Anyway, Bassima saw the ISVs as a threat to Shiite domination and would try to throw every possible obstacle in our path against ISV integration into the ISF. And this woman was the [government’s] lead on reconciliation!”
Saddam Hussein designed Baghdad with a circle of loyal neighborhoods around it. With its many officers, Seidiya was a place he could count on. But it had become a vital battleground during the civil war. Sunnis and Shiites both wanted it, since it opens up into Sunni strongholds like Dora. Shiites wanted to block whatever was coming in. It was located between Shiite-dominated Amil and Sunni-dominated Dora, and it was on the important road that Shiites took to go south to Karbala and Najaf. The Mahdi Army rained mortars down from the Baya district and destroyed Sunni mosques. The neighborhood was originally 55 percent Sunni and 45 percent Shiite, but by the end Shiites would have the upper hand. Seidiya went from being a relatively peaceful middle-class neighborhood to a deserted and broken wasteland, all under the Americans’ watch. Most of the residents had fled, and abandoned homes were used by militiamen and insurgents.
“The Shiites were definitely winning,” said Captain Noyes, a platoon leader in Seidiya. “They were on the offensive and the local Sunnis were on the defensive, but it was a very violent and contested battle. The Shiite groups were attempting to kick Sunnis out of Seidiya and move Shiites in. The Sunnis were attempting to defend themselves, but some of them had Al Qaeda ties and were targeted by coalition forces, so they were fighting a two-front battle.” Most of the murder victims he remembered encountering were Sunni. “Many were killed with a single shot to the head, and signs of torture were on their bodies. The bodies were placed in areas to intimidate locals. Sometimes IEDs were placed under the bodies targeting whoever tried to recover the body. The Shiites were more effective and organized. They were part of the government, Ministry of Interior, the IP, and INP working there. Sunnis were isolated.”
Noyes lived and worked with the 321 INP, or the Wolf Brigade, which was responsible for Seidiya. “They were extremely sectarian, regularly involved in and committing crimes,” he said. “The Wolf Brigade and Iraqi police were an arm of Shiite extremists, filled with Shiite militia members. I frequently found the Wolf Brigade involved in outright sectarian activities in cooperation with Shiite militias. The Iraqi police were so often tied to attacks on coalition forces and locals that it went beyond complacency or incompetence.
“Eventually an Iraqi Army battalion took over Seidiya, but they were still under the INP brigade command responsible for West Rashid. We got 321 INP kicked out over a long period of documenting and reporting their crimes against the people of Seidiya. Their battalion commander was LTC Haidar. At one point we found him and General Mundher stealing furniture from an abandoned apartment. They claimed it was General Mundher’s apartment and they were moving it out.”
The Americans arrested more than seventy members of the Wolf Brigade, who had been found expelling Sunnis and moving displaced Shiites into their homes. The Wolf Brigade was replaced by the Iraqi army’s Muthana Brigade, itself feared by Sunnis, and the Muthana Brigade clashed with the Seidiya Guard, the Awakening Group established by Noyes and his team. “The Seidiya Guard were by far superior to the INP as a counterinsurgency force. Their leaders were much more competent,” Noyes observed. “They conducted operations to win the support of the population; the INP did the exact opposite. The Seidiya Guards captured people occasionally. They would then turn them over to ISF or CF. Shiites that they handed over to INP were usually released. They understood their legitimacy was on the line, and so they were careful in how they handled people they captured. I encountered only support for the Seidiya Guard with the local populace. However, their relationship with the INP was horrible. They each viewed each other as illegitimate sectarian actors, and probably rightly so. The Seidiya Guard was disbanded after I left, under Iraqi government pressure.”
Not everyone was happy about the new militias being created by the Americans, especially the Shiite- dominated ISF. More a paramilitary force than a team of street cops, the Iraqi National Police resembled the National Guard in the United States, compared with the more local Iraqi police. Both types of police units were dominated by Shiite supporters or members of the Mahdi Army or Badr militia and had fought in the civil war, often targeting Sunni civilians and cleansing Sunni areas. I accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Reineke of the 2-2 SCR to a meeting at the headquarters of the INP’s Seventh Brigade, in the former home of Ali Hassan Majid, the notorious Chemical Ali. It was now a joint security station ( JSS), staffed by Iraqis and Americans. This station was feared by Sunnis, who were often kidnapped by the national police and, if they were lucky, released for ransom. It was rumored to be a Badr militia base for torturing Sunnis.
Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim, the INP brigade commander, sat behind a large wooden desk surrounded by plastic flowers. Behind him was a photograph of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. To his side was a shotgun. Karim controlled three INP battalions and was the senior Iraqi security official in the area. Even the Iraqi army officers in his area were under his authority. Lieut. Col. Jim Crider was partnered with Karim’s Third Battalion, Seventh Brigade, or 372. “Every time we went on patrol with them, we got shot at,” Crider told me. “Every time we patrolled with national police, we were introducing an irritant” into the Sunni neighborhoods. Sometimes Sunni militiamen would let the Americans pass, only to blow up the INP vehicles. Although Crider’s men at the JSS with Karim always had a list of all the prisoners held there and inspected the jails, Crider admitted that abuses probably still took place outside his men’s gaze. Iraqis were relieved when they learned that the Americans, and not the INPs, had detained their sons. “In the context of the surge, our policy was not to turn prisoners over to the INPs,” he said. “I remember Karim as very sectarian. I hated being around him. I once brought an Iraqi army commander from Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, to our JSS to show him our setup. Karim was furious and brought us all into his office, where he sat and stared at the wall. It was weird, so I got up and left. I could tell he was a sectarian stooge from a long way away. Guys like him are the greatest threat to the stability of Iraq. They push regular Sunnis into a corner and then are surprised when they fight back.”
In December 2007 the delegation of Americans led by Reineke was greeted warmly by Karim and his men. Five or six of his officers were with him, all Shiites. Reineke acted with exaggerated deference, saying “
A stern man named Abu Jaafar had been observing the exchange. Wearing a dark suit and a dark shirt buttoned up, with no tie, he had two thuggish companions in leather jackets who were very friendly with Karim. A Shiite known to the Americans as Sheikh Ali, Abu Jaafar had his own ISV unit of about 100 men in southern Dora’s Saha neighborhood. The Americans said he was unofficially in charge of that area. He was also a Neighborhood Advisory Council representative for Mahala 828. “He may not be Mahdi Army, but he has a lot of Mahdi Army friends,” Maj. Jeffrey Gottlieb whispered to me. He also had a lot of access to Karim’s headquarters.
“We’ve got a sectarian fault line in the Saha area,” Captain Cox explained to me that night, back at his base, drawing a line on the satellite image on the wall. “Saha was a battleground between [Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Mahdi Army]. We took over on September 8, 2007. The drop in violence is thanks to our unit moving in and patrolling every day.” Sunnis had been forced to rely on Al Qaeda for self-defense, he explained, and though northern Saha had been “an absolute killing zone before,” rich Sunnis were now trying to return.
Victims of sectarian killings were down by half since the 2-2 SCR had arrived, Cox said. “We can have meetings and agreements between prominent Shiites who had ties to militias and prominent Sunnis who had ties to AQ.” He sounded triumphant, but I couldn’t help noticing myself that attacks against Americans were also down to nearly zero when I was there.
But not far away, in Mahala 836, Cox admitted, a Shiite man was murdered when he went to check out his house after hearing it was safe to go back. The 2-2 SCR also noted a spike in criminal killings, they told me. I wondered how they could distinguish. The Mahdi Army cease-fire and the withdrawal of Al Qaeda forces to northern Iraq in order to avoid the surge created a power vacuum that allowed criminals to operate more freely.
