receive. The Sadrist movement provided them with food such as rice, flour, and sugar. There was no running water in the area, so they relied on a nearby well. Although they had been connected to the national power grid, they rarely got electricity. They had to break apart a bed to use it for firewood because they had no cooking gas or kerosene. On some days they had no food. Jasim was unable to register for his pension as a wounded veteran because the ministries were not functioning properly.
Jasim’s brother found an occasional job working in the sewage system, and he would sometimes bring money to the family. Only their older children attended school. The family members had voted in the most recent elections for the Shiite Iraqi Alliance list, but they complained that they had not received anything from the government, not even security. “My message to the American people after five years,” said Jasim’s wife: “They destroyed us and didn’t help us, they didn’t reconstruct the country, they even added more destruction to us. The days during Saddam were better. Now there is killing and nothing good. Before there was security and life was going on easily, while now there is nothing. Now things are getting worse and worse, killing in the streets, and there is no life. Strangers come to our homes and threaten us. I feel life is miserable now and our country is destroyed.”
The neglect in Sadr City and other neighborhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad was shocking. But Washash, in central Baghdad, was stark for its contrast to the upscale Mansour district adjacent to it. Of course, much of Mansour was deserted when I visited because of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army, but the district’s clothing stores and restaurants were once packed, its shopping boulevard and ice cream parlors open until late at night. The streets of the majority-Shiite Washash remained unpaved dirt, many flooded with water or sewage. It was quiet and removed from the nearby bustle.
Washash was a staging point for Mahdi Army attacks against Al Qaeda and forays into the Mansour district. It was one of the few Shiite neighborhoods I saw that was surrounded by concrete walls, with only one road left open for cars, guarded by Iraqi soldiers. Elsewhere a few narrow openings between the concrete blocks allowed pedestrians to enter one at a time. About five thousand families lived in Washash, but most of its Sunnis had fled or were slaughtered, and the Mahdi Army men there were notorious, even among other Mahdi Army units, for their brutality. In Washash I saw more posters and banners in honor of Muqtada and his father than anywhere else in Baghdad.
When I first visited Washash in April 2003, sewage flooded the streets and there was a thriving arms market nearby. About sixty thousand people lived in an area not much larger than one square kilometer. When American vehicles approached, the weapons dealers would hastily conceal their wares. The revenge killings started in Washash soon after Baghdad fell, and it didn’t take long for the murders to take on a sectarian tone. In October 2003 three Sunnis were killed in Washash: Sheikh Ahmed Khudeir and his brother Walid Khudeir were killed along with a teenage assistant as they walked home from the Sunni Washash Mosque after the morning prayer. The three were riddled with bullets. Locals believed militiamen from the Badr Corps had killed them. Hospital officials reported seeing many similar cases in the area. In August 2004 a police chief and a patrolman were killed in an explosion in Washash. In December 2004 several members of a Sunni Salafist group in Washash were killed, and Sunni gunmen tried to kill a Shiite sheikh called Razaq; they missed Razaq but killed his wife and wounded his son, who remained paralyzed. Following the killings, Sunni and Shiite clerics issued a joint edict banning sectarian fighting. By the summer of 2005, sectarian violence was a common occurrence. Sectarian violence targeting Sunnis was so bad that in July the Sunni
Washash and the nearby Iskan were located in northeast Mansour on an important sectarian front line between Shiite-controlled Hurriya and Kadhimiya and Sunni-controlled Khadra, Jamia, Adil, and Mutanabi. In October 2006, during Operation Together Forward II, American soldiers raided a house in Washash while searching for a death squad and found documents recording the cleansing of Sunnis from the area. The documents included a list of nearly seventy homes where Sunni families had been expelled and Shiite families were brought in to replace them. There was also a list of “good” families who would not be expelled. American soldiers discovered letters threatening Sunnis as well as DVDs with the same message from the Mahdi Army, with images of exploding houses and threats to kill a male of the house. That month Washash notables asked the Iraqi government to intervene in a crime wave that had led to the discovery of sixty corpses and the threatening of many families by militias. In November a journalist working for the state-run
In the summer of 2007, as American forces pushed the Mahdi Army out of Hurriya, some members of the militia moved to Washash, resulting in an increase of militia activity and murders. In July of that year Sunni politician Adnan Dulaimi publicly accused Shiite militias of cleansing hundreds of Sunni families from Washash and added that soldiers from the Iraqi army’s Sixth Division had cooperated with the militias. Dulaimi’s bodyguards had clashed in the past with men from the Sixth Division, and Dulaimi accused the division’s Colonel Rahim of an attempted assassination. That same month, Tariq al-Hashimi, leader of the Islamic Party and the Sunni vice president, complained about Shiite militias in Washash. In August a car bomb exploded close to a coffee shop in Washash. Later that month the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor Regiment, set up a combat outpost nearby. A Sunni Arabic teacher at the local secondary school was shot on the street. Men were killed for drinking alcohol. In September a U.S. airstrike during clashes with the Mahdi Army killed between fourteen and thirty-one residents, some of whom were civilians. Several homes were destroyed, including one that belonged to an expelled Sunni family whose teenage son had been murdered earlier that summer (they had moved to Ghazaliya).
Later that month gunmen assassinated Washash’s notorious Mahdi Army commander, Hamudi Naji, along with two of his associates, leading to reprisals against Sunnis. (Several months earlier Naji and his men had struck a truce with Sunnis in Washash.) Locals believed that two of the assassins were from the Iraqi Islamic Party. Some blamed the small Ugaidat clan; others said Naji was killed by the relatives of a man he had killed two years earlier. Hundreds of Sunnis fled Washash after the reprisals. Many were killed, including whole families, and several homes were destroyed. One car carrying a fleeing Sunni family was hit by an RPG before they escaped. Many Sunnis who fled to nearby Adil complained that American and Iraqi forces had facilitated their displacement by directing them to the highway and escorting them. That month a car bomb exploded in Washash and killed two civilians. The Mahdi Army manned checkpoints and kidnapped Sunnis without American interference.
In the fall of 2007 the bodies of murder victims were often found in Washash. In October more than one thousand men marched to protest the new wall the Americans were planning to build around the area. Their chants rejected the wall and America. Small Jersey barriers were already up, but the Americans were constructing a larger wall that would seal the neighborhood more effectively. In clashes with the Iraqi army after the protest, two locals were injured. That month the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi army fought openly in Washash.
In November four Mahdi Army commanders were killed in Washash. It was suspected that the Mahdi Army itself might have been responsible for the assassinations, and that the four were negotiating with the Americans to establish a Shiite Awakening group. In late 2007 Mahdi Army men from Washash declared that they were operating independently of the militia’s hierarchy as a result of disagreements with the local leadership, based in Shula.
In 2006 Washash was technically a battle space “owned” by Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile, but from July to November of that year he did very little there because he was concentrated in Amriya. Gentile told me that no other American combat unit conducted systematic COIN operations there in 2006—the result of low troop numbers, perhaps. By the time an American unit eventually got there, a brutal Shiite militia was running rampant. Lieut. Col. Ed Chesney commanded the First Battalion, Sixty-fourth Armor, Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division, from Fort Stewart, Georgia. They arrived in late May 2007 and controlled their area of operations from June 15, 2007, to July 3, 2008. The battalion’s area of operations encompassed a large portion of the Mansour district, including the neighborhoods of Khadra, Jamia, Adil, Iskan, Washash, Mutanabi, Andalus, and Mansour. Chesney was on his third deployment to Iraq; he had been an executive officer in Bayji from 2003 to 2004 and a deputy brigade commander in eastern Baghdad from July 2005 to January 2006.
“The battalion and our brigade prepared for the deployment by focusing on our core war-fighting fundamentals and skills,” Chesney said. “We did not focus on COIN until late in our preparation. Most of my senior NCOs and officers had at least one Operation Iraqi Freedom deployment as experience, and we used the collective experience.”
“Washash was the poorest area we were responsible for,” Chesney said. “It was also heavily Shia, with the neighborhoods to the south being mixed to heavily Sunni. The walls were not in place, other than some Jersey
