Nir Rosen - Aftermath

A similar approach had proved useful in the rural Anbar province, which had been dominated by Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. American Special Forces reintroduced a tough police chief whose tribe was disliked and feared, and they built a vast earthen berm around the city, restricting all vehicles.

At first the locals of Amriya did not like it, “but they grew to appreciate the security that it helped to bring,” Kuehl said of the walls he built. “I especially had trouble with the shop owners at the entrance to Amriya. We were able to accommodate some of their concerns, but I left them up. I did want to open up Amriya to more vehicle traffic through the checkpoint, but I met resistance from many of the locals. This was not completely resolved before we left.”

The local police were also a hindrance to Kuehl’s ambitions to improve the security environment: they were, he said, “incompetent, poorly led, poorly trained, poorly equipped.” Stationed in Khadra, its leadership was Sunni and, to make things even more difficult, may have had Al Qaeda links. The lower ranks were filled by Shiites, generally from outside Baghdad. “No one was local, which was one of the biggest drawbacks to the police,” Kuehl said. “They pretty much spent most of their time in the station and collected reports and statements from people who came in. We would take them with us in patrols in Khadra, but they could not come into Amriya without getting shot at.”

The Iraqi National Police were another problem, Kuehl said, lacking strong leadership skills. “It was like having three hundred privates, no sergeants, and only a dozen officers. They were not equipped as well as the Iraqi Army, which was a challenge given the lethality of the environment. We conducted joint patrols with them, but their primary focus was on conducting checkpoints, which was a sore point with the locals.” The INPs were also known to do the sectarian bidding of their political superiors. Kuehl recalled being approached by a group of imams because ten Sunnis were suddenly detained after someone from the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry turned up at a couple of checkpoints with a list of people to detain. When Kuehl went to the local police headquarters to find out what was going on, no one could produce the list. Eventually Kuehl managed to get a copy of the names of all the men detained. He went to the holding cell and talked to each one. “A couple months after their arrest I inquired on their status,” Kuehl said. “It took over a week for someone to figure out that they were still being held. I finally was able to get their families to be able to see them. I suspect this was all sectarian-driven. They were then pushed up to the jail at FOB Justice, an ironic name, and were still being held when we left over six months later.”

The Iraqi army, Kuehl said, was the most competent of the security forces they worked with. Of the army battalions he worked with, Second Battalion, First Brigade, Sixth Division, was the most competent. But, he added, the battalion “went through a string of commanders, and their performance directly correlated with the quality of battalion commander. The first commander I worked with was Colonel Ahmed, a Sunni. Very competent, I really respected him. Although his formation was mostly Shiite, I think they respected him.” Ahmed was being targeted by Al Qaeda, though, and after his sons were attacked, he requested and received a transfer. “The guy who replaced him was basically honest but not a great commander. He was replaced in May by Colonel Sabah, who was previously in Ghazaliya. He had a terrible reputation among the Sunni population, and there was a lot of concern about him. He was basically competent, but he was ruthless and crooked. We suspected him of extortion, coercion, and rape. We got the reports on Sabah from people in Iraqi Family Village, which was just outside of Liberty. Sabah kept an apartment there. We got a lot of reports on him. Must caveat to say that none were proven, just lots of reports.” Another regarded him as “the worst Iraqi battalion commander I have ever seen. He clearly had a sectarian agenda and was implicated by locals in a weapons-selling scheme where he would sell weapons found in weapons caches, potentially back to the Shiite militias.” In contrast to Sabah, Lieutenant Wael, his replacement, was a true professional, according to Kuehl. “He was smart yet lacked the arrogance I saw in most Iraqi officers. Initially he was a bit wary about working with the SOI, but I think he quickly saw how effective they were. Wael was a solid officer and another Sunni, which was a plus to the area. I do not think Brigadier General Ghassan [a local Iraqi army commander in western Baghdad] liked him working so close with Abul Abed [the founder of the Sons of Iraq in Amriya], so he got transferred to Washash, and Lieutenant Hassan was brought in from there in December 2007, just before we left. Hassan was okay, but not as smart and creative as Wael.”

IN FEBRUARY 2007 there was an effort by the Iraqi Security Forces to go after some of the Sunni leadership in Mansour. In a forty-eight-hour period three of the top Sunnis Kuehl was working with were targeted by the Iraqi army. This included Adnan Dulaimi in Adil, a powerful politician belonging to the Iraqi Accord Front who lived along the border between Hateen and Yarmuk, and Sheikh Khalid in Amriya. Part of the problem with the politicians, as Kuehl recalled, was that they had well-armed security detachments and the Iraqi army was very suspicious of them. One night Kuehl had to position himself between Dulaimi’s security force and the army to prevent a confrontation. Soon after he was called to an incident at another politician’s location, where he kept him from getting arrested. Two days later the 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion raided Khalid’s mosque in Amriya.

After these incidents Kuehl met Ghassan and his commanders at his headquarters in the Green Zone. “I told them that I thought they needed to be a little more aware of the appearance of their actions to include excessive detentions and the targeting of these political figures. The commander responsible for Yarmuk took offense at my remarks and did not like me interfering with his operations. We got into a nice little shouting match, and he later stormed out. Ghassan did not appreciate this, and our relationship was never the same.”

Staff sergeant “Yosef ” (his preferred nickname) was an American soldier who served in the First ID, Second Brigade Reconnaissance Troop (Second BRT), which was outsourced to Kuehl’s 1-5 Cav. Under their platoon leader, Capt. Brian Weightman, the troop set up a joint security station in an abandoned shopping mall in the Adil neighborhood in February 2007, at a point where two freeways met close to Dulaimi’s home. Yosef worked with Dulaimi’s bodyguards, a variety of Iraqi Security Forces, and eventually with the Awakening group in Amriya.

On one occasion, Yosef recalled, he was on the roof of a police station in a Sunni neighborhood, talking with a police guard who spoke great English but initially didn’t want anything to do with him. Yosef managed to establish a rapport with him. The guard confided that every policeman at the station was off-duty Mahdi Army. This made sense to him.

On another day Yosef ’s patrol group heard a loud exchange of gunfire. They got a report that a police truck had been blown up on the ramp, just southwest of the mall they were patrolling. When Yosef’s men showed up, “the police were shooting the shit out of an apartment building.” Under a colonel’s direction, the police seemed to be systematically shooting along every story of the apartment complex, story by story. “He was standing out in the middle of the street, pointing and yelling to gun trucks that were more or less on line with one another, pumping the building full of rounds. When we asked him if he needed any help, he kind of blew us off,” Yosef said. When the group asked the colonel what the police were doing, the colonel reported they had taken fire from the building and were returning fire, but it seemed to Yosef’s men that they were just shooting the whole side of the building up.