Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 11

CHAPTER EIGHT.

The Battle Over Amriya.

Part 1.

Amriya, in western Baghdad's Ras.h.i.+d district, was one of the first neighborhoods to feel the full blast of civil war and ma.s.s population displacement. Long a resistance stronghold, it soon became as fearsome as Dora. The Samarra bombings of February 2006 accelerated this, as s.h.i.+tes in Baghdad, particularly those in the Iraqi Security Forces who were linked to the s.h.i.+te militias, saw Amriya-with its large Sunni population, former links to the Baath Party, and current links to Al Qaeda along with Sunnis from Anbar-as a prime target for attack. The Sunnis, in turn, fought back ferociously. As it turned out, Amriya was the first place in Baghdad where the Awakening phenomenon of the Anbar was replicated. American collaboration with Sunni militiamen-many of whom were former resistance fighters-succeeded in radically changing the neighborhood.

Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile's squadron had been based in the west of Ras.h.i.+d district since January 2006. He and his men were among the first squadrons to go through the newly created COIN Academy in Camp Taji, just north of Baghdad. "The week course was essentially a course in Galula 101," he told me, in reference to the French theorist of counterinsurgency. "We used what we learned at Taji often in the months ahead. I never thought that more troops were needed, since I concluded early on that there were limits to what American combat power could accomplish and at some point Iraqis had to take over for the destiny of the country."

Gentile had been leading counterinsurgency operations with a primary focus on transitioning security responsibilities to the Iraqi Security Forces. However, after the Samarra bombings, it became clear to him that their primary purpose was to try to arrest the violence and protect the local population.

Gentile began to grasp after the Samarra bombings that the orgy of violence unleashed by it was actually a civil war. "The Sunnis regarded the government as their mortal enemy," he said, "and in many respects, they were correct. For the first half of 2006, when we were in West Ras.h.i.+d, we worked only with national police and the local police. After Samarra, within days, their links to s.h.i.+te militias and sectarian killings became clear. We did our best to curb this, but it was very difficult to do so."

In June 2006 he moved up to northwestern Baghdad-princ.i.p.ally Amriya, Ghazaliya, Shula, Mansour, Kadhimiyah, Khadra, FOB Justice-and took over from an infantry battalion from Tenth Mountain Division. "It was an exceptionally large area," he said, "but I focused on Ghazaliya, Khadra, and Amriya, with the latter being the primary focus. This move was part of the Casey drawdown plan [General Casey's plan to transition power to Iraqi Security Forces], which was in full swing until things fell apart in Baghdad in July 2006."

The expanding sectarian warfare was made evident with the daily dumping of dead bodies on the streets of the district. The Iraqi army battalion commander who served with Gentile speculated that the bodies were Sunnis, killed elsewhere in Baghdad and then dumped on the streets of Amriya to intimidate the Sunnis there. "I saw it differently," Gentile said. "They were mostly s.h.i.+tes who were still living in or coming into Amriya, and the Sunnis killed them as a way of 'cleansing' their district. Any semblance of trust had broken down completely between s.h.i.+te and Sunni, and the Sunnis in Amriya, I believed, saw any remaining s.h.i.+te in the district as a threat and link to marauding s.h.i.+te militia that could still enter the district and kill, since they were aligned with Iraqi Security Forces.

"The Iraqi army battalion in Amriya had turned Route Cedar, the main market street, into a kinetic civil-war attack zone," Gentile said. The Iraqi soldiers had two checkpoints on either end of the street and fighting outposts on roofs and inside buildings on nearly every block. The constant fighting, IEDs, suicide bombs, and car bombs had shut down all the businesses. Gentile thought that he could win "local hearts and minds" if he improved conditions on the road. He was authorized to remove the two checkpoints and the other outposts. He stationed one of his cavalry troops on the street and focused on reopening businesses. In mid-August 2006 he started building short concrete barriers-Jersey barriers, in American military parlance-around the entire district, with a single entry point run by the Iraqi army. "I initially started to build it in order to try and prevent Sunni insurgent infiltration into the district bringing in IED, car bomb materials, etc., from Ghazaliya to the north and Abu Ghraib to the west. But after it went up-especially the southern wall, which isolated Amriya from the s.h.i.+te-dominated West Ras.h.i.+d to the south of it-I found that the locals actually liked it because it prevented marauding s.h.i.+te militias from entering into it." All of this led to a much-improved state of security for the local Sunnis, Gentile said, but the increased security for Sunnis made the area more lethal for the remaining s.h.i.+tes because it gave the Sunni militias greater freedom of movement. They no longer had to fear s.h.i.+te militias.

This was the beginning of the ma.s.sive population transfer: Sunnis from areas of Baghdad being taken over by s.h.i.+tes were moving to Amriya. Any family moving out from Amriya was s.h.i.+te. "I knew it was going on, but there was no way to stop it," Gentile said. "We tried through moral suasion, but the locals and their leaders denied to us that it was happening. We tried driving bans, but that became impractical. How does one stop a civil war at the barrel of a gun with only a seven-hundred-man cavalry squadron in a district of close to a hundred thousand people?"

I spoke to Gentile some time after his tour in Amriya. I was curious to know what difference the new counterinsurgency doctrine made. "People like Tom Ricks will tell you that during the surge, units operated differently and adopted new COIN tactics. That just did not happen. What was decisive and made the fundamental difference in Amriya was the co-opting of our former enemies-the non-Al Qaeda Sunni insurgents who became known as the SOI, the Sons of Iraq."

Amriya came to be seen as a critical piece of terrain because it physically linked the western parts of Baghdad with eastern Anbar. It was also important because it was so close to the Baghdad International Airport and a relatively easy and safe trip for Sunni leaders coming back to Baghdad from the west. "But for the Sunnis in the area, after I built the wall around the place, and after we got the main market street back up and running, and after I established close operations with the Iraqi army battalion, it did actually get better," Gentile says.

Gentile says he had enough troops to "secure Amriya" but that he was challenged by an enemy that was a mix of Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups. But since he did not have the Sons of Iraq on his watch-they would emerge later, after Gentile left Baghdad-he never had the local intelligence to discover who set off an IED or fired a sniper round. His efforts were also complicated by the fact that Sunnis were using their increased security to attack the remaining s.h.i.+tes in the district. The Sunnis also saw the Iraqi army battalion that Gentile was partnered with as an enemy.

Although Gentile was in Baghdad before the surge, he insists he was using the COIN principle already and that every time he was visited by Admiral Giambastiani and Generals Abizaid, Casey, and Chiarelli, he briefed them on how he was using "clear, hold, and build." "The notion that method started with the surge of troops in Baghdad is hok.u.m," he says.

The Iraq army battalion Gentile's squadron partnered with in Amriya was "an exceptionally strong outfit," he said. "The battalion commander, a Sunni and a professional army officer who served in Saddam Hussein's army for twenty years prior, was highly competent, professional, and principled. Tactically the battalion was effective too: it could move, shoot, and communicate, and had competent leaders. Yet the problem with it was that aside from its battalion commander and a handful of soldiers, it was almost completely s.h.i.+te." Gentile never believed that there were active links between this battalion and s.h.i.+te militias, unlike the police units he had worked with in West Ras.h.i.+d, where the links were clear. "But one could not get away from the fact that they were s.h.i.+te and when you boiled it all down with them, especially at times when they were angry over a killing or attack, they saw every Sunni resident in Amriya as their mortal enemy. How would a more robust MITT [military transition] team, more combined patrols with me, more parts for their Humvees, change that basic condition?"

Though Gentile was skeptical that COIN was a cure-all, he knew that he could not kill his way out of the problems he was facing in the district either, so he started fraternizing with local religious leaders, even those with strong links to insurgent groups. He met regularly with Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque, Sheikh Khalid of the Abbas Mosque, and the imam of the Ha.s.sanein Mosque. "I spent a lot of personal time with them, and I think it made a difference in terms of how we were perceived in the area," he says. "I actually became close to them and considered them my friends." He even visited two mosques-close to where his battalion was often pounded by IED strikes-that were considered to be strongly influenced by Al Qaeda and befriended Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque.

"Sheikh Walid and Sheikh Khalid both were extremely important to me and my squadron. I did not consider them anti-American at all. Both of them became key conduits for me for information in the area and in resolving problems." Khalid's influence and importance in the area became clear to Gentile. He spent many hours in discussion with Khalid, to the extent that Khalid began to start hinting to him that things were slowly changing. "It was becoming clear to the Sunnis in Baghdad that the Americans were finally starting to understand their position. He and Walid and I had agreed on the opening of an Amriya police station that would be manned by local Sunnis from Amriya," Gentile said. The problem was getting this approved by the s.h.i.+te government. This plan was clearly a forerunner of what would become the Awakening.

In October 2006 Sheikh Khalid said something to Gentile that caught his attention at the time and that he has never forgotten. "For some reason I asked him about insurgent attacks in the area and about Al Qaeda," Gentile said. "He then pulled me off to the side a bit, out of earshot range of his mosque guards, and my troops knew what to do by placing themselves between me and the imam and his guards. He then very breezily dismissed Al Qaeda as an important factor in the future of the area and the country. I thought that odd at the time, since AQI seemed to be behind so much of the violence. But it later occurred to me that what he was essentially saying and reflecting were the early and fundamental changes that were occurring in Anbar with the Awakening and his sense that it would very possibly be soon spreading to Baghdad."

As it turned out, Sheikh Khalid was a key player in the eventual link of U.S. forces in Amriya with the Sons of Iraq. Gentile's successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, commanded the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, in Amriya from November 2006 until January 2008. "Amriya was pretty violent when we got there, as was Khadra just to the north," he told me. "Soon after we took over the entire Mansour Security District, which includes all of Mansour area except Ghazaliya, which 2-12 Cav was responsible for. Most of the violence seemed to be directed at the Iraqi Security Forces, especially the Iraqi police. They could not come into Amriya without getting attacked. A lot of violence was also directed at the populace, especially against the s.h.i.+tes. Kidnapping was also common. The going rate for ransom was between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand dollars. Civil society had completely broken down. I think many people responded with random and vengeful violence. However, I also believe that JAM special groups working with elements within the Iraqi government were trying to push the Sunnis out of Baghdad. I also think that AQI and other extremist groups were trying to establish a Sunni enclave to stop the JAM encroachment."

It was Kuehl's first deployment in Iraq, but he was well schooled in counterinsurgency. He had written his master's thesis on civilians on the battlefield in the Korean War and had studied Mao Zedong's theories on guerrilla warfare. Just before taking command of the 1-5 Cav, he read Learning to Eat Soup With a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons From Malaya and Vietnam by Lieut. Col. John Nagl. Nagl had been his roommate at West Point and would go on to play a crucial role in writing the U.S. Army's new manual on counterinsurgency. Nagl's book emphasized the importance of the military becoming a learning organization, adapting to the needs of a different type of war. "Of course, prior to deployment we had a number of leader teaches and seminars to discuss the fight we were going into," Kuehl said. "This study culminated with the COIN Academy in Taji, which I thought was an excellent course."

The first large IED to hit one of Kuehl's patrols occurred one February morning in Khadra. The IED was planted at an intersection and tore off the driver's door. The driver lost both legs. After securing the site Kuehl took his patrol to a nearby street and started questioning locals. He talked to one man who asked him if the patrol was a combined one with the Iraqi National Police. "I told him it was not, it was a U.S.-only patrol. His response was a bit startling. He said, 'That is not supposed to happen.' I pressed him to explain. He just repeated that our patrols were not supposed to get attacked. He also asked why the INP observation post on a nearby bridge did not see the IED go in. It should have been able to. He was a bit upset himself, showing a piece of shrapnel that landed in his yard where his daughter was playing."

Kuehl left him to see for himself, pa.s.sing through the same intersection that had just been bombed. Just as he was looking up to see the window from the observation post that overlooked the intersection, his vehicle was. .h.i.t by another IED. "It flattened a couple tires and took some chunks out of our windows, but everyone was okay. From this incident I realized that there were definitely different insurgent groups working in the area. The locals knew what was going on with at least one of these groups, and it sounded like they were not targeting U.S. troops. But this other group definitely was." He did not know it then, but this was the start of Al Qaeda flexing its muscles in the area. They had been pushed out of other areas, like Haifa Street and Anbar, and were trying to take over Mansour. Compounding this was the influx of displaced people from Hurriya to the north and Amil and Jihad from the south. "Locals kept complaining that the violence was coming from people outside the area. We kept dismissing this, but to a large extent I think they were correct," Kuehl said.

At the COIN Academy in October 2006, General Casey informed Kuehl and his team that the goal was to hand security in Baghdad over to the ISF by the summer of 2007 so that the Americans could depart as soon as possible. This was based on the not-unreasonable notion, advocated even by Centcom commander General Abizaid, that the American presence in Iraq was the cause of most of the violence in Iraq. But once in Baghdad, Kuehl was convinced that Casey's goal was unrealistic because of the sectarian violence and the sectarian nature of the government and ISF. He began to focus on protecting the population, even before General Petraeus arrived and formalized the new approach.

Previous attempts had been made to rid Amriya of Al Qaeda, such as Operation Together Forward in August 2006 and Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 in April 2007. Yet in May 2007 Amriya was even more violent. According to Kuehl, previous operations had failed because of poor intelligence, which led to imprecise targeting. Once an area was cleared of Al Qaeda there were not enough troops to hold it, and Sunnis did not trust the ISF. During Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 Al Qaeda men fled or blended into the population, avoiding the operations. As a result of the Americans' inability to provide security, they could not move on to rebuild the area. When Kuehl and his men changed their focus from handing over authority to the ISF and instead tried to protect the population, he said they began to see gains in security.

In January 2007 the Mahdi Army seized the Hurriya neighborhood and moved on to the Amil and Jihad districts. "We couldn't do anything and the Iraqi Army chose not to do anything," Kuehl later wrote. "Instead, we watched helplessly as thousands of Sunnis were forced out of their homes getting pushed into Mansour." Sunni militias were forced to collaborate with Al Qaeda to protect their areas from the Mahdi army, but the Americans offered an alternative that, in the short term at least, proved more tempting. Kuehl hypothesized that Al Qaeda controlled Amriya but only as an active minority that intimidated the neutral majority. In February 2007 he began to have clandestine meetings with clerics in Amriya late at night. Sheikh Walid was already organizing against Al Qaeda, but he was not ready to act. That month Kuehl also met with community leaders and a.s.sured them of his commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and protecting Amriya from s.h.i.+te militias.

Kuehl inherited Gentile's wall around Amriya, but it was too short and had a lot of holes in it. "We fought to keep it closed, and AQI fought to keep it open," he said. "Our first casualty was a sergeant killed while trying to put one of these barriers back in place." Kuehl spent a couple of days in personal reconnaissance figuring out how to get from Abu Ghraib to central Baghdad without running into a checkpoint. It was all too easy, he found. One evening he traced out this route to his boss, Colonel Burton. From there the brigade developed a plan to wall off a good portion of northwest Baghdad, starting with Route Sword, south of Ghazaliya. Then they built blast walls along the airport road. By June Amriya was closed up. "The final point was establis.h.i.+ng the entry control points into Amriya," he said. "I knew they would be targets, so I wanted to make it look formidable, like the Green Zone."

A similar approach had proved useful in the rural Anbar province, which had been dominated by Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. American Special Forces reintroduced a tough police chief whose tribe was disliked and feared, and they built a vast earthen berm around the city, restricting all vehicles.

At first the locals of Amriya did not like it, "but they grew to appreciate the security that it helped to bring," Kuehl said of the walls he built. "I especially had trouble with the shop owners at the entrance to Amriya. We were able to accommodate some of their concerns, but I left them up. I did want to open up Amriya to more vehicle traffic through the checkpoint, but I met resistance from many of the locals. This was not completely resolved before we left."

The local police were also a hindrance to Kuehl's ambitions to improve the security environment: they were, he said, "incompetent, poorly led, poorly trained, poorly equipped." Stationed in Khadra, its leaders.h.i.+p was Sunni and, to make things even more difficult, may have had Al Qaeda links. The lower ranks were filled by s.h.i.+tes, generally from outside Baghdad. "No one was local, which was one of the biggest drawbacks to the police," Kuehl said. "They pretty much spent most of their time in the station and collected reports and statements from people who came in. We would take them with us in patrols in Khadra, but they could not come into Amriya without getting shot at."

The Iraqi National Police were another problem, Kuehl said, lacking strong leaders.h.i.+p skills. "It was like having three hundred privates, no sergeants, and only a dozen officers. They were not equipped as well as the Iraqi Army, which was a challenge given the lethality of the environment. We conducted joint patrols with them, but their primary focus was on conducting checkpoints, which was a sore point with the locals." The INPs were also known to do the sectarian bidding of their political superiors. Kuehl recalled being approached by a group of imams because ten Sunnis were suddenly detained after someone from the s.h.i.+te-dominated Interior Ministry turned up at a couple of checkpoints with a list of people to detain. When Kuehl went to the local police headquarters to find out what was going on, no one could produce the list. Eventually Kuehl managed to get a copy of the names of all the men detained. He went to the holding cell and talked to each one. "A couple months after their arrest I inquired on their status," Kuehl said. "It took over a week for someone to figure out that they were still being held. I finally was able to get their families to be able to see them. I suspect this was all sectarian-driven. They were then pushed up to the jail at FOB Justice, an ironic name, and were still being held when we left over six months later."

The Iraqi army, Kuehl said, was the most competent of the security forces they worked with. Of the army battalions he worked with, Second Battalion, First Brigade, Sixth Division, was the most competent. But, he added, the battalion "went through a string of commanders, and their performance directly correlated with the quality of battalion commander. The first commander I worked with was Colonel Ahmed, a Sunni. Very competent, I really respected him. Although his formation was mostly s.h.i.+te, I think they respected him." Ahmed was being targeted by Al Qaeda, though, and after his sons were attacked, he requested and received a transfer. "The guy who replaced him was basically honest but not a great commander. He was replaced in May by Colonel Sabah, who was previously in Ghazaliya. He had a terrible reputation among the Sunni population, and there was a lot of concern about him. He was basically competent, but he was ruthless and crooked. We suspected him of extortion, coercion, and rape. We got the reports on Sabah from people in Iraqi Family Village, which was just outside of Liberty. Sabah kept an apartment there. We got a lot of reports on him. Must caveat to say that none were proven, just lots of reports." Another regarded him as "the worst Iraqi battalion commander I have ever seen. He clearly had a sectarian agenda and was implicated by locals in a weapons-selling scheme where he would sell weapons found in weapons caches, potentially back to the s.h.i.+te militias." In contrast to Sabah, Lieutenant Wael, his replacement, was a true professional, according to Kuehl. "He was smart yet lacked the arrogance I saw in most Iraqi officers. Initially he was a bit wary about working with the SOI, but I think he quickly saw how effective they were. Wael was a solid officer and another Sunni, which was a plus to the area. I do not think Brigadier General Gha.s.san [a local Iraqi army commander in western Baghdad] liked him working so close with Abul Abed [the founder of the Sons of Iraq in Amriya], so he got transferred to Washash, and Lieutenant Ha.s.san was brought in from there in December 2007, just before we left. Ha.s.san was okay, but not as smart and creative as Wael."

IN FEBRUARY 2007 there was an effort by the Iraqi Security Forces to go after some of the Sunni leaders.h.i.+p in Mansour. In a forty-eight-hour period three of the top Sunnis Kuehl was working with were targeted by the Iraqi army. This included Adnan Dulaimi in Adil, a powerful politician belonging to the Iraqi Accord Front who lived along the border between Hateen and Yarmuk, and Sheikh Khalid in Amriya. Part of the problem with the politicians, as Kuehl recalled, was that they had well-armed security detachments and the Iraqi army was very suspicious of them. One night Kuehl had to position himself between Dulaimi's security force and the army to prevent a confrontation. Soon after he was called to an incident at another politician's location, where he kept him from getting arrested. Two days later the 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion raided Khalid's mosque in Amriya.

After these incidents Kuehl met Gha.s.san and his commanders at his headquarters in the Green Zone. "I told them that I thought they needed to be a little more aware of the appearance of their actions to include excessive detentions and the targeting of these political figures. The commander responsible for Yarmuk took offense at my remarks and did not like me interfering with his operations. We got into a nice little shouting match, and he later stormed out. Gha.s.san did not appreciate this, and our relations.h.i.+p was never the same."

Staff sergeant "Yosef " (his preferred nickname) was an American soldier who served in the First ID, Second Brigade Reconnaissance Troop (Second BRT), which was outsourced to Kuehl's 1-5 Cav. Under their platoon leader, Capt. Brian Weightman, the troop set up a joint security station in an abandoned shopping mall in the Adil neighborhood in February 2007, at a point where two freeways met close to Dulaimi's home. Yosef worked with Dulaimi's bodyguards, a variety of Iraqi Security Forces, and eventually with the Awakening group in Amriya.

On one occasion, Yosef recalled, he was on the roof of a police station in a Sunni neighborhood, talking with a police guard who spoke great English but initially didn't want anything to do with him. Yosef managed to establish a rapport with him. The guard confided that every policeman at the station was off-duty Mahdi Army. This made sense to him.

On another day Yosef 's patrol group heard a loud exchange of gunfire. They got a report that a police truck had been blown up on the ramp, just southwest of the mall they were patrolling. When Yosef's men showed up, "the police were shooting the s.h.i.+t out of an apartment building." Under a colonel's direction, the police seemed to be systematically shooting along every story of the apartment complex, story by story. "He was standing out in the middle of the street, pointing and yelling to gun trucks that were more or less on line with one another, pumping the building full of rounds. When we asked him if he needed any help, he kind of blew us off," Yosef said. When the group asked the colonel what the police were doing, the colonel reported they had taken fire from the building and were returning fire, but it seemed to Yosef's men that they were just shooting the whole side of the building up.

"We inquired where he was taking fire from, and he answered with a kind of a grin and said that they had it under control," Yosef said. This was at a time when the military were harping on Iraqi Security Forces taking responsibility, so Yosef 's men left the scene, knowing there were probably no insurgents in the building.

Like Kuehl, Yosef was impressed by the professionalism and nonsectarianism he found among some who served in the Iraqi army. Yosef told me of a lieutenant called Mustafa, who epitomized this. He was, Yosef reported, a physical giant, with the physique and face of an old boxer: strong legs, big belly, broad shoulders, and a beat-up face with a crooked, mashed nose. He was a Sunni who had been in Iraqi Special Forces before the war. He spoke perfect English, but never around his men or other Iraqis. He carried a short AK-47 with a hundred-round drum.

"We patrolled with him on and off for a couple of months," Yosef said. "One day he found something my whole platoon pa.s.sed up: a nervous-looking taxi driver in a long line of cars waiting for gas, who had an IED initiator under his driver's seat. Mustafa choke-slammed the poor dude with one hand and calmly restrained him under one of his heavy boots pressed down on the dude's back." His techniques in the neighborhood worked well-perhaps too well, Yosef suggested. Under Mustafa's leaders.h.i.+p the neighborhood had become relatively peaceful, but he wasn't arresting enough people to satisfy his command. They had him moved into another neighborhood.

When Yosef next saw him, a few months later, he was further north, in a demilitarized zone between s.h.i.+te forces in Ghazaliya to the north and established Sunni forces in the south. Yosef was with his boss, Captain Weightman, when they joined Mustafa in his office, a barren room in a large house on a block of other large houses looking north from Mansour. He told them that his name had been leaked to some Al Qaeda forces near his home, and they had kidnapped his brother and tortured him extensively to get to him. "He showed us the pictures of his brother's back with las.h.i.+ngs and his brother's battered face," Yosef said. "In the end they accepted a ransom from Mustafa for his brother. I think the amount was ten thousand dollars." Mustafa told them that when his command had moved him up to the neighborhood, they removed all of his Humvees, so he had to patrol his neighborhood on foot. "It was obvious that his good intentions weren't appreciated by his command. But Mustafa didn't hide, and he was out on foot with his men every day," Yosef said. Observed Weightman, "We worked well together, and he genuinely tried to help the people of the areas he was a.s.signed to. He was not sectarian. He couldn't get promoted above second lieutenant."

ONE DAY, EARLY ON in their deployment, Yosef and his men were the first to the scene of a devastating vehicle-borne IED strike on an army checkpoint at the intersection of what the Americans called Phone Card Road and Route Huskies, just southeast of Adil. The blast was so large that it destroyed two Humvees, took the front off three stories of two buildings, and sent another Humvee deep into the coffee shop in the same building. The planners of the VBIED had timed it to explode as the army unit was changing guard. Seventeen soldiers were killed. Yosef discovered that that the son of Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi was a VBIED builder in the area of the bombing and was suspected of being involved.

Dulaimi was the leader of the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament at the time. He had been living in Hurriya but had left-along with thousands of other Sunnis-because of Mahdi Army intimidation and killings of Sunnis, and moved to Adel. Before Kuehl's company established a combat outpost in Adel, Dulaimi's thugs prevented sectarian killings of Sunnis in the area by their mere presence. His house-modest by an Iraqi politician's standards, protected by low concrete barriers, with a small yard in the front-sat in the center of the neighborhood and provided a good view of the area.

At this time Kuehl's company was stretched thin and thought Dulaimi could be co-opted because of his partic.i.p.ation in government. "We just couldn't be there all the time with such a large area, having only three platoons, and the active portion of the insurgency that was combating our troop in Jamia." But Dulaimi was known, in the words of an American major, to be a "sleazeball," even though Kuehl's company had no specific evidence to detain him. "Even if we did, politicians had complete immunity with respect to U.S. forces. We weren't allowed to search his house," the major said.

Dulaimi's compound was right down the street from the joint security station established at the Adil mall. It was there that Yosef tried to establish a relations.h.i.+p with the guards stationed outside the compound. Yosef 's company had moved into the deserted five-story mall with the hesitant approval of Dulaimi, who remembered the help Weightman's platoon had offered a few months earlier when they responded to a firefight on his street between Mahdi Army forces and Dulaimi's guards and helped repel the Mahdi Army.

Soon after they were settled at the new joint security station Yosef was out patrolling with Weightman in a convoy of four Humvees when Uday, Dulaimi's head bodyguard, requested a meeting. At the time Dulaimi was having trouble with the Iraqi police patrolling the neighborhood. There were accusations from the police that Dulaimi was harboring insurgents among his staff and that his family members were attacking police checkpoints and patrols. However, there were also allegations that the police were behaving aggressively toward Dulaimi's neighbors and arresting innocent people.

During the conversation with Weightman, Uday became angry and stated, "If by the next night, you don't convince the IP to get out of the neighborhood, then all you have done here will be ruined!" Weightman's response was measured and without anger. "I think this impressed Uday. Even though Uday had pressure on him from the extremists among his ranks to go to war with the Americans living in their neighborhood as well as to continue their open war with the Iraqi Security Forces, Captain Weightman's response diffused the situation, and we ended up having a relatively safe, although sometimes rocky, working relations.h.i.+p with Uday and Dulaimi's compound security forces."

One day Yosef, who was building a rapport with Uday, accompanied him as his guard and escort on a visit to a prison. While there he witnessed one of the most disturbing manifestations of sectarianism when he realized that 90 percent of those jailed were Sunni. The prison was so full, Yosef speculated, because the police "had rounded up every male in the neighborhood of fighting age." Uday was using the cover story that he was visiting the prison as a humanitarian observer. In reality, Yosef noted to himself, "he's just trying to track down his brother and the other eight members of Dulaimi's bodyguards who've been arrested and lost in the system."

The prison was a vision of bedlam. The cells were so crowded that half the prisoners had to stand while the other half sat or lay down. The paperwork doc.u.menting the accusations against some of the prisoners was said to be lost. Other prisoners had been in jail for up to six months without a trial. The legal system was swamped. s.e.xually transmitted diseases were rampant, often spread by the guards. Guards were providing condoms and medical care to the detainees only if the detainees either paid them money or submitted s.e.xually. In his notes from his visit, Yosef observed, "I don't care if 90% of those Sunnis are Al Qaeda. When all of the guards are s.h.i.+te, and most of those s.h.i.+tes are in the Mahdi Army, it gets ugly."

"There are reports of released prisoners mysteriously dying shortly after their release, perhaps by poisoning," Yosef recorded in his notes. "Some prisoners' records show 'transferred' next to their name, but no mention where to. In-processing records are recorded in a book, and inaccessible to public. Once they have a trial they are recorded into a data base and that is accessible to the public. This means that when they get arrested, they virtually disappear from their family and friends."

There were three big rooms where the prisoners were crammed in like slaves. Yosef noticed some of the guards silencing the prisoners when Uday came by. So when they went to the maximum-security wing, "with its short dead-end corridors and lazy guards," Yosef and two fellow soldiers filled the doorway and spoke loudly so Uday could discreetly ask questions and take notes about the guards' abuses. "The guards finally caught on after a couple of wings, but we were late for Uday's next meeting, so we took off," Yosef said.

CAPT. BRENDAN GALLAGHER initially served in the western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra, which was where Kuehl initially set up his first combat outpost alongside the Iraqi police. "In April and May 2007 at our first combat outpost-the Khadra police station-we would have IEDs. .h.i.t us as soon as we left the main gate," Gallagher said. This happened repeatedly over the course of weeks. The IEDs would strike them within one hundred meters of a local police defensive position. "The police on guard should have been able to see the IEDs being emplaced," he said. "They were in plain view of his position. This was infuriating to me, because it seemed so evident that at least some of the guards were in collusion."

When Gallagher confronted the police chain of command, they were generally dismissive of his concerns. He began to suspect that they were either incompetent or collaborating with insurgents. "In retrospect, I believe some of them were probably being pressured by AQI to keep quiet and pa.s.sively let us get attacked," Gallagher said. Soon after that, he decided to move his company's combat outpost to a different part of Khadra, co-located with 2/5/2 National Police. "When I told the local police I had decided to move, they practically begged us to stay," he said, but by that point he had lost confidence in them.

A month later Gallagher's company was rea.s.signed to Amriya. Most residents there thought that the s.h.i.+te-dominated government was conspiring against them, intentionally denying basic services to an area dominated by Sunnis. "There appeared to be a lot of circ.u.mstantial evidence to support this," Gallagher said. They heard reports that the national police or the army was forcibly removing people from their homes because the inhabitants were Sunni.

By early 2007, Khadra and Amriya were overwhelmingly Sunni, yet the Khadra police had s.h.i.+tes throughout their ranks. "This helped create a significant credibility gap with the Sunni population," Gallagher said. "If the police had been exceedingly competent they might have been able to overcome that obstacle, but that was hardly the case." In early 2007, the Khadra police essentially refused to patrol on their own because they were prime targets for the insurgents. "Police inherently symbolize stability and order, and for that reason Al Qaeda wanted them dead. The fact that that many of these IPs were s.h.i.+tes only made things even more dangerous for them," Gallagher said.

To make matters worse, their vehicles had almost no armor. Therefore the police tended to stay in their headquarters at the center of Khadra. "We tried to get them to investigate murders and other crimes that were happening on a regular basis, but it was like pulling teeth to get them to leave their HQ building. They would only leave the police station when we personally escorted them, and even then they were little value-added," Gallagher said.

"There was serious sectarianism and collaboration throughout some sectors of the *ISF," he said. "However, there were also many good and honest Iraqi soldiers and policemen who were doing the best they could. The challenge was determining who was who. In some ways it was like trying to play poker with many different players at the table, all with varying motives (some good, some not so good), and we were trying to figure out what was going on. But unlike poker, this was not a game-lives were on the line."

As had been the case with Lieutenant Mustafa, some of the most effective people working in the Iraqi Security Forces could be punished by their superiors, or face the wrath of insurgents, if they seemed to be working too well with the Americans. "One of the most effective 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion commanders had his family threatened," Gallagher recalled. "He was forced to leave his post and depart the area as a result. This was a setback for us, because he was extremely competent, impartial, and nonsectarian. He was only able to stay in command for a relatively short duration."

One Iraqi army commander that Gallagher met with, who was responsible for the Hurriya and Adil neighborhoods at the time, admitted that if it came down to fighting for their country or the Mahdi Army, most of his soldiers would fight for the Mahdi Army. He was a Sunni commander. People were extremely fearful that the security forces were collaborating with Mahdi Army operatives to carry out a.s.sa.s.sinations, either by letting them through checkpoints or providing information or other a.s.sistance.

The process of sectarian cleansing started before the 1-5 Cav got on the ground in Amriya, Gallagher told me. "Within the first few months of our deployment, virtually all of the s.h.i.+tes had effectively been driven out or killed," he said. "Once the Sunni volunteers stood up, things eventually started to calm down in our area of operations."

The Iraqi Security Forces maintained checkpoints outside Amriya to avoid being attacked. Consequently, the walls that trapped Al Qaeda in Amriya also meant they focused their attacks on the Americans, since they were deprived of other targets. Kuehl moved forces from elsewhere in Mansour to focus on Amriya, and he asked for more troops, which allowed for more patrolling. He also increased the concrete fortifications around Amriya and imposed curfews and bans on vehicles.

But just as he was trying to establish a permanent combat outpost in Amriya, close to the Maluki Mosque, an IED attack on May 19, 2007, killed six of his soldiers and one interpreter. Kuehl called Sheikh Walid that night and demanded his help in getting rid of Al Qaeda. He was convinced that the sheikhs of Amriya knew who the Al Qaeda men were but were too scared to act. In the past American soldiers had retaliated brutally after suffering such losses, and there were many soldiers who wanted to "do a Falluja" and respond with extreme violence. But Kuehl restrained them. Locals, also expecting the Americans to "do a Falluja," were apparently impressed when they didn't. Sheikh Khalid later said that this restraint was a key factor convincing locals of the Americans' good will.

According to Kuehl, the Awakening men in Amriya approached him first. "I think it was something the Sunni leaders.h.i.+p had been setting up for some time, and I had been encouraging them to work with us," he said. "I just did not think it would happen in this way. I believe many of them were former insurgents. Looking back, I think one of the imams was hinting at it for a while but was a bit secretive in our discussions. I figured that there were things going on in the background that I could not see. Sheikh Walid called me on the night of May 29 to tell me they would attack Al Qaeda the next day. We had a heated discussion for about twenty minutes. I was trying to convince him to give us the intel and let us take care of it. He insisted that they had to do it themselves."

Kuehl warned him that if they threatened American soldiers or civilians in any of their operations, they would be shot; then he ordered his men to back off and let events transpire. The next night Sheikh Walid called Kuehl up to tell him of their success, and the next day Al Qaeda responded.

"They were pretty c.o.c.ky after the initial success, but Al Qaeda came after them hard on the second day, which is when they asked for my help." The Americans responded quickly, driving to the Fardus Mosque to back up the rebels. Dead and wounded fighters lay sprawled in the mosque. The Americans also lost one soldier in the battle.

In a letter sent home to family and friends later that year, Staff Sergeant Yosef wrote, almost wistfully, of the time in May 2007 when Abul Abed, a charismatic and enigmatic Sunni militia leader previously unknown to the Americans, entered their midst. "Abul Abed saw some Al Qaeda men placing a roadside bomb on the side of the road near his house," Yosef wrote. "He confronted them and asked why they were placing it so close to his house. Adul Abed told them, 'That is a big bomb. It could kill me and my family.' Their reply? 'It's okay if you die. This is jihad.' Abul Abed walked directly back into his house and did what I hope any of us would have done under the same circ.u.mstances: he grabbed his AK-47, walked back outside, and shot the three men to death in his front yard."

Abul Abed was a former officer in Saddam's army. "After that event, he feared for his life," Yosef wrote. "He did have connections though, useful connections, connections with guns. They consisted of Iraqi Sunni men, who up until then, had been fighting 'American invaders.'"

Yosef empathized with these men, even though some of them had fought in Falluja against comrades in Yosef's platoon. "Last May these local men from Amriya decided that they couldn't live with Al Qaeda anymore," Yosef wrote, "and since they couldn't rely on the s.h.i.+a-run government for help, they called us and literally asked us if we would allow them to start a war against Al Qaeda. We said yes. When my platoon first got the word that we had been selected to work with the 'Freedom Fighters' of Amriya, we couldn't believe it. We had just finished a five-month mission living out of a four-story abandoned mall at the intersection of two highways in Western Baghdad. We were exhausted, and I remember one of my Army friends saying, 'Great, now we're going to train more terrorists.'"

In early June Yosef 's platoon went into Amriya for the first time. They took five Humvees and about twenty men. "So, there we were driving slowly down a narrow Amriya neighborhood road, trash and rubble on either side," Yosef wrote. "No one was around. We made it without incident to the temporary headquarters of the AFF [Amriya Freedom Fighters] at an abandoned school. A few of their men met us at the gate. They all had guns. We really didn't know what to expect. We left our Humvees with drivers and gunners in them. We had about ten dismounted soldiers when we went inside the compound."

The school, as Yosef describes it, was situated in the middle of a fairly upscale Iraqi neighborhood, complete with the familiar abandoned two-story houses, electrical wires bunched together and hanging low from telephone poles, and trash on the side of the streets. Yosef 's company commander, his interpreter, and two other soldiers went into the main meeting room with Abul Abed, the AFF leader. Yosef, his platoon leader and his section sergeant walked into a room next to the main meeting room.

"At the end of an outer corridor was Abul Abed's office, one door short of his office was another cla.s.sroom with some sofas, and tables. Both rooms had fans, and since it was the beginning of June, CPT Weightman, SSG Kirk, and I waited in the other room while CPT Mitch.e.l.l and Abul Abed introduced themselves, and started planning. It was in this other room, short of Abul Abed's office, where I met Ali, and Muhamad. Ali was younger than me, in his early twenties-a short skinny dude, with thick well kept hair, sly eyes and a smile that probably drove women wild. He wore a t-s.h.i.+rt, sweat pants, and interestingly enough had a hand grenade in his pocket.

"Muhamad on the other hand was in his late teens, tall, with a sharp strong jaw, and big eyes. He wore a tank-top, had on shorts and carried a thick sheep herding stick. He too had a grin on his face, and unlike Ali, Muhamad could speak English. They seemed comfortable enough with us, and so we started joking around with them. We already had our helmets off, which was disarming in and of itself. But something was bothering me. The hand grenade that Ali had in his sweat pants pocket, he kept on taking it out and rolling it around in his hands. I, being the most uptight of the three Americans, was kind of worried and asked if Ali would let me see the hand grenade. He seemed slightly taken aback by my worry, but he handed it to me none-the-less. I looked at it. Sure enough it was a Russian made fragmentation grenade, slightly less powerful than the American made ones, but still deadly especially in a confined s.p.a.ce such as this room. I showed it to CPT Weightman, who was much less impressed with it and told me to give it back to Ali. I did, and we continued our light hearted exchange of jokes and jabs.

Mitch.e.l.l picked up on Yosef's ability to build a rapport with Iraqis early and a.s.signed him to gain intelligence on the different men in Abul Abed's group. Yosef did this by hanging out with them whenever they were there. Some of the younger AFF, like Muhamad, still attended school, and then patrolled with the AFF when they were out of school. The relations.h.i.+p, as Yosef reported, developed from caution to common respect and friends.h.i.+p. "Watching Abul Abed lead his men was educational. It showed me the reality of the old saying, 'A company is the long shadow of a single man.' They were professional because he was professional. If there were lapses in some of his soldiers' performance, it was because they were moonlighting as AFF, when in fact they worked for other forces in the neighborhood."

A few months later Al Qaeda came for Muhamad at his high school. They raided his school while he was in cla.s.s, bribed the school guards and took him away from his cla.s.smates. They kidnapped him, kept him for the afternoon, and tortured him. They ended up beheading him and leaving his head in a tree. Two years later, when I spoke to Sergeant Yosef about this, his anger was still raw. In a note to his family, soon after Muhamad's death, he wrote: " I feel slightly guilty for Muhamad's death. I thought at the time, and still think that there was an Al Qaeda spy within the AFF who fingered Muhamad. Perhaps by befriending Muhamad, and encouraging him to be friendly with me I effectively made him a target. Perhaps they kidnapped him out from his high school and beheaded him, specifically so that other young AFF would understand that being friends with American soldiers was a sin punishable by death. Any fear Al Qaeda was attempting to instill in the AFF was trumped though by Abul Abed's swift vengeance. I don't want to be too specific, but I'll say this, Mohamed's death was avenged at least 4-fold within a day. The practical result of this brought confidence back to the AFF as quickly as it had wavered."

AFTER THE INITIAL SUCCESS of establis.h.i.+ng Abul Abed and his men, Kuehl found that the harder part was working out a longer-range partners.h.i.+p and then maintaining it. "There were a couple of things I wanted to ensure," he told me. "First, we had to work with the Iraqi army. Second, I wanted to have some civil control of this movement. Getting the Iraqi army on board was the first challenge. I met with Brigadier General Gha.s.san for about two hours trying to convince him this was a good idea. He had already helped by providing Abul Abed's men ammunition, but he was a bit hesitant to get directly involved. He finally agreed to meet with Abul Abed, who was cooling his heels outside along with another leader. This was probably the most important negotiation I ever had to do."

"I don't think Abul Abed and the Iraqi army relations.h.i.+p was ever good," Sergeant Yosef added. "I remember Colonel Sabah, who Abul Abed was supposed to work with. The first time I saw them b.u.t.t heads was one night when the AFF and the Iraqi army were supposed to do a patrol together. Colonel Sabah wanted to head the patrol, with the AFF acting as neighborhood advisers. Abul Abed refused. He wanted the patrol to be conducted by AFF, with the Iraqi army acting as observers, because there had been accusations by the neighborhood residents that the Iraqi army had been too aggressive. The other issue was that Colonel Sabah didn't want Abul Abed on the ground with his men. Colonel Sabah wanted to be in command of all the men, both Iraqi army and AFF."

This argument took place in Abul Abed's office at AFF HQ. Colonel Sabah had two other officers with him, one younger and one very gray one, who would take turns trying to persuade Abul Abed to play by their rules. Abul Abed's skill as debater was apparently brilliant, said Yosef. He would listen to Colonel Sabah and officers yell until they were exhausted, and then he would quickly answer with sharp responses.

"After about fifteen minutes, the oldest of the three Iraqi army officers basically gave up," Yosef reported. "He had a look on his face like, 'This really isn't my fight.' Then the younger one slowly sputtered out of steam. It was obvious that this Iraqi army officer was not very intelligent. Abul Abed really didn't even acknowledge him. Colonel Sabah ended up nudging him out of the argument. Finally, it was Colonel Sabah against Abul Abed. Colonel Sabah laid all his cards down with what he thought was the final blow. He said the following, and I remember because I asked my interpreter what he said: 'If you don't patrol under my command, then you will be considered an enemy force, and I will arrest you and your men.' Abul Abed stood there for a minute thinking, then took his pistol belt off and threw it into his closet and said, 'Fine, if I have to patrol under your command or else get arrested if I command my patrol, then I will not patrol, and neither will my men. You are on your own,' and then he walked to the door, as the three Iraqi army officers stood there dumbfounded, and yelled to his men, 'No one is going anywhere tonight!' Colonel Sabah and his guys stormed out infuriated, and some heated words were said with lots of pointing and angry eyes.

"Abul Abed was obviously furious. But he knew that Colonel Sabah wouldn't do the patrol alone. Abul Abed knew where the enemy forces were hiding. It was his AFF intelligence on Amriya that had gathered the Iraqi army and even the Americans here tonight. If Abul Abed didn't go out, then the Iraqi army would be blind. Colonel Sabah came back, he compromised, and said that it would be a joint command that night. During the patrol, if I remember correctly, the AFF and the Iraqi army men worked well together, but the rift between Abul Abed and Colonel Sabah grew greater as the night went on. I was on patrol so I don't know exactly how it happened, but I remember hearing afterward that they continued to argue throughout the patrol. It makes sense, too. Abul Abed was about Colonel Sabah's age, and Abul Abed was an officer under Saddam. These two men should have been peers in the same army, but one was excluded from the mainstream security forces, and the other was not."

The relations.h.i.+p between the Iraqi army and Abul Abed's Awakening group was always contentious, especially at the leaders.h.i.+p level. Gallagher said that they always had to a walk a tightrope to maintain the support of the Iraqi army. There was one incident that nearly shut down the whole effort. Four bodies had been found in the southeast corner of Amriya. Gallagher was in Sabah's office at the time, and Sabah was convinced that Abul Abed was behind it. This was on a day when a number of local contractors had been invited to Abul Abed's HQ to start generating projects to repair the infrastructure and get some money flowing in the community.

When Sabah arrived at Abul Abed's headquarters, he started shouting at the Fursan (as the AFF were called, taking their name from the Arabic word for "knights") while ten of his security detachment formed a tight, protective circle around him. Sabah's men had weapons drawn on the Fursan, and the Fursan had weapons drawn on them. Gallagher managed to get into the center of his tight circle with his interpreter. "Sabah was yelling that there was only one army in Amriya and that it was either Abul Abed or him. It turns out that some knucklehead in the Fursan had refused Sabah's security detachment entry into the HQ building."

Yosef was also present, filming with his video camera. "I guess the day before the IA wouldn't let one of Abul Abed's food trucks into Amriya and then called the AFF 'sons of animals.' When the Iraqi army showed up at the AFF HQ, Abu Bilal, one of Abed's lieutenants, ordered his men to get their guns and grenades and get ready for a fight, and they all started running out to the gate with their AK-47s."

Abu Bilal apparently was in a terrible mood. His brothers had just been kidnapped by Al Qaeda. But when Abul Abed emerged from his building, he was furious as he tried to stand down his men, especially with Abu Bilal. "I set my camera on the gate's wall and videotaped the whole thing," Yosef noted later. "Major Daniels came running out into the street from his meeting with Abul Abed, without any armor or helmet, just sungla.s.ses. He and his men positioned themselves between the IA trucks and the AFF at the gate. It was a zoo. Finally, the IA left. Luckily, before I turned my camera off, I recorded Abu Bilal striding out after them, with his s.h.i.+rt untucked. His s.h.i.+rt is never untucked. In the video, it's apparent he's got multiple weapons under his s.h.i.+rt. I wonder if he ever caught up with the IA patrol and took some pop shots at them."

"This incident," Gallagher said, "set us way back, and I spent the next forty-eight hours dealing with the fallout. From this incident we hammered out a written agreement between us, the Iraqi army, and the Fursan. While it put more restrictions on the Fursan, they were generally positive and a step toward rule of law. It also placed more emphasis on the Iraqi army to conduct joint operations with the Fursan."

Kuehl's own relations.h.i.+p with the Awakening men in his area was tentative at first, but eventually they grew close. "For a long time I was not sure how far I could trust Abul Abed," he said. "I knew he was a bit of a hothead. Some members of the group were just thugs. I believe some were brought in by Abul Abed and Sheikh Khalid to gain local political support for the movement. There were times where I had to discipline members of the group. At one point I arrested one of the leaders of one of the factions. I never trusted the guy because we suspected him of pus.h.i.+ng people out of homes and stealing their furniture. I had even detained him and three of his brothers during an operation just before the Fursan came forward. One brother we kept, the others we released due to lack of evidence. I ended up detaining this guy after we connected him to an attack on Abul Abed and excessive use of force. I think we also got some other incriminating evidence on him."

Over time Kuehl developed closer relations.h.i.+ps with the Awakening men at his level and also at subordinate levels. Abed's men were brought into the planning and targeting process along with the Iraqi army. "In a sense, each of us gave legitimacy to the other," Kuehl said. "Not everyone trusted the Fursan, nor did everyone trust us or the IA. When we did operations together, complaints went down." Initially Abed's men, who could move easily within the population and were not burdened with heavy equipment, conducted missions with U.S. oversight. They identified five targets on their first mission. Kuehl provided an outer cordon with his D Company, consisting of tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles. These vehicles were fitted with great optics so they could keep a close eye on what was going on, even at night.

Abul Abed and his men went in and captured their five targets without firing a shot. They questioned them and turned two over to Kuehl. "They wanted to release the other three, which is an interesting part of this," Kuehl said. "In our negotiations Sheikh Khalid asked for the ability to give amnesty. He said many of the AQI fighters were the young boys of the community. He wanted to release them after they signed an oath to not fight for Al Qaeda and for their parents to also sign for them. I thought this was a great idea and agreed. I think this did a lot to undermine AQI's base."

The other part of destroying Al Qaeda involved local civil oversight, which was also risky. Kuehl saw Sheikh Khalid as the most legitimate local leader. The Neighborhood Advisory Council was seen to be ineffective and had links with AQI and corruption. On the other hand, Kuehl suggests, Sheikh Khalid seemed to be respected by many in the community. Sheikh Khalid was a strong critic of the Maliki government. He shared the perception with many in Amriya that the Maliki government was intentionally denying services to Sunni areas. He was fairly soft-spoken, but despite his quiet exterior he had strong opinions and definite influence in the community.

Sheikh Khalid's mosque was located next door to Gallagher's company's combat outpost, which helped facilitate communication. He would provide recommendations to Gallagher on how the locations of concrete barriers should be less obtrusive to the local pedestrian traffic, particularly for Iraqi children who walked to the nearby school. "We therefore adjusted the barrier locations to meet his request. I believe following through on such reasonable requests helped sustain a positive working relations.h.i.+p, which in turn helped sustain our credibility and respect in the area," Gallagher said.

Abul Abed seemed to respect Khalid. "I tried to get Khalid to sign the security contract we were establis.h.i.+ng, but he kept delaying," Kuehl said. "He never said no, but there was always some new demand. I think he was also getting pressure from other people behind the scenes. After months of haggling I finally made the decision to have Abul Abed sign the contract. In retrospect, I think Khalid wanted to keep out of direct involvement. Still, I thought it important that we get some voice of the people. We asked Khalid to organize the local leaders within the community. He formed a local council from the community to include tribal leaders, former military officers, and other professionals. He took great risk in doing this since it would have no official government legitimacy. However, he was politically connected, and I think he did a great job of adding legitimacy to the effort. One group that never really got on board was the Iraqi Islamic Party. They were jealous of the power that this movement was gaining, and I think they saw it as a threat."

"Money was not the primary motivator for Abul Abed," Kuehl later wrote, noting that Abed's men were not paid for the first three months. When they did get paid in September 2007, Kuehl described the sum as a "pittance" compared with the risk they were taking, much less than what Al Qaeda were paying their men. "[Abed] was driven by a desire to protect his family and bring stability to the Sunni areas. While he was very much against [the Mahdi Army], I would not label him as sectarian. Several of his closest aides were s.h.i.+tes. I would cla.s.sify him as a nationalist if anything."

Over time restrictions had to be put on the Fursan's operations. All operations had to be conducted with the Iraqi army. The problem was that the army had difficulty keeping pace with the Fursan. But multiple security outposts were established throughout Amriya with the Fursan, protecting key infrastructure in the community. "Between their outposts, the Iraqi army outposts, and our two combat operation posts, you could not move two blocks in Amriya without running into someone involved in security," Kuehl said. "Violence dropped significantly."

With Abul Abed's intelligence as well as information coming from other sources, Kuehl was able to map out the insurgent network. "The information provided by Abul Abed and his men allowed us to target much more accurately," he said. "We had names and in some cases pictures. We posted wanted posters that proved very effective. Tips from locals increased significantly. We hit Al Qaeda pretty hard, detaining some, killing others. Those that remained fled. Civilian deaths pretty much ceased."

Other than a couple found dead in their home in August, Amriya did not have any other murders until Christmas Day. IED attacks dropped off completely, as did small-arms fire and indirect-fire attacks. The last IED, a deep buried one that went off on August 6, ended up killing the driver of a Bradley. Within thirty-six hours of the attack, Abul Abed and his men were able to determine that it had been carried out by a cell from an insurgent group that was brought into Amriya for a joint operation. "We had never been able to do this before," Kuehl said.

Like many I spoke to, Gallagher characterized the initial relations.h.i.+p between the Americans and the Fursan as tenuous; many U.S. soldiers were skeptical of working with men who had been their enemy. "Some of the volunteers had almost certainly been emplacing IEDs against my soldiers just a few months earlier," he said. But trust was built over time. Gallagher described a turning point for him and his men: "We were conducting a company cordon and search in northeastern Amriya, Mahala 630. We received a report that there was an IED just a few meters from one of our Bradleys on an exterior blocking position. I began to call up EOD [Explosive Ordinance Disposal] to destroy it," Gallagher recalled. But before anyone could react, one of the new volunteers, a daring young nineteen-year-old named Ali, got out his small pocketknife, walked over to the