by Nir Rosen
In Dora the Mahdi Army was under the command of the Karkh, or western Baghdad Brigade. The leader for western Baghdad and many of his local commanders were recently replaced for ignoring the freeze, and the Sadrists were trying to provide social services and help local municipalities. Some Sunni families who had been displaced by Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur were received by the Sadrists in Abu Dshir and provided with assistance. Mahdi Army men complained that the cease-fire was paralyzing them and causing them to lose respect or authority in their areas. In the nearby Bayya district, the Sadrist office was furious when an unknown corpse turned up on the street; several days were spent investigating whether somebody had disobeyed Muqtada’s orders. But the Mahdi Army was unable to control the rogue groups; sometimes, in fact, they received help from them.
In Abu Dshir the Mahdi Army relied on lookouts who watched for the Americans on rooftops and street corners. They also released pigeons from coops when American patrols approached. In the past this had led Americans to shoot innocent pigeon keepers. Apart from going on raids in Abu Dshir, the Americans conducted “presence patrols” in which they walked through the streets and interacted with people. I followed a platoon of soldiers from the 2-2 SCR around Market Street and spoke to the local shopkeepers about them. Flocks of sheep were herded through the streets, a common sight in the city. The Americans walked past furniture shops, waved to shopkeepers, and bought roasted chicken and fresh bread at inflated rates. “The Americans don’t have a strategy,” one local observed. “They don’t know who is with them or who is against them, and they’ve been here for four years.” I asked a group of men if Muqtada was powerful in this area. “It’s a Shiite neighborhood,” one said, as if it were obvious. “JAM has lookouts on streets dressed just like that,” an American officer said, pointing to a young man in a matching tracksuit. “It’s funny, you can look at these guys and know that they’re bad and have nothing to detain them for.”
Shopkeepers whose shops were destroyed during the fighting were supposed to receive money from the Americans. “Why did some get money and some didn’t?” I was asked by men who assumed I was a translator for the Americans. A group of men called the American officer over to show him an old man’s leg that was injured in an explosion. “Can’t anybody help him?” they asked. Another man asked if the Americans could help his unemployed son find a job in the security forces.
Platoon leader Lieutenant Cowan decided to visit a random house and ordered his men to “clear” it. Uninvited, they pushed open the outer gate and the door to the house. As the translator was elsewhere with Cowan, I had to explain to a frightened and bewildered woman and her two sons that the officer merely wanted to talk to them and they needn’t worry. The younger boy clung to his mother’s abaya and whimpered in terror. A soldier gave him some candy, and he stopped crying. “I feel bad walking on these people’s carpets with my shoes,” one major said. “My wife would kill me.” He went back outside. Cowan came in with his Iraqi translator, who wore a mask and sunglasses. He asked the woman how much electricity she received per day, about her water and sense of security. Cowan asked her if she knew who Ziyad al-Shamari was and how much influence the Mahdi Army had over the area. She laughed sheepishly with her older son. “We don’t go outside, we close the door,” she said. “You don’t hear rumors?” asked Cowan. “You don’t hear whispers? Do you know if there is JAM activity in the Kadhimayn Mosque?”
In a different home Cowan encountered an old man in a wheelchair who was a retired Iraqi colonel. “All Shiites here love the U.S. Army,” the man told him. “Yeah, well, we love you,” Cowan said with a smile. “In the beginning the Mahdi Army protected us from Al Qaeda,” the old man said. “Then they joined the police, they are all police. They protect us from mortars, Al Qaeda in Arab Jubur.”
One day I accompanied twenty-two-year-old platoon leader Rob Johnston as his men took two masked Iraqi “sources” from the Badr militia to identify Mahdi Army suspects. The Americans had been collaborating with this militia since 2004, when they teamed up with Jalaluddin al-Saghir, the Supreme Council cleric and politician. Saghir would send his security chief, known as Haji Dhia, to the Americans. Haji Dhia would wear a ski mask, point out the house, and tell the Americans what they would find there. He once escorted an American unit to a house at 2 a.m. They found an arms bazaar inside, with more than one hundred Kalashnikovs laid out in neat rows around the walls, along with ammunition, Glock pistols, and two MP-5s. Though at first the information was directed against Sunnis and helped the Americans arrest Al Qaeda cells, the Supreme Council provided information about the Sadrists as well, especially during the 2004 fighting in Najaf.
That morning in December 2007, the Americans descended from their vehicles and entered the main covered market in Abu Dshir. People tried to navigate around the large soldiers, looking at them quizzically as they squeezed through the tight alleys of the market. The Iraqi sources stayed in the vehicle. As women bought vegetables, fish, and clothes in various stalls, the soldiers rounded up all the men in the market, as well as those entering or leaving, pushing them back and holding them by their shoulders, ordering them to obey. One by one they led dozens of men to the street so the sources could identify them. One young boy started crying. A man hurrying back to his stall was halted. “Fish, fish,” he said in Arabic.
I wandered off to buy some popcorn from a stand. As I returned men warned me to go in a different direction because the Americans were stopping people. Sergeant Bowyer, charged with carrying out psychological operations, distributed an Arabic-language newspaper published by Americans and asked people inane questions. “So, how is everything here?” he asked one man. “What’s your sense of the people? Are people really happy in regards to reconciliation?” “Do you think JAM feels threatened by reconciliation?” he asked another. “When JAM tries to influence the people in Abu Dshir, how do they do it?” he asked another. “We can’t talk about this openly,” one man replied. “I’ll take that as a sign that it does happen,” Bowyer said. His vehicle was equipped with speakers, and as he drove through Market Street it blasted an announcement in Arabic calling on the people to continue with reconciliation and ignore those who would “take them back.”
The men raided a house and found some bewildered men working. “We’re laborers,” the men protested as they were taken to be identified by the sources, who had pointed out the house. They were pushed against the walls. One soldier held one of them by the back of the neck. The three men were quickly interrogated one by one. “What do you think of the way he talks,” the lieutenant asked me. “Do you think he’s honest?” Their stories were consistent with the obvious—they were mere laborers. “Can I go?” the last man asked me. “They’re not taking me away?” As I said no, he smiled and kissed my cheek. “We appreciate the time you gave us,” Lieutenant Johnston told them.
Children chased after the soldiers asking them for candy and teasing them. When they learned I spoke Arabic, they pointed to the pigeons that were flying above homes. They had been released by Mahdi Army lookouts. All the children liked Muqtada. “The Americans are dogs and Muqtada will defeat them,” one boy said. “The Americans are donkeys and the boys who take candy from the Americans are donkeys,” another boy said. “When they are here we say, ‘I love you,’ but when they leave we say, ‘Fuck you,’” he told me. Another boy showed me his watch, which had a picture of Muqtada’s father on its face.
Johnston’s platoon raided Abu Dshir one night. The soldiers broke down the gate of a home and rushed into the house. “We are not Mahdi Army, we are in the Iraqi army,” an old man protested. “We are not Mahdi Army or anything.” It was a middle-class home with no overt signs of religiosity and none of the typical things associated with Muqtada’s supporters. The five women and one child were herded into the living room as three men were interrogated. “Mister, I am no Jaish al-Mahdi,” one man protested in English. “Okay, okay, uskut, shukran” (be quiet, thank you), said a soldier. “We hate the Mahdi
Army,” said an old woman, “believe me.” Thinking I was a translator, the residents looked at me and begged me to explain that none of them had anything to do with the Mahdi Army. The women were made to stand, empty their pockets, and pat themselves down, starting with their arms, down their chests to their legs.
One man, it turned out, was a laborer who had signed up for the Awakening. Another worked in their father’s pastry shop. Their father was seventy years old, and a brother who was absent was in the Iraqi army. The men’s pictures were taken. They were shown pictures of Mahdi Army suspects and asked to identify them, but they recognized none of them. “We are not terrorists,” the old man said. “We like the government.” Most of their protests went untranslated. “Why do you think automatically I’m looking for the Mahdi Army?” Johnston asked. “Because you have been arresting people and accusing them of being Mahdi Army lately,” the man replied. He was handcuffed and complained that they were too tight. Johnston put his finger between the cuffs and the man’s wrists. “If I can fit one finger, it’s okay,” he said. The two sons were also handcuffed, and they were all taken away. Their phones, computer, and cash were also taken, as were their personal papers, CDs, and other objects of interest that had Arabic writing on them. “They probably got some propaganda in there,” a sergeant explained as he carried off a hard drive.
Neighbors who rushed into their homes when the Americans arrived provoked American suspicion, and they too were brought in for interrogation. One old man started crying, fearing the Americans would take his son away. On the way back the tired soldiers bantered in the Stryker. “You know what I hate most about detainee duty? Watching those motherfuckers shit,” one complained. “I bet there’s an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us,” another said.
The Reconciliation?
In Virginia, sometime after my trip to Iraq in December 2007, I met P.J. Dermer, a former Special Forces aviator who had been a Middle East foreign area officer in the U.S. Army since the late 1980s and had traveled independently through much of the region. In 2003 he worked with the Iraqi army; subsequently, he returned to work under Petraeus. “Sunnis realized they were in trouble—we were killing ‘em, the Shiites were killing ‘em,” Dermer observed. “As we saw the Awakening develop, we realized we can’t kill our way out of this. But some guys were afraid to come out, and we had to make sure Maliki was soothed.”
Even in 2004 and 2005 American commanders established relationships with Sunni tribal leaders who were tired of the Al Qaeda presence in their area. But there was no systematic approach to transition these temporary alliances on the battlefield into a normal relationship with the Iraqi government. In July 2007 Petraeus established the Force Strategic Engagement Cell (FSEC). Its task was to reach out to the resistance and “reconcile” them with the Iraqi government. Typical of the military, the unusual name for talking to resistance leaders was “key leader engagement.” According to Petraeus, the goal of KLE was “to understand various local situations and dynamics, and then—in full coordination with the Iraqi government—to engage tribal leaders, local government leaders, and, in some cases, insurgent and opposition elements.” This was a challenge for the military, which needs a formula or system for everything it does, even building relationships. Petraeus formalized KLE because developments like the Awakening were occurring with little involvement or support from the Iraqi government. As a result the government was very suspicious of the Awakening and the Americans’ motives. In addition, Petraeus had no body of his own through which to coordinate these local developments or approach them strategically.
“You cannot kill or capture your way out of an insurgency,” Petraeus said. He hoped to establish a dialogue between members of the resistance, or at least influential supporters, and the Iraqi government. This would facilitate the American and Iraqi forces’ takeover of areas controlled by the resistance without requiring combat in village after village. Of course, those in the resistance, whether Sunni or Shiite, who were “irreconcilable” would be killed or captured. FSEC was composed of a few dozen mostly military officers, although the American ambassador appointed a civilian from the State Department to work with them. “Engagers” working for FSEC developed “lanes” to reach out to the Iraqi government and resistance.
“We gave insurgents a place to come see us, to realize we weren’t ogres,” Dermer said. “The Awakening was also a movement within Sunnis at large, but they didn’t realize what they wanted. Some wanted to take over from the Shiites, others just wanted to go back to normal life. We were getting deeper and deeper [with the Sunni resistance], further up the hierarchy, and having more success. But Sunnis were way too divided.” Dermer met leaders of the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna, the Jihad and Reform Front, and some people connected to the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
Dermer would meet these resistance men in Jordanian hotels. In Jordan and Syria he also met with Iraqi businessmen and expatriates who were in touch with the resistance but were not driving it. In 2003 he had been involved in the creation of the new Iraqi Defense Ministry. Many of the former military officers he had met then were now influential in the resistance.
The Iraqi government’s Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), led by the notorious Dr. Bassima al-Jadri, was set up by Maliki to work on “reconciliation” issues with the Americans and to deal with the Awakening movement. “The Awakening wasn’t a reconciliation with the Iraqis but with the power to be in the battlefield,” Dermer explained. “The purpose of Maliki’s reconciliation committee was also to thwart whatever we wanted to do. The reconciliation committee was all Shiite except for a couple of token Sunnis. They did a good job of making us believe we were making progress. It was clear to me from dealing with the Iraqi army, Bassima, Adnan [a Shiite former intelligence officer under Saddam], that they [the Awakening] were doomed from the beginning. We kept a nice face on it with all this talk about jobs, yeah yeah, blah blah. The Iraqi government was flabbergasted when we told them how many [Awakening men] we had on the payroll. But it worked. It settled down the killing to a manageable degree. Abud Qanbar hated tribal sheikhs. He’s urban. ‘They had their chance,’ he said. The Iraqis wanted to arrest all the Awakening leaders, and the minute space developed they went after them. Maliki was smart; he created the reconciliation committee. He was building tribal councils, the mirror image [of the Awakening] but Shiites. Bassima and Adnan were involved in building the tribal councils. You could get something done if you had a good relationship with Bassima and Adnan. The tribal support councils were meant to manipulate tribes to be on Maliki’s side, like the Ottomans and Saddam. Bassima was Maliki’s watchdog to mitigate the Awakening and the Sunnis. Some senior insurgent guys were FREs [former regime elements], generals I met in 2003.”
Though Jadri was a friend and confidante of Maliki, everybody else around her hated her. “Bassima had issues being a woman in a man’s world,” Dermer told me. “Iraqi generals kissed her ass.” Jadri and Adnan wanted to meet the Awakening men, so the Americans brokered it. “Sunnis wouldn’t engage with the Iraqi government without American interlocution,” Dermer said. “The Shiites wanted us out of the way. We brought in Raad from Ghazaliya, Abul Abed from Amriya, and Abu Azzam al-Tamimi from Abu Ghraib.” These were important Awakening leaders in Baghdad. “We brought them into the palace to meet Bassima and Adnan,” he said. “It took a lot of work.”
Dermer mocked the notion of “key leader engagement,” which in practice meant trying to have as many meetings as possible and using that as a measure of progress. FSEC was originally led by Graeme Lamb, a British general who was Petraeus’s deputy and who had experience establishing a dialogue with armed groups in Northern Ireland. “Lamb was replaced by an idiot British general and an idiot State Department guy,” Dermer complained bitterly. “The guys in charge of FSEC didn’t get it. It takes very unique people for this office. These fuckers are killers. You can’t be a starry-eyed thirty-year-old or Harvard grad, but
it was a lot of PowerPoint briefings, six-month rotations—it was bureaucratic. People hated success, like getting high in the insurgency. The agency [CIA] fought us, State [Department] hated us. Once you put it in a bureaucracy, it won’t work. It was a brilliant idea, but we didn’t know what we were doing.”
FSEC also saw the prison population as a group with potential to be “reconciled,” and also as a possible source of intelligence on the resistance. Some prisoners were resistance leaders and could actually encourage their supporters outside to reach an accommodation with the Americans or the Iraqi government. In American prisons Dermer and his colleagues met with leaders of the Mahdi Army and special groups.
Throughout the American occupation the majority of Iraqis seized and imprisoned by the Americans were innocent, even innocent of conducting attacks against the Americans. Few of the tens of thousands of Iraqis detained in the American-run gulags were ever even charged with anything. Few Americans question whether they had a right to invade a foreign country and arrest scores of its men every day on scant evidence. When the men were eventually released, the Americans staged shows of fanfare and magnanimity.