Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Osama was the English-speaking diplomatic face, but behind him were tough men of the resistance. One, called Salah Nasrallah, or Abu Salih, had dark reddish skin, a sharp nose, and small piercing eyes. The Americans required that each mahala have two ISV bosses, so Osama gave half of his three hundred men to Abu Salih’s control. (“We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq,” an American Army officer from the area told me.) The day I met Abu Salih he was wearing a baseball cap with the Iraqi flag on it. Turning off Sixtieth Street we walked up to the Batul School for Girls. A soldier with the 2-2 SCR had been shot in the throat and killed in front of this school, presumably by Al Qaeda. Abu Salih explained that the Mahdi Army kidnapped Sunni girls from the school and that during final exams they had attacked it and shot it up, then looted it. Osama blamed the Mahdi Army but added, “When I say Mahdi Army I mean the Iraqi National Police.” Abu Salih picked up Korans and other religious books that were strewn about the dusty floors.

A thick muscular man called Amar, or Abu Yasser, was the other brawn behind the operation. Handsome and jovial, Abu Yasser wore a green sweatshirt and matching sweatpants with a pistol holstered his under arm. “Amar is the real boss,” an American Army intelligence officer from the area told me. “That guy’s an animal, he’s crazy.” Osama explained that nobody from Mahala 832 knew that he was in charge of the ISVs in the area. “They think Abu Salih and Abu Yasser are in charge, because my family is still there.” He added that they were still arresting Al Qaeda infiltrators from among the ISVs. Osama was trying to arrange for Abu Yasser to manage his own ISV unit in the nearby Mahala 834, where he actually lived.

Abu Yasser had worked for the General Security Service until 1993 and then joined the Iraqi military industry. In 2004 he joined the Army of the Mujahideen, a resistance organization operating in Mosul, the Anbar province, and southern Baghdad. Although he claimed to have joined to protect Sunni areas from the Mahdi Army, in 2004 that Shiite militia was still cooperating with the Sunni resistance and was not targeting Sunnis. In fact, he had fought the American occupation, operating mostly out of Arab Jubur, he said, where the organization “was young people, mostly to defend the area.” He had not resigned from that organization, he added, but decided to work with the Americans and the ISVs “because of Iranians getting more power in Iraq,” he told me. “They are occupying Sunni areas. They are the bigger enemy.” Like many others, Abu Yasser admitted that Sunnis had made a strategic blunder by boycotting the Iraqi political process in the early days of the occupation, and Sunni clerics had made a mistake issuing fatwas prohibiting Sunnis from joining the nascent security forces the Americans were creating.

Abu Salih had belonged to the 1920 Revolution Battalions. He had decided to work with his former enemies the Americans and join the ISVs because of the Iraqi government. “It’s an Iranian government,” he said, “and the people are its victims.” A colleague of his, Abu Yusef, averred, “Maliki is Iraqi, but he lived in Iran a long time, he works for them.” Referring to Maliki’s political party, Abu Salih added, “The Dawa Party is the first enemy of Iraq.” Unlike some of his associates, Abu Salih did not think it had been a mistake for Sunnis to boycott the security forces. “If Sunnis had joined they would have been killed or fired,” he said. Abu Salih admitted that some men from Al Qaeda joined the ISVs so that they could have the identity card as protection should they get arrested. If the Iraqi government did not allow the ISVs to join its security forces, “it will be worse than before,” he said.

Abu Yusef, who was sitting with Abu Salih, was a former investigator for Saddam’s Special Security Service. Like all members of the security forces, he had been fired when former American proconsul Paul Bremer issued an edict dissolving them in May 2003. Many joined the resistance after that, though Abu Yusef denied having done so (but he told me he fought the Mahdi Army and killed many of them). The Mahdi Army killed twenty-seven members of his family, he said, adding that on one day, earlier in 2007, forty-seven Sunni corpses were found next to the nearby Sunni Tawhid Mosque, presumably murdered by the Mahdi Army. He denied being anti-Shiite, though. His wife was Shiite, and many of the officers he worked with in the security service were Shiites from throughout Iraq.

The Hero House—the sobriquet the Americans gave to Osama’s headquarters—was located behind a tall concrete wall that stretched the length of a highway the Americans called Route Senators. The Americans paid Iraqis to build these walls, Osama said. Before they were erected, he said, the Iraqi National Police had fired on the neighborhood from the highway. Now his guards manned a checkpoint at a gap in the wall that allowed vehicles to enter the area. The house belonged to Abu Yasser’s cousin, a doctor living in Britain. It was also surrounded by concrete barriers and manned by men in civilian clothing casually slinging Kalashnikovs. Inside the mostly empty house was a room with mattresses and another with some chairs, a desk, and a large satellite image of Dora that the Americans had given Osama. As we drank tea in the office, one of Osama’s sources entered and pointed to a spot on the map where an Al Qaeda agent was residing. The suspected Al Qaeda man was called Walid. “He is harmful to people,” Osama told me. “I just want to kill him. Now he is back in the area. His cousins are Al Qaeda also.” But he said he would watch him instead, to see who he worked with. The Americans had recently required the ISVs to wear uniforms, and Osama was annoyed that most of his men were still in their civilian attire.

Inside I met Hussein, a lanky twenty-one-year-old wearing a blue tracksuit. He was one of Osama’s original partners, though he was from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. He was working as a guard in a local Sunni mosque when the Mahdi Army, backed by the Iraqi National Guard, expelled his family and other Sunnis from the area. They killed his uncle and cousin. His family fled to Arab Jubur, but Al Qaeda pressured him to join them and came to his house looking for him, so his family told them he had gone to Syria, and he started to work with Osama in Dora. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are the same thing,” he told me, “two faces of the same coin.”

Hussein was the fourth-ranking member of Osama’s unit, after Abu Yusef and Abu Salih. He took me with him as he drove through the area to inspect the twenty checkpoints their men were maintaining. We drove through the mostly deserted neighborhood, with its shattered homes. Most of the graffiti on the walls had been painted over, but some still said, “Long Live the Mujahideen.” On various corners two or three men stood or sat with their Kalashnikovs. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army destroyed a lot here,” Hussein said as we surveyed the devastation, but he added that “Al Qaeda destroyed the area, not the Mahdi Army.” We were stopped at the checkpoints, and though some of the men recognized Hussein, many cautiously gripped their weapons and questioned us. “We’re a patrol from the central headquarters,” Hussein told them. Some of the men were teenagers, others were in their fifties. One of them covered his face menacingly with a red checkered scarf. The local market, previously shut down, was partially reopened, and as ISV checkpoints were being established some of the Sunnis who had fled the area, though none of the Shiites or Christians, were returning. “Clean Shiites can come back,” Osama told me. While I was there a Sunni family from the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, arrived at the checkpoint. They hoped to stay in one of the homes in the area. The ISV men questioned them and demanded copies of the identity cards of all the people who would live in the house. “Anyone else I will arrest,” said Osama. A woman approached the gate to ask for information about men who had been arrested, but the guards could not help her.