by Nir Rosen
I asked him how he could work in a government that was made up of the same militias that killed his brothers. “This is a very complicated subject. Iraq has gone through bad conditions in the past, much worse than this. Is the government going to last forever? The answer is no. There will be another stage where there will be other elections, so if we abandon our roles in Iraq, falsification will happen again in the elections, and we won’t enter the elections because of the destruction, the fighting, and this will be a success to Iran, primarily. I follow the law. We have lots of supporters, even including Shiite brothers. Yesterday we had a meeting with the tribes of the south. We are dealing with each other as Iraqis. The strife that happened between Shiites and Sunnis is being reconciled now. Yesterday we had a visit here in Amriya from tribal leaders of the south, from Yusifiya, Mahmudiya, Mahawil, Karbala, and Hilla. We had tribal leaders of big Shiite tribes. They were our guests, and we even had reconciliation between towns and neighborhoods, Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. Is this bad for the government? If Iraq doesn’t get a professional government that is not sectarian, that doesn’t belong to only one sect, then this county will fail.”
Abul Abed appeared on television and called for Shiites to return to their homes in Amriya. “My first principle is reconciliation, stopping the sectarian fighting across Baghdad neighborhoods. We wanted to make a model for others to follow, and we wanted the others to do the same initiatives, but unfortunately, this didn’t happen. There was a Sunni family from Amriya that went back to the Amil neighborhood. The day after they got there, the father, the mother, and two sons were killed. One of the brothers survived and gave me his mother’s phone number, so I called. A man answered the phone. I said, ‘Hello, how are you, my brother?’ The guy said, ‘Hello, who are you?’ I said, ‘I am Abul Abed, the leader of the Thuwar in Amriya.’ He said, ‘And what do you want?’ I said, ‘My brother, our area was a red zone. Shiites used to be killed in our areas, and we took the responsibility of returning Shiite families into their homes in our areas, and now we protect them. This is an innocent family. Why did you take them? What did they do?’ He said, ‘We are the Mahdi Army, there can only be killing between you and us.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you something, if you are a real man, the brave man and the real soldier who considers himself a brave fighter doesn’t kill a woman, nor does he kidnap a family. I am a soldier, and I only fight the ones who carry weapons against me. I fight men. This is a manly point of view, and if you want the Islamic point of view, the Prophet said, “Don’t cut a tree, don’t kill an animal, don’t kill a woman, and don’t kill an old man, this is if you were a Muslim.”‘ He said, ‘You are filthy, and there can only be blood between you and us.’ I hung up the phone. The next day the surviving brother was told that all his family were killed.” Abul Abed said that similar things happened to many Sunnis who returned to Hurriya.
“I am a Sunni. I’m sure that 80 percent of Shiites are not satisfied with the United Iraqi Alliance. I have Iraqi friends from Sadr City—they visited me with presents, they cried for the good old days when we were all together. The politicians are the reason for this problem, whether they are Sunnis or Shiites. Neither the Sunnis in the government represent us and help us, nor did the Shiites in the government help the Shiite population. People got tired from the situation. They want to breathe and go out freely. Two bombs exploded by my house targeting me, planted by Al Qaeda to kill me. I was transferred to an American hospital and had operations and survived. One of my sons was burned, and the other was injured.”
After I last saw him, Abul Abed began to seek alliances with other Awakening men in preparation for the upcoming provincial elections. This attempt to become legitimate might have been his undoing. In April a bomb targeting Abul Abed in Amriya wounded him, and he went to Jordan for medical treatment. In June 2008 while he was at a reconciliation conference in Sweden, his house in Iraq was raided on the suspicion that he had been involved in sixty murders or abductions. He never returned to Iraq, settling in Jordan instead. Al Qaeda’s predictions that the Awakening leaders would be disposed of after they served their purpose were proven correct, he said. Abul Abed blamed the Islamic Party, with whom he had a longstanding feud (as Um Omar’s husband could attest). Abu Ibrahim, Abul Abed’s former close aide, took over for him and was perceived by many as a stooge for the Iraqi army who arrested anybody who opposed him.
“I am aware that Abul Abed is in Jordan,” Kuehl told me. “I have had contact with him from time to time and am concerned about his safety as well as that of his family. I am hoping that he will be able to come to the U.S. at some point under refugee status. I do not know the details of why he had to leave. I am pretty sure it was politically motivated.”
Staff Sergeant Joe Hartman had expected Abul Abed to rise in Iraqi politics. “I never thought that he would be betrayed. However, after reading some of the reports about his disrespect for current political leaders when they tried to visit with him, it seems to me that any political savvy he once had was corrupted by the tough military work he performed in Amriya. I can’t imagine anyone remaining unaffected after having to defeat such a ruthless enemy as Al Qaeda, all the time still being persecuted by the Iraqi army for his past. He must have slept with one eye open every night. I hope he finds some peace.”
AMRIYA WOULD BECOME a battleground again, but this time it involved senior U.S. officers, long after they served in Iraq, who quarreled over the efficacy of the surge doctrine. Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, who preceded Kuehl and went on to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, became the most strident and outspoken voice within the military decrying the cult of counterinsurgency.
Gentile admitted that violence in Amriya had dropped precipitously starting in July 2007. “But the primary condition for that lowering of violence in Amriya was the deal cut with Abed and the SOIs,” he maintained. “Was Dale Kuehl instrumental in that role? Yes, most certainly he was. Might another battalion commander less savvy to the area have missed that opportunity? Sure. But did the opportunity arise because Dale and his battalion were doing things in terms of COIN tactics and methods that were fundamentally different than mine? No. The COPs [combat outposts] didn’t go into Amriya until after the deal had been cut.”
Kuehl was unwilling to criticize Gentile publicly, but he believed that his time in Amriya during the surge did involve new and innovative tactics that led to success. “In general they were doing COIN operations,” he said of Gentile and his men, “but we did change some things based on training and lessons learned that were pretty standard throughout the Army during our preparation, [placing a] heavy emphasis on COIN. Some of the criticism Gian has received is a bit unfair. He and his men were not hiding out on the FOB [Forward Operating Base], and they were patrolling every day. However, Gian’s assertion that we did nothing different is false. He cites a lieutenant in my battalion who says that we had not really changed anything. At the platoon level, it may not have been much different, but I think it was different at the battalion and brigade level.”
The two men had admirers and detractors. I spoke to one captain who served under both in Amriya. He described Gentile as “an intelligent, thoughtful, and caring leader who lost a lot of soldiers and took each of their deaths very, very personally. He was a pleasure to work for, and in the short time I worked for him, for two months, he took the time to mentor me. Unlike many of our senior leaders, he actually had some useful knowledge to pass on. I believe that his current arguments hold merit, but I wish he would quit responding to everything like it was an ad hominem. I truly believe he took his command so personally that he feels underlying guilt for the deaths of his soldiers, and this is the manifestation. He takes it personal now and is poor at conveying his beliefs, which is sad. Violence didn’t go down under Kuehl until the SOI. May 2007 was the most violent month in the war in that area, as I recall. Gentile and Kuehl both kept lines of communication open with the extremists and local insurgents. Gentile was more conventional when
I got there, but it was a conventional high-kinetic fight. He understood the concept of COIN, but the timing and resources weren’t there to execute it.”
This captain told me that Kuehl was “an arrogant though intelligent ass” who “did not understand the fight until late, if at all. He was very, very concerned that any misstep by Abul Abed’s guys would have ramifications on his career . . . not its effects on his soldiers, Iraqis, or the outcome of the war. He was able to act dispassionately and rationally despite all of the losses his unit faced because he did not care about his men. I also believe that General Petraeus understood his sector better than he Kuehl did . . . he probably spent more time there.”
On the other hand, Capt. Brendan Gallagher told me, “That is an extremely harsh and unfair criticism of Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl. I am not sure who said it, but I can verify it is 100 percent false. I can say with absolute confidence that Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl cared extremely deeply for each and every soldier in 1-5 Cav. I have nothing but positive things to say about him. I think in combat he was willing to accept certain risks in order to achieve success, which is what any good commander must do. If you take zero risks, you hunker down your forces in extreme force-protection mode, then you will not succeed in this kind of war. Consider for a moment: if you follow the bunker mentality to its logical conclusion, then you might as well not even leave the FOB at all—or better yet, never even deploy to Iraq in the first place. That way you are guaranteed not to incur any casualties. However, you also are guaranteed not to accomplish any of your strategic objectives. I think this marks perhaps the most important way in which we blazed a new path in Amriya. We were willing to take calculated risks into unchartered waters in order to make progress. Secretary of Defense [Robert] Gates said it best himself: we cannot kill or capture our way to victory. If we focus only on killing the enemy and force protection as our overriding objectives, then we effectively ignore history and disavow counterinsurgency doctrine. Dismounted patrols, the establishment of COPs, getting out on the ground and gaining the trust of average Iraqis—all these things involve inherent risk. But if we take prudent steps to mitigate each risk, we stand the best chance of success. Compare the security situation in Amriya when we departed [in January ‘08] to the security conditions previously. The results speak for themselves.”
According to a major who served under Gentile, “Despite Lieutenant Colonel Gentile being depicted in the media as a ‘conservative’ who only wants to focus on high-intensity conflict, he set the groundwork for Lieutenant Colonel Kuehl extremely well in one of the most important aspects of counterinsurgency. COIN is about people, and people are about relationships—especially in Arabic and Muslim culture. Gentile spent all of his time, in the very brief time that I saw him, talking, negotiating, and working with the local imams in Amriya. Kuehl, the beneficiary of this initial relationship building, continued the relationship and allowed the SOI to emerge with the support of the local imams.”
I asked Gentile what he thought Kuehl did differently from him. “Other than rightly capitalizing on the changed conditions that presented to him the opportunity to cut a deal with the SOIs, not much,” he said. “His organizational structure as a combat battalion was a bit different than mine, since I was an armored reconnaissance squadron—which meant that he had a greater dismounted capability, which might have produced more dismounted patrols. But in terms of tactics, I don’t believe there was much difference at all, although I am sure he would disagree with that statement. My outfit did dismounted operations, we engaged with the local population, etc. The notion that I ‘commuted’ to the area and stayed inside my vehicles as put forward by the surge zealots is a chimera. Dale did not put his first combat outpost in until late May ‘07, and it was a tactical one in the sense that its purpose was to facilitate movement into and out of the area. The first Galula-like COP did not go into the district until late June. So the notion that during the first five or six months of the surge—which arguably was the decisive period—that he was doing things on the tactical level radically different from me is not correct. What happened is that after the violence began to drop, and American soldiers and marines stopped dying in large monthly numbers, folks looked back onto the first period and superimposed the coherence of [the COIN manual] FM 3-24 that they believed was there at the time but actually was not.”
“Probably the biggest difference,” Kuehl said of his approach as opposed to Gentile’s, “was in taking a broader, long-term perspective of the problem. One of the things that was highlighted in our staff training was the need to develop a ‘campaign plan’ at the battalion level. This plan is intended to be long-term, with objectives six months to even a year out. In contrast, the campaign plan I got from Gian looked out about two weeks and really was nothing more than a patrol schedule.
“I visited Gian’s squadron in July 2006, and they were stretched pretty thin. If other parts of Baghdad were like his area, I am sure it looked like there were barely any U.S. soldiers on the ground. To be fair, I do not think that this type of planning or creating of a vision was part of the train[ing] Gian would have had, so [it is] not necessarily surprising that they did not have one. Even now we continue to adapt, and units that are there now are probably doing things I never thought of. There were two long-term projects that Gian left me with. The first was the Amriya Bank, which he laid the groundwork for. The other was the establishment of a police station. This second one did not happen until after we left.”
Gentile wrote an article in the September 2007 issue of Armed Forces Journal called “Eating Soup With a Spoon,” the title being a reference to John Nagl’s influential book on COIN, Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife. In the article Gentile criticized the COIN manual and especially the paradoxes of “Tactical success guarantees nothing” and “The more you protect yourself, the less secure you are.” Kuehl would later write accounts of his time in Amriya in part as a response to Gentile’s criticism. “I think in this article Gian underestimates the abilities of our officer corps to use the manual as it is intended, as a guide as opposed to dogma,” Kuehl told me. “I think the article also provides some insights into Gian’s way of thinking. In his mind the new manual takes the enemy out of the equation and tries to make COIN sound easy by winning over the populace. I think one quote by Gian is relevant: ‘I was angry and bewildered because the paradoxes, through their clever contradictions, removed a fundamental aspect of counterinsurgency warfare that I had experienced throughout my year as a tactical battalion commander in Iraq: fighting. And by removing the fundamental reality of fighting from counterinsurgency warfare, the manual removes the problem of maintaining initiative, morale and offensive spirit among combat soldiers who will operate in a place such as Iraq.’”
I asked Gentile about this. “I don’t think that a center of gravity, theoretically, even if there can be such a thing, should be predetermined and turned into a rule for any type of stability or counterinsurgency operation,” he said. “In modern counterinsurgencies certainly the population is an important consideration, but the American Army has turned the notion of the people as a center of gravity into an immutable rule, which then determines a prescribed set of tactics and procedures, which ultimately calls for large numbers of American combat soldiers on the ground. This kind of approach might be the right choice in certain circumstances, but it should not be the only way. If it is, then we can expect many more adventures at nation building to come.”
Kuehl told me that “Gian tried to maintain the initiative while maintaining the morale and fighting esprit by his men by doing periodic large-scale cordon-and-searches to keep them focused. He also established small kill teams in houses, some of them occupied by residents. These teams generally consisted of a six-man team, usually including a sniper, emplaced to counter enemy IED efforts. I remember Gian telling me that many of these operations were to maintain the morale of the unit. What baffled me was that they served no real tactical purpose. In fact, I think in some ways they
hurt the effort because they were not focused on good intelligence, so we were stumbling around inconveniencing the local populace.
“I banned the use of occupied homes for small kill teams right after we took over. I read a couple patrol reports from Gian’s unit that made clear to me that these operations were not going to win over the populace. We continued with the cordon-and-search operations (we called them ‘block parties’) for a while. However, as we gained more intel, we relied less on them and focused more on targeted raids and eventually did away with them altogether.”
I asked Gentile if he thought his cordon-and-search operations and small kill teams had been counterproductive. “Well, this is certainly the stock question that any population-centric counterinsurgency expert would ask,” he said. “Sure, they can be, but we should not assume a priori that they will be all the time.”
These operations could serve a purpose that outweighed their potential to alienate the population, he said. “It depends on the situation and what strategy has been created as the political object of war and the necessary military means to accomplish it. In other words, if you are a New American Army Way of War proponent, then the absolute and unequivocal answer to the question is that they are never productive and can never work in any counterinsurgency operation. But depending on the policy objective and a realistic approach to strategy, such methods might be effective. And arguably, during the critical months of the surge, it was just these types of operations that reduced Al Qaeda, fueled by the former Sunni insurgents who we bought off.”
Kuehl found it ironic that Gentile focused on offensive operations to maintain the initiative and morale, he said, because “Gentile did not have the initiative when he turned over the area to us. The initiative belonged to the insurgents. Gian’s patrols would not go on the two main streets in town due to the IED threat, and there was one area where they would not dismount due to the sniper threat. He had very little information on the nature of the threat in the area. While there were perhaps a dozen individuals that they were looking at, there was no clear understanding of the nature of the insurgency. At least none that he passed on to me.”