Nir Rosen - Aftermath

One of the men prepared lunch for us: mushy cooked tomatoes; mushy fried potatoes; and kibbe, ground meat fried in dough. Osama called an American sergeant from a nearby base. “Your guys detained this guy,” he said. “He is seventy years old. What’s wrong with this guy, is he bad? Oh, he’s fifty? They told me he was very old. If you know for sure he is Al Qaeda, then fuck him.” Then he asked about a series of men who were detained and warned about an Iraqi who worked with the Americans. “He is a bad guy,” he said. “He threatens people.”

Osama received a phone call from representatives of the Awakening Council boss Ahmad Abu Risha in Ramadi, the brother of the slain Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, summoning him and his men to a meeting. He was very excited and hoped to discuss what would happen in six months, when the ISV program was scheduled to end. He wanted the Awakening groups and the ISVs to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, “because the Iraqi government doesn’t do shit.” If the U.S. Army left or once more took to remaining within their FOBs, he said, violence in the area would return.

Haji Hashim was the deputy head of the Rashid council who had collaborated with Crider. In 2003 Hashim and others volunteered to set up the local council. Before the war he had been in the Ministry of Education. “I spoke in mosques,” he said, “and said we have to work with the Americans. Dora became very bad in 2005. We were considered collaborators.” Al Qaeda came in, he said, and then it became dominated by locals and was joined by other resistance groups. “Then sectarianism started,” he said. “Al Qaeda killed Shiites, the Mahdi Army and Badr killed Sunnis and former officers. Things got worse after Samarra. Most police were supporters of the Mahdi Army, and Dora was a target for the Mahdi Army. In Shiite mosques they spoke out against Dora. Many Sunnis were killed in Abu Dshir.”

The people of Dora collected their government-provided propane tanks in Abu Dshir. In 2006 “Sunni agents from here went there to get them, and four were killed,” he told me. “After that nobody could get propane, so people had to use wood to cook. So American patrols went to collect the propane, and now it’s better, but there are still lingering fears about being attacked.” Hashim was shot in the head once when he left the house to collect his propane. The Americans took him to the hospital in the Green Zone, but he lost his vision in one eye.

“I have seen dogs eating dead bodies,” Hashim told me. “Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq killed any Shiite, any government employee, and Shiites killed any Sunni. The Iraqi National Police used to shoot randomly when they were attacked. The leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces was sectarian at the time. They made random arrests, would shoot randomly and kill innocent people. The Rafidein Brigade of the INPs made random arrests. They took sixty-eight people from shops, and after that we found their bodies in Abu Dshir. Police shot at electrical stations so people wouldn’t have power.”

One especially vindictive unit came through with PKCs (heavy-caliber machine guns) and shot up the area the day before they were replaced. “They had a strong hate,” Hashim explained. “Anybody who crossed the street was shot. Only cats crossed the street.” He attributed the improved security to the Americans. “One of the most important things they did was walling off the areas,” he said. “It’s true it bothered people, but it worked.” The Americans also helped release innocent Sunnis who had been arrested by the Rafidein Brigade.

A new commander took over the Rafidein Brigade and improved relations with the people, Hashim told me. But the commander was later replaced by another who “did bad things, made random arrests, he made problems instead of solving them.” This one was later punished and transferred to the traffic police. “Then the Wolf Brigade came in 2007,” said Hashim. “They arrested people in mosques right away, tortured people. Boys from the area fought the Wolf Brigade. I asked them why they were fighting. They said, ‘It’s better to die fighting than to end up arrested with holes drilled in our bodies.’”

ONE DAY I ACCOMPANIED men from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, a unit based in the nearby FOB Falcon, on a mission as they met up with Osama and his men as well as Hamid, or Abu Abdel Rahman, head of the Hadhir Neighborhood Advisory Council (NAC). Hamid had been in the Iraqi army for twenty-two years. Now he represented the six mahalas in his area. The Americans were establishing NACs and DACs (District Advisory Councils), institutions separate from the Iraqi government and funded by the U.S. military. Three Sunnis of the ten members in Hamid’s council had been assassinated. Five others had fled the area to avoid death. Hamid explained that because Sunnis had boycotted the elections for the provincial councils, Shiites dominated them and were trying to appoint Shiites to the local councils. The members of the Baghdad provincial council were mostly from Shiite neighborhoods such as Sadr City, Shaab, and Karada, he said. The NACs and DACs were an American attempt to compensate for the electoral disparities, though as with the Awakening and the ISVs, they were creating separate independent institutions that did not answer to the central Iraqi government. NACs and DACs were loosely tied, and though they were only meant to “advise” the Americans, the goal was to get them to “implement.” Hamid knew Osama and had helped him receive the ISV contract.

The Americans met up with Hamid, Osama, Abu Salih, Abu Yasser, and Abu Yusef at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint and walked down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by their Stryker armored vehicles. The Tawhid’s Sheikh Abu Muhammad wore a green dishdasha with a brown vest. An older, bearded man, he had thick glasses and wore a white cap, topped by a red scarf. Shawn Spainhour, a civil affairs officer with the unit, asked the sheikh what help he needed. The mosque’s generator had been shot up by armed Shiites, and the sheikh asked for three thousand dollars to fix it. Spainhour took notes. “I probably can do that,” he said. The sheikh also asked for a NAC to be set up in his area, “so it will see our problems.” Two bearded middle-aged men in sweaters walked up to the Americans in the mosque and gave them a tip on a Mahdi Army suspect. The soldiers quickly got back into the Strykers, as did Hamid, Osama, and his men, and the Stryker vehicles drove up to a street in Mahala 830, where they found a group of young men with electrical cables. Some of the men ran away when the Americans showed up. Those who stayed were forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wore flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit guarded them and took their pictures one by one. “Somebody move!” shouted one soldier. “I’m in the mood to hit somebody!” Another one pushed a prisoner against the wall. “You know Abu Ghraib?” he taunted him. Unlike in the nearby Shiite area of Abu Dshir, in majority-Sunni Mekanik it was standard practice to arrest all “military-age males” for “processing.”

As other elements of the American unit raided nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the unit came up to me, thinking I was the Americans’ translator, and explained that the men in the courtyard were Sunnis and that some belonged to the Awakening. Some of the men had been involved in tipping off the Americans to the Mahdi Army suspect down the block. I tried to tell the soldiers, but the electrical wires on the ground caused the Americans to think the men had been trying to lay an IED, so they blindfolded and handcuffed all eleven of them. “If an IED is on the ground, we arrest everybody in a hundred-meter radius,” I was told, though here it was only an electrical cable, and most likely the men had been trying to connect a house to a generator. In the house the two tipsters had identified, the soldiers found Mahdi Army “propaganda” and arrested several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or “Sabrin the Cruel,” an alleged Mahdi Army leader.