Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Adil wasn’t the only person I knew who was feeling punished by the new order. In late 2008, two weeks after the Americans handed authority over Dora’s Awakening groups to the Iraqi National Police, Osama’s comrade Abu Yasser was arrested by the INPs. Osama told me that Abu Yasser was taken to General Karim’s headquarters, hung from his arms, and tortured. To end the torture he confessed to murders he hadn’t committed but wisely confessed to killing people who were still alive. Then he was moved to the INP prison in Kadhimiya. He had already paid twenty thousand dollars, Osama told me. “They can’t release him without money—everything costs money.” Abu Yasser was worried that Al Qaeda men in prison with him would find out that he was an Awakening group member and kill him.

Soon after, Osama and Abu Yasser’s fellow comrade Abu Salih arranged a lunch for Eid. He invited locals, including the local American unit. Abu Salih had become famous for helping many Shiite families come back and protecting them. The head of the Baghdad Operations Command, Abud Qanbar, came to shake his hand, and it was shown on Iraqi TV. But after lunch the Americans left, and a different American unit showed up and arrested him. He was taken to the major crimes unit of the Iraqi police and accused of terrorism. He too was tortured and hung by his arms, and had trouble walking afterward. Abu Salih also paid about twenty thousand dollars, Osama said, and his family expected him to be released when more money was paid.

“They torture and wait for them to confess; they don’t use evidence,” Osama said. At least eight other men I knew from Osama’s group had been arrested since the INPs took over. His young deputy Hussein had managed to abscond safely. There was also a warrant out for Osama, and he could not return to Dora to visit his parents. Abu Yusef—Osama’s former ally—had switched allegiances and joined with Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s old nemesis. But Kashkul was arrested by the Americans and taken to the prison at Camp Bucca. Abu Yusef fled before he could be arrested. Now a fat man called Abu Suleiman was in charge of Osama’s old area. “He’s not a good guy,” Osama said. He felt betrayed. “The Americans were only with us when they needed us,” he said. He called the Americans when Abu Yasser was first arrested, but they told him it was an Iraqi affair and that they couldn’t do anything for him. “The SOI [Sons of Iraq] was never supposed to be an amnesty program,” one American Embassy official in Baghdad told me defensively when I recounted this story to him.

The British special operators Osama and some of his men worked with also rotated units. “The new guys were assholes,” he said. They warned Abu Yasser that the Americans would arrest him if he did not help them arrest Al Qaeda men. In his one year working with the British, Abu Yasser helped them arrest several senior Al Qaeda men, including an explosives expert called Abu Maryam. The British gave sources one hundred dollars per visit, but Osama refused to take their money. “I said I am not a source, I’m working for my country,” he told me.

Dora had changed dramatically since Osama and I had toured its devastation in 2007. I got an introduction to the new Dora with Adil Adnan, a round man with a gray mustache, and his son Maher. For the past five years Adnan had been the Education Ministry’s supervisor for seventy-six schools in southern Baghdad. Before that he had been a school principal for twenty-four years. He drove me down Dora’s Masafi Street. “This street, you couldn’t drive on it,” he said. “It was empty. The concrete barriers helped a lot, even if it was annoying.”

Adnan was originally from Arab Jubur. “I didn’t visit for three years because it was unsafe,” he said. “The Awakening saved the area.” Adnan took me to his house in Dora’s Jumhuriya area. He had a green yard and a small garden under a skylight in his living room, which he proudly told me was in a Spanish style. “In 2005 the resistance got strong here,” Adnan said. “Then Americans brought random groups to run the government in 2006 and 2007.” That’s when sectarianism started in the Education Ministry. Adnan knew at least five Shiite and Sunni school principals who were killed and twenty or twenty-five teachers who were killed, including a Christian physical education teacher. Militias came into schools and ordered teachers to give certain students good grades. Many children whose parents were wealthy were kidnapped.

In 2006 Maher was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army. “They took me to the Kadhimein Husseiniya and beat me with pistols,” Maher told me. The cleric interrogated him. They told him he had killed Imam Hussein. Maher protested that his father was Sunni but his mother was Shiite. They called him a tali (lamb), as the Mahdi Army refers to victims about to be executed. Maher asked for a glass of water. “What do you think this is?” they taunted. “The Sheraton?” They put him in the trunk of the car and drove him to be executed, but he kicked it open and managed to run away.

“There was no sectarianism before,” Adnan recalled, but now “there are still bad people talking about sectarianism. Even in the worst times I had seven Shiite headmasters who stayed in Dora. Some were transferred so Shiites took salaries to Sunnis and Sunnis took salaries to Shiites. Sunni teachers from elsewhere would come, and I would give them jobs.”

Adnan had a principal’s impartiality and viewed all sides in the conflict as responsible. “Who was killing if everybody says it wasn’t me?” he asked dismissively. “The Awakening, the police, the Mahdi Army—all say it wasn’t me.” Then there was a change in the American behavior. “The Americans got better, they started to know the area, they spread out more, had more patrols.” Unlike most Iraqis I met, Adnan wasn’t worried about the impending American withdrawal. “Let the Americans leave,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”

Maher drove me around the neighborhood. He pointed to a young girl. “Al Qaeda killed her father and brother,” he told me. Not far away some Shiites had returned and put up the religious flags traditional Shiites raise above their homes. Some people viewed it as a provocation and threw a concussion bomb at the house.

On a different day I met Maher again, and we drove to Arab Jubur, where his family originally hailed from. The banks of the Tigris, an idyllic rural area, had been the scene of some of the worst Al Qaeda violence of the war. We passed empty fields where Al Qaeda used to dump the bodies of Shiites they captured on the highway. “They would take whole Kia buses full of people,” he said. “Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigade, the Army of the Mujahideen, Al Qaeda, were all here.” There were numerous checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers and Awakening men every few hundred meters. We drove past fields from where Al Qaeda had launched an attack on Abu Dshir. The road was scarred by IED craters that had been filled with dirt. On our left was the bank of the Tigris. Maher pointed to destroyed houses on the side of the road. “This one was Al Qaeda,” he said. “This one was a slaughterer.” Many homes had been destroyed by American airstrikes during the surge. The violence had destroyed the farms and roads. Most people in the area were farmers, and earning a living was much harder now. There were no services, no drinking water, no clinic.

In the schoolyard I found an eighteen-year-old boy watching younger children playing. In 2008 he lost his hand when an IED went off. His brother had lost a leg from an IED in a different incident. On the road I found a small boy on his way to school, leaning on a crutch. He was missing an arm and had a prosthetic leg. One day in 2008 he was tending his sheep when an IED went off. On the side of the road a man called Sami Adnan stood by his hardware. Like many, he had fled the area when the situation was at its worst. “The Americans used to bomb randomly every day, and there were terrorists,” he said. His house was burned and destroyed when he was away, but he didn’t know who was responsible. He attributed the improved security to the Awakening men. “Even the Americans got better after the terrorists left,” he said.