Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  Gottlieb conducted an inventory of the weapons that were supposed to have been assigned to the base. Five hundred and fifty weapons were missing, including pistols, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Guys take weapons when they go AWOL,” he explained. “It was funny how they always expended four hundred rounds of ammunition. They would have fake engagements and transfer the ammunition to militias.” There was also a problem of “ghost police,” he said. Although 542 INP men were assigned to his JSS on paper, only about 200 would show up at any time. Some would be on leave and some simply did not exist, their salaries pocketed by officers. “Officers get a certain number of ghosts,” he said. He looked at an American soldier nearby. “I need some ghosts. How much are you making?”

  I accompanied the NPTT on a joint raid with the INPs. Captain Adil, a trim thirty-year-old with a shaved head and sharp gaze, led the raid, despite his rank and position as a battalion staff intelligence officer, because only 25 percent of the INP’s officer positions were full. As a result, INP officers end up doing a lot of things that American noncommissioned officers do. Adil briefed his men on the mission using cardboard and Styrofoam on the floor to replicate the vehicles. All the men wore the same blue uniforms, but with a variety of helmets, flak vests, and boots. “Today we have an operation in Mahala 830,” he said. “Do you know it? Our target is an Al Qaeda guy.” Adil would be riding in the Reva, a South African armored vehicle. The rest would follow in Hummers and pickup trucks. His men repeated the instructions; he ordered them to shout the answers.

  The targets were two brothers, Salah and Muhamad, suspected of working for Al Qaeda. They occasionally visited their family in their brother Falah’s home. Falah was known as Falah al-Awar, or Falah the Blind, because he had lost an eye. He belonged to the Islamic State of Iraq and had been arrested two weeks earlier by the Americans. Under interrogation he revealed that his brothers were involved in similar actions, attacking the Americans, kidnapping, and killing. “He dimed his brothers out,” an American officer said.

  Thirty-five Iraqi National Policemen took part in the raid. The INPs climbed over the wall and broke through the main gate. They burst into the house, ordering the women and children in one room while tying the hands of two young men with strips of cloth. One of them was Muhamad, one of the brothers they were looking for. The other young man was Mustafa, Muhamad’s young brother. He wasn’t on the target list but was picked up anyway. Salah was nowhere to be found. Mustafa started crying. “My father is dead,” he said. Adil reassured him, holding the top of his head with his hand, as if he were palming a basketball. Seated in the living room, the women asked how long the two would be taken for. Adil told them they were being taken for questioning, and explained where his base was.

  Then it was over. The INPs sped away. The Americans followed, surprised at the hurry. “We just picked up some Sunnis, we’re getting the fuck outta here,” joked one American sergeant. “Yeah, the moral ambiguity of what we do is not lost on me,” said Gottlieb jocularly in response. “We have no way of knowing if those guys did what they say they did.” Gottlieb later said that the Interior Ministry “uses ‘Al Qaeda’ as a scare word for Americans,” describing all Sunni suspects in this way.

  Back at the base Muhamad and Mustafa were seated on the floor in the operations room, blindfolded, with their hands in plastic zip ties. Sergeant Costa, an American, high-fived Adil’s deputy, Lieutenant Amar. The names on the prisoners’ ID cards were compared to what Costa and Major Fox had on a printed document of their own. Both were brothers from the Harfush family. These were the guys they wanted. Their pictures were taken, including of their front and rear torsos, to look for scars or wounds and to compare their physical condition then with how it might end up later, in case of future abuse. The older brother had a leg injury, which they photographed. The two were then separated. The older prisoner sat in Adil’s office, which had a locker, a plastic table, two beds, and a television playing an old Egyptian film. Costa and Fox sat on one of the beds with a translator. The prisoner, Muhamad Abdallah Harfush Gertaini, of the Garguri tribe, wore a blue tracksuit. After his blindfold was taken off, he was taken outside to throw up. He came back shivering. “Why are you shivering?” Adil asked with a smile. He gave him Amar’s jacket to stay warm. Adil showed him a picture and asked him who it was. “My cousin Qasim,” he said, and gave his address in the Mekanik neighborhood. “But he was arrested a few months ago.” Qasim was being held in an American prison. “This family, all of them work for Al Qaeda,” Adil said with a laugh.

  Adil began a long lecture. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said. “You’re an Iraqi citizen and you want to serve your country and repent. . . . How many checkpoints were bombed? How many of our men were martyred? We are the state, we put the law above all else regardless of sect. Why didn’t we go after your neighbors, why you?” Muhamad denied any wrongdoing. “I have four sources,” Adil said. “I know everything. I’ll advise you right, I have people I trust who told me about you and your brother. A source saw you with his eyes.” Adil showed him a picture of another man and asked who it was. Muhamad answered and told him that the man had been martyred. “Martyred?” shouted Adil. “He was a terrorist!” Adil showed him a picture of a one-eyed man. “He is my brother,” Muhamad answered. Adil listed people his brother had killed. Both brothers had volunteered for the Awakening. “The Awakening won’t help you,” he said. “I’ll get all of you. You’re a liar. Four sources swear against you.” Muhamad meekly protested. “Ask people,” he said. “I did ask,” said Adil. “I know you. I have a source who will talk for a whole hour about how you were injured in your leg. This is your last chance . . . you have until the morning.” He asked about Muhamad’s brother Salah, who they failed to find on their raid, and called Muhamad a liar when he said he had gone to work in construction up north.

  Mustafa was brought out. He had long matted hair and wore matching jeans and a jacket. He stretched uncomfortably. “My hand,” he winced in pain. “My haaand,” Adil mocked him, and asked him about Salah. Mustafa said he worked in a bakery in the north. Adil believed he was in Baghdad. Mustafa was taken out, and Muhamad was brought back, his blindfold removed. “Good morning,” Adil said. “Do you know your religion? You guys are always talking about Islam.” He lectured about Islam and quoted Condoleezza Rice. “These guys are destroying Islam,” he told us, and looked back at the prisoner. “You say we are Iranian. We are Iraqis, we are building your country.” The brothers were accused of expelling Shiites and killing civilians. “No criminal will say, ‘I am a criminal,’” Adil said. “They all say, ‘I’m innocent.’” Adil’s source claimed that Mustafa was wounded while attacking an INP checkpoint.

  The next day Sunni leaders from the area met with the American soldiers and claimed the brothers were innocent. Hamid, the Hadhir NAC boss, would not vouch for them, however. When the 2-2 SCR first arrived they had imposed discipline on the 172 INP Battalion, some of whom had gone on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians. “We arrested a whole checkpoint, nineteen guys, in the beginning, from the 172,” Captain Dehart told me, “so they don’t use checkpoints as staging points, so there will be no more shenanigans.” Still, some local Sunni leaders asked that the two brothers be transferred to American custody.

  Getting to Know Adil

  I met with Captain Adil several times in 2007 and 2008, and we became friends. Adil had been an army infantry officer before the American occupation. His father was a Shiite former Army officer and his mother was Sunni. Adil’s sister married a Sunni man and they fled to Syria, because she feared Shiite militias would kill him. Adil’s wife was Sunni. He had lived in the majority-Shiite and Mahdi Army-controlled eastern Baghdad district of Shaab, but he moved after the Mahdi Army threatened him for refusing to obtain weapons for them. He paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but was cheated and denied the job until a friend helped. “Before the war it was just one party,” he said. �
�Now we have one hundred thousand parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back to service. First they take money, then ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good. The army is not sectarian. I dream to get back to the army. In Saddam’s time nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he said. He rejected the notion that most officers had been Sunni or that most of the Baath Party had been Sunni. “If someone tells you, ‘I was not in the Baath Party,’ he is a liar. All Iraqis were in the Baath.” The Americans made a mistake by dissolving the Iraqi army and security services, he said. In Dora the army had a good reputation, and there were many stories told about how soldiers helped people go to the hospital and get through roadblocks.

  Typical of an officer who graduated from the military academy before the American occupation, Adil viewed the new sectarianism that dominated inter-Iraqi relations as anathema. The Iraqi army was the least sectarian force in Iraq, he said. In the Seidiya district it had battled the police, and at Dora’s Thirtieth Street checkpoint Iraqi soldiers came to blows with local INPs and IPs from the Balat station in Saha, Mahdi Army men who had gone through the Police Academy. Some of these Mahdi Army policemen were involved in the recent clashes with the Awakening men in the Kifaat area of Mahala 828. A U.S. Army intelligence officer told me that from a Sunni perspective, the Balat station was “problematic.” It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Muhamad and Sergeant Ali Faqr. Muhamad had his hands tied; a Mahdi Army leader had entered his office and threatened him with a gun to his head. Muhamad asked the Americans to arrest Mahdi Army suspects for him.

  Adil admitted that attacks against his people had gone down since the establishment of Awakening units. “The Awakening has the right to join the Iraqi Security Forces,” he said, “but they should be cleaned so we won’t have terrorists inside government. Just like we were cleaning the INPs, they are cleaning up the Awakening.” But he was also suspicious of the Awakening members. “Awakening in Dora is the same people who used to be attacking us, and now they taunt us, saying, ‘We used to attack you.’” He told me that Abu Salih was a former insurgent who had made IEDs. He suspected Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s rival, of working with Al Qaeda and helping the group to infiltrate the Awakening. I asked him about Osama’s men. “All these people before were shooting us,” he said. He admitted that INPs from the Sixth Brigade had shot at Sunnis in Dora, but not his INPs. He accused Hamid of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. “I have an order from the Ministry of Interior to arrest him,” he said.

  The Americans were pressuring him to target the Mahdi Army as well as Al Qaeda. “It’s better if the Americans go after the Mahdi Army,” he said. “If we arrest them, then the chain of command will release them. The sectarian issue is powerful.” Adil did not trust his own men. “Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army,” he said, locking his door before we spoke. “Sadr and Badr officials controlled the leadership of the INPs, and the Iraqi police—all of them are Sadr.” Although the Interior Ministry’s leadership was dominated by the Badr militia, he said, the majority of its employees were still Sadr supporters. Adil’s best friend and lieutenant, Amar, was Sunni. “I was fighting to get him,” he told me, and was threatened as a result of their friendship. “An officer is a brother of an officer. I want to work with something not for Sunnis or Shiites, just for Iraq.”

  Adil was repeatedly threatened by the Mahdi Army. He dismissed the freeze. “No one cares about Muqtada,” he said. “A week ago Mahdi Army guys threatened an INP checkpoint . . . and then sniped at the checkpoint, so the INPs arrested three of them.” The men worked for a Mahdi Army leader called Wujud, who lived in Sadr City. Wujud worked with another Mahdi Army leader called Amar al-Masihi, and together they fired mortars at Adil’s base after the arrests. In nearby Abu Dshir he warned that the Kadhimayn Mosque was an office for the Sadrists, and it ordered the people of Abu Dshir not to join the ISVs. The Americans wanted Adil to go after the Kadhimayn Mosque, but he could not do it.

  Adil was summoned to meet Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, the former brigade intelligence section commander. Wujud and another Shiite militiaman were there. “They stole our vehicles and weapons,” he said, “and Wujud told INPs to be careful because you give Americans information. In front of Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil, Wujud told me, ‘Adil, be careful, we will kill you.’ My boss was sitting there and didn’t do anything.” I asked him why he had not arrested Wujud. “They know us,” he said. “They know where we live. I’m not scared for myself, but I’m scared for my family.”

  Wujud worked with Ziyad al-Shamari, a leader of what the Americans called a “special group” because of a poor translation of what may be better termed a “private group,” as Iraqis called Shiite militias and gangs not loyal to Muqtada. Adil added that a man called Abu Yusuf, a contractor who was working with the Americans in Combat Outpost Blackfoot, also worked with Wujud and owned the car used in a recent attack. Adil warned that Wujud and Abu Yusuf stole cars and might blow them up to make it look like Al Qaeda was responsible. Wujud once lived in Dora but now lived in eastern Baghdad’s Ur neighborhood, and he was in charge of dispatching men to Iran for training. General Karim was also from Ur. “He is Mahdi Army,” Adil said, claiming Karim had cleansed Sunnis from other parts of Baghdad and its surrounding towns when he was with the Fourth Brigade. “No one can talk about the Mahdi Army in our battalion or police or in the Ministry of Interior.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Fadhil was replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Majid. Majid asked Adil to collect the ransom for a Sunni man whose release had been ordered by the Iraqi courts. “He was not Al Qaeda,” Adil said. Majid wanted four thousand dollars, but the prisoner was related to Lieutenant Amar, and his family told him. Like most officers accused of pro-Shiite sectarianism, Majid was promoted out of the position where he caused trouble and moved from division to brigade. “No orders come to us to arrest Shiites, but many gangs from the Mahdi Army are kidnapping people for money,” Adil said, “If he is Sunni, they take money and kill him.”

  “Our command,” he said, referring to General Karim, “wants to work with the Mahdi Army.” Karim praised the Mahdi Army when the Americans were not around, he said, and complained when others criticized them. Adil knew Karim’s friend Abu Jaafar as well. “Abu Jaafar is a bad guy,” he said. “He has groups fighting in Mahala 828. He knows Ziyad al-Shamari. He always puts his nose in our operations and tells our commanders where to open checkpoints. Abu Jaafar was a mechanic before the war, so how is he a sheikh? He worked with special groups and made deals with them to fight. Abu Jaafar calls every Sunni Al Qaeda.” Adil believed Abu Jaafar worked for the Badr militia. “Badr came here [from Iran] and took the government and assassinated former Baathists, officers, and pilots,” Adil said.

  One day I met Adil in his neighborhood. Though it was not far from where he used to live and still dominated by the Mahdi Army, he was less known there. He grew nervous as we approached an INP checkpoint. He didn’t want them to know who he was, in case his men had informed the Mahdi Army about his attitude, which could make him or his family a target. At home his two boys watched television in his small living room. “I have decided to leave my job,” he told me. “No one supports us.” Lieutenant Amar, a former Republican Guard officer, also wanted to quit; together they would try to join the army. He was feeling pressure from his chain of command, and had been accused of being Sunni. A few months earlier he was accused by the Interior Ministry’s internal affairs department of selling cars to terrorists, and five days before I met him he heard rumors that the ministry had issued an order to fire him. When I mentioned Adil’s concerns to Gottlieb, he said that Adil was always threatening to quit.

  I visited Shaab, Adil’s old neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, to attend Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque, a center for Muqtada’s followers. My friend Firas picked me up, the same friend who a year earlier had been too scared to let anybody at the Mustafa Husseiniya know that he knew me. To avoid certain checkpoints we drove through a former Iraqi ai
r base that had been looted after the war and was full of indigent Shiite squatters. It was called the Hawasim neighborhood by locals, a reference to looting. Small children with matted hair played barefoot in mounds of garbage. Sewage flooded the roads. Donkeys and sheep dug through trash searching for something edible. “Long live Asa’ib al-Haq,” said graffiti on a wall, referring to a Sadrist resistance group that split from the Mahdi Army. My friend put a cassette of Mahdi Army songs in his stereo. As the chanting and wailing began, he joked, “Now we are Mahdi Army.” The song was a refutation of rumors that Muqtada fled to Iran when the surge started. “He prefers death over leaving his home,” the men sang.

  We drove past local Shiite ISVs the Americans had hired to pressure the Mahdi Army. The men wore masks to conceal their faces and avoid retaliation, and they were protected by Iraqi police manning the checkpoints with them, defeating the purpose of having them there. Graffiti on the walls called for death to the Awakening men.

  We arrived before the noon prayers so we could talk to the imam and listen to the sermon. I met Sayyid Jalil Sarkhi al-Hassani in a green guest room. He was seated on the floor reading a religious book. He had a beard with no mustache and wore wire-framed glasses and a brown cloak. As we spoke his men prepared him for his sermon, placing a white funeral shroud around his shoulders, a symbol that he was ready for martyrdom. On one side of the room was a large painting of Muqtada’s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, who was Sayyid Jalil’s teacher. Sayyid Jalil lived in Sadr City and normally ran a mosque there, but for the past year he had led Friday prayers at the Shurufi Mosque.