Armed Humanitarians

by Nathan Hodge

  That approach, however, would require some finesse. Bremer’s first move as the head of the CPA was to issue a sweeping de-Ba’athification order, which in effect barred thousands of low-level civil servants from work. Under Saddam, Ba’ath Party membership had been obligatory for many professionals, including doctors, professors, and schoolteachers. Petraeus would seek, and receive, an exemption from Bremer in order to keep some of those institutions functioning.

  Petraeus was careful not to clash openly with Bremer, but Colonel Lloyd Sammons, who worked in the CPA’s governance office, noted that Petraeus was conspicuously absent from the regular meetings in Baghdad on provincial affairs. “The military commanders were also supposed to come in for these meetings,” Sammons later noted. “Every commander came in except one, and that was Petraeus. General Petraeus never showed up at the time I was there. He blew them off.”8

  In Mosul, as in other cities throughout Iraq, soldiers who were trained as aviators, infantrymen, or artillery gunners were having to adapt to a new job description: aid worker. Lieutenant Katrina Lewison, a young West Point graduate from western Kansas and now a Black Hawk pilot, was one of the soldiers who unexpectedly found herself on a quasi-humanitarian mission. On paper, she was a platoon leader with the Sixth Battalion of the 101st Aviation; in practice, she was a construction boss, supervising a team of sixty Iraqi day laborers.

  Lewison’s career in the construction business began on Mosul’s unemployment line. Each day, hundreds of jobless men from Mosul would line up outside the front gate of the airfield where the helicopter unit was based. A minor local sheikh named Doctor Mohammed had presented himself to the division on the day it arrived in Mosul, sending out a handwritten note, in stilted English, that was hand-carried to the airfield by an elderly man. Major Fred Wellman, the battalion executive officer, went to meet Doctor Mohammed. Over a gelatinous plate of lamb meat, Wellman agreed to help start building clinics and schools in the local villages.

  The sheikh emerged as a trusted labor broker, and helped Lewison to hire carpenters to do some construction jobs. “After I hired one family, they had other family members and friends, and with the sense of family honor, I could hold one man responsible for all the family members, and they knew that if one person did something wrong that I would fire all the rest of them,” she said. To Lewison, the employment scheme seemed to be working. Iraqi men were getting cash, and they were staying off the streets.

  The division’s approach to governing Mosul—in essence, spreading cash around and trying to restore essential services—had its hazards, however. The Civil Affairs approach meant getting outside the wire and working among the population in Mosul. But that hearts-and-minds work was often hard to square with the imperatives of what the military called “force protection.” On August 2, 2003, Lewison received permission to accompany her husband, Lieutenant Tyler Lewison, on a local reconstruction project. Tyler Lewison’s unit was assigned to a Civil Affairs project at the University of Mosul, and reopening classes was a point of pride for Petraeus. For Katrina Lewison, the mission was supposed to be a break from the routine. August 2 was Tyler’s birthday, and Katrina, who did not get to see much of her husband while on deployment, had received permission to accompany Tyler’s unit for the day.

  As the soldiers left one of the university buildings and climbed into their Humvee, someone tossed a hand grenade at their truck. Amid the noise and confusion, the soldiers sped away; a warrant officer was bleeding from a shrapnel injury in the neck, and Katrina Lewison had been nicked by a grenade splinter.

  Iraq had no clear frontline, and the troops there faced a war in which the adversary’s primary weapon was the roadside bomb, termed by the military parlance an improvised explosive device, or IED. At the beginning of the war, the IED was not expected to be the main threat. But as the U.S. military settled into an uneasy routine of occupation in the summer of 2003, insurgents began seeding the roads with improvised bombs. They observed the patterns of the U.S. patrols, counted how many vehicles were in each different convoy, and noted what kinds of vehicles they used and how vulnerable they were.

  During its stay in northern Iraq, the 101st Airborne Division became the region’s largest single employer. The division had around twenty thousand troops at its disposal, and it could saturate Mosul and Nineveh Province with patrols and Civil Affairs projects.9 Under Petraeus’s leadership, things were starting to get up and running, but the question remained: What would happen after the division went home? In late January 2004, the 101st Airborne Division began rotating home to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and it handed over responsibility for the area to Task Force Olympia, an eight-thousand-strong force built around the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division, commanded by Brigadier General Carter Ham.10 (A Stryker is a type of eight-wheeled, armored combat vehicle.)

  The Third Stryker brigade was designated as a reserve force for Multi-National Corps-Iraq, meaning that it was on call to support other units outside of northern Iraq, so it was stretched a bit thin. It also had far fewer CERP funds at its disposal than the 101st. A RAND research report noted that the 101st Airborne Division spent around thirty-one million dollars in reconstruction funds during its stay in northern Iraq; the arriving Stryker brigade had less than half that amount, around fifteen million. The 101st Airborne Division also had an engineering unit that was able to take on ambitious projects to rebuild roads and irrigation systems, repair a major bridge between Irbil and Mosul, and reopen Mosul University.11

  Using cash as a temporary fix had its risks: Although it kept some of the holdover institutions running, new, fully functioning Iraqi civil and political institutions had yet to emerge. So when the money ran out, it could all fall apart. Watching the Mosul handover from his office in CPA-Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Sammons warned in October 2004 that things would not turn out well. Before leaving Iraq, he took a trip to visit an Army Reserve Civil Affairs group in Mosul, and he relayed his concerns to an interviewer from the U.S. Institute of Peace. “They were very worried, and they had a good reason to be worried,” Sammons said. “General Ham had replaced General Petraeus in charge of the Stryker force in the north. Ham was a nice guy, but he was no Petraeus. Petraeus walked around with two stars on his shoulders and two stars in his pocket. You could tell. You could feel it. I hear now they call him King David over there.”12 More important, Petraeus could commandeer more cash and other resources than Ham.

  Petraeus was on an upward career trajectory. Less than half a year after the 101st Airborne Division returned from Iraq, he was rewarded with a third star and command of Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq, which was responsible for training and equipping the Iraqi military and police forces. Ham, meanwhile, presided over a dwindling supply of emergency funds, and his troops could not always follow through on humanitarian aid and reconstruction projects begun by the 101st Airborne Division.

  “The Iraqis were furious because Ham couldn’t fund a lot of the projects that had been promised by Petraeus,” Sammons complained. “Do you think that maybe the Civil Affairs people are going to have a hard time working and living in that situation? We’re talking mainly about reservists who, for the most part, were not equipped to handle a lot of violence. A lot of them are very smart. You have Ph.D.s and you have people with real world experience who know how to do things and are no idiots. I don’t know how they managed in the long term, but I can’t imagine that they’ve had an easy time of it.”

  Sammons’s worries prove to be well founded. Mosul may have been judged a success during the 101st Airborne Division’s stay, but things rapidly went south after the handover to the Stryker brigade. Major Tim Vidra, an Army reservist, was one of the soldiers who found themselves in the difficult position of trying to rebuild Mosul as a violent insurgency gained momentum. For Vidra and soldiers like him, figuring out who, exactly, was in charge—whom to work with—became one of the primary challenges in the frontier chaos of post-Saddam Iraq.


  In July 2004, Vidra was on reserve duty at U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs. It was a convenient part-time assignment; Vidra was attending graduate school, and Colorado Springs was a good place to hang out, take courses, and do reserve work at the same time. As the Iraq War entered its second year, however, Civil Affairs specialists were in especially high demand. Vidra was involuntarily transferred to a Civil Affairs unit that was preparing to deploy to Iraq. The Army gave him six days’ notice. After reporting to Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, he received an assignment to Bravo Company, 448th Civil Affairs Battalion, which would be supporting the Stryker brigade that replaced the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul.

  Bravo Company’s first assignment was to support Fifth Battalion, Twentieth Infantry Regiment, a unit of the Stryker brigade that had been sent out to patrol the area surrounding Tal Afar, a rough border town in Nineveh Province not far from the Syrian border. Tal Afar was a magnet for insurgent groups, but the battalion, which was sent to pacify the town and the surrounding area, had only 650 soldiers to patrol an area about twice the size of Connecticut. There was no local police force, and only a few Iraqi National Guard troops supplemented the U.S. soldiers. A particularly heavy battle erupted on September 4, 2004, after insurgents shot down an OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter. When a scout platoon moved in to secure the crash site and evacuate the pilots, dozens of insurgents converged on their position, and Bravo Company had to fight through an ambush to rescue the embattled platoon. The incident could have turned into another Mogadishu-style debacle, but digital networking tools—which gave the commander on the scene a precise, up-to-the-minute picture of the location of friendly forces—helped identify the crash site and escape routes. More than a hundred insurgents were killed in the firefight; only one Iraqi National Guard trooper was killed.13

  Despite the Stryker brigade’s digital equipment, the Civil Affairs soldiers went blind into Tal Afar. The day before he was sent from Mosul to Tal Afar, Vidra had sat in on a half-hour briefing on current operations in the area in which the briefers made scant mention of Civil Affairs. As it turned out, the Civil Affairs unit that Vidra’s team was replacing was somewhat dysfunctional. They hadn’t gone “outside the wire” (off their base) in two months because of the heavy fighting. The team that preceded his had been pretty intent on finding chores they could do within the confines of the base, and there were no ongoing reconstruction projects in the city. Vidra’s team would have to start from scratch.

  Much as Civil Affairs means working outside the wire, it also requires finding key local leaders who can help identify the needs of the local community. And with Iraq’s administrative and governance institutions still in tatters, that was a challenge. U.S. forces had detained the mayor and the police chief, who were allegedly colluding with the insurgents. With little formal civilian leadership in the city, it would be hard to begin any meaningful reconstruction work. The U.S. military handpicked a new mayor for Tal Afar (a former Ba’athist general) and a new police chief (the leader of a local Shiite militia, as it later emerged).

  The biggest chore for Vidra’s Civil Affairs team members, however, was dealing with a huge population of displaced people outside the city. Before insurgents moved in, Tal Afar had been a city of around 200,000 people, but around 190,000 people had fled into the neighboring desert because of the heavy fighting. The Civil Affairs team had to help the Iraqi Red Crescent Society deal with 190,000 internally displaced people in the deserts outside Tal Afar. Actually, Vidra said, the insurgents had made a tactical error. “They really paid a price by allowing civilians to flee, because it let us use our weapons systems more effectively against them. They didn’t make that mistake again. In later fights, the insurgents would threaten the population and tell them they had to stay in the city to give them more cover.”

  For a spell the fighting died down in Tal Afar. U.S. security forces tried to screen the civilians flooding back into the city, but their efforts were only marginally effective in culling out insurgents. The soldiers set up checkpoints on the main roads into the city, but insurgents would just take the small back roads. Vidra’s Civil Affairs team had to help get some very basic services back online. U.S. forces had turned off electricity to the city during the fighting to try and disrupt the insurgents. After the major fighting was over, the Civil Affairs team had to figure out how to turn it back on.

  After that first attempt to pacify Tal Afar, top generals and experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flew in to assess the situation and find out what was going on. The planners in Baghdad had ambitious designs to rebuild the town, but they had some unrealistic expectations. For instance, they devised U.S.-style contracting schemes, and one of the selection criteria was that the winning bidder had to have a bank account so the Corps of Engineers could wire money to them. Iraq’s banking system was in shambles at that point, and Vidra had to explain to the planners that the only place Iraqis could open an account was in Baghdad. “They [were] trying to use a selection criteria for Tal Afar that was meaningless, they couldn’t do it,” Vidra later recalled. “Tal Afar had a total cash economy.”

  By the end of September 2004, Tal Afar saw a brief period of calm, and Vidra had begun to initiate a series of small-scale construction projects. But the Fifth Battalion 20th Infantry Regiment was redeploying, and their leadership didn’t seem particularly interested in supporting the hearts-and-minds mission. The only way the battalion’s commander would allow Vidra to go into town was if he was accompanied by a full infantry company, and that meant he couldn’t do his job. The 5-20 was a very good infantry unit, but they really hadn’t caught on to what Civil Affairs teams could do.

  About six weeks after its arrival in Tal Afar, Vidra’s Civil Affairs team was transferred out of Tal Afar, and he was sent back to Mosul, where his team was attached to First Battalion, Fifth Infantry Regiment. This unit’s operational area had recently shifted to cover the southern portions of Mosul, including a particularly rough neighborhood known locally as Palestine, which had historically been a center of insurgent activity. Few local leaders were willing to step forward to assist the Americans in reconstruction projects. Collaborating with coalition forces could be a death sentence for Iraqis. The Palestine neighborhood had a bad reputation: A number of former generals in Saddam’s army lived there, and they may have been helping organize attacks on coalition forces.

  Vidra learned firsthand how dangerous it could be. On a trip to the neighborhood on February 22, 2005, Vidra went out to take a look at neighborhood generators used to supplement power when the electrical grid was down, which was fairly often. He was interviewing the generator operator through an interpreter when a sniper opened fire. When the men sought cover on the other side of the building, they were caught in a burst of machine-gun fire. Vidra was hit in the abdomen with a tracer round—probably one that ricocheted, for the injury was considered relatively light—a “return to duty” injury. His wound was cleaned up and he was back at work the next day. The soldier standing next to him was shot in the neck, but miraculously the bullet missed any major veins or arteries. They were both very lucky.

  The security situation in the Mosul area had been deteriorating since late 2004. In November the local police force walked off the job en masse, and the chief of police fled the city. The U.S. Marines had begun an assault on Fallujah, in Iraq’s western Anbar Province, and a number of insurgent fighters fled north into Mosul. Insurgents had used Nineveh Province as a staging area in the past, but as more fighters came north, the entire region erupted. For several days, the U.S. military nearly lost control of Mosul. U.S. combat engineers were deployed to secure the bridges that went through central Mosul. The U.S. troops were reinforced by a contingent of Kurdish peshmerga, and another Stryker battalion that had been preparing to go into Fallujah was pulled back and sent to reinforce Mosul.

  One particular town, Hammam al-Alil, the largest town outside Mosul in the battalion’s operating area, was spiraling dangerously out of contro
l. A substantial portion of the Iraqi National Guard walked away from the brand-new training center the U.S. military had just built for them, and the place was ransacked. The situation was touch-and-go, and as the battalion moved into the area, Vidra persuaded the commander to focus his CERP money on the town of Hammam al-Alil. It was the only U.S. development work going on there at the time. During the spike in violence, USAID forbade its representatives to go to Mosul.

  Attacks on U.S. forces in the town had crested in the last week of 2004, when there were thirteen incidents. As Vidra started spending money in the town, he charted the dollars invested and the projects started against the number of incidents. He saw an interesting correlation. The more money he spent, the fewer attacks there seemed to be. The Civil Affairs team collected intelligence from the local population as they spent money, and it seemed to promote a virtuous cycle: The more information the military units had, the more effective they were in their targeted raids on insurgent safehouses. The more insurgents killed or captured, the fewer the number of attacks. Information also made it a lot easier to run development projects. Vidra spent $1.6 million in Hammam Al-Alil over the course of about six months—roughly the cost of a new Stryker vehicle.14 By the time Vidra handed over the mission to his successor, attacks in the town were down to zero.

  This approach was not about sustainable development or meeting the long-term needs of the population; it was about using money as a weapon. The projects that Vidra focused on—keeping fighting-age Iraqis off the streets; discouraging the population from supporting insurgents; and repairing infrastructure—were all of direct benefit to U.S. forces. A good example was a roadbuilding project funded by Vidra. The Stryker unit had to traverse a twelve-mile dirt road that connected the town of Hammam Al-Alil to a major north–south highway, and U.S. troops had lost two Strykers to improvised explosive devices on the road. Vidra was able to go out and find a Kurdish contractor to come in and pave the highway with asphalt, making it much harder for insurgents to bury roadside bombs.