the last elections that the people they voted for weren’t sincere, so they don’t care for politics.” The other Awakening men we met had been impressed by Maliki; he was an effective strongman. “We want secular people, nationalist, not religious parties,” Abu Taisir averred.
In Baghdad a few days later, I saw Omar al-Juburi, a leading Sunni member of Parliament and a former adviser to Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi. He was now living in a gaudy mansion in the Yarmuk district. I first met Juburi in 2006, when he presented me with detailed files demonstrating that Sunnis had been killed by Shiite death squads and Iraqi police. Since then, he said, “the minister of interior has expelled sixty thousand bad policemen; today the police is better than the army.” The Sunni presence in Iraq was now stable. “The storm has passed,” he said. But there were 2.4 million unemployed Iraqis, he warned, and no job opportunities.
Compared with their actions during the early years of the occupation, Iraq’s Sunnis seemed downright docile. A little angry, yes, and bitter and wistful, but there was no fuel for a return to the fighting, and the Sunni community lacked even a single charismatic political figure with real appeal. In Baghdad I went to the Ghazaliya neighborhood to visit the Um Al Qura Mosque. This was once the most significant “proresistance” mosque in the city; the neo- Baathist Association of Muslim Scholars used to broadcast calls to jihad against the Americans from its loudspeakers. Now it was a massive construction site, with housing complexes, hotels, and party halls being built. Plastic trees with lights lined the stone path leading to the mosque. Sunnis who had been killed by Shiite death squads used to be brought there; now a senior sheikh was showing me the numerous certificates of appreciation that American forces had bestowed on him. He did continue to insist, however, that Sunnis were really the majority in Iraq, while two of his bodyguards complained loudly that Saddam was a better leader than Maliki. I thought, It’s no surprise that some Shiites still think all Sunnis are Baathists.
I had been hoping to meet Abu Omar, the Awakening leader in Adhamiya. Just a year earlier, he and I had been drinking tea together in the main square, but he was now keeping a low profile, and he sent his son to meet me at the tea house. His son and I walked down the main street for a few minutes, then turned left into an alley with short, bullet-ridden buildings that had shops on the bottom floors. Abu Omar was standing at the bottom of a stairwell, still wearing the same brown tracksuit as last year, with a pistol holster strapped around his shoulder. We sat on a nearby bench and had sweet Iraqi tea. Abu Omar lamented the loss of his American patron, who had been protective of him. He now lived anxiously, looking over his shoulder, worried about revenge attacks from Al Qaeda or arrest from the Iraqi Security Forces. His Awakening men had been granted the most menial and demeaning jobs—they were the cleaning staff in government offices—so many had quit.
Three days before my visit to Adhamiya, Saleh al Mutlaq’s local office had been bombed. “This is because the Awakening is less,” Abu Omar told me; it was not able to control the street. He recommended I visit Adhamiya’s Kam neighborhood but explained it was too dangerous for him to go there with me. In Kam I found an entire building taken over by squatters. The displaced families had been assigned apartments by members of the resistance and Awakening.
One woman, called Kifah Hadi Majid, had been expelled from Haifa Street by the Mahdi Army after they killed her son three years earlier. Her son Mutlab, who wore an Iraqi army uniform, was in the local Awakening group. A gang had killed his wife for jewelry. “The Awakening were given jobs with the Baghdad sanitation, and we fought the terrorists,” he said. “It was better before. We controlled the street. Nobody could talk to us—not the army, nobody. We communicated directly with the Americans. Now nobody respects us, and payment is a problem.” They hadn’t been paid in fifty-eight days.
I told an Iraqi army intelligence officer that Awakening men were complaining about the lousy jobs they were given. “What education do the Awakening men have?” he asked. “If you don’t have an education, of course you will be a cleaner.” He had arrested three Awakening men whom the army had warrants against for working with Al Qaeda. He didn’t think Abu Omar was a bad man, he told me, just corrupt.
In Washash Abu Karar was still in charge of the tribal council. But one of its members, Sheikh Amer Asaedi, had fled the area after someone blew up his car. I met up again with Abu Karar’s cousins Hassan and Fadhil Abdel Karim, who helped lead the intifada against the Mahdi Army in Washash. They told me their nemesis, Ihab al-Tawil, had recently been released from prison. A few months before I met them, their brother Ali was shot and killed in his home nearby, his wife wounded. Ali’s killers came around 7 p.m. and announced, “We are the Mahdi Army!” The children, who saw their parents shot in front of them, were still in shock.
“We became victims,” Hassan told me. “We get threatening calls warning us we will be killed.” I asked him why he didn’t leave. “If we leave, then the whole neighborhood will leave,” he said. “We cleaned the mosques that militias used, we made Sunnis pray together with Shiites. Now I can’t go out. I stay home in my brother’s house in the back room.”
Friday prayers were less important, no longer a symbol of defiance. How could Sadrists defy the state when they were represented so well in ministries and Parliament? How could they be anti-establishment when they were part of the establishment? Friday prayers at the main Sadrist office in Sadr City were tamer than I had ever seen; the only hint of politics was a prayer for the release of prisoners. In Ur I visited the Mustafa Husseiniya, once a Mahdi Army hub. “People don’t come here anymore,” said the young man who guarded it. “They are scared since all the arrests.” Abul Hassan, the Mustafa Husseiniya’s former caretaker, who had been my guide in the area, was still in prison, and his assistant Haidar had absconded. Sheikh Safaa, its former Imam, was still safe in Qom, Iran.
In Amriya I visited Um Omar’s NGO again. Several days earlier Sheikh Muhamad, of the nearby Hassanein Mosque—with whom Lieut. Col. Gian Gentile claimed he had worked closely—had been killed. “He was our friend,” she told me. “The killers were teenagers.” Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque and his old friend Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque had absconded, fearing both the government and Al Qaeda. Thirty-five Sunni sheikhs had been killed in Baghdad in the past month. “Al Qaeda is killing all the sheikhs who stood against them,” she said. Meanwhile, Sheikh Khalid of the Amriya Council—who was seen by both Gentile and his successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, as a decisive figure in defeating Al Qaeda in the area—had been jailed in October of 2009. He was accused of terrorism, a deliberately vague charge, but he was said to have had a role in bombings against Shiite areas in 2006. He was also alleged to have belonged to the Islamic Army of Iraq.
Most local Awakening leaders were either dead or arrested, Um Omar said, and the Awakening was now very weak. Abul Abed’s successor, Muhamad, had survived several assassination attempts. “The Awakening project was a lie, an American lie,” she said. “They said, ‘Come in, throw your weapons, join the Awakening, fight Al Qaeda,’ to discover the identity of the resistance.” The Americans came around now only when there was an arrest to be made.
Six days before my visit, all of Amriya had been closed off as American and Iraqi Special Forces raided the area. Three local children were kidnapped for ransom. There were also assassinations with silencers. Um Omar’s brother-in-law had been killed in 2009; he had been head of the Amriya Neighborhood Advisory Council.
Sheikh Khalid was a bad man, Um Omar insisted; he used to provide the
“In the time of displacement,” as she called it, five thousand families fled to Amriya, while 1,800 families fled from Amriya. Since violence had subsided, 559 families had returned. But ten months earlier the returning Iraqis had stopped coming because of intimidation. In January a bomb was placed under one Shiite returnee’s car. Most returnees were Shiites, but only about one-third of them returned to stay. The rest sold their homes.
Al Qaeda men in Abu Ghraib had recently threatened Um Omar’s local office there, accusing it of being a “Jewish organization.” Um Omar was forced to close her local school as well as her vocational training for women in tailoring. A year earlier she had gone to Abu Ghraib with her husband and some engineers. She called the resistance and told them she was coming, but as soon as she arrived armed men with masks put guns to their heads. She started shouting at them angrily, “I’m Um Omar!” and her husband told her to relax. They were taken to a destroyed house in a remote area, separated, and interrogated. She was accused of being Shiite. The men from the resistance made phone calls and then released the couple once they established their identity and apologized to the mayor.
Um Omar still had 225 needy children in her school, and she also ran a successful program finding husbands for the many widows while continuing to assist IDPs. Amriya was now so crowded that displaced families would share houses. Government schools had more than sixty children in each class. I met Um Ala, who was displaced from the Jihad district. Um Omar had found a widow to marry one of Um Ala’s sons. Her family fled to Amriya with three others, and now they shared a house. Um Ala’s husband was “killed in the sectarianism,” she told me, and her sister was also a widow. They had owned their house in Jihad but were too scared to go back. Now a Shiite
