by Nir Rosen
A tribal leader warned, “If it is going to be like this for a long time, the young men will lose their minds. Maybe we will too. We can’t control our sons. It will be very bad. We can’t keep our sons quiet anymore.”
“We receive electricity for half an hour a week,” another tribal leader told me. “What about shops, factories, and workers? What is the reason? They should say it clearly on TV: ‘This neighborhood is a target. We don’t want to give them services; we want to humiliate them.’ The other neighborhoods around us all have electricity. We were bombed by aircraft. More than fourteen houses were destroyed.”
One man who had served in the Iraqi army’s special forces for twenty-three years said the Iraqi army had just raided his home. “They insulted me and my honor!” he shouted at me. “An Iraqi soldier came with an American standing beside him. He said to me that I am the brother of a whore! I have only one AK-47, and he took it. Why did he take it? It was only an AK-47 with thirty bullets. They destroyed my furniture and stole my money. My son has a lung problem and I don’t have money to buy kerosene, and the soldier is calling me the brother of a whore! I spent eight years fighting in the war with Iran, and a soldier came to me yesterday and called me the brother of a whore! If there is security, as Mr. Bush is saying, then American or Iraqi soldiers wouldn’t come at seven o’clock and shoot randomly. We lost many people because of those injuries.”
A tribal leader led me to the rubble of a home the Americans had bombed two months earlier. Seven of his relatives had been killed there, some of them children. “What do they want?” he demanded. “Do they want us to fight? We don’t mind. If you try to strangle a cat, it will scratch you. We are trying to control our sons, and each one of us has seven to eight sons. If the situation continues like this, we will have to make a decision. We are losing our patience.”
They led me through the market, which had once served the neighborhoods around Washash. “We are paying rent and we don’t have work,” one shopkeeper told me. “This wall ruined our life and our business,” another said. “Would you accept to walk in this mud?” a man asked me. “People are holding their sons in order to cross the pools of water on their way to the schools. It’s as if Washash is not on the map. Even the government doesn’t care about it.”
They showed me more shops without customers. “The policy of walls is wrong,” a tribal leader told me. “The Americans think that they are providing security for the people. Even if they achieved that, what is the use of safety if a man is hungry? When they closed the area people lost their living.” We approached the walls that separated Washash from Mansour. “We are like Palestine,” one of my guides said. They showed me the narrow opening between the barriers. Behind it was an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier spotted me filming and began to approach. “He won’t dare come in,” one of the men said of the soldier. “We will fuck him.”
Nevertheless, I was ushered away by Mahdi Army men, who consulted one another about what to do with me before the Iraqi soldiers came looking. One offered to drive me to a different opening in the back of the neighborhood, where there was a friendly Iraqi National Police checkpoint. He assured me that the police were “good,” and I got in his car alongside another Mahdi Army member, who then led me through a fence to a gap in the barrier. “They are from our group,” he said of the police, meaning they were with the Mahdi Army. As I waited for my driver to circle around and come pick me up, he explained to the police officer what had happened, and the police protected me from the Iraqi army.
I returned the next day to resume filming in the area, spotting unarmed Mahdi Army men sitting on steps and standing on street corners. As soon as I began, men from the Mahdi Army told me that someone had alerted the Iraqi army and a patrol was looking for me. We snuck past them again, avoiding the vehicles that slowly searched the streets.
I MET WITH SALIM, the Iraqi army captain so loathed by the Mahdi Army supporters who guided me through Washash. He was an intelligence officer in Mansour, thirty years old, with a round face and a short military haircut. I told him the men in Washash had accused him of being a Sunni and targeting them for sectarian reasons. “I’m a Shiite,” he replied with a laugh. “How can I be sectarian?”
Before the war Salim had been an artillery officer living in Bayaa. In September 2003 an American lieutenant colonel based in Camp Falcon, asked Salim about his job. The American, who also happened to be an artillery officer, asked Salim to join the new Iraqi army. He became an officer in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, commanding a company in charge of the airport road.
In early 2004 the Americans established the Defense Ministry and Salim became part of the new Iraqi army. “At the time there was only Al Qaeda, not Mahdi Army,” he said. “We confiscated a lot of weapons and car bombs. This was before the sectarianism started. I was trained to be an intelligence officer.” When Salim joined the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, there were very few Sunni officers, he said. “Sunni officers were afraid because they were worried that the Americans think Sunnis are terrorists, but Americans judged people on whether they were good.” On the night of the Samarra shrine attack in 2006, Salim’s unit had orders to protect all Sunni mosques and the Islamic Party headquarters. “But the Iraqi army, not all of it was clean,” he said, “and some officers told their soldiers to let the Mahdi Army operate freely, especially in Rusafa [eastern Baghdad]. Samarra made officers sectarian, but even before that the Iraqi National Police was infiltrated with militias. Most officers were in a dilemma: if you act like a real officer and be a patriot, you will lose your family and your house, because you live in a Shiite area—this happened to me.”
Salim first clashed with the Mahdi Army in Washash when it was commanded by Hamudi Naji. Much of the government supported the Mahdi Army and had access to good information, he said, so Hamudi managed to obtain Salim’s phone number. “In the end of 2006 we captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys,” he said. “But we got orders from the prime minister’s office and Baghdad Operations Center to release them. Once we captured four armed Mahdi Army guys with Glocks—they had masks. It was next to the Buratha Mosque. An army lieutenant captured them. He was punished, and they were released an hour later. So the officer requested to be transferred to Iraqi special forces.”
“I was on patrol next to Maamun College in the Iskan neighborhood, on Street Twenty-three, and I saw two guys with a pistol and MP5 take a man and put him in the trunk of their car. We went after them. The men ran away and left their weapons. The man in the trunk was Sunni. His family came to get him, and we kept the vehicle and guns.” This was when Salim’s conflict with the Mahdi Army began. Hamudi Naji called him. “You are Shiite, one of us,” Hamudi said, according to Salim. “We don’t want anything from you—just return the car and the weapons.” Salim responded that if Hamudi gave him the name of the two fugitives, then he would return the car. “These men are in the Mahdi Army,” Hamudi said. “How can I give them to you?” Hamudi used religious language and appealed to Salim as a Shiite. “I said I am secular,” Salim told me. “I don’t care if you’re Sunni or Shiite or Hindu—I have orders.”
In 2007 Salim and his men stopped a government vehicle at one of their checkpoints that was leaving Washash and heading to Sadr City. The men wore tracksuits and had two Glocks with three magazines each. The Americans said they were Mahdi Army leaders and detained them. One of the suspects was called Ali Kadhim. The Americans had a picture of him wearing a turban. Hamudi Naji called Salim again and demanded their release. Salim told him that they were wanted and that the Americans had them in their custody. “You arrested them, so you bring them back to us,” Hamudi said. “You have twenty-four hours to get them back to me.” Hamudi called Salim again that night. “What have you done about them?” he asked. “You’re crazy,” Salim replied. “The Americans have them.” I expressed surprise at the Mahdi Army’s audacity. “The state was on their side,” Salim said. “We were afraid of the Mahdi Army; they weren’t afraid of us.”
Ha
mudi Naji arranged for Mahdi Army men in Bayaa to join with members of the Iraqi National Police Fifth Brigade and go to Salim’s house. They mistakenly went to the house of his neighbor Anas, who was an army captain as well. The Mahdi Army men insisted that Anas was Salim with a fake ID card and put him in the trunk of their car. Hamudi called Salim’s phone and was surprised to hear Salim answer. “Who are you?” he asked. “Salim,” the captain replied. “So who is the lamb we have here?” Hamudi asked, referring to Anas as a victim about to be killed. Anas was released after being terribly beaten. Salim sent his family to Hilla and his wife and children to Egypt. “For one year I visited them every two months,” he told me. “It was very expensive.”
A week after the failed raid on Salim’s house, the Mahdi Army killed his uncle in the Amil district. “I decided to terminate the Mahdi Army in Washash,” he told me. The Americans had a new captain and colonel in the area, and in mid-2007 they had a meeting with Salim about the Washash, Iskan, and Tobchi neighborhoods. The Americans brought their intelligence officer, and Salim gave him all his information.
The Americans, Salim told me, decided it was time to rid the area from Amriya to Mansour of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. The Iraqis and the new American troops worked on a plan. The colonel told Salim he had heard good things about him and that his captain would give Salim whatever help he needed. They built the walls around Washash and set up a joint security station next to it, with a quick reaction force to counter the Mahdi Army. The previous American base had been too far away. Salim met with the American platoon leaders and NCOs, and introduced them to his team. He suggested that they first target Al Qaeda so that locals wouldn’t think that they were only going after the Mahdi Army. The first target was Abu Zeinab, an Al Qaeda leader in Mansour. “Too easy,” the Americans replied.
“I had strong intelligence sources in Mansour,” Salim told me. “It was a great operation. We found a car bomb and an IED factory. The intelligence was all ours. The Americans were new and had no sources.” Abu Zeinab wasn’t there, but the Americans gained crucial information from the ID cards they found in his house and arrested him in Bab al-Muadham one month later. The next week Salim’s source told him about a Mahdi Army weapons depot. He told the Americans, who set up a decoy mission to a Sunni area in Mansour and then sent a small force to Washash to get the real target. In a garden behind the house they found four explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), two sniper rifles, as well as PKC machine guns. But there were no people in the house, which belonged to displaced Sunnis. Salim told the Americans that this was a great opportunity; they turned the house into an Iraqi army base and used it to conduct night missions. During one of them they detained the sakak (assassin) Ihab al-Tawil. After he was interrogated, he led the Americans to six or seven houses with a total of nine buried bodies belonging to Sunni and Shiite victims. One of the victims was a six-year-old boy whose father was Sunni and whose mother was Shiite. The killers couldn’t find the boy’s father, so they killed him instead.
The day after the raid, an Iraqi soldier named Hussein Naas was killed by Muhamad Karim Muhamad, a sniper from Washash, while on a foot patrol. Muhamad was a former Iraqi National Police officer who had been trained by the Americans. A source gave Salim his location, and a force of Iraqi and American soldiers closed off the area for five hundred square meters, conducted dismounted raids, and captured the suspect while he was in bed with his wife. At first he denied killing Naas, but Salim showed him all their evidence. He, in turn, led them to a house with four sniper rifles, sticky bombs, rockets, IEDs, and ammunition.
During Ramadan in late 2007, while Salim was visiting his family in Egypt, he learned that a small team of American and Iraqi special forces had ambushed Hamudi Naji and killed him. Mahdi Army guys were up very late, eating and loudly playing games. An Iraqi member of the team called Hamudi Naji and pretended to be a neighbor complaining about the late-night noise. Hamudi came with three of his security men to see what his men were doing. The Americans killed him and one of his guards. Salim told me that Hamudi’s body was riddled with sixty bullets. After this ambush, the Americans increased their raids in Washash and Iskan.
At that time the Mahdi Army was at its peak, according to Salim. Two people in the prime minister’s office supported the Mahdi Army, he explained. One was Maj. Gen. Adnan al-Maksusi, an intelligence officer, and the other was the notorious Dr. Bassima al-Jadri. “They used to fire all officers who were against the Mahdi Army or who arrested the Mahdi Army,” Salim told me. “Petraeus told Maliki, ‘Either you fire these two people or we fire you.’” The Mahdi Army was taking over Sunni areas, Salim explained, “so the Americans came up with the Awakening—former insurgents but officially armed, so it created a balance. We knew the Awakening men, we had their names, we knew that they were wanted. The first time I heard about it I was against it, armed men on the street. The Americans said, ‘Cooperate with them, use them now, and we’ll arrest them later.’ The Awakening created a balance between Shiites and Sunnis in early 2008.” I told him about my Awakening friends in Dora being arrested. “It’s just like what they did in the Jamia district and Amriya,” he said. “Every Humvee that went to the airport road, Abul Abed would place an IED against it—so later they arrested the bad Awakening men. We found dead bodies of Shiites in Abul Abed’s house in Amriya.”
With Hamudi Naji gone, Salim’s campaign against the Mahdi Army began in earnest. There were orders to arrest all Mahdi Army leaders, he told me. The Iraqi army closed off the Iskan, Tobchi, and Washash areas for four days. “In Washash we arrested over seventy men,” he said. “In Iskan we arrested twenty men. In Tobchi we arrested twelve senior men with weapons.” Naji was replaced by his nephew Hikmat Hussein Maan. Hikmat, known as Hakami, had a brother called Hossam al-Awar, or One-eyed Hossam, who was the main sakak in Washash. These two men escaped to Rusafa in eastern Baghdad. “The Mahdi Army freeze is a lie,” Salim told me. “It’s just information operations, like when the Americans said they stopped operations in Falluja but they continued them.” Hakami fled to Ur, which was outside Salim’s area of operations, but the young captain was determined to get him.
Salim had a female source in Washash. The Mahdi Army had killed her husband and left her with six children. Hakami had been in love with her, Salim told me. Salim arranged to meet her at a restaurant in Mansour, “like civilians,” he said. “Next we met in an apartment, but nothing happened,” he joked. He told her he wanted her to resume her relationship with Hakami, and she called him in Ur. “They met in Najaf and fucked,” he told me. The next time they met in Zafraniya at her friend’s house. The third meeting was arranged to take place in Karada. Salim called a military transition team (MTT, pronounced “mitt”) whose captain he liked. “Hakami had been in Iran the week before,” he told me. “He got six thousand dollars and the names of a cell to organize in Shula. It was to be an assassination cell.”
Salim met the American intelligence officers in charge of his area. They wanted Hakami too, but Salim’s source did not know the Americans were involved; she thought it was only the Iraqi army. Salim agreed on the plan with her the day before, but he didn’t tell her that U.S. Special Forces in civilian clothes would arrest Hakami. On the day of the meeting in Karada, she would be wearing an abaya and carrying a yellow government file so that she could claim to be going to a ministry. She would meet Hakami at her friend’s house at 7 a.m. She would write a text message but send it only when she saw Hakami.
“The Americans don’t trust anybody, so they came at midnight,” Salim told me. They had a Lebanese translator with them and told Salim to wear civilian clothes. They drove in a black GMC and covered Salim’s eyes with black goggles so he couldn’t see. He was offended, but one of the American intelligence officers said he would wear them too. After driving around for thirty minutes, they took him to a room with two beds and a couch and removed the goggles. American Special Forces men with beards came in. One spoke Arabic. Then Iraqi special forces came in
. Salim told them the details. They left him at 3 a.m. and came back with more questions, as well as food and drinks. At 5 a.m. they told him that they could not conduct the operation because they didn’t have enough information. “Special Forces didn’t trust anybody,” he said. “They thought it was an ambush for them.” Salim was frustrated. He asked them if they could at least give him permission to operate in Karada. They told him they would send regular forces and he could sit with them in a Humvee.
At 6 a.m. they blacked out his eyes again and drove him to the checkpoint, where he found the MTT team and an African American lieutenant waiting for him along with four Humvees. They gave Salim an American uniform and a pistol. The interpreter working for the Americans did not speak English well, he recalled. They waited for the woman’s message at the Jadriya JSS. She called at 7 a.m. to say that Hakami had not yet appeared. The convoy of Americans acted like a normal patrol in Karada and stopped in Dalal Square. At 7:20 a.m., the message came: Hakami had arrived.
The Americans came very fast. They arrested Hakami and the woman. The MTT team was very pleased, Salim recalled. “Hakami thought I was an interpreter because I was wearing an American uniform,” Salim said. “He said to me, ‘Please, brother, help me, it’s not me.’ I said, ‘Do you know who I am? I’m Captain Salim.’ He started crying.”
In detention in Washash, Hakami revealed his bases and arms depot. The Americans then took him to Camp Bucca. Hossam al-Awar was never caught, but it was widely rumored that he worked as a bodyguard for a general in the Interior Ministry in Kadhimiya.
“Many people were deceived by the Mahdi Army,” Salim said. “We Iraqis are not well educated. The Mahdi Army manipulated.” Salim insisted that I had to distinguish between the Mahdi Army and the Sadrist Current. “The Current defended Shiites from Al Qaeda,” he said. “The Mahdi Army used bad guys for personal gain. Al Qaeda was the same. They said, ‘We have to protect your area from the Mahdi Army and the Americans,’ and then they turned on the people and harmed the area. But we good people were the victims.”