Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“I’m with a very dangerous ministry,” warned Salim, “you don’t want to know.”

As armed guards looked on, they stood shouting at each other—each demanding to see the other’s ID cards and each refusing, not knowing who was, in fact, more powerful. As I sat in the car, I was getting more and more nervous. But after ten tense minutes they embraced and kissed. It turned out they knew each other. This was fortunate, because the bald man was an officer with the puissant Office of the Prime Minister, and he trumped Salim, who was a mere army officer. A friend later commented that the standoff reminded him of Iraq under Saddam, when a plethora of security agencies competed with one another.

Six years after the fall of Baghdad, it felt as if the Iraqis were occupying Iraq. Roads were no longer blocked by aggressive American troops but by aggressive Iraqi Security Forces in military, police, or civilian attire, waving their weapons, shouting. They were just as intimidating as their U.S. counterparts. They manned ubiquitous checkpoints throughout the city, stopping cars, searching them. They had brought a measure of security to the war-torn capital, but the price was a heavily militarized society. Even if the overt sectarianism of the security forces had been tempered—they no longer slaughtered Sunnis—their Shiite identity was apparent and made Sunnis who were stopped at checkpoints nervous.

On a different day I was driving with a friend in a car that belonged to a third friend of ours. We were stopped at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint. The policeman asked for the car’s registration. When my friend told him that it was not in his name, the policeman became hostile. He demanded my friend’s ID. He read his name out loud, “Hassanein,” an obviously Shiite name, and his demeanor changed. He smiled and waved us on our way. When I visited government buildings and police stations, the walls were often festooned with posters of Hussein, a clear sign that they were dominated by Shiites. On the concrete barriers outside the National Assembly, there was a large mural of Shiite pilgrims marching to Karbala. These displays created a sense among Sunnis that the state and its security forces were Shiite, that they did not belong.

Not that the Americans had withdrawn. One friend working with the American military in Baghdad’s Yarmuk and Qadisiya districts told me he knew of twenty or twenty-five innocent Iraqis who had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. One old man approached his door when he heard American soldiers coming so that he could open it for them. He was shot in the head. Shots to the head or shots to the chest were common at the slightest provocation, my friend complained.

According to the Baghdad morgue, every day there were ten to fifteen political murders in Baghdad alone, but this was far lower than the hundreds it received every day in 2006, when Iraqi women had to search through disfigured corpses to find their husbands and sons. But if the levels of violence had gone down, many still had not recovered. “During the last years we faced death many times,” a doctor from Sadr City told me. “We became numb. We don’t have feelings anymore.”

But now it was possible to talk about post-American Iraq. And there were many worrying signs. “It will be like the Republican Guard,” one American official told me. “[Maliki] has an extralegal counterterrorism force that answers to him.” Maliki had empowered the Office of the Prime Minister and placed under its command thousands of elite soldiers capable of operating without American military or logistical support. Trained by American special operators, they were dominated by Shiites but loyal to Maliki, not the institution. Like their American trainers, they justified their above-the-law status with the mantra of counterterrorism; when they operated, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries were never informed. Sunnis and Kurds complained to the Americans that Maliki had become the new Saddam of the Shiites.

The random and indiscriminate violence had subsided. This was most evident in the conspicuous displays of wealth. Baghdad’s roads were full of H3 Hummers and other expensive and large vehicles that cost tens of thousands of dollars in cash. New expensive restaurants catered to a new elite, or one that was in hiding. The girls in Baghdad’s universities were dressing more fashionably than ever before, and young men were adopting the fashion trends of Lebanon. For years this would have been impossible to see. Anybody with any money would have been a target for kidnappers. Women immodestly dressed could have been killed. Men in clear Western fashions could have been beaten. Bars were back open, which was at least a sign that vigilante extremists had stopped blowing them up. Playgrounds were full of children, young men played soccer in new fields, people were no longer afraid to leave their houses. But none of it felt completely real.

One night I strolled along Abu Nawas Street with my friend Hussein. Couples walked by the river, children played. Nothing special there, no great achievement in returning normalcy and stability to a place that had both before America took them away, but still hard to get used to after the past few years of occupation, civil war, and terror. Hussein told me his children played games where they lay improvised explosive devices against each other, to blow each other up. He pointed to the security patrols that went by in the park. “All this is a lie,” he gestured at the people. “If it was safe they wouldn’t need a security patrol.” Al Qaeda and other Sunni militias were just lying dormant, he said, as was the Mahdi Army. I expressed skepticism. He stopped a couple walking by. “Excuse me,” he said. “My friend is a journalist. Do you feel safe now?” The young man did not hesitate: he said no and kept on walking.

The Americans rated the Iraqi National Police “the most improved security force,” according to a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. “It used to be a death squad,” he said. “Now the worst officers have been fired or transferred to where they can do no harm.” But even if the overt sectarianism had receded, it was still there. I met up with Captain Adil from the INPs in Dora. After Adil refused to arrest Sunnis without warrants, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim had transferred him north to Mosul, a much more dangerous assignment. Adil was then accused of stealing cars and held in a secret prison on the second floor of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Affairs Committee office. He told me he had been framed and that his accuser was a Mahdi Army commander in Abu Dshir.

Twenty-seven people were held in a small cell he described as three meters by two meters in size. They slept standing up. All the other men were Sunni. The torture started at midnight. “I was handcuffed and blindfolded and beaten like in movies,” he told me. He was placed under a cold shower for many hours. A policeman named Gafar, who worked with the Mahdi Army in Dora and knew Adil, beat him so badly he urinated blood. “When Americans came they would make us shut up or threaten us,” he said. “When they beat me they said, ‘Why do you hate the Mahdi Army?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me this? It’s not about cars.’ ‘You are a collaborator,’ they said. ‘You worked with the Americans against the Mahdi Army, you know why you are here.’” Adil’s fellow prisoners were there without their families’ knowledge. They cried and wailed at night, he said, and the prisoners could hear Shiite religious songs on their jailers’ cellphones. After twenty-two days, his captors demanded twenty thousand dollars for his release, but he negotiated it down to seven thousand, which his brother-in-law handed to a police captain outside a restaurant.

Adil resigned after he was released. “I served my country,” he told me, but now he felt betrayed. He still supported Maliki, though. “He is a real nationalist,” he told me. “Everybody likes him.” He was very pleased with Maliki’s moves to include former Baathists in the government. “Nuri al-Maliki is the best leader I saw in my life,” he said. “He doesn’t know about this prison. The Americans don’t know.”