The MPs arrived at the site in a number of Humvees. No one seemed to be at the site at first. The military vehicles were loud, their engines distinctive; undoubtedly the thieves had taken the chance to hide as we approached. I could see several trucks used to transport the stolen goods parked near the bins. They were empty.
The army sent a helicopter to help with the operation. As its beam played over the grounds, I told one of the MPs to follow me through the property.
I walked through the lot to a truck that looked new. I jumped behind the wheel—the keys were in the ignition.
“Watch,” I said. I turned the ignition and started the vehicle.
As soon as they heard the motor, several thieves climbed out of the bin nearby where they’d been hiding and started to run. While the MPs gave chase, I got the truck moving forward, then jumped out, leaving it in low gear. It rolled down into the vacant bin with a thud and crash. It wouldn’t be used to steal from anyone anymore.
I did the same to two or three other trucks nearby, ruining them as well.
Most of the thieves managed to escape, and it’s doubtful that the operation put much of a dent into Mosul’s black market. But it was a success in one way: it told the thieves they couldn’t just take what they wanted.
It was also important for me: I had become something more than just a translator. I was no longer working for the Americans, but with them. They wanted to bring justice to Iraq, and so did I.
Somehow, I had adopted Soheila’s optimism for our country. I suddenly saw that there was a chance for real change. I was nearly forty years old, a mature man, and yet I was as hopeful as a teenager starting a new family. Maybe Iraq could be a good place to live.
If we got rid of the corruption, if people kept working together, if we made things rather than destroyed them—what greatness could we achieve?
4
Fighting for a Better Iraq
I WORKED WITH THE U.S. Army for several more months, into 2004. Most of my work was routine. The city remained relatively peaceful—wary, increasingly frustrated, but calm on the surface.
Underneath, things were changing little by little. Insurgents were moving in and natives were starting to vent the resentments they felt. Life hadn’t improved much since Saddam had been chased away, and it grated. Still, while the rest of the country was becoming increasingly violent, in Mosul actions against the Americans were the exception, relatively isolated and insignificant.
The Americans weren’t completely blind to increasing dissatisfaction, but they were limited in how to deal with it. Gradually, the MP units began dealing with more counterinsurgency issues, even as their focus remained mostly on the Iraqi police force and law enforcement in general.
My first real experience with a major counterinsurgency operation came early in 2004 when my company loaned me to another unit that wanted to help an agent infiltrate a terrorist cell in the city. The operation was complex—they intended to arrest a man who was already working with them as an informer. That would boast his bona fides with the insurgents, who would believe he had every reason to hate the Americans and would continue to share information with him.
I didn’t know the intricacies of the plan; all I was told was that his arrest had to look good. It had to be clear that he was an enemy of the U.S. Army and that he had every reason to hate Americans and to want them dead.
How do you do that, except by giving him a good beating in front of the neighbors?
I grabbed him as they took him out of the house, and threw him to the ground. He was clearly expecting something, but had enough of a surprised look on his face to sell the whole act. I hammed it up, yelling at him and throwing a few kicks and punches in his direction—not too hard, but enough to make it clear I thought he was the son of a foul dog with murder in his heart.
The Americans rushed over to pull me off. That was my signal to go at my victim in a frenzy, pushing against them and trying to get more slaps and punches in.
I had to make it look real. There was a good bit of groaning and probably a few bruises before I was down.
The American soldiers were shocked. They thought I’d lost my mind. I got a good dressing-down from the officer in charge when we returned to the police station.
Why had I hit the man? Why had I put up such a fuss?
“Hey, this is my culture,” I told him. “I know what I am doing. If you just take him out the way you were going to, people will think it is a setup. People will not believe you. You have to beat him—you have to make it look real.”
“That’s not the way we do things.”
“That is the way you have to do things, if you want to succeed. This is my country. My rules.”
“No.”
“You guys are not allowed to beat him,” I said. “And everyone knows, American rights, no bullshit, yes? But I can beat him. And that is what would happen if he really was bad. Iraqi police—Iraqis—we don’t expect the arrest to be soft. So if you do not want him to be killed by these guys as a spy, you have to act as if he is bad. Do you understand? My country, my rules.”
That phrase became kind of a joke with me as time went on. My country, my rules. But at the heart of it was a great truth. Without understanding the culture of a place, it is next to impossible to have the effect you want. What to one culture seems a sign of strength, to another may be a billboard of weakness. And that was often true in Iraq.
Americans value restraint as a worthy trait. That makes completely no sense in my native country. Our logic is very simple: Why did this person not hit back? Because he can’t. He is weak. He is a fool. Hit him again. Get what you want. He is weak and will give in.
I didn’t convince the soldiers at the time, and they were wary of me for a while. Still, that mission was a success; the man we arrested was accepted by the insurgents. Maybe you can’t give my fists much if any credit, but I know that what I did made the arrest look real.
I KNOW THERE are stories about Americans mistreating prisoners at other places in Iraq, but from what I saw in Mosul, they erred on the side of being too careful, if anything. Iraqi culture is very rough and emphatic. Someone who is arrested is a disgrace to others in the community, and he can’t be handled as if he is an angel. A man who is a traitor—the insurgents were traitors to the new Iraq—should be treated even worse. If you are serious about the charge, that is.
The Americans were too lenient in many ways. They didn’t understand our culture—if you want results, you can’t just be strong, you have to act strong. People have to see you being strong. What good is a watchdog that sits quietly in the corner of a yard when an intruder is at the fence? Yes, if the robber comes over, he might chase him or even bite, but isn’t it better if the dog leaps to his feet and warns the robber away before he even tries to do anything?
A FEW DAYS later, we went on another mission with the Iraqi police to locate a man believed to be a cell leader. The house he was said to be staying at was in a crime-ridden area of town, a place that before the war would have been dangerous to walk in alone if you weren’t known. Now it was even worse.
The arresting force consisted of seven or eight American MPs and five local policemen. We drove into the neighborhood in a small train of Humvees. The suspect’s house was down an alley; it was so narrow we had to park the vehicles at the end and walk in. We split into two teams—the Americans were in one group, assigned to make the actual arrest, and the Iraqi police in the other. Their job was to keep civilians out of the way and watch the back of the target house in case the man tried to escape.
I went with the Iraqis so I could relay information back and forth. As the Americans set up a perimeter around the target house, the Iraqi police and I went next door. I knocked on the door and asked the owner for permission to come through to his backyard.
“Hey,” I told him. “We are looking for someone. We need to come through your house and go to the back.”
He started hemming and hawing, asking questions and protesti
ng. All of a sudden I realized why.
The intel had been wrong. The cell leader wasn’t next door; he was here.
“Fuck you,” I said, pushing the door open. I ran in, glancing left and right in the empty room before heading to the stairs. I leapt up in a few bounds, then found a bedroom.
The suspect was lying in bed, snoring away. A gun peeked out from under his pillow.
I grabbed the gun, then put my hand over his mouth.
“Hey, brother,” I told him as he woke. “We need you to go to the police station. We have some questions for you.”
“Wha?” he mumbled. “What is going on?”
“I have your pistol in my pocket for my safety and your safety,” I said. “My friends here will take you without trouble. Come on.”
He stared at me. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to see the Iraqi police squad fanning out behind me. But there was no one there.
In fact, not only had the Iraqis not followed me in, but they hadn’t bothered to come in the house at all. For some bizarre reason, they had pulled back to the alley and met the MPs. Apparently, learning that they had the wrong house—and not knowing that I was in the right one—the Americans decided to call off the operation and go back to the police station. The Iraqis didn’t question them or mention that I had run into the house, let alone why. Apparently the Americans didn’t notice me missing. They walked back to their vehicles and started to leave.
I didn’t know any of this. I waited for a few minutes, wondering what was going on. Finally I realized that the police and the Americans had left me on my own. I was in the room with a suspected terrorist cell leader; downstairs, there was at least one man who probably sympathized with the man and was more than likely armed.
For just a moment, I considered taking the suspect with me. But that would have been foolhardy: it was daylight, and there were far too many people likely to object.
On the other hand, leaving him alone and running off would have been crazy, too. If he or the man downstairs grabbed a gun, I wouldn’t make it back to the alley alive.
“Up, out of the bed,” I told the suspect.
He got up cautiously. I was bigger than him, but he didn’t look like a weakling either.
“Here,” I told him, moving near the window. “Come here.”
He came and stood in front of me.
“Nothing personal,” I told him. “But I can’t take a chance. I don’t trust you with my life. And so—”
I pushed him out the window. He fell awkwardly amid a shower of curses. It wasn’t a long fall and I knew it wouldn’t be fatal, though I did hear later that he had broken his arm.
There were other things on my mind at the moment besides his health. I walked down the stairs as calmly as I could, acting as if nothing at all had happened. I still had the pistol in my pocket, my hand inches away. The homeowner stared at me but said nothing as I left.
Swiftly as possible, without looking like I was in a panic, I walked down the alley and then out of the neighborhood. No matter how calm I looked on the outside, my heart was in overdrive.
“What the hell happened to you?” asked the head of the MP unit when I got back. “Where were you?”
“Where was I?” I told him. It was an interesting conversation.
The Americans thought they had lost their suspect—until he showed up at the police station a few days later to complain about me. Unluckily for him, the man was not only a suspected insurgent but a wanted criminal, whose crimes according to the police included assault. He was arrested; I’m not sure what happened to him after that.
WAS I WRONG to push him? Should I have left him free to attack me?
I was learning that these are the sorts of decisions you have to make in war. It’s not a matter of being desperate—it’s a matter of preventing yourself from being desperate.
In this case, I knew he wouldn’t die from the fall. I’m sorry that he broke his arm—that I didn’t intend—but in the small room and the narrow confines of the slum I was in, pushing him was the best decision I could make.
It was either my safety or a terrorist’s. I chose to protect myself.
I didn’t apologize to the MPs for it, and I don’t apologize now. I wish the circumstances were different—but if I am really going to make a wish, I would wish that Saddam had never existed, that there was no need for war, and that there would always be peace.
I would wish that there was no insurgency. I would wish that rather than resisting American help, the entire country had come together and taken advantage of it.
THE INCIDENT HELPED give me a reputation as someone not to mess with. Some of the Iraqis were probably afraid of me. Some of the Americans may have thought I was a little crazy. Both were mixed blessings.
I did my best to stay quiet and calm on the rest of the missions they took me on. They trusted me and knew I was on their side, but I think they were wary that I might do something they didn’t want.
While the insurgency was starting to become active, there was still a lot of goodwill toward Americans in Mosul. Things were fairly calm, and most of what the MP unit was dealing with were routine police matters.
Elsewhere in Iraq, things were very different.
Immediately after the invasion, the main opposition to the Americans and the new Iraqi government came from the Fedayeen Saddam, the organization Saddam had created before being chased from power. As the opposition intensified, the American command concentrated on rounding up the ringleaders, including Saddam Hussein, who as the former dictator was seen as a key figure. But Saddam’s capture in December of 2003 near Tikrit did nothing to lessen the insurgency. By that time, Saddam had little credence with anyone. He was a broken man and probably more of an embarrassment to the fighters than an inspiration.
Meanwhile, the forces fighting against Americans and Iraqis in favor of a democratically elected government had grown. Most significantly, the Fedayeen fighters had been joined by militants fighting under the banner of al-Qaeda in Iraq. These were radical Sunnis, who besides hating Americans began focusing their attacks on Shiites.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliated groups grew rapidly in 2004. Among other tactics, it encouraged suicide bombings against civilian targets—in other words, terrorists targeted innocent civilians as a normal course of business. Many of the fighters involved in al-Qaeda in Iraq were foreigners, who came because they thought they were fighting jihad against infidels and nonbelievers. But certainly not all were. Young men from poor rural families were especially easy to recruit. While some were committed to the cause for religious and ideological reasons, in many cases money and sheer boredom were their real motivators.
There was a flipside to the insurgency among radical Shiites, who for convenience’s sake I’ll call Shia militias, as the best known of these groups were formed and run as small private armies. The most famous was the Mahdi Army led by Moqtada al-Sadr. Himself an imam, Sadr was descended from a line of famous clerics; he was a fiery speaker and an effective politician. He had very large support around Baghdad, most especially in Sadr City, a poor area dominated by public housing projects. The Shia militias battled the government and the Americans, and occasionally Sunnis.
Significant backing for the militias came from Iran. Although this fact was not widely publicized in the United States, Iran supplied money, weapons, and know-how to the Shia insurgency. Iran’s ultimate aim was to dominate Iraq, its traditional enemy. It was a long-term goal, and the campaign was waged on many fronts. Today, any Iraqi can point to a dozen things that prove the immense influence Iran has achieved over the current government, starting with the way the Iranian flag is flown in the capital.
As you might expect, the Shiite insurgents and the Sunni insurgents were strongest in the areas where other members of their faith dominated. As the insurgencies grew, so did the tension between the two branches of Islam.
There were many permutations in the civil war that raged during the occupation, alliances of conven
ience and longer-lasting ones of blood. We weren’t interested in the politics or the religion of the terrorists we were assigned to arrest, but in dealing with the people on the ground it was helpful to know what their overall allegiance and background was. Realizing that you were looking for a Shiite meant you didn’t have to waste your time with a suspect who was Sunni, for example. But otherwise, the subtleties of who reported to whom and who prayed a certain way were irrelevant to anyone dealing on the street level with the problem. You don’t ask how a man ties his turban when he’s pointing a machine gun at you.
IN THE SPRING of 2004, the Mahdi Army began an open revolt, seizing swaths of Baghdad and some small towns in the south where Shiites had the majority population. Al-Qaeda and the associated mujahideen associated with it—mujahideen means Islamic fighters in general, but in Iraq it was usually used to refer to Sunni insurgents —stepped up their attacks. It was during this time that four Blackwater contractors were killed and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, an incident that inflamed many Americans and became emblematic of the insurgency’s hatred for Americans.
By now, I was one of five interpreters, or “terps,” working with the MP company. With tensions increasing every day and the police now a popular target for the insurgents, the job became more stressful—and, perversely, more interesting.
Mosul, farther north than either Baghdad or Fallujah, gradually saw more and more violence. Police stations were attacked with IEDs (improvised explosive devices). Individual policemen were targeted and attacked. It wasn’t only rank-and-file policemen, nor were the small, isolated stations the only ones targeted. The Sheik Fatihi police station, a major installation, was attacked with a bomb and a drive-by shooting in March. Within days, the terrorists tried to kill Major General Mohammed Khairi al-Barhawi, the chief of police for the Nineveh governorate (the province of which Mosul is the capital). Al-Barhawi escaped, but four policemen were injured, as were several civilians. The same day, insurgents lobbed four mortar shells at one of the city police stations, and two foreign contractors were killed in a drive-by shooting.
Code Name: Johnny Walker: The Extraordinary Story of the Iraqi Who Risked Everything to Fight with the U.S. Navy SEALs Page 8