Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 20

I returned to Afghanistan in January 2010. In what was a routine incident, the Americans had just killed four Afghans in Ghazni's Qarabagh district: one of the men worked for the Basim phone company, one was a cobbler, and two were students. Locals took the bodies and protested on the highway between Kabul and Kandahar.

On the way to Maidan Shahr, the capital of Wardak province, I stopped to talk to bus drivers about the conditions on the road. "There are a lot of roadblocks because of the Americans," a bus driver called Mir Ali told me. "They oppress people a lot." A pa.s.senger chimed in. "Tell him the problem of the people," he said. "There are certainly attacks. The Americans attack and raid homes every night. They indiscriminately and continuously arrest people and take people out of their homes." Mir Ali told the man that we were only talking about security on the road. "Who cares about the road?" the man asked. "They are indiscriminately raiding and searching homes in places where there is no Taliban or enemy. People have personal conflicts, and the Americans come and arrest them and drag them and imprison them."

Gul Rahman was also a driver on the same route. "The road security is fine, but people are oppressed by the Americans," he told me. "They are raiding during the nights. Some people have hostility from the time of the factions [the 1990s], from the revolution in the past, some people have enmity with each other. Now some people report to the government or tribal militias, so the Americans continuously raid, arrest, and imprison people. They have done this in Andar and Badam. They have killed more innocent people than you can imagine." He told me to go see for myself. "You will see people tortured, arrested, and imprisoned for no reason," he said. Even at the bus station, he complained, the police beat people without reason.

Zainullah was a driver on the road between Kabul and Helmand. For the past two days the road past Qarabagh in Ghazni had been closed, he said. "The Americans have killed people there, women and children. That is why people are protesting, and they have blocked the highway. The Taliban do not harm us, but there is a danger of thieves, and people are bothered by Americans. When American forces come, then the road is blocked for hours, and then we have to wait for hours, sometimes the whole day. Sick pa.s.sengers and women also have to wait. The road is 70 percent damaged and 30 percent built. There are no bridges, and most of the road is not paved."

The local travel agent at the bus stop agreed. "The situation was good before, but now it is worse," he said. "People cannot travel in these buses anymore because there is no security. About thirty or forty buses would leave from here before, but now the number is about ten to fifteen. During the evening and nighttime, it is not possible to leave." I asked if people were pleased with the work of the government or the Americans. "n.o.body likes them," he said. "How can we be happy when travels are delayed by the national army, American troops, or the police? How can they be happy?"

Zainullah told me of a bus that was robbed by thieves in Ghazni and then in Khushkabad. "This bus was robbed two times in one night," he said. "The whole station knows this story. Taliban do not harm people. The Taliban deal with the people that they need to deal with. Taliban harms no one. The danger always comes from Americans and thieves. The danger from the Americans on the highway is that they check each and every bridge for their security, and we have to wait. Even if you have sick pa.s.sengers or children, the Americans don't care at all. The road will be blocked by Americans. If something happens to them, then Americans indiscriminately shoot and arrest anyone. They don't care about anyone. The problems are because of American troops. This is certainly the job of government. They should stop it, and we don't have that power. My demand from the government is that the government should punish these people. If the government is not able to do so, then Afghans should be allowed to make a national movement. It is not going to work like this."

As we were speaking, several policemen showed up and made us leave, asking us to come to the police station because they hadn't been informed that we were in the area.

In Meidan Shah I attended a training session in basic science for several dozen village teachers from throughout Wardak (all of whom were men). When I showed up they were being taught the science behind basic hygiene.

The Taliban had a reputation for attacking state teachers, so I asked the men if they had been threatened. "There is no threat to education in this province," one man told me. "Education is neutral here," said another. "It neither supports the resistance nor the government." The Taliban did not harm schools and clinics, he said. "Most of the security problems are created by Americans. The Taliban do not make problems." I asked him what problems the Americans made. "Our hours start here at 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. We are not allowed to come here before American troops come to the provincial center. When we go to school, we experience the same problems. There is no alternative way. If we use another route, there is fear of thieves. There are many problems. This year somebody fired on the Americans, so the Americans entered the school and fired-which terrorized children so much that one boy wet himself. They were so scared that they did not come to school for five or six days, and finally the children were convinced and brought by their parents to school. The Americans first shot at the school, then they surrounded the school, then they entered and started firing inside it."

Outside the school the men pointed to villages only one kilometer away. Everything outside the provincial capital was in Taliban hands, they said. In the same town I attended a meeting of the National Solidarity Program, an Afghan-run, foreign-funded development program that gave grants to communities to develop local projects. I spoke to Muhamad Nasir Farida, the local government official in charge of the program in Wardak. "Many problems are created by the Americans," he said. "The Americans raid homes at nights, land helicopters, and whoever they see they kill them or arrest them."

Fazel Rabie Haqbeen was a former mujahid who worked as a senior official for the Asia Foundation, an American development NGO, in Kabul. He had twenty years of experience as an aid worker. He too wanted to talk about the deaths in Qarabagh. "Two hundred villagers are protesting with the dead bodies in Qarabagh," he said. "Villagers are crying and blocking the road for two days. Where are the hearts and minds of these villagers? The two hundred villagers are a casualty. It's not just the physical dead. Let me walk you through Kabul and ask a little child what he thinks of Americans. They are not winning hearts and minds."

Fazel was originally from the village of Miakhel in southern Kabul's Musahi district. In 2006 American Special Forces raided his village. "They killed a sleeping farmer," he said. "They dragged women and held them, they beat four villagers and detained four villagers. From that day Musahi district is not secure. The villagers don't care if the Taliban intrude into villages. After the raid the local Italian commander was killed, two district council members were killed. I am also a council member, but I don't go back much. The district police chief was killed, a local road construction company had its machines burned, and since then every day there is something."

The gap between the people and government was enormous, Fazel said. "Between the people and the international presence it's much more huge, and between the people and the Americans even more, and with the Special Forces much, much more."

When people compared the two evils of the Americans and the Taliban, they chose the lesser evil. "At least people can communicate with the Taliban," he said. "The elders can have influence; they are from the same culture. People are not progovernment or pro-Taliban, but they prefer the Taliban. The government isn't in a position to deliver any services."

The Americans relied on their own a.n.a.lysts, who didn't have in-depth knowledge of the Afghan context, he told me. "Our culture varies from village to village, tribe to tribe, region to region. As an Afghan I am not in a position to have in-depth knowledge; my knowledge will be superficial. Afghans don't trust you, so they won't tell you what's in their hearts and minds. They will say you are doing a great job."

He mocked the notion that the Americans could use Pashtunwali to their advantage. "The Americans are against Pashtunwali," he said. "They are carrying out house raids. Are you Pashtun so that you can do Pashtunwali with Pashtun? Before the war, if you were a foreigner or American, you could go everywhere safely. Today that is not the case. The whole situation is stirred into chaos, and everyone is provoking mistrust. The McChrystal plan is more troops, more casualties, more victims, more civilian dead. The wrong policies, the wrong approaches. If you come at 2 a.m. and kill my father, how will you expect me not to go mad?"

In late June a Rolling Stone magazine profile of General McChrystal revealed the contempt he and his men felt for their civilian counterparts and leaders.h.i.+p. President Obama seized the opportunity to dismiss McChrystal and replace him with General Petraeus. McChrystal had opposed Obama's eighteen-month deadline. He had wanted "to win." Obama merely wanted to "halt the Taliban's momentum." COIN was a long-term strategy and a stable extremist-free Afghanistan was an open-ended commitment, but the president seemed determined to leave as soon as he could. McChrystal and Obama had always been mismatched. Afghanistan policy seemed subordinate to domestic political considerations. The Democrats did not want to appear weak and reinforce the belief that Republicans were stronger on defense, especially as the November elections approached. Petraeus promised to reconsider the restrictions placed on the military meant to reduce civilian casualties. He announced a plan for "local police forces" or local militias. Just before Petraeus made his announcement Afghan President Karzai met with leaders from Kandahar and promised them that he would never agree to the American plan to create more militias.

Local militias had been created before and given different names. Previous attempts to use militias led to cooptation by the Taliban and other abuses. The new militias would not receive any training. The plan risked further destabilizing Afghanistan for the sake of expedience. Unlike the Awakening groups that began in the Iraqi Anbar and spread throughout that country, the militias in Afghanistan are not the result of a strategic s.h.i.+ft in the insurgency and are not composed of former insurgents. Afghanistan dose not have anything resembling the Sunni-s.h.i.+te divide and inter-Sunni conflict with al Qaeda that led insurgents in Iraq to temporarily ally with the Americans. In Afghanistan the creation of more militias can lead to a return to the chaos of the post-Soviet withdrawal. Decentralization is a good idea on the political level but not when it comes to security and the state's monopoly on violence. Creating militias means choosing sides in local tribal and inter-ethnic conflicts. According to one Afghan Army brigade commander in Helmand: "A militia empowers a man, an Army and Police force protect a people and empower a nation." Senior Afghan security officials worried that so-called local defense forces were the first step towards the return of the regionalism and warlordism that tore the country a part in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal. After 1989 small, local militias continued to fight against the central government. After the government was overthrown larger militias fought between themselves for control of Kabul. In a country torn by fighting, the Americans thought that more fighting was the solution. Meanwhile as Petraeus settled in the governor of Marja in Helmand was fired only months after the Americans helped install him.

With Petraeus, Obama had appointed the one general with the clout to ask for more troops and more time, but also the one sufficiently respected by all parties to be able to declare Afghanistan a lost cause. The Americans had won in Afghanistan when it was merely a punishment campaign. Once they lingered following the flight of bin Laden they began to flounder. And when they turned it into a war against the Taliban, an indigenous movement, they lost.

EPILOGUE.

The New Iraq?

IT WAS IN THE SPRING OF 2009 THAT I BEGAN TO REALIZE THAT THINGS were changing in Iraq. The civil war was over. There was no group that could overthrow the government. The Iraqi Security Forces had monopolized power, even if it wasn't pretty. I felt this most intensely one day when I was driving down Baghdad's Saadun Street with Captain Salim from Washash and a couple of friends. Salim was dressed in civilian clothes, with a pistol tucked under his s.h.i.+rt. A man in a black sedan tried to cut us off, but my friend behind the wheel aggressively sped up and prevented him from doing so. A war of angry faces and waving hands ensued until we were stopped in traffic just before Tahrir circle, at a checkpoint manned by armed men. The driver of the sedan emerged and blocked our path. He was tall, with thick shoulders, a big belly, and a mustache-the Iraqi security look. He had a shaved head and a pistol on his waist. He demanded that we get out of the car. Salim told him to leave us alone, that he was an officer. Where was he an officer? the bald man insisted.

"I'm with a very dangerous ministry," warned Salim, "you don't want to know."

As armed guards looked on, they stood shouting at each other-each demanding to see the other's ID cards and each refusing, not knowing who was, in fact, more powerful. As I sat in the car, I was getting more and more nervous. But after ten tense minutes they embraced and kissed. It turned out they knew each other. This was fortunate, because the bald man was an officer with the puissant Office of the Prime Minister, and he trumped Salim, who was a mere army officer. A friend later commented that the standoff reminded him of Iraq under Saddam, when a plethora of security agencies competed with one another.

Six years after the fall of Baghdad, it felt as if the Iraqis were occupying Iraq. Roads were no longer blocked by aggressive American troops but by aggressive Iraqi Security Forces in military, police, or civilian attire, waving their weapons, shouting. They were just as intimidating as their U.S. counterparts. They manned ubiquitous checkpoints throughout the city, stopping cars, searching them. They had brought a measure of security to the war-torn capital, but the price was a heavily militarized society. Even if the overt sectarianism of the security forces had been tempered-they no longer slaughtered Sunnis-their s.h.i.+te ident.i.ty was apparent and made Sunnis who were stopped at checkpoints nervous.

On a different day I was driving with a friend in a car that belonged to a third friend of ours. We were stopped at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint. The policeman asked for the car's registration. When my friend told him that it was not in his name, the policeman became hostile. He demanded my friend's ID. He read his name out loud, "Ha.s.sanein," an obviously s.h.i.+te name, and his demeanor changed. He smiled and waved us on our way. When I visited government buildings and police stations, the walls were often festooned with posters of Hussein, a clear sign that they were dominated by s.h.i.+tes. On the concrete barriers outside the National a.s.sembly, there was a large mural of s.h.i.+te pilgrims marching to Karbala. These displays created a sense among Sunnis that the state and its security forces were s.h.i.+te, that they did not belong.

Not that the Americans had withdrawn. One friend working with the American military in Baghdad's Yarmuk and Qadisiya districts told me he knew of twenty or twenty-five innocent Iraqis who had been killed by U.S. Special Forces. One old man approached his door when he heard American soldiers coming so that he could open it for them. He was shot in the head. Shots to the head or shots to the chest were common at the slightest provocation, my friend complained.

According to the Baghdad morgue, every day there were ten to fifteen political murders in Baghdad alone, but this was far lower than the hundreds it received every day in 2006, when Iraqi women had to search through disfigured corpses to find their husbands and sons. But if the levels of violence had gone down, many still had not recovered. "During the last years we faced death many times," a doctor from Sadr City told me. "We became numb. We don't have feelings anymore."

But now it was possible to talk about post-American Iraq. And there were many worrying signs. "It will be like the Republican Guard," one American official told me. "[Maliki] has an extralegal counterterrorism force that answers to him." Maliki had empowered the Office of the Prime Minister and placed under its command thousands of elite soldiers capable of operating without American military or logistical support. Trained by American special operators, they were dominated by s.h.i.+tes but loyal to Maliki, not the inst.i.tution. Like their American trainers, they justified their above-the-law status with the mantra of counterterrorism; when they operated, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries were never informed. Sunnis and Kurds complained to the Americans that Maliki had become the new Saddam of the s.h.i.+tes.

The random and indiscriminate violence had subsided. This was most evident in the conspicuous displays of wealth. Baghdad's roads were full of H3 Hummers and other expensive and large vehicles that cost tens of thousands of dollars in cash. New expensive restaurants catered to a new elite, or one that was in hiding. The girls in Baghdad's universities were dressing more fas.h.i.+onably than ever before, and young men were adopting the fas.h.i.+on trends of Lebanon. For years this would have been impossible to see. Anybody with any money would have been a target for kidnappers. Women immodestly dressed could have been killed. Men in clear Western fas.h.i.+ons could have been beaten. Bars were back open, which was at least a sign that vigilante extremists had stopped blowing them up. Playgrounds were full of children, young men played soccer in new fields, people were no longer afraid to leave their houses. But none of it felt completely real.

One night I strolled along Abu Nawas Street with my friend Hussein. Couples walked by the river, children played. Nothing special there, no great achievement in returning normalcy and stability to a place that had both before America took them away, but still hard to get used to after the past few years of occupation, civil war, and terror. Hussein told me his children played games where they lay improvised explosive devices against each other, to blow each other up. He pointed to the security patrols that went by in the park. "All this is a lie," he gestured at the people. "If it was safe they wouldn't need a security patrol." Al Qaeda and other Sunni militias were just lying dormant, he said, as was the Mahdi Army. I expressed skepticism. He stopped a couple walking by. "Excuse me," he said. "My friend is a journalist. Do you feel safe now?" The young man did not hesitate: he said no and kept on walking.

The Americans rated the Iraqi National Police "the most improved security force," according to a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. "It used to be a death squad," he said. "Now the worst officers have been fired or transferred to where they can do no harm." But even if the overt sectarianism had receded, it was still there. I met up with Captain Adil from the INPs in Dora. After Adil refused to arrest Sunnis without warrants, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim had transferred him north to Mosul, a much more dangerous a.s.signment. Adil was then accused of stealing cars and held in a secret prison on the second floor of the Interior Ministry's Internal Affairs Committee office. He told me he had been framed and that his accuser was a Mahdi Army commander in Abu Ds.h.i.+r.

Twenty-seven people were held in a small cell he described as three meters by two meters in size. They slept standing up. All the other men were Sunni. The torture started at midnight. "I was handcuffed and blindfolded and beaten like in movies," he told me. He was placed under a cold shower for many hours. A policeman named Gafar, who worked with the Mahdi Army in Dora and knew Adil, beat him so badly he urinated blood. "When Americans came they would make us shut up or threaten us," he said. "When they beat me they said, 'Why do you hate the Mahdi Army?' I said, 'Why are you asking me this? It's not about cars.' 'You are a collaborator,' they said. 'You worked with the Americans against the Mahdi Army, you know why you are here.'" Adil's fellow prisoners were there without their families' knowledge. They cried and wailed at night, he said, and the prisoners could hear s.h.i.+te religious songs on their jailers' cellphones. After twenty-two days, his captors demanded twenty thousand dollars for his release, but he negotiated it down to seven thousand, which his brother-in-law handed to a police captain outside a restaurant.

Adil resigned after he was released. "I served my country," he told me, but now he felt betrayed. He still supported Maliki, though. "He is a real nationalist," he told me. "Everybody likes him." He was very pleased with Maliki's moves to include former Baathists in the government. "Nuri al-Maliki is the best leader I saw in my life," he said. "He doesn't know about this prison. The Americans don't know."

Adil wasn't the only person I knew who was feeling punished by the new order. In late 2008, two weeks after the Americans handed authority over Dora's Awakening groups to the Iraqi National Police, Osama's comrade Abu Ya.s.ser was arrested by the INPs. Osama told me that Abu Ya.s.ser was taken to General Karim's headquarters, hung from his arms, and tortured. To end the torture he confessed to murders he hadn't committed but wisely confessed to killing people who were still alive. Then he was moved to the INP prison in Kadhimiya. He had already paid twenty thousand dollars, Osama told me. "They can't release him without money-everything costs money." Abu Ya.s.ser was worried that Al Qaeda men in prison with him would find out that he was an Awakening group member and kill him.

Soon after, Osama and Abu Ya.s.ser's fellow comrade Abu Salih arranged a lunch for Eid. He invited locals, including the local American unit. Abu Salih had become famous for helping many s.h.i.+te families come back and protecting them. The head of the Baghdad Operations Command, Abud Qanbar, came to shake his hand, and it was shown on Iraqi TV. But after lunch the Americans left, and a different American unit showed up and arrested him. He was taken to the major crimes unit of the Iraqi police and accused of terrorism. He too was tortured and hung by his arms, and had trouble walking afterward. Abu Salih also paid about twenty thousand dollars, Osama said, and his family expected him to be released when more money was paid.

"They torture and wait for them to confess; they don't use evidence," Osama said. At least eight other men I knew from Osama's group had been arrested since the INPs took over. His young deputy Hussein had managed to abscond safely. There was also a warrant out for Osama, and he could not return to Dora to visit his parents. Abu Yusef-Osama's former ally-had switched allegiances and joined with Muhammad Kashkul, Osama's old nemesis. But Kashkul was arrested by the Americans and taken to the prison at Camp Bucca. Abu Yusef fled before he could be arrested. Now a fat man called Abu Suleiman was in charge of Osama's old area. "He's not a good guy," Osama said. He felt betrayed. "The Americans were only with us when they needed us," he said. He called the Americans when Abu Ya.s.ser was first arrested, but they told him it was an Iraqi affair and that they couldn't do anything for him. "The SOI [Sons of Iraq] was never supposed to be an amnesty program," one American Emba.s.sy official in Baghdad told me defensively when I recounted this story to him.

The British special operators Osama and some of his men worked with also rotated units. "The new guys were a.s.sholes," he said. They warned Abu Ya.s.ser that the Americans would arrest him if he did not help them arrest Al Qaeda men. In his one year working with the British, Abu Ya.s.ser helped them arrest several senior Al Qaeda men, including an explosives expert called Abu Maryam. The British gave sources one hundred dollars per visit, but Osama refused to take their money. "I said I am not a source, I'm working for my country," he told me.

Dora had changed dramatically since Osama and I had toured its devastation in 2007. I got an introduction to the new Dora with Adil Adnan, a round man with a gray mustache, and his son Maher. For the past five years Adnan had been the Education Ministry's supervisor for seventy-six schools in southern Baghdad. Before that he had been a school princ.i.p.al for twenty-four years. He drove me down Dora's Masafi Street. "This street, you couldn't drive on it," he said. "It was empty. The concrete barriers helped a lot, even if it was annoying."

Adnan was originally from Arab Jubur. "I didn't visit for three years because it was unsafe," he said. "The Awakening saved the area." Adnan took me to his house in Dora's Jumhuriya area. He had a green yard and a small garden under a skylight in his living room, which he proudly told me was in a Spanish style. "In 2005 the resistance got strong here," Adnan said. "Then Americans brought random groups to run the government in 2006 and 2007." That's when sectarianism started in the Education Ministry. Adnan knew at least five s.h.i.+te and Sunni school princ.i.p.als who were killed and twenty or twenty-five teachers who were killed, including a Christian physical education teacher. Militias came into schools and ordered teachers to give certain students good grades. Many children whose parents were wealthy were kidnapped.

In 2006 Maher was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army. "They took me to the Kadhimein Husseiniya and beat me with pistols," Maher told me. The cleric interrogated him. They told him he had killed Imam Hussein. Maher protested that his father was Sunni but his mother was s.h.i.+te. They called him a tali (lamb), as the Mahdi Army refers to victims about to be executed. Maher asked for a gla.s.s of water. "What do you think this is?" they taunted. "The Sheraton?" They put him in the trunk of the car and drove him to be executed, but he kicked it open and managed to run away.

"There was no sectarianism before," Adnan recalled, but now "there are still bad people talking about sectarianism. Even in the worst times I had seven s.h.i.+te headmasters who stayed in Dora. Some were transferred so s.h.i.+tes took salaries to Sunnis and Sunnis took salaries to s.h.i.+tes. Sunni teachers from elsewhere would come, and I would give them jobs."

Adnan had a princ.i.p.al's impartiality and viewed all sides in the conflict as responsible. "Who was killing if everybody says it wasn't me?" he asked dismissively. "The Awakening, the police, the Mahdi Army-all say it wasn't me." Then there was a change in the American behavior. "The Americans got better, they started to know the area, they spread out more, had more patrols." Unlike most Iraqis I met, Adnan wasn't worried about the impending American withdrawal. "Let the Americans leave," he said. "It's the same thing."

Maher drove me around the neighborhood. He pointed to a young girl. "Al Qaeda killed her father and brother," he told me. Not far away some s.h.i.+tes had returned and put up the religious flags traditional s.h.i.+tes raise above their homes. Some people viewed it as a provocation and threw a concussion bomb at the house.

On a different day I met Maher again, and we drove to Arab Jubur, where his family originally hailed from. The banks of the Tigris, an idyllic rural area, had been the scene of some of the worst Al Qaeda violence of the war. We pa.s.sed empty fields where Al Qaeda used to dump the bodies of s.h.i.+tes they captured on the highway. "They would take whole Kia buses full of people," he said. "Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigade, the Army of the Mujahideen, Al Qaeda, were all here." There were numerous checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers and Awakening men every few hundred meters. We drove past fields from where Al Qaeda had launched an attack on Abu Ds.h.i.+r. The road was scarred by IED craters that had been filled with dirt. On our left was the bank of the Tigris. Maher pointed to destroyed houses on the side of the road. "This one was Al Qaeda," he said. "This one was a slaughterer." Many homes had been destroyed by American airstrikes during the surge. The violence had destroyed the farms and roads. Most people in the area were farmers, and earning a living was much harder now. There were no services, no drinking water, no clinic.

In the schoolyard I found an eighteen-year-old boy watching younger children playing. In 2008 he lost his hand when an IED went off. His brother had lost a leg from an IED in a different incident. On the road I found a small boy on his way to school, leaning on a crutch. He was missing an arm and had a prosthetic leg. One day in 2008 he was tending his sheep when an IED went off. On the side of the road a man called Sami Adnan stood by his hardware. Like many, he had fled the area when the situation was at its worst. "The Americans used to bomb randomly every day, and there were terrorists," he said. His house was burned and destroyed when he was away, but he didn't know who was responsible. He attributed the improved security to the Awakening men. "Even the Americans got better after the terrorists left," he said.

At a checkpoint I spoke with two Awakening men wearing blue uniforms. They had joined the Awakening a year and a half earlier to protect their area, they told me. Their salaries were two months late. "When the Americans were here, we got salaries every fifteen days," one of them said. Until now none of them had joined the ISF, though they had all applied. "It's only promises," they said. As we left Maher told me that both men were former members of the Army of the Mujahideen.

A local boy got in our car and directed us to the home of the Awakening boss, Amer Abdallah Khalal al-Rabia, of the Jubur tribe. "It became normal to see dead bodies here on the side of the road," the boy said as we drove. We turned off the road and drove several hundred meters through dense foliage and palm trees.

Amer was not home, but we met his twenty-five-year-old brother, Tahsin, who had joined the Awakening in 2007. He had been one of the first to join in all of southern Baghdad, he told me. In May 2007 he went to Mahmudiya to give the Americans information about Al Qaeda. His family had battled Al Qaeda even before the Awakening groups were formed, and Al Qaeda had killed three of his brothers. Another brother was killed after they established the Awakening group. In the early days of the occupation Islamist militants killed their tribe's sheikh, Khalid Dawud al-Rabia. "They accused him of collaborating and working with Chalabi," Tahsin told me, "but he was trying to open a police station here, and he wasn't working with Chalabi. A group of men belonging to Dr. Fatthi Yusuf Saleh al-Juburi, a local veterinarian, was responsible for the murder." Dr. Fatthi was the biggest terrorist in southern Baghdad, Tahsin said; his group distributed papers to schools saying girls can't attend.

Amer finally showed up wearing a loose-fitting suit, with a pistol tucked in his pants. A twenty-four-year veteran of the Iraqi army, he explained that he was responsible for the areas of Zunbaraniya, Uleimiya, and Beijia. Under the Americans he had commanded 629 men, but once authority for the Awakening s.h.i.+fted to the Iraqis, the Iraqi government fired fifty or sixty of his men every month. He now commanded only 490 men, not one of whom had joined the Iraqi Security Forces.

When two of Amer's men captured two Al Qaeda men, they turned them over to General Karim's national police in Dora. But General Karim had Amer's men arrested as well, and they had already spent three months in the serious crimes prison in Dora. "Our relations.h.i.+p with the Iraqi army is not good," Amer said. "They don't respect the Awakening. The Iraqi National Police don't like the Awakening." One month earlier Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of Amer's men because he did not salute them. Now that the Iraqi army paid them, many negative things were happening. Salaries had been reduced. Amer's salary was halved. Now he received the same amount as his men: about three hundred dollars. "The Americans used to come here to pay us," he said. "Now we have to go to the Iraqi army battalion and wait on long lines. Some people wait for two or three days. We are treated with disrespect. For the last two months, there is no salary. It was all false promises. We are targeted by Al Qaeda and we have no protection."

Amer spoke of a new trend: families of slain Al Qaeda men were filing charges against him and Tahsin. "They made fake death certificates," he said. "They said we killed people the Americans killed, and now there is a warrant for me in Baghdad."

Seven hundred and eighty-two families who had fled the area because of Al Qaeda had now returned. One factor limiting returns was the destruction of many homes. Sectarianism remained, but it was now more covert. The Americans were releasing terrorists from imprisonment in Camp Bucca, and there were rumors that the Awakening program would end in June. "Why did terrorism happen?" he asked me. "Because of the vacuum. If they don't put the Awakening men in the Iraqi army or Iraqi police, problems will happen."

"Metrics" to determine "progress" in Iraq have always been difficult to determine. The American surge was meant to give s.p.a.ce for Iraq's politicians to achieve a modic.u.m of reconciliation and progress. This had not happened, but it was an American-imposed standard. How did Iraqis feel about the situation? "The refugees are the best ones to determine the temperature on the ground, the best at keeping the pulse," UN a.s.sistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) head Stefan de Mistura told me. "If they return, the situation is normalizing. If they don't, then there is a reason. They have returned but not in substantial numbers." This was a contrast to other crises where he had worked. "In Kosovo we had two million people return," he said. "We were delighted but overwhelmed." After the January 2009 elections the changes became apparent: "We saw that the city of Baghdad changed its color. There was a cleansing."

Back in Baghdad I went to the Jihad district's Mukhabarat area and met Ibrahim Saleh, also known as Abu Abdallah Hamdani. He was the local Awakening leader there; he was not pleased with Iraq's new course. His area was walled off and the entrance was guarded by INPs and a tense Awakening man who barked at all strangers entering. I drove by a large lake of sewage and garbage, on a dirt road to Ibrahim's large house, which was being built atop a hill. Hundreds of families had fled the area to the Anbar and elsewhere because mortars were falling on their homes. Ibrahim's wife was among the victims of these mortars. The displaced started to return after the Awakening was established.

Ibrahim took charge of 160 men in August 2008 after the INPs arrested his brother Taher, the previous leader. He and his brother joined the Awakening because there were no jobs and because they wanted to help protect the area. "Al Qaeda and the special groups were fighting each other, and the Friendly Forces [as he called the Americans] came to us and asked Taher to protect the area and give information. The Awakening was established here in July 2007." He claimed Taher had a good relations.h.i.+p with the INPs, but one day Taher invited them to lunch, and after they finished eating they arrested him. "He was taken to the Fifth Brigade of INPs. They accused him of murder and stealing. In the beginning they beat him badly. He pa.s.sed out for two days." He was now in prison in the Shaab district. Both Taher and Ibrahim had been in the military before the war.

Ibrahim claimed that both Al Qaeda and s.h.i.+te militias had tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate him. Two weeks before I met him, one of his Awakening men was arrested and beaten until he confessed to murder. An Awakening commander in the nearby Furat district was arrested in October 2008. I told Ibrahim it seemed to me that the Awakening groups were used and disposed of. "This is the reality," he said. "I will be arrested, 100 percent. As soon as they finish with me, they will arrest me." He too felt betrayed. "We were with the government of Iraq and the Americans. The arrests can't happen without the permission of the Americans."

Jihad was a desperate area. Most young men had no jobs, Ibrahim said, and there were a lot of widows. There were many poor people and IDPs who didn't get any compensation. "You have to spend a lot of money to register," he told me. The Americans used to control the area firmly, he said, but since the Status of Forces Agreement took effect in January 2009, the Americans stopped coming around much, and whenever Ibrahim contacted them they told him he should talk to the Iraqi government. Although people started to return after security improved, once the arrests started again some fled anew. "People felt like it was a plan to make us come back and arrest us," he said. "It's only Sunnis being arrested." I met him alongside two members of the local council for Jihad and Furat, which had a total of twenty members. They all believed the Iraqi government was still sectarian and that when the Americans left the Iranians would occupy the country and fighting would resume. Only those loyal to Iran wanted the Americans to leave, they told me. Despite all this, Ibrahim had a positive view of Prime Minister Maliki.

Across Baghdad, I met other Awakening leaders who were experiencing the same frustrations that Ibrahim had. In Adhamiya I met Abu Omar, or Khalil Ibrahim, one of the Awakening leaders in the area. It was the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, the first time I had ever seen a festive mood and celebration in a Sunni part of the country, yet Abu Omar was not in a festive mood himself. I found him chatting with American soldiers across the street from the mosque. When he finished with them, he took me to sit with him on plastic chairs in the square by the mosque. Abu Omar had dark red skin, a bulbous nose, small eyes, and a large belly. As we sat and drank tea, small boys ran around us. One of them, whose father was a slain Awakening fighter, played with a plastic pistol, shooting at us. The main square was adorned with pictures of slain Awakening fighters, including two of Abu Omar's sons. I worried about suicide bombers, since several of Adhamiya's Awakening leaders had been killed by them. And it was a Yemeni suicide bomber who killed one of Abu Omar's sons.

Adhamiya was the last Sunni enclave in eastern Baghdad. "If the Awakening wasn't here, then in twenty years the Iraqi army and U.S. Army wouldn't be able to come in," Abu Omar said proudly, bragging that "this was the third-hottest area in Iraq." He was also proud that Saddam had made his last appearance in his neighborhood. Abu Omar fought the Americans on that day as well. "There were eleven Syrians [foreign fighters], G.o.d have mercy on them," he said. "They were martyred here." I asked him how he could collaborate with his former enemies. "The Americans are leaving, but the Iranians are staying," he told me.

In November 2007 Abu Omar joined the Awakening in his area with thirteen other family members. "Two previous groups tried but failed," he said. "They sat and would watch the killers." Most of the killers were from outside Adhamiya, he said. Abu Omar had been a noncommissioned officer in Iraqi army intelligence, with nineteen years of service. He claimed that after the war he was jobless and sold gasoline on the black market. "We saw the killing and kidnapping," he said, and wanted to put an end to it. The Americans approached them through the Sunni endowment. After an initial confrontation with Al Qaeda, Abu Omar and his men seized the Abu Hanifa Mosque. A comrade called Abu m.u.t.h.ana got on the mosque's loudspeakers and issued a statement to the people of Adhamiya, announcing the establishment of their Awakening group and their aim to rid the area of Al Qaeda. (Abu m.u.t.h.ana had since been arrested by the Iraqi authorities.) After Abu m.u.t.h.ana's statement, Al Qaeda men in nearby buildings opened fire on them, and one of Abu Omar's men was killed. Abu Omar says his men captured many Al Qaeda members and handed them over to the Americans.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Taha, the son-in-law of Ahmad Abdel Ghafur al-Samarai and the deputy of Harith al-Dhari from the a.s.sociation of Muslim Scholars, was now the imam of the Abu Hanifa Mosque. "All bad things come from this mosque," he said, pointing to it. Al Qaeda used to keep prisoners inside it, he said, and one day five IEDs were placed next to the mosque on the street. He did not believe they could have been placed without the cognizance of people in the mosque. The mosque graveyard was an IED factory, he claimed, and his men had found RPGs and explosives in the mosque.

At first Abu Omar's men clashed with the Iraqi army, and he once waged a three-hour gun battle with them. "We don't accept the Iraqi police here," he told me. "They can only come with the army. We don't like them-they're all militias." He too was apprehensive about an American withdrawal, telling me that the civil war would resume. A friend of his called Abu Karar, who was a member of Iraqi intelligence, had joined us at the table. "I disagree with you, Abu Omar," he said. "Nothing would happen if the Americans left." I asked Abu Omar why he did not unite with other Awakening leaders to form a stronger front. "We tried in 2008," he told me. "Awakening leaders couldn't join together because they couldn't agree among themselves."

This failure to unite would become painfully obvious on March 28, 2009, when clashes erupted in Baghdad's Fadhil district after the Iraqi army arrested Adil al-Mashhadani, the head of the local Awakening group. Mashhadani's men staged a two-day uprising, and the U.S. Army ended up rescuing its Iraqi counterparts. The clashes provoked speculation that the surge in American troops, to which the dominant narrative attributed the drop in violence, was unraveling or that the civil war might restart. I had been hearing about Mashhadani from s.h.i.+tes since 2007. Supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, in particular, were upset that someone like Mashhadani-who, they believed, used to slaughter s.h.i.+te civilians-had been empowered by the Americans. One U.S. national security official told me that the Americans had held information on Mashhadani for years but considered him one of the first insurgents to see which way the wind was blowing. They had wanted him arrested at one point, but the Iraqi army was not ready yet. The official had been concerned that other Awakening groups would rise up; he was relieved to see that none did.

In fact, the ill-fated uprising in Fadhil was best seen as confirmation that the civil war between Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes was over and could not begin again-not because of any reconciliation process or political settlement, neither of which had happened, but because the s.h.i.+te victory was definitive and the Sunni militias were crushed. The cleansing of Sunnis from much of Baghdad left Sunni insurgents with no sea of people to swim among. s.h.i.+tes had numerical superiority and the growing strength of the state and its security forces, which they dominated, along with the support of the world's only superpower.

Following the clashes between the Supreme Council and the Mahdi Army, and then Prime Minister Maliki's a.s.sault on s.h.i.+te militias, there was no longer a unified s.h.i.+te bloc but instead a central government confident in its victory and eager to a.s.sert its full authority. One Iraq expert from the U.S. Army who worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when s.h.i.+tes realized they had won and Sunnis realized they had lost. Both sides had now come to those realizations. Advocates of the surge hoped that following the drop in violence a political settlement could be reached between Iraq's warring factions. But this wouldn't happen, and it wasn't necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki, could simply continue to expand its power. The more Maliki became a new Saddam, the more popular he became among Iraqis. But he actually had to earn support and provide services, because he answered to the s.h.i.+te majority. And his power was checked by other factions and by an energetic Parliament that controlled the purse strings.

In November 2008 the Americans handed authority over nearly one hundred thousand Awakening group fighters to the Iraqi government. But few were hired. Although in 2008 the Iraqi government agreed to integrate these men into the security forces or government ministries by the end of 2009, it had to push that back until mid-2010. But in April 2010 the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction reported that only 37,041 had been integrated, even though the Iraqi government claimed the number was fifty thousand. But the Iraqi government declares an Awakening man integrated once he has been offered a job, regardless of whether he accepts it.

Senior Awakening leaders and many of their men were systematically arrested. Others were simply removed from their posts and told to go home. It was a quiet and slow process, but one that continued to emasculate the last groups that could compete with the state for authority. There was nothing the Awakening groups could do. As guerrillas and insurgents, they had been effective only when they operated covertly, underground, blending in with a Sunni population that was crushed in a brutal s.h.i.+te-led counterinsurgency campaign, which depopulated Sunni areas. Now the former resistance fighters were publicly known paid guards-their names, addresses, and biometric data possessed by the Americans and Iraqis. They could not return to an underground that had been cleared, so they were cornered. They had failed to unite, and many were on the run. Some had left the country, and others were being tried in court for killing the very Al Qaeda men the Americans had originally wanted them to kill.

The failed uprising in Fadhil was a symptom of the Sunni inability to unite. Although the Awakening groups were a formidable force when they were established, in retrospect it seemed that many of the former insurgent leaders had miscalculated. For the most part they had not been incorporated into the political system or the security forces. They were hated or mocked by members of the Iraqi Security Forces, who had their own nicknames for the men of the Awakening, or Sahwa, in Arabic: they called them Sakhla, meaning "sheep," or Shahwa, meaning "horniness."

"The Sahwa were always going to get screwed," Major Gottlieb told me. "In the fall of 2007, the Interior Ministry began demanding their names, addresses, family members, employment history, etc. from the Americans. To their credit, the units in our sector dragged their feet on providing the information. I suspect that the various, purposefully unsuccessful drives to vet Sahwa for Interior Ministry employment were designed to gather this information. Everyone turned in forms, but no one ever seemed to get hired."

In truth, the Awakening men were not the only ones who found it difficult to get jobs. Everybody in Iraq had this problem. n.o.body could get a job with the security forces unless they were affiliated with a political party, which often also required a family connection. The alternative was to pay a bribe that amounted to several months' salary. But former s.h.i.+te militiamen had much less trouble integrating into the security forces than their Sunni counterparts.

A new, s.h.i.+te-dominated order was being established in Iraq. The cleansing of Sunnis had sufficiently weakened enemies of the s.h.i.+te state, and Sunni civilians needed not fear as long as they accepted the new order. s.h.i.+tes had nearly succeeded in clearing Sunni areas from future threats. The occasional Al Qaeda-inspired suicide attack could kill ma.s.ses of civilians, but it had no strategic impact. The drop in violence was complex and primarily a symptom of Iraqi dynamics, though the concrete walls built by the Americans and the increased American presence in neighborhoods at a time when the Americans were less aggressive and considered by Iraqis to be the least of all evils were also essential.

The surge strengthened Maliki and his security forces: it neutered the Sunni militias and allowed Maliki to weaken the s.h.i.+te militias. These s.h.i.+te militias were the initial storm troopers of the civil war, the ones who cleansed Sunnis from Baghdad and paved the way for the s.h.i.+te victory, but following that they only stood in the way of Maliki as he consolidated his control. There were still many battles left to be fought in Iraq, and when the Americans departed a new phase of violence and factional fighting would likely begin, but the war between Iraq's Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes appeared to be over.

DESPITE THEIR MANY GRIEVANCES, the Sunni militias were holding their fire. I was curious to discover if the Sadrist militias were similarly conflicted, having been thrashed by Maliki, with American help, in the spring of 2008, during Operation Charge of the Knights. I met up with Muhamad, who worked in the Sadr Current's social affairs group in Shaab. Abul Ha.s.san of the Mustafa Husseiniya, whom I had spent time with in previous years, had been arrested by the Americans with three other men one night in late 2008. Sayyid Jalil now worked in the main Sadrist office in Sadr City. The Shurufi Mosque had shut down after weapons were discovered inside it. Prayer was forbidden. Instead, about five hundred men sat on mats on the street beside it. Iraqi National Police were posted around the men, watching lazily. Sheikh Abdel Karim al-Saedi of the Suwaed tribe from Amara stood before them on a podium. Most of his audience was young. I spoke with Muhamad as the sheikh discussed religion. Muhamad's brother was killed by the Americans in May 2008. Many civilians were killed in Charge of the Knights, he said, and the Americans were still arresting people. Muhamad told me that Maliki was negotiating with Sadrists: if they joined his coalition he would release Mahdi Army prisoners.

Someone stood up and shouted a hossa. "We will keep the Friday prayers that Muhammad Sadr started regardless of what America and Israel or Britain say!" For Sadrists the Friday prayers had once been identified with defying oppression. Now the grievances were more mundane. Sheikh Abdel Karim's sermon was a litany of complaints about inflation, money laundering, immorality, h.o.m.os.e.xuality, alcohol, lack of food, lack of housing, and corruption. Now that security had improved, where were the service improvements? He complained. Where was the large budget people had been promised?

Although I paid little attention to his comment on h.o.m.os.e.xuality at the time, soon after, Sadrist militiamen began brutally slaughtering men suspected of h.o.m.os.e.xuality. One staff member in Sadr City's Chuwader hospital said he saw four corpses of suspected h.o.m.os.e.xuals brought in. One of the bodies was found in a garbage dump while the others were on the streets. Two of them were found with superglue clogging their a.n.u.ses. This happened to many others. He said the victims were tortured to death in the area's garages. In some cases the victims' tribes were said to be complicit in the murders. Sadrist sermons were said to call for the "disciplining" of h.o.m.os.e.xuals. The Mahdi Army's militia activity was frowned upon, but in conservative areas like Sadr City n.o.body would condemn them for killing h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Women with "bad reputations" were also killed, their bodies thrown in garbage dumps.

After Friday prayers ended a man took me to his neighbor's home. The Americans had raided it the night before. The door had been blown up with plastic explosives. All the gla.s.s on the doors and windows was broken. All the furniture was overturned, closets were dumped, items seemed gratuitously broken. Five brothers were arrested. Their relatives complained that the Americans came with a Sudanese translator and an Iraqi informer who wore a mask. The Americans often searched homes in the area, they said, but they had never done this before. This time they ransacked the house and took the family's gold, forty thousand dollars (the brother had just sold his house), cellphones, and the computer's hard drive, and smashed the computer screen.

The next day I went to the Qiba Mosque in Shaab, which I had first visited in March 2004 after the twin Ashura bombings, when I encountered a nascent militia that nearly killed me (see Chapter Two). This time Iraqi soldiers stood guard outside and in the mosque's courtyard. There was a poster of Muqtada al-Sadr's father on the gate. Two brothers, Abu Ali and Abu Riyadh, took care of the mosque and cleaned it. They told me that Sheikh Walid had fled north to Salahaddin. His house was now occupied by IDPs from Diyala, who said they would leave when Sheikh Walid returned. Not far away men were fixing the Sunni Al Haq Mosque as well. Sayyid Nasr of the Sayyid Haidar Husseiniya, along with the head of the local s.h.i.+te Awakening group, had told them eight months earlier to open the Qiba Mosque. Now the Sunni endowment was helping to fix the mosque. The day before about sixty people had attended the Friday prayers, they told me. As I left with my friends I saw that many young men from the area had gathered around the mosque and were looking at us ominously.

The next week I attended Friday prayers in Sadr City. Driving to Martyrs' Square, I saw boys playing billiards and table soccer (Foosball) on the side of road. Men worked in their garages, traffic was heavy-it was not like Friday prayers of the past, when Sadr City's streets were deserted. We drove past a poster honoring Hizballah's slain hero Imad Mughniyeh. I was searched by young men from the Sadrist office who wore badges with the image of Lebanon's Imam Musa Sadr on them, something I had never seen before in Iraq. I walked past an animal market: chickens in cages, sheep being slaughtered, pools of blood collecting by the curb. A large mural of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr stood in the center of a large traffic circle. Thousands of mostly young men sat on mats or even cardboard. The cleric spoke from a podium next to the Sadrist headquarters. The sermon, on s.h.i.+te eschatology, had little to do with politics. The imam spoke about Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr's twenty-five predictions about the arrival of the Mahdi. Infidels would gather against Muslims, the cleric warned. But then he turned to the Status of Forces Agreement. It was permissible to make peace with infidels, he said, but the SOFA took more from Iraq than it gave, and it was more about protecting the Americans than helping the Iraqis. At the end of the sermon he led the crowds in chants of "Go out, Americans," "Yes, Muqtada," and "Yes, hawza," but the chants seemed tepid, almost indifferent, lacking the pa.s.sion of the past.

A local tribal sheikh called Karim al-Muhamadawi told me the thousands of men praying were inactive Mahdi Army members. After prayers we went to his house for a lunch of rotisserie chicken. He had a thick mustache and wore a black dishdasha. The Americans had put Sheikh Karim in charge of one sector of Sadr City and asked him to provide fifty men, who would each get three hundred dollars a month. "We don't call it Awakening here in the City," he said, referring to Sadr City in the abbreviated way its residents do. Instead they called the men night guards. Nine sectors of Sadr City were firmly under government control, with concrete walls surrounding them-together they were known as the Golden Square.

Sheikh Karim's family came to Baghdad from Amara in 1951. In 1961 Abdul Karim Qasim, the prime minister of Iraq, built this area for government employees, Karim told me. He remembered when the fedayeen and different state security bodies stormed into Sadr City in 1999 and killed demonstrators, following the death of Muqtada's father. When the Mahdi Army took control of Sadr City, the area became off-limits to other parties. The Sadrists destroyed the Communist Party headquarters and then the Supreme Council headquarters, and because they didn't let other parties into the area, anything bad that happened there was blamed on the Sadrists. After Charge of the Knights, though, other parties such as Dawa had become active in Sadr City, and the Sadrists lost popularity, Karim told me. But the Sadrists were still the most popular movement in Sadr City.

"Muqtada was popular because of his father, and he was the only one opposed to the Americans," Karim said. "In the beginning the Sadr Current was just and helped the poor," he continued. "Then gangs infiltrated and even Muqtada didn't know. When they heard people were doing bad things in their name, the Sadrists punished them. But the Mahdi Army was not organized; it was a mess. The City is big, and Muqtada was in Najaf and couldn't control it." The men who controlled gas stations and extorted from shops were far from the Mahdi Army, he said. "They were gangs."

The Mahdi Army was still in Sadr City, but it was moribund. After the Iraqi and American armies entered the area, services improved. The gangs were sidelined, and the prices of benzene and cooking gas went down. The Americans built solar-powered street lights, increased electricity, and improved water and sewage. Many people were hired to clear garbage. The Americans handed control of the services to the Iraqi government. "Even Sadrists here voted for Maliki," Karim told me. "People like going out at night without being bothered."

Washash, in western Baghdad, had also improved greatly in the year since I had visited. The concrete walls were still up, but cars could now drive into the market, and the Mahdi Army had been expelled. I met again with Abu Karar, head of the Washash Tribal Council, who had helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army. I asked him if the government was now active in Washash. "We don't have a state," he said. "It was all autonomous, unilateral. We depend on ourselves and our sons." He proudly lifted up his arm and squeezed his own bicep. "If we see anything, we call the army or police, because the state can't enter every area. They protect the entrance and exits. The American army stopped entering Washash." Abu Karar told me that he expected the militias to try to make a comeback. "We want the walls still up. The walls are 60 or 70 percent responsible for the success of the security. Why did we find twenty-seven bodies in Washash? Because they couldn't go out? Now the market is good because there is security. This whole story in Washash is over. The state didn't thank me. They never asked how I pay or feed those eighty young men protecting the streets. Militias call me and threaten me."

Some of the fiercest battles in the civil war occurred in southwestern Baghdad, in areas like Seidiya and Bayaa. The area was now under the control of the local police and the national police. I drove down a road formerly known as the "Street of Death." An Al Qaeda sniper had targeted everyone on this road-women, children, even cats. The Omar Mosque on the main road was one of the only ones that had reopened. Its location made it relatively safe, but it was still guarded by police-and there was a police station next to it, just in case. Some Sunnis were praying there as we pa.s.sed. Nearby was a destroyed house that had belonged to a s.h.i.+te family who were all killed when Al Qaeda blew it up. The Sunni Hamza Mosque in Turath had been converted into an INP station. In Maalif, I drove alongside garbage dumps and sewage ca.n.a.ls. Maalif, possibly the poorest neighborhood in the area, had attracted many IDPs from Abu Ghraib, Haswa, Mahmudiya, Radwaniya, and Amriya. There were so many new students in the local elementary school that caravans were being used as cla.s.srooms. Many IDPs squatted in empty lots alongside vast piles of sewage and trash. Flies swarmed around my face when I stopped to talk to several young men. One of them, Safa Hussein Jumaa, was displaced from Haswa in April 2006 after Al Qaeda attacked his family, he explained. They chose Maalif because it was a cheap area and they had relatives there. They owned their house in Haswa but dared not go back, even to sell it. "We heard people go back and their house gets blown up," he said. Large groups of jobless young men loitered on the sides of Maalif's unpaved roads. Immense piles of garbage separated homes, with lakes and ca.n.a.ls of sewage around them. The Neighborhood Advisory Council estimated that Maalif had grown from fifty thousand people in 2004 to one hundred and fifty thousand in 2009. The Sunni Ali a.s.sajad and Mustafa mosques had both been converted into INP stations. I drove by a garbage dump where some enterprising IDPs had built a home entirely of disposed air-conditioning units. Dozens of them were piled atop one another and in rows to form walls covered by a tarp.

Amriya was harder than ever to get into. The Iraqi army had a.s.sumed more authority; the Awakening men were weaker and more obedient. After the army denied my request to enter, Um Omar-who had been my point person during my years in Iraq for the Sunni humanitarian situation-called a representative and persuaded him to relent. I found her in her office. Security had improved a lot, she said, attributing it to the Awakening men who had joined the Iraqi Security Forces. In Amriya the police were better than the army because of the presence of many Awakening men.

Abul Abed had caused problems for her. "He killed many people after he became head of the Awakening," she told me, and he had personally threatened her, forcing her to move from Amriya to Adil. "We found tens of dead bodies after Abul Abed left," she said. Her priority now was helping orphans. Twenty percent of the displaced families registered in Amriya went back to their homes, and about 20 percent of the area's displaced s.h.i.+tes had returned. But six months before I met her, the house of a s.h.i.+te family that had come back was blown up, she said, and an elderly s.h.i.+te man was killed in a different house. The problems in Amriya started with the displaced persons, she told me. Many were young men without work. "If they took your house, you have endured violence, you don't have a home, you will be violent and listen to anybody who gives you money," she said. "Young men stopped going to school, they are angry, they are promised stuff by a man who gives them a car, money, and weapons. They are still here, though the violence is over."

The army helped returnees a lot, she said, but there were problems with returnees who "returned with force," backed by the army. This was why some of them were killed. "If there was a balance with people returning to Amriya and people leaving Amriya, then there would be less problems," she said.

In July 2009 an internal memorandum written by Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, was leaked. Reese urged the Americans to declare victory and go home: "Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the Baathists, and the s.h.i.+a violent extremists that might have toppled it a year or two ago. Iraq may well collapse into chaos of other causes, but we have made the ISF strong enough for the internal security mission." Since the Status of Forces Agreement was signed with the Iraqis, and the June 30 handover of security to the Iraqis took effect, it was clear to Reese that the Americans were no longer wanted. "Prime Minister (PM) Maliki hailed June 30th as a 'great victory,' implying the victory was over the U.S.," Reese wrote. He worried that the longer the Americans remained, the more likely violence would break out between them and