Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Hussein was the fourth-ranking member of Osama’s unit, after Abu Yusef and Abu Salih. He took me with him as he drove through the area to inspect the twenty checkpoints their men were maintaining. We drove through the mostly deserted neighborhood, with its shattered homes. Most of the graffiti on the walls had been painted over, but some still said, “Long Live the Mujahideen.” On various corners two or three men stood or sat with their Kalashnikovs. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army destroyed a lot here,” Hussein said as we surveyed the devastation, but he added that “Al Qaeda destroyed the area, not the Mahdi Army.” We were stopped at the checkpoints, and though some of the men recognized Hussein, many cautiously gripped their weapons and questioned us. “We’re a patrol from the central headquarters,” Hussein told them. Some of the men were teenagers, others were in their fifties. One of them covered his face menacingly with a red checkered scarf. The local market, previously shut down, was partially reopened, and as ISV checkpoints were being established some of the Sunnis who had fled the area, though none of the Shiites or Christians, were returning. “Clean Shiites can come back,” Osama told me. While I was there a Sunni family from the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, arrived at the checkpoint. They hoped to stay in one of the homes in the area. The ISV men questioned them and demanded copies of the identity cards of all the people who would live in the house. “Anyone else I will arrest,” said Osama. A woman approached the gate to ask for information about men who had been arrested, but the guards could not help her.

  One of the men prepared lunch for us: mushy cooked tomatoes; mushy fried potatoes; and kibbe, ground meat fried in dough. Osama called an American sergeant from a nearby base. “Your guys detained this guy,” he said. “He is seventy years old. What’s wrong with this guy, is he bad? Oh, he’s fifty? They told me he was very old. If you know for sure he is Al Qaeda, then fuck him.” Then he asked about a series of men who were detained and warned about an Iraqi who worked with the Americans. “He is a bad guy,” he said. “He threatens people.”

  Osama received a phone call from representatives of the Awakening Council boss Ahmad Abu Risha in Ramadi, the brother of the slain Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, summoning him and his men to a meeting. He was very excited and hoped to discuss what would happen in six months, when the ISV program was scheduled to end. He wanted the Awakening groups and the ISVs to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, “because the Iraqi government doesn’t do shit.” If the U.S. Army left or once more took to remaining within their FOBs, he said, violence in the area would return.

  Haji Hashim was the deputy head of the Rashid council who had collaborated with Crider. In 2003 Hashim and others volunteered to set up the local council. Before the war he had been in the Ministry of Education. “I spoke in mosques,” he said, “and said we have to work with the Americans. Dora became very bad in 2005. We were considered collaborators.” Al Qaeda came in, he said, and then it became dominated by locals and was joined by other resistance groups. “Then sectarianism started,” he said. “Al Qaeda killed Shiites, the Mahdi Army and Badr killed Sunnis and former officers. Things got worse after Samarra. Most police were supporters of the Mahdi Army, and Dora was a target for the Mahdi Army. In Shiite mosques they spoke out against Dora. Many Sunnis were killed in Abu Dshir.”

  The people of Dora collected their government-provided propane tanks in Abu Dshir. In 2006 “Sunni agents from here went there to get them, and four were killed,” he told me. “After that nobody could get propane, so people had to use wood to cook. So American patrols went to collect the propane, and now it’s better, but there are still lingering fears about being attacked.” Hashim was shot in the head once when he left the house to collect his propane. The Americans took him to the hospital in the Green Zone, but he lost his vision in one eye.

  “I have seen dogs eating dead bodies,” Hashim told me. “Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq killed any Shiite, any government employee, and Shiites killed any Sunni. The Iraqi National Police used to shoot randomly when they were attacked. The leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces was sectarian at the time. They made random arrests, would shoot randomly and kill innocent people. The Rafidein Brigade of the INPs made random arrests. They took sixty-eight people from shops, and after that we found their bodies in Abu Dshir. Police shot at electrical stations so people wouldn’t have power.”

  One especially vindictive unit came through with PKCs (heavy-caliber machine guns) and shot up the area the day before they were replaced. “They had a strong hate,” Hashim explained. “Anybody who crossed the street was shot. Only cats crossed the street.” He attributed the improved security to the Americans. “One of the most important things they did was walling off the areas,” he said. “It’s true it bothered people, but it worked.” The Americans also helped release innocent Sunnis who had been arrested by the Rafidein Brigade.

  A new commander took over the Rafidein Brigade and improved relations with the people, Hashim told me. But the commander was later replaced by another who “did bad things, made random arrests, he made problems instead of solving them.” This one was later punished and transferred to the traffic police. “Then the Wolf Brigade came in 2007,” said Hashim. “They arrested people in mosques right away, tortured people. Boys from the area fought the Wolf Brigade. I asked them why they were fighting. They said, ‘It’s better to die fighting than to end up arrested with holes drilled in our bodies.’”

  ONE DAY I ACCOMPANIED men from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, a unit based in the nearby FOB Falcon, on a mission as they met up with Osama and his men as well as Hamid, or Abu Abdel Rahman, head of the Hadhir Neighborhood Advisory Council (NAC). Hamid had been in the Iraqi army for twenty-two years. Now he represented the six mahalas in his area. The Americans were establishing NACs and DACs (District Advisory Councils), institutions separate from the Iraqi government and funded by the U.S. military. Three Sunnis of the ten members in Hamid’s council had been assassinated. Five others had fled the area to avoid death. Hamid explained that because Sunnis had boycotted the elections for the provincial councils, Shiites dominated them and were trying to appoint Shiites to the local councils. The members of the Baghdad provincial council were mostly from Shiite neighborhoods such as Sadr City, Shaab, and Karada, he said. The NACs and DACs were an American attempt to compensate for the electoral disparities, though as with the Awakening and the ISVs, they were creating separate independent institutions that did not answer to the central Iraqi government. NACs and DACs were loosely tied, and though they were only meant to “advise” the Americans, the goal was to get them to “implement.” Hamid knew Osama and had helped him receive the ISV contract.

  The Americans met up with Hamid, Osama, Abu Salih, Abu Yasser, and Abu Yusef at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint and walked down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by their Stryker armored vehicles. The Tawhid’s Sheikh Abu Muhammad wore a green dishdasha with a brown vest. An older, bearded man, he had thick glasses and wore a white cap, topped by a red scarf. Shawn Spainhour, a civil affairs officer with the unit, asked the sheikh what help he needed. The mosque’s generator had been shot up by armed Shiites, and the sheikh asked for three thousand dollars to fix it. Spainhour took notes. “I probably can do that,” he said. The sheikh also asked for a NAC to be set up in his area, “so it will see our problems.” Two bearded middle-aged men in sweaters walked up to the Americans in the mosque and gave them a tip on a Mahdi Army suspect. The soldiers quickly got back into the Strykers, as did Hamid, Osama, and his men, and the Stryker vehicles drove up to a street in Mahala 830, where they found a group of young men with electrical cables. Some of the men ran away when the Americans showed up. Those who stayed were forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wore flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit guarded them and took their pictures one by one. “Somebody move!” shouted one soldier. “I’m in the mood to hit somebody!” Another one pushed a prisoner against the wall. “You know Abu Ghr
aib?” he taunted him. Unlike in the nearby Shiite area of Abu Dshir, in majority-Sunni Mekanik it was standard practice to arrest all “military-age males” for “processing.”

  As other elements of the American unit raided nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the unit came up to me, thinking I was the Americans’ translator, and explained that the men in the courtyard were Sunnis and that some belonged to the Awakening. Some of the men had been involved in tipping off the Americans to the Mahdi Army suspect down the block. I tried to tell the soldiers, but the electrical wires on the ground caused the Americans to think the men had been trying to lay an IED, so they blindfolded and handcuffed all eleven of them. “If an IED is on the ground, we arrest everybody in a hundred-meter radius,” I was told, though here it was only an electrical cable, and most likely the men had been trying to connect a house to a generator. In the house the two tipsters had identified, the soldiers found Mahdi Army “propaganda” and arrested several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or “Sabrin the Cruel,” an alleged Mahdi Army leader.

  The Strykers took the prisoners to the nearby COP Blackfoot. Inside, Hamid and the Sahwa men drank sodas and ate muffins. Osama and Abu Salih shook hands with the Americans and thanked them for arresting Sabrin, who they said had a lot of blood on his hands. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided were released, three of them being taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructed them to list who did what, what they did, where, when, and how. Abu Salih walked by and quickly told the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in some attack. None of the Americans noticed this coaching. Osama met with a sergeant from the unit and asked him if he could put a PKC on top of his pickup truck. “No,” the sergeant said. “But we can hide it,” Osama pleaded. Sabrin was soon moved to a “detainee holding facility” at FOB Prosperity. “We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad Mahdi Army guy,” said an American Army intelligence officer. “He was involved in EJKs,” or extra-judicial killings, a euphemism for murders.

  Osama’s main competition for contracts with the Americans was another local Sunni power broker called Muhammad Kashkul, or Abu Tariq. A former bodyguard for Saddam, he was now a contractor too. “He knows that when security is stabilized contracts will come in,” Captain Cox said, explaining Kashkul’s motivation for collaborating with the Americans. In one meeting with the Americans, Kashkul bragged that while working as a bodyguard for Saddam he had slept with 472 women. “Is that a lot in America?” he asked. Kashkul and Osama tried to play different American units against one another, but Cox helped arrange a meeting where the two were forced to work out what he described as “their turf war.” Osama was not convinced. “Coalition forces like Kashkul, so I have to be his friend,” he said. “They told me I have no choice. I have to be his friend. For two years they were looking for him. Showing his picture. Then they arrested him, took him to Blackfoot, and released him after two hours and said, ‘He is working with us.’”

  The Americans were obsessed with the concept of “reconciliation,” which Cox defined as “Agree to quit fighting and talk about problems and get U.S. contracts.”

  “Osama hates reconciliation,” Sperry told me. “He doesn’t feel that he has anything to reconcile. He hates that these other guys get contracts.” Osama had recently lost face when he accidentally discharged his Glock pistol and nearly hit an American soldier while in a meeting. Some of his men were proving unruly as well. “A couple of Osama’s guys were caught outside their sector,” the officer told me, “so we detained them and brought in the leaders. Abu Salih was really pissed.” When I was visiting Falcon FOB to discuss the ISVs, a major stuck his head through the door. “Are you tracking that the Heroes beat some guy up?” he asked Captain Dehart. “The Heroes’ usefulness is almost over,” Captain Dehart grumbled. He defended the reconciliation process. “It’s an overt process,” he said. “You can’t be in the shadows. We take mahalas, the Critical Infrastructure Security guards, the local leadership, provide us names.” As a result, he said, the men with real power in the area emerged from the shadows. “I’ve heard them tell me, ‘I will give you a hundred men, you give them weapons, and you will have no problems.’” But the process they called reconciliation required some community vetting in theory. It seemed that the Americans were turning themselves into a commodity sought after by Iraq’s warring factions. The Americans were a way to obtain contracts, influence, weapon licenses, identity cards. “They love ID cards,” joked one Army intelligence officer.

  When Osama drove me home from Dora we stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint near Qadisiya. He noticed a familiar Audi parked on the street and then saw a man he knew as Naseem walking past the soldiers. Naseem was Al Qaeda, he said, and was responsible for many attacks against civilians and the Americans. Osama put his cap on and called a soldier over. The soldier had a green bandanna masking all but his eyes as though he were a bank robber. “That guy is called Naseem, he is with Al Qaeda,” Osama said. The soldier seemed annoyed and I was worried that he would arrest us instead. “I’m with the Awakening,” Osama said, he showed several badges he had been given by the Americans. The soldier told him to keep going but Osama insisted. “What do you want me to do?” the soldier asked. Osama tried to convince them, but the soldiers were indifferent. Frustrated, he drove away.

  Osama’s part of Dora, which included Mahalas 830, 832, 834, and 836, was called Hadhir. Though each mahala had its own ISV unit, Osama hoped that eventually all of the Sunni Awakening militias would be united under one leader so that they could attain political power too. We were in Mahala 830. The Mahdi Army used to attack from Mahala 832. Iraqi National Police, who cooperated with the Mahdi Army, would drive up to Sixtieth Street and spray houses with gunfire, Osama told me as we walked by a solitary INP checkpoint. “I want to kill them,” he said, “really, but the Americans make us work together.” Since his men had been granted legitimacy by the Americans they were taunting the national police, telling them that just days before they were shooting at them.

  “There was definitely a link” between the INPs and sectarian forces, Nick Cook told me. “I am not sure how deep it went, but you could tell the INP definitely treated the Sunni neighborhoods with a lot of indifference and disdain. Many times I heard the national police refer to the neighborhood as lived in by dogs or criminals, referring to the residents. To the national police every person was a suspect. I never did see outright prejudice, but when you moved from Mekanik, a Sunni area, to Abu Dshir, a Shiite area, you definitely saw a change in personality with the national police.” Captain T recalled, “I remember several instances of units in predominantly Shiite areas actually catching [INPs] in the act of planting IEDs.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Miska was based in Kadhimiya’s Forward Operating Base Justice. It had three detention centers in it: the Kadhimiya prison; the Ministry of Justice prison, where the government executed condemned people; and an Iraqi army detention center. Miska worked closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, and at one point he had six brigades’ worth of Iraqi National Police or army men working with him. I asked him about the abuses he saw. “The Kadhimiya prison run by the national police was the most notorious,” he said. “This was Saddam’s former military intelligence facility. Senior members of the national police reportedly tortured, extorted, and killed prisoners, mainly Sunnis. The prison was made to hold about 350 prisoners. They had about 900 there when we first began putting pressure on the NP. At first we would conduct inspections and bring in teams that would write reports. The NP would complain that all the Americans talked about was human rights. They would also do a good job of stonewalling the investigators and making it difficult to gain entrance. We eventually started cycling reporters into the facility and getting front-page stories to embarrass the NP. The prisoner population quickly dwindled as a result.”

  One of Miska’s closest colleagues was an Iraqi army brigade comm
ander who was going after both the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda. As a result, he was put under intense political pressure. Miska accompanied him to numerous meetings with senior Sadrists and other politicians who were trying to get him to back down. But every time he would keep the heat on. The Iraqi commander eventually left Iraq after four attempts on his life, and Mahdi Army hit squads were hunting for his family. “It took me eight months to finally get through the bureaucracy of immigration, UNHCR, and other agencies to help him relocate to the U.S.,” Miska said. “Today his family is safe and living much more comfortably than they did in Iraq.”

  The Iraqi government, it seemed, would come up with every possible excuse not to send help to Dora. “When we would go to the Green Zone and ask ministers and deputy ministers to help out, they would claim that Dora was too dangerous,” Captain T said. “We would protest and say that we would take them there to see it themselves and would, of course, protect any government workers or contractors who were working in the area. To them, this was impossible because the area was unsafe!

  “It was ridiculous dealing with the Iraqi government. This was particularly clear when we were setting up the Iraqi Security Volunteers as paid security forces in our area. We were attempting to integrate them into the Iraqi security forces, but the government stonewalled this at every turn. They would ask for ridiculously detailed information from the ISVs, which they were, in turn, unwilling to provide to a government they didn’t trust. The government would demand that the ISVs meet standards far above what the ISF themselves had to meet.