Nir Rosen - Aftermath

The Strykers took the prisoners to the nearby COP Blackfoot. Inside, Hamid and the Sahwa men drank sodas and ate muffins. Osama and Abu Salih shook hands with the Americans and thanked them for arresting Sabrin, who they said had a lot of blood on his hands. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided were released, three of them being taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructed them to list who did what, what they did, where, when, and how. Abu Salih walked by and quickly told the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in some attack. None of the Americans noticed this coaching. Osama met with a sergeant from the unit and asked him if he could put a PKC on top of his pickup truck. “No,” the sergeant said. “But we can hide it,” Osama pleaded. Sabrin was soon moved to a “detainee holding facility” at FOB Prosperity. “We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad Mahdi Army guy,” said an American Army intelligence officer. “He was involved in EJKs,” or extra-judicial killings, a euphemism for murders.

Osama’s main competition for contracts with the Americans was another local Sunni power broker called Muhammad Kashkul, or Abu Tariq. A former bodyguard for Saddam, he was now a contractor too. “He knows that when security is stabilized contracts will come in,” Captain Cox said, explaining Kashkul’s motivation for collaborating with the Americans. In one meeting with the Americans, Kashkul bragged that while working as a bodyguard for Saddam he had slept with 472 women. “Is that a lot in America?” he asked. Kashkul and Osama tried to play different American units against one another, but Cox helped arrange a meeting where the two were forced to work out what he described as “their turf war.” Osama was not convinced. “Coalition forces like Kashkul, so I have to be his friend,” he said. “They told me I have no choice. I have to be his friend. For two years they were looking for him. Showing his picture. Then they arrested him, took him to Blackfoot, and released him after two hours and said, ‘He is working with us.’”

The Americans were obsessed with the concept of “reconciliation,” which Cox defined as “Agree to quit fighting and talk about problems and get U.S. contracts.”

“Osama hates reconciliation,” Sperry told me. “He doesn’t feel that he has anything to reconcile. He hates that these other guys get contracts.” Osama had recently lost face when he accidentally discharged his Glock pistol and nearly hit an American soldier while in a meeting. Some of his men were proving unruly as well. “A couple of Osama’s guys were caught outside their sector,” the officer told me, “so we detained them and brought in the leaders. Abu Salih was really pissed.” When I was visiting Falcon FOB to discuss the ISVs, a major stuck his head through the door. “Are you tracking that the Heroes beat some guy up?” he asked Captain Dehart. “The Heroes’ usefulness is almost over,” Captain Dehart grumbled. He defended the reconciliation process. “It’s an overt process,” he said. “You can’t be in the shadows. We take mahalas , the Critical Infrastructure Security guards, the local leadership, provide us names.” As a result, he said, the men with real power in the area emerged from the shadows. “I’ve heard them tell me, ‘I will give you a hundred men, you give them weapons, and you will have no problems.’” But the process they called reconciliation required some community vetting in theory. It seemed that the Americans were turning themselves into a commodity sought after by Iraq’s warring factions. The Americans were a way to obtain contracts, influence, weapon licenses, identity cards. “They love ID cards,” joked one Army intelligence officer.

When Osama drove me home from Dora we stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint near Qadisiya. He noticed a familiar Audi parked on the street and then saw a man he knew as Naseem walking past the soldiers. Naseem was Al Qaeda, he said, and was responsible for many attacks against civilians and the Americans. Osama put his cap on and called a soldier over. The soldier had a green bandanna masking all but his eyes as though he were a bank robber. “That guy is called Naseem, he is with Al Qaeda,” Osama said. The soldier seemed annoyed and I was worried that he would arrest us instead. “I’m with the Awakening,” Osama said, he showed several badges he had been given by the Americans. The soldier told him to keep going but Osama insisted. “What do you want me to do?” the soldier asked. Osama tried to convince them, but the soldiers were indifferent. Frustrated, he drove away.

Osama’s part of Dora, which included Mahalas 830, 832, 834, and 836, was called Hadhir. Though each mahala had its own ISV unit, Osama hoped that eventually all of the Sunni Awakening militias would be united under one leader so that they could attain political power too. We were in Mahala 830. The Mahdi Army used to attack from Mahala 832. Iraqi National Police, who cooperated with the Mahdi Army, would drive up to Sixtieth Street and spray houses with gunfire, Osama told me as we walked by a solitary INP checkpoint. “I want to kill them,” he said, “really, but the Americans make us work together.” Since his men had been granted legitimacy by the Americans they were taunting the national police, telling them that just days before they were shooting at them.

“There was definitely a link” between the INPs and sectarian forces, Nick Cook told me. “I am not sure how deep it went, but you could tell the INP definitely treated the Sunni neighborhoods with a lot of indifference and disdain. Many times I heard the national police refer to the neighborhood as lived in by dogs or criminals, referring to the residents. To the national police every person was a suspect. I never did see outright prejudice, but when you moved from Mekanik, a Sunni area, to Abu Dshir, a Shiite area, you definitely saw a change in personality with the national police.” Captain T recalled, “I remember several instances of units in predominantly Shiite areas actually catching [INPs] in the act of planting IEDs.”

Lieutenant Colonel Miska was based in Kadhimiya’s Forward Operating Base Justice. It had three detention centers in it: the Kadhimiya prison; the Ministry of Justice prison, where the government executed condemned people; and an Iraqi army detention center. Miska worked closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, and at one point he had six brigades’ worth of Iraqi National Police or army men working with him. I asked him about the abuses he saw. “The Kadhimiya prison run by the national police was the most notorious,” he said. “This was Saddam’s former military intelligence facility. Senior members of the national police reportedly tortured, extorted, and killed prisoners, mainly Sunnis. The prison was made to hold about 350 prisoners. They had about 900 there when we first began putting pressure on the NP. At first we would conduct inspections and bring in teams that would write reports. The NP would complain that all the Americans talked about was human rights. They would also do a good job of stonewalling the investigators and making it difficult to gain entrance. We eventually started cycling reporters into the facility and getting front-page stories to embarrass the NP. The prisoner population quickly dwindled as a result.”

One of Miska’s closest colleagues was an Iraqi army brigade commander who was going after both the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda. As a result, he was put under intense political pressure. Miska accompanied him to numerous meetings with senior Sadrists and other politicians who were trying to get him to back down. But every time he would keep the heat on. The Iraqi commander eventually left Iraq after four attempts on his life, and Mahdi Army hit squads were hunting for his family. “It took me eight months to finally get through the bureaucracy of immigration, UNHCR, and other agencies to help him relocate to the U.S.,” Miska said. “Today his family is safe and living much more comfortably than they did in Iraq.”