Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Not all factions were so cooperative. Miska described a 2007 battle by the shrine in Kadhimiya in which the American unit called Iraqi Security Forces for help but none of them came. A Sadrist Parliament member, Baha al-Araji, was sitting in the Iraqi brigade commander’s office telling him not to assist the Americans. “The next day Araji introduced a resolution in Parliament to prevent Americans from coming within a certain radius of the shrine to create a sanctuary for JAM to operate,” Miska said. “It didn’t pass, but it set back American relationships.”

  Mahdi Army fighters from different areas would come in to place explosively formed penetrators (EFPs)—a more powerful type of IED—targeting the Americans and the Iraqi general in charge. Normally they would warn civilians to leave beforehand. “There was one particular period after a firefight with the Mahdi Army in Kadhimiyah in April 2007,” Miska said. “Prior to the firefight we did not have an IED in six months in the neighborhood. After the firefight we were getting banged with EFPs right outside our gates. We were able to prevent most of the attacks, but some still achieved success. The people were very frustrated about all of the Mahdi Army attacks in Kadhimiyah. But Mahdi elements played on the fears that the infidels were threatening the sanctity of the shrine. Finally in August, my truck got hit with an EFP during a combined patrol. Eleven people hit the ground wounded when the bomb went off. Eight ambulances pulled up to the scene within thirty seconds of the blast. Casualties were quickly hauled away. No U.S. or Iraqi soldiers were wounded. The backlash from the people was quick. A senior leader approached us and asked to broker a deal. If we would agree to bring a former Mahdi Army leader back from hiding in Iran, he would promise to keep the ‘bad’ Mahdi Army out of Kadhimiya. We gave the former leader thirty days to make a difference. He lived up to his end of the deal, since no further Iranian bombs [EFPs] went off in Kadhimiya. We promised not to detain him as long as he did not conduct extremist activities against the Iraqi people or our forces.”

  Unlike the Mahdi Army, Al Qaeda took longer to change its calculations. Its ranks were reduced as the Americans targeted them with better intelligence, the Iraqi security forces attacked them, Awakening men turned on them, and they outstayed their welcome in most Sunni areas. American commanders on their third tour of Iraq were beginning to figure out how to do things better; crucially, they demonstrated an improved ability to take advantage of social dynamics in Iraq. The increase in troops also allowed them to take more action without the same limitations. “It’s unclear if the surge would have worked a year earlier,” John Nagl told me. “Sunnis didn’t realize they had lost and the American military wasn’t ready.”

  The Americans called these new Sunni militias neighborhood watch groups, concerned local citizens, Iraqi Security Volunteers, or Critical Infrastructure Security guards. These groups were paid by the U.S. military and operated in much of the country, employing former fighters and often empowering them, to the fury of the Shiite-dominated government as well as the Shiite militias, who thought they had defeated the Sunnis, just to see them trying to regain power through the backdoor. The Americans euphemistically called it “Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems.” General Petraeus paid these former insurgents without first getting approval from Washington. Control over the war had devolved to the field.

  Another key dynamic that was fortuitous for the Americans was the success of the sectarian cleansing operations. Militias had consolidated their control; clear front lines were developing. Many Sunni neighborhoods were depopulated. There was nowhere for Sunni militias to hide. The majority of the Iraqi refugees abroad were Sunnis. The Shiites had won the civil war. In 2007 the Bush administration and the U.S. military stopped talking of Iraq as a grand project of nation building, and the American media dutifully obeyed. Any larger narrative was abandoned, and Iraq was presented as a series of small pieces. Just as Iraq was being physically deconstructed, so too was it being intellectually deconstructed, not as a state undergoing transition but as small stories of local heroes and villains, of well-meaning American soldiers, of good news here and progress there. But it was too early to tell if the whole was less or greater than the sum of its parts.

  Ghost Town

  I decided to visit those parts to find out for myself. In December 2007, I took advantage of the lull in Iraq’s civil war to visit areas that had been no-go zones a year earlier. Baghdad’s neighborhoods were walled-off islands, but Iraqis could now visit areas outside their own for the first time in a year or two. The checkpoints manned by the Iraqi Security Forces were no longer as feared, but a foreign journalist was still a tempting commodity. Iraqis knew to make jokes when stopped, to assess if their interlocutor was a Sunni or Shiite, and to use the right kind of slang. For $250 in Baghdad’s Sadr City I purchased two fake Iraqi National Identity cards: one Sunni name and one Shiite name. It was something many Iraqis had done as the “killings over identity” got worse.

  I started in Dora, one of Baghdad’s most fearsome neighborhoods. Dora was a formerly mixed area in southern Baghdad with a majority-Sunni population. It was once a good place to live, with many expensive villas; but their prices had fallen dramatically since 2005, when Sunni militias began to expel Shiites and Christians. The Sunni militiamen who cleansed much of Dora lived in the surrounding rural areas, such as Arab Jubur and Hor Rajab. Criminal gangs took advantage of the chaos to target anybody with money for kidnapping and ransom. As the Iraqi Security Forces strengthened and were populated by supporters or members of sectarian Shiite militias, Sunnis from the Shiite areas of southern Baghdad were cleansed. Soon Sunni and Shiite areas exchanged volleys of mortars, and front lines were drawn between neighbors and friends. Shiites moved into empty Sunni homes and Sunnis moved into empty Shiite homes, creating a further incentive for violence that was part criminal and part sectarian. As Sunni militias radicalized and became more anti-Shiite, Sunnis grew to depend on Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq’s fighters for protection against the Shiite militias. Motivated less by nationalism or any interest in the notion of Iraq, and more by grander Manichaean ambitions to fight the West or establish an Islamic emirate, these radical jihadist groups became a golem, terrorizing the very Sunnis looking to them for protection and often acting like criminal gangs. Dora was easily accessible from the southern belts of Baghdad, allowing Al Qaeda to cross the Tigris and enter Karada and other Shiite areas. Dora was also on the highway to Baghdad from the south and adjacent to the still-contested Seidiya neighborhood.

  Dora was undergoing a radical transformation that I could not clearly see when I visited in late 2007. Much of Dora, it seemed to me, was a ghost town. I walked down Sixtieth Street in an area called Mekanik with one Sunni militia. Tall concrete walls built by the Americans divided parts of it, separating warring factions. Lakes and rivers of mud and sewage choked the streets, with mountains of trash dividing them. Most of the windows of the one- or two-story homes were broken. The wind blew through them, whistling eerily. House after house and block after block were deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open. Many were emptied of furniture; in others the furniture was covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Apart from our footsteps, there was complete silence.

  My guide was a thirty-year-old man called Osama, who grew up in this neighborhood. He pointed to shops he used to go to, now empty or destroyed, a barbershop that had belonged to a Shiite man, a hardware store that had belonged to a Sunni man. “This is all my neighborhood,” Osama told me. He wore jeans, a sweater, and a baseball cap, and had a slight baby face concealed by stubble. The previous U.S. Army unit had not been active in his area, he told me. “They were really cowards,” he said. “They let Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army fight.”

  We passed by the Ibn Sinna elementary school, which had served as a dividing line between Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. We continued and he showed me a Shiite mosque that in previous incarnations had been a cafe and before the war a Baath Party office. He pointed to the
destroyed mosque. “The Mahdi Army was killing people here,” he said. “They were torturing people and the people destroyed it. They were shooting on our neighborhood. The Americans raided it; it was a great day. If I find somebody from the Mahdi Army I would kill him right away, not give him to the coalition forces.”

  Osama had lost many friends and relatives in the civil war. When we drove past the nearby district of Baya, he pointed to the gas station. “The Baya fuel station is all Mahdi Army,” he said. “They killed my uncle here. He didn’t accept to leave. Twenty guys came to the house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him, and killed him.” The Mahdi Army also targeted men with Sunni names. “I have three friends called Omar,” Osama told me, “all killed.”

  Osama said the Mahdi Army freeze was “bullshit.” In the nearby area of Seidiya, he said, “two days ago they blew up the Sunni Ibrahim al-Khalil Mosque. The Mahdi Army is still killing people. Twenty days ago they killed three Sunni civilians who came back because they heard it was safe.” The Mahdi Army was Iran, he told me, the Quds Force. “The Mahdi Army is not listening to Muqtada and Muqtada is lying,” he said. “The Mahdi Army made Al Qaeda come here to defend people, but then Al Qaeda was worse. The government sucks; you know they are all corrupt. Then after a few months Al Qaeda became corrupt.”

  Osama had been a translator working with the Americans; then he had moved on to sign lucrative construction and sanitation contracts with the American company KBR. Al Qaeda got wind that he worked as a contractor for the Americans, and he felt threatened. He and a network of friends of his in the neighborhood started acting as sources for the Americans, sometimes riding along in U.S. Army vehicles with their faces masked to point out suspects.

  Osama and his men were first contracted by the American military under Lieut. Col. Jim Crider, who commanded the First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry of the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division (1-4 Cav), during the surge in 2007 and 2008. They took over the East and West Rashid security districts in January 2007. In May 2007 they took over the northeast sector of East Rashid and attempted to apply the principles of the new counterinsurgency field manual.

  “Anyone who was openly Shiite was already gone by the time we got to Dora,” Crider recollected. “We found a few people who were Shiite but posed as Sunni for their own protection. It was common for our troops to find three military-aged males with no furniture living in a house. That is not good enough evidence to detain them, so we would demand that they produce a legitimate rental contract within seventy-two hours or move out. More often than not, we would revisit the house to find it empty again.

  “The government of Iraq back then was very sectarian. They were terrified that Sunnis would take back what they had gained.” Crider cited the installation of Dr. Bassima al-Jadri as head of the government’s reconciliation committee as one example. Jadri was a thirty-eight-year-old former senior official in Saddam’s military industry ministry, where she had worked on improving Iraq’s conventional weapons capacity. Even then she was connected to the Sadrists, and after the war she was in Parliament allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Her formal relationship with the Sadrists began in 2004, when their opposition to Bremer intensified. They sought her out, and she agreed to advise them, meeting with religious and tribal leaders. She later established a relationship with the Dawa Party and became close to Jaafari and then Maliki. By this time her bodyguards had split off from the Sadrists. She was very suspicious of Sunnis and Americans, believing that neither wanted to allow Shiites to rule Iraq. She was very forceful, and when Maliki established his office of the commander in chief, meant to advise him on military matters, Jadri was put in charge of it, in part because of her fierce loyalty to him.

  Under her the office developed a fearsome reputation for issuing secret sectarian orders, advising Maliki on military matters and overruling the Defense and Interior Ministries, circumventing the chain of command to order officers to attack targets. She helped Maliki create his own praetorian guard. Jadri wanted to purge all nonsectarian officers and those not loyal to the ruling Shiite parties while promoting sectarian officers by removing Sunni names from lists of recruits to the army and police. She viewed all Sunnis as Al Qaeda supporters. When Maliki established a national reconciliation committee, the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation, Jadri was put in charge of it.

  IN ITS FIRST MONTH in Dora the 1-4 Cav was attacked fifty-two times. Sunni militias used deep buried IEDs to destroy American armored vehicles. In response, starting in June 2007 Crider initiated a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week presence in his area. This curtailed Al Qaeda’s ability to move about freely. People began to stay outside later into the night.

  A fellow officer was reading David Galula’s 1964 treatise Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which “emphasizes the importance of conducting a census right away,” Crider said. The 2-12 Infantry, from whom Crider adopted the idea, called it Operation Close Encounters. “I knew a good idea when I heard one,” he said, “so we began to conduct this operation daily in order to map out who lived in our neighborhood, what they thought, and who was not supposed to be there.”[1] The goal was also “to build a real relationship with the population one family at a time,” he would later explain in an article he wrote for Military Review. “We found that while people would not talk to us on the streets, they would often speak freely inside their homes. Since we went to every home, no one felt singled out. Galula points out that a census can serve as a ‘basic source of intelligence.’ We found that it was a tremendous source of intelligence that gave us an in-depth understanding of how people felt. We came to understand that Al Qaeda in Iraq was supported only by a small minority of the population. We discovered issues around which we could build an alliance based on a relationship of trust and respect. We could shape our talking points, information operations, and psychological operations to have the effect we wanted because we knew our target audience well.”

  The 1-4 Cav visited every home in the area, talking at length with every family. Using handheld biometric data collection tools, the Americans were able to document who lived in every house and made it difficult for the Al Qaeda men to know who was informing on them. By June and July of 2007, the 1-4 Cav was able to use local sources and terminate Al Qaeda cells that dispatched car bombs and planted IEDs. The removal of these cells allowed for the Awakening men to begin operating in the area.

  Although an occupation is always onerous, the 1-4 Cav and other units that implemented COIN did not conduct mass arrests in which all men were targeted randomly, as had units before 2007. Officers from the 1-4 Cav visited families of arrested men, explaining to them what evidence they had. In August Al Qaeda men from Arab Jubur infiltrated Dora, bringing their families so that they would appear to be internally displaced persons. As the 1-4 Cav cooperated with the American unit in Arab Jubur, they were able to arrest the Al Qaeda men, frustrating the group’s attempt to reinvigorate itself.

  Crider insists that the twenty-four-hour presence in the neighborhoods produced immediate results, with IEDs and murders dropping off significantly. He also suggested that because his unit was made up of young soldiers who were in Iraq for the first time, they were not encumbered with the attitude that the Iraqi people were the enemy. “A platoon would go out and do an eight-hour patrol, handing out microgrants, cutting loose wires, talking to Iraqis,” Crider said. He was struck at the familiarity his lieutenants developed with the neighborhoods and local families. Using a computer program called Tigernet, they could plot the information on who lived in every house, their job, skills, ability to speak English, and other details into every location on the satellite maps of his area.

  Back then the only concrete barriers in Dora were smaller “Jersey” barriers around the Mekanik area. “They didn’t stop movement as good as we wanted to,” Crider said. “We were trying to get walls as soon as we could. It forces the population to f
unnel through checkpoints and protects from gunfire. It took three or four months to put up the walls. Dora was the first place in southwest Baghdad that got walls. There was one protest when walls went up by guys we believe were involved in the insurgency. The insurgents hated those walls. Over the course of a few weeks we saw the impact.” The farmlands that had been used to smuggle weapons or fighters into his area were now cut off.

  In September 2007 there was a murder campaign in Dora, with more than nineteen killings. The first victim was Haji Sattar, a local council member. His killers entered the District Advisory Council in broad daylight and asked for him by name. Then they shot him in the head and walked out. “The murder campaign was an attempt to shake up the neighborhood,” Crider said, “They were trying to kill people who they thought were sources for us.” It briefly succeeded. Haji Hashim, the deputy head of the Rashid district council and a close ally of the Americans, fled for three months. “Sattar’s death got Hashim shaken,” Crider told me. Hashim had been collaborating with the Americans since 2003 but had managed to stay alive and stay respected by many people in Dora. “Hashim would give us tips: ‘Don’t drive down this street for a couple of days,’” Crider said.

  By July 2007 Crider’s men had cultivated thirty-six new local Iraqi sources. “In August the number of detentions skyrocketed, and soon enemy activity fell down,” Crider said. The last attack that killed one of his soldiers happened on September 9. “The last IED was September 27. When Shiites returned to Dora in early 2008, there was some increase in violence but no killings.” Crider’s unit arrested more than 250 Al Qaeda suspects, with 80 percent of them sent on to long-term detention, although most never faced any court or due process to establish their guilt.