Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Kuehl warned him that if they threatened American soldiers or civilians in any of their operations, they would be shot; then he ordered his men to back off and let events transpire. The next night Sheikh Walid called Kuehl up to tell him of their success, and the next day Al Qaeda responded.

“They were pretty cocky after the initial success, but Al Qaeda came after them hard on the second day, which is when they asked for my help.” The Americans responded quickly, driving to the Fardus Mosque to back up the rebels. Dead and wounded fighters lay sprawled in the mosque. The Americans also lost one soldier in the battle.

In a letter sent home to family and friends later that year, Staff Sergeant Yosef wrote, almost wistfully, of the time in May 2007 when Abul Abed, a charismatic and enigmatic Sunni militia leader previously unknown to the Americans, entered their midst. “Abul Abed saw some Al Qaeda men placing a roadside bomb on the side of the road near his house,” Yosef wrote. “He confronted them and asked why they were placing it so close to his house. Adul Abed told them, ‘That is a big bomb. It could kill me and my family.’ Their reply? ‘It’s okay if you die. This is jihad.’ Abul Abed walked directly back into his house and did what I hope any of us would have done under the same circumstances: he grabbed his AK-47, walked back outside, and shot the three men to death in his front yard.”

Abul Abed was a former officer in Saddam’s army. “After that event, he feared for his life,” Yosef wrote. “He did have connections though, useful connections, connections with guns. They consisted of Iraqi Sunni men, who up until then, had been fighting ‘American invaders.’”

Yosef empathized with these men, even though some of them had fought in Falluja against comrades in Yosef’s platoon. “Last May these local men from Amriya decided that they couldn’t live with Al Qaeda anymore,” Yosef wrote, “and since they couldn’t rely on the Shia-run government for help, they called us and literally asked us if we would allow them to start a war against Al Qaeda. We said yes. When my platoon first got the word that we had been selected to work with the ‘Freedom Fighters’ of Amriya, we couldn’t believe it. We had just finished a five-month mission living out of a four-story abandoned mall at the intersection of two highways in Western Baghdad. We were exhausted, and I remember one of my Army friends saying, ‘Great, now we’re going to train more terrorists.’”

In early June Yosef ’s platoon went into Amriya for the first time. They took five Humvees and about twenty men. “So, there we were driving slowly down a narrow Amriya neighborhood road, trash and rubble on either side,” Yosef wrote. “No one was around. We made it without incident to the temporary headquarters of the AFF [Amriya Freedom Fighters] at an abandoned school. A few of their men met us at the gate. They all had guns. We really didn’t know what to expect. We left our Humvees with drivers and gunners in them. We had about ten dismounted soldiers when we went inside the compound.”

The school, as Yosef describes it, was situated in the middle of a fairly upscale Iraqi neighborhood, complete with the familiar abandoned two-story houses, electrical wires bunched together and hanging low from telephone poles, and trash on the side of the streets. Yosef ’s company commander, his interpreter, and two other soldiers went into the main meeting room with Abul Abed, the AFF leader. Yosef, his platoon leader and his section sergeant walked into a room next to the main meeting room .

“At the end of an outer corridor was Abul Abed’s office, one door short of his office was another classroom with some sofas, and tables. Both rooms had fans, and since it was the beginning of June, CPT Weightman, SSG Kirk, and I waited in the other room while CPT Mitchell and Abul Abed introduced themselves, and started planning. It was in this other room, short of Abul Abed’s office, where I met Ali, and Muhamad. Ali was younger than me, in his early twenties—a short skinny dude, with thick well kept hair, sly eyes and a smile that probably drove women wild. He wore a t-shirt, sweat pants, and interestingly enough had a hand grenade in his pocket.

“Muhamad on the other hand was in his late teens, tall, with a sharp strong jaw, and big eyes. He wore a tank-top, had on shorts and carried a thick sheep herding stick. He too had a grin on his face, and unlike Ali, Muhamad could speak English. They seemed comfortable enough with us, and so we started joking around with them. We already had our helmets off, which was disarming in and of itself. But something was bothering me. The hand grenade that Ali had in his sweat pants pocket, he kept on taking it out and rolling it around in his hands. I, being the most uptight of the three Americans, was kind of worried and asked if Ali would let me see the hand grenade. He seemed slightly taken aback by my worry, but he handed it to me none-the-less. I looked at it. Sure enough it was a Russian made fragmentation grenade, slightly less powerful than the American made ones, but still deadly especially in a confined space such as this room. I showed it to CPT Weightman, who was much less impressed with it and told me to give it back to Ali. I did, and we continued our light hearted exchange of jokes and jabs.

Mitchell picked up on Yosef’s ability to build a rapport with Iraqis early and assigned him to gain intelligence on the different men in Abul Abed’s group. Yosef did this by hanging out with them whenever they were there. Some of the younger AFF, like Muhamad, still attended school, and then patrolled with the AFF when they were out of school. The relationship, as Yosef reported, developed from caution to common respect and friendship. “Watching Abul Abed lead his men was educational. It showed me the reality of the old saying, ‘A company is the long shadow of a single man.’ They were professional because he was professional. If there were lapses in some of his soldiers’ performance, it was because they were moonlighting as AFF, when in fact they worked for other forces in the neighborhood.”

A few months later Al Qaeda came for Muhamad at his high school. They raided his school while he was in class, bribed the school guards and took him away from his classmates. They kidnapped him, kept him for the afternoon, and tortured him. They ended up beheading him and leaving his head in a tree. Two years later, when I spoke to Sergeant Yosef about this, his anger was still raw. In a note to his family, soon after Muhamad’s death, he wrote: “ I feel slightly guilty for Muhamad’s death. I thought at the time, and still think that there was an Al Qaeda spy within the AFF who fingered Muhamad. Perhaps by befriending Muhamad, and encouraging him to be friendly with me I effectively made him a target. Perhaps they kidnapped him out from his high school and beheaded him, specifically so that other young AFF would understand that being friends with American soldiers was a sin punishable by death. Any fear Al Qaeda was attempting to instill in the AFF was trumped though by Abul Abed’s swift vengeance. I don’t want to be too specific, but I’ll say this, Mohamed’s death was avenged at least 4-fold within a day. The practical result of this brought confidence back to the AFF as quickly as it had wavered.”

AFTER THE INITIAL SUCCESS of establishing Abul Abed and his men, Kuehl found that the harder part was working out a longer-range partnership and then maintaining it. “There were a couple of things I wanted to ensure,” he told me. “First, we had to work with the Iraqi army. Second, I wanted to have some civil control of this movement. Getting the Iraqi army on board was the first challenge. I met with Brigadier General Ghassan for about two hours trying to convince him this was a good idea. He had already helped by providing Abul Abed’s men ammunition, but he was a bit hesitant to get directly involved. He finally agreed to meet with Abul Abed, who was cooling his heels outside along with another leader. This was probably the most important negotiation I ever had to do.”