Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Though Jadri was a friend and confidante of Maliki, everybody else around her hated her. “Bassima had issues being a woman in a man’s world,” Dermer told me. “Iraqi generals kissed her ass.” Jadri and Adnan wanted to meet the Awakening men, so the Americans brokered it. “Sunnis wouldn’t engage with the Iraqi government without American interlocution,” Dermer said. “The Shiites wanted us out of the way. We brought in Raad from Ghazaliya, Abul Abed from Amriya, and Abu Azzam al-Tamimi from Abu Ghraib.” These were important Awakening leaders in Baghdad. “We brought them into the palace to meet Bassima and Adnan,” he said. “It took a lot of work.”

Dermer mocked the notion of “key leader engagement,” which in practice meant trying to have as many meetings as possible and using that as a measure of progress. FSEC was originally led by Graeme Lamb, a British general who was Petraeus’s deputy and who had experience establishing a dialogue with armed groups in Northern Ireland. “Lamb was replaced by an idiot British general and an idiot State Department guy,” Dermer complained bitterly. “The guys in charge of FSEC didn’t get it. It takes very unique people for this office. These fuckers are killers. You can’t be a starry-eyed thirty-year-old or Harvard grad, but it was a lot of PowerPoint briefings, six-month rotations—it was bureaucratic. People hated success, like getting high in the insurgency. The agency [CIA] fought us, State [Department] hated us. Once you put it in a bureaucracy, it won’t work. It was a brilliant idea, but we didn’t know what we were doing.”

FSEC also saw the prison population as a group with potential to be “reconciled,” and also as a possible source of intelligence on the resistance. Some prisoners were resistance leaders and could actually encourage their supporters outside to reach an accommodation with the Americans or the Iraqi government. In American prisons Dermer and his colleagues met with leaders of the Mahdi Army and special groups.

Throughout the American occupation the majority of Iraqis seized and imprisoned by the Americans were innocent, even innocent of conducting attacks against the Americans. Few of the tens of thousands of Iraqis detained in the American-run gulags were ever even charged with anything. Few Americans question whether they had a right to invade a foreign country and arrest scores of its men every day on scant evidence. When the men were eventually released, the Americans staged shows of fanfare and magnanimity.

In December 2007 the 1-28 Infantry Division, which controlled the Jihad district, staged one of these slightly absurd “reconciliation” ceremonies when it released fifteen Shiite men. Col. Pat Frank of the 1-28, who supervised the ceremony, explained to me that Jihad was part of what the Americans had named Northwest Rashid, and was about 42 percent Shiite and 58 percent Sunni. There were a little over 1,800 ISVs in Northwest Rashid. There were also 985 Shiite police recruits and 834 Sunni police recruits; 850 of them came out of the ISVs. “Moderates have gained the momentum in the area and overtaken extremists,” Frank said.

Frank’s men staged a reconciliation accord between Sunnis and Shiites as a gesture and requested a list of local men they had imprisoned that the district’s leaders wanted to be released. “They were suspected of Shiite militant activity,” Frank said, but were screened by the Americans and Iraqi government before their release. “Some people on the list were rejected at senior levels” by the Americans, he told me. Only fifteen men had been approved. The Americans built a “reconciliation hall” for the “Reconciliation Committee.” Frank showed neighborhood leaders charts in which he gave them red stars or green stars depending on whether violence had gone down in their area. He gave a metal emblem of the black lion, which symbolized his unit, to a female American correspondent in case she ever had problems. “The Iraqis know us and love us,” he said. “Just show it to them and you’ll be fine.”

The fifteen prisoners were brought in to the building in handcuffs. The few journalists present were ordered not to take pictures until the cuffs were removed. The event was clumsily choreographed. Journalists, council members, and local dignitaries were herded into a separate room and guarded by soldiers. Tahsin Ali Samarai, of the Reconciliation Council’s security committee complained that they had given the Americans a list of 562 prisoners from their area that they wanted released. The Iraqi army colonel in charge of the area told me that all the men were innocent. Another tribal sheikh agreed. “The Americans arrest people randomly,” he said, adding that some of the men had been imprisoned for nearly two years. Sheikh Awad Abdul Wahel, also known as Abu Muhammad, was president of the tribal sheikh council, which had submitted seven hundred names of prisoners from the Jihad district alone. “I serve my people, not the Americans,” he said. “They were never accused or found guilty,” Sheikh Hussein Karim al-Kinani said. “American accusations and arrests are random.”

Outside one angry young woman called Leila waited with her two children. Her husband, Muhammad, was arrested sixteen months earlier while sleeping on his roof to avoid the summer heat. A neighbor was shot and Muhammad was rounded up with all the other men of military age in the area. Their son was born while he was in prison. Leila blamed the Americans for the civil war and did not want to talk about reconciliation. One woman in an abaya came because she heard men were going to be released. Her son was captured by Abul Abed, the notorious Awakening leader in the Sunni district of Amriya.

Inside the prisoners were boisterous. They were seated in alphabetical order, and behind them sat “guarantors” for a “bond” they would have to sign. “It’s not an oath on the Koran,” Frank explained. “It’s on their honor. A guarantor is a mentor, just like in the U.S., when an individual runs in trouble with law and somebody steps up to mentor them. The reconciliation committee wants to see these fifteen men do well.” The Iraqis seemed uninterested and amused by the American show. They endured speeches given by Frank and Captain Ducote. “We want to make this a special event,” Frank said, and asked the men to quiet down. “Thank you for being patient, but this is for you.” Prisoners and guarantors got up pair by pair to each sign their “bond.” The Iraqi colonel played his part. “The government is in control now,” he said, “not like before. There is a state and there is law.” He told them to join the police or the army. Frank was uncertain how to describe the prisoners. He could no longer call them detainees. “We will now ask each individual to stand,” he said. “Guarantors stand too. You raise your right hand. Guarantors put your left hand on the shoulder of the individual.”

“I acknowledge that recent signings of the Reconciliation Agreement have ushered in an era of peace and partnership between Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish, Christian, the Mahdi Army, Iraqi Security Forces, and American Forces,” the oath said somewhat optimistically. Interestingly, the only militia that was mentioned was the Mahdi Army, though the Americans were granting it a role as a legitimate actor. “Based on my arrest record, Iraqi Government and Coalition Force leaders have agreed that my immediate release would be beneficial to the Reconciliation process. I pledge to not commit any violations of the Reconciliation Agreement’s 12 points, violate Iraqi Law, or attack Coalition Forces.” The men were not told what those twelve points were. “As a proud Iraqi citizen living in Northwest Rashid, I will become a contributing member of the community in the historic effort to rebuild this proud nation.” The Iraqis might have wondered where Northwest Rashid was, since they never used this designation. They might also have considered that they were rebuilding a proud nation the Americans had helped destroy. The guarantors took a similar oath stating that they were “bound by honor” to notify American or Iraqi authorities if the “individual” violated the oath. “As an Iraqi living in Northwest Rashid, I am proud to guarantee the mature and peaceful future actions of this citizen,” they said.