Nir Rosen - Aftermath

At a checkpoint I spoke with two Awakening men wearing blue uniforms. They had joined the Awakening a year and a half earlier to protect their area, they told me. Their salaries were two months late. “When the Americans were here, we got salaries every fifteen days,” one of them said. Until now none of them had joined the ISF, though they had all applied. “It’s only promises,” they said. As we left Maher told me that both men were former members of the Army of the Mujahideen.

A local boy got in our car and directed us to the home of the Awakening boss, Amer Abdallah Khalal al-Rabia, of the Jubur tribe. “It became normal to see dead bodies here on the side of the road,” the boy said as we drove. We turned off the road and drove several hundred meters through dense foliage and palm trees.

Amer was not home, but we met his twenty-five-year-old brother, Tahsin, who had joined the Awakening in 2007. He had been one of the first to join in all of southern Baghdad, he told me. In May 2007 he went to Mahmudiya to give the Americans information about Al Qaeda. His family had battled Al Qaeda even before the Awakening groups were formed, and Al Qaeda had killed three of his brothers. Another brother was killed after they established the Awakening group. In the early days of the occupation Islamist militants killed their tribe’s sheikh, Khalid Dawud al-Rabia. “They accused him of collaborating and working with Chalabi,” Tahsin told me, “but he was trying to open a police station here, and he wasn’t working with Chalabi. A group of men belonging to Dr. Fatthi Yusuf Saleh al-Juburi, a local veterinarian, was responsible for the murder.” Dr. Fatthi was the biggest terrorist in southern Baghdad, Tahsin said; his group distributed papers to schools saying girls can’t attend.

Amer finally showed up wearing a loose-fitting suit, with a pistol tucked in his pants. A twenty-four-year veteran of the Iraqi army, he explained that he was responsible for the areas of Zunbaraniya, Uleimiya, and Beijia. Under the Americans he had commanded 629 men, but once authority for the Awakening shifted to the Iraqis, the Iraqi government fired fifty or sixty of his men every month. He now commanded only 490 men, not one of whom had joined the Iraqi Security Forces.

When two of Amer’s men captured two Al Qaeda men, they turned them over to General Karim’s national police in Dora. But General Karim had Amer’s men arrested as well, and they had already spent three months in the serious crimes prison in Dora. “Our relationship with the Iraqi army is not good,” Amer said. “They don’t respect the Awakening. The Iraqi National Police don’t like the Awakening.” One month earlier Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of Amer’s men because he did not salute them. Now that the Iraqi army paid them, many negative things were happening. Salaries had been reduced. Amer’s salary was halved. Now he received the same amount as his men: about three hundred dollars. “The Americans used to come here to pay us,” he said. “Now we have to go to the Iraqi army battalion and wait on long lines. Some people wait for two or three days. We are treated with disrespect. For the last two months, there is no salary. It was all false promises. We are targeted by Al Qaeda and we have no protection.”

Amer spoke of a new trend: families of slain Al Qaeda men were filing charges against him and Tahsin. “They made fake death certificates,” he said. “They said we killed people the Americans killed, and now there is a warrant for me in Baghdad.”

Seven hundred and eighty-two families who had fled the area because of Al Qaeda had now returned. One factor limiting returns was the destruction of many homes. Sectarianism remained, but it was now more covert. The Americans were releasing terrorists from imprisonment in Camp Bucca, and there were rumors that the Awakening program would end in June. “Why did terrorism happen?” he asked me. “Because of the vacuum. If they don’t put the Awakening men in the Iraqi army or Iraqi police, problems will happen.”

“Metrics” to determine “progress” in Iraq have always been difficult to determine. The American surge was meant to give space for Iraq’s politicians to achieve a modicum of reconciliation and progress. This had not happened, but it was an American-imposed standard. How did Iraqis feel about the situation? “The refugees are the best ones to determine the temperature on the ground, the best at keeping the pulse,” UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) head Stefan de Mistura told me. “If they return, the situation is normalizing. If they don’t, then there is a reason. They have returned but not in substantial numbers.” This was a contrast to other crises where he had worked. “In Kosovo we had two million people return,” he said. “We were delighted but overwhelmed.” After the January 2009 elections the changes became apparent: “We saw that the city of Baghdad changed its color. There was a cleansing.”

Back in Baghdad I went to the Jihad district’s Mukhabarat area and met Ibrahim Saleh, also known as Abu Abdallah Hamdani. He was the local Awakening leader there; he was not pleased with Iraq’s new course. His area was walled off and the entrance was guarded by INPs and a tense Awakening man who barked at all strangers entering. I drove by a large lake of sewage and garbage, on a dirt road to Ibrahim’s large house, which was being built atop a hill. Hundreds of families had fled the area to the Anbar and elsewhere because mortars were falling on their homes. Ibrahim’s wife was among the victims of these mortars. The displaced started to return after the Awakening was established.

Ibrahim took charge of 160 men in August 2008 after the INPs arrested his brother Taher, the previous leader. He and his brother joined the Awakening because there were no jobs and because they wanted to help protect the area. “Al Qaeda and the special groups were fighting each other, and the Friendly Forces [as he called the Americans] came to us and asked Taher to protect the area and give information. The Awakening was established here in July 2007.” He claimed Taher had a good relationship with the INPs, but one day Taher invited them to lunch, and after they finished eating they arrested him. “He was taken to the Fifth Brigade of INPs. They accused him of murder and stealing. In the beginning they beat him badly. He passed out for two days.” He was now in prison in the Shaab district. Both Taher and Ibrahim had been in the military before the war.

Ibrahim claimed that both Al Qaeda and Shiite militias had tried to assassinate him. Two weeks before I met him, one of his Awakening men was arrested and beaten until he confessed to murder. An Awakening commander in the nearby Furat district was arrested in October 2008. I told Ibrahim it seemed to me that the Awakening groups were used and disposed of. “This is the reality,” he said. “I will be arrested, 100 percent. As soon as they finish with me, they will arrest me.” He too felt betrayed. “We were with the government of Iraq and the Americans. The arrests can’t happen without the permission of the Americans.”

Jihad was a desperate area. Most young men had no jobs, Ibrahim said, and there were a lot of widows. There were many poor people and IDPs who didn’t get any compensation. “You have to spend a lot of money to register,” he told me. The Americans used to control the area firmly, he said, but since the Status of Forces Agreement took effect in January 2009, the Americans stopped coming around much, and whenever Ibrahim contacted them they told him he should talk to the Iraqi government. Although people started to return after security improved, once the arrests started again some fled anew. “People felt like it was a plan to make us come back and arrest us,” he said. “It’s only Sunnis being arrested.” I met him alongside two members of the local council for Jihad and Furat, which had a total of twenty members. They all believed the Iraqi government was still sectarian and that when the Americans left the Iranians would occupy the country and fighting would resume. Only those loyal to Iran wanted the Americans to leave, they told me. Despite all this, Ibrahim had a positive view of Prime Minister Maliki.