Hazim recalled the worst phases of the civil war: "People couldn"t go out of their houses. When Al Qaeda was strong, Shiites couldn"t go out on the street. Then the Shiites got strong, and Sunnis couldn"t go out on the street." But all that was now in the past. Iraqi and American forces had arrested members of armed groups in the town during Operation Fard al-Qanun (Rule of Law), the Iraqi name for what Americans called the surge. "The state is strong here now," Hazim told me. "The government is strong. You can"t even fire a shot in the air now; the police will come in two minutes."
A year earlier Ali Zahawi, Iskandariya"s chief of police, made an interesting observation to me. "Iskandariya is a small Iraq," he said. "It connects south to north. It went through very hard times: Al Qaeda was the first phase; then militias who did the same thing as Al Qaeda, killing and displacement; and the third stage was operation Imposing Law [The Surge]." Now he warned of a fourth stage in the battle. Al Qaeda and Mahdi Army men, he said, were falsely implicating their enemies to the courts and getting them arrested.
There were still active militias in Iraq, and the level of violence would be unacceptable almost anywhere else on earth. But the fears frequently voiced by foreign a.n.a.lysts and reporters-that the civil war was merely in abeyance, and that sectarian fury could break out again at any moment after a series of deadly attacks or an unfavorable election result-were overblown. The threat of civil war no longer seemed to loom; the country was decidedly not "unraveling," as many continued to suggest. Armed militias had not been eliminated, but they had been emasculated: they carried out a.s.sa.s.sinations with silenced pistols and magnetic car bombs, but they were no match for the Iraqi Security Forces, which had shed their reputation as sectarian death squads and appeared to have earned the support of much of the public. Apart from the occasional suicide bombing, Iraqi civilians were no longer targeted at random-and even the more spectacular attacks had little to no strategic impact.
As worldwide attention returned to Iraq in the run-up to the March 7 elections, a new chorus of concerns emerged. Many worried that the corrupt maneuvering of some Shiite parties-which banned prominent nationalist and secularist candidates under the thin pretense of de-Baathification-would lead to a Sunni boycott and then renewed sectarian violence and war. But just as the dismantling of the Sunni Awakening groups in 2009 failed to produce the disaster many a.n.a.lysts predicted, the results of the elections seemed unlikely to stoke the embers of a new insurgency.
The continued sectarian exhortations of Iraqi politicians were met with cynicism by the public, whose support for religious parties had diminished considerably. Iraqis were still "sectarian" to a degree: most Shiites preferred the company of Shiites and Sunnis the company of Sunnis. The vitriol and hatred of the war had faded, but a legacy of bitterness and suspicion remained. Gone was the fear of the other-and it was this fear that led to the rise of the militias and sectarian religious parties.
A year later, during my travels in Iraq that February-in the capital and, more important, in the surrounding provinces of Diyala, Babil, and Salahuddin-I found Sunnis and Shiites alike talking of the civil war as if it were a painful memory from the distant past. Just as the residents of Northern Ireland refer obliquely to "the Troubles," Iraqis spoke of "the Events" or "the Sectarianism"-as in, "My brother was killed in the Sectarianism." Uneducated Iraqis might even say, "When the Sunni and Shiite happened."
The looming election-signposted in the foreign media as a critical "turning point" liable to wreck the fragile gains of the previous two years-seemed to be of little interest to most Iraqis, who were disenchanted with the pitiful performance of their political leaders and the tired rhetoric of sectarian religious parties.
In Shuwafa, a Shiite village alongside a ca.n.a.l west of Iskandariya, I met a schoolteacher named Akil, who had led a Shiite Awakening group that battled Al Qaeda after the ethnic cleansing of the village in 2006. He and his men had laid down their weapons the year before-after a portion of their salaries had been siphoned off by official corruption-but he said the security situation had improved dramatically. "The Awakening is over," he told me. "The Iraqi army is here, with two Hummers, so we feel safe. And nearby there is an army base." Akil had returned to teaching biology to children.
Like many Iraqis, Akil seemed indifferent to the approaching elections. "People don"t like the religious parties anymore," he said. Many believed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, head of the religious Shiite Dawa Party, had transcended his sectarian affiliation. "He is not considered to be from a religious party anymore," Akil said.
Reconstruction proceeded haltingly in Shuwafa: fifty families of the hundreds who had fled to Karbala to escape Al Qaeda had returned, but few had the funds to rebuild their homes or repair their farms. In the nearby village of Malha, where well-fed sheep were grazing on dark green gra.s.s around the rubble of destroyed houses, the situation was much the same. Only two homes were being rebuilt, and the majority of the village"s residents had not yet returned. Those who came back survived by working in a local Shiite Awakening group-earning only two hundred dollars a month, barely enough to replace a single one of the hundreds of sheep that had been killed or stolen by Sunni insurgents when they fled. The lives of Iraq"s millions of internal refugees remained bleak, and the country"s humanitarian crisis was grave. But the restoration of some semblance of security had bolstered the authority of the state and the prime minister. "The Awakening, the Americans, the Iraqi army, and the tribes made it safer here," one man in Malha told me. "Everybody here is with Maliki."
In the town of Shat al-Taji, northwest of Baghdad, I drove past orange groves, palm trees, and boys in school uniforms walking home on the side of the road alongside schoolgirls wearing pink backpacks and holding hands. The majority-Sunni town, which stretches along the Tigris River, had been the site of brutal conflict in the civil war. I walked along the banks with Abu Taisir, a small man with a pistol tucked into the side of his trousers who was the deputy head of the local Awakening group. "Al Qaeda used to behead people and dump them in the river right there," he said, pointing over the tall reeds to a spot on the sh.o.r.e.
Abu Taisir took me to meet Abdulrahman Ismail, a Shiite neighbor who was displaced from Shat al-Taji in October 2006 but had since returned home. After a series of death threats-and the murder of four of his cousins, who were beheaded and tossed in the river-"we feared for our children and went to Kut," Ismail said. But after security improved in the town, he continued, the Awakening men contacted the displaced Shiite families to tell them it was safe to return. Ismail found that his home had been taken over by an Al Qaeda man who was later killed; his family"s belongings and livestock had been stolen. "We feel safe now," he said, "but we still feel a little scared."
Abu Taisir"s outfit had arrested eighty-five Al Qaeda suspects, he told me; ten of his men had been killed in the fighting. Abu Taisir himself had been shot twice, most recently in November. Some of the Al Qaeda men were still in town, he said, but they hadn"t been arrested because n.o.body would testify against them. "They have roots here like us," Abu Taisir said. Both men agreed that there was a new balance of power in the town-the remnants of the insurgency were overwhelmed by the Awakening men and the Iraqi Security Forces. "Now if we call the police, they come," Abu Taisir said.
He had commanded 360 men, but only eighty-two were offered jobs in the government, and low-ranking ones at that. Many felt betrayed. "We"re fighters," he said. "We brought peace to this area, we fought Al Qaeda. Now we are janitors?"
The failure to integrate the Awakening men into government security forces had been widespread, and many feared the consequences of the continuing disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt of Iraq"s Sunnis. But they had been disenfranchised since 2003, in part thanks to their own miscalculations. Iraq"s new order was dominated by Shiites, and that was not easily undone: the government was soundly in Shiite hands; the only question with regard to the upcoming elections, then, was whether it would remain in Maliki"s comparatively reliable hands or pa.s.s into those of his more divisive and inflammatory Shiite rivals. At the time of my visit to Shat al-Taji, the de-Baathification committee had just banned the leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, from the elections. Outside observers worried that excluding him could agitate Sunnis, but his removal was met with barely a whimper; even other Sunni politicians failed to unite to support him. "People here are upset about Saleh al-Mutlaq," Abu Taisir said, "but they saw from the last elections that the people they voted for weren"t sincere, so they don"t care for politics." The other Awakening men we met had been impressed by Maliki; he was an effective strongman. "We want secular people, nationalist, not religious parties," Abu Taisir averred.
In Baghdad a few days later, I saw Omar al-Juburi, a leading Sunni member of Parliament and a former adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. He was now living in a gaudy mansion in the Yarmuk district. I first met Juburi in 2006, when he presented me with detailed files demonstrating that Sunnis had been killed by Shiite death squads and Iraqi police. Since then, he said, "the minister of interior has expelled sixty thousand bad policemen; today the police is better than the army." The Sunni presence in Iraq was now stable. "The storm has pa.s.sed," he said. But there were 2.4 million unemployed Iraqis, he warned, and no job opportunities.
Compared with their actions during the early years of the occupation, Iraq"s Sunnis seemed downright docile. A little angry, yes, and bitter and wistful, but there was no fuel for a return to the fighting, and the Sunni community lacked even a single charismatic political figure with real appeal. In Baghdad I went to the Ghazaliya neighborhood to visit the Um Al Qura Mosque. This was once the most significant "proresistance" mosque in the city; the neo-Baathist a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars used to broadcast calls to jihad against the Americans from its loudspeakers. Now it was a ma.s.sive construction site, with housing complexes, hotels, and party halls being built. Plastic trees with lights lined the stone path leading to the mosque. Sunnis who had been killed by Shiite death squads used to be brought there; now a senior sheikh was showing me the numerous certificates of appreciation that American forces had bestowed on him. He did continue to insist, however, that Sunnis were really the majority in Iraq, while two of his bodyguards complained loudly that Saddam was a better leader than Maliki. I thought, It"s no surprise that some Shiites still think all Sunnis are Baathists.
I had been hoping to meet Abu Omar, the Awakening leader in Adhamiya. Just a year earlier, he and I had been drinking tea together in the main square, but he was now keeping a low profile, and he sent his son to meet me at the tea house. His son and I walked down the main street for a few minutes, then turned left into an alley with short, bullet-ridden buildings that had shops on the bottom floors. Abu Omar was standing at the bottom of a stairwell, still wearing the same brown tracksuit as last year, with a pistol holster strapped around his shoulder. We sat on a nearby bench and had sweet Iraqi tea. Abu Omar lamented the loss of his American patron, who had been protective of him. He now lived anxiously, looking over his shoulder, worried about revenge attacks from Al Qaeda or arrest from the Iraqi Security Forces. His Awakening men had been granted the most menial and demeaning jobs-they were the cleaning staff in government offices-so many had quit.
Three days before my visit to Adhamiya, Saleh al Mutlaq"s local office had been bombed. "This is because the Awakening is less," Abu Omar told me; it was not able to control the street. He recommended I visit Adhamiya"s Kam neighborhood but explained it was too dangerous for him to go there with me. In Kam I found an entire building taken over by squatters. The displaced families had been a.s.signed apartments by members of the resistance and Awakening.
One woman, called Kifah Hadi Majid, had been expelled from Haifa Street by the Mahdi Army after they killed her son three years earlier. Her son Mutlab, who wore an Iraqi army uniform, was in the local Awakening group. A gang had killed his wife for jewelry. "The Awakening were given jobs with the Baghdad sanitation, and we fought the terrorists," he said. "It was better before. We controlled the street. n.o.body could talk to us-not the army, n.o.body. We communicated directly with the Americans. Now n.o.body respects us, and payment is a problem." They hadn"t been paid in fifty-eight days.
I told an Iraqi army intelligence officer that Awakening men were complaining about the lousy jobs they were given. "What education do the Awakening men have?" he asked. "If you don"t have an education, of course you will be a cleaner." He had arrested three Awakening men whom the army had warrants against for working with Al Qaeda. He didn"t think Abu Omar was a bad man, he told me, just corrupt.
In Washash Abu Karar was still in charge of the tribal council. But one of its members, Sheikh Amer Asaedi, had fled the area after someone blew up his car. I met up again with Abu Karar"s cousins Ha.s.san and Fadhil Abdel Karim, who helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army in Washash. They told me their nemesis, Ihab al-Tawil, had recently been released from prison. A few months before I met them, their brother Ali was shot and killed in his home nearby, his wife wounded. Ali"s killers came around 7 p.m. and announced, "We are the Mahdi Army!" The children, who saw their parents shot in front of them, were still in shock.
"We became victims," Ha.s.san told me. "We get threatening calls warning us we will be killed." I asked him why he didn"t leave. "If we leave, then the whole neighborhood will leave," he said. "We cleaned the mosques that militias used, we made Sunnis pray together with Shiites. Now I can"t go out. I stay home in my brother"s house in the back room."
Friday prayers were less important, no longer a symbol of defiance. How could Sadrists defy the state when they were represented so well in ministries and Parliament? How could they be anti-establishment when they were part of the establishment? Friday prayers at the main Sadrist office in Sadr City were tamer than I had ever seen; the only hint of politics was a prayer for the release of prisoners. In Ur I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya, once a Mahdi Army hub. "People don"t come here anymore," said the young man who guarded it. "They are scared since all the arrests." Abul Ha.s.san, the Mustafa Husseiniya"s former caretaker, who had been my guide in the area, was still in prison, and his a.s.sistant Haidar had absconded. Sheikh Safaa, its former Imam, was still safe in Qom, Iran.
In Amriya I visited Um Omar"s NGO again. Several days earlier Sheikh Muhamad, of the nearby Ha.s.sanein Mosque-with whom Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile claimed he had worked closely-had been killed. "He was our friend," she told me. "The killers were teenagers." Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque and his old friend Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque had absconded, fearing both the government and Al Qaeda. Thirty-five Sunni sheikhs had been killed in Baghdad in the past month. "Al Qaeda is killing all the sheikhs who stood against them," she said. Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid of the Amriya Council-who was seen by both Gentile and his successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, as a decisive figure in defeating Al Qaeda in the area-had been jailed in October of 2009. He was accused of terrorism, a deliberately vague charge, but he was said to have had a role in bombings against Shiite areas in 2006. He was also alleged to have belonged to the Islamic Army of Iraq.
Most local Awakening leaders were either dead or arrested, Um Omar said, and the Awakening was now very weak. Abul Abed"s successor, Muhamad, had survived several a.s.sa.s.sination attempts. "The Awakening project was a lie, an American lie," she said. "They said, "Come in, throw your weapons, join the Awakening, fight Al Qaeda," to discover the ident.i.ty of the resistance." The Americans came around now only when there was an arrest to be made.
Six days before my visit, all of Amriya had been closed off as American and Iraqi Special Forces raided the area. Three local children were kidnapped for ransom. There were also a.s.sa.s.sinations with silencers. Um Omar"s brother-in-law had been killed in 2009; he had been head of the Amriya Neighborhood Advisory Council.
Sheikh Khalid was a bad man, Um Omar insisted; he used to provide the fatwas for Abul Abed to kill people, and he had his own court for killing people. Sheikh Walid was like Sheikh Khalid too. But Sheikh Hussein was good, she said; he never killed people.
"In the time of displacement," as she called it, five thousand families fled to Amriya, while 1,800 families fled from Amriya. Since violence had subsided, 559 families had returned. But ten months earlier the returning Iraqis had stopped coming because of intimidation. In January a bomb was placed under one Shiite returnee"s car. Most returnees were Shiites, but only about one-third of them returned to stay. The rest sold their homes.
Al Qaeda men in Abu Ghraib had recently threatened Um Omar"s local office there, accusing it of being a "Jewish organization." Um Omar was forced to close her local school as well as her vocational training for women in tailoring. A year earlier she had gone to Abu Ghraib with her husband and some engineers. She called the resistance and told them she was coming, but as soon as she arrived armed men with masks put guns to their heads. She started shouting at them angrily, "I"m Um Omar!" and her husband told her to relax. They were taken to a destroyed house in a remote area, separated, and interrogated. She was accused of being Shiite. The men from the resistance made phone calls and then released the couple once they established their ident.i.ty and apologized to the mayor.
Um Omar still had 225 needy children in her school, and she also ran a successful program finding husbands for the many widows while continuing to a.s.sist IDPs. Amriya was now so crowded that displaced families would share houses. Government schools had more than sixty children in each cla.s.s. I met Um Ala, who was displaced from the Jihad district. Um Omar had found a widow to marry one of Um Ala"s sons. Her family fled to Amriya with three others, and now they shared a house. Um Ala"s husband was "killed in the sectarianism," she told me, and her sister was also a widow. They had owned their house in Jihad but were too scared to go back. Now a Shiite family lived in it and paid a nominal rent. In Amriya one of her sons and a nephew had been killed by Al Qaeda. "Things can"t go back to how they were before," her son said about Iraq. "There was blood, vengeance." They heard a Sunni from the Mashhadani tribe was killed after he tried to return to Hurriya. "Every Sunni who returns to a Shiite area and gets killed," her son said, "they say he was a terrorist or Baathist." I asked if the relations between Sunnis and Shiites could ever go back to the way they were. "Impossible," they all said. "Every displaced person says it"s impossible," Um Omar said with disapproval. "I don"t think it"s impossible."
After listening to thousands of traumatized Iraqis, I had become inured to the stories of heartbreak that I had heard. But when Um Omar took me to Amriya"s squatter settlement, on a sandy lot on the outskirts of the neighborhood, it was as if I was twenty-five years old again and taking my first footsteps in Iraq.
Behind the squatter settlement, a large wall divided Amriya from an American military base. Guard posts with tinted windows and rotating sensors towered above the shacks. Most of the squatter families here were from Amil, and as we explored the settlement Um Omar was visibly uncomfortable and warned me not to speak English. She worried about Al Qaeda supporters among the displaced who came in, she said, and tricked poor people who wanted to be mujahideen. Sixty-eight families lived in makeshift shacks, and in one of them I found a middle-aged woman sitting alone in a cold room, bare except for a mattress Um Omar had provided. She had rented a home with her daughters in the Amil district. "When the Sunni and Shiite started," she said, Shiite militiamen told her to leave or they would take her daughters. She started crying as she told me this, and I was suddenly reminded of my mother, whom she resembled, and I got tearful. As I left, I tried to fix the corrugated iron shield that was protecting her hovel from the cold, howling wind, but the wind kept knocking it down.
"THE SITUATION CANNOT go back to how it was," said Captain Salim, the Iraqi army intelligence officer I had known in Washash. "We have a strong government; you can use the law." I had joined him and his Sunni lieutenant for lunch at their base in Baghdad-a Saddam-era palace in Adhamiya. Both men insisted that the era of sectarian division within the armed forces and the police was over. "The army was not built on a sectarian basis," the captain said. "It was built by the Americans to serve Iraqis, and it was strong in the fight against Al Qaeda and against the Mahdi Army."
The Mahdi Army was finished now, Salim continued, though it was still killing Iraqi army officers in a campaign of targeted a.s.sa.s.sinations; more than five officers who had taken part in the operation to crush the Mahdi Army in Sadr City had been killed in Baghdad in the past two months. In the past, they said, armed groups could easily attack police and army checkpoints; they had the firepower and the quiet support of the civilian population. "Before people would say that they didn"t see anything after an attack," the Sunni lieutenant said. "Now they call us before anything happens." Anonymous tips, he added, were leading to numerous arrests. "We can"t work without the people"s help, and the calls help a lot."
Salim told me that he had detained "bad" Awakening leaders and that he was waiting until after the elections to arrest even more, in order to avoid any destabilizing effects. His main challenge was obtaining arrest warrants. "The judge asks for more evidence," he said. "The prisons are full of innocent people, so they want more evidence. They don"t want random arrests like in the past." Though Salim had once feared his police counterparts for their a.s.sociations with Shiite militias, now, he said, the police were good, and Iraqi Security Forces were continuing to arrest Mahdi Army men.
Neither man thought it possible that the civil war could resume. "The people understand now," Salim said. "Before Shiites loved the Mahdi Army, but the Mahdi Army worked for its own interests, for the interests of Iran. The Sunnis supported Al Qaeda because they didn"t trust the government, but then the Awakenings were established." In the army, they said, most officers supported Maliki or the secular former Baathist Ayad Allawi-and Salim said he worried only about the Shiite Alliance leader, former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, whom many blamed for the intensification of the civil war that occurred under his watch. "Only he can bring sectarianism back," Salim said.
Salim was confident the Americans would not leave Iraq because of their conflict with Iran and because of their continued support and training of the Iraqi army. Although the Americans had saved the Iraqi Security Forces from humiliation during the battles with Shiite militias in 2008, "Now we have engineers, intelligence, armor, 120-millimeter mortars, helicopters, good logistics," he boasted.
I asked if the army was stronger now than it was before the overthrow of Saddam. As a fighting force it was, he said, "but before, when you fought, you had trust that the government had your back. Now, you don"t know. If Sadrists win the elections, they will find a way to fire us. The army has no relation with the government. We weren"t Saddam"s army either."
Ironically, for all Salim"s talk about the improving security situation and the strength of the state, like many of his colleagues, he had moved his family to Suleimaniya, a Kurdish city in the north, for safekeeping. The Iraqi Security Forces were more confident and less sectarian, it seemed, but still vulnerable. Having their wives up north also freed the men to attend parties with liquor and prost.i.tutes, called gaada.
After lunch Salim invited me to join him for shooting practice-which I did. He also invited me to join him and other officers for a gaada-which I did not. We descended to their shooting range by the river. Saddam"s initials were etched in the tiles on the walls. Some of his men were shooting fish in the river with shotguns. I observed that Salim had lost weight since I had last seen him. He smiled and told me that he had stopped eating rice and started running. Salim gave me his American M4, which had a laser scope. I went through several magazines firing it.
In Diyala, a majority-Sunni province northeast of Baghdad, I met with Dhari Muhamad Abed, head of the government"s Returnee a.s.sistance Center. "Now sectarianism is completely over," he said. "Security is good." Indeed, as we drove through villages in Diyala where numerous atrocities had taken place, we found that Iraqi police and soldiers were pervasive, as was the case almost everywhere I traveled in Iraq, no matter how rural or remote. The security forces were no longer hiding their ident.i.ties to avoid being killed by Al Qaeda, and they were no longer acting as death squads, though arbitrary detention of suspects remains the norm. Human rights abuses persist in Iraq, but they can no longer be described as sectarian; the state has achieved security in part by returning to its authoritarian roots.
More than thirty-seven thousand families had been displaced in Diyala-about 25 percent of the province"s total population-and eighty-five villages were destroyed during the civil war. Only one-third of the refugees have returned. With the end of the civil war and the establishment of a security infrastructure, the refugee crisis remains Iraq"s most serious issue. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are homeless and landless, squatting on government property. A senior United Nations official put the figure at half a million, calling it "an acute humanitarian crisis."
In Baquba, the provincial capital, seven hundred Sunni families are squatting at Saad camp, on the grounds of an army base on the outskirts of the city. They were driven from their homes shortly after the American invasion in 2003 by Kurdish militias eager to seize territory in the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam.
I asked one man if he would like to return to his home. "Who will protect us if we go back?" he asked. The police regularly raided their camp, arresting men and telling the people they would have to leave. "Where will we go?" one old man asked me.
Similar scenes can be found across the country. In the Abu Dshir district of Baghdad, an immense and sprawling squatter camp houses thousands of Shiites who fled rural areas around the capital; they live in tents and makeshift shelters built from sc.r.a.p metal and mud. The enormous Sadrein camp, in Baghdad"s Sadr City, contains more than 1,500 families, who live on a rubbish dump with the choking stench of sewage clotting the air. Most of the men I met were unemployed. Children played in mountains of rubbish. Like most poor Iraqis, the squatters depended on the state rations, known as the Public Distribution System, for survival. "If they decide to remove the squatters, there will be an uprising and chaos," said the leader of one compound in Hurriya where hundreds of families were living. "No one can remove the squatters," Captain Salim told me. "We have to solve the problem first, give them land. The government only builds housing for its workers, not the poor citizens."
SUNNIS LARGELY did not take part in the January 2005 parliamentary elections. They voted in the October 2005 const.i.tutional referendum but resoundingly opposed the majority"s support for the Const.i.tution. The December 2005 parliamentary elections enshrined the new sectarian order and empowered a Shiite-dominated government, leading to the civil war.
But the January 2009 provincial election results showed that Iraqis were tiring of the overtly sectarian parties: they repudiated inc.u.mbents throughout the country, punishing them for their failure to perform. The results signaled that the civil war was over. People felt secure enough to look for new representatives and to begin to demand the provision of services and proper governance. The January 2009 votes by Arab and other non-Kurdish Iraqis were in favor of a strong centralized government that was not openly sectarian. In 2009 explicitly sectarian and religious parties were rejected, but Shiites still voted for Shiite parties and Sunnis voted for Sunni parties, and it seemed Iraq"s elections had crystallized internal differences, entrenching sectarianism.
Between August 2009 and January 2010 Baghdad suffered four major coordinated terrorist attacks. The August 2009 bombings were spectacular and devastating. At the foreign ministry three hundred people were killed or wounded from a local staff of five hundred. Maliki blamed Syria and created a diplomatic scandal. Iran offered to intervene and act as intermediary, but Iraq chose Turkey as the intermediary instead. The Iraqi government failed to convince anybody that Syria had played a role, but the effort was seen as an example of the government strategy of deliberately picking fights with neighbors. Despite these violent attacks, the political arena was the main front for disputes. And despite the sectarian compet.i.tion for power, there were other divides and cross-sectarian alliances, especially in Parliament.
Maliki, for instance, had a particularly acrimonious relationship with the Parliament, which was the strongest one in Iraqi history, able to check the power of the executive. In 2009 Parliament charged Abdul Falah al-Sudani, the trade minister, who came from Maliki"s Dawa Party, with corruption. The Integrity Committee subjected him to fierce questioning, which was broadcast on television. Interestingly, the head of the Integrity Committee was from the Shiite Fadhila Party, which showed that politics in Iraq didn"t necessarily rotate on a Shiite-Sunni axis. Parliament also cut funding for Maliki"s Tribal Support Councils.
Maliki"s Dawa was still an elitist party without gra.s.sroots support and with no ability to mobilize the street. Despite relative improvements in security, Maliki had failed to deliver notable improvements in services. In both the 2009 and 2010 elections, Iran tried and failed to unite Maliki with the Sadrists and the Supreme Council, but Maliki spurned them because with them he had no guarantee of occupying the prime minister"s position. Maliki tried and failed to reach a nonsectarian alliance with Allawi and Mutlaq in the months leading up to the 2010 elections.
The Supreme Council included more women on its list, even unveiled ones. The parties were forced to mature; even the sectarian ones turned to technocrats as candidates. They were responding to pressure from the 2009 elections, when sect and religion were discredited as sufficient to win elections.
In 2008 a new de-Baathification law was pa.s.sed-this time by the Iraqis-and a new commission was supposed to be established, with new staff and new rules. But this never happened, and the same people who were appointed by Paul Bremer"s CPA in 2003 remained in control-including the director, Ali al-Lami (whose origins were exposed in Chapter Two), and the postwar Sadrists from Ur, who allied with the ubiquitous chairman of the committee, Ahmad Chalabi.
The de-Baathification Committee, now renamed the Accountability and Justice Commission, announced in January 2010 that it was banning 511 candidates from the elections for being former Baathists. The Independent High Electoral Commission approved the decision, as did Maliki. Curiously, Accountability and Justice Commission leaders such as Lami and Chalabi were candidates in the March elections as well. The timing made it clear that the committee was politicized, as did the ma.s.sive list of candidates who were banned.
While many of the banned candidates were secular Shiites, the best known were Sunnis, and it was the nonsectarian parties that suffered the most from the decision. Candidates with a Sunni base were especially targeted, regardless of whether they were Sunni or Shiite. In Iraq secular Arab nationalism is often wrongly identified by sectarian Shiites to be Sunni and Baathist. The ban was also a great way for the weakened religious Shiite parties to eliminate their rivals. Mutlaq was the most prominent victim, but even Abdel Qader al-Obeidi, the defense minister and an ally of Maliki who was running on his list, was targeted.
Gen. Ray Odierno, the American commander in Iraq, as well as Christopher Hill, the American amba.s.sador, played on Iraqi fears by accusing Lami and Chalabi of working on behalf of Iran, hoping to ruin Chalabi"s long ambition of becoming prime minister. As the Americans" former anointed one, Chalabi had better access to them than any other Iraqi in 2003 and 2004, and he benefited from them more than any other politician. According to a CIA source, he certainly would have had secrets to sell. But even Chalabi was not a proxy or tool; it was possible to be a sectarian Shiite actor in Iraq without being controlled by the Iranians. Iran had p.a.w.ns in Iraq but not proxies. It had groups who were poor and desperate but did not willingly do Iran"s bidding. Even then the Supreme Council hated Iran. Its members remembered the humiliation of being looked down upon by Iranians for being Arabs. When they were in Iran all the Supreme Council men wanted was to get out of Iran. If the so-called pro-Iranian groups took power they would not need Iranian support. They would have access to their own resources and power. As long as the Americans were in Iraq then Iran had an existential interest in undermining American efforts. The rise of Turkey as a regional actor with influence and popularity among Arabs counterbalanced both Iran and Saudi Arabia, creating a third pole. The Turks wanted to turn the Kurdish regional government in the north into a Turkish va.s.sal state. Meanwhile the Turkish amba.s.sador in Baghdad was so active internally that he was called in to the foreign ministry twice for them to issue formal complaints about his meddling.
Prime Minister Maliki had cultivated an image as a nationalist with a petrostate agenda: a powerful leader spreading Iraq"s oil wealth. He had even flirted with ex-Baathist Sunni candidates in the past. The de-Baathification moves by Chalabi and his allies were designed to force Maliki back into the sectarian camp. If he supported the decision, he would lose support among Sunnis and nonsectarian Shiites. But if he opposed it, he would lose support among many Shiites.
Maliki"s candidate in Diyala, Muhammad Salman, explained that Maliki still had his base of Shiite voters and that he could not reach out to or defend ex-Baathists like Mutlaq at their expense, lest he lose Shiite voters. Because of this Maliki quickly backed the de-Baathification move, even though his ally Defense Minister Obeidi was on the list. With false rumors of a Baathist coup and the recent bombings, the environment was ripe for targeting opponents under the pretext of anti-Baathism. The campaign took a sectarian turn thanks to the de-Baathification crisis. Anti-Sunnism masqueraded as anti-Baathism, with gruesome posters of ma.s.s graves and different Iraqi TV stations, each controlled by a political party, showing videos of Baathist torture and executions. Former Prime Minister Jaafari warned on his posters that he would not give s.p.a.ce for the return of the Baathists.
President Jalal Talabani condemned the ban and questioned the committee"s legal existence. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden rushed to Baghdad to try to pressure the Iraqi government to resolve the crisis, with the support of the European Union and the United Nations. But the Americans had lost their leverage, as they often said starting in 2009, when Maliki grew more confident of his ability to survive without them. The appeals committee decided that there wasn"t enough time before the election to review the appeals, so it postponed decisions about them until after the elections-meaning candidates who won could still be banned after the fact.
Then Maliki made the appeals committee overturn its decision to delay matters and review some of the candidates immediately. Two dozen decisions were reversed, including the one banning Obeidi but importantly not the one banning Mutlaq. The election commission then approved all this maneuvering. Allawi, in turn, threatened to boycott the elections, and Mutlaq initially called for one (though he later changed his mind, probably because he would have been ignored anyway). Meanwhile, beyond the Green Zone, candidates throughout Iraq were being intimidated and blown up, including allies of Maliki, who may have been targeted by the Mahdi Army.
Since the beginning of the Iraq War, American planners and observers had been preoccupied with the consequences of decisive singular events-from the arrest of Saddam Hussein to the battle for Falluja and the previous rounds of national and provincial elections. At each easily identifiable juncture, exaggerated claims were advanced by those in search of a turning point, whether for the better or for the worse.
The elections of March 7 were the first to be held in a formally sovereign Iraq, and they did represent a milestone in the country"s political evolution. Maliki remained a popular candidate, supported by Iraqis for having crushed both Sunni and Shiite armed groups, but his list came a close second to Allawi"s Iraqiya list, which was a surprise after his dismal performance in 2005. Even though Allawi is a Shiite, he was a secular candidate par excellence, capturing the Sunni vote and a sizable Shiite vote, signaling that many Iraqi voters were craving the secular nationalism of old. But it also signaled that the Saudi-Iranian compet.i.tion in the region dominated Iraqi politics just as it did in Lebanon and even Palestine. Allawi could not have achieved his victory without the tremendous backing of Saudis, financially and in the media.
But regardless of the outcome-Maliki contested but could not overturn the vote count-the elections would not precipitate a return to the civil war. The state was too strong, and there was no longer a security vacuum. The security forces took their work seriously-perhaps too seriously. The sectarian militias had been beaten and marginalized, and the Sunnis had accepted their loss in the civil war. But in the United States, there was considerable trepidation about the election result, and suspicions of Iranian influence still clung to Maliki-an echo of the tendentious Sunni notion that an Arab cannot have a strong Shiite ident.i.ty without being pro-Iranian. In the elections Maliki was the most popular individual candidate, with Allawi a distant second. Maliki wanted a coup but it would not succeed. Most Shiite parties and candidates did not want Maliki to be prime minister. The debate in Baghdad political circles is how to get rid of Maliki. But Allawi could not form a coalition. Regardless of who became prime minister, Iraq would become increasingly authoritarian. Oil revenues will not kick in for several years so there will not be an immediate improvement in services. Even when revenues reach Iraqi coffers, they will have to initially go to cover the infrastructure costs. The fact that the government cannot provide better services means it will have to become more authoritarian. It will use democratic methods and a facade to seem less authoritarian.
Maliki and his allies, after all, like many other Iraqis, were extremely nationalistic and chauvinistic. They believed Iraq was the only democracy in the region, better than its neighbors, and they zealously wanted to secure their control over a sovereign and increasingly powerful nation. Those who warned of Iranian interference in Iraq ignored Saudi, American, and other foreign involvement. And they too often a.s.sumed that Iran was a negative actor in the region that had to be countered, and that only Sunni dictatorships could do that. Indeed, having overcome its fear of Iraqi Shiites, Egypt signed a strategic agreement with Iraq. Egypt could see the shifting alliances in the region and was hedging its bets, an American intelligence official told me: "Iraq is a major opportunity. Iraq will be the number-one or -two oil producer in the world."
Some pundits, including several leading neoconservatives, had begun to argue that the United States should keep a larger number of troops in Iraq than was previously agreed-but this risked undermining America"s partnership with the Iraqi government. "You want Iraq to be pro-Western and to invite you in," an American intelligence official told me. "So you build that relationship by strictly adhering to the agreement you signed."
By 2011 the Americans are expected to reduce their provincial presence to Basra, Erbil, Mosul, Diyala, and Kirkuk, with an eye on the restive fault line between Arabs and Kurds that runs from Iran to Syria. Were it not for the American presence along the so-called disputed territories between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq, it is possible that war would have broken out already. Kirkuk has long been described as a powder keg, but of late, Nineveh province has become equally dangerous. Its governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi, campaigned in the 2009 election on a rabidly anti-Kurdish platform. Whenever he traveled into areas that the Kurds claimed were theirs, even if they were outside the jurisdiction of the Kurdish Regional Government, Kurdish security forces hara.s.sed him, even drawing their guns. As a result he traveled with a U.S. Army escort, since he was the governor and had the right to go wherever he wanted in the province, even if he was merely being provocative. In February 2010 Kurdish security forces drew guns on him and the Americans, even firing at their convoy. With American backing, the Iraqi Security Forces arrested three Kurdish men; the next day the Kurds arrested five ISF members.
The Kurds were getting jittery, realizing the Americans really were leaving. But even if the Kurdish star was fading, the Kurds were more than likely to play the kingmaker in the long process of a.s.sembling a government after the elections, and anyone forming a government would have to make concessions to them if they wanted to avoid dependence on Shiite rivals. The lack of a unified sectarian bloc in Iraq was a positive development, militating against future conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. "U.S. strategic interests are best served when Shiites of Iraq are divided," an experienced American intelligence officer explained to me.
FROM THE BEGINNING of the occupation, the U.S. government and media focused too much on elite-level politics and on events in the Green Zone, neglecting the Iraqi people, the atmosphere of the "street," neighborhoods, villages, mosques. They were too slow to recognize the growing resistance to the occupation, too slow to recognize that there was a civil war-and now, perhaps for the same reason, many were worried that there was a "new" sectarianism or a new threat of civil war. But the U.S. military was no longer on the streets and could not accurately perceive Iraq, and journalists were busy covering the elections and the de-Baathification controversy but not reporting enough from outside or even inside Baghdad. Just as they didn"t understand the power of militias in the past, now they did not understand the power of the Iraqi Security Forces. Iraqis were no longer so scared of rival militias or being exterminated, and they no longer supported the religious parties so vehemently. Another thing people would have noticed, had they cared to look, was that the militias were weaker than ever. The Awakening groups were finished, so violence was very limited in scope and impact. Politicians might have been talking the sectarian talk, but Iraqis had grown very cynical.
But even though Iraq"s elections may have been transparent, Iraq remained colonized by tens of thousands of American soldiers. The Status of Forces Agreement deprived Iraq of its full sovereignty. Part of it was "legally" confiscated by the continuing UN mandate, and the rest was denied by the United States. Throughout the occupation major decisions concerning the shape of Iraq had been made by the occupiers with no input or say by the Iraqis: the economic system, the political regime, the army and its loyalties, all the way to the control over airs.p.a.ce and the formation of all kinds of militias and tribal military groups. The effects of all this will likely linger for decades. While the Americans have mostly, if not totally, withdrawn from the population centers, no occupying army ever wants to be present in the daily lives of citizens if it can have local clients do the job. In the early twentieth century, the British had no presence in the daily lives of Iraqis until Iraqis misbehaved and had to face the wrath of the Royal Air Force. Britain colonized Iraq with fewer than four brigades, most of which were based behind the walls of Habbaniya. But in 1941 they defeated the Iraqi army and occupied the whole country with two brigades.
The presence of the U.S. Army forecloses many options for Iraqis, drawing the parameters within which they can act. There are varieties of colonialism and occupation, and they depend more on the financial interests and strategic aims of the colonizers than their wish to grant independence to their va.s.sals. The continued American military presence in Iraq was still a constant implied threat. The Americans could stay on their bases if the Iraqis behaved, or they could emerge and kill whomever they wanted, as they once had. Moreover, Iraq was still burdened by several UN sanctions dating back to the Saddam era. It was forced to pay 5 percent of its oil revenues in reparations, mostly to the Kuwaitis. The Chapter VII resolutions denied Iraq full sovereignty and isolated it from the international financial community. In addition, with Saudi and Iranian interference and money in post-Saddam Iraq, as in Lebanon, it is impossible to have true democracy or sovereignty.
The Bush administration had tried to implement an "80 percent solution," based on the notion that if Kurds and Shiites could reach agreement, then Sunnis could be ignored. But Sunni frustration can still lead to destabilization. Sunnis might not be able to overthrow the new Shiite sectarian order, but they can still mount a limited challenge to it. According to Iraqi political scientist Gha.s.san Atiyyah, the Kurds, with only the mountains as their friends (to paraphrase a Kurdish proverb), were able to destabilize Iraq for eighty years. Sunni Arabs are present in much more of the country and have allies throughout the Arab world who can supply them well enough to destabilize Iraq more than the Kurds ever could. It is not only Baathists and Al Qaeda supporters who oppose the new order. There are Sunnis who see themselves as Iraqi nationalists and worry that Iraq is falling under Iranian control. They see signs of this when much of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite leadership goes to Iran to negotiate political deals and work out the postelection order. But Shiites and Kurds cannot reach agreement without the Sunnis. It is Sunnis who dominate the border area between Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq. And as long as the Iraqi state insists on its Shiite ident.i.ty, there will be Sunnis willing to undermine it.
While violence was down even in Baghdad"s worst-hit neighborhoods, and many Sunnis and Shiites strived to rebuild old friendships, Iraqi social relations were deeply wounded. I visited my friend Maher in Dora once again. He took me to the home of his old schoolmate Ra"fat Abid Alwan, a young Shiite man. Ra"fat had once owned a successful local curtain shop. In 2005 his family received a threatening letter. Then his brother was shot in the head and killed in the Dora market. Another brother was kidnapped later that year by an Interior Ministry vehicle. He was released three weeks later for a ransom of eighty thousand dollars, and the family fled to Syria. But they didn"t like Syria. They"d had a nice life in Iraq and didn"t want to end up working as bakers in Syria. So in August 2006 they returned to Baghdad"s I"ilam neighborhood, buying a new shop for curtains. They lived in I"ilam for a year. "Sectarianism started," Ra"fat told me. "We saw bodies on the street," so they returned to Syria again. In their absence Dr. Nabil, the local Al Qaeda boss, had taken over their home and given it to a Sunni family. The Americans discovered IEDs in the house and took it over, and then handed it over to the Iraqi army. While they were away four Shiite neighbors in Dora were beheaded. Ra"fat paid twenty-three thousand dollars to be smuggled from Syria to Turkey to Greece to Sweden in late 2007. After a year the Swedes told him Iraq was safe again and sent him home. His family returned to Iraq from Syria, and he joined them in December 2008.
In April 2009 nine houses in Dora belonging to Shiites were blown up. One belonged to Ra"fat"s brother. "It"s wrong to stay here, they blew up his house," he told me. "We are not comfortable emotionally," Ra"fat"s mother told me. Now they were trying to sell their house and move back to I"ilam. "Most of the neighborhood is gone," Ra"fat said. "People only come back to sell homes." I asked if relations could go back to the way they were. "Impossible!" they said. Ra"fat and Maher laughed at the notion. "This was the prettiest area of Dora, people knew each other," Maher said. "We could enter each other"s homes like family." I asked them how people could turn on one another like that. They blamed the Al Qaeda men who were mostly from the rural areas adjacent to Dora. "They wanted Dora for themselves," they said. "It was criminally motivated." Both Ra"fat and Maher agreed that there was still a lot of hatred.
A NEWSWEEK ISSUE in March 2010 declared U.S. victory in Iraq. But for Iraqis there was no victory. Since the occupation began in 2003, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed. Many more had been injured. There were millions of widows and orphans. Millions had fled their homes. Tens of thousands of Iraqi men had spent years in American prisons. The new Iraqi state was among the most corrupt in the world. It was often brutal. It failed to provide adequate services to its people, millions of whom were barely able to survive. Iraqis were traumatized. This upheaval did not spare Iraq"s neighbors, either. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees languished in exile. Sectarianism increased in the region. Weapons, tactics, and veterans of the jihad made their way into neighboring countries. And now the American "victory" in Iraq was being imposed on the people of Afghanistan.
Seven years after the disastrous American invasion, the cruelest irony in Iraq is that, in a perverse way, the neoconservative dream of creating a moderate, democratic ally in the region to counterbalance Iran and Saudi Arabia had come to fruition. But even if violence in Iraq continues to decline and the government becomes a model of democracy, Iraq will never be a model to be emulated by its neighbors. People in the region remember, even if those in the West have forgotten, the seven years of chaos, violence, and terror, and to them this is what Iraq symbolizes. Thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other failed U.S. policies in the Middle East, the U.S. had lost most of its influence on Arab people, if not the Muslim world-even if it could still exert pressure on Arab regimes. At first some Arab elites thought they could benefit from Bush and the neoconservatives, but now reformists and the elite want nothing to do with the U.S., which can only harm their credibility. Every day there are a.s.sa.s.sinations with silenced pistols and the small magnetic car bombs known as sticky bombs; every day men still disappear and secret prisons are still discovered. In Sunni villages Awakening men are being found beheaded. And although some militiamen have been absorbed into the security forces, others have turned to a life of crime, and brazen daylight robberies are common. But despite this, the worst might be over for Iraqis. On my trips to Iraq in years past, I had made a habit of scanning the walls of Baghdad neighborhoods for bits of sectarian graffiti, spray-painted slogans that were pro-Mahdi Army, pro-Saddam, anti-Shiite, or pro-insurgency. This time, however, there were almost none to be found. The exhortations to sectarian struggle had been replaced with the enthusiasms of youthful football fans: now the walls say, "Long Live Barcelona."
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
This book would not be possible without the strong support of the New York University Center on Law and Security. I am very grateful to its generous director, Karen Greenberg, as well as Steve Holmes and David, Nicole, Jeff, Fransesca, Sarvenaz, and the rest of the family I have made there. They have given me a place to feel at home, the freedom to do my work, and the confidence of knowing I have their backing. My editor at Nation Books, Carl Bromley, was supernaturally patient with me and believed in my vision. Without him it would not have come to reality. Thanks to Mark Sorkin for his excellent copy editing and suggestions. I am also very grateful to my agent, Denise Shannon, for her enthusiasm and support.
I also acknowledge the Investigative Fund of The Nation Inst.i.tute-particularly Joe Conason and Esther Kaplan-who have supported my work.
Many Iraqis welcomed me as a brother into their families. Meitham, Ali, Osama, Abbas, Ha.s.sanein, Aws, Wisam, the Hamdi family, Omar Salih, Omer Awchi, Rana al-Aiouby, and others made this book possible, and took great risks to care for me and share their lives with me. In Lebanon my close friends Mohamad Ali Nayel, Naim a.s.saker, Bissane el Cheikh, Amer Mohsen, Michel Samaha, and Patrick Haenni taught me all I needed to know. Thanks also to Amba.s.sador Imad Moustapha, Toufic Alloush, Mirvat Abu Khalil, Seyid Nawaf al-Musawi, Haj Osama Hamdan, Wisam, Hamelkart Ataya, Mansour Aziz, Walid Abou Khashbee, Abdo Saad, Omar Nashabi, the brave members of Samidoun, Rami Kanan, Sharif Bibi, and Najat Sharafeddine.
Jon Sawyer and Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supported my work in Afghanistan. Deb Chasman and Josh Cohen at the Boston Review gave me the opportunity and the s.p.a.ce to write important chapter-length articles. Likewise, Monika Bauerlein of Mother Jones. Betsy Reed gave this ma.n.u.script a vigorous read, which I thank her for. I owe a big debt to Jonathan Shainin, my good friend who runs the best weekend review section in the English language at the National in Abu Dhabi.
Ghaith Abdul Ahad, Hannah Allam, Tom Bigley, Leila Fadel, Seymour Hersh, Bob Bateman, and Andrew Exum are friends and colleagues who helped, advised, challenged, and inspired me. In Afghanistan, Shahir and Melek gave me friendship, help, and also saved my life. Thanks to Qais for helping out with that too. Thanks to Aziz Hakimi, Aners Fange, Andrew Wilder and Peter Jouvenal, Fazel Rabie Haqbeen, Mullah Tariq Osman, Josh Foust, Professor Tom Johnson, Tom Stanworth, John Moore, Matt Bruggmann, Steve Clemons, As"ad Abu Khalil, Kristele Younes, Peter Bergen, Elizabeth Campbell, Joel Charney, Scott Armstrong, the Theros family, Ahmad, Marika, Nick, the Zivkovic family, the Lombardi family, and my editor at Rolling Stone, Eric Bates.
Numerous Iraqis, Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, Palestinians and Jordanians, as well as American soldiers, officers, and officials, trusted me with their knowledge and experience anonymously-I thank them all.
Lastly, to my parents, my brothers, my wife, Tiffany, and Dakota (for not totally destroying my laptop while I wrote this book), I love you and I thank you.
A NOTE ON SOURCES.
In writing this book I relied on very few secondary sources; the bulk of it is based on the seven years I have spent reporting in the Muslim world, from Somalia to Afghanistan. I cannot thank the many hundreds of people who welcomed me, helped me, educated me, and shared pieces of their lives with me, but it is thanks to their trust and generosity that this book is possible. I tried to avoid senior officials on any side to avoid propaganda and simplistic generalizations, and instead I tried to find out what was really transpiring myself. I was helped by local and international academics, journalists, historians, soldiers, policemen, militiamen, and aid workers. My colleagues at the Warlord Loop listserv were very helpful and stimulating. When it comes to secondary sources, I did, however, learn a lot from Military Review and the Small Wars Journal, which informed my thinking for the chapters on the surge in Iraq and Afghanistan. Articles in McClatchy"s, the Washington Post, and even some in the New York Times were also important. The reports of the International Crisis Group are essential for background, as are the articles in the Middle East Research and Information Project (merip.org) and the Middle East Journal.
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