In July, Jim walked into a meeting in Baghdad’s heavily guarded Green Zone with Col. Chipper Lewis, the newly appointed American senior combat advisor for the Iraqi National Police. Six-foot-five and blunt-spoken, Lewis had met Jim in pre-deployment training at Fort Bliss, Texas, and flew into Baghdad with him. A veteran infantry officer, Lewis knew the National Police would be a tough mission, and Jim was a man who could help. Looking Jim in the eye, he gave him his official assignment: he was to train, mentor, and advise the all-Shiite Iraqi National Police Quick Reaction Force Battalion. Then Lewis gave Jim the lowdown on the unit.
“It’s a fucking Shiite militia,” he said. “It’s out of control.”
The six-hundred-man battalion, Lewis explained, like many Iraqi units hastily recruited at the time, was formed out of a militia from Sadr City and legitimized by the government. Col. Taher Alasadi, a veteran Iraqi Army officer who grew up in Sadr City and served a year in jail in 2000 for bad-mouthing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, led it. Called “commandos” by the Iraqis, the unit was to serve as a quick reaction force for the National Police, pursuing high-value targets in Baghdad and responding to emergencies anywhere in the country. The Baghdad-based unit was relatively autonomous. Unlike the two dozen other National Police battalions, it was not linked to the American military chain of command and had never before been assigned American advisors. It took orders directly from Nouri Al-Maliki, a longtime Shiite politician and dissident, as well as the minister of interior and the head of the Iraqi National Police, Gen. Adnan, whom Lewis was assigned to mentor.
Lewis paused.
“This is what we think is going on down there: government-sanctioned killings,” Lewis said. The U.S. military was convinced that senior Iraqi officials were using the unit as an instrument of sectarian violence, to carry out politically driven executions of Sunni targets. The unit was going out on missions around Baghdad on short notice at all hours. Moreover, he said, Col. Taher appeared to be corrupt, taking pay for six hundred police while far fewer were on the job at any given time. “Everybody in the world is convinced that Colonel Taher and his organization are primarily responsible for all these killings at night,” Lewis told Jim. “So don’t go into this nonchalantly. Go in with your dukes up.”
In reality, the situation was worse than Lewis let on. He did not tell Jim what his own marching orders were at the time. U.S. commanders, persuaded that the National Police were, in his words, “the root of all evil of sectarian violence in Iraq,” had made Lewis an advisor in name only. His real job was to figure out how to dismantle the entire National Police apparatus. “My mission was basically ‘make these guys go away,’ ” he recalled later.
But first Lewis wanted to see what Jim would turn up.
Initially, what Jim learned was disturbing. The police had the look and smell of an undisciplined militia. They lived in a small compound bordering the Green Zone known as Site One that was dirty and run-down, with no plumbing, electricity, or air-conditioning. It had a small detention center run by the National Police headquarters where beatings allegedly took place. The police wore mismatched uniforms and had bandanas wrapped around their heads. They fought each other, played cards, rolled dice, smoked, and dipped. “These motherfuckers were a gang. They were just a bunch of thugs the government turned into a military unit,” Jim recalled.
During the first six weeks, Jim was unable to go on missions with the police because his U.S. military team had not yet arrived. So he focused on sizing up Col. Taher, the Iraqi commander, while monitoring his contacts. Taher, he discovered, had deep and extensive ties with members of the Mahdi Army, the main Shiite insurgent group led by Islamic cleric Muqtada al Sadr. But the relationship was not entirely what it appeared. Probing further, Jim learned that Taher’s association with the Mahdi Army was familial and business-related, and involved no tactical dealings with the militia. Taher’s parents lived in Sadr City, and he had to take his police there for medical care because the Sunni-run hospitals in Baghdad would not treat them. He also learned that Taher, while skimming off some government funds, was using the vast bulk of his payroll for the police. Jim spent hours drinking tea with Taher in his office and began to see his potential as a commander. Taher, he learned, was a seasoned officer, having graduated from the Baghdad Military Academy and spent fifteen years in Iraqi Special Forces and commando units, including fighting in the Iran-Iraq War. Pragmatic and secular in outlook, he drank alcohol and had a girlfriend, in violation of Islam. He was outraged by Sunni insurgent atrocities but was no radical Shiite. Jim decided Taher was someone he could influence.
“I am not here to stop you from doing your mission,” Jim told him. “I am here to help. There will come a time when I will have men and guns and vehicles and ammo and I will fight beside you,” he said. “You and I will become like brothers.”
Meanwhile, Jim was given a nine-man U.S. military team and two Iraqi interpreters, and set out to train them. Jim spoke some Arabic, but he realized that grooming the right interpreter would be critical to his mission to try to mold the Iraqi police. He wanted an interpreter who could speak for him forcefully and clearly in any forum, and also one who would fight by his side, sparing a U.S. soldier from shouldering that risk. On the first day his team left the Baghdad base, headed for a firing range, Jim found his man. The patrol stalled in traffic along a stretch of Route Irish, one of the most heavily attacked roads in Baghdad. Jim dismounted from his Humvee and walked ahead a hundred yards down the hot, congested street to try to clear the way. He turned around and was surprised to see his twenty-four-year-old interpreter, Mack, a few steps behind him. Mack had no military training, and in fact in 2000 had left Baghdad to work at a potato chip factory in Jordan to avoid mandatory service in the Iraqi Army. He knew an American soldier walking alone down that street made a ready target. Still, something made him follow Jim.
Mack had worked for the U.S. military since 2003, and he was aware from their first encounter that Jim was not like other American officers.
“I was outside in the Humvee smoking a cigarette and I saw a guy in DCUs [a desert camouflage uniform]. His uniform was plain. You could tell he didn’t care what he looked like. He didn’t look like an officer. He looked like someone who did a lot of things himself,” Mack recalled.
Jim offered to help Mack and another interpreter, Joseph, as they moved with the U.S. team onto the Baghdad base next to the police compound. “You don’t hear that very much from an officer,” Mack said. “He didn’t have to do that. He wanted to build a good relationship with the Iraqis.”
For Jim, Mack’s decision to follow him, unprompted, down a Baghdad road cratered from roadside bombs was the first indication he was the interpreter Jim was looking for. In coming days, he violated the rules and outfitted Mack with gear just like his own—a U.S. military uniform, M4 carbine, 9 mm pistol, body armor, helmet, and night vision goggles. Then he trained Mack and the rest of his team on close-quarters battle and other urban combat skills.
“You’re going outside the wire with me. One day you will save my life,” Jim told Mack.
No other U.S. military unit had ever given Mack a gun, let alone trained him. “Everyone was saying, ‘Do not trust the terps [interpreters]. Don’t give them weapons,’ ” Mack recalled. With Jim, he was treated no differently than a U.S. soldier, and looked so much like one that Iraqis started calling him “mister” when they went on patrol.
After two weeks of training, Jim and Mack walked into Taher’s office at Site One. “The team is ready,” Jim told Taher.
The U.S. team began going out on raids with the police, who were initially very wary of the Americans. At first Jim had little means of verifying who their targets were or whether they were legitimate. But after weeks of riding in the lead vehicle on missions and feeding Taher intelligence on roadside bombs and other threats, Jim slowly began receiving more information from Taher on who was who. He also learned that Taher would sometimes only pretend to go after targets, reve
aling a tension between the Iraqi commander and his political taskmasters. Just as Jim’s team was gaining some rapport with the Iraqi police, the battalion received a mission that would put their relationship to the ultimate test.
In mid-October 2006, a spate of revenge killings erupted forty-five miles north of Baghdad in the Tigris River city of Balad between primarily Shiite urban dwellers and Sunni tribesmen living in surrounding rural areas. It soon began to spiral out of control when Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia got involved. According to U.S. and Iraqi reports at the time, three Sunni men were killed, including a local insurgent leader. The Sunni insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq retaliated on October 13 by kidnapping a group of about a dozen Shiite laborers who went to work in date groves in an outlying village. The laborers were found beheaded and with holes drilled in their skulls. That prompted more Shiite killings of Sunni civilians. The Shiites then sent an SOS to the Mahdi Army in Baghdad, and by October 14, busloads of Mahdi gunmen were taking control of Balad’s streets, while broadcasts from mosques warned all Sunnis to leave the city. At checkpoints, the Shiite militiamen were beating and killing suspected Sunnis, and scores of bodies began piling up at the Balad morgue.
Prime Minister Maliki’s office called the National Police commander, then Gen. Hussein Alawadi, who ordered in Taher’s quick reaction force to Balad on October 17. Lewis called Jim in to give him the mission.
“Jim, we are getting some pretty bad reports of sectarian violence up there. Here is the bottom line: we need you to get up there, find out what is going on, and fix it.”
“Roger that, sir,” Jim said.
About two hours later, Jim, Taher, and Mack rolled out in the lead vehicle of a patrol with the U.S. team and two hundred Iraqi police commandos. When they arrived at an Iraqi army base on the outskirts of Balad, they were ordered to retake several checkpoints across the city—some abandoned, others held by Shiite militiamen or Sunni insurgents.
The next morning they pushed into Balad, a deserted no-man’s-land with an eerie, foreboding feeling about it. Feral dogs roamed the streets, and plastic trash bags were flying around in the wind. Not a person was in sight. They arrived at the first abandoned highway checkpoint, its machine gun position blown up by an RPG, and dropped off some police with guns. At the second checkpoint, they dropped off another group of police, but came under mortar fire from a nearby orchard. Helicopters spotted insurgents moving into a nearby school, but the police were afraid and refused to go after them, so Jim and Mack cleared the building. Then Mack got a radio call that insurgents were threatening police Jim had stationed at the first checkpoint, telling them to leave or they would be killed. Jim and Mack headed back there, but again the Iraqi police with them balked, cowering under the cover of a nearby bridge. As they got closer, insurgents ripped into the checkpoint with RPGs and PKC machine guns. Two of them ran into bushes by the side of the road. Jim and Mack chased them down, and their gunner, Capt. James Kim, mowed fighters down with his M240 machine gun. After the shooting stopped, they treated one of the police who had been shot in the leg. Then they saw an Iraqi man lying beside his car, which had been hit by one of the RPGs. His guts were spilling out, and Jim and his medic, Sgt. Robert “Doc” Minor, treated him. No one thought the man would live, but the police took him to a local hospital. Later they learned he had survived.
“That was our first day in Balad,” Mack recalled.
Jim’s American advisory team had proven it would fight to back up the Iraqi police, a major step in gaining their trust. The next day, when the Spartan vehicles arrived at one of the Balad checkpoints, the Iraqi police Jim had positioned there broke out in grateful cheers. Jim’s U.S. teammates were disappointed at the skittishness of the police, but Jim urged them to be patient. As the fighting wore on in Balad, the police began to stand their ground—shooting back, transporting their wounded, and calling for reinforcements under fire. Other Iraqi units would bribe Sunni insurgents not to attack them on the road from Balad to Baghdad. Col. Taher refused to do so, braving the attacks because he knew the Americans would back him up.
“You let me make the decision to be honest,” Taher told Jim in their makeshift headquarters in an abandoned fire station in Balad. “I do not have to be corrupt, because you are with me.”
As the Shiite police helped restore order in Balad, initially they lashed out at some of their Sunni insurgent detainees, beating them badly. Word on the street was that the unit was a Shiite militia led by a “dirty American.” Jim did not intervene at first to stop them, knowing that if he did he would lose his influence with the police. Instead, he brought the detainees food and water, and treated their wounds. Col. Taher saw him and began to do the same. The beatings lessened, and the police moved to curb the abuse of local Sunnis, for example by freeing Sunni civilians illegally detained in Balad by another Iraqi unit. The Shiite police commandos were still in essence a militia, but Taher’s leadership, molded by Jim, was moderating their sectarian excesses and improving their competence.
“They are going to have to fight the war. We have to walk in their shoes. They are fighting in the streets for their families,” Jim recalled.
The Balad mission, initially to last for only a few days, was extended to weeks and then months. Col. Taher decided to rotate out his force of about two hundred commandos every two weeks. Unwilling to allow the police to make the trip alone, Jim and his team would escort them from Balad to Baghdad and back, facing multiple ambushes in what became by far their most dangerous mission.
On November 24, Jim’s Humvee was in the lead of several commando pickup trucks as they sped down a deserted, gritty highway north of Baghdad. Sunni insurgents detonated dozens of bombs along the road every week, and Jim knew the explosions would cut like butter through the flimsy, thin-skinned Iraqi trucks.
Jim shot out far ahead of the convoy, scanning for IEDs. He was circling back at high speed when he saw an IED thirty feet away—but there was no time to stop. His up-armored Humvee ran headlong into a 130 mm artillery shell rigged to detonate. The explosion flipped the vehicle over twice, as it tumbled down a slope off the side of the road. The gunner, Kim, was tossed out like a rag doll. When the Humvee stopped, it burst into flames.
Jim’s head and body smashed into the windshield. His night vision goggles had been ripped off, and he could barely see, pinned by radios and other gear. He reached down and yanked on the door handle, but the door was bent and wouldn’t budge. Ammunition inside started exploding like popcorn. The Humvee’s halon fire suppression system engaged, sucking the oxygen out of the cabin. As the fire advanced deeper and deeper into the vehicle, Jim labored to breathe. He couldn’t hear and could barely see. The flames started to singe him.
I’m done. I’m fixing to burn to death, Jim thought.
Jim tried to stand but was held back by his gun sling. He released the weapon, started to get up again, and passed out.
When Jim came to, he was on a medevac chopper headed for a military hospital in Balad. Only later did Jim hear from Mack how he survived.
Two Iraqi police had climbed onto the burning Humvee and—together with an officer named Maj. Fadil, who was in the seat behind Jim—pushed and pulled him unconscious from the wreckage. Jim had proven he would fight and die for his Iraqi comrades, and now they had risked their lives to save him.
Jim was soon released from the hospital and eleven days later, on December 6, he returned to the scene of the firefight. He wanted revenge. He wanted to stop insurgents from littering bombs along that strip of road to Baghdad. That meant luring the Sunni insurgents in the area, who were tightly linked with the Jabouri tribe, into a pitched battle. Jim’s experiences in Afghanistan and his growing understanding of Arab tribal culture had taught him that to draw the tribesmen out, he had to attack their honor and the reputations of their women.
Climbing onto the roof of his new Humvee, next to the burned-out engine block of the old one, Jim shouted into a loudspeaker.
“Salaam aleiku
m. You did not kill any of my men. No one was even wounded. So we are all back, and I want to make sure you know it is me.” Jim paused. “I am going to come back in six days. . . . Bring all your whore wives out to the side of the road. Bring your whore daughters and your whore mothers so that when I come back through, I can fuck them properly. Judging from the way you fight, I’m sure you guys really don’t know how to fuck.”
Jim then shot his entire magazine of twenty bullets into the air, waited a few minutes, and drove off.
On the morning of December 11, Jim woke up on his cot in the tiny concrete room that he shared with his nine-man U.S. team on the Iraqi base in Balad. The room was dank and reeked from the overflowing shitters around the corner. Jim pulled on his boots, walked down a dirty hallway, and stepped outside the one-story building, taking a deep breath as the first glints of sunlight hit the building. He crossed the gravel courtyard to his Humvee, opened the door, and pulled out a bottle of water and a razor, which he set on the hood. Splashing a handful of water on his face, he started to shave off three days of growth. As the blade scraped across his cheek, he couldn’t help but think: This might be the last time.
American Spartan Page 5