Aftermath: following the bloodshed of America's wars in the muslim world Part 9

Osama had lost many friends and relatives in the civil war. When we drove past the nearby district of Baya, he pointed to the gas station. "The Baya fuel station is all Mahdi Army," he said. "They killed my uncle here. He didn't accept to leave. Twenty guys came to the house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him, and killed him." The Mahdi Army also targeted men with Sunni names. "I have three friends called Omar," Osama told me, "all killed."

Osama said the Mahdi Army freeze was "bulls.h.i.+t." In the nearby area of Seidiya, he said, "two days ago they blew up the Sunni Ibrahim al-Khalil Mosque. The Mahdi Army is still killing people. Twenty days ago they killed three Sunni civilians who came back because they heard it was safe." The Mahdi Army was Iran, he told me, the Quds Force. "The Mahdi Army is not listening to Muqtada and Muqtada is lying," he said. "The Mahdi Army made Al Qaeda come here to defend people, but then Al Qaeda was worse. The government sucks; you know they are all corrupt. Then after a few months Al Qaeda became corrupt."

Osama had been a translator working with the Americans; then he had moved on to sign lucrative construction and sanitation contracts with the American company KBR. Al Qaeda got wind that he worked as a contractor for the Americans, and he felt threatened. He and a network of friends of his in the neighborhood started acting as sources for the Americans, sometimes riding along in U.S. Army vehicles with their faces masked to point out suspects.

Osama and his men were first contracted by the American military under Lieut. Col. Jim Crider, who commanded the First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry of the Fourth Infantry Brigade Combat Team, First Infantry Division (1-4 Cav), during the surge in 2007 and 2008. They took over the East and West Ras.h.i.+d security districts in January 2007. In May 2007 they took over the northeast sector of East Ras.h.i.+d and attempted to apply the principles of the new counterinsurgency field manual.

"Anyone who was openly s.h.i.+te was already gone by the time we got to Dora," Crider recollected. "We found a few people who were s.h.i.+te but posed as Sunni for their own protection. It was common for our troops to find three military-aged males with no furniture living in a house. That is not good enough evidence to detain them, so we would demand that they produce a legitimate rental contract within seventy-two hours or move out. More often than not, we would revisit the house to find it empty again.

"The government of Iraq back then was very sectarian. They were terrified that Sunnis would take back what they had gained." Crider cited the installation of Dr. Ba.s.sima al-Jadri as head of the government's reconciliation committee as one example. Jadri was a thirty-eight-year-old former senior official in Saddam's military industry ministry, where she had worked on improving Iraq's conventional weapons capacity. Even then she was connected to the Sadrists, and after the war she was in Parliament allied with Muqtada al-Sadr. Her formal relations.h.i.+p with the Sadrists began in 2004, when their opposition to Bremer intensified. They sought her out, and she agreed to advise them, meeting with religious and tribal leaders. She later established a relations.h.i.+p with the Dawa Party and became close to Jaafari and then Maliki. By this time her bodyguards had split off from the Sadrists. She was very suspicious of Sunnis and Americans, believing that neither wanted to allow s.h.i.+tes to rule Iraq. She was very forceful, and when Maliki established his office of the commander in chief, meant to advise him on military matters, Jadri was put in charge of it, in part because of her fierce loyalty to him.

Under her the office developed a fearsome reputation for issuing secret sectarian orders, advising Maliki on military matters and overruling the Defense and Interior Ministries, circ.u.mventing the chain of command to order officers to attack targets. She helped Maliki create his own praetorian guard. Jadri wanted to purge all nonsectarian officers and those not loyal to the ruling s.h.i.+te parties while promoting sectarian officers by removing Sunni names from lists of recruits to the army and police. She viewed all Sunnis as Al Qaeda supporters. When Maliki established a national reconciliation committee, the Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation, Jadri was put in charge of it.

IN ITS FIRST MONTH in Dora the 1-4 Cav was attacked fifty-two times. Sunni militias used deep buried IEDs to destroy American armored vehicles. In response, starting in June 2007 Crider initiated a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week presence in his area. This curtailed Al Qaeda's ability to move about freely. People began to stay outside later into the night.

A fellow officer was reading David Galula's 1964 treatise Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice, which "emphasizes the importance of conducting a census right away," Crider said. The 2-12 Infantry, from whom Crider adopted the idea, called it Operation Close Encounters. "I knew a good idea when I heard one," he said, "so we began to conduct this operation daily in order to map out who lived in our neighborhood, what they thought, and who was not supposed to be there."1 The goal was also "to build a real relations.h.i.+p with the population one family at a time," he would later explain in an article he wrote for Military Review. "We found that while people would not talk to us on the streets, they would often speak freely inside their homes. Since we went to every home, no one felt singled out. Galula points out that a census can serve as a 'basic source of intelligence.' We found that it was a tremendous source of intelligence that gave us an in-depth understanding of how people felt. We came to understand that Al Qaeda in Iraq was supported only by a small minority of the population. We discovered issues around which we could build an alliance based on a relations.h.i.+p of trust and respect. We could shape our talking points, information operations, and psychological operations to have the effect we wanted because we knew our target audience well."

The 1-4 Cav visited every home in the area, talking at length with every family. Using handheld biometric data collection tools, the Americans were able to doc.u.ment who lived in every house and made it difficult for the Al Qaeda men to know who was informing on them. By June and July of 2007, the 1-4 Cav was able to use local sources and terminate Al Qaeda cells that dispatched car bombs and planted IEDs. The removal of these cells allowed for the Awakening men to begin operating in the area.

Although an occupation is always onerous, the 1-4 Cav and other units that implemented COIN did not conduct ma.s.s arrests in which all men were targeted randomly, as had units before 2007. Officers from the 1-4 Cav visited families of arrested men, explaining to them what evidence they had. In August Al Qaeda men from Arab Jubur infiltrated Dora, bringing their families so that they would appear to be internally displaced persons. As the 1-4 Cav cooperated with the American unit in Arab Jubur, they were able to arrest the Al Qaeda men, frustrating the group's attempt to reinvigorate itself.

Crider insists that the twenty-four-hour presence in the neighborhoods produced immediate results, with IEDs and murders dropping off significantly. He also suggested that because his unit was made up of young soldiers who were in Iraq for the first time, they were not enc.u.mbered with the att.i.tude that the Iraqi people were the enemy. "A platoon would go out and do an eight-hour patrol, handing out microgrants, cutting loose wires, talking to Iraqis," Crider said. He was struck at the familiarity his lieutenants developed with the neighborhoods and local families. Using a computer program called Tigernet, they could plot the information on who lived in every house, their job, skills, ability to speak English, and other details into every location on the satellite maps of his area.

Back then the only concrete barriers in Dora were smaller "Jersey" barriers around the Mekanik area. "They didn't stop movement as good as we wanted to," Crider said. "We were trying to get walls as soon as we could. It forces the population to funnel through checkpoints and protects from gunfire. It took three or four months to put up the walls. Dora was the first place in southwest Baghdad that got walls. There was one protest when walls went up by guys we believe were involved in the insurgency. The insurgents hated those walls. Over the course of a few weeks we saw the impact." The farmlands that had been used to smuggle weapons or fighters into his area were now cut off.

In September 2007 there was a murder campaign in Dora, with more than nineteen killings. The first victim was Haji Sattar, a local council member. His killers entered the District Advisory Council in broad daylight and asked for him by name. Then they shot him in the head and walked out. "The murder campaign was an attempt to shake up the neighborhood," Crider said, "They were trying to kill people who they thought were sources for us." It briefly succeeded. Haji Has.h.i.+m, the deputy head of the Ras.h.i.+d district council and a close ally of the Americans, fled for three months. "Sattar's death got Has.h.i.+m shaken," Crider told me. Has.h.i.+m had been collaborating with the Americans since 2003 but had managed to stay alive and stay respected by many people in Dora. "Has.h.i.+m would give us tips: 'Don't drive down this street for a couple of days,'" Crider said.

By July 2007 Crider's men had cultivated thirty-six new local Iraqi sources. "In August the number of detentions skyrocketed, and soon enemy activity fell down," Crider said. The last attack that killed one of his soldiers happened on September 9. "The last IED was September 27. When s.h.i.+tes returned to Dora in early 2008, there was some increase in violence but no killings." Crider's unit arrested more than 250 Al Qaeda suspects, with 80 percent of them sent on to long-term detention, although most never faced any court or due process to establish their guilt.

Nick Cook, a captain serving under Crider in Dora and the neighborhoods south of it, helped set up the first Awakening groups in his areas. "In Dora we were approached by a guy named Zeki, an old source of ours, who wanted to help stand up the SOIs," he told me. They wanted their headquarters set up along the boundary between his troop and the other American troop in Dora. Cook was introduced to Zeki and his partner, who stated emphatically that they had hundreds of fighters ready to take up arms against Al Qaeda. A lot of their members had come from Arab Jubur. As Cook got to know Zeki's group, it became clear that many had relatives living in Dora, and that they wanted to help their families.

At first it seemed that the group was making little difference in Dora. At the beginning of Ramadan in 2007, however, Zeki's group received information that the mosques were going to be attacked by Al Qaeda. They asked permission to set up security. "About two dozen guys in red and black jogging suits took to the streets," he said. No incidents occurred during that time, and the "neighbors seemed happy to see their sons taking to the streets." From then on the Sons of Iraq were a constant presence. Many members of the group told Cook that they had joined resistance groups right after the invasion because they wanted to get the Americans out of Iraq. Later, though, they felt disenfranchised and identified the selfishness of the groups as the cause.

Cook was also the one who first established a relations.h.i.+p with Osama. "Osama came to me in April of 2007," he said. "He had run into me the day before, and I had given him my phone number." The father of one of Osama's friends had been kidnapped that night, so Osama decided to bring his friend to the combat outpost in Mekanik. Cook met with Osama and heard his friend's story. Then he immediately directed a patrol to try to find where the father had been taken. Unfortunately, the search was unsuccessful. But Cook said that Osama never forgot the encounter.

About two weeks later, an IED hit and destroyed a Humvee, killing one soldier in Cook's troop and badly injuring two others. Three days later Osama called Cook and told him he was parked outside a house; inside it, he said, the man responsible for the IED was having lunch. A patrol was sent to investigate immediately. When the troops arrived Osama guided them to the house and pointed out the insurgent. Once the man was brought back to Forward Operating Base Falcon, the unit discovered that he was one of the top-ten "high-value individuals" for a cavalry regiment a little to the south of where Cook was stationed.

From then on, the unit forged a close relations.h.i.+p with Osama and relied on his intelligence. He even helped a patrol surprise a couple of insurgents emplacing an IED in the middle of the night. When Cook and his troops were moved north into Dora, they handed Osama over as a source and friend to the unit that replaced them. But the new unit did not manage the relations.h.i.+p well, and Osama started calling Cook's fire support NCO to tell him how he was tired of working with them. He said he was planning to start the SOI in Mekanik because he hated what Mekanik had become.

At the beginning of August Cook's Tactical Humintelligence Team received a phone call. Approximately sixteen members of Al Qaeda were being held by Osama and his fighters in Mekanik. This was no longer Cook's area of operation, but the unit whose jurisdiction it was said they could not help. So Cook's troop received permission to go and link up with Osama's fighters. They joined forces and later transferred the sixteen men into U.S. custody.

Col. Jeff Peterson commanded the 1-14 Cavalry Squadron, which was attached to the 3-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team. He was in Baghdad from July 2006 until September 2007, operating both in Haifa Street and areas in the neighborhoods of Saha, Mekanik, and Abu Ds.h.i.+r, just south of Dora proper. Peterson worked with the regular police and the national police in East Ras.h.i.+d. "They were over 90 percent s.h.i.+te and infiltrated with Mahdi Army members or at least sympathized with them," he told me. "I had evidence that their leaders.h.i.+p compromised our missions, and I suspected they at least cooperated with the enemy attacking our forces. Some members of the national police were guilty of sectarian violence, and we arrested some officers. The Sunni population was so distrustful of the national police that I built a barrier around the Mekanik neighborhood and didn't allow the national police in the area.

"The security situation improved somewhat. There was significant improvement to the national police as we more effectively partnered with them down to platoon level. Additionally, the commander was replaced and we arrested several officers that we think were the primary source of corruption in the battalion. Over time they became much more competent, professional in their behavior, and successful in their operations. They also began gaining the trust of the local population.

"The biggest challenge I faced was the sectarian nature of the s.h.i.+te-dominated local government structures. They had significant influence over the decisions about resource allocation and controlling essential services like benzene, propane, and kerosene distribution, and medical clinic and school re-sourcing. They gave priority to the s.h.i.+te neighborhoods and neglected the Sunni neighborhoods. This made it very difficult to build legitimacy in the eyes of the Sunnis who were being marginalized by their local government. In general, the s.h.i.+tes, in conjunction with the national police, would attempt to displace Sunnis from their homes and then take physical control of the vacant house. In response, the Sunnis would defend their homes or counterattack into s.h.i.+te areas. I never sensed the Sunnis were trying to expand; it was the s.h.i.+tes that were trying to take control of more area."

Something I was told by Capt. Jim Keirsey, who served in East Ras.h.i.+d between October 2006 and December 2007, confirmed the endemic sectarianism of the Iraqi Security Forces. "A large number of the national police brigade and battalion charged with securing the population of Dora persecuted the population," Keirsey said. "They were often very antagonistic toward the population of Dora. It became a vicious cycle. Extremists within Dora would attack s.h.i.+te residents to drive them out. The national police would execute reprisal detentions or allow s.h.i.+te extremists to attack Sunnis in Dora. Or they would detain Sunnis from Dora outside of the community. Dora Sunni extremists would then seek additional reprisals, perhaps capturing a pa.s.sing taxi driver and beating him near death. Then the national police, enraged, would charge into the mahala en ma.s.se with little fire discipline, terrorizing the populace."

As I walked the desolate streets in December 2007, it was hard to know if things were improving. But with few killings occurring in Dora, the conflict seemed frozen in place. A man and his daughter walked hurriedly by. I asked them why the area was empty. "It's a good neighborhood," they a.s.sured me. "People left because there is no electricity." In another home I found a man shaving a friend. They told me there had not been electricity in the area for a year and a half. The Mahdi Army controlled the electrical station in the area, they explained. "People will come back when electricity comes back," they said. "We're afraid to go out at night." The Mahdi Army fired mortars at this area from the nearby s.h.i.+te neighborhood of Abu Ds.h.i.+r, people told me, and launched attacks from there, engaging Al Qaeda in firefights in Dora. I asked one man why he had not fled like everybody else. "Where will I go?" he asked me. Many s.h.i.+te homes in Dora were burned down, to prevent the owners from ever returning. Poor Sunnis who were expelled from Hurriya and Shaab or other poor s.h.i.+te areas had moved into the homes of better-off s.h.i.+tes who had been expelled from well-to-do Sunni areas such as Dora, Ghazaliya, and Amriya.

Osama ran three hundred Iraqi Security Volunteers but resented the restrictions placed on him by the Americans. In Seidiya, Adhamiya, Amriya, Ghazaliya, and other volatile Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, ISVs were allowed to patrol freely and carry heavy-caliber machine guns. "We use our own guns," Osama told me. "The Americans didn't give us anything." Osama had a contract to provide a certain number of men at ten dollars per day. He was paid every other week, and he paid his men and provided uniforms and whatever else they might need.

"The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," Adam Sperry told me when I visited his office in Forward Operating Base Falcon. A bright twenty-three-year-old who majored in creative writing in college, Sperry was an Army intelligence officer from the Second Squadron, Second Cavalry Regiment. Capt. Travis c.o.x, his colleague, explained to me that at higher levels a lot of money and time was being spent trying to figure out how to transition the ISVs into other jobs. "To a large extent they are former insurgents," c.o.x admitted.

The 2-2 SCR was patrolling Osama's area in Dora when I visited. The unit's Major Garrett had to figure out what to do with all these militiamen. He placed his hopes on vocational training centers that offered instruction in automotive repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, electricity repair, and English. But adults who were part of a militia were not likely to want to abandon their weapons. "At the end of the day they want a legitimate living," Garrett told me. "That's why they're joining the ISVs." I didn't think anybody was working for a paltry ten dollars per day merely for a legitimate living. These were men who had fought the American occupation as well as the s.h.i.+tes of Iraq. They had not done so for profit, as the Americans insisted. "The ideological fight, forget about it," Captain Dehart, the unit's senior intelligence officer, said when I suggested this to him. "We bought into it too much. It's money and power." Peace would come to Iraq "if they just realized they would make more money with us through construction contracts than fighting us."

In Dora the Americans were the government, building electrical power stations because the s.h.i.+te-dominated government didn't care about supplying electricity or other services to Sunnis. The 2-2 SCR was spending thirty-two million dollars on construction contracts signed with Iraqis and on salaries for Sunni militiamen they hired to be ISVs. They spent twelve million dollars alone building walls around neighborhoods. Sperry complained that American counterinsurgency strategy "is to spend millions of dollars and build walls to make Iraqis more divided than they already are." But his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Reineke, felt very strongly about building walls around neighborhoods and didn't care if some people were cut off as a result. He was frustrated that a wall he was paying local contractors to build around Mahala 860 was taking too long. The wall was meant to keep Al Qaeda fighters out and cut off arms smuggling routes. Some locals left outside were upset that they were not being included inside the walls. Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy Iraqis off temporarily, and they distributed "microgrants" of three thousand dollars to all the shop owners in their area.

I WONDERED what would happen when this ma.s.sive influx of American money stopped pouring in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the ruling s.h.i.+tes even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been trying to exterminate until recently? Sunnis they believed had been trying to kill them? The British occupation of Iraq in the early twentieth century was described as "colonialism on the cheap." The British did not spend much money on the occupation, and relied on the use of airpower as an alternative to a large standing army. The British bribed tribes and tried to mold the political system in a way that benefited their local allies and enriched them, turning them into feudal lords. This was nothing compared to the billions of dollars the Americans were throwing into Iraq. Adding up all the men employed by the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the other security branches, the Awakening militiamen, and others working for private security companies that contracted with the American departments of State or Defense, there were more than a million Iraqi men in the security sector. This was more than Saddam had. But for the Americans, spending billions of dollars bribing Iraqis was a pittance compared to how much they spent per year just keeping their military in Iraq or the cost of repairing their damaged vehicles, let alone the cost of injured soldiers. But loyalty that can be purchased is by its nature fickle. Would these maneuvers lead to a real or stable political process in Iraq?

Osama was the English-speaking diplomatic face, but behind him were tough men of the resistance. One, called Salah Nasrallah, or Abu Salih, had dark reddish skin, a sharp nose, and small piercing eyes. The Americans required that each mahala have two ISV bosses, so Osama gave half of his three hundred men to Abu Salih's control. ("We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq," an American Army officer from the area told me.) The day I met Abu Salih he was wearing a baseball cap with the Iraqi flag on it. Turning off Sixtieth Street we walked up to the Batul School for Girls. A soldier with the 2-2 SCR had been shot in the throat and killed in front of this school, presumably by Al Qaeda. Abu Salih explained that the Mahdi Army kidnapped Sunni girls from the school and that during final exams they had attacked it and shot it up, then looted it. Osama blamed the Mahdi Army but added, "When I say Mahdi Army I mean the Iraqi National Police." Abu Salih picked up Korans and other religious books that were strewn about the dusty floors.

A thick muscular man called Amar, or Abu Ya.s.ser, was the other brawn behind the operation. Handsome and jovial, Abu Ya.s.ser wore a green sweats.h.i.+rt and matching sweatpants with a pistol holstered his under arm. "Amar is the real boss," an American Army intelligence officer from the area told me. "That guy's an animal, he's crazy." Osama explained that n.o.body from Mahala 832 knew that he was in charge of the ISVs in the area. "They think Abu Salih and Abu Ya.s.ser are in charge, because my family is still there." He added that they were still arresting Al Qaeda infiltrators from among the ISVs. Osama was trying to arrange for Abu Ya.s.ser to manage his own ISV unit in the nearby Mahala 834, where he actually lived.

Abu Ya.s.ser had worked for the General Security Service until 1993 and then joined the Iraqi military industry. In 2004 he joined the Army of the Mujahideen, a resistance organization operating in Mosul, the Anbar province, and southern Baghdad. Although he claimed to have joined to protect Sunni areas from the Mahdi Army, in 2004 that s.h.i.+te militia was still cooperating with the Sunni resistance and was not targeting Sunnis. In fact, he had fought the American occupation, operating mostly out of Arab Jubur, he said, where the organization "was young people, mostly to defend the area." He had not resigned from that organization, he added, but decided to work with the Americans and the ISVs "because of Iranians getting more power in Iraq," he told me. "They are occupying Sunni areas. They are the bigger enemy." Like many others, Abu Ya.s.ser admitted that Sunnis had made a strategic blunder by boycotting the Iraqi political process in the early days of the occupation, and Sunni clerics had made a mistake issuing fatwas prohibiting Sunnis from joining the nascent security forces the Americans were creating.

Abu Salih had belonged to the 1920 Revolution Battalions. He had decided to work with his former enemies the Americans and join the ISVs because of the Iraqi government. "It's an Iranian government," he said, "and the people are its victims." A colleague of his, Abu Yusef, averred, "Maliki is Iraqi, but he lived in Iran a long time, he works for them." Referring to Maliki's political party, Abu Salih added, "The Dawa Party is the first enemy of Iraq." Unlike some of his a.s.sociates, Abu Salih did not think it had been a mistake for Sunnis to boycott the security forces. "If Sunnis had joined they would have been killed or fired," he said. Abu Salih admitted that some men from Al Qaeda joined the ISVs so that they could have the ident.i.ty card as protection should they get arrested. If the Iraqi government did not allow the ISVs to join its security forces, "it will be worse than before," he said.

Abu Yusef, who was sitting with Abu Salih, was a former investigator for Saddam's Special Security Service. Like all members of the security forces, he had been fired when former American proconsul Paul Bremer issued an edict dissolving them in May 2003. Many joined the resistance after that, though Abu Yusef denied having done so (but he told me he fought the Mahdi Army and killed many of them). The Mahdi Army killed twenty-seven members of his family, he said, adding that on one day, earlier in 2007, forty-seven Sunni corpses were found next to the nearby Sunni Tawhid Mosque, presumably murdered by the Mahdi Army. He denied being anti-s.h.i.+te, though. His wife was s.h.i.+te, and many of the officers he worked with in the security service were s.h.i.+tes from throughout Iraq.

The Hero House-the sobriquet the Americans gave to Osama's headquarters-was located behind a tall concrete wall that stretched the length of a highway the Americans called Route Senators. The Americans paid Iraqis to build these walls, Osama said. Before they were erected, he said, the Iraqi National Police had fired on the neighborhood from the highway. Now his guards manned a checkpoint at a gap in the wall that allowed vehicles to enter the area. The house belonged to Abu Ya.s.ser's cousin, a doctor living in Britain. It was also surrounded by concrete barriers and manned by men in civilian clothing casually slinging Kalashnikovs. Inside the mostly empty house was a room with mattresses and another with some chairs, a desk, and a large satellite image of Dora that the Americans had given Osama. As we drank tea in the office, one of Osama's sources entered and pointed to a spot on the map where an Al Qaeda agent was residing. The suspected Al Qaeda man was called Walid. "He is harmful to people," Osama told me. "I just want to kill him. Now he is back in the area. His cousins are Al Qaeda also." But he said he would watch him instead, to see who he worked with. The Americans had recently required the ISVs to wear uniforms, and Osama was annoyed that most of his men were still in their civilian attire.

Inside I met Hussein, a lanky twenty-one-year-old wearing a blue tracksuit. He was one of Osama's original partners, though he was from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. He was working as a guard in a local Sunni mosque when the Mahdi Army, backed by the Iraqi National Guard, expelled his family and other Sunnis from the area. They killed his uncle and cousin. His family fled to Arab Jubur, but Al Qaeda pressured him to join them and came to his house looking for him, so his family told them he had gone to Syria, and he started to work with Osama in Dora. "Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are the same thing," he told me, "two faces of the same coin."

Hussein was the fourth-ranking member of Osama's unit, after Abu Yusef and Abu Salih. He took me with him as he drove through the area to inspect the twenty checkpoints their men were maintaining. We drove through the mostly deserted neighborhood, with its shattered homes. Most of the graffiti on the walls had been painted over, but some still said, "Long Live the Mujahideen." On various corners two or three men stood or sat with their Kalashnikovs. "Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army destroyed a lot here," Hussein said as we surveyed the devastation, but he added that "Al Qaeda destroyed the area, not the Mahdi Army." We were stopped at the checkpoints, and though some of the men recognized Hussein, many cautiously gripped their weapons and questioned us. "We're a patrol from the central headquarters," Hussein told them. Some of the men were teenagers, others were in their fifties. One of them covered his face menacingly with a red checkered scarf. The local market, previously shut down, was partially reopened, and as ISV checkpoints were being established some of the Sunnis who had fled the area, though none of the s.h.i.+tes or Christians, were returning. "Clean s.h.i.+tes can come back," Osama told me. While I was there a Sunni family from the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, arrived at the checkpoint. They hoped to stay in one of the homes in the area. The ISV men questioned them and demanded copies of the ident.i.ty cards of all the people who would live in the house. "Anyone else I will arrest," said Osama. A woman approached the gate to ask for information about men who had been arrested, but the guards could not help her.

One of the men prepared lunch for us: mushy cooked tomatoes; mushy fried potatoes; and kibbe, ground meat fried in dough. Osama called an American sergeant from a nearby base. "Your guys detained this guy," he said. "He is seventy years old. What's wrong with this guy, is he bad? Oh, he's fifty? They told me he was very old. If you know for sure he is Al Qaeda, then f.u.c.k him." Then he asked about a series of men who were detained and warned about an Iraqi who worked with the Americans. "He is a bad guy," he said. "He threatens people."

Osama received a phone call from representatives of the Awakening Council boss Ahmad Abu Risha in Ramadi, the brother of the slain Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, summoning him and his men to a meeting. He was very excited and hoped to discuss what would happen in six months, when the ISV program was scheduled to end. He wanted the Awakening groups and the ISVs to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, "because the Iraqi government doesn't do s.h.i.+t." If the U.S. Army left or once more took to remaining within their FOBs, he said, violence in the area would return.

Haji Has.h.i.+m was the deputy head of the Ras.h.i.+d council who had collaborated with Crider. In 2003 Has.h.i.+m and others volunteered to set up the local council. Before the war he had been in the Ministry of Education. "I spoke in mosques," he said, "and said we have to work with the Americans. Dora became very bad in 2005. We were considered collaborators." Al Qaeda came in, he said, and then it became dominated by locals and was joined by other resistance groups. "Then sectarianism started," he said. "Al Qaeda killed s.h.i.+tes, the Mahdi Army and Badr killed Sunnis and former officers. Things got worse after Samarra. Most police were supporters of the Mahdi Army, and Dora was a target for the Mahdi Army. In s.h.i.+te mosques they spoke out against Dora. Many Sunnis were killed in Abu Ds.h.i.+r."

The people of Dora collected their government-provided propane tanks in Abu Ds.h.i.+r. In 2006 "Sunni agents from here went there to get them, and four were killed," he told me. "After that n.o.body could get propane, so people had to use wood to cook. So American patrols went to collect the propane, and now it's better, but there are still lingering fears about being attacked." Has.h.i.+m was shot in the head once when he left the house to collect his propane. The Americans took him to the hospital in the Green Zone, but he lost his vision in one eye.

"I have seen dogs eating dead bodies," Has.h.i.+m told me. "Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq killed any s.h.i.+te, any government employee, and s.h.i.+tes killed any Sunni. The Iraqi National Police used to shoot randomly when they were attacked. The leaders.h.i.+p of the Iraqi Security Forces was sectarian at the time. They made random arrests, would shoot randomly and kill innocent people. The Rafidein Brigade of the INPs made random arrests. They took sixty-eight people from shops, and after that we found their bodies in Abu Ds.h.i.+r. Police shot at electrical stations so people wouldn't have power."

One especially vindictive unit came through with PKCs (heavy-caliber machine guns) and shot up the area the day before they were replaced. "They had a strong hate," Has.h.i.+m explained. "Anybody who crossed the street was shot. Only cats crossed the street." He attributed the improved security to the Americans. "One of the most important things they did was walling off the areas," he said. "It's true it bothered people, but it worked." The Americans also helped release innocent Sunnis who had been arrested by the Rafidein Brigade.

A new commander took over the Rafidein Brigade and improved relations with the people, Has.h.i.+m told me. But the commander was later replaced by another who "did bad things, made random arrests, he made problems instead of solving them." This one was later punished and transferred to the traffic police. "Then the Wolf Brigade came in 2007," said Has.h.i.+m. "They arrested people in mosques right away, tortured people. Boys from the area fought the Wolf Brigade. I asked them why they were fighting. They said, 'It's better to die fighting than to end up arrested with holes drilled in our bodies.'"

ONE DAY I ACCOMPANIED men from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, a unit based in the nearby FOB Falcon, on a mission as they met up with Osama and his men as well as Hamid, or Abu Abdel Rahman, head of the Hadhir Neighborhood Advisory Council (NAC). Hamid had been in the Iraqi army for twenty-two years. Now he represented the six mahalas in his area. The Americans were establis.h.i.+ng NACs and DACs (District Advisory Councils), inst.i.tutions separate from the Iraqi government and funded by the U.S. military. Three Sunnis of the ten members in Hamid's council had been a.s.sa.s.sinated. Five others had fled the area to avoid death. Hamid explained that because Sunnis had boycotted the elections for the provincial councils, s.h.i.+tes dominated them and were trying to appoint s.h.i.+tes to the local councils. The members of the Baghdad provincial council were mostly from s.h.i.+te neighborhoods such as Sadr City, Shaab, and Karada, he said. The NACs and DACs were an American attempt to compensate for the electoral disparities, though as with the Awakening and the ISVs, they were creating separate independent inst.i.tutions that did not answer to the central Iraqi government. NACs and DACs were loosely tied, and though they were only meant to "advise" the Americans, the goal was to get them to "implement." Hamid knew Osama and had helped him receive the ISV contract.

The Americans met up with Hamid, Osama, Abu Salih, Abu Ya.s.ser, and Abu Yusef at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint and walked down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by their Stryker armored vehicles. The Tawhid's Sheikh Abu Muhammad wore a green dishdasha with a brown vest. An older, bearded man, he had thick gla.s.ses and wore a white cap, topped by a red scarf. Shawn Spainhour, a civil affairs officer with the unit, asked the sheikh what help he needed. The mosque's generator had been shot up by armed s.h.i.+tes, and the sheikh asked for three thousand dollars to fix it. Spainhour took notes. "I probably can do that," he said. The sheikh also asked for a NAC to be set up in his area, "so it will see our problems." Two bearded middle-aged men in sweaters walked up to the Americans in the mosque and gave them a tip on a Mahdi Army suspect. The soldiers quickly got back into the Strykers, as did Hamid, Osama, and his men, and the Stryker vehicles drove up to a street in Mahala 830, where they found a group of young men with electrical cables. Some of the men ran away when the Americans showed up. Those who stayed were forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wore flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit guarded them and took their pictures one by one. "Somebody move!" shouted one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!" Another one pushed a prisoner against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunted him. Unlike in the nearby s.h.i.+te area of Abu Ds.h.i.+r, in majority-Sunni Mekanik it was standard practice to arrest all "military-age males" for "processing."

As other elements of the American unit raided nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the unit came up to me, thinking I was the Americans' translator, and explained that the men in the courtyard were Sunnis and that some belonged to the Awakening. Some of the men had been involved in tipping off the Americans to the Mahdi Army suspect down the block. I tried to tell the soldiers, but the electrical wires on the ground caused the Americans to think the men had been trying to lay an IED, so they blindfolded and handcuffed all eleven of them. "If an IED is on the ground, we arrest everybody in a hundred-meter radius," I was told, though here it was only an electrical cable, and most likely the men had been trying to connect a house to a generator. In the house the two tipsters had identified, the soldiers found Mahdi Army "propaganda" and arrested several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or "Sabrin the Cruel," an alleged Mahdi Army leader.

The Strykers took the prisoners to the nearby COP Blackfoot. Inside, Hamid and the Sahwa men drank sodas and ate m.u.f.fins. Osama and Abu Salih shook hands with the Americans and thanked them for arresting Sabrin, who they said had a lot of blood on his hands. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided were released, three of them being taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructed them to list who did what, what they did, where, when, and how. Abu Salih walked by and quickly told the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in some attack. None of the Americans noticed this coaching. Osama met with a sergeant from the unit and asked him if he could put a PKC on top of his pickup truck. "No," the sergeant said. "But we can hide it," Osama pleaded. Sabrin was soon moved to a "detainee holding facility" at FOB Prosperity. "We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad Mahdi Army guy," said an American Army intelligence officer. "He was involved in EJKs," or extra-judicial killings, a euphemism for murders.

Osama's main compet.i.tion for contracts with the Americans was another local Sunni power broker called Muhammad Kashkul, or Abu Tariq. A former bodyguard for Saddam, he was now a contractor too. "He knows that when security is stabilized contracts will come in," Captain c.o.x said, explaining Kashkul's motivation for collaborating with the Americans. In one meeting with the Americans, Kashkul bragged that while working as a bodyguard for Saddam he had slept with 472 women. "Is that a lot in America?" he asked. Kashkul and Osama tried to play different American units against one another, but c.o.x helped arrange a meeting where the two were forced to work out what he described as "their turf war." Osama was not convinced. "Coalition forces like Kashkul, so I have to be his friend," he said. "They told me I have no choice. I have to be his friend. For two years they were looking for him. Showing his picture. Then they arrested him, took him to Blackfoot, and released him after two hours and said, 'He is working with us.'"

The Americans were obsessed with the concept of "reconciliation," which c.o.x defined as "Agree to quit fighting and talk about problems and get U.S. contracts."

"Osama hates reconciliation," Sperry told me. "He doesn't feel that he has anything to reconcile. He hates that these other guys get contracts." Osama had recently lost face when he accidentally discharged his Glock pistol and nearly hit an American soldier while in a meeting. Some of his men were proving unruly as well. "A couple of Osama's guys were caught outside their sector," the officer told me, "so we detained them and brought in the leaders. Abu Salih was really p.i.s.sed." When I was visiting Falcon FOB to discuss the ISVs, a major stuck his head through the door. "Are you tracking that the Heroes beat some guy up?" he asked Captain Dehart. "The Heroes' usefulness is almost over," Captain Dehart grumbled. He defended the reconciliation process. "It's an overt process," he said. "You can't be in the shadows. We take mahalas, the Critical Infrastructure Security guards, the local leaders.h.i.+p, provide us names." As a result, he said, the men with real power in the area emerged from the shadows. "I've heard them tell me, 'I will give you a hundred men, you give them weapons, and you will have no problems.'" But the process they called reconciliation required some community vetting in theory. It seemed that the Americans were turning themselves into a commodity sought after by Iraq's warring factions. The Americans were a way to obtain contracts, influence, weapon licenses, ident.i.ty cards. "They love ID cards," joked one Army intelligence officer.

When Osama drove me home from Dora we stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint near Qadisiya. He noticed a familiar Audi parked on the street and then saw a man he knew as Naseem walking past the soldiers. Naseem was Al Qaeda, he said, and was responsible for many attacks against civilians and the Americans. Osama put his cap on and called a soldier over. The soldier had a green bandanna masking all but his eyes as though he were a bank robber. "That guy is called Naseem, he is with Al Qaeda," Osama said. The soldier seemed annoyed and I was worried that he would arrest us instead. "I'm with the Awakening," Osama said, he showed several badges he had been given by the Americans. The soldier told him to keep going but Osama insisted. "What do you want me to do?" the soldier asked. Osama tried to convince them, but the soldiers were indifferent. Frustrated, he drove away.

Osama's part of Dora, which included Mahalas 830, 832, 834, and 836, was called Hadhir. Though each mahala had its own ISV unit, Osama hoped that eventually all of the Sunni Awakening militias would be united under one leader so that they could attain political power too. We were in Mahala 830. The Mahdi Army used to attack from Mahala 832. Iraqi National Police, who cooperated with the Mahdi Army, would drive up to Sixtieth Street and spray houses with gunfire, Osama told me as we walked by a solitary INP checkpoint. "I want to kill them," he said, "really, but the Americans make us work together." Since his men had been granted legitimacy by the Americans they were taunting the national police, telling them that just days before they were shooting at them.

"There was definitely a link" between the INPs and sectarian forces, Nick Cook told me. "I am not sure how deep it went, but you could tell the INP definitely treated the Sunni neighborhoods with a lot of indifference and disdain. Many times I heard the national police refer to the neighborhood as lived in by dogs or criminals, referring to the residents. To the national police every person was a suspect. I never did see outright prejudice, but when you moved from Mekanik, a Sunni area, to Abu Ds.h.i.+r, a s.h.i.+te area, you definitely saw a change in personality with the national police." Captain T recalled, "I remember several instances of units in predominantly s.h.i.+te areas actually catching [INPs] in the act of planting IEDs."

Lieutenant Colonel Miska was based in Kadhimiya's Forward Operating Base Justice. It had three detention centers in it: the Kadhimiya prison; the Ministry of Justice prison, where the government executed condemned people; and an Iraqi army detention center. Miska worked closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, and at one point he had six brigades' worth of Iraqi National Police or army men working with him. I asked him about the abuses he saw. "The Kadhimiya prison run by the national police was the most notorious," he said. "This was Saddam's former military intelligence facility. Senior members of the national police reportedly tortured, extorted, and killed prisoners, mainly Sunnis. The prison was made to hold about 350 prisoners. They had about 900 there when we first began putting pressure on the NP. At first we would conduct inspections and bring in teams that would write reports. The NP would complain that all the Americans talked about was human rights. They would also do a good job of stonewalling the investigators and making it difficult to gain entrance. We eventually started cycling reporters into the facility and getting front-page stories to embarra.s.s the NP. The prisoner population quickly dwindled as a result."

One of Miska's closest colleagues was an Iraqi army brigade commander who was going after both the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda. As a result, he was put under intense political pressure. Miska accompanied him to numerous meetings with senior Sadrists and other politicians who were trying to get him to back down. But every time he would keep the heat on. The Iraqi commander eventually left Iraq after four attempts on his life, and Mahdi Army hit squads were hunting for his family. "It took me eight months to finally get through the bureaucracy of immigration, UNHCR, and other agencies to help him relocate to the U.S.," Miska said. "Today his family is safe and living much more comfortably than they did in Iraq."

The Iraqi government, it seemed, would come up with every possible excuse not to send help to Dora. "When we would go to the Green Zone and ask ministers and deputy ministers to help out, they would claim that Dora was too dangerous," Captain T said. "We would protest and say that we would take them there to see it themselves and would, of course, protect any government workers or contractors who were working in the area. To them, this was impossible because the area was unsafe!

"It was ridiculous dealing with the Iraqi government. This was particularly clear when we were setting up the Iraqi Security Volunteers as paid security forces in our area. We were attempting to integrate them into the Iraqi security forces, but the government stonewalled this at every turn. They would ask for ridiculously detailed information from the ISVs, which they were, in turn, unwilling to provide to a government they didn't trust. The government would demand that the ISVs meet standards far above what the ISF themselves had to meet.

"Dr. Ba.s.sima al-Jadri was a particular problem in this regard, as she was extremely sectarian. She saw the ISVs as the armed forces for the Sunni political parties. We tried our hardest to make sure that the ISVs were security oriented, not politically motivated. In fact, this led us to deny a small group of low-level informants our sponsors.h.i.+p as ISVs. They turned against us and went 'rogue.' They were sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party. We eventually had to detain several of them to convince them that we would not permit the politicization of our ISVs. Anyway, Ba.s.sima saw the ISVs as a threat to s.h.i.+te domination and would try to throw every possible obstacle in our path against ISV integration into the ISF. And this woman was the [government's] lead on reconciliation!"

Saddam Hussein designed Baghdad with a circle of loyal neighborhoods around it. With its many officers, Seidiya was a place he could count on. But it had become a vital battleground during the civil war. Sunnis and s.h.i.+tes both wanted it, since it opens up into Sunni strongholds like Dora. s.h.i.+tes wanted to block whatever was coming in. It was located between s.h.i.+te-dominated Amil and Sunni-dominated Dora, and it was on the important road that s.h.i.+tes took to go south to Karbala and Najaf. The Mahdi Army rained mortars down from the Baya district and destroyed Sunni mosques. The neighborhood was originally 55 percent Sunni and 45 percent s.h.i.+te, but by the end s.h.i.+tes would have the upper hand. Seidiya went from being a relatively peaceful middle-cla.s.s neighborhood to a deserted and broken wasteland, all under the Americans' watch. Most of the residents had fled, and abandoned homes were used by militiamen and insurgents.

"The s.h.i.+tes were definitely winning," said Captain Noyes, a platoon leader in Seidiya. "They were on the offensive and the local Sunnis were on the defensive, but it was a very violent and contested battle. The s.h.i.+te groups were attempting to kick Sunnis out of Seidiya and move s.h.i.+tes in. The Sunnis were attempting to defend themselves, but some of them had Al Qaeda ties and were targeted by coalition forces, so they were fighting a two-front battle." Most of the murder victims he remembered encountering were Sunni. "Many were killed with a single shot to the head, and signs of torture were on their bodies. The bodies were placed in areas to intimidate locals. Sometimes IEDs were placed under the bodies targeting whoever tried to recover the body. The s.h.i.+tes were more effective and organized. They were part of the government, Ministry of Interior, the IP, and INP working there. Sunnis were isolated."

Noyes lived and worked with the 321 INP, or the Wolf Brigade, which was responsible for Seidiya. "They were extremely sectarian, regularly involved in and committing crimes," he said. "The Wolf Brigade and Iraqi police were an arm of s.h.i.+te extremists, filled with s.h.i.+te militia members. I frequently found the Wolf Brigade involved in outright sectarian activities in cooperation with s.h.i.+te militias. The Iraqi police were so often tied to attacks on coalition forces and locals that it went beyond complacency or incompetence.

"Eventually an Iraqi Army battalion took over Seidiya, but they were still under the INP brigade command responsible for West Ras.h.i.+d. We got 321 INP kicked out over a long period of doc.u.menting and reporting their crimes against the people of Seidiya. Their battalion commander was LTC Haidar. At one point we found him and General Mundher stealing furniture from an abandoned apartment. They claimed it was General Mundher's apartment and they were moving it out."

The Americans arrested more than seventy members of the Wolf Brigade, who had been found expelling Sunnis and moving displaced s.h.i.+tes into their homes. The Wolf Brigade was replaced by the Iraqi army's m.u.t.h.ana Brigade, itself feared by Sunnis, and the m.u.t.h.ana Brigade clashed with the Seidiya Guard, the Awakening Group established by Noyes and his team. "The Seidiya Guard were by far superior to the INP as a counterinsurgency force. Their leaders were much more competent," Noyes observed. "They conducted operations to win the support of the population; the INP did the exact opposite. The Seidiya Guards captured people occasionally. They would then turn them over to ISF or CF. s.h.i.+tes that they handed over to INP were usually released. They understood their legitimacy was on the line, and so they were careful in how they handled people they captured. I encountered only support for the Seidiya Guard with the local populace. However, their relations.h.i.+p with the INP was horrible. They each viewed each other as illegitimate sectarian actors, and probably rightly so. The Seidiya Guard was disbanded after I left, under Iraqi government pressure."

Not everyone was happy about the new militias being created by the Americans, especially the s.h.i.+te-dominated ISF. More a paramilitary force than a team of street cops, the Iraqi National Police resembled the National Guard in the United States, compared with the more local Iraqi police. Both types of police units were dominated by s.h.i.+te supporters or members of the Mahdi Army or Badr militia and had fought in the civil war, often targeting Sunni civilians and cleansing Sunni areas. I accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Reineke of the 2-2 SCR to a meeting at the headquarters of the INP's Seventh Brigade, in the former home of Ali Ha.s.san Majid, the notorious Chemical Ali. It was now a joint security station ( JSS), staffed by Iraqis and Americans. This station was feared by Sunnis, who were often kidnapped by the national police and, if they were lucky, released for ransom. It was rumored to be a Badr militia base for torturing Sunnis.

Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim, the INP brigade commander, sat behind a large wooden desk surrounded by plastic flowers. Behind him was a photograph of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. To his side was a shotgun. Karim controlled three INP battalions and was the senior Iraqi security official in the area. Even the Iraqi army officers in his area were under his authority. Lieut. Col. Jim Crider was partnered with Karim's Third Battalion, Seventh Brigade, or 372. "Every time we went on patrol with them, we got shot at," Crider told me. "Every time we patrolled with national police, we were introducing an irritant" into the Sunni neighborhoods. Sometimes Sunni militiamen would let the Americans pa.s.s, only to blow up the INP vehicles. Although Crider's men at the JSS with Karim always had a list of all the prisoners held there and inspected the jails, Crider admitted that abuses probably still took place outside his men's gaze. Iraqis were relieved when they learned that the Americans, and not the INPs, had detained their sons. "In the context of the surge, our policy was not to turn prisoners over to the INPs," he said. "I remember Karim as very sectarian. I hated being around him. I once brought an Iraqi army commander from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, to our JSS to show him our setup. Karim was furious and brought us all into his office, where he sat and stared at the wall. It was weird, so I got up and left. I could tell he was a sectarian stooge from a long way away. Guys like him are the greatest threat to the stability of Iraq. They push regular Sunnis into a corner and then are surprised when they fight back."

In December 2007 the delegation of Americans led by Reineke was greeted warmly by Karim and his men. Five or six of his officers were with him, all s.h.i.+tes. Reineke acted with exaggerated deference, saying "naam seidi" (yes, sir) repeatedly when addressing Karim. They discussed where they would place checkpoints and conduct joint patrols. Karim sought a.s.surances that the ISV recruits had been properly vetted by local leaders, the Iraqi National Police, and the U.S. Army. Reineke mentioned that General Mustafa, a local ISV leader from Arab Jubur, had requested to open an office at the JSS. Karim grew tense. "The Awakening is a path for these individuals to get recruited by Iraqi Security Forces for jobs in the government," he said. "More than that we don't agree, the government is worried that these groups will be a militia or will be used by political groups." Reineke tried to a.s.sure him that "the volunteers are only a short-term solution until they find jobs in the government." Karim responded that "we have information that the Baath Party and Al Qaeda have infiltrated the Awakening. It's very dangerous." Reineke mentioned that in nearby Seidiya, the Awakening had opened an office. "The Awakening in Seidiya was killing people," Karim said. "They are not yet in the government. We don't accept that the Awakening will open an office. There is only one government. Those who qualify can join the police or the government, but the Awakening is temporary. There are two commands in this area: American and Iraqi. We won't accept another." The Iraqi general won the showdown.

A stern man named Abu Jaafar had been observing the exchange. Wearing a dark suit and a dark s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned up, with no tie, he had two thuggish companions in leather jackets who were very friendly with Karim. A s.h.i.+te known to the Americans as Sheikh Ali, Abu Jaafar had his own ISV unit of about 100 men in southern Dora's Saha neighborhood. The Americans said he was unofficially in charge of that area. He was also a Neighborhood Advisory Council representative for Mahala 828. "He may not be Mahdi Army, but he has a lot of Mahdi Army friends," Maj. Jeffrey Gottlieb whispered to me. He also had a lot of access to Karim's headquarters.

"We've got a sectarian fault line in the Saha area," Captain c.o.x explained to me that night, back at his base, drawing a line on the satellite image on the wall. "Saha was a battleground between [Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army]. We took over on September 8, 2007. The drop in violence is thanks to our unit moving in and patrolling every day." Sunnis had been forced to rely on Al Qaeda for self-defense, he explained, and though northern Saha had been "an absolute killing zone before," rich Sunnis were now trying to return.

Victims of sectarian killings were down by half since the 2-2 SCR had arrived, c.o.x said. "We can have meetings and agreements between prominent s.h.i.+tes who had ties to militias and prominent Sunnis who had ties to AQ." He sounded triumphant, but I couldn't help noticing myself that attacks against Americans were also down to nearly zero when I was there.

But not far away, in Mahala 836, c.o.x admitted, a s.h.i.+te man was murdered when he went to check out his house after hearing it was safe to go back. The 2-2 SCR also noted a spike in criminal killings, they told me. I wondered how they could distinguish. The Mahdi Army cease-fire and the withdrawal of Al Qaeda forces to northern Iraq in order to avoid the surge created a power vacuum that allowed criminals to operate more freely.

A few days later I returned to meet with Karim without the Americans present and found him talking to several senior s.h.i.+te army officers about the forced displacement of Iraqis and what to do with the displaced. An Awakening member was living in a house that the original owner had sold to somebody else, and now the Awakening man refused to relinquish it to the new owner. "We need a mechanism to solve these problems," one officer said. A colonel called Najam who spoke with a s.h.i.+te southern Iraqi dialect worried that displaced Sunnis had taken over former homes of s.h.i.+tes in Dora. "We need to bring back the s.h.i.+tes, but the Sunnis are in the houses," he said. "This battle is bigger than the other battles-this is the battle of the displaced." Eavesdropping, I could hear Najam angrily condemning somebody, presumably the Awakening. "They are killers, terrorists, ugly, pigs," he said.

Karim's phone rang, and he spoke with a superior officer about a clash the previous day between the Awakening and armed s.h.i.+tes. "American officers took Awakening men to a sector where they shouldn't be," he said. "Residents saw armed men not in uniforms and shot at them from buildings. Four Awakening were injured. My battalion was called in to help." In truth, they had clashed with the Mahdi Army, but Karim downplayed their role and blamed an American captain for establis.h.i.+ng an ISV unit in an area where he should not have. "Yes, sir," he said, "the Awakening will withdraw from that area. They started the problem."

Gen. Abdul Amir, another man present, was the commander of the important Sixth Division of the Iraqi army. He warned that men were joining the Awakening for political purposes. "They want to be prominent in their neighborhood so that they will get elected. The prime minister said, 'I don't want this to be about politics, I want this to be about security.'"

The sectarian s.h.i.+te parties ruling Iraq worried about the Awakening becoming a pan-Iraqi movement. If it succeeded in being nonsectarian, it could displace them from power. Najam joked that 98 percent of the Awakening was Al Qaeda. Just then a U.S. Army major walked in and met with Karim outside the office. An embarra.s.sed Karim returned and said he'd been informed he could not talk to me.

"Gen. Abdul Karim was a completely sectarian individual who was more interested in consolidating s.h.i.+te influence and power via his police than in really solving the problems that plagued the area," an American captain confided to me. "He was also incompetent in that he did not at all understand how to run operations or how to collect and use intelligence. People were fairly scared of him, especially his own subordinates, which suggests he was connected to one s.h.i.+te militia or another, though this was never confirmed. I think it was unlikely that he was intimately involved in any particular militia, but only because that might create a problem for him. I remember once, while visiting our AOR [area of responsibility], his personal security detachment, a ridiculous thirty-plus policemen, provoked our ISVs into a confrontation and hauled several away to the INP HQ. It was a near nightmare getting them released, but the event was indicative of Karim's belief that he controlled Dora and that only he would influence the security situation there."

I returned on a different day to meet Abu Jaafar, who suggested Karim's headquarters as a good location. Karim showed me a plaque on his wall that he said was an award from Prime Minister Maliki for being nonsectarian, and he pointed to medals on his desk that the Americans had given him-also, he said, for being nonsectarian. Next to them were a couple of traditional rings worn only by s.h.i.+tes.

Before the war he had owned some minivans, he said. After the war he built the s.h.i.+te Imam al-Ha.s.san Mosque in Saha. "When terrorist activities started in the area, I wasn't involved," he said, because it was not clear who was responsible. "When things got clear I saw that people needed somebody to lead them and command them according to G.o.d." He explained that his men had taken the homes of "bad Sunnis" (meaning Al Qaeda) and inventoried their contents. "They don't want to come back because they were killers," he said. Problems in his area had started two years earlier, he said, with random a.s.sa.s.sinations. "My cousin was a school princ.i.p.al and a local council member, and he was shot to death walking home. And others were killed, and we didn't know why or who killed them. After a while I knew that my neighbor was informing for the killers. Most of the dead were s.h.i.+tes. I talked to the young men in our area and said, 'If we don't cooperate, we will be killed one by one.' We started to guard our area." Abu Jaafar and his militia used old refrigerators, cinder blocks, and earth to wall off their area. His enemies-Al Qaeda but also the 1920 Revolution Battalion and the Army of the Mujahideen-were, he claimed, these same people in the Awakening. s.h.i.+tes did not need an Awakening. "We are already awake," he said, smiling icily.

Abu Jaafar pulled out a list of forty-six people from Saha. "Criminals in the Awakening," he said. "For two years I was naming these people." He singled out Hamid, the Neighborhood Advisory Council boss in Hadhir. "s.h.i.+tes could not join the local council," he said. "They would be killed." He blamed Hamid for dividing Saha in two, with s.h.i.+tes control