Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Adil began a long lecture. “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” he said. “You’re an Iraqi citizen and you want to serve your country and repent. . . . How many checkpoints were bombed? How many of our men were martyred? We are the state, we put the law above all else regardless of sect. Why didn’t we go after your neighbors, why you?” Muhamad denied any wrongdoing. “I have four sources,” Adil said. “I know everything. I’ll advise you right, I have people I trust who told me about you and your brother. A source saw you with his eyes.” Adil showed him a picture of another man and asked who it was. Muhamad answered and told him that the man had been martyred. “Martyred?” shouted Adil. “He was a terrorist!” Adil showed him a picture of a one-eyed man. “He is my brother,” Muhamad answered. Adil listed people his brother had killed. Both brothers had volunteered for the Awakening. “The Awakening won’t help you,” he said. “I’ll get all of you. You’re a liar. Four sources swear against you.” Muhamad meekly protested. “Ask people,” he said. “I did ask,” said Adil. “I know you. I have a source who will talk for a whole hour about how you were injured in your leg. This is your last chance . . . you have until the morning.” He asked about Muhamad’s brother Salah, who they failed to find on their raid, and called Muhamad a liar when he said he had gone to work in construction up north.

Mustafa was brought out. He had long matted hair and wore matching jeans and a jacket. He stretched uncomfortably. “My hand,” he winced in pain. “My haaand,” Adil mocked him, and asked him about Salah. Mustafa said he worked in a bakery in the north. Adil believed he was in Baghdad. Mustafa was taken out, and Muhamad was brought back, his blindfold removed. “Good morning,” Adil said. “Do you know your religion? You guys are always talking about Islam.” He lectured about Islam and quoted Condoleezza Rice. “These guys are destroying Islam,” he told us, and looked back at the prisoner. “You say we are Iranian. We are Iraqis, we are building your country.” The brothers were accused of expelling Shiites and killing civilians. “No criminal will say, ‘I am a criminal,’” Adil said. “They all say, ‘I’m innocent.’” Adil’s source claimed that Mustafa was wounded while attacking an INP checkpoint.

The next day Sunni leaders from the area met with the American soldiers and claimed the brothers were innocent. Hamid, the Hadhir NAC boss, would not vouch for them, however. When the 2-2 SCR first arrived they had imposed discipline on the 172 INP Battalion, some of whom had gone on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians. “We arrested a whole checkpoint, nineteen guys, in the beginning, from the 172,” Captain Dehart told me, “so they don’t use checkpoints as staging points, so there will be no more shenanigans.” Still, some local Sunni leaders asked that the two brothers be transferred to American custody.

I met with Captain Adil several times in 2007 and 2008, and we became friends. Adil had been an army infantry officer before the American occupation. His father was a Shiite former Army officer and his mother was Sunni. Adil’s sister married a Sunni man and they fled to Syria, because she feared Shiite militias would kill him. Adil’s wife was Sunni. He had lived in the majority-Shiite and Mahdi Army-controlled eastern Baghdad district of Shaab, but he moved after the Mahdi Army threatened him for refusing to obtain weapons for them. He paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but was cheated and denied the job until a friend helped. “Before the war it was just one party,” he said. “Now we have one hundred thousand parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back to service. First they take money, then ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good. The army is not sectarian. I dream to get back to the army. In Saddam’s time nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite,” he said. He rejected the notion that most officers had been Sunni or that most of the Baath Party had been Sunni. “If someone tells you, ‘I was not in the Baath Party,’ he is a liar. All Iraqis were in the Baath.” The Americans made a mistake by dissolving the Iraqi army and security services, he said. In Dora the army had a good reputation, and there were many stories told about how soldiers helped people go to the hospital and get through roadblocks.

Typical of an officer who graduated from the military academy before the American occupation, Adil viewed the new sectarianism that dominated inter-Iraqi relations as anathema. The Iraqi army was the least sectarian force in Iraq, he said. In the Seidiya district it had battled the police, and at Dora’s Thirtieth Street checkpoint Iraqi soldiers came to blows with local INPs and IPs from the Balat station in Saha, Mahdi Army men who had gone through the Police Academy. Some of these Mahdi Army policemen were involved in the recent clashes with the Awakening men in the Kifaat area of Mahala 828. A U.S. Army intelligence officer told me that from a Sunni perspective, the Balat station was “problematic.” It was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Muhamad and Sergeant Ali Faqr. Muhamad had his hands tied; a Mahdi Army leader had entered his office and threatened him with a gun to his head. Muhamad asked the Americans to arrest Mahdi Army suspects for him.

Adil admitted that attacks against his people had gone down since the establishment of Awakening units. “The Awakening has the right to join the Iraqi Security Forces,” he said, “but they should be cleaned so we won’t have terrorists inside government. Just like we were cleaning the INPs, they are cleaning up the Awakening.” But he was also suspicious of the Awakening members. “Awakening in Dora is the same people who used to be attacking us, and now they taunt us, saying, ‘We used to attack you.’” He told me that Abu Salih was a former insurgent who had made IEDs. He suspected Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s rival, of working with Al Qaeda and helping the group to infiltrate the Awakening. I asked him about Osama’s men. “All these people before were shooting us,” he said. He admitted that INPs from the Sixth Brigade had shot at Sunnis in Dora, but not his INPs. He accused Hamid of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. “I have an order from the Ministry of Interior to arrest him,” he said.

The Americans were pressuring him to target the Mahdi Army as well as Al Qaeda. “It’s better if the Americans go after the Mahdi Army,” he said. “If we arrest them, then the chain of command will release them. The sectarian issue is powerful.” Adil did not trust his own men. “Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army,” he said, locking his door before we spoke. “Sadr and Badr officials controlled the leadership of the INPs, and the Iraqi police—all of them are Sadr.” Although the Interior Ministry’s leadership was dominated by the Badr militia, he said, the majority of its employees were still Sadr supporters. Adil’s best friend and lieutenant, Amar, was Sunni. “I was fighting to get him,” he told me, and was threatened as a result of their friendship. “An officer is a brother of an officer. I want to work with something not for Sunnis or Shiites, just for Iraq.”

Adil was repeatedly threatened by the Mahdi Army. He dismissed the freeze. “No one cares about Muqtada,” he said. “A week ago Mahdi Army guys threatened an INP checkpoint . . . and then sniped at the checkpoint, so the INPs arrested three of them.” The men worked for a Mahdi Army leader called Wujud, who lived in Sadr City. Wujud worked with another Mahdi Army leader called Amar al-Masihi, and together they fired mortars at Adil’s base after the arrests. In nearby Abu Dshir he warned that the Kadhimayn Mosque was an office for the Sadrists, and it ordered the people of Abu Dshir not to join the ISVs. The Americans wanted Adil to go after the Kadhimayn Mosque, but he could not do it.