cause of the violence. The Americans were supposed to hand over prisoners to Iraq"s authorities, since it was officially a sovereign country, but international human rights officials were loath to make this recommendation because conditions in Iraqi prisons were at least as bad as they were under Saddam. One American officer told me that six years was a life sentence in an Iraqi prison, because that was your estimated life span there. In the women"s prison in Kadhimiya female prisoners were routinely raped.
Conditions in Iraqi prisons worsened during the surge because the Iraqi system could not cope with the ma.s.sive influx. Prisoners arrested by the Americans during the surge were supposed to be handed over to the Iraqis. They often were not, but those were the lucky ones. Even in American detention, Iraqis did not know why they were being held, and they were not visited by defense lawyers. The Americans could hold Iraqis indefinitely, so they didn"t even have to be tried by Iraqi courts. A fraction were tried in courts where Americans also testified. But observers were yet to see an Iraqi trial where they were convinced the accused was guilty and there was valid evidence that was properly examined, and no coerced confessions. Lawyers did not see their clients before trials, and there were no witnesses. Iraqi judges were prepared to convict on very little evidence. If Iraqi courts found prisoners innocent, the Americans sometimes continued to hold them anyway after their acquittal. There were five hundred of these "on hold" cases when I visited in early 2008. Often the Americans still arrested all men of military age when looking for suspects.
As politics and power became more and more local in Iraq, the Iraqi state itself seemed as though it were an American protectorate. As long as the new militias and security forces in Iraq fought Al Qaeda, they had the backing of the United States, much as dictatorships during the cold war enjoyed U.S. support as long as they fought communism, regardless of human rights abuses they might commit. The same logic applied to dictatorships in the Muslim world that collaborated in the war on terror. For sure, violence in Iraq was down, but there were still at least six hundred recorded attacks by resistance groups every month and about six hundred Iraqi civilians being killed in violence related to the civil war and occupation as well as more Iraqi soldiers and police. Since the surge began, nearly a million Iraqis had fled their homes, mostly from Baghdad, which had become a Shiite city. One reason fewer people were being killed was because there were fewer people to kill, fewer targets for the militias (which was why they turned on their own populations). The violence was not senseless; it was meant to displace the enemy"s population. And if war is politics by other means, then the Shiites won. Opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis blamed the Americans for their problems and wanted them to leave. American officials tried to put a positive spin on this, explaining that at least it united Iraqis, but Iraqis had opposed the American occupation from the day it began.
In early 2008 I met Captain Adil again. The Americans were threatening him, saying he would lose his value to them if he didn"t pursue the Mahdi Army more actively. His chain of command wanted to fire him for the feeble attempts he had made to target the Mahdi Army. He picked me up in his van, and for lack of anywhere safe and private we sat and talked as he nervously scanned every man who walked by. He complained that the Americans called every Shiite suspect Mahdi Army and every Sunni suspect Al Qaeda, and that the Awakening was raiding houses without the permission of the Americans or Iraqi Security Forces. Now the Mahdi Army worried that the ISVs and Awakening were a new force meant to target them, he said, and that they would replace Al Qaeda. He worried that the Mahdi Army could start fighting again out of fear of the Awakening. "No one can control these guys. Abu Jaafar, the ISVs-the coalition must be tough with them. The situation won"t get better. If someone kills your brother, can you forget his killer? You work hard to build a house and somebody blows up your house. Will they accept Sunnis back to Shiite areas and Shiites back to Sunni areas?"
Pilgrimage to Ramadi.
Early in the morning on February 2, 2008, I joined Osama"s comrades Abu Salih, Abu Yusef, and other ISV leaders from their area as they gathered to depart for Ramadi, the national seat of the Awakening Council, the political movement led by Abu Risha. They hoped to translate their military success into political power, but rivals from Dora had pre-empted them and appealed to Abu Risha to grant them recognition. We left in a three-car convoy. Abu Salih drove the car I was in. He explained that he named his son after his uncle Salih, who was killed by the Mahdi Army. Close to the Hero House we were stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier ordered Abu Salih to open the trunk. "I"m Abu Salih," he said. "Open the trunk," said the soldier. "Dog, son of a dog," Abu Salih muttered. "They have s.h.i.tty manners." We pa.s.sed by workers putting up new concrete walls. "They closed off Baghdad, but they didn"t close the Iranian border," he complained.
Driving west, we entered the Anbar province. Looking at the desolate flat desert with a few trees, Abu Salih said, "Iraq is beautiful." Past the town of Abu Ghraib we saw a pickup truck with a large Russian anti-aircraft gun called a Dushka affixed to its back. The Dushka was often used as a heavy-infantry machine gun. Somali warlords had made it famous by placing it on their "technical" vehicles. "Now that"s the Awakening," Abu Salih said, wistfully gazing at the Dushka. "How can we stand up to Gen. Abdul Karim with only Kalashnikovs?" We drove by more Awakening Council men with American Hummers and Russian PKCs, or belt-fed machine guns. "Ooh, look at that PKC," Abu Salih said.
We drove by the large yellow Awakening Council flag. The flag bore the Bedouin coffee pot as its symbol, stressing the group"s Bedouin origins, of which some Sunnis were proud. Some Shiites, in turn, prided themselves on a settled farmer heritage. "Hopefully we will have this flag today," said Abu Salih. We were meticulously searched before entering the Awakening Council headquarters, our pens checked, our candy squeezed. Inside a large opulent guest hall, supplicants sat on long sofas lining the walls. Abu Risha, brother of the slain founder of the movement, sat on an ornate throne under a picture of his brother Sattar. We were served tea by Bangladeshi servants, and he ignored us. Eventually he turned to our group and asked, "How is Dora?"
We followed him into a smaller office, where three of the rival men from Dora were sitting. They referred to Abu Risha with deference, calling him "our older brother" and "our father." It was a strange phenomenon, urba