Like many ma.s.s movements, the Sadrists were misunderstood and reviled. Muqtada was often mischaracterized as unintelligent or boorish, despite surviving a Baathist regime that killed his father and brothers and an American occupation that swore to kill or capture him. The Mahdi Army was often described as a militia, but it was also a people"s army. All Iraqi men have at least a rifle and some ammunition in their homes, and Muqtada"s force was composed of such volunteers, who could never be fully demobilized or disarmed because they armed, and in many cases mobilized, themselves. At one time the Sadrists were probably also the largest humanitarian organization in Iraq, providing sustainable a.s.sistance to more Iraqis (albeit Shiites) than anybody else. No other movement or leader in Iraq had such devoted and inspired followers. In a volatile and fissiparous Iraq, the Sadrists were there to stay. Muqtada represented the anger of many people. He was oppressed and angry like them; he had suffered like them. He did not lead them; they led him. He was only as popular as he was angry, and when he stopped being angry, stopped being "anti," his popularity went down. After he ordered his militia to freeze, it was common to hear Mahdi Army men say, "a.s.sayid jundi wasarahna" (the sayyid [Muqtada] is a soldier, and we have relieved him of his duty).
In February 2008 I revisited Abul Ha.s.san"s office in the Mustafa Husseiniya. When I had last seen him he had been brooding over the efficacy of the Mahdi Army"s cease-fire. But now he seemed absorbed by more mundane pressures of sustaining the social welfare network that the Sadrists had built for their base of supporters in the slums. During one of my visits I found him distributing, in his rarely empty office, bags of clothes and rations to poor women in black abayas, many of whom were from displaced families, expelled by Sunni militias. Most Iraqis had depended on the Public Distribution Service, an extremely efficient ration system that provided essential staples for all Iraqi families under the former regime. But the system had stopped functioning because of security problems, corruption, and sectarianism. Most families did not receive even half of what they used to, and displaced Iraqis, especially Sunnis, received nothing at all. The Sadrist movement was supplementing the rations for Shiites as well as it could, although some of that a.s.sistance may have come from extortion and other militia activities.
When I visited Abul Ha.s.san another time, his office was still crowded. Two young men from the Iraqi Security Forces were among those visiting him. One was a member of the FPS; the other belonged to the Iraqi National Guard. Both proudly told me they were also members of the Mahdi Army. "We want you to know that most of the Sadrists are working for the government," said the FPS member. They listed their many friends who had been killed by Sunni militias. "Many of my friends got killed in Adhamiya, Sleikh, and Bab al-Muadham when they were heading to their work," he told me. "One of my friends got killed, and they burned his body. His body stayed in the street for two days. It was only when the security forces intervened that his family was able to get his body." "I"m a soldier in Iraqi army, the Iraqi National Guard, for three years," said his friend. "We saw that none of the political parties or movements are working for the benefit of the people except this movement. The Sadrists are devoting their time and effort to help Iraqi people. I thought the best way to help the people is by joining them."
One man had absconded to Abul Ha.s.san"s office because the Americans were looking for him. "They came to our house," he told me. "They arrested my brother after destroying our furniture. They said that I"m wanted by them. They took him because he is my brother. If they do not find the one they are after, they will take the brothers. Sometimes they take the father." Several men were seated on the floor awaiting Abul Ha.s.san"s arbitration services. He was to adjudicate a legal dispute over real estate. "We can"t reach the registration directorate," they told me, because it was in Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold. "We might get killed if we go there because of the sectarian problems."
Abul Ha.s.san"s faithful a.s.sistant, Haidar, was always present. He had the dark skin of southern Iraqis. He was thin and muscular, and always wore a cap. He sedulously did Abul Ha.s.san"s bidding, and was in charge of feeding the guests and making tea for them. Haidar and his family had lived in Abu Ghraib. He insisted that there had been no sectarian tensions in the area before the war, and said he had played soccer with Sunnis. Things got worse after the battles in Falluja in 2004, he said, when foreign radical Sunnis killed people they accused of being spies and threatened to slaughter Shiites. In 2006, because of these threats, he and his family were forced to leave Abu Ghraib and come to Shaab.
I persuaded Haidar to show me his new home in Shaab and introduce me to his family. His mother told me about the fraught circ.u.mstances that led to her family"s flight. "Abu Ghraib was a Sunni area," she said, reflecting on her old neighborhood, "the Sunnis are good people. After one of my sons joined the police, we were told to leave the area, but there was nowhere to go. I accepted my son joining the police because we needed money. His father was a police sergeant, and after the war there were not enough jobs. Seven months after he took the job, we were one of about seventeen houses that received letters threatening us to leave the area. My two sons came to Shaab and found us a house to rent, and we stayed for a year there. My other son, the policeman, was killed during the course of duty. That house was not good enough for us."
"This house belonged to a [Sunni] terrorist," said Haidar, who joined the Mahdi Army soon after the American invasion. "He became a takfiri and was killed. Then the house was given to the Sadrist Current. There were a lot of takfiris here, and they committed a lot of killings in the area. Then the Mahdi Army came and finished them. There are no Wahhabis in the area anymore." Three other families also shared the house; the home received about thirty minutes of electricity a day from the national grid, so they paid to receive more from a local generator.
"I wish peace will be upon everyone," Haidar"s mother said. "We are getting tired. We just need a decent house to live in and decent food to live off of, and that America gets out so the Sunnis and the Shiites get back together without any differences. I wish for my sons to get an education and to be teachers or lawyers, and for the girls to grow up and get marred with a good future. I am a believer in G.o.d, and to die in dignity is better than another kind of death."
"I don"t think I"m able to go back," Haidar said of his old home, "because the tribes there now are against Shiites." Although the Anbar province was more stable because of the powerful Awakening militia there, Haidar and his family, like other Shiites, did not feel rea.s.sured. "The Awakening are the same," he said. "They were with the terrorists before, and they are the Awakening." He told me he would like to take revenge for his brother"s death.
Haidar took me to the nearby Saddah area on the outskirts of the city, where hundreds of impoverished Shiite Iraqis, many of them displaced by Sunni militias, lived in makeshift homes. There were about three hundred such homes in the area, with ten to twenty residents in each one. Locals complained that they were hara.s.sed by the Americans. The only help they received was from the local Sadrists.
Jasim Muhamad was an Iraqi army veteran who was wounded during the American invasion of 2003. He and seventeen of his relatives, including eight children, now lived in three adjacent shacks. They were from Haswa, near Falluja. They said that no one had returned to Haswa since some women went there to transfer their children"s school papers to Baghdad and were killed. "No one from the family tried to get us back to our homes," said Jasim"s wife. "If I go back, I will get killed." Up to three thousand families from Haswa were displaced, they told me, their homes looted. The Iraqi army had told them to leave Haswa because it was unsafe. They believed that the Awakening members were the ones who had expelled them and that these same militiamen would threaten them if they dared to return.
Previously Sunnis and Shiites had lived together in the area. Jasim and his family blamed outsiders for instigating the problems. They received a letter from the Tawhid Brigade, stating that because Sunni families had been killed and expelled in Baghdad, infidel families (meaning Shiites) had five days to leave or face death. Those who ignored this warning were killed, including Jasim"s brother-in-law, whose body was never found.
The Ministry of Displacement provided Jasim and his family with beds, blankets, and a small kerosene cooker, but nothing else. After one year of trying, they succeeded in transferring their ration cards from the Public Distribution Service, but they received rations only every few months, and only a small share of what they used to receive. The Sadrist movement provided them with food such as rice, flour, and sugar. There was no running water in the area, so they relied on a nearby well. Although they had been connected to the national power grid, they rarely got electricity. They had to break apart a bed to use it for firewood because they had no cooking gas or kerosene. On some days they had no food. Jasim was unable to register for his pension as a wounded veteran because the ministries were not functioning properly.
Jasim"s brother found an occasional job working in the sewage system, and he would sometimes bring money to the family. Only their older children attended school. The family members had voted in the most recent elections for the Shiite Iraqi Alliance list, but they complained that they had not received anything from the government, not even security. "My message to the American people after five years," said Jasim"s wife: "They destroyed us and didn"t help us, they didn"t reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily, while now there is nothing. Now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets, and there is no life. Strangers come to our homes and threaten us. I feel life is miserable now and our country is destroyed."
The neglect in Sadr City and other neighborhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad was shocking. But Washash, in central Baghdad, was stark for its contrast to the upscale Mansour district adjacent to it. Of course, much of Mansour was deserted when I visited because of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, but the district"s clothing stores and restaurants were once packed, its shopping boulevard and ice cream parlors open until late at night. The streets of the majority-Shiite Washash remained unpaved dirt, many flooded with water or sewage. It was quiet and removed from the nearby bustle.
Washash was a staging point for Mahdi Army attacks against Al Qaeda and forays into the Mansour district. It was one of the few Shiite neighborhoods I saw that was surrounded by concrete walls, with only one road left open for cars, guarded by Iraqi soldiers. Elsewhere a few narrow openings between the concrete blocks allowed pedestrians to enter one at a time. About five thousand families lived in Washash, but most of its Sunnis had fled or were slaughtered, and the Mahdi Army men there were notorious, even among other Mahdi Army units, for their brutality. In Washash I saw more posters and banners in honor of Muqtada and his father than anywhere else in Baghdad.
When I first visited Washash in April 2003, sewage flooded the streets and there was a thriving arms market nearby. About sixty thousand people lived in an area not much larger than one square kilometer. When American vehicles approached, the weapons dealers would hastily conceal their wares. The revenge killings started in Washash soon after Baghdad fell, and it didn"t take long for the murders to take on a sectarian tone. In October 2003 three Sunnis were killed in Washash: Sheikh Ahmed Khudeir and his brother Walid Khudeir were killed along with a teenage a.s.sistant as they walked home from the Sunni Washash Mosque after the morning prayer. The three were riddled with bullets. Locals believed militiamen from the Badr Corps had killed them. Hospital officials reported seeing many similar cases in the area. In August 2004 a police chief and a patrolman were killed in an explosion in Washash. In December 2004 several members of a Sunni Salafist group in Washash were killed, and Sunni gunmen tried to kill a Shiite sheikh called Razaq; they missed Razaq but killed his wife and wounded his son, who remained paralyzed. Following the killings, Sunni and Shiite clerics issued a joint edict banning sectarian fighting. By the summer of 2005, sectarian violence was a common occurrence. Sectarian violence targeting Sunnis was so bad that in July the Sunni waqf (endowment) complained about the targeting and arrest of Sunnis.
Washash and the nearby Iskan were located in northeast Mansour on an important sectarian front line between Shiite-controlled Hurriya and Kadhimiya and Sunni-controlled Khadra, Jamia, Adil, and Mutanabi. In October 2006, during Operation Together Forward II, American soldiers raided a house in Washash while searching for a death squad and found doc.u.ments recording the cleansing of Sunnis from the area. The doc.u.ments included a list of nearly seventy homes where Sunni families had been expelled and Shiite families were brought in to replace them. There was also a list of "good" families who would not be expelled. American soldiers discovered letters threatening Sunnis as well as DVDs with the same message from the Mahdi Army, with images of exploding houses and threats to kill a male of the house. That month Washash notables asked the Iraqi government to intervene in a crime wave that had led to the discovery of sixty corpses and the threatening of many families by militias. In November a journalist working for the state-run Al Sabah newspaper was killed in Washash. In December, gunmen a.s.sa.s.sinated a news editor for an Iraqi radio station as he left his home to go to work. In April 2007 four women accused of being informants for the Americans were killed in Washash.
In the summer of 2007, as American forces pushed the Mahdi Army out of Hurriya, some members of the militia moved to Washash, resulting in an increase of militia activity and murders. In July of that year Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi publicly accused Shiite militias of cleansing hundreds of Sunni families from Washash and added that soldiers from the Iraqi army"s Sixth Division had cooperated with the militias. Dulaimi"s bodyguards had clashed in the past with men from the Sixth Division, and Dulaimi accused the division"s Colonel Rahim of an attempted a.s.sa.s.sination. That same month, Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the Islamic Party and the Sunni vice president, complained about Shiite militias in Washash. In August a car bomb exploded close to a coffee shop in Washash. Later that month the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment, set up a combat outpost nearby. A Sunni Arabic teacher at the local secondary school was shot on the street. Men were killed for drinking alcohol. In September a U.S. airstrike during clashes with the Mahdi Army killed between fourteen and thirty-one residents, some of whom were civilians. Several homes were destroyed, including one that belonged to an expelled Sunni family whose teenage son had been murdered earlier that summer (they had moved to Ghazaliya).
Later that month gunmen a.s.sa.s.sinated Washash"s notorious Mahdi Army commander, Hamudi Naji, along with two of his a.s.sociates, leading to reprisals against Sunnis. (Several months earlier Naji and his men had struck a truce with Sunnis in Washash.) Locals believed that two of the a.s.sa.s.sins were from the Iraqi Islamic Party. Some blamed the small Ugaidat clan; others said Naji was killed by the relatives of a man he had killed two years earlier. Hundreds of Sunnis fled Washash after the reprisals. Many were killed, including whole families, and several homes were destroyed. One car carrying a fleeing Sunni family was. .h.i.t by an RPG before they escaped. Many Sunnis who fled to nearby Adil complained that American and Iraqi forces had facilitated their displacement by directing them to the highway and escorting them. That month a car bomb exploded in Washash and killed two civilians. The Mahdi Army manned checkpoints and kidnapped Sunnis without American interference.
In the fall of 2007 the bodies of murder victims were often found in Washash. In October more than one thousand men marched to protest the new wall the Americans were planning to build around the area. Their chants rejected the wall and America. Small Jersey barriers were already up, but the Americans were constructing a larger wall that would seal the neighborhood more effectively. In clashes with the Iraqi army after the protest, two locals were injured. That month the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi army fought openly in Washash.
In November four Mahdi Army commanders were killed in Washash. It was suspected that the Mahdi Army itself might have been responsible for the a.s.sa.s.sinations, and that the four were negotiating with the Americans to establish a Shiite Awakening group. In late 2007 Mahdi Army men from Washash declared that they were operating independently of the militia"s hierarchy as a result of disagreements with the local leadership, based in Shula.
In 2006 Washash was technically a battle s.p.a.ce "owned" by Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, but from July to November of that year he did very little there because he was concentrated in Amriya. Gentile told me that no other American combat unit conducted systematic COIN operations there in 2006-the result of low troop numbers, perhaps. By the time an American unit eventually got there, a brutal Shiite militia was running rampant. Lieut. Col. Ed Chesney commanded the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor, Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia. They arrived in late May 2007 and controlled their area of operations from June 15, 2007, to July 3, 2008. The battalion"s area of operations encompa.s.sed a large portion of the Mansour district, including the neighborhoods of Khadra, Jamia, Adil, Iskan, Washash, Mutanabi, Andalus, and Mansour. Chesney was on his third deployment to Iraq; he had been an executive officer in Bayji from 2003 to 2004 and a deputy brigade commander in eastern Baghdad from July 2005 to January 2006.
"The battalion and our brigade prepared for the deployment by focusing on our core war-fighting fundamentals and skills," Chesney said. "We did not focus on COIN until late in our preparation. Most of my senior NCOs and officers had at least one Operation Iraqi Freedom deployment as experience, and we used the collective experience."
"Washash was the poorest area we were responsible for," Chesney said. "It was also heavily Shia, with the neighborhoods to the south being mixed to heavily Sunni. The walls were not in place, other than some Jersey barriers on some of the streets. The area was dominated by a criminal JAM element under the control of Hamudi Naji. The Sunnis to the south were petrified of him and his element and did not trust the army. What police there were in the area were from the Kadhimiya district, which did not engender trust in the Sunni population. There had been sectarian killings and intimidation in the mixed and Sunni areas around Washash; all of this was attributed to Hamudi"s group. There was no JSS [joint security station] close to Washash.
"By this time there were not a lot of mixed neighborhoods," Chesney continued. "Consequently, when the army arrested people in Washash they were almost always Shia, so the people thought they were sectarian. But in Jamia, they arrested all Sunnis and were sectarian. When there was sectarianism it usually took the form of disrespect to the people or had a criminal aspect to it. Also, at times the Iraqi junior leaders performed poorly and were afraid to confront either JAM or Al Qaeda elements-this fostered the notion of sectarianism. The army around Washash, especially the rank and file, was sympathetic to JAM. . . . Lieutenant Colonel Ha.s.san, the battalion commander, did not trust them to conduct cordon and searches properly if U.S. forces weren"t there to watch over them. We suspected corruption in many areas but were unable to prove it."
Because it was so dangerous for outsiders, my driver, whose cousin lived there, arranged for us to be met by the head of the local tribal council, Sheikh Kadhim Khanjer Maan al-Saedy, who guaranteed my safety. A Sadrist, he introduced me to Mahdi Army men who surrounded us as we strolled through his neighborhood"s dirt streets. Many displaced Shiites from wealthier majority-Sunni neighborhoods had been forced to flee to Washash and work where they could. "We are helping the people who have been displaced from other cities," he said. "Some of the help is with stipends, salaries, or places to live in. Also we are trying to provide gas and kerosene as much as we can." Graffiti on the wall behind him said, "Long live the hero leader Muqtada al-Sadr." The men told me that Ahmad Chalabi had visited the area and promised to help. "He only sat for thirty minutes, drank his Pepsi, and left," a sheikh told me.
I met one man displaced from Dora. "Shiites were the minority there," he said, "and they started killing them in their houses. They did not get my son because he was at his college, and we came to this area because it has a Shiite majority." One month after fleeing to Washash, he said, "the Americans and the Iraqi army came to our street, and they blew up the door to our house, and they arrested us and some of our neighbors, we don"t know why. I was arrested by the American army with my son for eleven months and six days-without any charges. They accused me of being a terrorist, and they don"t have any proof. They released me and they kept my son, and we don"t know for which reason. If anybody says the Americans came to liberate the country, we say it is not true. If they came to liberate us, they should show some respect to us. There are no human rights."
Sheikh Kadhim introduced me to an elderly man in a head scarf whose home had recently been raided by the Americans. "At 11:30 p.m. they raided our house after breaking our doors," the man said. "They beat the men, women, and my daughters-in-law. We asked them, "What do you want?" but they said nothing. We don"t know what they wanted."
As Sheikh Kadhim and I walked down the street, we were surrounded by throngs of Mahdi Army men and other residents of Washash desperate to voice their anger. "As you know, we consider the Iraqi army to be our sons and brothers," Kadhim told me. "Unfortunately the army unit here which is surrounding the area is giving false information about us. They said we are doing many bad things and the neighborhood is unsafe. When the Iraqi army raid houses, they steal the mobile phones and money, attack the elderly people, and falsely accuse people. For example, some of our young guys were accused of planting bombs. After the investigation, they discovered it is not true. Some of them were accused of killing people; they said such and such killed ten or fifteen. After the investigation they released him. So there are false accusations against those innocent people."
Kadhim and the people of Washash spoke of the Iraqi army unit in charge of their area much the way Sunnis spoke of the Iraqi police. "They are dealing with us in a sectarian way," Kadhim said. "Most of the prisoners are Shiites, most of the arrests are of Shiites." The Iraqi police were different, he said. "The Iraqi police can come without weapons and see if anyone would shoot one bullet. We will be responsible for them as the tribal leaders council. . . . The police are peaceful people. If anyone files a complaint they will respond to him properly. We don"t have any problem with the police." I would soon find out just how close they were with the police.
We pa.s.sed men wheeling in goods for sale on pushcarts, and at an intersection I found a tractor used as a garbage truck to clean the streets. "Our sons collect trash with this car," one tribal leader told me. "The Sadrist Current collects the trash," a man corrected him.
On the corner sat many women in abayas by dozens of colorful jerricans. They were waiting for kerosene that the Mahdi Army was supposed to bring in, but, they claimed, the Iraqi army was besieging their area and preventing the kerosene from coming in. The women had been waiting for four days.
I approached the women hoping one might agree to talk to me on camera and was surprised by how eager they all were. "My dear," said an elderly woman with tribal tattoos on her chin, "we don"t have electricity, kerosene, or gas, and we are surrounded and we have been insulted. Where should we go? To whom should we complain? We are waiting for a month to get some kerosene, but we got nothing. Only the Mahdi Army used to bring us kerosene, but now the Iraqi army is not allowing them. It is not true that the Mahdi Army are terrorists," she said. A tribal leader interrupted her. "The Americans are the real terrorists," he insisted. "They are bringing Al Qaeda and the terrorists to Iraq!"
A younger woman explained to me that "without the Mahdi Army, our women or girls could not go outside. We are under a lot of pressure. They are defending us like they are defending their own sisters." She and her daughters had been expelled from the majority-Sunni town of Mahmudiya, she told me, after two of her sons were murdered. "The Mahdi Army are the only ones who gave me a shelter, and they are protecting me and my daughters. The terrorists killed my sons with a car bomb. One of them was married, and he left behind four children, and I have twelve people to look after. May G.o.d bless the Mahdi Army. Now I feel safe to go to the market. We are going out only with the protection of the Mahdi Army. Anyone who says they are terrorists is lying."
Another young woman, holding her baby, told me that "the Americans are ruining people"s lives. We don"t have electricity, and we don"t receive our rations. They are raiding the houses every night. What we have done? The Americans and the national guards are raiding our houses every day, and our sons are not sleeping there at night. Tell me, what we have done?"
A thick, muscular Mahdi Army man explained that an Iraqi army captain named Salim was preventing the kerosene truck from entering the neighborhood. Another man insisted Salim was a Sunni and was punishing them for sectarian reasons. I found out later that he was, in fact, a Shiite.
"We haven"t had electricity in Washash for four months," one man told me. "Sewage floods, and there is no water, no electricity, and we are surrounded. It is like a prison inside Washash. Tell me, what is the difference between here and prison? We are surrounded by a wall that prevents us from going to other neighborhoods. Our sons and daughters can"t go to the schools in the Arabi neighborhood, which is the closest area. Our conditions are very bad, and there are random arrests. The services we have are only through the help of the Sadrists, may G.o.d bless them. They are cleaning, they are helping the ones who need some money. They are bringing the kerosene and giving it to families."
A tribal leader warned, "If it is going to be like this for a long time, the young men will lose their minds. Maybe we will too. We can"t control our sons. It will be very bad. We can"t keep our sons quiet anymore."
"We receive electricity for half an hour a week," another tribal leader told me. "What about shops, factories, and workers? What is the reason? They should say it clearly on TV: "This neighborhood is a target. We don"t want to give them services; we want to humiliate them." The other neighborhoods around us all have electricity. We were bombed by aircraft. More than fourteen houses were destroyed."
One man who had served in the Iraqi army"s special forces for twenty-three years said the Iraqi army had just raided his home. "They insulted me and my honor!" he shouted at me. "An Iraqi soldier came with an American standing beside him. He said to me that I am the brother of a wh.o.r.e! I have only one AK-47, and he took it. Why did he take it? It was only an AK-47 with thirty bullets. They destroyed my furniture and stole my money. My son has a lung problem and I don"t have money to buy kerosene, and the soldier is calling me the brother of a wh.o.r.e! I spent eight years fighting in the war with Iran, and a soldier came to me yesterday and called me the brother of a wh.o.r.e! If there is security, as Mr. Bush is saying, then American or Iraqi soldiers wouldn"t come at seven o"clock and shoot randomly. We lost many people because of those injuries."
A tribal leader led me to the rubble of a home the Americans had bombed two months earlier. Seven of his relatives had been killed there, some of them children. "What do they want?" he demanded. "Do they want us to fight? We don"t mind. If you try to strangle a cat, it will scratch you. We are trying to control our sons, and each one of us has seven to eight sons. If the situation continues like this, we will have to make a decision. We are losing our patience."
They led me through the market, which had once served the neighborhoods around Washash. "We are paying rent and we don"t have work," one shopkeeper told me. "This wall ruined our life and our business," another said. "Would you accept to walk in this mud?" a man asked me. "People are holding their sons in order to cross the pools of water on their way to the schools. It"s as if Washash is not on the map. Even the government doesn"t care about it."
They showed me more shops without customers. "The policy of walls is wrong," a tribal leader told me. "The Americans think that they are providing security for the people. Even if they achieved that, what is the use of safety if a man is hungry? When they closed the area people lost their living." We approached the walls that separated Washash from Mansour. "We are like Palestine," one of my guides said. They showed me the narrow opening between the barriers. Behind it was an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier spotted me filming and began to approach. "He won"t dare come in," one of the men said of the soldier. "We will f.u.c.k him."
Nevertheless, I was ushered away by Mahdi Army men, who consulted one another about what to do with me before the Iraqi soldiers came looking. One offered to drive me to a different opening in the back of the neighborhood, where there was a friendly Iraqi National Police checkpoint. He a.s.sured me that the police were "good," and I got in his car alongside another Mahdi Army member, who then led me through a fence to a gap in the barrier. "They are from our group," he said of the police, meaning they were with the Mahdi Army. As I waited for my driver to circle around and come pick me up, he explained to the police officer what had happened, and the police protected me from the Iraqi army.
I returned the next day to resume filming in the area, spotting unarmed Mahdi Army men sitting on steps and standing on street corners. As soon as I began, men from the Mahdi Army told me that someone had alerted the Iraqi army and a patrol was looking for me. We snuck past them again, avoiding the vehicles that slowly searched the streets.
I MET WITH SALIM, the Iraqi army captain so loathed by the Mahdi Army supporters who guided me through Washash. He was an intelligence officer in Mansour, thirty years old, with a round face and a short military haircut. I told him the men in Washash had accused him of being a Sunni and targeting them for sectarian reasons. "I"m a Shiite," he replied with a laugh. "How can I be sectarian?"
Before the war Salim had been an artillery officer living in Bayaa. In September 2003 an American lieutenant colonel based in Camp Falcon, asked Salim about his job. The American, who also happened to be an artillery officer, asked Salim to join the new Iraqi army. He became an officer in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, commanding a company in charge of the airport road.
In early 2004 the Americans established the Defense Ministry and Salim became part of the new Iraqi army. "At the time there was only Al Qaeda, not Mahdi Army," he said. "We confiscated a lot of weapons and car bombs. This was before the sectarianism started. I was trained to be an intelligence officer." When Salim joined the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, there were very few Sunni officers, he said. "Sunni officers were afraid because they were worried that the Americans think Sunnis are terrorists, but Americans judged people on whether they were good." On the night of the Samarra shrine attack in 2006, Salim"s unit had orders to protect all Sunni mosques and the Islamic Party headquarters. "But the Iraqi army, not all of it was clean," he said, "and some officers told their soldiers to let the Mahdi Army operate freely, especially in Rusafa [eastern Baghdad]. Samarra made officers sectarian, but even before that the Iraqi National Police was infiltrated with militias. Most officers were in a dilemma: if you act like a real officer and be a patriot, you will lose your family and your house, because you live in a Shiite area-this happened to me."
Salim first clashed with the Mahdi Army in Washash when it was commanded by Hamudi Naji. Much of the government supported the Mahdi Army and had access to good information, he said, so Hamudi managed to obtain Salim"s phone number. "In the end of 2006 we captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys," he said. "But we got orders from the prime minister"s office and Baghdad Operations Center to release them. Once we captured four armed Mahdi Army guys with Glocks-they had masks. It was next to the Buratha Mosque. An army lieutenant captured them. He was punished, and they were released an hour later. So the officer requested to be transferred to Iraqi special forces."
"I was on patrol next to Maamun College in the Iskan neighborhood, on Street Twenty-three, and I saw two guys with a pistol and MP5 take a man and put him in the trunk of their car. We went after them. The men ran away and left their weapons. The man in the trunk was Sunni. His family came to get him, and we kept the vehicle and guns." This was when Salim"s conflict with the Mahdi Army began. Hamudi Naji called him. "You are Shiite, one of us," Hamudi said, according to Salim. "We don"t want anything from you-just return the car and the weapons." Salim responded that if Hamudi gave him the name of the two fugitives, then he would return the car. "These men are in the Mahdi Army," Hamudi said. "How can I give them to you?" Hamudi used religious language and appealed to Salim as a Shiite. "I said I am secular," Salim told me. "I don"t care if you"re Sunni or Shiite or Hindu-I have orders."
In 2007 Salim and his men stopped a government vehicle at one of their checkpoints that was leaving Washash and heading to Sadr City. The men wore tracksuits and had two Glocks with three magazines each. The Americans said they were Mahdi Army leaders and detained them. One of the suspects was called Ali Kadhim. The Americans had a picture of him wearing a turban. Hamudi Naji called Salim again and demanded their release. Salim told him that they were wanted and that the Americans had them in their custody. "You arrested them, so you bring them back to us," Hamudi said. "You have twenty-four hours to get them back to me." Hamudi called Salim again that night. "What have you done about them?" he asked. "You"re crazy," Salim replied. "The Americans have them." I expressed surprise at the Mahdi Army"s audacity. "The state was on their side," Salim said. "We were afraid of the Mahdi Army; they weren"t afraid of us."
Hamudi Naji arranged for Mahdi Army men in Bayaa to join with members of the Iraqi National Police Fifth Brigade and go to Salim"s house. They mistakenly went to the house of his neighbor Anas, who was an army captain as well. The Mahdi Army men insisted that Anas was Salim with a fake ID card and put him in the trunk of their car. Hamudi called Salim"s phone and was surprised to hear Salim answer. "Who are you?" he asked. "Salim," the captain replied. "So who is the lamb we have here?" Hamudi asked, referring to Anas as a victim about to be killed. Anas was released after being terribly beaten. Salim sent his family to Hilla and his wife and children to Egypt. "For one year I visited them every two months," he told me. "It was very expensive."
A week after the failed raid on Salim"s house, the Mahdi Army killed his uncle in the Amil district. "I decided to terminate the Mahdi Army in Washash," he told me. The Americans had a new captain and colonel in the area, and in mid-2007 they had a meeting with Salim about the Washash, Iskan, and Tobchi neighborhoods. The Americans brought their intelligence officer, and Salim gave him all his information.
The Americans, Salim told me, decided it was time to rid the area from Amriya to Mansour of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. The Iraqis and the new American troops worked on a plan. The colonel told Salim he had heard good things about him and that his captain would give Salim whatever help he needed. They built the walls around Washash and set up a joint security station next to it, with a quick reaction force to counter the Mahdi Army. The previous American base had been too far away. Salim met with the American platoon leaders and NCOs, and introduced them to his team. He suggested that they first target Al Qaeda so that locals wouldn"t think that they were only going after the Mahdi Army. The first target was Abu Zeinab, an Al Qaeda leader in Mansour. "Too easy," the Americans replied.
"I had strong intelligence sources in Mansour," Salim told me. "It was a great operation. We found a car bomb and an IED factory. The intelligence was all ours. The Americans were new and had no sources." Abu Zeinab wasn"t there, but the Americans gained crucial information from the ID cards they found in his house and arrested him in Bab al-Muadham one month later. The next week Salim"s source told him about a Mahdi Army weapons depot. He told the Americans, who set up a decoy mission to a Sunni area in Mansour and then sent a small force to Washash to get the real target. In a garden behind the house they found four explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), two sniper rifles, as well as PKC machine guns. But there were no people in the house, which belonged to displaced Sunnis. Salim told the Americans that this was a great opportunity; they turned the house into an Iraqi army base and used it to conduct night missions. During one of them they detained the sakak (a.s.sa.s.sin) Ihab al-Tawil. After he was interrogated, he led the Americans to six or seven houses with a total of nine buried bodies belonging to Sunni and Shiite victims. One of the victims was a six-year-old boy whose father was Sunni and whose mother was Shiite. The killers couldn"t find the boy"s father, so they killed him instead.
The day after the raid, an Iraqi soldier named Hussein Naas was killed by Muhamad Karim Muhamad, a sniper from Washash, while on a foot patrol. Muhamad was a former Iraqi National Police officer who had been trained by the Americans. A source gave Salim his location, and a force of Iraqi and American soldiers closed off the area for five hundred square meters, conducted dismounted raids, and captured the suspect while he was in bed with his wife. At first he denied killing Naas, but Salim showed him all their evidence. He, in turn, led them to a house with four sniper rifles, sticky bombs, rockets, IEDs, and ammunition.
During Ramadan in late 2007, while Salim was visiting his family in Egypt, he learned that a small team of American and Iraqi special forces had ambushed Hamudi Naji and killed him. Mahdi Army guys were up very late, eating and loudly playing games. An Iraqi member of the team called Hamudi Naji and pretended to be a neighbor complaining about the late-night noise. Hamudi came with three of his security men to see what his men were doing. The Americans killed him and one of his guards. Salim told me that Hamudi"s body was riddled with sixty bullets. After this ambush, the Americans increased their raids in Washash and Iskan.
At that time the Mahdi Army was at its peak, according to Salim. Two people in the prime minister"s office supported the Mahdi Army, he explained. One was Maj. Gen. Adnan al-Maksusi, an intelligence officer, and the other was the notorious Dr. Ba.s.sima al-Jadri. "They used to fire all officers who were against the Mahdi Army or who arrested the Mahdi Army," Salim told me. "Petraeus told Maliki, "Either you fire these two people or we fire you."" The Mahdi Army was taking over Sunni areas, Salim explained, "so the Americans came up with the Awakening-former insurgents but officially armed, so it created a balance. We knew the Awakening men, we had their names, we knew that they were wanted. The first time I heard about it I was against it, armed men on the street. The Americans said, "Cooperate with them, use them now, and we"ll arrest them later." The Awakening created a balance between Shiites and Sunnis in early 2008." I told him about my Awakening friends in Dora being arrested. "It"s just like what they did in the Jamia district and Amriya," he said. "Every Humvee that went to the airport road, Abul Abed would place an IED against it-so later they arrested the bad Awakening men. We found dead bodies of Shiites in Abul Abed"s house in Amriya."
With Hamudi Naji gone, Salim"s campaign against the Mahdi Army began in earnest. There were orders to arrest all Mahdi Army leaders, he told me. The Iraqi army closed off the Iskan, Tobchi, and Washash areas for four days. "In Washash we arrested over seventy men," he said. "In Iskan we arrested twenty men. In Tobchi we arrested twelve senior men with weapons." Naji was replaced by his nephew Hikmat Hussein Maan. Hikmat, known as Hakami, had a brother called Hossam al-Awar, or One-eyed Hossam, who was the main sakak in Washash. These two men escaped to Rusafa in eastern Baghdad. "The Mahdi Army freeze is a lie," Salim told me. "It"s just information operations, like when the Americans said they stopped operations in Falluja but they continued them." Hakami fled to Ur, which was outside Salim"s area of operations, but the young captain was determined to get him.
Salim had a female source in Washash. The Mahdi Army had killed her husband and left her with six children. Hakami had been in love with her, Salim told me. Salim arranged to meet her at a restaurant in Mansour, "like civilians," he said. "Next we met in an apartment, but nothing happened," he joked. He told her he wanted her to resume her relationship with Hakami, and she called him in Ur. "They met in Najaf and f.u.c.ked," he told me. The next time they met in Zafraniya at her friend"s house. The third meeting was arranged to take place in Karada. Salim called a military transition team (MTT, p.r.o.nounced "mitt") whose captain he liked. "Hakami had been in Iran the week before," he told me. "He got six thousand dollars and the names of a cell to organize in Shula. It was to be an a.s.sa.s.sination cell."
Salim met the American intelligence officers in charge of his area. They wanted Hakami too, but Salim"s source did not know the Americans were involved; she thought it was only the Iraqi army. Salim agreed on the plan with her the day before, but he didn"t tell her that U.S. Special Forces in civilian clothes would arrest Hakami. On the day of the meeting in Karada, she would be wearing an abaya and carrying a yellow government file so that she could claim to be going to a ministry. She would meet Hakami at her friend"s house at 7 a.m. She would write a text message but send it only when she saw Hakami.
"The Americans don"t trust anybody, so they came at midnight," Salim told me. They had a Lebanese translator with them and told Salim to wear civilian clothes. They drove in a black GMC and covered Salim"s eyes with black goggles so he couldn"t see. He was offended, but one of the American intelligence officers said he would wear them too. After driving around for thirty minutes, they took him to a room with two beds and a couch and removed the goggles. American Special Forces men with beards came in. One spoke Arabic. Then Iraqi special forces came in. Salim told them the details. They left him at 3 a.m. and came back with more questions, as well as food and drinks. At 5 a.m. they told him that they could not conduct the operation because they didn"t have enough information. "Special Forces didn"t trust anybody," he said. "They thought it was an ambush for them." Salim was frustrated. He asked them if they could at least give him permission to operate in Karada. They told him they would send regular forces and he could sit with them in a Humvee.
At 6 a.m. they blacked out his eyes again and drove him to the checkpoint, where he found the MTT team and an African American lieutenant waiting for him along with four Humvees. They gave Salim an American uniform and a pistol. The interpreter working for the Americans did not speak English well, he recalled. They waited for the woman"s message at the Jadriya JSS. She called at 7 a.m. to say that Hakami had not yet appeared. The convoy of Americans acted like a normal patrol in Karada and stopped in Dalal Square. At 7:20 a.m., the message came: Hakami had arrived.
The Americans came very fast. They arrested Hakami and the woman. The MTT team was very pleased, Salim recalled. "Hakami thought I was an interpreter because I was wearing an American uniform," Salim said. "He said to me, "Please, brother, help me, it"s not me." I said, "Do you know who I am? I"m Captain Salim." He started crying."
In detention in Washash, Hakami revealed his bases and arms depot. The Americans then took him to Camp Bucca. Hossam al-Awar was never caught, but it was widely rumored that he worked as a bodyguard for a general in the Interior Ministry in Kadhimiya.
"Many people were deceived by the Mahdi Army," Salim said. "We Iraqis are not well educated. The Mahdi Army manipulated." Salim insisted that I had to distinguish between the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist Current. "The Current defended Shiites from Al Qaeda," he said. "The Mahdi Army used bad guys for personal gain. Al Qaeda was the same. They said, "We have to protect your area from the Mahdi Army and the Americans," and then they turned on the people and harmed the area. But we good people were the victims."
One hundred and forty Sunni families returned to Washash, he told me. Salim also returned sixty-four Shiite families to Mansour"s Dawudi area, formerly an Al Qaeda stronghold. IDPs took their papers and identification cards to the returnee center in the Harthiya district. When they received a letter approving their return to their house, they gave it to the local unit in charge of the area. The family occupying the house had three days to leave, he told me. "If they don"t leave, they are treated like terrorists," he said. "They must go back to their house." Some families had agreed to exchange their houses.
The Mahdi Army was finished, he said, but its supporters were still in the government. Salim was jailed for two months, he claims because of his aggressive pursuit of the Mahdi Army. "They made fake charges against me," he said. "They accused me of killing Shiites." Others say Salim beat a Mahdi Army suspect to death. He told me that he paid thirty thousand dollars in ransom to the man"s family and he was released. But he was kept off active duty for several months as a result, which he viewed as additional punishment.
SALIM ALSO BELIEVED that Gen. Abdel Karim in Dora was a.s.sociated with the Mahdi Army. He told me that the Badr Corps had been active only for the first two years of the occupation. "Their first goal was to kill Iraqi pilots and high-ranking Baathists, Saddam supporters, Iranian targets," he said. "Then they worked with the government." Salim believed that men who had fought the Americans were also criminals. "The Americans didn"t come to destroy the country," he said. "If it wasn"t for the resistance, the Americans wouldn"t have stayed even for one year. We are all afraid-if the Americans go, who will fill the vacuum? Maybe the Iranians. Sectarianism is still there. An officer targeting Sunnis is promoted, but if he is targeting Shiites they will harm him or wait until the Americans leave. Shiites have power in the government and know they will take over Iraq. Sunnis want to overthrow the government and have Sunnis in power. n.o.body can do anything now because the Americans are here."
Capt. Clarence "Wes" Wilhite worked closely with Salim. Wilhite was the Commander of D Company (nicknamed the Black Knights), of the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment. Wilhite"s battalion arrived in Iraq in late May 2007 and departed in July 2008. He took over as the commander of D company in August 2007 and served throughout his deployment in that position. His area of operation included Washash, Iskan, Arabi, Dur Sud, Mutanabi, Hai Draq, Mansour, and Andalus. This put him on the eastern side of the battalion"s area. Unlike much of the 1-64 AR"s terrain, his area had not only an Al Qaeda presence but also Shiite militias, and in much of the area, these militias were the main threat.
"Dur Sud was where we established the JSS on August 25," Wilhite said. "This became known as the Sunni-Shiite "fault line" for most of our battalion meetings. For lack of a better a.n.a.logy, this was our line in the sand, where we wanted to prevent JAM expansion to the south. To the south of these areas, we faced the Sunni-insurgent threat, AQI. This area was unique because it was not necessarily as disputed as Amriya or Jamia. Often patrols encountered the deep-buried IED threats in Amriya and Jamia; however, this threat was not present in Andalus. Primarily, I saw this as a support zone where AQI used to facilitate operations in Amriya and Jamia. In the vicinity of the Grand Mosque was another interesting problem due to the high number of displaced persons, emba.s.sies, abandoned dense market areas, and high-level foreign officials in the area. Al Rawad Square had just suffered a vehicle-borne IED [VBIED] strike following a soccer game that killed over forty Iraqis in late July 2007."
I asked Wilhite what the area was like when he first arrived. ""Desolate" was the one word that came to mind," he said. "My first patrol over eastern Mansour prior to a.s.suming command of D Company was an eye-opener. I had hopped on a few patrols with my battalion commander"s security detail, but actually having the opportunity to walk the streets of these places and getting a back brief from some of my platoon leaders really opened my eyes. As I look back at my notes and video, specifically on Washash, the smell of raw sewage running through the streets in 105-degree heat, sights of Muqtada al-Sadr pictured everywhere, Naji graffiti everywhere, few people in sight, and young guys in tracksuits watching us at every corner and disappearing around the next corner come to mind. At the time, it was a nightmare, but an opportunity."
Wilhite explained that among his challenges were getting the Iraqi army to buy in to their plan and the persistent image of security in his area. "In July, prior to taking command of D Company and establishing the JSS, the company arrested one of the company commanders in the IA [Iraqi army] battalion who was actively working with Naji in Washash. We identified the IA company commander as being complacent and facilitating JAM operations in Washash and Arabi. He was detained and replaced."
Iraqi army cooperation with the Americans in the fall of 2007 prevented further collaboration with the Mahdi Army, he said. "Seeing the pure dissatisfaction and anger in their face at having to dig up their own people from shallow graves, having JAM kill a few of their soldiers or attack their checkpoints, affected their leadership-which, in turn, directly influenced their soldiers. Also, the IA"s first battalion commander we had to work with was terribly ineffective. The establishment of relationships, much like with any person in Arab culture, was absolutely critical. The relationship I had with Captain Salim and his second battalion commander, Lieutenant Wael, was a great one. Whenever we had good information, we shared it. When we detained someone, we made sure we both got the information from questioning. We made it a point to have all of our subordinate patrol elements do every patrol possible together after January. We took IA patrols to their FOB and did training exercises on dismounted patrolling techniques, marksmanship, vehicle search, home search (we actually learned more from them on this one), and room clearing. We made it a point to bring all of the leadership, IA officers and NCOs, to our planning sessions and patrol briefs. Often IA checkpoints would get in brief firefights with JAM. We always made it a point to get a patrol there as soon as possible to support them."
Another problem was the lack of effective local government leaders, Wilhite said. "There was no one-at least, very few. Literally, everyone had stepped down, fled the area, or been killed as a result of AQI attacks in the south, JAM in Mutanabi and Washash. When we didn"t have leaders we (us and the IA) asked around and made them to eliminate the perception of an area under martial law. I inherited a company that had great, ambitious small-unit leaders, but the vision and direction of where we were going was not clearly articulated. I wanted to compartmentalize the different lines of effort against Sunni and Shia insurgents and the effort to support the Iraqi population."
There were many different kinds of Iraqi police in Wilhite"s area, such as traffic, local, regional, and a quick reaction force. "Most of them were useless and corrupt," he told me. "The local ones based out of the Yarmuk area for the Mansour district were by far the most reliable. Our liaison in our JSS proved very helpful at times during the Sons of Iraq integration." With respect to the Iraqi army, he said, "competence varied here considerably, but collectively they were and became the most reliable, active, and trustworthy of the whole lot. This was, along with all ISF organizations, very officer-centric-the opinions, actions, and demeanor of the battalion commander drove the pulse of the whole organization. Our first battalion commander struck me as wishywashy, lethargic, and not a strong leader. He rarely provided us good feedback or buy-in about his area and was reserved to let the IA company commanders do what they saw fit with little back briefs. Lieutenant Colonel Wael came in with great ideas, a strong personality, and an open mind. A few commanders out there, I would go so far as to trust my soldiers to be led by them. Others should have been rooted out and fired. Sectarianism was present in their ranks.
"The Sons of Iraq turned out to be an excellent gamble yet arrived with a lot of baggage. Inspired from the Anbar Awakening and the success of Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl"s integration of the neighborhood watch in Amriya with 1-5 CAV, we adopted a program for recruitment of the concerned local citizens program, later known as the Sons of Iraq program, to support the Iraqi army security efforts in the area. The ability to get these guys on checkpoints inside the mahala and regularly talking to their neighbors increased the effectiveness and saturation of security in the area threefold and completed the "oil spot" of security in the area. Being able to add upwards of three to six checkpoints and a constant patrol walking inside the mahala during this critical time of transition helped everyone out. At its peak we had enrolled over four hundred local residents in this program."
Wilhite"s area "was less of an Al Qaeda stronghold and more of a transitory meeting area based on the terrain," he explained. "In the fall, mainly in Dawoodi and Andalus, we would usually use just one platoon with an IA company and conduct meet-and-greet "soft knock" patrols." Most of the area was abandoned or had Sunni IDPs moving into the area. By searching abandoned homes for explosives and engaging local religious leaders, Wilhite"s troops kept a pretty good pulse on the situation. For the most part, except for some questionable emba.s.sy areas that were off-limits, things remained quiet. Typical insurgent tactics remained ineffective-they used "soda pop" IEDs (which had little or no effect against U.S. vehicles) and murdered government officials to little avail. "Our biggest worry," Wilhite told me, "was that AQI would attempt to turn the area into a mini Amriya and Jamia." This was doubtful, however. By that time most AQI fighters had fled from Baghdad because of pressure in those areas. Winter was very quiet. In the spring insurgents regrouped and began using different tactics. The standard IEDs became slightly larger and targeted only the Iraqi army, not U.S. forces. Insurgents began intimidating new markets that were popping up in the area by creating a diversion (usually an argument), leaving behind a satchel on time delay, and blowing up a store. They also began using stationary VBIEDs to target pa.s.sing convoys and busy market areas.
In light of the shifting tactics, Wilhite said the Sons of Iraq provided vital intelligence. A few found out information about Al Qaeda cell meetings and even possible attacks in the area. "As you can guess," Wilhite said, "Salim had a personal stake in running these guys down. Some informants led us to higher-level folks." But, he said, he had been barred from discussing the details of these cases. AQI"s most effective attack targeted one of Wilhite"s dismounted patrols at a marketplace in southeastern Mutanabi. It was a suicide attack-the first and only time this method was used in the area.
Expulsion, displacement, and intimidation had been rampant before the JSS was built, but AQI"s ability to dump bodies and intimidate the populace decreased as U.S. forces established themselves in the area. Wilhite said they monitored the return of many families through the neighborhood council in the winter and spring of 2008, as conditions improved. The process for expulsion and displacement was fairly simple. Families were made to pay protection and rent to the Mahdi Army. If they didn"t pay, they were evicted, and if they didn"t leave, they were killed. Additionally, the Mahdi Army controlled propane, heating gas, and fuel in and around the mahala by forming a monopoly on the services provided to the populace. Local Shiite government complacency and corruption enabled this to occur.
Wilhite said he would characterize the Washash tribal leaders as Sadrists, or "White JAM." They had full knowledge of the killings that occurred in 2006 and 2007 but did not act on this knowledge for fear of their own lives and well-being. During his tenure in eastern Mansour, Wilhite said, he always considered the Washash sheikhs" council fairly useless and ineffective. "When they showed up at the neighborhood council meetings it was, "I want," "We need," "Give me this," "We are important," "No, there is no JAM in Washash," "No, I will not commit to anything," "Tell Americans to stop coming into Washash." Pretty frustrating." U.S. forces eliminated the Mahdi Army"s influence by putting the pressure on early. They were a.s.sisted in this effort by the a.s.sa.s.sination of Mahdi Army militiaman Hamudi Naji, and by other counter-measures such as the construction of the wall to restrict movement, the establishment of Sons of Iraq to the south to prevent further expansion into Mansour, and the IA"s desire to patrol the area. Hakami"s indecision also helped-most reports showed him growing paranoid over not wanting to end up like Naji. "In the end," Wilhite said, "I think JAM was dissolving when we left, not necessarily directly because of our actions but also because of the situation."
Wilhite explained that he erected the walls around Washash in order to isolate the neighborhood and the Mahdi Army there from the rest of the population, and to prevent them from moving south. "We occasionally told Washash folks that the walls were to keep Al Qaeda out. Usually, we pushed this information campaign when AQI would detonate a car bomb in a Shia neighborhood. We told the people, "See, the walls keep you safe!" We would say, "There are only two ways in, and the IA will not let a car bomb through the checkpoints. "" Concrete was the order of the day during that time; walls went up around Khadra, part of Jamia, and Amriya. "If I was a cement contractor," Wilhite said, "I"d be rich." He ended up using concrete in Iskan, Dur Sud, Arabi, and part of Mutanabi as well. Wilhite felt that the walls were effective. Some Washash businessmen complained about losing customers, but he viewed this complaint skeptically. Iskan, Arabi, and Dur Sud all had cheaper prices and, Wilhite said, better products than Washash in the first place. He asked around about where folks went for food in the areas adjacent to Washash Market area.
Hamudi Naji had owned "Black JAM," and it owned Washash, Wilhite reported. Naji"s men had their hands in everything. They had systematically taken over almost every Sunni home in Washash and rented it out to a Shiite family. Sunnis were given three options: pay an exorbitant amount of protection money and live there until Naji"s men told you to leave; leave in the next twenty-four hours to avoid being killed; or lose your house and your life immediately. Wilhite"s troops later found Sunni families murdered and buried in their backyards in different states of decomposition.
Naji"s group patrolled Washash much like a mafia gang. They had lookouts, and when the Americans would come on patrols or late-night raids, they used their own observation posts to describe the activity. When Wilhite"s group got too close, Naji"s group would often attempt to distract them with runners, gunfire, or distant explosions. Wilhite said his initial strategy was to stop focusing on Naji the individual (the agent of terror, the small-time warlord) and more on his apparatus (the organization itself). All intelligence always pointed to Naji, and Wilhite saw this as a liability. However, applying Petraeus"s COIN strategy to Dur Sud seemed new and made a lot of sense.
In Washash, numerous raids had failed to capture Naji. Wilhite wanted to weaken Naji"s network instead of constantly trying to catch the one guy who would supposedly make everyone"s problems go away. He attempted to identify all the unknown midlevel managers taking orders-weapons traffickers, IED makers, financial supporters, shift managers (including sergeants of the guard)-and used a JSS hot line to get information from Iraqis. Wilhite said his troop would sometimes take informants out with them and conduct raids to get information about a Naji-led killing. For the most part, they were successful.
"I remember," Wilhite said, "after a raid, an old man even gave us a big smile and a thumbs-up sign. I felt we were starting to gain momentum because the population of Washash saw us pulling these guys off the streets." Whenever possible, they also tried to bring the Iraqi army out with them too, though initially "buy-in" was difficult. Then, on the night of September 20, Naji was killed on the streets of Washash and all h.e.l.l broke loose. Immediately, there were a few retribution killings of Sunnis. Elements of Wilhite"s Red Platoon drove headlong into a firefight while attempting to gather information on what had transpired. The next three days were "days of madness," he recalls.
The Iraqi army moved three companies into the area and left them there to keep the peace. Those loyal to Naji wanted to kill and provoke every Sunni left in Washash and everyone connected to them. Several Sunni families piled everything they could carry and attempted to leave the first day. "I remember on the third day JAM attempted to intimidate anyone from leaving the area by detonating an IED on a group of males trying to leave the mahala," Wilhite said grimly. "For the next eight days, we patrolled Washash heavily until a b