Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Like many Iraqis, Akil seemed indifferent to the approaching elections. “People don’t like the religious parties anymore,” he said. Many believed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, head of the religious Shiite Dawa Party, had transcended his sectarian affiliation. “He is not considered to be from a religious party anymore,” Akil said.

Reconstruction proceeded haltingly in Shuwafa: fifty families of the hundreds who had fled to Karbala to escape Al Qaeda had returned, but few had the funds to rebuild their homes or repair their farms. In the nearby village of Malha, where well-fed sheep were grazing on dark green grass around the rubble of destroyed houses, the situation was much the same. Only two homes were being rebuilt, and the majority of the village’s residents had not yet returned. Those who came back survived by working in a local Shiite Awakening group—earning only two hundred dollars a month, barely enough to replace a single one of the hundreds of sheep that had been killed or stolen by Sunni insurgents when they fled. The lives of Iraq’s millions of internal refugees remained bleak, and the country’s humanitarian crisis was grave. But the restoration of some semblance of security had bolstered the authority of the state and the prime minister. “The Awakening, the Americans, the Iraqi army, and the tribes made it safer here,” one man in Malha told me. “Everybody here is with Maliki.”

In the town of Shat al-Taji, northwest of Baghdad, I drove past orange groves, palm trees, and boys in school uniforms walking home on the side of the road alongside schoolgirls wearing pink backpacks and holding hands. The majority-Sunni town, which stretches along the Tigris River, had been the site of brutal conflict in the civil war. I walked along the banks with Abu Taisir, a small man with a pistol tucked into the side of his trousers who was the deputy head of the local Awakening group. “Al Qaeda used to behead people and dump them in the river right there,” he said, pointing over the tall reeds to a spot on the shore.

Abu Taisir took me to meet Abdulrahman Ismail, a Shiite neighbor who was displaced from Shat al-Taji in October 2006 but had since returned home. After a series of death threats—and the murder of four of his cousins, who were beheaded and tossed in the river—”we feared for our children and went to Kut,” Ismail said. But after security improved in the town, he continued, the Awakening men contacted the displaced Shiite families to tell them it was safe to return. Ismail found that his home had been taken over by an Al Qaeda man who was later killed; his family’s belongings and livestock had been stolen. “We feel safe now,” he said, “but we still feel a little scared.”

Abu Taisir’s outfit had arrested eighty-five Al Qaeda suspects, he told me; ten of his men had been killed in the fighting. Abu Taisir himself had been shot twice, most recently in November. Some of the Al Qaeda men were still in town, he said, but they hadn’t been arrested because nobody would testify against them. “They have roots here like us,” Abu Taisir said. Both men agreed that there was a new balance of power in the town—the remnants of the insurgency were overwhelmed by the Awakening men and the Iraqi Security Forces. “Now if we call the police, they come,” Abu Taisir said.

He had commanded 360 men, but only eighty-two were offered jobs in the government, and low-ranking ones at that. Many felt betrayed. “We’re fighters,” he said. “We brought peace to this area, we fought Al Qaeda. Now we are janitors?”

The failure to integrate the Awakening men into government security forces had been widespread, and many feared the consequences of the continuing disenfranchisement of Iraq’s Sunnis. But they had been disenfranchised since 2003, in part thanks to their own miscalculations. Iraq’s new order was dominated by Shiites, and that was not easily undone: the government was soundly in Shiite hands; the only question with regard to the upcoming elections, then, was whether it would remain in Maliki’s comparatively reliable hands or pass into those of his more divisive and inflammatory Shiite rivals. At the time of my visit to Shat al-Taji, the de-Baathification committee had just banned the leading Sunni politician, Saleh al-Mutlaq, from the elections. Outside observers worried that excluding him could agitate Sunnis, but his removal was met with barely a whimper; even other Sunni politicians failed to unite to support him. “People here are upset about Saleh al-Mutlaq,” Abu Taisir said, “but they saw from the last elections that the people they voted for weren’t sincere, so they don’t care for politics.” The other Awakening men we met had been impressed by Maliki; he was an effective strongman. “We want secular people, nationalist, not religious parties,” Abu Taisir averred.

In Baghdad a few days later, I saw Omar al-Juburi, a leading Sunni member of Parliament and a former adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. He was now living in a gaudy mansion in the Yarmuk district. I first met Juburi in 2006, when he presented me with detailed files demonstrating that Sunnis had been killed by Shiite death squads and Iraqi police. Since then, he said, “the minister of interior has expelled sixty thousand bad policemen; today the police is better than the army.” The Sunni presence in Iraq was now stable. “The storm has passed,” he said. But there were 2.4 million unemployed Iraqis, he warned, and no job opportunities.

Compared with their actions during the early years of the occupation, Iraq’s Sunnis seemed downright docile. A little angry, yes, and bitter and wistful, but there was no fuel for a return to the fighting, and the Sunni community lacked even a single charismatic political figure with real appeal. In Baghdad I went to the Ghazaliya neighborhood to visit the Um Al Qura Mosque. This was once the most significant “proresistance” mosque in the city; the neo-Baathist Association of Muslim Scholars used to broadcast calls to jihad against the Americans from its loudspeakers. Now it was a massive construction site, with housing complexes, hotels, and party halls being built. Plastic trees with lights lined the stone path leading to the mosque. Sunnis who had been killed by Shiite death squads used to be brought there; now a senior sheikh was showing me the numerous certificates of appreciation that American forces had bestowed on him. He did continue to insist, however, that Sunnis were really the majority in Iraq, while two of his bodyguards complained loudly that Saddam was a better leader than Maliki. I thought, It’s no surprise that some Shiites still think all Sunnis are Baathists.

I had been hoping to meet Abu Omar, the Awakening leader in Adhamiya. Just a year earlier, he and I had been drinking tea together in the main square, but he was now keeping a low profile, and he sent his son to meet me at the tea house. His son and I walked down the main street for a few minutes, then turned left into an alley with short, bullet-ridden buildings that had shops on the bottom floors. Abu Omar was standing at the bottom of a stairwell, still wearing the same brown tracksuit as last year, with a pistol holster strapped around his shoulder. We sat on a nearby bench and had sweet Iraqi tea. Abu Omar lamented the loss of his American patron, who had been protective of him. He now lived anxiously, looking over his shoulder, worried about revenge attacks from Al Qaeda or arrest from the Iraqi Security Forces. His Awakening men had been granted the most menial and demeaning jobs—they were the cleaning staff in government offices—so many had quit.

Three days before my visit to Adhamiya, Saleh al Mutlaq’s local office had been bombed. “This is because the Awakening is less,” Abu Omar told me; it was not able to control the street. He recommended I visit Adhamiya’s Kam neighborhood but explained it was too dangerous for him to go there with me. In Kam I found an entire building taken over by squatters. The displaced families had been assigned apartments by members of the resistance and Awakening.