Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“There are reports of released prisoners mysteriously dying shortly after their release, perhaps by poisoning,” Yosef recorded in his notes. “Some prisoners’ records show ‘transferred’ next to their name, but no mention where to. In-processing records are recorded in a book, and inaccessible to public. Once they have a trial they are recorded into a data base and that is accessible to the public. This means that when they get arrested, they virtually disappear from their family and friends.”

There were three big rooms where the prisoners were crammed in like slaves. Yosef noticed some of the guards silencing the prisoners when Uday came by. So when they went to the maximum-security wing, “with its short dead-end corridors and lazy guards,” Yosef and two fellow soldiers filled the doorway and spoke loudly so Uday could discreetly ask questions and take notes about the guards’ abuses. “The guards finally caught on after a couple of wings, but we were late for Uday’s next meeting, so we took off,” Yosef said.

CAPT. BRENDAN GALLAGHER initially served in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra, which was where Kuehl initially set up his first combat outpost alongside the Iraqi police. “In April and May 2007 at our first combat outpost—the Khadra police station—we would have IEDs hit us as soon as we left the main gate,” Gallagher said. This happened repeatedly over the course of weeks. The IEDs would strike them within one hundred meters of a local police defensive position. “The police on guard should have been able to see the IEDs being emplaced,” he said. “They were in plain view of his position. This was infuriating to me, because it seemed so evident that at least some of the guards were in collusion.”

When Gallagher confronted the police chain of command, they were generally dismissive of his concerns. He began to suspect that they were either incompetent or collaborating with insurgents. “In retrospect, I believe some of them were probably being pressured by AQI to keep quiet and passively let us get attacked,” Gallagher said. Soon after that, he decided to move his company’s combat outpost to a different part of Khadra, co-located with 2/5/2 National Police. “When I told the local police I had decided to move, they practically begged us to stay,” he said, but by that point he had lost confidence in them.

A month later Gallagher’s company was reassigned to Amriya. Most residents there thought that the Shiite-dominated government was conspiring against them, intentionally denying basic services to an area dominated by Sunnis. “There appeared to be a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this,” Gallagher said. They heard reports that the national police or the army was forcibly removing people from their homes because the inhabitants were Sunni.

By early 2007, Khadra and Amriya were overwhelmingly Sunni, yet the Khadra police had Shiites throughout their ranks. “This helped create a significant credibility gap with the Sunni population,” Gallagher said. “If the police had been exceedingly competent they might have been able to overcome that obstacle, but that was hardly the case.” In early 2007, the Khadra police essentially refused to patrol on their own because they were prime targets for the insurgents. “Police inherently symbolize stability and order, and for that reason Al Qaeda wanted them dead. The fact that that many of these IPs were Shiites only made things even more dangerous for them,” Gallagher said.

To make matters worse, their vehicles had almost no armor. Therefore the police tended to stay in their headquarters at the center of Khadra. “We tried to get them to investigate murders and other crimes that were happening on a regular basis, but it was like pulling teeth to get them to leave their HQ building. They would only leave the police station when we personally escorted them, and even then they were little value-added,” Gallagher said.

“There was serious sectarianism and collaboration throughout some sectors of the *ISF,” he said. “However, there were also many good and honest Iraqi soldiers and policemen who were doing the best they could. The challenge was determining who was who. In some ways it was like trying to play poker with many different players at the table, all with varying motives (some good, some not so good), and we were trying to figure out what was going on. But unlike poker, this was not a game—lives were on the line.”

As had been the case with Lieutenant Mustafa, some of the most effective people working in the Iraqi Security Forces could be punished by their superiors, or face the wrath of insurgents, if they seemed to be working too well with the Americans. “One of the most effective 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion commanders had his family threatened,” Gallagher recalled. “He was forced to leave his post and depart the area as a result. This was a setback for us, because he was extremely competent, impartial, and nonsectarian. He was only able to stay in command for a relatively short duration.”

One Iraqi army commander that Gallagher met with, who was responsible for the Hurriya and Adil neighborhoods at the time, admitted that if it came down to fighting for their country or the Mahdi Army, most of his soldiers would fight for the Mahdi Army. He was a Sunni commander. People were extremely fearful that the security forces were collaborating with Mahdi Army operatives to carry out assassinations, either by letting them through checkpoints or providing information or other assistance.

The process of sectarian cleansing started before the 1-5 Cav got on the ground in Amriya, Gallagher told me. “Within the first few months of our deployment, virtually all of the Shiites had effectively been driven out or killed,” he said. “Once the Sunni volunteers stood up, things eventually started to calm down in our area of operations.”

The Iraqi Security Forces maintained checkpoints outside Amriya to avoid being attacked. Consequently, the walls that trapped Al Qaeda in Amriya also meant they focused their attacks on the Americans, since they were deprived of other targets. Kuehl moved forces from elsewhere in Mansour to focus on Amriya, and he asked for more troops, which allowed for more patrolling. He also increased the concrete fortifications around Amriya and imposed curfews and bans on vehicles.

But just as he was trying to establish a permanent combat outpost in Amriya, close to the Maluki Mosque, an IED attack on May 19, 2007, killed six of his soldiers and one interpreter. Kuehl called Sheikh Walid that night and demanded his help in getting rid of Al Qaeda. He was convinced that the sheikhs of Amriya knew who the Al Qaeda men were but were too scared to act. In the past American soldiers had retaliated brutally after suffering such losses, and there were many soldiers who wanted to “do a Falluja” and respond with extreme violence. But Kuehl restrained them. Locals, also expecting the Americans to “do a Falluja,” were apparently impressed when they didn’t. Sheikh Khalid later said that this restraint was a key factor convincing locals of the Americans’ good will.

According to Kuehl, the Awakening men in Amriya approached him first. “I think it was something the Sunni leadership had been setting up for some time, and I had been encouraging them to work with us,” he said. “I just did not think it would happen in this way. I believe many of them were former insurgents. Looking back, I think one of the imams was hinting at it for a while but was a bit secretive in our discussions. I figured that there were things going on in the background that I could not see. Sheikh Walid called me on the night of May 29 to tell me they would attack Al Qaeda the next day. We had a heated discussion for about twenty minutes. I was trying to convince him to give us the intel and let us take care of it. He insisted that they had to do it themselves.”