Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  One morning Dermer was with Abud in the BOC. Abud saw an announcement on the news that the Sadrists were going to hold a demonstration in Baghdad in response to the battle in Basra. “I’m not going to let this stand,” Abud said, according to Dermer. “I won’t allow it. The militias have to be stopped.” Dermer had hoped to contain the demo, but Abud said, “No, I’m going to stop it.” Dermer asked him if he needed Maliki’s permission. “I’m the commander of Baghdad,” Abud said. “I don’t need anybody’s permission.” Dermer realized Maliki had not given him guidance and that Abud was going to war.

  Without telling the Americans, Abud started moving battalions to the site of the demonstration. He knew he had Maliki’s blessing, but he was making the plan up by himself. Dermer and the American leadership were taken aback. “I have a core patch,” Dermer told me, “with a direct line to Petraeus, and I have battlefield responsibility with General Hammond [of the Fourth Infantry Division, which replaced the First Cavalry Division]. I have to translate this to the coalition, so I have to let Petraeus know.”

  Dermer persuaded Abud to sit down with the Americans and come up with a plan. Maliki then gave permission for the Americans to shoot into Sadr City, Ur, Shaab, and other areas, but the Americans were not allowed to enter Sadr City. Sadr City, and to some extent the Sadrists, had been off-limits to the Americans. In 2004 the Americans were about to kill Muqtada in Kufa, but he was with Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, so the American canceled the hit. Later Maliki would prohibit the Americans from operating in Sadrist areas or targeting the Mahdi Army. During the surge Americans had to get Maliki’s permission to kill or capture Mahdi Army men. Sometimes they wouldn’t tell him whom they were targeting because they were worried his people would inform the targets. Later there would be full coordination with the Iraqis about the target lists. In March 2008 the Americans were granted permission to use snipers and helicopter gunships, even if they couldn’t bring troops inside these areas.

  But the National Security Council’s Brett McGurk and other Americans were worried. Sadr City was home to three million people. Maliki assured them he knew the street, and it turned out that he did, which created a sense that the ISF could handle security. American sniper teams positioned on the edges of Sadr City proved to be very effective in the battles, though many civilians were also killed.

  “As a military Middle Eastern guy, Abud couldn’t fathom a militia,” Dermer told me. “Under Saddam he had despised the fedayeen [Saddam’s guerrilla force]. The Iraqi army is fighting to regain their honor. It’s not about fighting skills. Iraqi fighting skills were terrible. It’s about regaining their place in society. We lost a lot of American lives because of Iraqi incompetence. The Americans wanted to take over the operations during the Battle for Baghdad but didn’t. We were telling the Iraqi army what to do, and they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t pair with us in the battlefield. When it was time to advance up an avenue or cross a line, the Iraqis didn’t; the Americans did, so American soldiers got killed. They wanted our logistics, Apaches, and ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance]. We tried to get them to use their own shit, but why would they when they had our shit? We had to prevent them from failing so we won’t look like we failed.”

  After one battle Dermer and the Americans visited an apartment building in Ur that the Iraqi army had just destroyed. “It was a bloody mess,” he told me; the Iraqis had opened fire on the entire building, but the Americans had no choice but to tell them they did a good job.

  “IEDs scared the shit out of them,” Dermer said of the Iraqis he worked with, “so our guys would go down the road and they wouldn’t. We lost two majors. We were having heated arguments in BOC, yelling and shouting. We would plan for two hours and then they wouldn’t execute. Iraqi commanders were not being held responsible. Abud finally fired the Rusafa commander, but nobody would replace him, so Abud rehired him. We had one or two Iraqi brigades disappear off the battlefield, but that’s not bad out of five or six divisions in Baghdad.” I asked Dermer what made some units good. “It was the personality of the commander and his relationship with the American commander that determined whether a unit was effective,” he said. “Abud was good at building civil infrastructure after the fighting,” Dermer added. “He would take the minister of electricity, of water and power, of education—anybody in charge of building stuff, they wouldn’t go without him. Abud didn’t want the Iraqi military leading the effort; he wanted Iraqi civilians to do it.”

  The American and Iraqi surge, along with Charge of the Knights, emboldened Iraqis to resist militias. While Captain Salim attributed the improved situation in Washash to his efforts, and not the Americans’, Abu Karar, a leader in the Khazali tribe, also claimed responsibility. When I met Abu Karar he had big Shiite rings on his fingers. He was a large, grave man with dark reddish skin and a stain on his forehead from praying. He worked as an accountant in the Housing Ministry.

  Before 2006 there was no displacement in Washash, Abu Karar told me, and no explosions. Until that year the Mahdi Army was an army of principles and creed that fought the occupation. “They did a good job, and everybody liked them,” he said. “They improved Shiite areas. Before Samarra, I supported them. But after the Samarra explosion, their way of thinking changed. They became gangs, they took money from people, and each house in Washash paid five thousand dinars a month. If you didn’t pay, they blew up your house. Only Mahdi Army families didn’t have to pay. When militias took over, displacement started, and all the Sunnis left. Shiites came here from Ghazaliya, Dora, Jamia. Some stayed in empty Sunni houses, some paid rent. The pious IDPs paid rent to the Sunni owners, while militias also charged IDPs rent for the houses they were squatting in. There were no Sunnis left and they started to kill Shiites.”

  On August 14, 2008, Abu Karar led a “revolution” in Washash, he told me. As he describes it, his tribe coordinated with the Iraqi and American armies and carried weapons with their permission. They attacked the Mahdi Army at 6 a.m. “We had an intifada,” he said. “We knew where they stayed, and we arrested sixteen of them. I arrested [Mahdi Army leader] Ihab al-Tawil with my own hands. After the arrests, we found twenty-seven bodies, and twenty-five were Shiites.” I suggested this sounded like the way the Awakening groups started, and he bristled. “We don’t believe that,” he said, dismissing the Sunni resistance. “Most Sunnis supported Al Qaeda and turned on them because of pressure from the government.” To him the Awakening was made up of former Al Qaeda men, but he was not a former member of the Mahdi Army. “When did Ramadi start to resist?” he asked me, answering that it was when the governing council gave Shiites more seats than Sunnis.

  Soon after his uprising against the Mahdi Army, Abu Karar was elected to head the local tribal council. “My service to the area caused me to be elected,” he said. In the eight months since Charge of the Knights began, nobody was killed in Washash, he bragged. Five days into the campaign, Abu Karar met with the representatives of forty Sunni families from Washash in the nearby Arabi neighborhood. “It was my personal effort and my tribe’s effort,” he said. “I told them, ‘We want your return to be peaceful, without vengeance. Use the law or come to me to do it the tribal way, and anybody carrying weapons will be expelled again.’” The forty families returned. But Sunni areas were still dangerous, he said. “Sunnis are safe coming back to Shiite areas. But Shiites are not safe to come back to Sunni areas. Shiite IDPs have not left Washash to return to their homes. Some Sunnis can’t come back to Washash; they are wanted for crimes. We have four or five wanted families. They killed more than thirteen people from my tribe, and we will avenge them.”

  Hassan Abdel Karim and his brother Fadhil Abdel Karim were cousins of Abu Karar who also lived in Washash and were popular in the area. Both were thick and muscular. Hassan was a boxer. “Militias wanted us to work with them and carry weapons, but we rejected it,” he told me. “My wife is Sunni. My neighbor is Sunni.” One evening Mahdi Army men knocked on his door
and asked him to go knock on his Sunni neighbor’s door; his neighbor trusted Hassan and would open it. But Hassan refused. He warned his Sunni neighbors, who were from the Zowbaei tribe, that they were in danger. He told them he too would be leaving. But they insisted on staying. Three brothers from that family were killed. He also warned neighbors from the Sunni Mashhadani tribe, and they fled. After this, Mahdi Army men shot at his house and accused him and his brothers of being spies. He fled with his brother, his wife, and daughters to Syria, where they lived in Damascus’s Seyida Zeinab area. After they had fled, Mahdi Army men opened fire on their home, damaging it with hundreds of rounds and later charging the family for the expended bullets.

  Hassan remained in Syria for two years and nine months. In 2008, after Charge of the Knights, his cousins called him and asked him to return. “Let’s fight the Mahdi Army,” they told him. “They are killing Sunnis and Shiites. The people are strong but scared, and you are popular here, so they will follow you.” Hassan returned and initially joined an Awakening group in the Mansour district. After the Mahdi Army threw a grenade at his cousins’ house, Hassan and his brother captured Ihab al-Tawil, he told me. “The neighborhood was with us,” he said. “We gave Ihab to Captain Salim. We had an intifada against them in Washash.” A Mahdi Army member called him up angrily, demanding to know why he did this and why he was letting Sunnis return to Washash. “We began to uncover bodies and weapons,” he told me.

  “Mahdi Army members called me up to tell me because they didn’t want the army to raid their homes and get their families in trouble.” The Badr militia of the Supreme Council asked him to join them, he said, but he refused. “We rejected to carry weapons,” he told me.

  IN DECEMBER 2008 I flew Royal Jordanian from Amman to Basra. Most passengers were Iraqis. Because of the Muslim holiday Eid, embassies were closed; we did not have time to get visas, but a contact in the British military promised to obtain them upon arrival. The Iraqi customs officials did not take kindly to the violation of procedure and were offended by the British presumption, but a letter from the British commander persuaded them to relent. The Iraqi officials made it clear they were doing us and the British military a favor. Five Iraqi policemen stood at the exit examining all luggage. My colleague had a copy of Patrick Cockburn’s excellent book on Muqtada, and when they saw Muqtada’s glaring visage on the cover, they turned giddy. They were amazed that a foreigner would have a book in English all about their beloved cleric. One of them kissed the cover and asked if he could keep it. My friend agreed. I was surprised, not by the sentiment but by the comfort in which the men publicly expressed it.

  The Iraqi translator accompanying the Royal Marine who met us at the airport dismissed Muqtada’s supporters as merely poor and uneducated. It was the same mistake the occupiers had made from their arrival but was equally typical of middle- and upper-class Iraqis. After years of war and devastating sanctions imposed on Iraq, most Iraqis were poor and uneducated. But so what? Did this delegitimize the Sadrists or in any way reduce their popularity? On the contrary. Unfortunately, the man expressing it this time was the personal translator and adviser to the British commander in Basra, and sequestered as he was in Basra’s airport, he was getting scant information about Basra’s realities. The British commander had never heard of Thar Allah, one of the most lethal Iranian-backed militias in Basra. And when I asked him about the Mahdi Army, he was confused; he knew them only by their American-designated acronym, JAM.

  I found a city largely under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces, with little sign of the British presence except for the occasional patrol. The local economy was thriving, and women could once again walk on the streets without wearing the veil if they chose to. A trickle of Sunnis had returned. Over and over again, when I spoke to civilians they told me the same thing: “Now sectarianism is finished in Basra.” I spoke to officials of the once-formidable Communist Party. They blamed the Americans and British for introducing chaos into Basra. “Any foreign army is not good,” one official told me. “The British army is less violent than Americans, but they let militias rule and made deals with them.” The Communists also backed the prime minister. “Maliki is an Iraqi nationalist,” they told me. “He went from being a man of a party to a man of state. He said only the state can have weapons.” They agreed with me that the Sadrists were still the most popular movement among Shiites and worried that the Mahdi Army had sleeper cells. “The sectarian project failed in Iraq,” one of them told me. People in Basra spoke of “before March” and “after March” to describe their lives, and in the city’s middle-class areas, the Charge of the Knights campaign won only praise.

  I attended a conference in a large auditorium at the local chamber of commerce that had been planned by local officials to explain how they spent the hundred million dollars Maliki had given them after Charge of the Knights. There were no foreign soldiers there, and I was the only foreigner. Representatives of local businesses, civil society, and the local media attended. The conference was a hosted by a woman and started with a prayer and recitation of the Koran. The national anthem was played, and everybody stood up. The host and others read poems. The conference had a decidedly Shiite tone: every time the host asked the crowd to pray for the Prophet Muhammad and his family, as was the Shiite way, the crowd responded loudly. Grandiloquent speeches about Basra and Iraq followed. There was no mention of the British or the Americans. It felt like a postoccupation Iraq.

  I met with Jassim Ahmad, deputy head of the Sunni Islamic Party in Basra. The party’s previous headquarters was destroyed after Samarra with the help of local police, and it was now based in an unmarked building across from police headquarters. The Islamic Party had sixty-eight martyrs in Basra, he told me. Many Sunni sheikhs had been murdered as well. Sunnis began returning after Charge of the Knights, he said. Although the security forces in Basra had been closed to Sunnis, there were currently about four hundred Sunnis in the local police and army. “Now the Sunni sect doesn’t have problems in Basra,” he said.

  In stark contrast to downtown Basra were the slums of Hayaniya. They were far removed from the heart of the city, as if the population was segregated, and surrounded by sewage and garbage dumps. Streets were unpaved, and many houses were made of mud. An Iraqi army brigade surrounded them and had bases inside. The brigade, a mixed unit of Sunnis and Shiites that was headquartered in Ramadi and trained by the Americans, had arrived in Basra on April 13. I visited a school they were occupying in Hayaniya and met with two officers: one was a Sunni from Falluja, and the other was a Shiite from Baghdad’s Shaab district. They sat on beds in a room with no door. Their men played volleyball in the yard. “The enemy was anybody illegal,” they told me, “anybody carrying weapons.” They had clashed mostly with the Mahdi Army and Thar Allah, but now the city was quiet, they said, adding that “we don’t need help from the British.” Hayaniya had the most problems, they explained—it was like Sadr City. The officer from Falluja joked that in the upcoming elections, the Saddamists in his city would win because the Awakening groups backed them. Both officers praised the Awakening’s Abu Risha. “Petraeus is wrong,” the Sunni officer told me. “The Americans caused the problems. The army and the people and the Awakening brought peace.” His Shiite friend agreed. “We are the highest authority,” he said. Many locals complained that the Iraqi army’s occupation of schools and heavy presence in their neighborhood was oppressive and made them feel occupied.

  One evening I met with four Mahdi Army men in the Gzeiza slum, adjacent to Hayaniya. One commanded one hundred fighters, one commanded forty fighters, and the other two were mere fighters. Their more senior commanders had fled to Iran. They had all taken part in the 1991 uprising against Saddam and a smaller one in 1999. They insisted that both uprisings had been influenced by the Sadrists. There were about 1,500 houses in Gzeiza, they told me. The Iraqi army occupied four schools, they said, complaining that soldiers mistreated children, wore shorts, and were inappropriately dressed in front
of women. The army also stole from homes and harassed people, they said. They still supported Maliki despite his crackdown, but they insisted that Muqtada was popular throughout Basra. The Sadrist Current was under extreme pressure from the British forces, the Iraqi government, and the ISF, they said, but added that the Sadrists had no problem with the people or the government. They didn’t think that the Americans would leave Iraq. “The Mahdi Army is not weak,” one of them told me. “We obey Muqtada, and whatever he says we do, and he said, ‘Don’t fight the government.’ We are not against the government or the people, just against the occupation. We are giving the government an opportunity. Before Charge of the Knights the Mahdi Army controlled Basra. We can be more than the army. We can get rid of them in two days. There is pressure from the government now. There are provocations, but we were ordered not to have arms on the street.”

  The men conceded that killings were down, but they still complained about crime. “We are sitting on oil, and we don’t have electricity,” one of them said. “In the summer for an hour or two. Now it’s three hours on, three off.” The Mahdi Army was loyal only to Iraq, they told me, which was the same thing the two Iraqi army officers had said. The street in Iraq was Sadrist, they said, and the Mahdi Army was the muqawama (resistance). “The Mahdi Army made the government strong,” one said. “Baghdad had terrorism, but the Mahdi Army and the government got rid of it together. There is resistance of the pen and resistance of the gun. After the occupation the Mahdi Army will be cultural. The government is now arresting people randomly. Now all countries pursue their interests in Iraq.” Thar Allah had no links to the Mahdi Army, they said, but belonged to the Supreme Council, and the Supreme Council belonged to Iran. They blamed Thar Allah for the expulsion of Sunnis and Christians. Elections were coming up soon, and I asked whom they would vote for. “A week or two before the elections in the Friday prayers they will tell us who to vote for,” one of them told me.