The Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad wrote an article about his time with Abul Abed. "I think Ghaith embellished a bit, but the behavior he describes was a concern for me," Kuehl said. "We got a lot of reports about his behavior, and it is true we were not with him 24/7. But we were with him a lot, and he came to rely on our presence to ensure that he was not targeted by the government. In some cases we could deny reports because I had someone with him at the time he allegedly did something. In general his behavior was pretty consistent with what I saw from IA officers. I saw him on several occasions work to get Shiite families back into Amriya. Over time I think he learned that he had to tone down his image, since he had become a public figure. I think he grew with the increasing responsibility he gained from leading a large organization."
In late July 2007 a captain serving under Kuehl wrote to his father, reporting that within two months the Fursan had virtually eliminated Al Qaeda from Amriya-an area, as the captain observed, that had been declared "the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq" two months earlier. "These guys are from the neighborhoods, they know the people, and they are primarily concerned with making their neighborhoods safe again," the captain wrote. "They conduct joint operations with us and the Iraqi Army. Unlike the IA, these guys are actually a pleasure to work with. Most of them are ex-military from the Saddam era and several are former captains, majors, or lieutenants. They have discipline and know how to plan and execute a mission. The month before the movement started, we lost fourteen American soldiers in Amriya. In the two months that the movement has been going, we have lost zero American soldiers in Amriya."
The captain noted that people all the way up the chain of command had visited to see the project. Everyone realized the strategic importance of the Fursan, even the Maliki government, which was wary of the Sunni militias. But when Fursan members were seriously injured, their options were limited: "They are paying a heavy burden for their relentless pursuit of AQIZ," the captain said, using a common acronym for Zarqawi"s Al Qaeda in Iraq. "We can only treat them at U.S. facilities if they are in danger of losing life, limb, or eyesight. Otherwise, they must be treated at an Iraqi facility. This works just fine for the ISF, which are predominantly Shia. The Ministry of Health is dominated by the Sadrists. I have personally been in the three hospitals that these guys would be treated at and all have pictures of Muqtada al-Sadr hanging on the walls. If I send my Freedom Fighters to these hospitals, they will not last a day. Obviously, my only option to maintain the fighting force is to get these guys seen by Americans. To this point, we"ve been unable to provide these guys much in the way of legitimacy, money, or weapons, but we have been able to care for them. They are doing the work that we could not do and they are paying the price for it. Knowing that they will be properly treated if they get injured is an incredible morale boost for them, not unlike any warrior. I can"t emphasize enough how this whole endeavor could go either way at this point. In three years of doing this, this is the first endeavor that"s actually given me hope."
According to a major who served under Kuehl, "An unsung hero of this entire time period was the commander of the combat support hospital in Baghdad. More than anyone else he kept our sometimes tenuous relationship with the SOI on good standing, simply by admitting their casualties to his facility and treating them. The rules on this were somewhat in the gray area, and lesser men or those who did not see the strategic situation would have been justified refusing care and turning them away. I had one such conversation with a doctor on Camp Liberty who was discussing the practical reasons for not treating them, that they wouldn"t have enough beds for the American casualties. I told him that if he wanted to quit treating American casualties altogether, all he had to do was to treat these SOIs when they were injured."
From August 7, 2007, until Kuehl"s battalion departed in January 2008, there were no serious attacks in Amriya. In the second half of 2007, the murder and kidnapping rate dropped from at least thirty a month to four. By the time Kuehl left, two hundred shops had reopened. Kuehl does not credit the surge itself for the reduction in violence, nor does he think that violence dropped because the battalion paid off a Sunni militia. But the increase in troops let him defeat Al Qaeda in his area and halt the Mahdi Army advance into north-west Baghdad. The joint security stations and combat outposts that Kuehl set up in neighborhoods, increased foot patrols, improved understanding of the communities his men patrolled, construction of concrete barriers, as well as improved cooperation with the Iraqi Security Forces were all factors that helped reduce the violence, Kuehl believes.
In September the captain wrote once again, reflecting on the contribution played by Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha of the Anbar Awakening and Abul Abed, his Baghdad counterpart. He noted that both were charismatic leaders, uncompromising in their beliefs and corresponding actions-the types who start movements, excite people, and bring them together. But he cautioned: "They burn bright and they burn fast." Up until the end of July, he noted, if they had lost Abul Abed, the movement in Baghdad would have died. "If he"d died before that point, I believe that many of his men would have gone out to Anbar and fought with their brothers there, while the locals would have gone back to what they were doing before . . . attacking the Iraqi Army, and us occasionally, and trying to figure out a way to feed themselves and their families." But once Amriya was rid of Al Qaeda and the Awakening was legitimized, Abul Abed"s role seemed, paradoxically, less vital. "At this point, the show will go on with or without him." The traits that the captain identified in Abul Abed were central to his success and what made him "such a joy to work with": the honorable warrior, his charisma, the pa.s.sion and principle that "rubbed off on his men . . . don"t necessarily lend themselves to usefulness in the current environment." The same could have been said for Sattar Abu Risha, whose death, the captain suggested, was a "blessing in disguise, as now there"s a martyr for the cause."
"Unless they topple the current regime, they"re going to have to compromise," the captain explained. "They"re going to have to work with others. They"re going to have to follow principles like due process. It"s not efficient, but that"s the point. Democracies are messy and slow and they put an emphasis on negotiation and accommodation. Those aren"t really traits that Abul Abed possesses. That"s why I like him."
"As we handed over eastern Amriya upon our departure in January "08," Captain Gallagher said, "I told my replacement that this would be his number-one challenge: to ensure the volunteers were formally integrated into the security framework. I did not want to see us, or the Iraqi government, turn our backs on these men, because the blowback could be significant."
Part 2.
I returned to Amriya in December 2007. My friend Ha.s.san pointed to a gap in the concrete walls the Americans had built around the Sunni bastion. "We call it the Rafah Crossing," he joked, referring to the gate to besieged Gaza that another occupying army occasionally opened. Iraqi National Police loyal to the Mahdi Army had once regularly attacked Amriya, and Sunnis caught in their checkpoints, which we drove through anxiously, would have once ended up in the city morgue. Police had recently put up Shiite flags all around western Baghdad, which the residents of Amriya viewed as a provocation. Our car lined up behind dozens of others that had been registered with the local Iraqi army unit and were allowed to enter and exit the imprisoned neighborhood. It often took two or three hours to get past the American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, or the Fursan (most people called them the Thuwar, or revolutionaries). When it was our turn, we exited the vehicle while Iraqi soldiers searched it and an American soldier led his dog around the car to sniff it. I was patted down by one of the Sunni militiamen, who asked me if I was a bodybuilder. Not knowing I was American, he rea.s.sured me: "Just let the dog and the dog that is with him finish with your car and you can go." He laughed, and we laughed with him.
We drove past residents who were forced to trudge a long distance in and out of their neighborhood, past the tall concrete walls, because their cars had not been given permission to exit. Boys labored behind pushcarts, wheeling in goods for the shops that were open. One elderly woman in a black robe sat on a pushcart and complained loudly that the Americans were to blame for all her problems. Cars could not enter Amriya after 7:30 p.m. Once inside, we drove along roads scarred by ma.s.sive IEDs.
I met with Um Omar, a stern woman who ran the Ethar a.s.sociation, an independent NGO that provided aid, housing, and education to vulnerable families. She wore a tight head scarf and gloves on her hands as a sign of modesty. Um Omar had a degree in chemistry but had been a housewife before the war. "After the invasion, there were many needs," she said. "My sister"s husband was killed and two of my uncles were killed. My sister"s husband was killed by random American fire. One of my uncles was killed by an American tank, which drove over his car while it was driving on the wrong side of the road, so he crashed into it. My other uncle was killed by the mujahideen during the battle of Falluja while he was providing aid to Falluja. The mujahideen suspected he was a collaborator with the Americans because they saw him talking to the Americans when they stopped him at the checkpoint and let him through." Um Omar"s husband was a former Awakening man affiliated with the Islamic Party. He had been arrested by the Americans and was in a feud with Abul Abed, and so he lived outside Amriya.
Kuehl knew Um Omar. "If you have already talked to her, I am sure she had an unfavorable opinion of me," he told me. "Her husband, Abu Omar, was one of Abul Abed"s lieutenants from the start. The two had a bit of a love/hate relationship, and we had to step in on a couple occasions. I had to counsel Abu Omar once for excessive use of force, and he was also arrested outside Amriya with a couple of weapons in the vehicle he was in. He was held for a couple days and then released. From the start I was convinced that Abu Omar was representing some other faction. For a while I had even considered him as an important counterweight to Abul Abed. However, he also happened to be the brother of Hajji Salman, our primary AQI target."
The confrontation came to a head when the Americans, acting on a tip from a rival Fursan member, found a large weapons cache behind a false wall in Abu Omar"s house, Abu Omar claimed that they were put there by his brother. After he was arrested, the Iraqi Islamic Party pressured Kuehl for his release. Community leaders, including Um Omar, asked to meet. "I knew of her through her charity work but had not met her up to now," Kuehl said. "She was pretty impressive. She was obviously well educated and pa.s.sionate about getting the release of her husband. After about two weeks he was eventually released. Part of the condition for his release was that he would no longer work for the Fursan. Through this I pretty much determined that his affiliation was with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had been trying to take control of the movement from the start."
Um Omar"s main office was in Amriya, but the NGO also operated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Samarra, and Nasiriya. Most of its funds came from generous Iraqis. In Iraq a child was considered an orphan even if he or she had lost just one parent. The organization had registered 4,317 orphans. In Amriya alone it had 2,034 orphans. Before 2006 it had only 600 to 800 orphans in Amriya. "Their fathers were killed, their houses were burned," Um Omar told me, "some of them were left without either parent." Most of Amriya"s Sunnis were too scared to go to the Yarmuk hospital outside Amriya. "It"s a sectarian hospital," Um Omar told me. "By sectarian, I mean this hospital has militias in it and people are afraid to go there. If you live in Amriya, you have to go to private hospitals, which are expensive for orphans, widows, and displaced families."
When I first met Um Omar in January 2008, she had three thousand displaced families registered with her in Amriya alone. They were supposed to receive payments from the government, but she knew of no one who had. The Ethar a.s.sociation had once received help from the Red Crescent, but now that aid was going to the local Awakening group. Since Amriya"s security was improving, many Sunnis who had fled to Syria were coming back, even if some of them were not originally from Amriya. At least 50 percent of the families in Amriya could not access their monthly rations, and Um Omar knew of families who had not received any rations at all during the previous year. "We experienced the most difficult five years," she told me. "Iraq went through wars, the Iran war, the Kuwait war, the sanctions, but it wasn"t as hard or unmerciful like the days of the occupation. The number of orphans is so high, and as much as we find some people to adopt them, we see there are more orphans coming. We have many children whose fathers were arrested, and it"s been a long time that n.o.body knows where they are. There are the families of detainees: the husband has been arrested for three or four years, and n.o.body knows where he is. The Americans are easier in providing information and allowing contact with the detainee. In the first days of the occupation the detention by the occupation forces was ugly, as you saw in Abu Ghraib, but in the last year and now it"s preferable to be in the custody of the occupation forces than the MOI [Ministry of Interior]."
Ethar provided orphans with rations, blankets, and heaters for the winter-and medical care, thanks to volunteer doctors. Orphans also could attend their nursery school and subsequent education. Widows received medical care and vocational training as well as educational a.s.sistance, including university tuition. Ethar had a kitchen project where widows made pastries and sold them in local markets.
Um Omar took me to her nursery school. Among the orphans was a boy whose mother was killed beside him in cross fire. At first he did not talk to other students and remained isolated, but the teachers succeeded in making him more social. Um Omar had books full of files and photos of children in need of medical a.s.sistance, from a two-year-old bloated from cancer to a teenager who was shot by Americans and paralyzed. One seven-year-old girl called Hadia Abdallah had lost both her parents. Her father was killed by random American gunfire and then her mother was killed when Iraqi National Guardsmen opened fire indiscriminately. When the mother was shot she dropped Hadia on the ground, and the child was paralyzed from the waist down. Of the two thousand orphans Um Omar had registered in Amriya, 60 to 70 percent had lost a parent to fire by occupation forces, she told me. The rest were killed by terrorists.
Uday Ahmad was shot in the jaw. The boy"s jawbone was shattered, and he needed a simple operation so that he would not have to be fed through a plastic tube, but his family was afraid to visit hospitals because of the threat from Shiite militias. Another boy in her alb.u.m was shot below the eye by the Americans.
"Every day I listen to the widows and see their tears, and I can"t get them enough help," she said. "This morning a widow came in, her donor stopped providing help. Some donors get killed or got arrested and some of them got displaced. So they stop paying the help. She was waiting until the end of the month to come here to get paid. She came crying, saying it has been a month that she is feeding her children soup only. She did not buy fruit or vegetables for a month. She said yesterday the children were crying, "We don"t want soup anymore," and her neighbor heard their cry and gave them a plate of food. This is one case out of thousands of widows."
Two weeks earlier she delivered school uniforms to orphans in Abu Ghraib. "A little boy came to me shivering, without a coat and shoes," she said. "I can"t explain now how I managed to stop myself from crying, and the look in his eyes and his happiness while I was putting the new clothes on him, and he was looking at the new bag and new books."
I told Um Omar that I could see the children were still afraid. "How do you want them not to be afraid after they saw the terrorist militias raiding their areas, killing their fathers, killing their brothers, and destroying their houses? I know a displaced woman who told me that she saw two of her neighbors being dragged away just because they were Sunnis. She said they dragged the father and his son and killed them. How do you expect the young children to forget them easily? Obviously these kind of things have more impact on the spirit of children than they do on older people, and I don"t think that it will just go away and the wounds will heal quickly."
Um Omar complained that Amriya"s population had once been prosperous and very educated: a neighborhood for lawyers, doctors, and teachers. She estimated that 40 percent of those educated people had been displaced. The families who replaced them in Amriya were less educated and from poorer neighborhoods.
Since 2006 Um Omar had registered 5,520 displaced families in Amriya, and they hadn"t yet returned to their homes. "They are not willing to return because their areas became 100 percent Shiite areas, and their houses were either destroyed or burned, and their sons were killed. They can"t return anymore though they want to return home." They would never be able to return, though Shiite families had returned to Amriya, she said.
Um Omar admitted that there had been some security improvements, but she did not attribute it to American efforts. "It happened by the Awakening"s efforts. The tribal men"s efforts were the reason for improving the security. In the past, our areas were always raided by the militias and interior commandos, arresting many of our guys and taking them to unknown destinations. This is not security, right? We couldn"t stop the militias from doing this. I think security was improved when the Awakening guys joined the security forces."
Forty percent of Amriya"s homes were abandoned, their owners expelled. More than five thousand Sunni families from elsewhere in Iraq had moved in, mostly to Shiite homes. Of those who had fled to Syria, about one-fifth returned in late 2007 when their money ran out. The Ministry of Migration, officially responsible for displaced Iraqis, did nothing for them. The Ministry of Health, dominated by sectarian Shiites, neglected Amriya or sent expired medicines to its clinics. Like elsewhere in Iraq, the government-run ration system, upon which nearly all Iraqis relied for their survival, did not reach the Sunnis of Amriya often, and when it did most items were lacking. Children were suffering from calcium shortages as a result.
Seventeen-year-old Ahmad Maath was a student who helped support his family by leaving Amriya and collecting people"s rations and fuel for them. Amriya"s citizens were afraid of the INP who guarded the fuel station. "They are with the militias," he said. "They say, "f.u.c.k you, Sunnis, you are pimps"-you know, such silly things. But what can we do? We tolerate that because we want to feed our families." He and his friends would bring the tanks at night and wait until the morning to collect the government-supplied kerosene. One day Ahmad saw the Mahdi Army surround the station and take ten thousand liters of kerosene and one hundred and fifty cooking gas cylinders without paying. They said they needed it to cook for the Muharram ceremonies.
I had heard of corpses being dropped at garbage dumps, where dogs would feed on them. Twelve-year-old Abudi, my friend Hussein"s son, had seen many corpses in one of the main squares. "I saw people executed by Al Qaeda," Abudi told me. "I saw a woman here being executed. I felt scared from them. I feel afraid from both, the Americans and Al Qaeda. They attacked my father, a car rushed and shot my father. I felt sad. My father got injured and he was bleeding, but he is okay now. The Americans killed a child in Amriya because he was playing with a toy gun."
I visited Abudi"s elementary school in Amriya. It was overcrowded because of the many displaced children. Its population had grown from 400 to about 769 students. Each cla.s.s contained fifty-five students, with three to four students to a desk. One boy lost his father in Amriya when a bomb landed on their house. There were children displaced from Jihad, Shuhada, Furat, Shula, Turath, Amil, Hurriya. The teacher asked them if they wanted to go back home. "We can"t," a child said. "We are threatened by gangs." Sabrin was a small girl whose father was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the Muhamin neighborhood of Amriya. Abdurahman was a sixth-grade boy from New Baghdad. The Mahdi Army had threatened his family and kidnapped and killed his brother. His family"s house in New Baghdad was occupied; now they were renting a home in Amriya. To help support his family Abdurahman worked in restaurants and sold black-market gasoline on the streets. When Al Qaeda still controlled Amriya, one of his brothers was arrested by the Americans because a mujahid came to his shop to change the oil in his car, and his brother was accused by the Americans of working with them. One boy"s father was killed by the Mahdi Army in the Jihad district.
"When the children first came here they found themselves in a different environment than the one they used to live in," the school princ.i.p.al told me. "The way they behave and the way they are is all different. Gradually, they started to adapt to here. Of course, they were very afraid as a result of what they had seen in their areas. Some of them wake up at night. When they hear gunfire they just keep screaming. When a Hummer pa.s.ses by they scream, even when they are inside the cla.s.s. They are hurt from the inside. But you know they are children, so they occupy their time with playing and other stuff."
The school guard, who had not been paid in months, told me neither the Americans nor the Iraqi army brought security to Amriya. "Let us be realistic," he said, "our brothers from the Thuwar secured us. They are better than the army and the Americans. The Americans don"t do anything when you go complain about something. They just put it down on a paper, while the Awakening, when you go complain to them, they do something. They go to those who did wrong and punish them. They are our sons, from the same area and we know them well, while the Americans and the army are not."
Um Omar took me to visit the family of Saad Juma, who had been displaced from the Amil district by Shiite militias more than a year earlier. I found them in the burned-out house of a Shiite family that had fled with only their clothes. When Saad and his family moved in, the house was torched and dirty, full of tires and other flammable items that had been used to burn it. The Shiite militias had expelled all the Sunni families from the area using loudspeakers on police cars to warn them. They cursed Sunnis and said they would kill anyone they saw on the street. "I remember one of our neighbors who lived nearby was killed there," Saad said. "They killed him immediately. Another one was killed with his two little children in his garden. The militias called him by his name and shot him with two, three shots in the head, and they left the house after that."
Saad insisted that before the war, relations between Sunnis and Shiites in his area had been good. "We were like one family. Those militias came from outside, not from our area. Maybe from Shula or from other areas. They might come from the other side of the city." Um Omar added that "the militias knew who the families were, and they knew the area well. They must be helped by the others in this area." Saad agreed, adding that the local Sadrist office was near their area.
Saad owned his previous house and had shared it with ten other relatives. He was a construction worker before he was displaced, but now he relied on the Ethar a.s.sociation for food and aid. "The government is busy with itself," he said. "It doesn"t care about people. It only cares about itself." I asked him if he wanted to go back home. "Is there anyone who doesn"t wish to return to his home?" he asked me. But he didn"t think it was safe enough.
Abasya Aziz was from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe. She and her family were expelled from the house in Hurriya they had lived in for thirty-five years. For two days Shiite militiamen shot at their house and called on them to leave. The men left to find a new house, but the women stayed another four days until one was found. "We were very scared alone," she said. "I was scared to take all the furniture at once. So every day I take some of the furniture, and I also had to leave some furniture there." Their new house had no electricity, so she had to show me around with a flashlight. The landlord originally wanted rent to be 350,000 dinars but because they were poor he reduced it to less than 250,000. "I wish to return [to Hurriya] and live a stable life," Abasya Aziz said. "That"s what we are looking for. Now we can"t go back there because it is not safe. Also, I am afraid for my other sons. I can"t go back. It has been one year, and it"s still not safe there."
On the outskirts of Amriya, on a muddy field, I found a Sunni family in a makeshift brick home. I spoke to twenty-two-year-old Haidar, who lived there with eleven other family members. He told me that they were expelled from Amil by the Mahdi Army in 2006. His eighty-three-year-old grandfather had owned their house in Amil. Now Mahdi Army men were living in it. Haidar was on crutches, his legs amputated after a car bomb exploded too close to him when he was working as a mechanic in Bayaa. "Honestly, I don"t wish what happened to us even on my enemy," Haidar told me. "We were displaced from our area. We left our house without any reason. It was a big house with two floors. We don"t have issues with anybody. We left our house and came here to live in this dirty house while they came and lived in our house. We suffered lots of damages. Before I used to go with my brother and sell gas to earn a little money. Now I can"t anymore."
I returned often to Amriya and saw a lot of Um Omar. Of the 104 students in her school, ten received free education, fourteen were orphans, thirteen had fathers in detention, and most of the rest had been displaced within the past year. "It is a very bad life," Ms. Rasha, one of the teachers, told me about her students. "Our students, especially last year, we told them to study and focus on their school, especially the ones in the last year of the high school. They say, "What is the benefit? Let"s say we got into a good university, can we go study in that university?"" The students couldn"t go to university because of security problems and bombs, she told me, but also sectarianism. "Most of our students are named Omar. They say, "My name is Omar. When the teacher reads my name on the exam papers, they will mark it as failed and throw it away." Last year they canceled the results of the final high school examinations. Specifically they canceled the results of the students of Amriya, they didn"t mark their exam papers. The students made a second attempt on the exams and even a third attempt, but they"ve never received their results back."
ABUL ABED WAS KNOWN for his brutality. He was a short, thin thirty-five-year-old who had broken his knuckles beating prisoners and suspected members of Al Qaeda. He destroyed the homes of Al Qaeda men and hung pictures of their dead bodies on the walls of Amriya. He claimed four of his brothers had been killed by Shiite militiamen, and he kept pictures of their broken and tortured bodies on his phone. He and his men blasted through Amriya, letting everybody know they were its new rulers. According to some stories, Abul Abed had been working with a network of informers for the Americans, targeting Al Qaeda and Iranian spies, finally infiltrating Al Qaeda in Amriya. Abul Abed also had a good relationship with politicians Saleh al-Mutlaq and Ali Baban, a Sunni Kurd who was minister of planning and who had been expelled by the Islamic Party. Many of Abul Abed"s men were displaced Sunnis from Mahdi Army-controlled areas like Hurriya, yet he claimed he helped seventy-five Shiite families return to Amriya.
I first met with Abul Abed in what looked like a school or ex-Baath Party headquarters that had been converted into an office, and I later interviewed him several times in his lavish home. (One morning I found him drinking a can of nonalcoholic beer.) The street where he lived was manned by his guards, who stood at roadblocks. He traveled in convoys of pickup trucks and SUVs with his men hanging out of windows, their rifles and pistols waving about, sirens blaring, a pale imitation of the Blackwater style. He was a former military officer and leader in the Islamic Army of Iraq, but much of his biography was apocryphal, and he had labored to construct a heroic legend about himself.
He claimed that in 2006 he and others from the Islamic Army decided to fight Al Qaeda, which had declared the Islamic State of Iraq and was trying to control other Sunni groups, insisting that they pledge allegiance to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who would be the future caliph, and demanding a portion of their loot. The Islamic Army refused, and Abul Abed and his men began a clandestine war on Al Qaeda. The conflict started with a.s.sa.s.sinations but soon escalated into open warfare. Abul Abed claimed he had spent months collecting intelligence on Al Qaeda fighters who had sought sanctuary in Amriya after fleeing from other parts of Baghdad or the Anbar.
In May 2007, fourteen American soldiers were killed in Amriya. Until then Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl had lost only three men in Amriya. On May 29 Sheikh Walid of the Fardus Mosque called Kuehl up and told him Abul Abed"s men would be attacking Al Qaeda in Amriya. They attacked an Al Qaeda base at the Maluki Mosque, and the next day Al Qaeda men struck back at Tikriti Mosque. Sheikh Walid contacted the Americans, who sent Stryker vehicles to a.s.sist Abul Abed"s fighters. The Americans helped defeat Al Qaeda in that battle and then provided medical a.s.sistance to Abul Abed"s wounded men. That first week Abul Abed and his men, along with the Americans, killed about ten Al Qaeda suspects and captured another fifteen.
The official name for Abul Abed"s Awakening group, the first of its kind in Baghdad, was the Fursan (Knights) of Mesopotamia. But Abul Abed and his men referred to themselves as the Thuwar (revolutionaries). Part of Kuehl"s deal was that he would help Abul Abed"s men if they did not torture prisoners or kill people who were not from Al Qaeda. They would be allowed to hold prisoners for only twenty-four hours. Kuehl knew that as an American, he would never know the area or its people as well as the local Awakening men. At first Kuehl"s men asked the Fursan to wear white headbands and sit in the American vehicles to identify Al Qaeda locations. But soon Al Qaeda men took to wearing white headbands. Riding along with the Americans also didn"t work because the windowless vehicles left the Fursan disoriented and unable to locate targets. The Fursan were given special reflective armbands that the Americans could see as well as handcuffs and flares to help send signals to the Americans. Kuehl collected their biometric data and agreed to provide them with some weapons.
At first Abul Abed believed he could spread his control into other Sunni areas in western Baghdad. When Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, of the Sunni Islamic Party, visited Amriya without coordinating with Abul Abed, the Fursan leader was furious and nearly clashed with Hashimi"s bodyguards. Abul Abed felt threatened by the Islamic Party, and that same night he raided the home of Abu Omar, Um Omar"s husband, and a subordinate commander who was allied with the party. Shots were fired and civilians were threatened. Abu Omar was not home, but Abul Abed arrested several of his men.
In November 2007 Abul Abed was interviewed by the London-based, Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper. Al Qaeda had turned into Iraq"s biggest enemy, he said, and so he had to ally himself with his erstwhile enemies, the Americans, against whom he claimed he had once fought "honorably." He claimed to have six hundred men under his control, each of whom got paid about $360 a month, and three hundred of whom had become Amriya"s police force. He called for further integration of Awakening men into the government.
When I met him again in early 2008 he had switched from wearing military uniforms to suits. "The situation is different now," he said. "We have destroyed Qaeda. It is safe now, and it is very good for me-I am number one on the hit list of Qaeda. Just after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Sheikh Sattar, the next primary goal for Qaeda became me. If my fate is to die, then that is okay." He repeated his claim that he had six hundred men in Amriya, and many outside. I asked where. "All of Baghdad," he said. I asked how many; he said "a lot." His main target was anyone who broke the law, he said, whether they were Al Qaeda or not. "We are against criminals, against killers, against the ones who make bombs and against the ones who destroy." In the past his men had clashed with the Mahdi Army as well.
"Our areas and our sect were marginalized, which is what Al Qaeda used to initiate a sectarian war. Now we are working on fixing this and rehabilitat[ing] our areas in order to take our real positions in the government and in the country." He would not run in elections, he said, but Iraq"s national security adviser had taken the surprising step of offering Abul Abed a position in the government. "I have been offered many positions from different big political parties. But I refused them. I explained from the beginning to the journalists that I didn"t come for money, nor for political reasons. I know lots of scornful people who put themselves in front of others and step on people"s shoulders to go up the ladder and take a chair or a position in the government. This is not my goal, and I have explained that to the channels that visited me. I am not running for any position, not going to take part of the political process. I have a goal that I would like to achieve, not only in Amriya but in all of Baghdad: reinstate the security in our areas and save innocent people"s lives. Only when I achieve these goals I will leave.
"Everybody knows how Al Qaeda used to control our areas. They destroyed the area, they killed civilian families, they filled the streets with bombs. Their work became barbaric, killing people for their ident.i.ty, on suspicion. They started by killing Shiites, then they started killing Sunnis, then finally they started killing Christians with the excuse of establishing the Islamic State of Iraq. They said, "Since you are a Christian, you must pay a ransom." If the man had money to pay the ransom, he paid and lived in his home. If he didn"t, they killed him and threw his corpse in the trash. People advised them that this is destruction and far away of jihad, so they killed the ones who gave such advice. They acted like a gang-they kill and steal, and they look for new modern cars. They killed people under the name of jihad."
Abul Abed told me that jihad had four conditions: to preserve the religion, the land, the honor, and the money. "These are four conditions, all of which Al Qaeda breached. Qaeda claimed that they are fighting the occupation. If you fight the occupation, why would you kill civilians? If you are fighting occupation, why would you steal the water pumps? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you take down the mobile telecommunications towers? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you steal from the shops of the Muslims? They did that with the excuse, this is Shiite and that is Christian. Did the Prophet do that? The Prophet had a Jewish neighbor, and he never did that to him. Is taking rich people"s money a form of jihad? Is this against occupation? No, it is not." Al Qaeda, he said, is a dirty gang using the cover of Islam. They dragged people from their cars and filled the streets of Amriya with corpses. The smell of these bodies was everywhere, but people were prohibited from removing them because IEDs were placed just underneath them. "This is not jihad, this is destruction!" Abul Abed said. "All the shops were closed, food never entered the area because people were afraid to come into the area. If a man looks at them in a strange way, they killed him, and many other issues that we can"t count. The garbage acc.u.mulated and made mountains two meters high in the streets of Amriya. The government was about to attack Amriya. Day after day they said, "We must attack Amriya, we must bomb Amriya."
"It started when Al Qaeda kidnapped two young guys from the Dulaimi tribe in Amriya. The father of the two guys came into the mosque and was crying. Two days earlier Sheikh Walid was pa.s.sing by the Munadhama Street when he saw a very old woman. She was a Christian, white, and she was wearing a skirt that was not long, and she was fat. The woman"s husband was taken by Al Qaeda, and his body was in the back of their car and his leg was outside the car. The woman was holding her husband"s leg, not letting it go. The woman was on the ground and they were hitting her with their pistols. The sheikh and I were asking if this was jihad. No, this is not jihad. We knew then that fighting these people is the jihad itself, in order to protect people from them, to protect their money and to protect their honors. Al Qaeda destroyed people"s lives."
What actually sparked the war between the Islamic Army fighters and Al Qaeda in Amriya was the murder of an Islamic Army leader called Zeid, or Abu Teiba, who was a good friend of Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. Abu Teiba was a law school graduate who also provided security for the Maluki Mosque. Sheikh Hussein had been detained by the Americans, and Al Qaeda had taken over his mosque. Al Qaeda men captured Abu Teiba and brought him to the mosque, where they filmed his torture and accused him of being an infidel. "Zeid, he was one of the best guys in Amriya," Abul Abed told me. "He was an Arabic teacher, he was teaching the Koran, he was teaching Islamic religious beliefs and Islamic religious law, he was popular in mosques, he was popular in the area. They tortured him until he died. He was in the Maluki Mosque, he was in the house of G.o.d. When I started the fight, Zeid used to always protect the mosques. We have a video of him being tortured, tortured according to the Sharia law. A guy from the Islamic State of Iraq was slapping him while he was bleeding. He was not allowed to discuss why they tortured him because in their view he was an apostate. They were telling him, "You are a criminal. Abul Abed told you to fight the mujahideen.""
Abul Abed was in the Dubat neighborhood of Amriya, supplying his men with weapons and vehicles, when one of his men told him about Sabah, the so-called "white lion," who led Al Qaeda in Amriya. Sabah was standing on a corner with his a.s.sistant. Abul Abed walked to him accompanied by three or four of his men, carrying his charged pistol. They stood face to face.
After Abul Abed challenged him, Sabah stepped back, pulled his pistol, and shot at him, but his weapon didn"t work. Abul Abed pulled his pistol too. He shot Sabah, and Sabah ran. While he was running he charged his weapon again and pulled the trigger, but again it didn"t work. He was using Iraqi bullets. Abul Abed kept shooting at him until he fell; then he took his gun. "I always carry it with me," Abul Abed said. "I replaced the bullets with good foreign bullets."
Abul Abed recited the names of other Al Qaeda leaders he had fought and killed. "Let me tell you one point. They have announced themselves as an Islamic country. They all came up as leaders. Some of them presented themselves as a minister of defense, minister of interior, and mosque leaders, and security and intelligence and army and patrols. They were all known to the people of Amriya. We knew their names and their faces. We knew them all. They were not working only secretly but also publicly. They didn"t even cover their faces. The Iraqi and national forces were unable to enter the area." Abul Abed told me his unit lost about twenty martyrs in the battle of Amriya. The day before I met him the Iraqi National Guard and the Thuwar raided a home and confiscated weapons.
Abul Abed no longer bragged about being a former resistance fighter. He had become more cautious after Ghaith Abdul-Ahad"s controversial profile of him appeared in the Guardian. I told him that everybody said he was in the Islamic Army of Iraq. "Is this something to be ashamed of ?" he asked. "Allow me to let you know that we have corrected the att.i.tudes of many of the jihadist battalions. Many of them have put their guns down and said, "Enough." Some media are trying to make this a point against us, to make a problem between us and the Iraqi government."
I told him that the government maintained that the Awakening men were former insurgents and that it did not trust them. "Let"s say I am strong and you are also strong and I want to fight you but you can"t fight me, and I have caused you so many injuries, and made you dizzy, and you can"t win the fight with me despite your capabilities," Abul Abed said. "And then I tell you I won"t fight you anymore and give you my hands. I ask you to put your hands in mine, and I say, "Let"s build Iraq and forget our problems." If you are a nationalist and love your country and don"t have loyalties to neighboring countries, you would accept me as a friend, not because you are weak. But if you are loyal to a neighboring country and you have an interest in this fight, when I give you my hand you will beat my hand. That is fine, let"s fight again. This is Iran"s interest. I"m giving an example that if there were, as they say, armed resistance groups who offered their hands to the government, the government should accept them. If I push the resistance groups in the corner, they will give up and become more violent than before."
I asked him if Al Qaeda was the only threat to Iraq. "Not only Al Qaeda," he said. "We have the Mahdi Army. I think the Mahdi Army has a very short life." I asked him if he trusted the Mahdi Army cease-fire. "No," he said.
Abul Abed believed there was an Iranian occupation in Iraq. "The American occupation in Iraq is 20 percent, and the Iranian occupation is 80 percent in Iraq. We started being terminated. I experienced this during the time when Bayan Jabr Solagh was the minister of interior. I saw fifty police cars equipped with big machine guns. They entered Amriya from 4 a.m. till 7 a.m. They took my four older brothers. Since then they said they are in the ministry for interrogation. We went there and found their names in the detainee list. We went there more than once. After a while we heard there were more than twenty-one bodies found in the Iraqi-Iranian border in a town called Badra wa Jasan. When they transferred the bodies to the morgue, my four brothers were among the corpses. Their arms were cut, their eyes were taken out, their fingers were cut, their skin was burned with acid. Why? This is a question that I always direct to the Iraqi government. I say, Why? Because they are Sunnis, they always accuse us of being terrorists. If we were terrorists, what have we done? Why were my relatives terminated? Because Iran wants to terminate us."
I asked him if he was accusing the Iraqi government of being Iranian. He smiled. "I never said the government. I said Iran has the bigger hand in Iraq. . . . I am not accusing the journalists, but journalists often make problems for us with the government, and there are some parties in the government who want these problems. I am sure you understand my concerns. Journalism is a two-edged sword: one edge that can cut with it and the other edge might cut the user. I have been visited by a journalist from the Guardian, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. I hosted him for four days in my house with my family. He ate my food, I satisfied all his wishes, and then in his article he said I am a mafia man. He made a big mess for me."
When I mentioned the walls that Kuehl had erected in Amriya, Abul Abed denied that the walls made it like a prison. "Keep in mind that it is not only our area that is walled. Amriya is walled, Khadra is walled, Dora is walled, Hatin is walled, Adhamiya is walled. If we take off the walls, you will see how many car bombs will attack civilians. Qaeda attacked children and women in Ramadi with ma.s.sive trucks filled with chlorine." But he expected that the walls would shortly come down. "We are planning to open a police station manned by local inhabitants of this area. An official police station. Khadra police station is manned by Khadra people, Adhamiya police station is manned by Adhamiya people. Dora the same, and Fadhil the same."
Of his 600 men only 333 received salaries under the American contract, he said. "We are not here for the money. Ask any soldier of the Awakening if they have come for money. Is he risking his life, his family"s life, his children"s life, his wife"s life, for two hundred dollars? He might get killed, slaughtered, killed in car bombs for this simple amount of money. No, he is here for his beliefs and his principles." Abul Abed told me that he planned to open a police station in Amriya. Only 233 of the 600 candidates he had offered to the police academy had been accepted. He complained that his men were abused there. "The officers in the training center take our guys every night at about 2 a.m. into interrogation rooms. It"s like they were in a detention center, not a training center. The officers tell our guys that Abul Abed is a criminal and a terrorist. They ask them, "What did you do before coming here? Why did you sabotage Iraq?" They hara.s.s our guys a lot. Yesterday I paid a visit to the center and met with the guys. They were afraid to talk to me in public, and the majority of them said, "We want to leave this country." A first lieutenant from the national police who works in the center goes into their room every night and takes four or five of them and keeps interrogating them until the morning. The guys were asking me if they were detainees. We have very deep wounds. Let me tell you something, if you see all these fighters, every one of them has lost his brother, his uncle or his father, most of the guys have lost members of their families."
I asked him how he could work in a government that was made up of the same militias that killed his brothers. "This is a very complicated subject. Iraq has gone through bad conditions in the past, much worse than this. Is the government going to last forever? The answer is no. There will be another stage where there will be other elections, so if we abandon our roles in Iraq, falsification will happen again in the elections, and we won"t enter the elections because of the destruction, the fighting, and this will be a success to Iran, primarily. I follow the law. We have lots of supporters, even including Shiite brothers. Yesterday we had a meeting with the tribes of the south. We are dealing with each other as Iraqis. The strife that happened between Shiites and Sunnis is being reconciled now. Yesterday we had a visit here in Amriya from tribal leaders of the south, from Yusifiya, Mahmudiya, Mahawil, Karbala, and Hilla. We had tribal leaders of big Shiite tribes. They were our guests, and we even had reconciliation between towns and neighborhoods, Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. Is this bad for the government? If Iraq doesn"t get a professional government that is not sectarian, that doesn"t belong to only one sect, then this county will fail."
Abul Abed appeared on television and called for Shiites to return to their homes in Amriya. "My first principle is reconciliation, stopping the sectarian fighting across Baghdad neighborhoods. We wanted to make a model for others to follow, and we wanted the others to do the same initiatives, but unfortunately, this didn"t happen. There was a Sunni family from Amriya that went back to the Amil neighborhood. The day after they got there, the father, the mother, and two sons were killed. One of the brothers survived and gave me his mother"s phone number, so I called. A man answered the phone. I said, "h.e.l.lo, how are you, my brother?" The guy said, "h.e.l.lo, who are you?" I said, "I am Abul Abed, the leader of the Thuwar in Amriya." He said, "And what do you want?" I said, "My brother, our area was a red zone. Shiites used to be killed in our areas, and we took the responsibility of returning Shiite families into their homes in our areas, and now we protect them. This is an innocent family. Why did you take them? What did they do?" He said, "We are the Mahdi Army, there can only be killing between you and us." I said, "Let me tell you something, if you are a real man, the brave man and the real soldier who considers himself a brave fighter doesn"t kill a woman, nor does he kidnap a family. I am a soldier, and I only fight the ones who carry weapons against me. I fight men. This is a manly point of view, and if you want the Islamic point of view, the Prophet said, "Don"t cut a tree, don"t kill an animal, don"t kill a woman, and don"t kill an old man, this is if you were a Muslim."" He said, "You are filthy, and there can only be blood between you and us." I hung up the phone. The next day the surviving brother was told that all his family were killed." Abul Abed said that similar things happened to many Sunnis who returned to Hurriya.
"I am a Sunni. I"m sure that 80 percent of Shiites are not satisfied with the United Iraqi Alliance. I have Iraqi friends from Sadr City-they visited me with presents, they cried for the good old days when we were all together. The politicians are the reason for this problem, whether they are Sunnis or Shiites. Neither the Sunnis in the government represent us and help us, nor did the Shiites in the government help the Shiite population. People got tired from the situation. They want to breathe and go out freely. Two bombs exploded by my house targeting me, planted by Al Qaeda to kill me. I was transferred to an American hospital and had operations and survived. One of my sons was burned, and the other was injured."
After I last saw him, Abul Abed began to seek alliances with other Awakening men in preparation for the upcoming provincial elections. This attempt to become legitimate might have been his undoing. In April a bomb targeting Abul Abed in Amriya wounded him, and he went to Jordan for medical treatment. In June 2008 while he was at a reconciliation conference in Sweden, his house in Iraq was raided on the suspicion that he had been involved in sixty murders or abductions. He never returned to Iraq, settling in Jordan instead. Al Qaeda"s predictions that the Awakening leaders would be disposed of after they served their purpose were proven correct, he said. Abul Abed blamed the Islamic Party, with whom he had a longstanding feud (as Um Omar"s husband could attest). Abu Ibrahim, Abul Abed"s former close aide, took over for him and was perceived by many as a stooge for the Iraqi army who arrested anybody who opposed him.
"I am aware that Abul Abed is in Jordan," Kuehl told me. "I have had contact with him from time to time and am concerned about his safety as well as that of his family. I am hoping that he will be able to come to the U.S. at some point under refugee status. I do not know the details of why he had to leave. I am pretty sure it was politically motivated."
Staff Sergeant Joe Hartman had expected Abul Abed to rise in Iraqi politics. "I never thought that he would be betrayed. However, after reading some of the reports about his disrespect for current political leaders when they tried to visit with him, it seems to me that any political savvy he once had was corrupted by the tough military work he performed in Amriya. I can"t imagine anyone remaining unaffected after having to defeat such a ruthless enemy as Al Qaeda, all the time still being persecuted by the Iraqi army for his past. He must have slept with one eye open every night. I hope he finds some peace."
AMRIYA WOULD BECOME a battleground again, but this time it involved senior U.S. officers, long after they served in Iraq, who quarreled over the efficacy of the surge doctrine. Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, who preceded Kuehl and went on to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, became the most strident and outspoken voice within the military decrying the cult of counterinsurgency.
Gentile admitted that violence in Amriya had dropped precipitously starting in July 2007. "But the primary condition for that lowering of violence in Amriya was the deal cut with Abed and the SOIs," he maintained. "Was Dale Kuehl instrumental in that role? Yes, most certainly he was. Might another battalion commander less savvy to the area have missed that opportunity? Sure. But did the opportunity arise because Dale and his battalion were doing things in terms of COIN tactics and methods that were fundamentally different than mine? No. The COPs [combat outposts] didn"t go into Amriya until after the deal had been cut."
Kuehl was unwilling to criticize Gentile publicly, but he believed that his time in Amriya during the surge did involve new and innovative tactics that led to success. "In general they were doing COIN operations," he said of Gentile and his men, "but we did change some things based on training and lessons learned that were pretty standard throughout the Army during our preparation, [placing a] heavy emphasis on COIN. Some of the criticism Gian has received is a bit unfair. He and his men were not hiding out on the FOB [Forward Operating Base], and they were patrolling every day. However, Gian"s a.s.sertion that we did nothing different is false. He cites a lieutenant in my battalion who says that we had not really changed anything. At the platoon level, it may not have been much different, but I think it was different at the battalion and brigade level."
The two men had admirers and detractors. I spoke to one captain who served under both in Amriya. He described Gentile as "an intelligent, thoughtful, and caring leader who lost a lot of soldiers and took each of their deaths very, very personally. He was a pleasure to work for, and in the short time I worked for him, for two months, he took the time to mentor me. Unlike many of our senior leaders, he actually had some useful knowledge to pa.s.s on. I believe that his current arguments hold merit, but I wish he would quit responding to everything like it was an ad hominem. I truly believe he took his command so personally that he feels underlying guilt for the deaths of his soldiers, and this is the manifestation. He takes it personal now and is poor at conveying his beliefs, which is sad. Violence didn"t go down under Kuehl until the SOI. May 2007 was the most violent month in the war in that area, as I recall. Gentile and Kuehl both kept lines of communication open with the extremists and local insurgents. Gentile was more conventional when I got there, but it was a conventional high-kinetic fight. He understood the concept of COIN, but the timing and resources weren"t there to execute it."
This captain told me that Kuehl was "an arrogant though intelligent a.s.s" who "did not understand the fight until late, if at all. He was very, very concerned that any misstep by Abul Abed"s guys would have ramifications on his career . . . not its effects on his soldiers, Iraqis, or the outcome of the war. He was able to act dispa.s.sionately and rationally despite all of the losses his unit faced because he did not care about his men. I also believe that General Petraeus understood his sector better than he Kuehl did . . . he probably spent more time there."
On the other hand, Capt. Brendan Gallagher told me, "That is an extremely harsh and unfair criticism of Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl. I am not sure who said it, but I can verify it is 100 percent false. I can say with absolute confidence that Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl cared extremely deeply for each and every soldier in 1-5 Cav. I have nothing but positive things to say about him. I think in combat he was willing to accept certain risks in order to achieve success, which is what any good commander must do. If you take zero risks, you hunker down your forces in extreme force-protection mode, then you will not succeed in this kind of war. Consider for a moment: if you follow the bunker mentality to its logical conclusion, then you might as well not even leave the FOB at all-or better yet, never even deploy to Iraq in the first place. That way you are guaranteed not to incur any casualties. However, you also are guaranteed not to accomplish any of your strategic objectives. I think this marks perhaps the most important way in which we blazed a new path in Amriya. We were willing to take calculated risks into unchartered waters in order to make progress. Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates said it best himself: we cannot kill or capture our way to victory. If we focus only on killing the enemy and force protection as our overriding objectives, then we effectively ignore history and disavow counterinsurgency doctrine. Dismounted patrols, the establishment of COPs, getting out on the ground and gaining the trust of average Iraqis-all these things involve inherent risk. But if we take prudent steps to mitigate each risk, we stand the best chance of success. Compare the security situation in Amriya when we departed [in January "08] to the security conditions previously. The results speak for themselves."
According to a major who served under Gentile, "Despite Lieutenant Colonel Gentile being depicted in the media as a "conservative" who only wants to focus on high-intensity conflict, he set the groundwork for Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl extremely well in one of the most important aspects of counterinsurgency. COIN is about people, and people are about relationships-especially in Arabic and Muslim culture. Gentile spent all of his time, in the very brief time that I saw him, talking, negotiating, and working with the local imams in Amriya. Kuehl, the beneficiary of this initial relationship building, continued the relationship and allowed the SOI to emerge with the support of the local imams."
I asked Gentile what he thought Kuehl did differently from him. "Other than rightly capitalizing on the changed conditions that presented to him the opportunity to cut a deal with the SOIs, not much," he said. "His organizational structure as a combat battalion was a bit different than mine, since I was an armored reconnaissance squadron-which meant that he had a greater dismounted capability, which might have produced more dismounted patrols. But in terms of tactics, I don"t believe there was much difference at all, although I am sure he would disagree with that statement. My outfit did dismounted operations, we engaged with the local population, etc. The notion that I "commuted" to the area and stayed inside my vehicles as put forward by the surge zealots is a chimera. Dale did not put his first combat outpost in until late May "07, and it was a tactical one in the sense that its purpose was to facilitate movement into and out of the area. The first Galula-like COP did not go into the district until late June. So the notion that during the first five or six months of the surge-which arguably was the decisive period-that he was doing things on the tactical level radically different from me is not correct. What happened is that after the violence began to drop, and American soldiers and marines stopped dying in large monthly numbers, folks looked back onto the first period and superimposed the coherence of [the COIN manual] FM 3-24 that they believed was there at the time but actually was not."
"Probably the biggest difference," Kuehl said of his approach as opposed to Gentile"s, "was in taking a broader, long-term perspective of the problem. One of the things that was highlighted in our staff training was the need to develop a "campaign plan" at the battalion level. This plan is intended to be long-term, with objectives six months to even a year out. In contrast, the campaign plan I got from Gian looked out about two weeks and really was nothing more than a patrol schedule.
"I visited Gian"s squadron in July 2006, and they were stretched pretty thin. If other parts of Baghdad were like his area, I am sure it looked like there were barely any U.S. soldiers on the ground. To be fair, I do not think that this type of planning or creating of a vision was part of the train[ing] Gian would have had, so [it is] not necessarily surprising that they did not have one. Even now we continue to adapt, and units that are there now are probably doing things I never thought of. There were two long-term projects that Gian left me with. The first was the Amriya Bank, which he laid the groundwork for. The other was the establishment of a police station. This second one did not happen until after we left."
Gentile wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal called "Eating Soup With a Spoon," the t.i.tle being a reference to John Nagl"s influential book on COIN, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. In the article Gentile criticized the COIN manual and especially the paradoxes of "Tactical success guarantees nothing" and "The more you protect yourself, the less secure you are." Kuehl would later write accounts of his time in Amriya in part as a response to Gentile"s criticism. "I think in this article Gian underestimates the abilities of our officer corps to use the manual as it is intended, as a guide as opposed to dogma," Kuehl told me. "I think the article also provides some insights into Gian"s way of thinking. In his mind the new manual takes the enemy out of the equation and tries to make COIN sound easy by winning over the populace. I think one quote by Gian is relevant: "I was angry and bewildered because the paradoxes, through their clever contradictions, removed a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency warfare that I had experienced throughout my year as a tactical battalion commander in Iraq: fighting. And by removing the fundamental reality of fighting from counterinsurgency warfare, the manual removes the problem of maintaining initiative, morale and offensive spirit among combat soldiers who will operate in a place such as Iraq.""
I asked Gentile about this. "I don"t think that a center of gravity, theoretically, even if there can be such a thing, should be predetermined and turned into a rule for any type of stability or counterinsurgency operation," he said. "In modern counterinsurgencies certainly the population is an important consideration, but the American Army has turned the notion of the people as a center of gravity into an immutable rule, which then determines a prescribed set of tactics and procedures, which ultimately calls for large numbers of American combat soldiers on the ground. This kind of approach might be the right choice in certain circ.u.mstances, but it should not be the only way. If it is, then we can expect many more adventures at nation building to come."
Kuehl told me that "Gian tried to maintain the initiative while maintaining the morale and fighting esprit by his men by doing periodic large-scale cordon-and-searches to keep them focused. He also established small kill teams in houses, some of them occupied by residents. These teams generally consisted of a six-man team, usually including a sniper, emplaced to counter enemy IED efforts. I remember Gian telling me that many of these operations were to maintain the morale of the unit. What baffled me was that they served no real tactical purpose. In fact, I think in some ways they hurt the effort because they were not focused on good intelligence, so we were stumbling around inconveniencing the local populace.
"I banned the use of occupied homes for small kill teams r