Americans. In Seidiya, Adhamiya, Amriya, Ghazaliya, and other volatile Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, ISVs were allowed to patrol freely and carry heavy-caliber machine guns. “We use our own guns,” Osama told me. “The Americans didn’t give us anything.” Osama had a contract to provide a certain number of men at ten dollars per day. He was paid every other week, and he paid his men and provided uniforms and whatever else they might need.
“The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money,” Adam Sperry told me when I visited his office in Forward Operating Base Falcon. A bright twenty-three-year-old who majored in creative writing in college, Sperry was an Army intelligence officer from the Second Squadron, Second Cavalry Regiment. Capt. Travis Cox, his colleague, explained to me that at higher levels a lot of money and time was being spent trying to figure out how to transition the ISVs into other jobs. “To a large extent they are former insurgents,” Cox admitted.
The 2-2 SCR was patrolling Osama’s area in Dora when I visited. The unit’s Major Garrett had to figure out what to do with all these militiamen. He placed his hopes on vocational training centers that offered instruction in automotive repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, electricity repair, and English. But adults who were part of a militia were not likely to want to abandon their weapons. “At the end of the day they want a legitimate living,” Garrett told me. “That’s why they’re joining the ISVs.” I didn’t think anybody was working for a paltry ten dollars per day merely for a legitimate living. These were men who had fought the American occupation as well as the Shiites of Iraq. They had not done so for profit, as the Americans insisted. “The ideological fight, forget about it,” Captain Dehart, the unit’s senior intelligence officer, said when I suggested this to him. “We bought into it too much. It’s money and power.” Peace would come to Iraq “if they just realized they would make more money with us through construction contracts than fighting us.”
In Dora the Americans were the government, building electrical power stations because the Shiite- dominated government didn’t care about supplying electricity or other services to Sunnis. The 2-2 SCR was spending thirty-two million dollars on construction contracts signed with Iraqis and on salaries for Sunni militiamen they hired to be ISVs. They spent twelve million dollars alone building walls around neighborhoods. Sperry complained that American counterinsurgency strategy “is to spend millions of dollars and build walls to make Iraqis more divided than they already are.” But his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Reineke, felt very strongly about building walls around neighborhoods and didn’t care if some people were cut off as a result. He was frustrated that a wall he was paying local contractors to build around Mahala 860 was taking too long. The wall was meant to keep Al Qaeda fighters out and cut off arms smuggling routes. Some locals left outside were upset that they were not being included inside the walls. Often it seemed as if the American strategy was merely to buy Iraqis off temporarily, and they distributed “microgrants” of three thousand dollars to all the shop owners in their area.
I WONDERED what would happen when this massive influx of American money stopped pouring in. Would the Iraqi state become a bribing machine? Would the ruling Shiites even want to pay Sunnis whom they had been trying to exterminate until recently? Sunnis they believed had been trying to kill them? The British occupation of Iraq in the early twentieth century was described as “colonialism on the cheap.” The British did not spend much money on the occupation, and relied on the use of airpower as an alternative to a large standing army. The British bribed tribes and tried to mold the political system in a way that benefited their local allies and enriched them, turning them into feudal lords. This was nothing compared to the billions of dollars the Americans were throwing into Iraq. Adding up all the men employed by the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, the other security branches, the Awakening militiamen, and others working for private security companies that contracted with the American departments of State or Defense, there were more than a million Iraqi men in the security sector. This was more than Saddam had. But for the Americans, spending billions of dollars bribing Iraqis was a pittance compared to how much they spent per year just keeping their military in Iraq or the cost of repairing their damaged vehicles, let alone the cost of injured soldiers. But loyalty that can be purchased is by its nature fickle. Would these maneuvers lead to a real or stable political process in Iraq?
Osama was the English-speaking diplomatic face, but behind him were tough men of the resistance. One, called Salah Nasrallah, or Abu Salih, had dark reddish skin, a sharp nose, and small piercing eyes. The Americans required that each
A thick muscular man called Amar, or Abu Yasser, was the other brawn behind the operation. Handsome and jovial, Abu Yasser wore a green sweatshirt and matching sweatpants with a pistol holstered his under arm. “Amar is the real boss,” an American Army intelligence officer from the area told me. “That guy’s an animal, he’s crazy.” Osama explained that nobody from Mahala 832 knew that he was in charge of the ISVs in the area. “They think Abu Salih and Abu Yasser are in charge, because my family is still there.” He added that they were still arresting Al Qaeda infiltrators from among the ISVs. Osama was trying to arrange for Abu Yasser to manage his own ISV unit in the nearby Mahala 834, where he actually lived.
Abu Yasser had worked for the General Security Service until 1993 and then joined the Iraqi military industry. In 2004 he joined the Army of the Mujahideen, a resistance organization operating in Mosul, the Anbar province, and southern Baghdad. Although he claimed to have joined to protect Sunni areas from the Mahdi Army, in 2004 that Shiite militia was still cooperating with the Sunni resistance and was not targeting Sunnis. In fact, he had fought the American occupation, operating mostly out of Arab Jubur, he said, where the organization “was young people, mostly to defend the area.” He had not resigned from that organization, he added, but decided to work with the Americans and the ISVs “because of Iranians getting more power in Iraq,” he told me. “They are occupying Sunni areas. They are the bigger enemy.” Like many others, Abu Yasser admitted that Sunnis had made a strategic blunder by boycotting the Iraqi political process in the early days of the occupation, and Sunni clerics had made a mistake issuing
Abu Salih had belonged to the 1920 Revolution Battalions. He had decided to work with his former enemies the Americans and join the ISVs because of the Iraqi government. “It’s an Iranian government,” he said, “and the people are its victims.” A colleague of his, Abu Yusef, averred, “Maliki is Iraqi, but he lived in Iran a long time, he works for them.” Referring to Maliki’s political party, Abu Salih added, “The Dawa Party is the first enemy of Iraq.” Unlike some of his associates, Abu Salih did not think it had been a mistake for Sunnis to boycott the security forces. “If Sunnis had joined they would have been killed or fired,” he said. Abu Salih admitted that some men from Al Qaeda joined the ISVs so that they could have the identity card as protection should they get arrested. If the Iraqi government did not allow the ISVs to join its security forces, “it will be worse than before,” he said.
Abu Yusef, who was sitting with Abu Salih, was a former investigator for Saddam’s Special Security Service. Like all members of the security forces, he had been fired when former American proconsul Paul Bremer issued an edict dissolving them in May 2003. Many joined the resistance after that, though Abu Yusef denied having done so (but he told me he fought the Mahdi Army and killed many of them). The Mahdi Army killed twenty-seven members of his family, he said, adding that on one day, earlier in 2007, forty-seven Sunni corpses were found next to the nearby Sunni Tawhid Mosque, presumably murdered by the Mahdi Army. He denied being anti-Shiite, though. His wife was Shiite, and many of the officers he worked with in the security service were Shiites from throughout Iraq.
The Hero House—the sobriquet the Americans gave to Osama’s headquarters—was located behind a tall concrete wall that stretched the length of a highway the Americans called Route Senators. The Americans paid Iraqis to build these walls, Osama said. Before they were erected, he said, the Iraqi National Police had fired on the neighborhood from the highway. Now his guards manned a checkpoint at a gap in the wall that allowed vehicles to enter the area. The house belonged to Abu Yasser’s cousin, a doctor living in Britain. It was also surrounded by concrete barriers and manned by men in civilian clothing casually slinging Kalashnikovs. Inside the mostly empty house was a room with mattresses and another with some chairs, a desk, and a large satellite image of Dora that the Americans had given Osama. As we drank tea in the office, one of Osama’s sources entered and pointed to a
