Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  “Dr. Bassima al-Jadri was a particular problem in this regard, as she was extremely sectarian. She saw the ISVs as the armed forces for the Sunni political parties. We tried our hardest to make sure that the ISVs were security oriented, not politically motivated. In fact, this led us to deny a small group of low-level informants our sponsorship as ISVs. They turned against us and went ‘rogue.’ They were sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party. We eventually had to detain several of them to convince them that we would not permit the politicization of our ISVs. Anyway, Bassima saw the ISVs as a threat to Shiite domination and would try to throw every possible obstacle in our path against ISV integration into the ISF. And this woman was the [government’s] lead on reconciliation!”

  Saddam Hussein designed Baghdad with a circle of loyal neighborhoods around it. With its many officers, Seidiya was a place he could count on. But it had become a vital battleground during the civil war. Sunnis and Shiites both wanted it, since it opens up into Sunni strongholds like Dora. Shiites wanted to block whatever was coming in. It was located between Shiite-dominated Amil and Sunni-dominated Dora, and it was on the important road that Shiites took to go south to Karbala and Najaf. The Mahdi Army rained mortars down from the Baya district and destroyed Sunni mosques. The neighborhood was originally 55 percent Sunni and 45 percent Shiite, but by the end Shiites would have the upper hand. Seidiya went from being a relatively peaceful middle-class neighborhood to a deserted and broken wasteland, all under the Americans’ watch. Most of the residents had fled, and abandoned homes were used by militiamen and insurgents.

  “The Shiites were definitely winning,” said Captain Noyes, a platoon leader in Seidiya. “They were on the offensive and the local Sunnis were on the defensive, but it was a very violent and contested battle. The Shiite groups were attempting to kick Sunnis out of Seidiya and move Shiites in. The Sunnis were attempting to defend themselves, but some of them had Al Qaeda ties and were targeted by coalition forces, so they were fighting a two-front battle.” Most of the murder victims he remembered encountering were Sunni. “Many were killed with a single shot to the head, and signs of torture were on their bodies. The bodies were placed in areas to intimidate locals. Sometimes IEDs were placed under the bodies targeting whoever tried to recover the body. The Shiites were more effective and organized. They were part of the government, Ministry of Interior, the IP, and INP working there. Sunnis were isolated.”

  Noyes lived and worked with the 321 INP, or the Wolf Brigade, which was responsible for Seidiya. “They were extremely sectarian, regularly involved in and committing crimes,” he said. “The Wolf Brigade and Iraqi police were an arm of Shiite extremists, filled with Shiite militia members. I frequently found the Wolf Brigade involved in outright sectarian activities in cooperation with Shiite militias. The Iraqi police were so often tied to attacks on coalition forces and locals that it went beyond complacency or incompetence.

  “Eventually an Iraqi Army battalion took over Seidiya, but they were still under the INP brigade command responsible for West Rashid. We got 321 INP kicked out over a long period of documenting and reporting their crimes against the people of Seidiya. Their battalion commander was LTC Haidar. At one point we found him and General Mundher stealing furniture from an abandoned apartment. They claimed it was General Mundher’s apartment and they were moving it out.”

  The Americans arrested more than seventy members of the Wolf Brigade, who had been found expelling Sunnis and moving displaced Shiites into their homes. The Wolf Brigade was replaced by the Iraqi army’s Muthana Brigade, itself feared by Sunnis, and the Muthana Brigade clashed with the Seidiya Guard, the Awakening Group established by Noyes and his team. “The Seidiya Guard were by far superior to the INP as a counterinsurgency force. Their leaders were much more competent,” Noyes observed. “They conducted operations to win the support of the population; the INP did the exact opposite. The Seidiya Guards captured people occasionally. They would then turn them over to ISF or CF. Shiites that they handed over to INP were usually released. They understood their legitimacy was on the line, and so they were careful in how they handled people they captured. I encountered only support for the Seidiya Guard with the local populace. However, their relationship with the INP was horrible. They each viewed each other as illegitimate sectarian actors, and probably rightly so. The Seidiya Guard was disbanded after I left, under Iraqi government pressure.”

  Not everyone was happy about the new militias being created by the Americans, especially the Shiite-dominated ISF. More a paramilitary force than a team of street cops, the Iraqi National Police resembled the National Guard in the United States, compared with the more local Iraqi police. Both types of police units were dominated by Shiite supporters or members of the Mahdi Army or Badr militia and had fought in the civil war, often targeting Sunni civilians and cleansing Sunni areas. I accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Reineke of the 2-2 SCR to a meeting at the headquarters of the INP’s Seventh Brigade, in the former home of Ali Hassan Majid, the notorious Chemical Ali. It was now a joint security station ( JSS), staffed by Iraqis and Americans. This station was feared by Sunnis, who were often kidnapped by the national police and, if they were lucky, released for ransom. It was rumored to be a Badr militia base for torturing Sunnis.

  Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim, the INP brigade commander, sat behind a large wooden desk surrounded by plastic flowers. Behind him was a photograph of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. To his side was a shotgun. Karim controlled three INP battalions and was the senior Iraqi security official in the area. Even the Iraqi army officers in his area were under his authority. Lieut. Col. Jim Crider was partnered with Karim’s Third Battalion, Seventh Brigade, or 372. “Every time we went on patrol with them, we got shot at,” Crider told me. “Every time we patrolled with national police, we were introducing an irritant” into the Sunni neighborhoods. Sometimes Sunni militiamen would let the Americans pass, only to blow up the INP vehicles. Although Crider’s men at the JSS with Karim always had a list of all the prisoners held there and inspected the jails, Crider admitted that abuses probably still took place outside his men’s gaze. Iraqis were relieved when they learned that the Americans, and not the INPs, had detained their sons. “In the context of the surge, our policy was not to turn prisoners over to the INPs,” he said. “I remember Karim as very sectarian. I hated being around him. I once brought an Iraqi army commander from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, to our JSS to show him our setup. Karim was furious and brought us all into his office, where he sat and stared at the wall. It was weird, so I got up and left. I could tell he was a sectarian stooge from a long way away. Guys like him are the greatest threat to the stability of Iraq. They push regular Sunnis into a corner and then are surprised when they fight back.”

  In December 2007 the delegation of Americans led by Reineke was greeted warmly by Karim and his men. Five or six of his officers were with him, all Shiites. Reineke acted with exaggerated deference, saying “naam seidi” (yes, sir) repeatedly when addressing Karim. They discussed where they would place checkpoints and conduct joint patrols. Karim sought assurances that the ISV recruits had been properly vetted by local leaders, the Iraqi National Police, and the U.S. Army. Reineke mentioned that General Mustafa, a local ISV leader from Arab Jubur, had requested to open an office at the JSS. Karim grew tense. “The Awakening is a path for these individuals to get recruited by Iraqi Security Forces for jobs in the government,” he said. “More than that we don’t agree, the government is worried that these groups will be a militia or will be used by political groups.” Reineke tried to assure him that “the volunteers are only a short-term solution until they find jobs in the government.” Karim responded that “we have information that the Baath Party and Al Qaeda have infiltrated the Awakening. It’s very dangerous.” Reineke mentioned that in nearby Seidiya, the Awakening had opened an office. “The Awakening in Seidiya was killing people,” Karim said. “They are not yet in the government. We don’t accept that the Awakening will open an office. T
here is only one government. Those who qualify can join the police or the government, but the Awakening is temporary. There are two commands in this area: American and Iraqi. We won’t accept another.” The Iraqi general won the showdown.

  A stern man named Abu Jaafar had been observing the exchange. Wearing a dark suit and a dark shirt buttoned up, with no tie, he had two thuggish companions in leather jackets who were very friendly with Karim. A Shiite known to the Americans as Sheikh Ali, Abu Jaafar had his own ISV unit of about 100 men in southern Dora’s Saha neighborhood. The Americans said he was unofficially in charge of that area. He was also a Neighborhood Advisory Council representative for Mahala 828. “He may not be Mahdi Army, but he has a lot of Mahdi Army friends,” Maj. Jeffrey Gottlieb whispered to me. He also had a lot of access to Karim’s headquarters.

  “We’ve got a sectarian fault line in the Saha area,” Captain Cox explained to me that night, back at his base, drawing a line on the satellite image on the wall. “Saha was a battleground between [Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army]. We took over on September 8, 2007. The drop in violence is thanks to our unit moving in and patrolling every day.” Sunnis had been forced to rely on Al Qaeda for self-defense, he explained, and though northern Saha had been “an absolute killing zone before,” rich Sunnis were now trying to return.

  Victims of sectarian killings were down by half since the 2-2 SCR had arrived, Cox said. “We can have meetings and agreements between prominent Shiites who had ties to militias and prominent Sunnis who had ties to AQ.” He sounded triumphant, but I couldn’t help noticing myself that attacks against Americans were also down to nearly zero when I was there.

  But not far away, in Mahala 836, Cox admitted, a Shiite man was murdered when he went to check out his house after hearing it was safe to go back. The 2-2 SCR also noted a spike in criminal killings, they told me. I wondered how they could distinguish. The Mahdi Army cease-fire and the withdrawal of Al Qaeda forces to northern Iraq in order to avoid the surge created a power vacuum that allowed criminals to operate more freely.

  A few days later I returned to meet with Karim without the Americans present and found him talking to several senior Shiite army officers about the forced displacement of Iraqis and what to do with the displaced. An Awakening member was living in a house that the original owner had sold to somebody else, and now the Awakening man refused to relinquish it to the new owner. “We need a mechanism to solve these problems,” one officer said. A colonel called Najam who spoke with a Shiite southern Iraqi dialect worried that displaced Sunnis had taken over former homes of Shiites in Dora. “We need to bring back the Shiites, but the Sunnis are in the houses,” he said. “This battle is bigger than the other battles—this is the battle of the displaced.” Eavesdropping, I could hear Najam angrily condemning somebody, presumably the Awakening. “They are killers, terrorists, ugly, pigs,” he said.

  Karim’s phone rang, and he spoke with a superior officer about a clash the previous day between the Awakening and armed Shiites. “American officers took Awakening men to a sector where they shouldn’t be,” he said. “Residents saw armed men not in uniforms and shot at them from buildings. Four Awakening were injured. My battalion was called in to help.” In truth, they had clashed with the Mahdi Army, but Karim downplayed their role and blamed an American captain for establishing an ISV unit in an area where he should not have. “Yes, sir,” he said, “the Awakening will withdraw from that area. They started the problem.”

  Gen. Abdul Amir, another man present, was the commander of the important Sixth Division of the Iraqi army. He warned that men were joining the Awakening for political purposes. “They want to be prominent in their neighborhood so that they will get elected. The prime minister said, ‘I don’t want this to be about politics, I want this to be about security.’”

  The sectarian Shiite parties ruling Iraq worried about the Awakening becoming a pan-Iraqi movement. If it succeeded in being nonsectarian, it could displace them from power. Najam joked that 98 percent of the Awakening was Al Qaeda. Just then a U.S. Army major walked in and met with Karim outside the office. An embarrassed Karim returned and said he’d been informed he could not talk to me.

  “Gen. Abdul Karim was a completely sectarian individual who was more interested in consolidating Shiite influence and power via his police than in really solving the problems that plagued the area,” an American captain confided to me. “He was also incompetent in that he did not at all understand how to run operations or how to collect and use intelligence. People were fairly scared of him, especially his own subordinates, which suggests he was connected to one Shiite militia or another, though this was never confirmed. I think it was unlikely that he was intimately involved in any particular militia, but only because that might create a problem for him. I remember once, while visiting our AOR [area of responsibility], his personal security detachment, a ridiculous thirty-plus policemen, provoked our ISVs into a confrontation and hauled several away to the INP HQ. It was a near nightmare getting them released, but the event was indicative of Karim’s belief that he controlled Dora and that only he would influence the security situation there.”

  I returned on a different day to meet Abu Jaafar, who suggested Karim’s headquarters as a good location. Karim showed me a plaque on his wall that he said was an award from Prime Minister Maliki for being nonsectarian, and he pointed to medals on his desk that the Americans had given him—also, he said, for being nonsectarian. Next to them were a couple of traditional rings worn only by Shiites.

  Before the war he had owned some minivans, he said. After the war he built the Shiite Imam al-Hassan Mosque in Saha. “When terrorist activities started in the area, I wasn’t involved,” he said, because it was not clear who was responsible. “When things got clear I saw that people needed somebody to lead them and command them according to God.” He explained that his men had taken the homes of “bad Sunnis” (meaning Al Qaeda) and inventoried their contents. “They don’t want to come back because they were killers,” he said. Problems in his area had started two years earlier, he said, with random assassinations. “My cousin was a school principal and a local council member, and he was shot to death walking home. And others were killed, and we didn’t know why or who killed them. After a while I knew that my neighbor was informing for the killers. Most of the dead were Shiites. I talked to the young men in our area and said, ‘If we don’t cooperate, we will be killed one by one.’ We started to guard our area.” Abu Jaafar and his militia used old refrigerators, cinder blocks, and earth to wall off their area. His enemies—Al Qaeda but also the 1920 Revolution Battalion and the Army of the Mujahideen—were, he claimed, these same people in the Awakening. Shiites did not need an Awakening. “We are already awake,” he said, smiling icily.

  Abu Jaafar pulled out a list of forty-six people from Saha. “Criminals in the Awakening,” he said. “For two years I was naming these people.” He singled out Hamid, the Neighborhood Advisory Council boss in Hadhir. “Shiites could not join the local council,” he said. “They would be killed.” He blamed Hamid for dividing Saha in two, with Shiites controlling the south and Sunnis controlling the north. But in fact Shiites had pushed Sunnis out of northern Saha, and that area became a key front line in the civil war. Abu Jaafar pointed to two other names. “The Americans told me, ‘If you see these two men, you can kill them or bring them to us.’ Now they are wearing the Awakening uniform in Mahala 828. They said they have reconciled. I have to be patient. We are awake and our eyes are open.”

  Al Qaeda had changed its name and now called itself the Awakening, Abu Jaafar insisted. He claimed that Sunnis were acting weak so that they could attack once they regained strength. I asked him about Awakening Council founder Sattar Abu Risha, who had incurred the wrath of Al Qaeda. “He was just a robber in the street, and they made him a leader,” Abu Jaafar said dismissively. I told him that many Awakening members claimed they were fighting Al Qaeda. “How did they fight Al Qaeda?” he scoffed. “Fight themselv
es? Fight their brothers? And where is Al Qaeda? Did it evaporate overnight? We know everything, but we’re just waiting.” I asked him how he knew Karim so well. “General Karim is a good guy,” he said. “During the battles I was here every day.”

  Ghost Police

  I visited JSS Cougar at the Walid INP station, where the First Battalion, Seventh Brigade, Second Division (172 INP Battalion) worked with a U.S. Army National Police Training Team (NPTT). This team, led by the cynical Major Gottlieb, covered the area of Baghdad the Americans called East Rashid. I turned up dressed very casually, in a T-shirt and jeans. Seeing this, American officers from the 2-2 SCR admonished me to wear my body armor to protect myself from accidental INP discharges. “I did convoy security in the Sunni Triangle and was hit by numerous IEDs, complex attacks, small arms, but I never felt closer to death than when I was working with Iraqi Security Forces,” joked Captain Cox.

  A tall and lanky tank officer, Gottlieb underwent about seventy days of training with his men to prepare for this mission. “We don’t know as much as we could know because we don’t know Arabic,” he said. “The INPs here are almost all Shiites. Orders from their chain of command are usually to arrest Sunnis, not Shiites. But they don’t go on ‘Sunni hunts’ like the Second Brigade in Seidiya and a lot of other brigades.” The battalion he worked with was mostly from southern Iraq, especially Basra, and many were more loyal to the Badr militia. “At first they were encouraged to resign or given dangerous missions and were replaced by guys from Sadr City.” I asked him if he had any evidence of Sadrist sympathies among the men. “Today I was sitting in the office and the brigade finance officer’s phone rang, and the ring tone was a Sadr song,” he said. Pointing to the newly painted walls, he said, “It’s all cosmetic. They know if everything has fresh paint and looks squared away, we’ll think they’re squared away.” Local Iraqi National Police were resettling displaced Shiite families in empty Sunni homes in this area. Gottlieb called them “United Van Lines missions”: “The national police ask, ‘Can you help us move a family’s furniture?’ There are people coming back, and we don’t know if they were originally from here. Official U.S. policy is, we do not take part in any resettlement activity. I could make up a deed.”