Nir Rosen - Aftermath

In November 2007 Abul Abed was interviewed by the London-based, Saudi-owned Al Hayat newspaper. Al Qaeda had turned into Iraq’s biggest enemy, he said, and so he had to ally himself with his erstwhile enemies, the Americans, against whom he claimed he had once fought “honorably.” He claimed to have six hundred men under his control, each of whom got paid about $360 a month, and three hundred of whom had become Amriya’s police force. He called for further integration of Awakening men into the government.

When I met him again in early 2008 he had switched from wearing military uniforms to suits. “The situation is different now,” he said. “We have destroyed Qaeda. It is safe now, and it is very good for me—I am number one on the hit list of Qaeda. Just after the assassination of Sheikh Sattar, the next primary goal for Qaeda became me. If my fate is to die, then that is okay.” He repeated his claim that he had six hundred men in Amriya, and many outside. I asked where. “All of Baghdad,” he said. I asked how many; he said “a lot.” His main target was anyone who broke the law, he said, whether they were Al Qaeda or not. “We are against criminals, against killers, against the ones who make bombs and against the ones who destroy.” In the past his men had clashed with the Mahdi Army as well.

“Our areas and our sect were marginalized, which is what Al Qaeda used to initiate a sectarian war. Now we are working on fixing this and rehabilitat[ing] our areas in order to take our real positions in the government and in the country.” He would not run in elections, he said, but Iraq’s national security adviser had taken the surprising step of offering Abul Abed a position in the government. “I have been offered many positions from different big political parties. But I refused them. I explained from the beginning to the journalists that I didn’t come for money, nor for political reasons. I know lots of scornful people who put themselves in front of others and step on people’s shoulders to go up the ladder and take a chair or a position in the government. This is not my goal, and I have explained that to the channels that visited me. I am not running for any position, not going to take part of the political process. I have a goal that I would like to achieve, not only in Amriya but in all of Baghdad: reinstate the security in our areas and save innocent people’s lives. Only when I achieve these goals I will leave.

“Everybody knows how Al Qaeda used to control our areas. They destroyed the area, they killed civilian families, they filled the streets with bombs. Their work became barbaric, killing people for their identity, on suspicion. They started by killing Shiites, then they started killing Sunnis, then finally they started killing Christians with the excuse of establishing the Islamic State of Iraq. They said, ‘Since you are a Christian, you must pay a ransom.’ If the man had money to pay the ransom, he paid and lived in his home. If he didn’t, they killed him and threw his corpse in the trash. People advised them that this is destruction and far away of jihad, so they killed the ones who gave such advice. They acted like a gang—they kill and steal, and they look for new modern cars. They killed people under the name of jihad.”

Abul Abed told me that jihad had four conditions: to preserve the religion, the land, the honor, and the money. “These are four conditions, all of which Al Qaeda breached. Qaeda claimed that they are fighting the occupation. If you fight the occupation, why would you kill civilians? If you are fighting occupation, why would you steal the water pumps? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you take down the mobile telecommunications towers? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you steal from the shops of the Muslims? They did that with the excuse, this is Shiite and that is Christian. Did the Prophet do that? The Prophet had a Jewish neighbor, and he never did that to him. Is taking rich people’s money a form of jihad? Is this against occupation? No, it is not.” Al Qaeda, he said, is a dirty gang using the cover of Islam. They dragged people from their cars and filled the streets of Amriya with corpses. The smell of these bodies was everywhere, but people were prohibited from removing them because IEDs were placed just underneath them. “This is not jihad, this is destruction!” Abul Abed said. “All the shops were closed, food never entered the area because people were afraid to come into the area. If a man looks at them in a strange way, they killed him, and many other issues that we can’t count. The garbage accumulated and made mountains two meters high in the streets of Amriya. The government was about to attack Amriya. Day after day they said, ‘We must attack Amriya, we must bomb Amriya.’

“It started when Al Qaeda kidnapped two young guys from the Dulaimi tribe in Amriya. The father of the two guys came into the mosque and was crying. Two days earlier Sheikh Walid was passing by the Munadhama Street when he saw a very old woman. She was a Christian, white, and she was wearing a skirt that was not long, and she was fat. The woman’s husband was taken by Al Qaeda, and his body was in the back of their car and his leg was outside the car. The woman was holding her husband’s leg, not letting it go. The woman was on the ground and they were hitting her with their pistols. The sheikh and I were asking if this was jihad. No, this is not jihad. We knew then that fighting these people is the jihad itself, in order to protect people from them, to protect their money and to protect their honors. Al Qaeda destroyed people’s lives.”

What actually sparked the war between the Islamic Army fighters and Al Qaeda in Amriya was the murder of an Islamic Army leader called Zeid, or Abu Teiba, who was a good friend of Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. Abu Teiba was a law school graduate who also provided security for the Maluki Mosque. Sheikh Hussein had been detained by the Americans, and Al Qaeda had taken over his mosque. Al Qaeda men captured Abu Teiba and brought him to the mosque, where they filmed his torture and accused him of being an infidel. “Zeid, he was one of the best guys in Amriya,” Abul Abed told me. “He was an Arabic teacher, he was teaching the Koran, he was teaching Islamic religious beliefs and Islamic religious law, he was popular in mosques, he was popular in the area. They tortured him until he died. He was in the Maluki Mosque, he was in the house of God. When I started the fight, Zeid used to always protect the mosques. We have a video of him being tortured, tortured according to the Sharia law. A guy from the Islamic State of Iraq was slapping him while he was bleeding. He was not allowed to discuss why they tortured him because in their view he was an apostate. They were telling him, ‘You are a criminal. Abul Abed told you to fight the mujahideen.’”

Abul Abed was in the Dubat neighborhood of Amriya, supplying his men with weapons and vehicles, when one of his men told him about Sabah, the so-called “white lion,” who led Al Qaeda in Amriya. Sabah was standing on a corner with his assistant. Abul Abed walked to him accompanied by three or four of his men, carrying his charged pistol. They stood face to face.

After Abul Abed challenged him, Sabah stepped back, pulled his pistol, and shot at him, but his weapon didn’t work. Abul Abed pulled his pistol too. He shot Sabah, and Sabah ran. While he was running he charged his weapon again and pulled the trigger, but again it didn’t work. He was using Iraqi bullets. Abul Abed kept shooting at him until he fell; then he took his gun. “I always carry it with me,” Abul Abed said. “I replaced the bullets with good foreign bullets.”

Abul Abed recited the names of other Al Qaeda leaders he had fought and killed. “Let me tell you one point. They have announced themselves as an Islamic country. They all came up as leaders. Some of them presented themselves as a minister of defense, minister of interior, and mosque leaders, and security and intelligence and army and patrols. They were all known to the people of Amriya. We knew their names and their faces. We knew them all. They were not working only secretly but also publicly. They didn’t even cover their faces. The Iraqi and national forces were unable to enter the area.” Abul Abed told me his unit lost about twenty martyrs in the battle of Amriya. The day before I met him the Iraqi National Guard and the Thuwar raided a home and confiscated weapons.