fight? We don’t mind. If you try to strangle a cat, it will scratch you. We are trying to control our sons, and each one of us has seven to eight sons. If the situation continues like this, we will have to make a decision. We are losing our patience.”
They led me through the market, which had once served the neighborhoods around Washash. “We are paying rent and we don’t have work,” one shopkeeper told me. “This wall ruined our life and our business,” another said. “Would you accept to walk in this mud?” a man asked me. “People are holding their sons in order to cross the pools of water on their way to the schools. It’s as if Washash is not on the map. Even the government doesn’t care about it.”
They showed me more shops without customers. “The policy of walls is wrong,” a tribal leader told me. “The Americans think that they are providing security for the people. Even if they achieved that, what is the use of safety if a man is hungry? When they closed the area people lost their living.” We approached the walls that separated Washash from Mansour. “We are like Palestine,” one of my guides said. They showed me the narrow opening between the barriers. Behind it was an Iraqi army checkpoint. A soldier spotted me filming and began to approach. “He won’t dare come in,” one of the men said of the soldier. “We will fuck him.”
Nevertheless, I was ushered away by Mahdi Army men, who consulted one another about what to do with me before the Iraqi soldiers came looking. One offered to drive me to a different opening in the back of the neighborhood, where there was a friendly Iraqi National Police checkpoint. He assured me that the police were “good,” and I got in his car alongside another Mahdi Army member, who then led me through a fence to a gap in the barrier. “They are from our group,” he said of the police, meaning they were with the Mahdi Army. As I waited for my driver to circle around and come pick me up, he explained to the police officer what had happened, and the police protected me from the Iraqi army.
I returned the next day to resume filming in the area, spotting unarmed Mahdi Army men sitting on steps and standing on street corners. As soon as I began, men from the Mahdi Army told me that someone had alerted the Iraqi army and a patrol was looking for me. We snuck past them again, avoiding the vehicles that slowly searched the streets.
I MET WITH SALIM, the Iraqi army captain so loathed by the Mahdi Army supporters who guided me through Washash. He was an intelligence officer in Mansour, thirty years old, with a round face and a short military haircut. I told him the men in Washash had accused him of being a Sunni and targeting them for sectarian reasons. “I’m a Shiite,” he replied with a laugh. “How can I be sectarian?”
Before the war Salim had been an artillery officer living in Bayaa. In September 2003 an American lieutenant colonel based in Camp Falcon, asked Salim about his job. The American, who also happened to be an artillery officer, asked Salim to join the new Iraqi army. He became an officer in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, commanding a company in charge of the airport road.
In early 2004 the Americans established the Defense Ministry and Salim became part of the new Iraqi army. “At the time there was only Al Qaeda, not Mahdi Army,” he said. “We confiscated a lot of weapons and car bombs. This was before the sectarianism started. I was trained to be an intelligence officer.” When Salim joined the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, there were very few Sunni officers, he said. “Sunni officers were afraid because they were worried that the Americans think Sunnis are terrorists, but Americans judged people on whether they were good.” On the night of the Samarra shrine attack in 2006, Salim’s unit had orders to protect all Sunni mosques and the Islamic Party headquarters. “But the Iraqi army, not all of it was clean,” he said, “and some officers told their soldiers to let the Mahdi Army operate freely, especially in Rusafa [eastern Baghdad]. Samarra made officers sectarian, but even before that the Iraqi National Police was infiltrated with militias. Most officers were in a dilemma: if you act like a real officer and be a patriot, you will lose your family and your house, because you live in a Shiite area—this happened to me.”
Salim first clashed with the Mahdi Army in Washash when it was commanded by Hamudi Naji. Much of the government supported the Mahdi Army and had access to good information, he said, so Hamudi managed to obtain Salim’s phone number. “In the end of 2006 we captured a lot of Mahdi Army guys,” he said. “But we got orders from the prime minister’s office and Baghdad Operations Center to release them. Once we captured four armed Mahdi Army guys with Glocks—they had masks. It was next to the Buratha Mosque. An army lieutenant captured them. He was punished, and they were released an hour later. So the officer requested to be transferred to Iraqi special forces.”
“I was on patrol next to Maamun College in the Iskan neighborhood, on Street Twenty-three, and I saw two guys with a pistol and MP5 take a man and put him in the trunk of their car. We went after them. The men ran away and left their weapons. The man in the trunk was Sunni. His family came to get him, and we kept the vehicle and guns.” This was when Salim’s conflict with the Mahdi Army began. Hamudi Naji called him. “You are Shiite, one of us,” Hamudi said, according to Salim. “We don’t want anything from you—just return the car and the weapons.” Salim responded that if Hamudi gave him the name of the two fugitives, then he would return the car. “These men are in the Mahdi Army,” Hamudi said. “How can I give them to you?” Hamudi used religious language and appealed to Salim as a Shiite. “I said I am secular,” Salim told me. “I don’t care if you’re Sunni or Shiite or Hindu—I have orders.”
In 2007 Salim and his men stopped a government vehicle at one of their checkpoints that was leaving Washash and heading to Sadr City. The men wore tracksuits and had two Glocks with three magazines each. The Americans said they were Mahdi Army leaders and detained them. One of the suspects was called Ali Kadhim. The Americans had a picture of him wearing a turban. Hamudi Naji called Salim again and demanded their release. Salim told him that they were wanted and that the Americans had them in their custody. “You arrested them, so you bring them back to us,” Hamudi said. “You have twenty-four hours to get them back to me.” Hamudi called Salim again that night. “What have you done about them?” he asked. “You’re crazy,” Salim replied. “The Americans have them.” I expressed surprise at the Mahdi Army’s audacity. “The state was on their side,” Salim said. “We were afraid of the Mahdi Army; they weren’t afraid of us.”
Hamudi Naji arranged for Mahdi Army men in Bayaa to join with members of the Iraqi National Police Fifth Brigade and go to Salim’s house. They mistakenly went to the house of his neighbor Anas, who was an army captain as well. The Mahdi Army men insisted that Anas was Salim with a fake ID card and put him in the trunk of their car. Hamudi called Salim’s phone and was surprised to hear Salim answer. “Who are you?” he asked. “Salim,” the captain replied. “So who is the lamb we have here?” Hamudi asked, referring to Anas as a victim about to be killed. Anas was released after being terribly beaten. Salim sent his family to Hilla and his wife and children to Egypt. “For one year I visited them every two months,” he told me. “It was very expensive.”
A week after the failed raid on Salim’s house, the Mahdi Army killed his uncle in the Amil district. “I decided to terminate the Mahdi Army in Washash,” he told me. The Americans had a new captain and colonel in the area, and in mid-2007 they had a meeting with Salim about the Washash, Iskan, and Tobchi neighborhoods. The Americans brought their intelligence officer, and Salim gave him all his information.
The Americans, Salim told me, decided it was time to rid the area from Amriya to Mansour of Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. The Iraqis and the new American troops worked on a plan. The colonel told Salim he had heard good things about him and that his captain would give Salim whatever help he needed. They built the walls around Washash and set up a joint security station next to it, with a quick reaction force to counter the Mahdi Army. The previous American base had been too far away. Salim met with the American platoon leaders and NCOs, and introduced them to his team. He suggested that they first target Al Qaeda so that locals wouldn’t think that they were only going after the Mahdi Army. The first target was Abu Zeinab, an Al Qaeda leader in Mansour. “Too easy,” the Americans replied.
“I had strong intelligence sources in Mansour,” Salim told me. “It was a great operation. We found a car bomb and an IED factory. The intelligence was all ours. The Americans were new and had no sources.” Abu Zeinab wasn’t there, but the Americans gained crucial information from the ID cards they found in his house and arrested him in Bab al-Muadham one month later. The next week Salim’s source told him about a Mahdi Army weapons depot. He told the Americans, who set up a decoy mission to a Sunni area in Mansour and then sent a small force to Washash to get the real target. In a garden behind the house they found four explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), two sniper rifles, as well as PKC machine guns. But there were no people in the house, which belonged to displaced Sunnis. Salim told the Americans that this was a great opportunity; they turned the house into an Iraqi army base and used it to conduct night missions. During one of them they detained the
