by Nir Rosen
About one thousand families obtained the permits from the army and passed through the checkpoints, where soldiers and Lebanese demonstrators heckled them. They found only destruction. It was as if a giant plague of locusts had ravaged the camp. Every single home, building, apartment, and shop was destroyed. Most were also burned from the inside, and signs of the flammable liquids the soldiers had used abounded on the walls. The empty fuel canisters were left behind on the floors. Ceilings and walls were riddled with bullets shot from inside for sport. Lebanese soldiers had defecated in kitchens, on plates, bowls, and pots, as well as on mattresses. They had urinated into jars of olive oil. Most homes had been emptied of all their belongings. Furniture, appliances, sinks, toilets, televisions, refrigerators, gold jewelry, cash—all were stolen. Even the charred walls the Palestinians had been left with were not spared: insulting graffiti had been written on them, along with threats, signed by various army units. The media were not permitted in, and with few exceptions they were ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, if not reveling in it. The army’s behavior confused observers. While it seemed to ignore Fatah al-Islam targets, it systematically destroyed other parts of the camp. Following the battle the army continued to treat the camp as a military zone and imposed an army engineer onto the committee planning the reconstruction, informing other members of what the army wanted done.
The army, which had never been used to defend Lebanon from external threats such as Israel, only to suppress internal dissent, and which had struggled to defeat a small band of extremists, had systematically gone through every bit of the camp and ravaged the infrastructure, destroying six decades of life to render it impossible for the Palestinians to return. All the windows were broken, electrical wiring was pulled out, copper wires stolen for resale or reuse, water pumps removed or destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. The columns typical in the camp, which supported homes, had been shot up so that the concrete was turned to rubble and the rebar exposed. Those few computers that were not stolen had been picked apart, and the RAM and hard drives were all missing. Photo albums had been torn to shreds. Every car in the camp was burned, shot up, or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. Much of the looting and destruction had taken place after the fighting ceased, or in areas where fighting never occurred. The many businesses and shops that had served much of northern Lebanon had been looted of their wares, as had pharmacies and health clinics. Palestinians reported seeing their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli. The camp had once been imbricated into the local economy and culture. Now the Palestinians were unwanted and rejected. For some it was not just the second time they were refugees. Apart from 1948, in 1976 many arrived from Tel al-Zaatar, a camp near Beirut that had housed twenty thousand refugees until Lebanese Christian militias besieged it, massacred many of its inhabitants, and then leveled the camp to prevent the Palestinians’ return. “It is our destiny,” one man said without emotion in his blackened home in Nahr al-Barid, standing by excrement the Lebanese soldiers had left behind on the kitchen floor. The total loss of life from Nahr al-Barid was fifty civilians, 179 soldiers, and 226 suspected Fatah al-Islam militants. About six thousand families lost their homes.
Palestinian children’s art from this period depicts the Lebanese soldiers and Lebanese tanks destroying the camp as Israelis. Videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers circulated on the Internet, showing medical staff from the Civil Defense brigade abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, and some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds. Although still facing harassment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of rubble. One woman stood on her balcony throwing rubble from inside her home onto the broken street, where it was piled up on the sides. The majority of the Palestinians were still unable to access their homes, and could only wonder what was stolen, broken, and excreted upon. On the roof of a taller building in the new camp, I found Farhan Said Mansur, a sanitation officer standing with his wife and gazing silently across to their distant home, whose broken roof they could just make out—as if looking at Palestine, where he was born. “It is a calamity to all Palestinians,” he said.
Many Salafi jihadists had escaped to the Bedawi camp. Other cells had remained in Bedawi during the fighting. The camp’s security committee still had them under surveillance. Outside Bedawi I stopped with my photographer as he shot a bony horse grazing on a hill. Palestinian mechanics in the area surrounded him, holding his hand and warning him not to take pictures, because it was a Palestinian military position. We noticed concrete bunkers on the top of hills belonging to the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. Just beyond was the army. In November the influential American-allied Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt threatened that the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut would be the next Nahr al-Barid, and the Palestinian community felt even more vulnerable. That month the Lebanese cabinet warned that Islamist militants were infiltrating other Palestinian camps. The phenomenon would be dealt with as it had in Nahr al-Barid, said the minister of information, Ghazi al-Aridi. Nobody thought to address the actual condition of Palestinians in the camps.
As the Lebanese Army celebrated its “victory” over Fatah al-Islam, its commander, Michel Suleiman, was to become the next president. He would not be the first president to have punished the Palestinians. Between 1958 and 1964, President Fouad Shehab created an elaborate, ruthless secret-service network to monitor the Palestinian camps. During his 1970-76 reign, President Suleiman Franjieh clashed with Palestinian factions, even using the air force to bomb a neighborhood thought to be pro-Palestinian. I’ve heard followers of assassinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose Maronite Christian militia massacred Palestinians in 1976, brag that he was stopped at a checkpoint in the early years of the country’s 1975-90 civil war with a trunk full of the skulls of dead Palestinians. And the leading opposition Christian leader is Michel Aoun, a retired general who participated in the 1976 killings.
“Social confinement is leading the youth to religious radicalism,” says Bernard Rougier. “Youngsters are socialized by religious clerics who tell them how to understand the world and the ‘true reasons’ of their social exclusion. To end that situation, refugees should be allowed to work in the Lebanese society, in order for them to live under new and different influences (with a restriction: nothing should be done to naturalize them, because it could upset the Lebanese balance of power, and Palestinian refugees would be, once again, caught in the Lebanese inner contradictions; in addition to that, such naturalization would dissolve the negotiations about the right of return). So what needs to be done is to distinguish between the issues, between what is social (the right to work), what is political (and should be discussed at the regional level), and what is linked to the legal situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In order to do that, Lebanese parties would have to stop frightening the Lebanese society about the risk of tawtin (a condition almost impossible to meet in Lebanon).”
As Iraq became a less hospitable place for jihadists and foreign fighters, or as there were less American targets to go after, these veterans, experienced at fighting the most advanced army in the world, were looking for new battles. Andrew Exum is a former U.S. Army officer who led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and then led a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. He lived in Beirut from 2004 until 2006, and now researches insurgencies and militant Islamist groups at the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C. “The fighting in Nahr al-Bared is, unfortunately, just the first round in what I fear will be a series of battles fought in the aftermath of the Iraq War,” he says. “On Internet chat rooms, we’re seeing militants turn away volunteers to go fight in Iraq and promising the next fight will be in Lebanon and the Gulf. Lebanon, especially, is a magnet for Sunni extremists. You not only have a haven for these groups in the Palestinian camps—with security services from rival Arab states competing for
their loyalty and attention—you also have two tempting targets: both the pro-Western ruling coalition in Beirut as well as the opposition, led by a powerful bloc of Shiite parties. How can we not expect these Sunni militants, who have spent the past four years waging war on the Shiites of Iraq, to try and carry that fight onto the large, politically active Shiite population in Lebanon? Or onto the pro-Western regime that precariously hangs onto power?”
FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR Iraq became a less prominent topic on the jihadi web forums. In part the novelty factor wore off. But Iraq was a loss for the jihadists, and as it grew bloodier, with more civilians being targeted, it was less inspiring for aspiring jihadists than merely fighting against the crusader and occupier. But there was very little soul-searching on the forums; jihadis seemed to have moved on without a lot of serious public discussion of what went wrong. This was partly because fighting picked up in other places after 2005, especially in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Somalia.
And while America’s militaristic ambitions will likely engender violent resistance movements regardless of the ideological environment, a major reason for the growth of Al Qaeda is now something beyond anti-Americanism. It is the internal war between Sunnis and Shiites in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and even Yemen. Al Qaeda can no longer be seen as just a force against U.S. encroachments; it is now part of these local phenomena. In this internal war in the Muslim world, Al Qaeda has become a major driving force of Sunni-Shiite hatred. Al Qaeda in this case means something more general than the actual organization. Even in moderate Lebanon, sectarian Sunnis have been Salafized. They may not have been religious beforehand, but they view Al Qaeda as an effective way to combat perceived Shiite expansion and a potent symbol for them to reclaim their masculinity. One of the many ramifications of this is that the United States is yet again involving itself in forms of spiraling violence whose outcomes are unpredictable and whose unintended consequences will be keeping it busy for decades to come.
Part Three
THE SURGE
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Iraqi Solutions for Iraqi Problems”
BY LATE 2006 IRAQ SEEMED LOST, A FAILED STATE, HEADING TOWARD Rwanda and threatening to provoke a regional conflict. There was finally a sense among Americans in Baghdad that things were going wrong. The First Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army—known as the “First Team”—took over the headquarters of Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B), the major U.S. military unit responsible for the city of Baghdad, in November 2006. Before its arrival, military policy was directed to handing over more authority to the Iraqi Security Forces. As one embedded planner with the Fourth Infantry, who were previously in charge of Multi-National Division Baghdad, told me, “[We were] struggling to control violence when the prime directive was to downsize and turn over responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces as fast as humanly possible. Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army filled the void and were trying to ‘cleanse’ the opposing sect from their perceived areas of influence.” But the Iraqi Security Forces were hugely compromised. I was told that every new Iraqi army unit being deployed to Baghdad would first spend two weeks in the Bismaya range in Diyala to train. While training there, the Mahdi Army would contact these units and tell them to leave them alone. “The Iraqi army couldn’t do the right thing if they wanted to, because politicians would pressure them,” one deputy brigade commander told me.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, commander of the First Cavalry Division, who in November 2006 became the commanding general of MND-B, told a subordinate in September 2006, “I don’t know what we are going to do in Baghdad. I do know we are not going to keep doing what they’re doing.” “We were all very vested in Baghdad,” a key author of the change in American strategy from the First Cavalry told me. “First Cav felt very possessive of the place and realized it was burning and that the old ways weren’t working.”
The new priority was to focus on protecting the Iraqi population from violence and slow down the transition to the Iraqi Security Forces. The increase in troops that would become known as the “surge” would be much more than an additional thirty thousand American troops. It heralded a change in doctrine and tactics. The Americans would live in the neighborhoods, not merely in massive Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) cordoned off from the general population, from where they would “commute to work.” They would implement population-centric counterinsurgency, designed to secure, or control, the population and win their allegiance at the expense of rival guerrilla forces.
Before the surge the Americans would take Iraqi National Police (INP) units offline for extra training, including on the rule of law and human rights. It was called a “reblueing exercise,” but it never worked. The Americans would go in and clear an area, leaving the INP there. In operations such as Together Forward I and II, from 2006, the American unit would report that it cleared one thousand houses and twenty mosques, and confiscated twenty AK-47s. Then they would leave the INP, and violence would get worse, as happened in Ghazaliya. It took Zarqawi to push the Iraqi Security Forces to take their work seriously, and they did this with the help of power drills and death squads, punishing Sunnis en masse until the will of the resistance was broken. It wasn’t in the counterinsurgency manual, but it worked.
Baghdad was the sine qua non for everything the Americans were trying to do, but at the National Security Council they realized it was falling apart. Brett McGurk, the NSC’s director for Iraq, was writing daily reports for President Bush about security in Baghdad, arguing that the military strategy was not working. In August 2006 National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley asked McGurk and Meghan O’Sullivan to work on a review of Iraq policy. All the Iraqis McGurk knew from his time in the country in 2004 were fleeing, hiding in the Green Zone, or dead. The son of one Iraqi judge he was friends with was killed right outside the Green Zone.
McGurk looked at past similar civil wars and concluded that it took a neutral force to provide a presence and stabilize the country, but the ISF wasn’t neutral (and neither, of course, were the Americans). McGurk believed that the Americans did not have enough troops to achieve their ends, that their mission was not properly resourced. In the summer of 2006, he made his position clear to the president. Hadley knew that McGurk and O’Sullivan were advocates of a troop surge, but he didn’t want the media to say the NSC supported such a surge, because it would immediately form antibodies before they could even do a review. He told them never to use the word “surge.” Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, was opposed to an increase in troops, as were Secretary of State Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
McGurk and O’Sullivan challenged Abizaid’s assumptions. They saw that in battles during 2005, in the mid-Euphrates, in Al Qaim, Tal Afar, Heet, Haditha, and elsewhere, whenever the U.S. military stayed, the population turned against the insurgency and became cooperative. The Marines told them that mayors of towns had asked them not to leave. The pair were also skeptical that the Iraqi Security Forces could handle the levels of violence in Iraq, and proved that they couldn’t. The Interior Ministry was mistrusted, and the Iraqi army was at risk of fracturing or disbanding, as it had in 2004, when the Americans had to restart it.
In the spring of 2006 President Bush gave a speech highlighting Nineveh province’s Tal Afar to show that American strategy was working, but Tal Afar—where the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment had cleared, held, and built—was not part of the American strategy; it was an exception. McGurk and O’Sullivan were cynical that political reconciliation could end violence. People on the street were not fighting each other because the Iraqi Parliament could not agree on an oil law, they argued. They felt they could show empirically that more U.S. forces, with a different strategy, could stabilize the country and lead to security. They spoke to old Iraq hands at the CIA and saw that the agency’s findings supported their position. To them a troop surge was not intended to open a space for political reconciliation; it was about building u
p the Iraqi Security Forces so they could hold the line and allow politics to take its course. Although many CIA analysts thought a surge would be throwing good money after bad, and was coming too late to be effective, McGurk and O’Sullivan were zealous about the need for more troops.
By the end of the summer of 2006, Bush was finally focused on changing course in Iraq. He no longer trusted Casey and Abizaid, and he wouldn’t defer to the generals anymore. Although Bush was briefed every morning by a CIA official about events around the world, he asked for a special briefing by the CIA every Monday only on Iraq. But he didn’t want his regular briefer from the agency; he wanted a young analyst. It was unusual for a young analyst to have that kind of access to the president. A typical analyst was a geek in an argyle sweater who was terrified by the idea of briefing the president, especially since an analyst might approach Iraq as an intellectual challenge, while Bush often flaunted his anti-intellectual credentials. When he was briefed about how the Mahdi Army was providing services to its supporters and beginning to resemble Lebanese Hizballah in its early stages, Bush was not curious and did not inquire how and why. Instead he asked, Should we kill Sadr? And what do we do to stop it? But Bush was also beginning to understand Iraqi political dynamics. He talked to Maliki regularly, one on one, through a translator. He gave Maliki advice. Bush wanted to build a special relationship with Maliki, as one leader to another leader. Others in the administration said he should not engage so frequently because he would lose leverage.