Battlegrounds

by H. R. McMaster

  I returned to the Oval Office for the usually rushed briefing in advance of the visit. I made sure the president, who always stressed the need for partners to pull their weight, knew that Iraqis were taking the brunt of the battle against ISIS. The Iraqis had lost approximately 26,000 soldiers since 2014, compared to seventeen U.S. soldiers and marines killed in action against ISIS in Iraq during that same period.1 The president was concerned about Iranian influence in Iraq. I told him that Prime Minister Abadi was trying to strengthen Iraqi sovereignty and reduce malign Iranian influence. Abadi knew that if the Iraqi government aligned with Iran, another version of ISIS would portray itself to Sunni communities as a protector from Iranian-sponsored Shia militias. I stressed that a positive, long-term relationship with Iraq would not only assist with the defeat of ISIS, but also counterbalance Iranian influence there.

  Iran was intent on keeping Iraq weak and divided. After the collapse of the Iraqi Army in 2014 and ISIS’s rapid seizure of territory there, the Iraqi government deepened its reliance on Shia militias to maintain stability. These militias were mostly commanded by Iranian agents, giving Iran coercive power over the Baghdad government. Militias under the influence of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), included groups that had killed American soldiers.2 For example, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH), a group that operated in Iraq and Syria, had been equipped, funded, and trained by the IRGC. Shia militiamen were young; they and their commanders formed a new base of power. To further destabilize Iraq, Iran’s IRGC and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) also took advantage of divisions among Kurds and between Kurds and Arabs by supporting Kurdish factions sympathetic to Tehran.

  As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Ambassador Silliman joined us in the Oval Office, I suggested that two members of the delegation typified the promise and peril of Iraq. Abadi represented promise. He worked with all of Iraq’s communities to reduce ethnic and sectarian divisions and shared the U.S. desire for a strong and independent Iraq. He was a unifying leader in a country whose complex quilt of ethnic, tribal, and religious communities had been torn apart many times since Saddam Hussein took power in 1979. Abadi’s foreign minister, former prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, personified peril. Jaafari advocated for Iraq’s Shia community at the expense of others. He did Iran’s bidding, sowed division, and perpetuated conflict.

  To illustrate the point, I told them about how Abadi had supported the regiment I commanded more than a decade earlier in Tal Afar, a city that contained the complexities of Iraq and the Middle East in microcosm. In 2005, Tal Afar was a training ground and staging base for Al-Qaeda operations across Iraq. The terrorists used sectarian or religious conflict between Turkmen Shia and Sunni populations, as well as ethnic rivalries among Kurds, Turkmen, Yazidis, and Arabs, to embed themselves in communities that needed protection. As U.S. forces reduced their presence in northern Iraq, the city had become a sectarian battleground between Shia police and Al-Qaeda terrorists. Civilians were caught in the crossfire. Sunni and Shia families who had been friends and neighbors were forced to choose sides. Normal life stopped. Schools and markets closed. People barricaded themselves in their homes. The police morphed into a death squad that operated out of a sixteenth-century Ottoman castle in the center of the city and ventured out at night to murder, indiscriminately, Sunni men of military age. The police actually helped Al-Qaeda terrorists portray themselves as protectors and rationalize the brutal form of control they had established. Terrorists forced parents to give up their adolescent and young teenage boys to join their organization. So-called imams who rarely had more than an elementary school education put young recruits through initiations often involving sexual abuse and systematic dehumanization. For example, in one unexceptional case in Tal Afar, a young teenager was repeatedly raped and given the assignment to be the leg holder in beheadings of Shia or uncooperative Sunnis.3 It was a dystopian scene.

  Soon after the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment arrived in Tal Afar in May of 2005, I called Abadi to ask for his assistance in arresting the cycle of violence. Abadi, then a member of Iraq’s parliament, was influential in the powerful Shia Dawa (Islamic Call) Party. After I told him that the chief of police was fueling the cycle of violence in Tal Afar, Abadi arranged for his transfer to Baghdad and cleared the way for a Sunni Arab general who transformed the police from predators to protectors of civilians regardless of their sectarian, ethnic, or tribal identity. That chief, Maj. Gen. Najim Abed Abdullah al-Jibouri, was an extraordinarily courageous leader and effective mediator. After a successful counterterrorism offensive in 2005, Jibouri fostered understanding among Tal Afar’s ethnic and sectarian groups and a common commitment to preventing Al-Qaeda from returning. The city came back to life as schools and markets reopened once again, barricaded houses were no longer the norm, and the Iraqi Army and police barred Al-Qaeda from regaining a foothold. I wanted the president to know what often got lost in the reports of horrific violence and human suffering in Iraq: the perseverance of unifying leaders like Abadi and Jibouri, who wanted to forge a better future for all Iraqis regardless of religion, ethnicity, or tribal affiliation. But not all in Abadi’s party were conciliators.

  I advised the president that some members of the Iraqi delegation might look rough, but the thin, balding medical doctor with the close-cropped gray beard was the most coldblooded. Jaafari was driven mainly by a depraved desire for revenge against former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. He was the perfect agent for Iran because he fueled the violence that debilitated Iraq. In the run-up to the Iraqi election that resulted in Jaafari’s prime ministership, Iran provided millions of dollars to establish Shia sectarian-driven political parties. At the same time, the United States stood aside and did little to counter Iran’s influence. As prime minister from May 2005 to May 2006, Jaafari used policies and actions to marginalize Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and Turkmen and aid Iranian infiltration of Iraqi institutions.

  Jaafari spent the 1980s in Iran as a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an anti-Saddam organization thoroughly penetrated by Iranian intelligence.4 Later, he moved to London, where he became the spokesperson for the Dawa Party. Jaafari was pro-Iran and anti-United States. From 2007 to 2008, the former prime minister twice hosted me and then-Major Joel Rayburn at his home in Baghdad’s Green Zone, the fortified neighborhood at the center of the Iraqi capital. As Rayburn and I drank sweet tea, the doctor gave long lectures about the West’s many flaws. Jaafari shared the Iranian mullahs’ strange ideological blend of Marxist-Leninism and Shia millenarianism with an added dose of material from leftist American academics. He would occasionally pull books off his shelves and quote from them, as if to enter evidence in his case against the United States, one favored source being linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky and Jaafari shared the belief that all the world’s (and Iraq’s) ills derived from colonialism and “capitalist imperialism.” Jaafari seemed unaware that had it not been for the American invasion of 2003, he would have been quoting from Chomsky in exile.

  As prime minister, Jaafari blamed the United States even as he helped the Badr Organization, a Shia militia, gain control of the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.5 The new minister, Bayan Jabr, who shared Jaafari’s deceptively gentle appearance as well as his inner ruthlessness, used the National Police to abduct, systematically torture, and sometimes kill Sunni prisoners.6 The atrocities were part score settling for Iran. Victims were often former members of Saddam’s government, or Iraqi pilots who had bombed Iranian territory during the Iran-Iraq War, or even university professors who were critical of the Iranian Revolution. But, then, Iran was seeding nefarious people across the Iraqi government, with the help of people like Jaafari. One example was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. In 2005, U.S. officials discovered more than one hundred suffering people whom Iraqi national police had illegally arrested and crammed into his basement. Previously, Muhandis had been sentenced to death in Kuwait for terrorist
bombings in 1983. He was later killed in a U.S. strike in January 2020 that targeted Iranian IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani. And there was National Police general Mahdi al-Gharrawi, in whose headquarters U.S. Army soldiers uncovered a holding cell with 1,400 malnourished prisoners who clearly had been tortured repeatedly.7 Jaafari protected Muhandis and Gharrawi from prosecutors. While Abadi saw people like Gharrawi and Muhandis as corrupt and a liability to Iraq, Jaafari enabled their efforts to foment the sectarian civil wars that helped give rise first to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and, later, to its offspring, ISIS.8 As we walked to receive the delegation, I predicted that Jaafari would reveal his antipathy toward the United States by demanding more aid. He and others who acted as agents of Iran thought of American leaders as dupes whom they could fleece before turning Iraq fully toward Iran and against their erstwhile patrons.

  Much of the discussion across the Cabinet Room’s long mahogany conference table was about military progress in the campaign against ISIS. Just four months earlier, Iraqi forces had liberated the ancient city of Sinjar from ISIS, where in August 2014, terrorists massacred an estimated five thousand Yazidis, tortured thousands of girls and women in rape camps, and sold women as slaves, forcing them to marry those who killed their fathers and brothers.9 After the White House and Defense Department removed unnecessary restrictions on U.S. forces put in place during the Obama administration, such as how far forward advisors could operate in battle and how many helicopters could be in Syria, the pace of operations against ISIS in Syria and in Iraq increased.10 Although tough fighting was still ahead, success in wresting control of territory and populations from ISIS seemed inevitable.

  Toward the end of the meeting, the president asked if I had anything to add. I thought that the key questions were how to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS and prevent Iran from extending its influence across Iraq, into Syria, and to the borders of Israel. I asked Prime Minister Abadi what more we and others might do to help him break the cycle of conflict. He spoke of the need to pull Iraq’s traumatized society back together and convince all Iraqis that the government could secure them and provide them with a better future. When Jaafari, true to form, called for more U.S. aid, President Trump ignored him and ended the meeting. But before the table had cleared and the policy makers had dispersed, one of the prime minister’s aides slipped me a note. Abadi was asking me to meet him at his hotel after hours.

  At around nine o’clock that evening, I went to see Abadi. It was late, but late-night meetings are an Iraqi custom. Joel Rayburn came with me. We had served together many times in Iraq and Afghanistan. A colonel and a senior director on the National Security Council staff, Joel had recently written an excellent book that put Iraq’s contemporary fragmentation into historical perspective. He had also edited a seminal critical study of the U.S. Army’s experience in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. We had both taught history at West Point and shared a conviction that to understand the present, one must first understand the past. On the way to Abadi’s hotel, we discussed how the prime minister had borne witness to the tragedy of Middle East politics and had somehow transcended the sectarianism that embroiled the region. Abadi could be candid away from his own delegation, many of whom, including Jaafari, he could not trust. He could help us understand what the United States might do to help him and other leaders overcome the decades of trauma in the Middle East.

  * * *

  BORN IN 1952, Abadi came of age in the postcolonial period of growing cultural awareness among Arab states. Socialist ideas were popular, especially state control of resources, such as oil, to achieve social justice and equitable income distribution. As new political movements emerged in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, dictators gained power and fostered cults of personality with pervasive propaganda. In Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and, with the support of the United States, prevailed over European powers in the crisis that ensued. He built the Aswan High Dam on the Nile, defended the Palestinian cause, and promised social reform. From Iraq, a young Abadi watched Pan Arabism (which envisioned a unified Arab world) and socialist experiments collapse as nationalist and Islamist ideologies gained strength.11 In 1958, as Abadi entered grade school in Baghdad, waves of nationalist sentiment washed over Syria and Iraq. In Syria, a series of weak civilian governments, military coups, and counter-coups had thrust the left-leaning Baath Party into power. The Syria Baath, in pursuit of a single Arab state, entered into a union with Egypt that would last only two years.

  In Iraq, a coup ended the Hashemite monarchy that the British had established in 1921. On July 14, 1958, Faisal II, a soon-to-be-married twenty-three-year-old monarch who had ascended the throne at age three, found himself and other members of his family lined up facing a wall in the palace courtyard. A machine gun opened fire. The king’s bullet-ridden body was strung from a lamppost. Abadi remembered people celebrating the demise of the corrupt government but feeling remorse over the brutal murders of the king and his family. And he recollected how, after the king’s death, the freedoms, such as multiple political parties and a free press, began to evaporate. Over the next decade, authoritarian dictatorships were ascendant in the Arab world; foremost among them was Nasser, whose brand of Arab nationalism included strong anti-Israel sentiment. In 1967, when Abadi was a student in Baghdad Central High School, he witnessed a war motivated by that sentiment, the outcome of which would sound the death knell for Arab nationalism.

  Abadi recalled high expectations as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria initiated a war against Israel, and a huge letdown across the Arab world when, six days later, the Israel Defense Forces not only defeated the combined armies, but also seized Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Jordanian West Bank. The rush to assign blame generated conflicts within and among Arab nations that would go on for decades. In Syria, Minister of Defense Hafez al-Assad, a member of the socialist Baath Party and the minority Alawi sect, a secretive Shia offshoot that blends religions, blamed Syrian president Salah Jadid for the defeat and loss of territory.12 As the president’s position weakened, Assad activated a network of friends and relatives. In 1970, he mounted a bloodless coup, but the three decades that followed were far from bloodless. The defeat in the Six-Day War empowered Islamists, who used the religious dimension of the Israeli-Arab conflict to grow support. Islamist challengers to the Iraqi Baath Party grew, spurred on by the brutality of the Baaths. In 1966, Abadi had met the founder of the Dawa Party, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. Al-Sadr had founded the party in 1957 to combat secularist, Arab nationalist, and socialist ideas; to promote Islamic values and ethics; to increase political awareness; and, ultimately, to create a Shia Islamic state in Iraq.

  Abadi remembers being “overtaken” by the charismatic imam and being struck by his “humanness.” Al-Sadr presented Islam as an alternative to Marxism and capitalism. Abadi joined Dawa in 1967, one year before the Baath Party seized power in Iraq, and he became part of a growing Islamist movement that encompassed the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood as well as Dawa and other Shia groups. Abadi’s educated, pious Shia family, like many others, rejected a secular government driven by power and avarice.

  Abadi was completing a doctorate in London when events in Iran and Iraq thrust the Middle East into a new era of conflict. In February 1979, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the son and grandson of mullahs, overthrew the Shah of Iran to become supreme leader of the Islamic Republic. Abadi, who had become the leader of the Dawa organization in Europe, was hopeful. He thought that if the all-powerful Shah could be deposed, the same might be possible in Iraq, Syria, and across the Middle East. Abadi and other Dawa members met in cafés to talk about prospects for overthrowing the Baath in Iraq. Just four months later, there was a change in government in Iraq, but not the kind that Abadi and Dawa sought. Saddam Hussein, a man whose father died before he was born and whose mother abandoned him, mounted a coup in Baghdad and declared himself president. In Iran, the revolutionaries executed the Shah’s senior civilian and
military officials at a steady pace while, in Iraq, Saddam executed hundreds in one week. His internal opposition either dead or quelled, Saddam then turned to the threat that the Islamic Revolution in Iran posed to his secular nationalist dictatorship. Just four months after seizing power, he ordered the invasion of Iran, anticipating a short war against a country still in the throes of revolution. The ensuing eight-year war took a heavy toll on both nations; it would end in stalemate after an estimated one million people perished.13

  Those were hard years for the Abadi family. As Saddam invaded Iran, he ordered a brutal crackdown on Dawa and other Shia opposition groups. In April 1980, the founder of the Dawa Party and the man who inspired young Haider al-Abadi, Muhammad al-Sadr, was arrested by the Baath. The forty-five-year old cleric was tortured and forced to watch as his sister was raped. Saddam’s agents then drove a nail into his skull.14

  Ayatollah Khomeini framed the stakes of the Iran-Iraq War as more than the defense of Iran’s territorial integrity—it was a war to uphold Shia Islam and spread the Islamic Revolution. The Iran-Iraq War rekindled ancient animosities rooted in historical memory of a battle in Karbala, Iraq in AD 680. After the prophet Muhammad died in 632, Islam split between Shia (which means followers of Ali, those who believed that Ali ibn Abi Talib, a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, was Muhammad’s designated successor) and Sunnis (those who believed that Muhammad did not appoint a successor and who considered Abu Bakr to be the first rightful caliph after the Prophet). The Battle of Karbala pitted these factions against each other. The subsequent brutal defeat of the Shia forces is an emotional touchstone of their history, tradition, literature, and theology. Shia commemorate the battle over ten days every year, which culminate with the Day of Ashura, a day of mourning and processions that often entail self-flagellation. Khomeini made powerful use of Shia identity, especially historical grievances, to galvanize the masses.15