Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Abul Abed no longer bragged about being a former resistance fighter. He had become more cautious after Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s controversial profile of him appeared in the Guardian . I told him that everybody said he was in the Islamic Army of Iraq. “Is this something to be ashamed of ?” he asked. “Allow me to let you know that we have corrected the attitudes of many of the jihadist battalions. Many of them have put their guns down and said, ‘Enough.’ Some media are trying to make this a point against us, to make a problem between us and the Iraqi government.”

I told him that the government maintained that the Awakening men were former insurgents and that it did not trust them. “Let’s say I am strong and you are also strong and I want to fight you but you can’t fight me, and I have caused you so many injuries, and made you dizzy, and you can’t win the fight with me despite your capabilities,” Abul Abed said. “And then I tell you I won’t fight you anymore and give you my hands. I ask you to put your hands in mine, and I say, ‘Let’s build Iraq and forget our problems.’ If you are a nationalist and love your country and don’t have loyalties to neighboring countries, you would accept me as a friend, not because you are weak. But if you are loyal to a neighboring country and you have an interest in this fight, when I give you my hand you will beat my hand. That is fine, let’s fight again. This is Iran’s interest. I’m giving an example that if there were, as they say, armed resistance groups who offered their hands to the government, the government should accept them. If I push the resistance groups in the corner, they will give up and become more violent than before.”

I asked him if Al Qaeda was the only threat to Iraq. “Not only Al Qaeda,” he said. “We have the Mahdi Army. I think the Mahdi Army has a very short life.” I asked him if he trusted the Mahdi Army cease-fire. “No,” he said.

Abul Abed believed there was an Iranian occupation in Iraq. “The American occupation in Iraq is 20 percent, and the Iranian occupation is 80 percent in Iraq. We started being terminated. I experienced this during the time when Bayan Jabr Solagh was the minister of interior. I saw fifty police cars equipped with big machine guns. They entered Amriya from 4 a.m. till 7 a.m. They took my four older brothers. Since then they said they are in the ministry for interrogation. We went there and found their names in the detainee list. We went there more than once. After a while we heard there were more than twenty-one bodies found in the Iraqi-Iranian border in a town called Badra wa Jasan. When they transferred the bodies to the morgue, my four brothers were among the corpses. Their arms were cut, their eyes were taken out, their fingers were cut, their skin was burned with acid. Why? This is a question that I always direct to the Iraqi government. I say, Why? Because they are Sunnis, they always accuse us of being terrorists. If we were terrorists, what have we done? Why were my relatives terminated? Because Iran wants to terminate us.”

I asked him if he was accusing the Iraqi government of being Iranian. He smiled. “I never said the government. I said Iran has the bigger hand in Iraq. . . . I am not accusing the journalists, but journalists often make problems for us with the government, and there are some parties in the government who want these problems. I am sure you understand my concerns. Journalism is a two-edged sword: one edge that can cut with it and the other edge might cut the user. I have been visited by a journalist from the Guardian , Ghaith Abdul-Ahad. I hosted him for four days in my house with my family. He ate my food, I satisfied all his wishes, and then in his article he said I am a mafia man. He made a big mess for me.”

When I mentioned the walls that Kuehl had erected in Amriya, Abul Abed denied that the walls made it like a prison. “Keep in mind that it is not only our area that is walled. Amriya is walled, Khadra is walled, Dora is walled, Hatin is walled, Adhamiya is walled. If we take off the walls, you will see how many car bombs will attack civilians. Qaeda attacked children and women in Ramadi with massive trucks filled with chlorine.” But he expected that the walls would shortly come down. “We are planning to open a police station manned by local inhabitants of this area. An official police station. Khadra police station is manned by Khadra people, Adhamiya police station is manned by Adhamiya people. Dora the same, and Fadhil the same.”

Of his 600 men only 333 received salaries under the American contract, he said. “We are not here for the money. Ask any soldier of the Awakening if they have come for money. Is he risking his life, his family’s life, his children’s life, his wife’s life, for two hundred dollars? He might get killed, slaughtered, killed in car bombs for this simple amount of money. No, he is here for his beliefs and his principles.” Abul Abed told me that he planned to open a police station in Amriya. Only 233 of the 600 candidates he had offered to the police academy had been accepted. He complained that his men were abused there. “The officers in the training center take our guys every night at about 2 a.m. into interrogation rooms. It’s like they were in a detention center, not a training center. The officers tell our guys that Abul Abed is a criminal and a terrorist. They ask them, ‘What did you do before coming here? Why did you sabotage Iraq?’ They harass our guys a lot. Yesterday I paid a visit to the center and met with the guys. They were afraid to talk to me in public, and the majority of them said, ‘We want to leave this country.’ A first lieutenant from the national police who works in the center goes into their room every night and takes four or five of them and keeps interrogating them until the morning. The guys were asking me if they were detainees. We have very deep wounds. Let me tell you something, if you see all these fighters, every one of them has lost his brother, his uncle or his father, most of the guys have lost members of their families.”

I asked him how he could work in a government that was made up of the same militias that killed his brothers. “This is a very complicated subject. Iraq has gone through bad conditions in the past, much worse than this. Is the government going to last forever? The answer is no. There will be another stage where there will be other elections, so if we abandon our roles in Iraq, falsification will happen again in the elections, and we won’t enter the elections because of the destruction, the fighting, and this will be a success to Iran, primarily. I follow the law. We have lots of supporters, even including Shiite brothers. Yesterday we had a meeting with the tribes of the south. We are dealing with each other as Iraqis. The strife that happened between Shiites and Sunnis is being reconciled now. Yesterday we had a visit here in Amriya from tribal leaders of the south, from Yusifiya, Mahmudiya, Mahawil, Karbala, and Hilla. We had tribal leaders of big Shiite tribes. They were our guests, and we even had reconciliation between towns and neighborhoods, Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods. Is this bad for the government? If Iraq doesn’t get a professional government that is not sectarian, that doesn’t belong to only one sect, then this county will fail.”

Abul Abed appeared on television and called for Shiites to return to their homes in Amriya. “My first principle is reconciliation, stopping the sectarian fighting across Baghdad neighborhoods. We wanted to make a model for others to follow, and we wanted the others to do the same initiatives, but unfortunately, this didn’t happen. There was a Sunni family from Amriya that went back to the Amil neighborhood. The day after they got there, the father, the mother, and two sons were killed. One of the brothers survived and gave me his mother’s phone number, so I called. A man answered the phone. I said, ‘Hello, how are you, my brother?’ The guy said, ‘Hello, who are you?’ I said, ‘I am Abul Abed, the leader of the Thuwar in Amriya.’ He said, ‘And what do you want?’ I said, ‘My brother, our area was a red zone. Shiites used to be killed in our areas, and we took the responsibility of returning Shiite families into their homes in our areas, and now we protect them. This is an innocent family. Why did you take them? What did they do?’ He said, ‘We are the Mahdi Army, there can only be killing between you and us.’ I said, ‘Let me tell you something, if you are a real man, the brave man and the real soldier who considers himself a brave fighter doesn’t kill a woman, nor does he kidnap a family. I am a soldier, and I only fight the ones who carry weapons against me. I fight men. This is a manly point of view, and if you want the Islamic point of view, the Prophet said, “Don’t cut a tree, don’t kill an animal, don’t kill a woman, and don’t kill an old man, this is if you were a Muslim.”‘ He said, ‘You are filthy, and there can only be blood between you and us.’ I hung up the phone. The next day the surviving brother was told that all his family were killed.” Abul Abed said that similar things happened to many Sunnis who returned to Hurriya.