and well-being. During his tenure in eastern Mansour, Wilhite said, he always considered the Washash sheikhs’ council fairly useless and ineffective. “When they showed up at the neighborhood council meetings it was, ‘I want,’ ‘We need,’ ‘Give me this,’ ‘We are important,’ ‘No, there is no JAM in Washash,’ ‘No, I will not commit to anything,’ ‘Tell Americans to stop coming into Washash.’ Pretty frustrating.” U.S. forces eliminated the Mahdi Army’s influence by putting the pressure on early. They were assisted in this effort by the assassination of Mahdi Army militiaman Hamudi Naji, and by other counter-measures such as the construction of the wall to restrict movement, the establishment of Sons of Iraq to the south to prevent further expansion into Mansour, and the IA’s desire to patrol the area. Hakami’s indecision also helped—most reports showed him growing paranoid over not wanting to end up like Naji. “In the end,” Wilhite said, “I think JAM was dissolving when we left, not necessarily directly because of our actions but also because of the situation.”
Wilhite explained that he erected the walls around Washash in order to isolate the neighborhood and the Mahdi Army there from the rest of the population, and to prevent them from moving south. “We occasionally told Washash folks that the walls were to keep Al Qaeda out. Usually, we pushed this information campaign when AQI would detonate a car bomb in a Shia neighborhood. We told the people, ‘See, the walls keep you safe!’ We would say, ‘There are only two ways in, and the IA will not let a car bomb through the checkpoints. ’” Concrete was the order of the day during that time; walls went up around Khadra, part of Jamia, and Amriya. “If I was a cement contractor,” Wilhite said, “I’d be rich.” He ended up using concrete in Iskan, Dur Sud, Arabi, and part of Mutanabi as well. Wilhite felt that the walls were effective. Some Washash businessmen complained about losing customers, but he viewed this complaint skeptically. Iskan, Arabi, and Dur Sud all had cheaper prices and, Wilhite said, better products than Washash in the first place. He asked around about where folks went for food in the areas adjacent to Washash Market area.
Hamudi Naji had owned “Black JAM,” and it owned Washash, Wilhite reported. Naji’s men had their hands in everything. They had systematically taken over almost every Sunni home in Washash and rented it out to a Shiite family. Sunnis were given three options: pay an exorbitant amount of protection money and live there until Naji’s men told you to leave; leave in the next twenty-four hours to avoid being killed; or lose your house and your life immediately. Wilhite’s troops later found Sunni families murdered and buried in their backyards in different states of decomposition.
Naji’s group patrolled Washash much like a mafia gang. They had lookouts, and when the Americans would come on patrols or late-night raids, they used their own observation posts to describe the activity. When Wilhite’s group got too close, Naji’s group would often attempt to distract them with runners, gunfire, or distant explosions. Wilhite said his initial strategy was to stop focusing on Naji the individual (the agent of terror, the small-time warlord) and more on his apparatus (the organization itself). All intelligence always pointed to Naji, and Wilhite saw this as a liability. However, applying Petraeus’s COIN strategy to Dur Sud seemed new and made a lot of sense.
In Washash, numerous raids had failed to capture Naji. Wilhite wanted to weaken Naji’s network instead of constantly trying to catch the one guy who would supposedly make everyone’s problems go away. He attempted to identify all the unknown midlevel managers taking orders—weapons traffickers, IED makers, financial supporters, shift managers (including sergeants of the guard)—and used a JSS hot line to get information from Iraqis. Wilhite said his troop would sometimes take informants out with them and conduct raids to get information about a Naji-led killing. For the most part, they were successful.
“I remember,” Wilhite said, “after a raid, an old man even gave us a big smile and a thumbs-up sign. I felt we were starting to gain momentum because the population of Washash saw us pulling these guys off the streets.” Whenever possible, they also tried to bring the Iraqi army out with them too, though initially “buy-in” was difficult. Then, on the night of September 20, Naji was killed on the streets of Washash and all hell broke loose. Immediately, there were a few retribution killings of Sunnis. Elements of Wilhite’s Red Platoon drove headlong into a firefight while attempting to gather information on what had transpired. The next three days were “days of madness,” he recalls.
The Iraqi army moved three companies into the area and left them there to keep the peace. Those loyal to Naji wanted to kill and provoke every Sunni left in Washash and everyone connected to them. Several Sunni families piled everything they could carry and attempted to leave the first day. “I remember on the third day JAM attempted to intimidate anyone from leaving the area by detonating an IED on a group of males trying to leave the
“In the fall of 2007,” he continued, “we continued our strategy of attacking JAM’s network.” His troops did more raids, captured more low-level guys, and started building the wall around Washash. The purpose of the wall was to prevent them from having free access in and out of the
The last Black JAM assassination was carried out in early November of that year. “An Iraqi army soldier had actually stopped a kidnapping from occurring and killed one of the midlevel managers of the Washash JAM network,” Wilhite said. “Unfortunately, he was killed in the process. What we were missing was a persistent presence in the area that could remain on the streets.” On the national level, the Awakening movement came to full steam. U.S. forces began recruiting Sons of Iraq in eastern Mansour. “Ultimately,” Wilhite explained, “the constant presence of the Sons of Iraq working with the Iraqi army in Dur Sud and Arabi prevented any more JAM movement into these areas to the south. Additionally, it motivated many families to work with our local neighborhood council members to bring displaced families, Sunni and Shiite, back into the communities.” At that point, the Mahdi Army was effectively contained through physical barriers and the presence of security in the southern
Wilhite’s low-intensity campaign against the Mahdi Army operations continued until Muqtada al-Sadr’s “falling out” with the government in late March and early April 2008, when Prime Minister Maliki declared full-scale war on the Mahdi Army. “At this point, things transitioned very rapidly to a kinetic fight, and for a few brief moments all hell broke loose,” Wilhite said. On March 27, the Mahdi Army began attacking symbols of the government of Iraq (like Iraqi army safe houses and checkpoints), and verbally threatened and intimidated workers in several government buildings in the area. Just about every predominantly Shiite community experienced a skirmish of some kind that day. At midday the Third Company safe house was attacked with small-arms fire and three RPGs from inside Washash. Wilhite’s company teamed up with their attached military transition team and the remainder of the Iraqi army to respond. Unlike previous engagements that were short in duration, this one continued even after U.S. forces moved in to support the Iraqi army. “By the end of the day,” Wilhite said, “all four of my platoons, the ‘mitt,’ my sniper assets, and half of the IA battalion had been involved in what turned into a five-hour engagement.” Under orders from his Iraqi army superiors, Wael, the local IA commander, was prevented from entering Washash to root out pockets of resistance. As the Mahdi Army drew short on ammunition and it got dark, the firefight petered out. Similar to the September 2007 operation in which Naji was killed, this one continued with persistent security operations for several days after the fighting subsided, with no new contacts except for when a Mahdi Army sniper killed an IA soldier the first night. It was a turning point—Wael and the Iraqi army wanted the Mahdi Army out of the area for good.
Naji had operated in a very brutal manner, freely using torture and aggressive intimidation tactics to hold on to power. He had used contacts in Kadhimiya, Shula, and Sadr City to assist and support his operations in the first few months of the U.S. presence in the area. For the most part, under Naji, the Mahdi Army operated fairly independently from a “higher headquarters.” There were occasional clashes within the Sadrist community, but outside Washash, no real divisive internal disputes were monitored. By the time Hakami replaced Naji as leader, his power base was not nearly as extensive and his ability to expand to the south was limited.
“Salim never saw Naji’s body, nor did I,” Wilhite said. Word on the street was that he had been killed by rival members of the Ugaidat tribe from another
