In 2006 Maher was kidnapped by the Mahdi Army. “They took me to the Kadhimein Husseiniya and beat me with pistols,” Maher told me. The cleric interrogated him. They told him he had killed Imam Hussein. Maher protested that his father was Sunni but his mother was Shiite. They called him a
“There was no sectarianism before,” Adnan recalled, but now “there are still bad people talking about sectarianism. Even in the worst times I had seven Shiite headmasters who stayed in Dora. Some were transferred so Shiites took salaries to Sunnis and Sunnis took salaries to Shiites. Sunni teachers from elsewhere would come, and I would give them jobs.”
Adnan had a principal’s impartiality and viewed all sides in the conflict as responsible. “Who was killing if everybody says it wasn’t me?” he asked dismissively. “The Awakening, the police, the Mahdi Army—all say it wasn’t me.” Then there was a change in the American behavior. “The Americans got better, they started to know the area, they spread out more, had more patrols.” Unlike most Iraqis I met, Adnan wasn’t worried about the impending American withdrawal. “Let the Americans leave,” he said. “It’s the same thing.”
Maher drove me around the neighborhood. He pointed to a young girl. “Al Qaeda killed her father and brother,” he told me. Not far away some Shiites had returned and put up the religious flags traditional Shiites raise above their homes. Some people viewed it as a provocation and threw a concussion bomb at the house.
On a different day I met Maher again, and we drove to Arab Jubur, where his family originally hailed from. The banks of the Tigris, an idyllic rural area, had been the scene of some of the worst Al Qaeda violence of the war. We passed empty fields where Al Qaeda used to dump the bodies of Shiites they captured on the highway. “They would take whole Kia buses full of people,” he said. “Ansar al-Sunna, the 1920 Revolution Brigade, the Army of the Mujahideen, Al Qaeda, were all here.” There were numerous checkpoints manned by Iraqi soldiers and Awakening men every few hundred meters. We drove past fields from where Al Qaeda had launched an attack on Abu Dshir. The road was scarred by IED craters that had been filled with dirt. On our left was the bank of the Tigris. Maher pointed to destroyed houses on the side of the road. “This one was Al Qaeda,” he said. “This one was a slaughterer.” Many homes had been destroyed by American airstrikes during the surge. The violence had destroyed the farms and roads. Most people in the area were farmers, and earning a living was much harder now. There were no services, no drinking water, no clinic.
In the schoolyard I found an eighteen-year-old boy watching younger children playing. In 2008 he lost his hand when an IED went off. His brother had lost a leg from an IED in a different incident. On the road I found a small boy on his way to school, leaning on a crutch. He was missing an arm and had a prosthetic leg. One day in 2008 he was tending his sheep when an IED went off. On the side of the road a man called Sami Adnan stood by his hardware. Like many, he had fled the area when the situation was at its worst. “The Americans used to bomb randomly every day, and there were terrorists,” he said. His house was burned and destroyed when he was away, but he didn’t know who was responsible. He attributed the improved security to the Awakening men. “Even the Americans got better after the terrorists left,” he said.
At a checkpoint I spoke with two Awakening men wearing blue uniforms. They had joined the Awakening a year and a half earlier to protect their area, they told me. Their salaries were two months late. “When the Americans were here, we got salaries every fifteen days,” one of them said. Until now none of them had joined the ISF, though they had all applied. “It’s only promises,” they said. As we left Maher told me that both men were former members of the Army of the Mujahideen.
A local boy got in our car and directed us to the home of the Awakening boss, Amer Abdallah Khalal al- Rabia, of the Jubur tribe. “It became normal to see dead bodies here on the side of the road,” the boy said as we drove. We turned off the road and drove several hundred meters through dense foliage and palm trees.
Amer was not home, but we met his twenty-five-year-old brother, Tahsin, who had joined the Awakening in 2007. He had been one of the first to join in all of southern Baghdad, he told me. In May 2007 he went to Mahmudiya to give the Americans information about Al Qaeda. His family had battled Al Qaeda even before the Awakening groups were formed, and Al Qaeda had killed three of his brothers. Another brother was killed after they established the Awakening group. In the early days of the occupation Islamist militants killed their tribe’s sheikh, Khalid Dawud al-Rabia. “They accused him of collaborating and working with Chalabi,” Tahsin told me, “but he was trying to open a police station here, and he wasn’t working with Chalabi. A group of men belonging to Dr. Fatthi Yusuf Saleh al-Juburi, a local veterinarian, was responsible for the murder.” Dr. Fatthi was the biggest terrorist in southern Baghdad, Tahsin said; his group distributed papers to schools saying girls can’t attend.
Amer finally showed up wearing a loose-fitting suit, with a pistol tucked in his pants. A twenty-four-year veteran of the Iraqi army, he explained that he was responsible for the areas of Zunbaraniya, Uleimiya, and Beijia. Under the Americans he had commanded 629 men, but once authority for the Awakening shifted to the Iraqis, the Iraqi government fired fifty or sixty of his men every month. He now commanded only 490 men, not one of whom had joined the Iraqi Security Forces.
When two of Amer’s men captured two Al Qaeda men, they turned them over to General Karim’s national police in Dora. But General Karim had Amer’s men arrested as well, and they had already spent three months in the serious crimes prison in Dora. “Our relationship with the Iraqi army is not good,” Amer said. “They don’t respect the Awakening. The Iraqi National Police don’t like the Awakening.” One month earlier Iraqi soldiers had beaten one of Amer’s men because he did not salute them. Now that the Iraqi army paid them, many negative things were happening. Salaries had been reduced. Amer’s salary was halved. Now he received the same amount as his men: about three hundred dollars. “The Americans used to come here to pay us,” he said. “Now we have to go to the Iraqi army battalion and wait on long lines. Some people wait for two or three days. We are treated with disrespect. For the last two months, there is no salary. It was all false promises. We are targeted by Al Qaeda and we have no protection.”
Amer spoke of a new trend: families of slain Al Qaeda men were filing charges against him and Tahsin. “They made fake death certificates,” he said. “They said we killed people the Americans killed, and now there is a warrant for me in Baghdad.”
Seven hundred and eighty-two families who had fled the area because of Al Qaeda had now returned. One factor limiting returns was the destruction of many homes. Sectarianism remained, but it was now more covert. The Americans were releasing terrorists from imprisonment in Camp Bucca, and there were rumors that the Awakening program would end in June. “Why did terrorism happen?” he asked me. “Because of the vacuum. If they don’t put the Awakening men in the Iraqi army or Iraqi police, problems will happen.”
“Metrics” to determine “progress” in Iraq have always been difficult to determine. The American surge was meant to give space for Iraq’s politicians to achieve a modicum of reconciliation and progress. This had not happened, but it was an American-imposed standard. How did Iraqis feel about the situation? “The refugees are the best ones to determine the temperature on the ground, the best at keeping the pulse,” UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) head Stefan de Mistura told me. “If they return, the situation is normalizing. If they don’t, then there is a reason. They have returned but not in substantial numbers.” This was a contrast to other crises where he had worked. “In Kosovo we had two million people return,” he said. “We were delighted but overwhelmed.” After the January 2009 elections the changes became apparent: “We saw that the city of Baghdad changed its color. There was a cleansing.”
Back in Baghdad I went to the Jihad district’s Mukhabarat area and met Ibrahim Saleh, also known as Abu Abdallah Hamdani. He was the local Awakening leader there; he was not pleased with Iraq’s new course. His area was walled off and the entrance was guarded by INPs and a tense Awakening man who barked at all strangers entering. I drove by a large lake of sewage and garbage, on a dirt road to Ibrahim’s large house, which was being built atop a hill. Hundreds of families had fled the area to the Anbar and elsewhere because mortars were falling on their homes. Ibrahim’s wife was among the victims of these mortars. The displaced started to return after the Awakening was established.
Ibrahim took charge of 160 men in August 2008 after the INPs arrested his brother Taher, the previous leader. He and his brother joined the Awakening because there were no jobs and because they wanted to help protect the area. “Al Qaeda and the special groups were fighting each other, and the Friendly Forces [as he called the Americans] came to us and asked Taher to protect the area and give information. The Awakening was established here in July 2007.” He claimed Taher had a good relationship with the INPs, but one day Taher invited them to lunch, and after they finished eating they arrested him. “He was taken to the Fifth Brigade of INPs. They
