The Assassins' Gate

by George Packer

  T. X. Hammes volunteered to go to Baghdad in January 2004 to work on training and found that the American operation was staffed at less than 50 percent. There was no system for printing out Iraqi ID cards in Arabic or getting cash salaries to soldiers in an efficient way. By September, when recently promoted Lieutenant General David Petraeus was trying to make up for all the lost time, the level of staffing was still only 60 percent. It was the same problem of bureaucratic inertia in Washington that was bedeviling the reconstruction. “It is clear that the only way you get out of Iraq is to train Iraqi security forces,” Hammes said. “This administration absolutely failed to do that.” Because of manpower regulations, Hammes was recalled to Washington after two months even though he’d volunteered for a year, knowing as well as anyone the importance of the training to counterinsurgency in Iraq.

  “The U.S. failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort for nearly a year, and did not attempt to seriously train and equip Iraqi forces for proactive security and counterinsurgency mission until April 2004,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who followed the training closely, wrote in July 2004. This failure followed directly from the Pentagon’s original sin of willful blindness in the face of the insurgency. “The U.S. wasted precious time waiting for its own forces to defeat a threat it treated as the product of a small number of former regime loyalists (FRLs) and foreign volunteers, and felt it could solve without creating effective Iraqi forces.” The new Iraqi security forces, resenting their low pay and inferior equipment, seemed to feel that they were being asked to fight for the United States, not Iraq. Without the brutal discipline of Saddam’s army, most of them were incapable of becoming cohesive fighting forces and quickly fell apart under fire. A CPA official once said to me that a lot of the bravest, most dedicated, most idealistic Iraqis seemed to be fighting on the other side.

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  THE SUNNI INSURGENCY fed on the unhappiness of a minority group that had essentially run Iraq since its creation and foresaw a diminished role in the new order, especially after the abolition of the army and debaathification made the point clearer than it needed to be. The insurgency’s backbone—its organizers, financiers, suppliers—were officials of the Baath Party and the regime’s many intelligence and security services. Shadowy messages began to appear bearing the name “Party of the Return.” But from early on, the character of the insurgency was more complicated than the rearguard action of a ruling party whose moment in history had passed. What could be called Sunni nationalism took root in some Iraqis who had never greatly benefited from the Baath Party. Their motives were various and overlapping: patriotism, religion, personal resentment over some injury done by American soldiers. The insurgency remains poorly understood in part because it defies easy categorization.

  I met a tribal sheikh from Ramadi named Zaydan Halef al-Awad, who had fled the American military to Amman, Jordan. A traditional man, he had seen the Americans as partners who could benefit his tribe, and he said that he had joined the insurgency only when their behavior made it impossible to cooperate. “We Iraqis have a nature, which is revenge. If my cousin kills my brother, I have to kill him. If the Americans come from thousands of miles away and dishonor our women and hurt our children, how can I spare them?”

  He had almost nothing in common with the young Iraqi a reporter for the London weekly Observer met in Baghdad. He had been a fan of Bon Jovi and American movies before the war and had welcomed the invasion, imagining a new life of freedom, travel, and consumer goods, until the spectacle of civilian deaths and looting turned him into a full-fledged insurgent in an independent seven-man cell (while he continued to hold down his day job in a government ministry). This fighter’s grievances were a mix of economic hardship and national pride that amounted to no clear political agenda. He found the foreign jihadis in Iraq too bloody and irrational to work with.

  Iraq’s Sunnis were the country’s modernizers, and in the cities they tended to be more secular than the Shia. But Islamist ideology, which had taken hold in other Arab countries with repressive and corrupt secular regimes, quickly spread through occupied Iraq in a particularly virulent form, the default worldview of a suddenly dispossessed group. A friend of one of my translators, who had been a partying and carefree student before the invasion, fled to Yemen, grew his beard, and became a collector of beheading videos. Sometimes the transformation happened in less than half an hour. The Washington Post reported the story of an overweight and unemployed thirty-two-year-old college graduate who spoke some English and lived with his mother in Adhamiya. Until the night American soldiers raided the house, he had accepted their presence in Iraq. But that night they humiliated him by mockingly spreading his secret girlie magazines across his bed next to his Qur’an. Twenty minutes later the soldiers were gone, and the young man began to slap his mother, screaming that Americans were devils. He spent the night in the mosque, and when he came home the next day he threw out all the foreign-made cheese in the refrigerator, burned all the Western images in the house, and forbade his mother to watch Western news or movies. When she brought home antianxiety medication for her troubled son, he refused the pills: The yellow ones were from Jews and the red ones from evil foreigners. As the world would discover with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, military occupation and sexual shame are a combustible mix. In the eyes of Iraqi men, the trespasses of the soldiers frequently crossed a line into the most sensitive realm. Raids sometimes caught the women of the household in their nightgowns, and there was a persistent rumor that night-vision goggles had see-through capabilities. The young man in Adhamiya probably suffered the same psychological troubles as his overweight, unemployed, living-with-mother counterpart in America. But in Iraq there was a violent ideology ready to answer his moment of crisis.

  The Iraq War proved some of the Bush administration’s assertions false, and it made others self-fulfilling. One of these was the insistence on an operational link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. In fact, Saddam had always kept a wary distance from Islamist terrorist groups; he co-opted conservative Sunni imams in Iraq only to use them as window dressing. But after the fall of the regime, the most potent ideological force behind the insurgency was Islam and its hostility to non-Islamic intruders. Some former Baathist officials even stopped drinking and took to prayer. The insurgency was called mukawama, or resistance, with overtones of religious legitimacy; its fighters became mujahideen, holy warriors; they proclaimed their mission to be jihad.

  The first terror bombing hit the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad on August 7, 2003, and was soon followed by the devastation of the UN mission. In October, as violence surged across Iraq with the start of the Ramadan Offensive, the Red Cross and several police stations in Baghdad were blown up on a single bloody morning. In November, a suicide bomber drove his car into the Italian base at Nasiriya and killed nineteen Italians. In January, more than two dozen people were blown to pieces while waiting to enter the Assassins’ Gate. These bombings were widely believed to be the work of foreign fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda and led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had migrated to Iraq after al-Qaeda was routed in Afghanistan. The strategy was clear and largely successful: Isolate the American occupiers in Iraq by driving other foreigners out of the country and intimidating any Iraqis who cooperated with them. No one knew how many jihadis were slipping across Iraq’s unguarded borders; the American military put the number in the hundreds. They introduced forms of violence that the Baathist and Sunni nationalist insurgencies, as brutal as they were, stopped short of, but their tactics advanced goals that were shared by the local fighters. Eventually, the jihadis began targeting Iraqi civilians with massive explosions simply for being Shia or Kurds, as in the Ashura bombings. The Shia were considered non-Muslims by Sunni extremists and were feared by larger numbers of Sunnis as Iraq’s democratic majority; the Kurds were regarded as agents of the Americans and the Jews. Zarqawi appealed for the blessing and help of O
sama bin Laden in a letter that was intercepted and made public by the U.S. military. It revealed a strategy of fomenting ethnic civil war in order to prevent the emergence of a democratic government. The foreign jihadis came to be intensely hated in Iraq—even in Falluja, where they assumed more and more control leading up to the April violence—but they also served a useful purpose, for both Iraqis and Americans. If it was Sudanese, Algerians, Egyptians, Syrians, Saudis, and other Arabs who were turning thousands of Iraqis into scattered bits of flesh, then the country was enduring international terrorism, not the civil war that everyone dreaded. Even after some terrorists were positively identified as Iraqis, local people continued to insist that no Iraqi would do such things. The terrorists had to be foreigners—either Arab jihadis or American agents seeking to perpetuate the occupation.

  Among young Iraqis who now had access to new media, a morbid interest arose in DVDs and Web sites that featured footage of attacks on American soldiers, beheadings, outtakes from Baath-era crimes, and other grotesque entertainments, in what was becoming a subculture of death. The atmosphere was so brutal that the news of mass murders became numbingly routine. Personal anecdotes that came my way somehow hit harder. They suggested an epidemic of violence that was going largely unreported. My driver’s sister, a gerontologist at a public clinic, told me that a woman had come in the day before with severe shock: Her husband, a translator at an American base, had been shot dead before her eyes. One of my translators, also a doctor, had a friend from medical school, a Shiite, who had gone to work at a clinic near Ramadi in order to be with his fiancée. Local people immediately suspected him of being a spy—why else would a Shiite want to work in a wild place like Anbar province?—and the doctor and his fiancée were beheaded. A factory owner in Mosul appeared in a documentary film saying that the fall of the regime had improved his business. The film was shown several times on Arab satellite TV, and soon afterward the factory owner’s uncle was kidnapped; when the family ransomed his release, he was returned without eyes or hands. And there was this leaflet that an Iraqi-American woman working with the CPA picked up in Kadhimiya and showed me:

  IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MERCIFUL. THIS IS A FINAL WARNING.

  To the spies at the local council, to all the translators and coordinators who work with the occupation forces: we are warning you that you should go back to your God and to the people. Otherwise your fate is known ahead of time and your punishment will be just, because you are informing on our sons and our brothers and they are being arrested now, and if they are exposed to any danger we will take justice into our own hands in order to defend our people who reject the traitor even more than the occupier. If you don’t stop after this warning we will tell your families that you are spies and your families should disown you because you are traitors and have sold out our land and our honor. We will tell your families to kick you out of your homes publicly, otherwise they will be like you and they will also be responsible.

  GOD IS GREAT. MAY BELOVED IRAQ LIVE LONG WITH HONOR AND DIGNITY. MAY THE CURSE OF GOD BE ON ALL WHO EXTEND A HELPING HAND TO THE AGGRESSORS.

  The Sunni insurgency never articulated a political vision that could win over Iraqis in large numbers. Its rhetoric was nationalist and Islamist; its strategy was increasingly sectarian. But what it really excelled at was fear.

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  THE SHIITE INSURGENCY was fundamentally different. It began on April 10, 2003, in Shiism’s holiest shrine, the tomb of Imam Ali in Najaf. Ayatollah Abdul-Majid al-Khoei, the son of a grand ayatollah who had been Sistani’s predecessor as Iraq’s leading Shiite cleric until his death in 1992, returned to Iraq from exile with American support in early April and entered his hometown of Najaf. Khoei had run a human-rights foundation in London, and he wanted to guide Iraq’s Shiite majority in a democratic direction. His appearance in the holy city was taken as a direct challenge by Moqtada al-Sadr, himself the son of a late and revered ayatollah, but far more radical than Khoei in the theocratic mold, with Iranian backing. On the morning of April 10, Khoei went to the shrine to make a conciliatory gesture toward its Baathist kilidar, or keeper. A mob of Sadr followers gathered outside and besieged the mosque office. The keeper was murdered on the spot; Khoei, who fired a gun in self-defense, was bound, beaten, and dragged by the mob to the door of Sadr’s headquarters. I spoke with the young judge, Raed Juhi, who investigated the case (he would later read charges to Saddam Hussein at his first court appearance). Eyewitnesses told Judge Juhi’s investigation that when Sadr appeared at the door, he was asked by the mob what should be done with Khoei. The witnesses reported Sadr answering, “Take this person away from here and kill him.”

  The investigation was conducted two months after the murder, and in order for there to be an autopsy on Khoei, who was buried inside the gates of the shrine, the police, having secured the permission of the victim’s family for this most un-Islamic deed, exhumed his body in the middle of the night. The severed finger, lacerations, stab wounds, and bone fractures confirmed the witnesses’ testimony about the manner of Khoei’s death (the corpse was returned for reinterment several nights later under cover of new burials). Juhi issued arrest warrants against Sadr and two dozen others. But rather than executing all of the warrants, the CPA placed Sadr’s under seal.

  The murder of Khoei was an ill omen of the political violence to come. In Kuwait, Jay Garner’s inner circle received the news without concern. “Oh, it’s just them killing each other,” one of the retired generals said. But Sadr had struck an audacious early blow in what was essentially an internal Shiite power struggle, and the Americans’ refusal to confront him only emboldened Sadr to push harder. Shortly after the murder of Khoei, his followers even surrounded the small rented house of Ayatollah Sistani in Najaf, but armed tribesmen from the region drove them away. Sadr’s main rivals were the other leading clerical families—the Khoeis and the Hakims—who were vying for leadership and who were more willing to play by the CPA’s rules. Sadr was around thirty (his exact age remained a mystery—some said he was still in his twenties), with a cleric’s black turban and bushy black beard, but without the scholarly credentials; his slightly cross-eyed scowl and demagogic outbursts left most observers unimpressed. Some Iraqis thought Sadr mentally ill, and one called him a “Mongolian,” by which he meant Mongoloid. But Sadr had two weapons that made it unwise to underestimate him: his father’s mantle, and his father’s following among young, poor, dispossessed Shiite men, the generation created by Saddam, whom Sadr’s aides organized and armed as the Mahdi Army. They took over schools and hospitals, intimidated the staffs, assaulted unveiled women, set up kangaroo sharia courts that issued death sentences, repeatedly tried to seize control of the holy shrines, ran criminal gangs, firebombed liquor stores, and were often drunk themselves. They made themselves extremely unpopular among the middle classes of Najaf, Karbala, Basra, and Baghdad. Their tactics were those of fascist bullies; Sadr’s father had at one time been Saddam’s handpicked Shiite leader, and many of the men around the younger Sadr were former Baathists. In March 2004, they wiped a village of gypsies in southern Iraq off the map. But the fragile Iraqi police were unable or unwilling to constrain them (the Basra police chief and many of his officers were Sadrists themselves), and the occupation authority allowed Sadr’s strength to grow unchecked while providing him with a rhetorical target that was a far better recruiting tool than his attacks on other Shia. In October 2003, Sadr briefly declared himself the government of Iraq.

  The CPA didn’t know what to do with young Sadr. If he was arrested, there would be a backlash; if he was ignored, he would continue his campaign of intimidation. Sadr had been left off the Governing Council, but now he was, in Lyndon Johnson’s phrase, outside the tent pissing in, and the CPA had no channel to his movement, making or failing to make decisions, as so often, without enough information. Ambassador Hume Horan, Bremer’s liaison to the Shia, said of Sadr, “His father would be so distressed if he’d seen his son. How can you do an Erik Erikson o
n Moqtada al-Sadr? Here’s this unchurched son of one of the great churchmen who fills the role without any of the qualifications. What is he lashing out at? Is it his own sense of inadequacy that is being projected out?” Horan, who committed suicide in 2004 while suffering from cancer, was an elder of the Presbyterian church and a bookishly eccentric retired diplomat who was reading a ten-volume French historical novel at the palace. His assignment in Iraq was to get to know the more moderate senior Shiite clergy—“these shaggy fellows,” he called them. “I feel like a paleontologist. It’s like a new frontier for an Arabist, to talk to Shia clergy. They’ve not been poisoned by these anti-Semitic currents that have been washing around much of the Sunni world. I think their otherworldliness has given them some protection against the distemper. I wish them well. Innocence deserves a break now and again.” I asked Horan what the chances were of an Iranian-style theocracy being imposed by the Shiite majority on Iraq. “Absolutely zero,” he said. “Not a chance in the world.”