Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Battle Over Amriya

  Part 1

  Amriya, in western Baghdad’s Rashid district, was one of the first neighborhoods to feel the full blast of civil war and mass population displacement. Long a resistance stronghold, it soon became as fearsome as Dora. The Samarra bombings of February 2006 accelerated this, as Shiites in Baghdad, particularly those in the Iraqi Security Forces who were linked to the Shiite militias, saw Amriya—with its large Sunni population, former links to the Baath Party, and current links to Al Qaeda along with Sunnis from Anbar—as a prime target for attack. The Sunnis, in turn, fought back ferociously. As it turned out, Amriya was the first place in Baghdad where the Awakening phenomenon of the Anbar was replicated. American collaboration with Sunni militiamen—many of whom were former resistance fighters—succeeded in radically changing the neighborhood.

  Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile’s squadron had been based in the west of Rashid district since January 2006. He and his men were among the first squadrons to go through the newly created COIN Academy in Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad. “The week course was essentially a course in Galula 101,” he told me, in reference to the French theorist of counterinsurgency. “We used what we learned at Taji often in the months ahead. I never thought that more troops were needed, since I concluded early on that there were limits to what American combat power could accomplish and at some point Iraqis had to take over for the destiny of the country.”

  Gentile had been leading counterinsurgency operations with a primary focus on transitioning security responsibilities to the Iraqi Security Forces. However, after the Samarra bombings, it became clear to him that their primary purpose was to try to arrest the violence and protect the local population.

  Gentile began to grasp after the Samarra bombings that the orgy of violence unleashed by it was actually a civil war. “The Sunnis regarded the government as their mortal enemy,” he said, “and in many respects, they were correct. For the first half of 2006, when we were in West Rashid, we worked only with national police and the local police. After Samarra, within days, their links to Shiite militias and sectarian killings became clear. We did our best to curb this, but it was very difficult to do so.”

  In June 2006 he moved up to northwestern Baghdad—principally Amriya, Ghazaliya, Shula, Mansour, Kadhimiyah, Khadra, FOB Justice—and took over from an infantry battalion from Tenth Mountain Division. “It was an exceptionally large area,” he said, “but I focused on Ghazaliya, Khadra, and Amriya, with the latter being the primary focus. This move was part of the Casey drawdown plan [General Casey’s plan to transition power to Iraqi Security Forces], which was in full swing until things fell apart in Baghdad in July 2006.”

  The expanding sectarian warfare was made evident with the daily dumping of dead bodies on the streets of the district. The Iraqi army battalion commander who served with Gentile speculated that the bodies were Sunnis, killed elsewhere in Baghdad and then dumped on the streets of Amriya to intimidate the Sunnis there. “I saw it differently,” Gentile said. “They were mostly Shiites who were still living in or coming into Amriya, and the Sunnis killed them as a way of ‘cleansing’ their district. Any semblance of trust had broken down completely between Shiite and Sunni, and the Sunnis in Amriya, I believed, saw any remaining Shiite in the district as a threat and link to marauding Shiite militia that could still enter the district and kill, since they were aligned with Iraqi Security Forces.

  “The Iraqi army battalion in Amriya had turned Route Cedar, the main market street, into a kinetic civil-war attack zone,” Gentile said. The Iraqi soldiers had two checkpoints on either end of the street and fighting outposts on roofs and inside buildings on nearly every block. The constant fighting, IEDs, suicide bombs, and car bombs had shut down all the businesses. Gentile thought that he could win “local hearts and minds” if he improved conditions on the road. He was authorized to remove the two checkpoints and the other outposts. He stationed one of his cavalry troops on the street and focused on reopening businesses. In mid-August 2006 he started building short concrete barriers—Jersey barriers, in American military parlance—around the entire district, with a single entry point run by the Iraqi army. “I initially started to build it in order to try and prevent Sunni insurgent infiltration into the district bringing in IED, car bomb materials, etc., from Ghazaliya to the north and Abu Ghraib to the west. But after it went up—especially the southern wall, which isolated Amriya from the Shiite-dominated West Rashid to the south of it—I found that the locals actually liked it because it prevented marauding Shiite militias from entering into it.” All of this led to a much-improved state of security for the local Sunnis, Gentile said, but the increased security for Sunnis made the area more lethal for the remaining Shiites because it gave the Sunni militias greater freedom of movement. They no longer had to fear Shiite militias.

  This was the beginning of the massive population transfer: Sunnis from areas of Baghdad being taken over by Shiites were moving to Amriya. Any family moving out from Amriya was Shiite. “I knew it was going on, but there was no way to stop it,” Gentile said. “We tried through moral suasion, but the locals and their leaders denied to us that it was happening. We tried driving bans, but that became impractical. How does one stop a civil war at the barrel of a gun with only a seven-hundred-man cavalry squadron in a district of close to a hundred thousand people?”

  I spoke to Gentile some time after his tour in Amriya. I was curious to know what difference the new counterinsurgency doctrine made. “People like Tom Ricks will tell you that during the surge, units operated differently and adopted new COIN tactics. That just did not happen. What was decisive and made the fundamental difference in Amriya was the co-opting of our former enemies—the non-Al Qaeda Sunni insurgents who became known as the SOI, the Sons of Iraq.”

  Amriya came to be seen as a critical piece of terrain because it physically linked the western parts of Baghdad with eastern Anbar. It was also important because it was so close to the Baghdad International Airport and a relatively easy and safe trip for Sunni leaders coming back to Baghdad from the west. “But for the Sunnis in the area, after I built the wall around the place, and after we got the main market street back up and running, and after I established close operations with the Iraqi army battalion, it did actually get better,” Gentile says.

  Gentile says he had enough troops to “secure Amriya” but that he was challenged by an enemy that was a mix of Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups. But since he did not have the Sons of Iraq on his watch—they would emerge later, after Gentile left Baghdad—he never had the local intelligence to discover who set off an IED or fired a sniper round. His efforts were also complicated by the fact that Sunnis were using their increased security to attack the remaining Shiites in the district. The Sunnis also saw the Iraqi army battalion that Gentile was partnered with as an enemy.

  Although Gentile was in Baghdad before the surge, he insists he was using the COIN principle already and that every time he was visited by Admiral Giambastiani and Generals Abizaid, Casey, and Chiarelli, he briefed them on how he was using “clear, hold, and build.” “The notion that method started with the surge of troops in Baghdad is hokum,” he says.

  The Iraq army battalion Gentile’s squadron partnered with in Amriya was “an exceptionally strong outfit,” he said. “The battalion commander, a Sunni and a professional army officer who served in Saddam Hussein’s army for twenty years prior, was highly competent, professional, and principled. Tactically the battalion was effective too: it could move, shoot, and communicate, and had competent leaders. Yet the problem with it was that aside from its battalion commander and a handful of soldiers, it was almost completely Shiite.” Gentile never believed that there were active links between this battalion and Shiite militias, unlike the police units he had worked with in West Rashid, where the links were clear. “But one could not get away from the fact that they were Shiite and when you boiled it all down with them, espec
ially at times when they were angry over a killing or attack, they saw every Sunni resident in Amriya as their mortal enemy. How would a more robust MITT [military transition] team, more combined patrols with me, more parts for their Humvees, change that basic condition?”

  Though Gentile was skeptical that COIN was a cure-all, he knew that he could not kill his way out of the problems he was facing in the district either, so he started fraternizing with local religious leaders, even those with strong links to insurgent groups. He met regularly with Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque, Sheikh Khalid of the Abbas Mosque, and the imam of the Hassanein Mosque. “I spent a lot of personal time with them, and I think it made a difference in terms of how we were perceived in the area,” he says. “I actually became close to them and considered them my friends.” He even visited two mosques—close to where his battalion was often pounded by IED strikes—that were considered to be strongly influenced by Al Qaeda and befriended Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque.

  “Sheikh Walid and Sheikh Khalid both were extremely important to me and my squadron. I did not consider them anti-American at all. Both of them became key conduits for me for information in the area and in resolving problems.” Khalid’s influence and importance in the area became clear to Gentile. He spent many hours in discussion with Khalid, to the extent that Khalid began to start hinting to him that things were slowly changing. “It was becoming clear to the Sunnis in Baghdad that the Americans were finally starting to understand their position. He and Walid and I had agreed on the opening of an Amriya police station that would be manned by local Sunnis from Amriya,” Gentile said. The problem was getting this approved by the Shiite government. This plan was clearly a forerunner of what would become the Awakening.

  In October 2006 Sheikh Khalid said something to Gentile that caught his attention at the time and that he has never forgotten. “For some reason I asked him about insurgent attacks in the area and about Al Qaeda,” Gentile said. “He then pulled me off to the side a bit, out of earshot range of his mosque guards, and my troops knew what to do by placing themselves between me and the imam and his guards. He then very breezily dismissed Al Qaeda as an important factor in the future of the area and the country. I thought that odd at the time, since AQI seemed to be behind so much of the violence. But it later occurred to me that what he was essentially saying and reflecting were the early and fundamental changes that were occurring in Anbar with the Awakening and his sense that it would very possibly be soon spreading to Baghdad.”

  As it turned out, Sheikh Khalid was a key player in the eventual link of U.S. forces in Amriya with the Sons of Iraq. Gentile’s successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, commanded the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, in Amriya from November 2006 until January 2008. “Amriya was pretty violent when we got there, as was Khadra just to the north,” he told me. “Soon after we took over the entire Mansour Security District, which includes all of Mansour area except Ghazaliya, which 2-12 Cav was responsible for. Most of the violence seemed to be directed at the Iraqi Security Forces, especially the Iraqi police. They could not come into Amriya without getting attacked. A lot of violence was also directed at the populace, especially against the Shiites. Kidnapping was also common. The going rate for ransom was between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand dollars. Civil society had completely broken down. I think many people responded with random and vengeful violence. However, I also believe that JAM special groups working with elements within the Iraqi government were trying to push the Sunnis out of Baghdad. I also think that AQI and other extremist groups were trying to establish a Sunni enclave to stop the JAM encroachment.”

  It was Kuehl’s first deployment in Iraq, but he was well schooled in counterinsurgency. He had written his master’s thesis on civilians on the battlefield in the Korean War and had studied Mao Zedong’s theories on guerrilla warfare. Just before taking command of the 1-5 Cav, he read Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam by Lieut. Col. John Nagl. Nagl had been his roommate at West Point and would go on to play a crucial role in writing the U.S. Army’s new manual on counterinsurgency. Nagl’s book emphasized the importance of the military becoming a learning organization, adapting to the needs of a different type of war. “Of course, prior to deployment we had a number of leader teaches and seminars to discuss the fight we were going into,” Kuehl said. “This study culminated with the COIN Academy in Taji, which I thought was an excellent course.”

  The first large IED to hit one of Kuehl’s patrols occurred one February morning in Khadra. The IED was planted at an intersection and tore off the driver’s door. The driver lost both legs. After securing the site Kuehl took his patrol to a nearby street and started questioning locals. He talked to one man who asked him if the patrol was a combined one with the Iraqi National Police. “I told him it was not, it was a U.S.-only patrol. His response was a bit startling. He said, ‘That is not supposed to happen.’ I pressed him to explain. He just repeated that our patrols were not supposed to get attacked. He also asked why the INP observation post on a nearby bridge did not see the IED go in. It should have been able to. He was a bit upset himself, showing a piece of shrapnel that landed in his yard where his daughter was playing.”

  Kuehl left him to see for himself, passing through the same intersection that had just been bombed. Just as he was looking up to see the window from the observation post that overlooked the intersection, his vehicle was hit by another IED. “It flattened a couple tires and took some chunks out of our windows, but everyone was okay. From this incident I realized that there were definitely different insurgent groups working in the area. The locals knew what was going on with at least one of these groups, and it sounded like they were not targeting U.S. troops. But this other group definitely was.” He did not know it then, but this was the start of Al Qaeda flexing its muscles in the area. They had been pushed out of other areas, like Haifa Street and Anbar, and were trying to take over Mansour. Compounding this was the influx of displaced people from Hurriya to the north and Amil and Jihad from the south. “Locals kept complaining that the violence was coming from people outside the area. We kept dismissing this, but to a large extent I think they were correct,” Kuehl said.

  At the COIN Academy in October 2006, General Casey informed Kuehl and his team that the goal was to hand security in Baghdad over to the ISF by the summer of 2007 so that the Americans could depart as soon as possible. This was based on the not-unreasonable notion, advocated even by Centcom commander General Abizaid, that the American presence in Iraq was the cause of most of the violence in Iraq. But once in Baghdad, Kuehl was convinced that Casey’s goal was unrealistic because of the sectarian violence and the sectarian nature of the government and ISF. He began to focus on protecting the population, even before General Petraeus arrived and formalized the new approach.

  Previous attempts had been made to rid Amriya of Al Qaeda, such as Operation Together Forward in August 2006 and Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 in April 2007. Yet in May 2007 Amriya was even more violent. According to Kuehl, previous operations had failed because of poor intelligence, which led to imprecise targeting. Once an area was cleared of Al Qaeda there were not enough troops to hold it, and Sunnis did not trust the ISF. During Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 Al Qaeda men fled or blended into the population, avoiding the operations. As a result of the Americans’ inability to provide security, they could not move on to rebuild the area. When Kuehl and his men changed their focus from handing over authority to the ISF and instead tried to protect the population, he said they began to see gains in security.

  In January 2007 the Mahdi Army seized the Hurriya neighborhood and moved on to the Amil and Jihad districts. “We couldn’t do anything and the Iraqi Army chose not to do anything,” Kuehl later wrote. “Instead, we watched helplessly as thousands of Sunnis were forced out of their homes getting pushed into Mansour.” Sunni militias were forced to collaborate with Al Qaeda to protect their areas from the Mahdi army, but the Amer
icans offered an alternative that, in the short term at least, proved more tempting. Kuehl hypothesized that Al Qaeda controlled Amriya but only as an active minority that intimidated the neutral majority. In February 2007 he began to have clandestine meetings with clerics in Amriya late at night. Sheikh Walid was already organizing against Al Qaeda, but he was not ready to act. That month Kuehl also met with community leaders and assured them of his commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and protecting Amriya from Shiite militias.

  Kuehl inherited Gentile’s wall around Amriya, but it was too short and had a lot of holes in it. “We fought to keep it closed, and AQI fought to keep it open,” he said. “Our first casualty was a sergeant killed while trying to put one of these barriers back in place.” Kuehl spent a couple of days in personal reconnaissance figuring out how to get from Abu Ghraib to central Baghdad without running into a checkpoint. It was all too easy, he found. One evening he traced out this route to his boss, Colonel Burton. From there the brigade developed a plan to wall off a good portion of northwest Baghdad, starting with Route Sword, south of Ghazaliya. Then they built blast walls along the airport road. By June Amriya was closed up. “The final point was establishing the entry control points into Amriya,” he said. “I knew they would be targets, so I wanted to make it look formidable, like the Green Zone.”