them. He was shot in the head. Shots to the head or shots to the chest were common at the slightest provocation, my friend complained.
According to the Baghdad morgue, every day there were ten to fifteen political murders in Baghdad alone, but this was far lower than the hundreds it received every day in 2006, when Iraqi women had to search through disfigured corpses to find their husbands and sons. But if the levels of violence had gone down, many still had not recovered. “During the last years we faced death many times,” a doctor from Sadr City told me. “We became numb. We don’t have feelings anymore.”
But now it was possible to talk about post-American Iraq. And there were many worrying signs. “It will be like the Republican Guard,” one American official told me. “[Maliki] has an extralegal counterterrorism force that answers to him.” Maliki had empowered the Office of the Prime Minister and placed under its command thousands of elite soldiers capable of operating without American military or logistical support. Trained by American special operators, they were dominated by Shiites but loyal to Maliki, not the institution. Like their American trainers, they justified their above-the-law status with the mantra of counterterrorism; when they operated, the Iraqi Defense and Interior ministries were never informed. Sunnis and Kurds complained to the Americans that Maliki had become the new Saddam of the Shiites.
The random and indiscriminate violence had subsided. This was most evident in the conspicuous displays of wealth. Baghdad’s roads were full of H3 Hummers and other expensive and large vehicles that cost tens of thousands of dollars in cash. New expensive restaurants catered to a new elite, or one that was in hiding. The girls in Baghdad’s universities were dressing more fashionably than ever before, and young men were adopting the fashion trends of Lebanon. For years this would have been impossible to see. Anybody with any money would have been a target for kidnappers. Women immodestly dressed could have been killed. Men in clear Western fashions could have been beaten. Bars were back open, which was at least a sign that vigilante extremists had stopped blowing them up. Playgrounds were full of children, young men played soccer in new fields, people were no longer afraid to leave their houses. But none of it felt completely real.
One night I strolled along Abu Nawas Street with my friend Hussein. Couples walked by the river, children played. Nothing special there, no great achievement in returning normalcy and stability to a place that had both before America took them away, but still hard to get used to after the past few years of occupation, civil war, and terror. Hussein told me his children played games where they lay improvised explosive devices against each other, to blow each other up. He pointed to the security patrols that went by in the park. “All this is a lie,” he gestured at the people. “If it was safe they wouldn’t need a security patrol.” Al Qaeda and other Sunni militias were just lying dormant, he said, as was the Mahdi Army. I expressed skepticism. He stopped a couple walking by. “Excuse me,” he said. “My friend is a journalist. Do you feel safe now?” The young man did not hesitate: he said no and kept on walking.
The Americans rated the Iraqi National Police “the most improved security force,” according to a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. “It used to be a death squad,” he said. “Now the worst officers have been fired or transferred to where they can do no harm.” But even if the overt sectarianism had receded, it was still there. I met up with Captain Adil from the INPs in Dora. After Adil refused to arrest Sunnis without warrants, Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim had transferred him north to Mosul, a much more dangerous assignment. Adil was then accused of stealing cars and held in a secret prison on the second floor of the Interior Ministry’s Internal Affairs Committee office. He told me he had been framed and that his accuser was a Mahdi Army commander in Abu Dshir.
Twenty-seven people were held in a small cell he described as three meters by two meters in size. They slept standing up. All the other men were Sunni. The torture started at midnight. “I was handcuffed and blindfolded and beaten like in movies,” he told me. He was placed under a cold shower for many hours. A policeman named Gafar, who worked with the Mahdi Army in Dora and knew Adil, beat him so badly he urinated blood. “When Americans came they would make us shut up or threaten us,” he said. “When they beat me they said, ‘Why do you hate the Mahdi Army?’ I said, ‘Why are you asking me this? It’s not about cars.’ ‘You are a collaborator,’ they said. ‘You worked with the Americans against the Mahdi Army, you know why you are here.’” Adil’s fellow prisoners were there without their families’ knowledge. They cried and wailed at night, he said, and the prisoners could hear Shiite religious songs on their jailers’ cellphones. After twenty-two days, his captors demanded twenty thousand dollars for his release, but he negotiated it down to seven thousand, which his brother-in-law handed to a police captain outside a restaurant.
Adil resigned after he was released. “I served my country,” he told me, but now he felt betrayed. He still supported Maliki, though. “He is a real nationalist,” he told me. “Everybody likes him.” He was very pleased with Maliki’s moves to include former Baathists in the government. “Nuri al-Maliki is the best leader I saw in my life,” he said. “He doesn’t know about this prison. The Americans don’t know.”
Adil wasn’t the only person I knew who was feeling punished by the new order. In late 2008, two weeks after the Americans handed authority over Dora’s Awakening groups to the Iraqi National Police, Osama’s comrade Abu Yasser was arrested by the INPs. Osama told me that Abu Yasser was taken to General Karim’s headquarters, hung from his arms, and tortured. To end the torture he confessed to murders he hadn’t committed but wisely confessed to killing people who were still alive. Then he was moved to the INP prison in Kadhimiya. He had already paid twenty thousand dollars, Osama told me. “They can’t release him without money—everything costs money.” Abu Yasser was worried that Al Qaeda men in prison with him would find out that he was an Awakening group member and kill him.
Soon after, Osama and Abu Yasser’s fellow comrade Abu Salih arranged a lunch for Eid. He invited locals, including the local American unit. Abu Salih had become famous for helping many Shiite families come back and protecting them. The head of the Baghdad Operations Command, Abud Qanbar, came to shake his hand, and it was shown on Iraqi TV. But after lunch the Americans left, and a different American unit showed up and arrested him. He was taken to the major crimes unit of the Iraqi police and accused of terrorism. He too was tortured and hung by his arms, and had trouble walking afterward. Abu Salih also paid about twenty thousand dollars, Osama said, and his family expected him to be released when more money was paid.
“They torture and wait for them to confess; they don’t use evidence,” Osama said. At least eight other men I knew from Osama’s group had been arrested since the INPs took over. His young deputy Hussein had managed to abscond safely. There was also a warrant out for Osama, and he could not return to Dora to visit his parents. Abu Yusef—Osama’s former ally—had switched allegiances and joined with Muhammad Kashkul, Osama’s old nemesis. But Kashkul was arrested by the Americans and taken to the prison at Camp Bucca. Abu Yusef fled before he could be arrested. Now a fat man called Abu Suleiman was in charge of Osama’s old area. “He’s not a good guy,” Osama said. He felt betrayed. “The Americans were only with us when they needed us,” he said. He called the Americans when Abu Yasser was first arrested, but they told him it was an Iraqi affair and that they couldn’t do anything for him. “The SOI [Sons of Iraq] was never supposed to be an amnesty program,” one American Embassy official in Baghdad told me defensively when I recounted this story to him.
The British special operators Osama and some of his men worked with also rotated units. “The new guys were assholes,” he said. They warned Abu Yasser that the Americans would arrest him if he did not help them arrest Al Qaeda men. In his one year working with the British, Abu Yasser helped them arrest several senior Al Qaeda men, including an explosives expert called Abu Maryam. The British gave sources one hundred dollars per visit, but Osama refused to take their money. “I said I am not a source, I’m working for my country,” he told me.
Dora had changed dramatically since Osama and I had toured its devastation in 2007. I got an introduction to the new Dora with Adil Adnan, a round man with a gray mustache, and his son Maher. For the past five years Adnan had been the Education Ministry’s supervisor for seventy-six schools in southern Baghdad. Before that he had been a school principal for twenty-four years. He drove me down Dora’s Masafi Street. “This street, you couldn’t drive on it,” he said. “It was empty. The concrete barriers helped a lot, even if it was annoying.”
Adnan was originally from Arab Jubur. “I didn’t visit for three years because it was unsafe,” he said. “The Awakening saved the area.” Adnan took me to his house in Dora’s Jumhuriya area. He had a green yard and a small garden under a skylight in his living room, which he proudly told me was in a Spanish style. “In 2005 the resistance got strong here,” Adnan said. “Then Americans brought random groups to run the government in 2006 and 2007.” That’s when sectarianism started in the Education Ministry. Adnan knew at least five Shiite and Sunni school principals who were killed and twenty or twenty-five teachers who were killed, including a Christian physical education teacher. Militias came into schools and ordered teachers to give certain students good grades. Many children whose parents were wealthy were kidnapped.
