Americans to think the men had been trying to lay an IED, so they blindfolded and handcuffed all eleven of them. “If an IED is on the ground, we arrest everybody in a hundred-meter radius,” I was told, though here it was only an electrical cable, and most likely the men had been trying to connect a house to a generator. In the house the two tipsters had identified, the soldiers found Mahdi Army “propaganda” and arrested several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or “Sabrin the Cruel,” an alleged Mahdi Army leader.
The Strykers took the prisoners to the nearby COP Blackfoot. Inside, Hamid and the Sahwa men drank sodas and ate muffins. Osama and Abu Salih shook hands with the Americans and thanked them for arresting Sabrin, who they said had a lot of blood on his hands. Once the misunderstanding was cleared up, the Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided were released, three of them being taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructed them to list who did what, what they did, where, when, and how. Abu Salih walked by and quickly told the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in some attack. None of the Americans noticed this coaching. Osama met with a sergeant from the unit and asked him if he could put a PKC on top of his pickup truck. “No,” the sergeant said. “But we can hide it,” Osama pleaded. Sabrin was soon moved to a “detainee holding facility” at FOB Prosperity. “We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad Mahdi Army guy,” said an American Army intelligence officer. “He was involved in EJKs,” or extra-judicial killings, a euphemism for murders.
Osama’s main competition for contracts with the Americans was another local Sunni power broker called Muhammad Kashkul, or Abu Tariq. A former bodyguard for Saddam, he was now a contractor too. “He knows that when security is stabilized contracts will come in,” Captain Cox said, explaining Kashkul’s motivation for collaborating with the Americans. In one meeting with the Americans, Kashkul bragged that while working as a bodyguard for Saddam he had slept with 472 women. “Is that a lot in America?” he asked. Kashkul and Osama tried to play different American units against one another, but Cox helped arrange a meeting where the two were forced to work out what he described as “their turf war.” Osama was not convinced. “Coalition forces like Kashkul, so I have to be his friend,” he said. “They told me I have no choice. I have to be his friend. For two years they were looking for him. Showing his picture. Then they arrested him, took him to Blackfoot, and released him after two hours and said, ‘He is working with us.’”
The Americans were obsessed with the concept of “reconciliation,” which Cox defined as “Agree to quit fighting and talk about problems and get U.S. contracts.”
“Osama hates reconciliation,” Sperry told me. “He doesn’t feel that he has anything to reconcile. He hates that these other guys get contracts.” Osama had recently lost face when he accidentally discharged his Glock pistol and nearly hit an American soldier while in a meeting. Some of his men were proving unruly as well. “A couple of Osama’s guys were caught outside their sector,” the officer told me, “so we detained them and brought in the leaders. Abu Salih was really pissed.” When I was visiting Falcon FOB to discuss the ISVs, a major stuck his head through the door. “Are you tracking that the Heroes beat some guy up?” he asked Captain Dehart. “The Heroes’ usefulness is almost over,” Captain Dehart grumbled. He defended the reconciliation process. “It’s an overt process,” he said. “You can’t be in the shadows. We take
When Osama drove me home from Dora we stopped at an Iraqi army checkpoint near Qadisiya. He noticed a familiar Audi parked on the street and then saw a man he knew as Naseem walking past the soldiers. Naseem was Al Qaeda, he said, and was responsible for many attacks against civilians and the Americans. Osama put his cap on and called a soldier over. The soldier had a green bandanna masking all but his eyes as though he were a bank robber. “That guy is called Naseem, he is with Al Qaeda,” Osama said. The soldier seemed annoyed and I was worried that he would arrest us instead. “I’m with the Awakening,” Osama said, he showed several badges he had been given by the Americans. The soldier told him to keep going but Osama insisted. “What do you want me to do?” the soldier asked. Osama tried to convince them, but the soldiers were indifferent. Frustrated, he drove away.
Osama’s part of Dora, which included Mahalas 830, 832, 834, and 836, was called Hadhir. Though each
“There was definitely a link” between the INPs and sectarian forces, Nick Cook told me. “I am not sure how deep it went, but you could tell the INP definitely treated the Sunni neighborhoods with a lot of indifference and disdain. Many times I heard the national police refer to the neighborhood as lived in by dogs or criminals, referring to the residents. To the national police every person was a suspect. I never did see outright prejudice, but when you moved from Mekanik, a Sunni area, to Abu Dshir, a Shiite area, you definitely saw a change in personality with the national police.” Captain T recalled, “I remember several instances of units in predominantly Shiite areas actually catching [INPs] in the act of planting IEDs.”
Lieutenant Colonel Miska was based in Kadhimiya’s Forward Operating Base Justice. It had three detention centers in it: the Kadhimiya prison; the Ministry of Justice prison, where the government executed condemned people; and an Iraqi army detention center. Miska worked closely with the Iraqi Security Forces, and at one point he had six brigades’ worth of Iraqi National Police or army men working with him. I asked him about the abuses he saw. “The Kadhimiya prison run by the national police was the most notorious,” he said. “This was Saddam’s former military intelligence facility. Senior members of the national police reportedly tortured, extorted, and killed prisoners, mainly Sunnis. The prison was made to hold about 350 prisoners. They had about 900 there when we first began putting pressure on the NP. At first we would conduct inspections and bring in teams that would write reports. The NP would complain that all the Americans talked about was human rights. They would also do a good job of stonewalling the investigators and making it difficult to gain entrance. We eventually started cycling reporters into the facility and getting front-page stories to embarrass the NP. The prisoner population quickly dwindled as a result.”
One of Miska’s closest colleagues was an Iraqi army brigade commander who was going after both the Mahdi Army and Al Qaeda. As a result, he was put under intense political pressure. Miska accompanied him to numerous meetings with senior Sadrists and other politicians who were trying to get him to back down. But every time he would keep the heat on. The Iraqi commander eventually left Iraq after four attempts on his life, and Mahdi Army hit squads were hunting for his family. “It took me eight months to finally get through the bureaucracy of immigration, UNHCR, and other agencies to help him relocate to the U.S.,” Miska said. “Today his family is safe and living much more comfortably than they did in Iraq.”
The Iraqi government, it seemed, would come up with every possible excuse not to send help to Dora. “When we would go to the Green Zone and ask ministers and deputy ministers to help out, they would claim that Dora was too dangerous,” Captain T said. “We would protest and say that we would take them there to see it themselves and would, of course, protect any government workers or contractors who were working in the area. To them, this was impossible because the area was unsafe!
“It was ridiculous dealing with the Iraqi government. This was particularly clear when we were setting up the Iraqi Security Volunteers as paid security forces in our area. We were attempting to integrate them into the Iraqi security forces, but the government stonewalled this at every turn. They would ask for ridiculously detailed information from the ISVs, which they were, in turn, unwilling to provide to a government they didn’t trust. The government would demand that the ISVs meet standards far above what the ISF themselves had to meet.
“Dr. Bassima al-Jadri was a particular problem in this regard, as she was extremely sectarian. She saw the ISVs as the armed forces for the Sunni political parties. We tried our hardest to make sure that the ISVs were security oriented, not politically motivated. In fact, this led us to deny a small group of low-level informants our sponsorship as ISVs. They turned against us and went ‘rogue.’ They were sponsored by the Iraqi Islamic Party. We eventually had to detain several of them to convince them that we would not permit the politicization of our ISVs.
