spot on the map where an Al Qaeda agent was residing. The suspected Al Qaeda man was called Walid. “He is harmful to people,” Osama told me. “I just want to kill him. Now he is back in the area. His cousins are Al Qaeda also.” But he said he would watch him instead, to see who he worked with. The Americans had recently required the ISVs to wear uniforms, and Osama was annoyed that most of his men were still in their civilian attire.
Inside I met Hussein, a lanky twenty-one-year-old wearing a blue tracksuit. He was one of Osama’s original partners, though he was from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad. He was working as a guard in a local Sunni mosque when the Mahdi Army, backed by the Iraqi National Guard, expelled his family and other Sunnis from the area. They killed his uncle and cousin. His family fled to Arab Jubur, but Al Qaeda pressured him to join them and came to his house looking for him, so his family told them he had gone to Syria, and he started to work with Osama in Dora. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are the same thing,” he told me, “two faces of the same coin.”
Hussein was the fourth-ranking member of Osama’s unit, after Abu Yusef and Abu Salih. He took me with him as he drove through the area to inspect the twenty checkpoints their men were maintaining. We drove through the mostly deserted neighborhood, with its shattered homes. Most of the graffiti on the walls had been painted over, but some still said, “Long Live the Mujahideen.” On various corners two or three men stood or sat with their Kalashnikovs. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army destroyed a lot here,” Hussein said as we surveyed the devastation, but he added that “Al Qaeda destroyed the area, not the Mahdi Army.” We were stopped at the checkpoints, and though some of the men recognized Hussein, many cautiously gripped their weapons and questioned us. “We’re a patrol from the central headquarters,” Hussein told them. Some of the men were teenagers, others were in their fifties. One of them covered his face menacingly with a red checkered scarf. The local market, previously shut down, was partially reopened, and as ISV checkpoints were being established some of the Sunnis who had fled the area, though none of the Shiites or Christians, were returning. “Clean Shiites can come back,” Osama told me. While I was there a Sunni family from the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad, arrived at the checkpoint. They hoped to stay in one of the homes in the area. The ISV men questioned them and demanded copies of the identity cards of all the people who would live in the house. “Anyone else I will arrest,” said Osama. A woman approached the gate to ask for information about men who had been arrested, but the guards could not help her.
One of the men prepared lunch for us: mushy cooked tomatoes; mushy fried potatoes; and kibbe, ground meat fried in dough. Osama called an American sergeant from a nearby base. “Your guys detained this guy,” he said. “He is seventy years old. What’s wrong with this guy, is he bad? Oh, he’s fifty? They told me he was very old. If you know for sure he is Al Qaeda, then fuck him.” Then he asked about a series of men who were detained and warned about an Iraqi who worked with the Americans. “He is a bad guy,” he said. “He threatens people.”
Osama received a phone call from representatives of the Awakening Council boss Ahmad Abu Risha in Ramadi, the brother of the slain Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, summoning him and his men to a meeting. He was very excited and hoped to discuss what would happen in six months, when the ISV program was scheduled to end. He wanted the Awakening groups and the ISVs to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, “because the Iraqi government doesn’t do shit.” If the U.S. Army left or once more took to remaining within their FOBs, he said, violence in the area would return.
Haji Hashim was the deputy head of the Rashid council who had collaborated with Crider. In 2003 Hashim and others volunteered to set up the local council. Before the war he had been in the Ministry of Education. “I spoke in mosques,” he said, “and said we have to work with the Americans. Dora became very bad in 2005. We were considered collaborators.” Al Qaeda came in, he said, and then it became dominated by locals and was joined by other resistance groups. “Then sectarianism started,” he said. “Al Qaeda killed Shiites, the Mahdi Army and Badr killed Sunnis and former officers. Things got worse after Samarra. Most police were supporters of the Mahdi Army, and Dora was a target for the Mahdi Army. In Shiite mosques they spoke out against Dora. Many Sunnis were killed in Abu Dshir.”
The people of Dora collected their government-provided propane tanks in Abu Dshir. In 2006 “Sunni agents from here went there to get them, and four were killed,” he told me. “After that nobody could get propane, so people had to use wood to cook. So American patrols went to collect the propane, and now it’s better, but there are still lingering fears about being attacked.” Hashim was shot in the head once when he left the house to collect his propane. The Americans took him to the hospital in the Green Zone, but he lost his vision in one eye.
“I have seen dogs eating dead bodies,” Hashim told me. “Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq killed any Shiite, any government employee, and Shiites killed any Sunni. The Iraqi National Police used to shoot randomly when they were attacked. The leadership of the Iraqi Security Forces was sectarian at the time. They made random arrests, would shoot randomly and kill innocent people. The Rafidein Brigade of the INPs made random arrests. They took sixty-eight people from shops, and after that we found their bodies in Abu Dshir. Police shot at electrical stations so people wouldn’t have power.”
One especially vindictive unit came through with PKCs (heavy-caliber machine guns) and shot up the area the day before they were replaced. “They had a strong hate,” Hashim explained. “Anybody who crossed the street was shot. Only cats crossed the street.” He attributed the improved security to the Americans. “One of the most important things they did was walling off the areas,” he said. “It’s true it bothered people, but it worked.” The Americans also helped release innocent Sunnis who had been arrested by the Rafidein Brigade.
A new commander took over the Rafidein Brigade and improved relations with the people, Hashim told me. But the commander was later replaced by another who “did bad things, made random arrests, he made problems instead of solving them.” This one was later punished and transferred to the traffic police. “Then the Wolf Brigade came in 2007,” said Hashim. “They arrested people in mosques right away, tortured people. Boys from the area fought the Wolf Brigade. I asked them why they were fighting. They said, ‘It’s better to die fighting than to end up arrested with holes drilled in our bodies.’”
ONE DAY I ACCOMPANIED men from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, a unit based in the nearby FOB Falcon, on a mission as they met up with Osama and his men as well as Hamid, or Abu Abdel Rahman, head of the Hadhir Neighborhood Advisory Council (NAC). Hamid had been in the Iraqi army for twenty-two years. Now he represented the six
The Americans met up with Hamid, Osama, Abu Salih, Abu Yasser, and Abu Yusef at an Iraqi National Police checkpoint and walked down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by their Stryker armored vehicles. The Tawhid’s Sheikh Abu Muhammad wore a green
As other elements of the American unit raided nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the unit came up to me, thinking I was the Americans’ translator, and explained that the men in the courtyard were Sunnis and that some belonged to the Awakening. Some of the men had been involved in tipping off the Americans to the Mahdi Army suspect down the block. I tried to tell the soldiers, but the electrical wires on the ground caused the
