about the prime minister and started supporting him.
Maliki’s move was also a surprise for the Americans. A British general in Basra complained to me that the Iraqis had appropriated a British military plan for attacking the Shiite militias in the city, but he may have been looking to restore a wounded ego. “Charge of the Knights was a British-inspired plan,” he told me eight months later. “It caught everybody by surprise. We were going to do it later. Charge of the Knights was written by the Royal Marines, but it was predicated on the Iraqi military being where they are now.” Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General Petraeus had only twelve to twenty-four hours’ notice of the offensive. “It is an open secret that it did not go well in the first few days and only turned around when the U.S. started to provide support, mostly intelligence, airpower, and planners,” a senior American military official working on Iraq told me. “But I think Maliki started to realize that if his security forces didn’t control the country, then he wasn’t really the leader. I think it was a purely institutional move to assert the primacy of the prime minister. How Maliki became a nationalist is a long story that I don’t totally understand myself. I think part of it was just growing into the job. I also think that there was a seminal moment in Basra when his personal bodyguard—and I understand the two were close—was killed by a Sadrist round.”
An American intelligence official dealing with Iraq told me that the Mahdi Army’s attempt to take over Karbala had affected Maliki, especially when Mahdi Army rockets landed too close to Maliki’s house. “The Basra offensive caught us by surprise,” the official told me. “He had no logistics, no plan, only General Mohan [Mohan al- Freiji, Maliki’s chief of security in Basra]. No food, no place for them to sleep. Petraeus and Crocker took advantage of it and saved his ass. Maliki also wanted to go to Sadr City and Maysan, but the U.S. felt he wasn’t ready. Maliki realized he could be a nationalist leader.” Importantly, it was Iran that brokered the cease-fire between Maliki and the various Mahdi Army groups.
The Iraqi decision to go into Basra was made independently; the Americans heard of the operation only after it started, when Maliki flew down with the key leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces to oversee it. Petraeus and Crocker were extremely worried when Maliki did this, but Bush, apparently, was supportive and said, “He’s finally doing it.” “Maliki goes to Basra and takes on Iranian-backed stooges,” an American intelligence official told me. “He is the one Arab leader who has taken on with force an Iranian-backed group.” But there was a tense seventy-two- hour window during which Maliki’s forces were surrounded. When Americans came to Basra, with Navy SEALs and air support, they came in lightly, but they turned the tide. But once the Americans helped swing things in favor of the ISF, “they gave us the finger,” Lieut. Col. P.J. Dermer complained to me. Dermer worked closely with the Iraqi army; even when the Americans were rescuing them, he said, the Iraqis just did whatever they wanted. “Maliki committed his men to battle knowing there was an American corps on the ground,” Dermer told me. “What Maliki did [seizing the initiative against the Shiite militias] was brilliant, but his guys sucked. We bailed them out, so when [Gen.] Abud [Qanbar] entered Sadr City, he entered without a shot being fired at them.”
Having the Americans come to the rescue may have seemed like a failure at first, but it won Maliki the support of more Iraqis, who saw it as a move against sectarian militias and demonstrated that he could take the initiative. He capitalized on his success by establishing tribal support councils throughout the south whose members benefited from his largesse and often acted as Maliki’s own Awakening councils, even arresting Mahdi Army men. It was a naked attempt to steal support from Shiite groups that had a deeper grassroots base than the prime minister, and it worked. Maliki was beginning to expand and assert his control. He was at once targeting Sunni areas and Shiite areas. Following his successful challenges of the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and Basra, albeit with substantial U.S. support, he turned to Mosul. At the same time, he was consolidating control over the Shiite Maysan province and planning to target Al Qaeda in Diyala. The American victories in Najaf and Falluja in 2004 taught Iraqi groups that they could not remain for long under American bombardment, and it was better to disperse. Following Maliki’s American-assisted victories, he wisely adopted a key element of counterinsurgency theory and tried to establish the credibility of his government as the nonsectarian group that could protect the population.
Dermer lived in the Baghdad Operations Center (BOC), working with General Abud Qanbar every day. In the beginning, the Americans led the briefings, but by the spring of 2008 the Iraqis had taken them over and would ask the Americans if they had anything to add only at the end. “Abud was a good man,” Dermer told me, “great for Iraq—a nationalist above religion. He ran his shop single-handedly; everything had to go through him. He didn’t rely on his staff enough. But he learned the importance of the media. Abud’s primary staff guy who handled the media was Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta. Abud called him first thing in the morning and last thing at night—what other military commander in the Middle East focuses on media so much?”
One morning Dermer was with Abud in the BOC. Abud saw an announcement on the news that the Sadrists were going to hold a demonstration in Baghdad in response to the battle in Basra. “I’m not going to let this stand,” Abud said, according to Dermer. “I won’t allow it. The militias have to be stopped.” Dermer had hoped to contain the demo, but Abud said, “No, I’m going to stop it.” Dermer asked him if he needed Maliki’s permission. “I’m the commander of Baghdad,” Abud said. “I don’t need anybody’s permission.” Dermer realized Maliki had not given him guidance and that Abud was going to war.
Without telling the Americans, Abud started moving battalions to the site of the demonstration. He knew he had Maliki’s blessing, but he was making the plan up by himself. Dermer and the American leadership were taken aback. “I have a core patch,” Dermer told me, “with a direct line to Petraeus, and I have battlefield responsibility with General Hammond [of the Fourth Infantry Division, which replaced the First Cavalry Division]. I have to translate this to the coalition, so I have to let Petraeus know.”
Dermer persuaded Abud to sit down with the Americans and come up with a plan. Maliki then gave permission for the Americans to shoot into Sadr City, Ur, Shaab, and other areas, but the Americans were not allowed to enter Sadr City. Sadr City, and to some extent the Sadrists, had been off-limits to the Americans. In 2004 the Americans were about to kill Muqtada in Kufa, but he was with Iraqi National Security Adviser Mowaffak al- Rubaie, so the American canceled the hit. Later Maliki would prohibit the Americans from operating in Sadrist areas or targeting the Mahdi Army. During the surge Americans had to get Maliki’s permission to kill or capture Mahdi Army men. Sometimes they wouldn’t tell him whom they were targeting because they were worried his people would inform the targets. Later there would be full coordination with the Iraqis about the target lists. In March 2008 the Americans were granted permission to use snipers and helicopter gunships, even if they couldn’t bring troops inside these areas.
But the National Security Council’s Brett McGurk and other Americans were worried. Sadr City was home to three million people. Maliki assured them he knew the street, and it turned out that he did, which created a sense that the ISF could handle security. American sniper teams positioned on the edges of Sadr City proved to be very effective in the battles, though many civilians were also killed.
“As a military Middle Eastern guy, Abud couldn’t fathom a militia,” Dermer told me. “Under Saddam he had despised the fedayeen [Saddam’s guerrilla force]. The Iraqi army is fighting to regain their honor. It’s not about fighting skills. Iraqi fighting skills were terrible. It’s about regaining their place in society. We lost a lot of American lives because of Iraqi incompetence. The Americans wanted to take over the operations during the Battle for Baghdad but didn’t. We were telling the Iraqi army what to do, and they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t pair with us in the battlefield. When it was time to advance up an avenue or cross a line, the Iraqis didn’t; the Americans did, so American soldiers got killed. They wanted our logistics, Apaches, and ISR [intelligence surveillance reconnaissance]. We tried to get them to use their own shit, but why would they when they had our shit? We had to prevent them from failing so we won’t look like we failed.”
After one battle Dermer and the Americans visited an apartment building in Ur that the Iraqi army had just destroyed. “It was a bloody mess,” he told me; the Iraqis had opened fire on the entire building, but the Americans had no choice but to tell them they did a good job.
“IEDs scared the shit out of them,” Dermer said of the Iraqis he worked with, “so our guys would go down the road and they wouldn’t. We lost two majors. We were having heated arguments in BOC, yelling and shouting. We would plan for two hours and then they wouldn’t execute. Iraqi commanders were not being held responsible. Abud finally fired the Rusafa commander, but nobody would replace him, so Abud rehired him. We had one or two Iraqi brigades disappear off the battlefield, but that’s not bad out of five or six divisions in Baghdad.” I asked Dermer what made some units good. “It was the personality of the commander and his relationship with the American commander that determined whether a unit was effective,” he said. “Abud was good at building civil infrastructure after the fighting,” Dermer added. “He would take the minister of electricity, of water and power, of education—anybody in charge of building stuff, they wouldn’t go without him. Abud didn’t want the Iraqi military leading the effort; he wanted Iraqi civilians to do it.”
