Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Then Frank spoke. “The coalition would like to welcome all the members of the free Jihad community,” he said. “The area of Jihad has been changed a lot. Violence has been reduced tremendously, and this reconciliation is proof.” He did not explain who the men were reconciling with. “With your release from detention we expect that you will become part of the reconciliation, and we look forward to working with you and the guarantor, the person behind you. All the citizens of Baghdad are watching Jihad now.” It was unlikely that any of them were, because the only Iraqi journalist present was a lone freelance cameraman. “Welcome back,” said Captain Ducote. “Jihad is not the same place that you left. You were released based on your ability to join the reconciliation process. I look forward to seeing you on the streets as we patrol.”

It was a reconciliation between the Americans and the Iraqis, not between Iraqis, just as the Awakening was a reconciliation between Sunnis and the Americans. By December, up to eighty thousand men were part of the ISV program in eight Iraqi governorates. Nearly all were Sunnis, though there were a few thousand Shiites as well, in separate units. The Awakening program peaked at about one hundred thousand men. Though it was meant to compensate for the sectarian imbalance resulting from Sunnis’ boycotting the security forces and being black listed by the Shiite government, the creation of new Sunni militias seemed to be promoting sectarianism and a fissiparous future. The drop in violence resulting from the decision of Sunni militias to cooperate with the Americans, the Mahdi Army’s decision to regroup, and the “surge” in American troops was meant to buy time for reconciliation between Iraq’s warring parties and bickering politicians, but there was no political progress. Apart from the security forces, the Iraqi government was nonexistent outside the Green Zone. The Americans were the government. Walls created small fortress neighborhoods in Baghdad, preventing militias from fighting one another directly. Shiite militias battled one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Everybody waited for the civil war between Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen to start in the north. Sunnis and even some Shiites had quit the government, which couldn’t pass laws or provide services anyway. The prime minister’s office circumvented Parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that Parliament opposed.

Iraq was still under a foreign occupation. American soldiers were not mere policemen walking their beats on patrol, helping old women cross the street and working on reconstruction and beautification projects.

A foreign military occupation is a systematic imposition of violence and terror on an entire people. When I visited Iraq during the peak of the surge, at least twenty-four thousand Iraqis languished in American prisons. At least nine hundred of them were juveniles. Some were forced to go through a brainwashing program called the “House of Wisdom,” in which American officers arrogantly arranged for prisoners to be lectured about Islam—as if a poor understanding of Islam, not the occupation itself, was the cause of the violence. The Americans were supposed to hand over prisoners to Iraq’s authorities, since it was officially a sovereign country, but international human rights officials were loath to make this recommendation because conditions in Iraqi prisons were at least as bad as they were under Saddam. One American officer told me that six years was a life sentence in an Iraqi prison, because that was your estimated life span there. In the women’s prison in Kadhimiya female prisoners were routinely raped.

Conditions in Iraqi prisons worsened during the surge because the Iraqi system could not cope with the massive influx. Prisoners arrested by the Americans during the surge were supposed to be handed over to the Iraqis. They often were not, but those were the lucky ones. Even in American detention, Iraqis did not know why they were being held, and they were not visited by defense lawyers. The Americans could hold Iraqis indefinitely, so they didn’t even have to be tried by Iraqi courts. A fraction were tried in courts where Americans also testified. But observers were yet to see an Iraqi trial where they were convinced the accused was guilty and there was valid evidence that was properly examined, and no coerced confessions. Lawyers did not see their clients before trials, and there were no witnesses. Iraqi judges were prepared to convict on very little evidence. If Iraqi courts found prisoners innocent, the Americans sometimes continued to hold them anyway after their acquittal. There were five hundred of these “on hold” cases when I visited in early 2008. Often the Americans still arrested all men of military age when looking for suspects.

As politics and power became more and more local in Iraq, the Iraqi state itself seemed as though it were an American protectorate. As long as the new militias and security forces in Iraq fought Al Qaeda, they had the backing of the United States, much as dictatorships during the cold war enjoyed U.S. support as long as they fought communism, regardless of human rights abuses they might commit. The same logic applied to dictatorships in the Muslim world that collaborated in the war on terror. For sure, violence in Iraq was down, but there were still at least six hundred recorded attacks by resistance groups every month and about six hundred Iraqi civilians being killed in violence related to the civil war and occupation as well as more Iraqi soldiers and police. Since the surge began, nearly a million Iraqis had fled their homes, mostly from Baghdad, which had become a Shiite city. One reason fewer people were being killed was because there were fewer people to kill, fewer targets for the militias (which was why they turned on their own populations). The violence was not senseless; it was meant to displace the enemy’s population. And if war is politics by other means, then the Shiites won. Opinion polls showed that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis blamed the Americans for their problems and wanted them to leave. American officials tried to put a positive spin on this, explaining that at least it united Iraqis, but Iraqis had opposed the American occupation from the day it began.

In early 2008 I met Captain Adil again. The Americans were threatening him, saying he would lose his value to them if he didn’t pursue the Mahdi Army more actively. His chain of command wanted to fire him for the feeble attempts he had made to target the Mahdi Army. He picked me up in his van, and for lack of anywhere safe and private we sat and talked as he nervously scanned every man who walked by. He complained that the Americans called every Shiite suspect Mahdi Army and every Sunni suspect Al Qaeda, and that the Awakening was raiding houses without the permission of the Americans or Iraqi Security Forces. Now the Mahdi Army worried that the ISVs and Awakening were a new force meant to target them, he said, and that they would replace Al Qaeda. He worried that the Mahdi Army could start fighting again out of fear of the Awakening. “No one can control these guys. Abu Jaafar, the ISVs—the coalition must be tough with them. The situation won’t get better. If someone kills your brother, can you forget his killer? You work hard to build a house and somebody blows up your house. Will they accept Sunnis back to Shiite areas and Shiites back to Sunni areas?”

Early in the morning on February 2, 2008, I joined Osama’s comrades Abu Salih, Abu Yusef, and other ISV leaders from their area as they gathered to depart for Ramadi, the national seat of the Awakening Council, the political movement led by Abu Risha. They hoped to translate their military success into political power, but rivals from Dora had pre-empted them and appealed to Abu Risha to grant them recognition. We left in a three-car convoy. Abu Salih drove the car I was in. He explained that he named his son after his uncle Salih, who was killed by the Mahdi Army. Close to the Hero House we were stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier ordered Abu Salih to open the trunk. “I’m Abu Salih,” he said. “Open the trunk,” said the soldier. “Dog, son of a dog,” Abu Salih muttered. “They have shitty manners.” We passed by workers putting up new concrete walls. “They closed off Baghdad, but they didn’t close the Iranian border,” he complained.