American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  “We have certainly pulled neighborhoods back from the brink,” Petraeus said.

  But seconds later, the aircraft pivoted again, exposing boarded-up shops on a deserted, trash-strewn street. A bit farther, along the Tigris River, a hulking pile of twisted steel came into view—the remains of the Sarafiya Bridge, blown up ten days before our helicopter ride amid a series of spectacular and deadly suicide bombings.

  “That’s a setback,” Petraeus said, his voice lower. “That breaks your heart.”

  Petraeus was right to point out that not all of Baghdad was a blazing inferno of bomb blasts, as shown on the nightly news. Overall, though, I knew from statistics that violence was spiking upward. Attacks were on the rise, including an upsurge in especially lethal bombings that were killing scores in Baghdad markets, bus stations, and mosques.

  The massive bombings were so bad that Petraeus had ordered huge concrete walls built around neighborhoods—euphemistically calling them “gated communities”—to try to control population access and keep out car and truck bombs.

  We flew over a west Baghdad district, and Petraeus pointed out a towering wall going up around it. “That’s part of the ‘concrete caterpillar,’ ” he told me.

  U.S. troop casualties were also trending higher as American soldiers moved deeper into the city and insurgents assaulted their small outposts. Deaths among Iraqi forces were on the rise, too. While it was expected that such a large influx of forces into the war zone would initially bring more fighting and deaths—an argument I’d heard advanced again and again by U.S. commanders—at some point there had to be a turnaround and the killing had to subside. When would that happen? Petraeus wasn’t sure.

  “On a bad day, I actually fly Baghdad just to reassure myself that life still goes on,” he told me, leaning back and propping his legs on the seat in front of him.

  As darkness fell and some lights in the city came on, we passed over Baghdad’s southern flank, where Petraeus had led the legendary “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st Airborne Division in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. After that, he served another full tour as the general in charge of training Iraqi forces. As he looked out the window, he said that he felt a personal sense of obligation to help the Iraqi people, because “General Colin Powell was right, it is Pottery Barn rules—if you break it, you own it.”

  But he told me that when he returned to Iraq this time, in February 2007, he was shocked at how far security had deteriorated. “The whole society is more fearful, more suspicious, more worried”—and more difficult to help, he admitted.

  “I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say that this has an effect on all of us,” he said. “And so every now and then we just get on the helicopter. . . . You go see some projects that you know have been built. . . . You see some police stations and you see people just sort of driving on, people getting on with their lives, and it sort of reassures you: ‘Hey, these people are survivors.’ ”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I made my way with a foot patrol of 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers into Baghdad’s Sadriya market and came face-to-face with some of those Iraqi survivors Petraeus spoke of.

  As random gunshots rang out in the distance, I followed the soldiers down narrow streets jammed with shops and pedestrians in eastern Baghdad’s Rusafa district. Rusafa was a center of markets frequented by Shiite residents and workers, and so was often targeted in car bombings by Sunni extremist groups.

  The latest bombing, on April 18, had killed more than a hundred people at a bus depot beside Sadriya market as workers were crowding into vans and buses at the end of the day. Charred carcasses of vehicles were strewn at the blast site. I picked my way through the debris and met Sabah Abd, a thirty-three-year-old Iraqi man. Abd owned a fruit stand piled high with oranges just a few feet from one of Petraeus’s concrete barriers that divided Sadriya market from the bus depot. I introduced myself in Arabic as an American reporter and asked a few simple questions.

  Abd told me that when the bomb went off, it threw him to the ground, splattered with blood.

  “The whole world shook,” he told me.

  But three days later Abd was back at his stand. “My wife said, ‘If you go there, I will divorce you.’ But what can I do? There is no work outside,” he told me.

  The American patrol advanced and met a group of Iraqi police who were moving through the neighborhood collecting scores of disfigured bodies to take to the morgue. I realized that despite the horrific scene, at least one thing was going right—U.S. troops were maintaining a close, relatively constant presence in the area. Shopkeepers knew the soldiers and were greeting them and inviting them to tea. As Petraeus dispatched troops to neighborhood outposts, American forces were learning more about the needs and concerns of Iraqi civilians and responding to them.

  For too long I had watched the military move in the opposite direction. Since the 2003 invasion, I had traveled extensively across Iraq on multiple reporting trips and spent the better part of a year in the country. I had been shot at, rocketed, and mortared, and vehicles I was riding in had been hit by roadside bombs. I had patrolled in areas so dangerous that walking down the street was impossible—we had to use alleys and move directly from one house to another by climbing over their courtyard walls. In other areas, we had to run on patrol, darting across intersections in a crouch.

  As the violence intensified in 2004, I observed U.S. troops progressively withdraw into large, garrison-like encampments. From there, they waged highly conventional, large-scale sweeps into Iraqi cities—kicking in doors, conducting searches, detaining young men, demanding information—and then leaving as quickly as they arrived. The “clearing operations” alienated and angered Iraqi civilians. No effective Iraqi forces filled the void left by the U.S. troops, and as a result, insurgents quickly resurfaced and terrorized any civilians who had cooperated with the Americans. So the vicious cycle repeated itself. Some insurgent-held towns had been “cleared” by different U.S. military units half a dozen times in just three or four years.

  As U.S. military units fortified their bases, welded extra steel onto their vehicles, and added more Kevlar to their body armor, they were so distanced from ordinary Iraqis that it began to impact my ability to cover the war. On one trip to the insurgent-held town of Baqubah in eastern Diayala Province, the patrols I went out on kept hitting roadside bombs every day, forcing us to return to base. On another trip, I went north to Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq with two million people, and discovered that the Army brigade stationed there had suspended patrols inside the town. I avoided asking units to depart from their missions to take me places—not wanting to be responsible for anyone getting hurt or killed—but this was an extreme case. So I convinced a military police element that was passing through Mosul to let me ride with them and make a few stops so I could interview Iraqi residents.

  Against this backdrop, I arrived in late 2005 in Tal Afar, a northern Iraqi town of three hundred thousand people near the Syrian border, and was encouraged to find a much different military mind-set. Just a few months earlier, Tal Afar had been in the throes of sectarian fighting with a dug-in Sunni insurgency. Col. H. R. McMaster, a bold and ingenious commander, had systematically cleared the town and then moved his cavalry troops to live deep inside the neighborhoods among the people, greatly reducing violence. McMaster was no stranger to combat. He had earned a Silver Star in 1991 as a commander in a decisive Gulf War tank battle. In April 2005, I was riding in his Humvee south of Baghdad in an area known as the Triangle of Death when McMaster led our fight out of an ambush that killed the first soldier he lost from his regiment. What made the difference in Tal Afar, though, was McMaster’s ability to outwit the enemy psychologically and politically.

  Later in 2006, I watched as Col. Sean McFarland adopted Petraeus’s counterinsurgency approach against a formidable insurgency in the town of Ramadi in the Sunni stronghold of Anbar Province. Anbar was the main base of the extremist Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Ramadi was the mo
st violent place I’d ever set foot in. You could count on coming under attack within about twenty-five minutes of leaving any U.S. base in that town. But McFarland and others pushed a plan to recruit local Sunni tribes to turn against the insurgents and join the local security forces in what became known as the “Anbar Awakening.”

  A short distance from Ramadi, I covered the work of a Special Forces team that was also effectively engaging local Sunni tribes around the Anbar town of Hit, where the population had earlier been completely estranged by conventional clearing operations.

  “It’s not about bulldozing Hit, driving through with a tank, with all the kids running away. . . . These insurgencies are defeated by personal relationships,” said Master Sgt. Chris Heim, the Special Forces team sergeant, as we rode through the desert after meeting with a Sunni tribal leader. The real battles, he said, are unfolding “in a sheik’s house, squatting in the desert eating with my right hand and smoking Turkish cigarettes and trying to influence tribes to rise up against an insurgency.” That made perfect sense to me.

  In 2007, the Sunni awakening in Anbar began to spread to other Sunni communities in Iraq, where Sunni tribesmen embattled by both Islamic extremists such as Al Qaeda in Iraq and Shiite militias were increasingly willing to switch sides and ally with U.S. forces.

  Intrigued by the trend, I flew in the summer of 2007 to the eastern town of Baqubah, where for years I’d seen hard-core Sunni insurgents battling U.S. forces all along the town’s canals and dense orange and palm groves. There, one night I walked with U.S. soldiers to a dim, abandoned house and met with a Sunni insurgent commander. He was sitting cross-legged, and—letting us know he was armed—lifted up his T-shirt, revealing a pistol stuck in his belt. It was a strange feeling to sit next to a man who just weeks earlier would have tried to kill all the Americans in that room, including me.

  “We decided to cooperate with American forces and kick Al Qaeda out, and have our own country,” said the twenty-one-year-old commander, who gave only his nom de guerre, Abu Lwat. “In the future, we want to have someone in the government,” he said, holding his cigarette with a hand that was missing one finger. Abu Lwat was the first of many Sunni fighters I would meet in coming weeks, all of them risking their lives to defend their communities and aid the Americans.

  As U.S. surge forces gained a foothold in Iraq’s trouble spots and Sunni tribes and residents showed a willingness to switch sides, I got wind that Petraeus was moving to capitalize on the trend by launching a grassroots local security initiative. Petraeus, I learned from a subordinate commander, had pushed through a controversial program to allow the U.S. military to use commanders’ funds, emergency payments, and other monies to pay local Iraqi men to protect their neighborhoods, formalizing the sporadic efforts by Iraqi tribesmen and villagers to defend their communities. Recruiting the security forces from their home turf was a major strategy shift—and a bold one.

  In July 2007, I walked into an interview with Petraeus in his ornate, spacious office in a palace near the Baghdad International Airport. I had just arrived from a grimy outpost south of Baghdad and had not showered for at least a week. My clothes were dirty from a long foot patrol and streaked with white salt marks left behind after sweating in the Baghdad heat. My hair was pulled back in a ponytail. By that point, I just wanted answers—and Petraeus supplied them.

  “The bottom-up piece is much farther along than any of us would have anticipated a few months back,” Petraeus told me. “It’s become the focus of a great deal of effort, as there is a sense that this can bear a lot of fruit.”

  Petraeus paused, choosing his words carefully. U.S. recruitment of grassroots forces was the most significant trend in Iraq since the beginning of the surge four months earlier, he said. It could propel the slow-moving national efforts to forge cooperation among Iraq’s main religious sects and ethnic groups.

  “This is a very, very important component of reconciliation because it’s happening from the bottom up,” he said.

  It was page-one news—and, I sensed, a turning point in the war.

  In coming months, the program spread more rapidly than Petraeus or anyone else had imagined. In a little more than a year, a local guard emerged of more than a hundred thousand men. They came to be known as the “Sons of Iraq.” Petraeus’s experiences in Iraq would profoundly shape how he thought about solutions for Afghanistan, a country with a largely rural population scattered across rugged and inhospitable terrain.

  ULTIMATELY, PETRAEUS KNEW SUCCESS in counterinsurgency would rest on the shoulders of his men on the ground and their ability to grasp the mission.

  Not long after our Black Hawk helicopter ride, Petraeus singled out one American officer for his exemplary work with the Iraqi police. Petraeus was well aware that in the end Iraqis would have to secure Baghdad and the rest of the country alone. But they badly needed skilled American mentors to help them get there.

  “The story of U.S. Army Major Jim Gant and the Iraqi National Police Battalion that he advises is an important piece of the mosaic depicting the battle we’re waging in Iraq,” Petraeus told a group of reporters in early May 2007.

  “A few days ago, Major Jim Gant received the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for valor in combat,” Petraeus said. “He asked to be awarded the medal in front of his best friends—his fellow Iraqi brothers in arms—saying: ‘We, both American and Iraqi, have to do this together. Neither of us can do it by ourselves.’ ”

  Petraeus invited Jim and some of his Iraqi comrades to a meeting in his office in Baghdad’s Green Zone and came away from it praising Jim as a tremendously effective advisor.

  A week later, I was offered an opportunity to interview Jim. I took it.

  CHAPTER 5

  RIDING ON THE HOOD of his Humvee, Jim cradled his M4 carbine and braced his boots on the bumper as the vehicle twisted through the trash-strewn streets of Baghdad’s Sadr City. Beside him was his Iraqi comrade and interpreter Mohammed Alsheikh, nicknamed “Mack,” who rarely left his side. Jim scanned left and tried to spot roadside bombs, while Mack scanned right and watched for gunmen.

  It was early 2007, and Jim and the Iraqi police he advised were roaming a part of Baghdad that Petraeus’s surge troops had not yet occupied. He and his small U.S. team had bonded with his Iraqi counterparts so closely that together they could go places that other U.S. units could not. The overcrowded Shiite slum of two million people in the middle of Baghdad rarely saw a daytime patrol by American forces. Apart from conducting night raids, they mainly stayed out of the area. Sadr City was ruled by the main Shiite militia, known as the Mahdi Army, or Jaish al Mahdi ( JAM), which used the slum as a safe haven for staging attacks on Sunnis and U.S. forces across Baghdad. Sectarian killing was rife in Baghdad and other religiously mixed parts of Iraq, and the country was teetering on the brink of civil war. The Shiite militias had become as much of a threat to U.S. forces as the Sunni insurgents. But Jim had managed to gain safe passage through the area from Mahdi Army commanders, who ordered their fighters not to strike his patrols. So his Humvees, easily identified by the crimson Spartan helmets spray-painted on their doors, were able to roll through Sadr City exposed but unscathed.

  A Shiite militiaman with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder waved the vehicle through one of the makeshift checkpoints that ringed Sadr City. The Humvee moved through dusty markets and streets that stank from sewage running through the gutters, and paused in front of a small hospital. One of Jim’s Iraqi comrades went in to pick up a policeman who had been shot in a Baghdad raid a few days before. Sadr City was the only place the Shiite policeman could safely receive treatment. Shiites taken to Sunni hospitals in the city would often disappear, never to be seen again.

  Jim had volunteered to go to Iraq in 2006. As a newly promoted major, he could no longer fight alongside the men he had led as a captain in 2003 and 2004 on his Special Forces team, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 316, when they returned to combat in Afghanistan. It was how the system wor
ked, but it was painful for Jim. The Army machine had to rotate officers through a limited number of command positions—but breaking up teams could hurt cohesion and morale. Jim felt incredibly guilty about not deploying with the men he’d taught to hunger for combat. The ache intensified in August 2005 when the comrades he loved most in the world faced their toughest battle in Afghanistan and one of them died fighting. Jim was proud of his men, brothers all, but devastated he was not by their side.

  So Jim felt compelled to join the fray in Iraq, where the violence and U.S. casualties were escalating sharply. Having tested himself against Afghan insurgents, he wanted to find out what kind of enemy the Iraqis were. The American general in charge of training Iraqi forces, Brig. Gen. Dan Bolger, offered him a position leading a small U.S. military team advising Iraqi forces. Jim accepted immediately, and gave his team the call sign “Spartan.” Over the next fourteen months, he would see the heaviest fighting of his life, sharpening his combat skills like never before. Yet the bloodshed and constant danger deeply scarred him psychologically. At the same time, his work with the Iraqis opened his eyes to the potential for comradeship and trust with indigenous forces that built on his Afghanistan experience and went beyond what he had ever imagined possible. In Iraq he led a non-American unit in battle for the first time, and he grew even more convinced of the power of bonding with and motivating a foreign force. But it didn’t start out that way.

  When Jim arrived in Baghdad in June 2006, the city was in the throes of the worst sectarian slaughter in its history. Warring between Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Sunni religious factions had exploded following the February 2006 bombing by Sunni extremists of one of the Shiites’ holiest shrines, the Al-Askari mosque in the contested city of Samarra. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were fleeing their homes as sectarian cleansing and executions took place in mixed neighborhoods. Exploiting the sectarian split, the Sunni extremist group Al Qaeda in Iraq was intensifying its attacks, and huge car bombs were exploding across Baghdad each week. Meanwhile, the U.S. military strategy in Iraq was still focused on the increasingly unrealistic goal of handing over territory to Iraq’s fledgling security forces as quickly as possible. Iraq’s newly installed prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki, was predicting that Iraqi forces could take responsibility for security in the country in eighteen months. The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, called 2006 “the year of the police” and was pushing a plan to train Iraqi police and start putting them in charge of civil security by the end of the year. Jim was assigned to be part of that effort. But behind the façade of transition, concerns were growing within the U.S. military about the sectarianism and corruption of the Iraqi forces—in particular the National Police.