by Nir Rosen
There was a serious and heated internal debate among the Americans in Baghdad, both between different headquarters and within them, over whether they should focus on population security or continue to capture and kill. Advocates of the latter approach, of which Odierno apparently was the champion, saw which way the wind was blowing, aped the new COIN language, and called their method “clearing,” as in “clear, hold, and build” or “clear, control, and retain.”
But Morgado disagreed with this description of Odierno’s philosophy. “Maliki wanted to go and kill Sunnis,” he told me. “By putting a larger American presence in the belts, it stopped Maliki from pursuing this aim, and it allowed Americans to effectively interdict lines of communication and thereby stop accelerants of the violence. The Awakening would have been hard-pressed to happen if Maliki was allowed to unleash a one-sided assault on the Sunnis in the belts.”
General Petraeus and the bulk of MND-B were focused on providing security to the Iraqi population. Odierno and some other elements—most notably the Third Stryker Brigade combat team, Second Infantry Division, under the command of Steve Townsend—wanted to keep “clearing,” the most violent part of the “clear, hold, and build” process. Odierno tasked the Third Infantry Division to lead the organization of Multi-National Division-Central and facilitate the fight in the belts outside Baghdad. As airpower advocates have noted, more bombs were dropped in 2007 in MND-C’s area of operations than at any time earlier in the war. While Baghdad was focused on population security (despite some internal dissidents and occasional lapses), MND-C was still killing and capturing until much later, when the Awakening groups were established there too.
Odierno wanted to reduce the influence of MND-B (the major institutional proponent of executing the surge) and transfer terrain to the other units that shared his focus on killing and capturing. Odierno could never directly say, “Don’t secure the population,” since Petraeus would overturn that, but he could nibble away at MND-B’s influence. (Morgado denied that his old boss had any obsession with killing. “I believe General Odierno sensed weakness in General Fil,” he said. “Odierno used to talk about reconciling with various parties back in 2003 to 2004. This was not a new concept for him.”)
Most interlocutors I dealt with from the military and National Security Council agreed that Odierno was neither a visionary nor a strategist. “Petraeus is an A who hires A-pluses,” one American intelligence analyst dealing with Iraq told me. “Odierno is a B who hires Cs.” Petraeus also had the star power to handpick whomever he wanted, which led to the creation of a coterie of West Point graduates and within that a smaller group of graduates from West Point’s social sciences department. Petraeus made COIN the universal policy, and thanks to his status he was able to sell an increase in troops to the American people and Congress despite their growing antiwar mood.
Though the surge was Baghdad-oriented, the increased troop numbers also allowed the Americans to operate in the “belts” that surrounded the city. Odierno’s role in the belts was a key element. He took the concept of the surge and decided where to put troops. “He is not a bright guy, and he didn’t have bright guys around him, but he figured out how to fight the battle of Baghdad,” one insider told me. If Doug Ollivant and others at First Cav were the architects of the surge, Odierno was the builder, the operational realizer. Morgado served in Balad, north of Baghdad, between July and November 2007. “Al Qaeda in Iraq had freedom of maneuver in the belts,” he explained. “This gave them unlimited opportunities to marshal resources in the hinterlands, use multiple avenues to infiltrate supplies and weapons into Baghdad, and conduct attacks. Al Qaeda, with this latitude, was free to conduct attacks on Shiites and act as an accelerant for retribution by the Mahdi Army or other Shiites.
“While U.S. and Iraqi forces kept the Shiites under control in Baghdad, U.S.-led efforts in the belts kept the Sunnis/Al Qaeda off-balance. Both efforts depended on the other, but the belts clearly supported the efforts within Baghdad. I thought it was critical for U.S. forces to lead in the belts. We stood up the Sons of Iraq and brought the Sunnis into the ‘good guy’ side of the ledger. I don’t think this was feasible or desirable by a Maliki-led effort. His solution to the Sunni problem would have been ‘Kill them all’ and only would have exacerbated the problem. Though the Sons of Iraq pose a political problem now and in the future, these are much better conditions.”
Balad is a Shiite-dominated town surrounded by rural Sunni communities. By the time Morgado arrived in Balad, the Mahdi Army had been largely put down, while most Sunnis within the town had been chased out or killed. Morgado’s principal threat remained Al Qaeda in Iraq and associated groups. “We were tight along the Salahaddin/Diyala fault line,” he said. “Their lines of communication ran from Samarra and Anbar in the west, from Baquba in the east, and Mosul to the north. In turn, they would use the Balad area to stage attacks in Baghdad/Taji area in the south.”
The first Sons of Iraq group was “stood up” in Balad in August 2007. Morgado’s battalion cultivated six of these groups, putting about 200 individuals on the payroll. “They were extremely effective. Once these groups stood up, Al Qaeda went after them hard, but they remained resilient. With largely Sons of Iraq influence, we began capturing or killing every major high-value target we had, and attacks in our zone decreased dramatically. It was clear with the Sons of Iraq that part of their motivation was monetary, but largely they were tired of the violence. Their allegiance with Al Qaeda only brought them death and instability. By working with us, they realized they could stabilize the community. Knowing that we were providing support to these groups, monetarily and operationally, gave them a lot of confidence.”
When Bush announced his surge in January 2007, I thought it was too late for the Americans to make a difference. I had spent four years writing about the oppressive nature of the American occupation, and I didn’t see how enlarging it could make things better. General Petraeus himself asserted that military gains would be ephemeral if Iraq’s factions did not reach political deals. It seemed as if more troops might only provoke further resistance, or if not, that a few thousand more troops couldn’t possibly halt the civil war and affect the situation in Iraq strategically. But the addition of more American troops also forced other armed factions in Iraq to change their plans and actions.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Miska, the introduction of combat outposts, smaller bases inside neighborhoods, and joint security stations where Americans lived and worked with Iraqi security forces allowed the Americans to integrate the Iraqi army, Iraqi police, and U.S. forces into an overall security plan. “We were commuting to work, but an insurgent lives among the people, so you must do it too,” he told me. “We started doing this in Ghazaliya before the surge. Ghazaliya was a killing field. The Mahdi Army was attacking from Shula and the north, Al Qaeda was attacking from the south. The first combat outpost we put in was on the sectarian fault line between the two sides. We set it up with the Iraqi army, and within a week some stores opened up, people came in. We were there in a sustained presence and wouldn’t leave them. It helped set up Sons of Iraq; people realized Americans could be an ally.”
Miska said that the Sons of Iraq were originally organized to fill a gap in local security, predominantly because the local police would not provide security to the Sunni population areas. During the surge, the Americans started placing combat outposts (COPs) and joint security stations ( JSSs) along the sectarian fault lines and right in the Sunni areas because the need was greatest there. “Al Qaeda held the Sunni population hostage in neighborhoods like Amriya, where the flagpole of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia was planted,” he said. “I think part of the reason the Sons of Iraq came to us in Amriya and Ghazaliya was that they saw the Americans were committed to protecting the Sunni people. Nobody else had a stake in the game—not the police, not the Iraqi army or the Iraqi government.”
More than the surge itself, the declaration of the surge forced armed factions in Iraq to change
their calculations. Sunni militias who resented Al Qaeda or were already in conflict realized that the Americans were no longer aiding the “Iranians” whom Sunnis saw as their fundamental enemy. Instead they saw the Americans acting to limit Iranian influence. They saw that the Americans would back them against Al Qaeda and would not abandon them, as they had previously done with Sunni collaborators. Controlling the Anbar province and cutting it off from Sunni strongholds in western Baghdad denied Al Qaeda some of its strategic depth and access to its hinterland. This weakened it and allowed Sunni groups opposed to Al Qaeda to take advantage of the opening. These Sunni groups might have been more skeptical of the Americans had they not seen the success of their Anbari brethren, who began collaborating with Americans against Al Qaeda groups in the summer of 2006 and helped turn one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq into one of the least violent.
There had always been infighting between Sunni resistance groups, but they tried to minimize these publicly to maintain the appearance of a united front. Al Qaeda tried to Iraqify itself after the death of Zarqawi, with Iraqis as its official leaders, controlling the Mujahideen Advisory Council. The increased sectarian violence and aggressive Shiite push forced Sunni groups to rally together and work with Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda members acted like gang leaders, terrorizing local populations more than fighting the occupier. Local religious, tribal, and traditional leaders, as well as educated elites, were either killed, co-opted, or expelled. Often the population followed them out, turning areas into ghost towns.
In October 2006 Al Qaeda announced the creation of its Islamic state in Iraq. It was not about liberating Iraq from the occupation; it was about a larger global war. But most of the Iraqi resistance had no appetite for this sort of global jihad. Resistance groups began to feud with Al Qaeda, as leaders were assassinated. In 2007 the Islamic Army of Iraq publicly broke with Al Qaeda, condemning its tactics and claiming that thirty members of the Islamic Army had been killed by Al Qaeda. These clashes began in Amriya. That year three leading resistance groups established the Jihad and Reform Front, which condemned Al Qaeda’s tactics (such as targeting civilians) and goals.
Al Qaeda men condemned tribal traditions for being un-Islamic, and actively undermined or usurped traditional authority. This alienated local communities. During the modernizing era of the 1970s, tribes were marginalized as the state asserted itself. But in the ’80s tribes were co-opted and armed in the war against Iran. Tribalism was used by the regime, and tribal leaders who proved loyal servants were empowered. Although tribal leaders were initially ignored by the occupation, the Americans also began to co-opt and collaborate with them during the surge, empowering them to rebel against Al Qaeda.
Sunnis in Anbar might have opposed the occupation, but they also wanted stability, and Al Qaeda brought only chaos. The Sunni tribal “Awakening” began in Anbar, led by Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha. Soon other tribal leaders joined him. Many were not important or powerful until the Americans empowered them. Abu Risha himself was widely known as a highway robber, operating on the highway between Baghdad and Amman. His conflict with Al Qaeda might have had more to do with a dispute over looted goods than ideology. But when Al Qaeda killed his tribesmen, a blood feud between it and the tribes started. Al Qaeda taxes on smuggling also made tribal leaders chafe. The explicit American shift in emphasis from killing the enemy to protecting the population allowed it to be more subtle when dealing with resistance groups. By the end of 2006, the Syrians had also cracked down on illegal border crossings, closing some of the routes Al Qaeda relied on for personnel and supplies. As for Sheikh Sattar, shortly after meeting President Bush, he was blown up outside his home in September 2007, which was probably convenient for both the Iraqi government and the Americans, who now no longer had the problem of disposing of him once he outlived his usefulness.
At the same time, the Sadrists were facing a backlash from fatigued Shiites who saw them as an onerous gang. An increase in American troops focusing on Baghdad was guaranteed to lead to a crackdown on the Mahdi Army, and Muqtada al-Sadr always retreated before the Americans could defeat him, a lesson from his 2004 experience in Najaf. But if his people could lie low and wait for the Americans to reduce their troops once more, they could emerge unscathed and even benefit by letting the Americans cull his ranks of disobedient and criminal-minded elements, strengthening his control.
By the summer of 2007, tension between Maliki and the Sadrists had increased. Though the Sadrists had backed Maliki’s rise to power, they now withdrew from the government, hoping to weaken him. Maliki went so far as to compare Sadrists with Baathists. On the other hand, many of the Sadrists in the government were viewed as corrupt and brutal, so it is also possible that Muqtada withdrew them to clean his movement’s image. The year 2006 was supposed to be the year of the police, according to the Americans. Instead it was the year the police and Mahdi Army became one. The rank and file were dominated by Sadrists. Officers were terrified of their own men. The Mahdi Army took for granted its authority over certain areas. Nobody could challenge the Sadrists—not the Iraqi Security Forces and not the Americans. Just like Sunni criminals using fatwas to justify their crimes under the guise of Al Qaeda, so too did Shiite criminals profit from the booty they seized from Sunnis under the guise of Mahdi Army activities. As a result of its criminal activities, seizure of Sunni property, and control over essential services such as gas and benzene distribution, the Mahdi Army was well funded. Its wealth also allowed it to provide social services so as to maintain and even increase its base of support from urban youth to the many families it now assisted, especially among the displaced.
Control over its men was always a concern for the Mahdi Army leadership. As leaders were arrested, younger, less-disciplined fighters gained more control. Different Mahdi Army units fought each other. As Mahdi Army territory increased, its leadership lost control over local units. Splinter groups terrorized and preyed on people in the name of the Mahdi Army. Even supporters of the Sadrists began to resent the Mahdi Army.
In the summer of 2007, six months into the surge, the Mahdi Army was still cleansing Sunnis in areas like Hurriya. Although Hurriya was majority-Shiite, its Sunnis were well organized and strong. Shiites were initially on the defensive, with many of their civilians killed on a daily basis. To defeat the threat of Sunni militias, the Mahdi Army systematically cleansed all the areas and began to encroach on the nearby majority-Sunni Adil neighborhood. The assassination of businessmen and religious leaders struck fear into the community, weakening it and facilitating its flight. Following attacks on Shiites, the Mahdi Army would pile Sunni corpses on streets in revenge. Amriya and Ghazaliya were the last two neighborhoods in western Baghdad still fully in Sunni hands. Dora was still contested. In eastern Baghdad, only Adhamiya remained in Sunni hands.
In late August 2007, Mahdi Army men clashed with opponents from the Supreme Council in Karbala. About one hundred people were killed and much property was destroyed while hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were in the city to mark the Mahdi’s birthday. An outraged Maliki, who considered Karbala his town, flew down and made it clear he was the boss, wearing a pistol and giving orders to his special forces to secure the city and arrest Mahdi Army men, in some cases leading his own men into neighborhoods. Maliki realized that the Mahdi Army could threaten his authority. On August 29 Muqtada declared a tajmid (freeze), ordering his army to halt its operations for six months. Soon after he turned on unruly members of his movement, killing or expelling them.
The Mahdi Army cease-fire was the most important factor in the decline in violence. Until the freeze, eight months into the surge, the civil war was still raging and Sunnis were being cleansed from Shiite neighborhoods that had already been walled off. The militias were still advancing on the west side of the Tigris, far from their base in the east, until the freeze halted their advance all at once. The freeze would cost the movement dearly, because in a way its expansion was its purpose. Sadrists had few firm principles except being
opposed to the occupation and federalism. The movement represented the angry, dispossessed poor, and it had to express their anger in some way. By the time of the freeze the sectarian killings were beginning to decline. But now the Mahdi Army was in control of areas where it did not have a natural constituency, such as with middle-class or better-educated Shiites. With the increase in American troops and change in their tactics, the Mahdi Army was also less necessary for self-defense, and its excesses were harder for Shiites to tolerate.
A lesser-known element in the new counterinsurgency approach was increased attacks against the Mahdi Army’s key nodes, support zones, and capabilities. Protecting the population through bases inside neighborhoods and erecting concrete walls were the most obvious and essential elements. But the Americans also increased their offensive action against the Mahdi Army both inside and outside Baghdad. This was a key reason for Muqtada’s cease-fire. From February to August 2007, the Americans and their allies arrested an average of one thousand suspected Mahdi Army men per month, and killed many as well. This had a chilling effect on the Shiite militia. The Mahdi Army cease-fire held despite attempts by the Supreme Council and other rivals to provoke the Sadrists into confrontations.
According to Miska, the cease-fire was not declared because Muqtada had a change of heart about the United States. “He did it because most of his militia was fragmented and out of control,” he said. “In order to regain control, he issued the cease-fire. Any elements that did not obey the cease-fire would be subject to discipline. Discipline was sometimes doled out by elements we called ‘Golden JAM’ [U.S. military used the acronym JAM—for Jaish al-Mahdi—to describe the Mahdi Army] coming from Najaf to kill rogue leaders and elements. Sometimes the U.S. forces collaborated with the Golden JAM to get the same targets. We also coordinated with moderate members of JAM against more extremist elements. The majority of JAM would never admit this, but it did happen in very subtle and discreet ways. There are many different flavors of the Mahdi Army, its many different members acting for different motives, using the name of the organization.”