A few days later I returned to meet with Karim without the Americans present and found him talking to several senior Shiite army officers about the forced displacement of Iraqis and what to do with the displaced. An Awakening member was living in a house that the original owner had sold to somebody else, and now the Awakening man refused to relinquish it to the new owner. “We need a mechanism to solve these problems,” one officer said. A colonel called Najam who spoke with a Shiite southern Iraqi dialect worried that displaced Sunnis had taken over former homes of Shiites in Dora. “We need to bring back the Shiites, but the Sunnis are in the houses,” he said. “This battle is bigger than the other battles—this is the battle of the displaced.” Eavesdropping, I could hear Najam angrily condemning somebody, presumably the Awakening. “They are killers, terrorists, ugly, pigs,” he said.
Karim’s phone rang, and he spoke with a superior officer about a clash the previous day between the Awakening and armed Shiites. “American officers took Awakening men to a sector where they shouldn’t be,” he said. “Residents saw armed men not in uniforms and shot at them from buildings. Four Awakening were injured. My battalion was called in to help.” In truth, they had clashed with the Mahdi Army, but Karim downplayed their role and blamed an American captain for establishing an ISV unit in an area where he should not have. “Yes, sir,” he said, “the Awakening will withdraw from that area. They started the problem.”
Gen. Abdul Amir, another man present, was the commander of the important Sixth Division of the Iraqi army. He warned that men were joining the Awakening for political purposes. “They want to be prominent in their neighborhood so that they will get elected. The prime minister said, ‘I don’t want this to be about politics, I want this to be about security.’”
The sectarian Shiite parties ruling Iraq worried about the Awakening becoming a pan-Iraqi movement. If it succeeded in being nonsectarian, it could displace them from power. Najam joked that 98 percent of the Awakening was Al Qaeda. Just then a U.S. Army major walked in and met with Karim outside the office. An embarrassed Karim returned and said he’d been informed he could not talk to me.
“Gen. Abdul Karim was a completely sectarian individual who was more interested in consolidating Shiite influence and power via his police than in really solving the problems that plagued the area,” an American captain confided to me. “He was also incompetent in that he did not at all understand how to run operations or how to collect and use intelligence. People were fairly scared of him, especially his own subordinates, which suggests he was connected to one Shiite militia or another, though this was never confirmed. I think it was unlikely that he was intimately involved in any particular militia, but only because that might create a problem for him. I remember once, while visiting our AOR [area of responsibility], his personal security detachment, a ridiculous thirty-plus policemen, provoked our ISVs into a confrontation and hauled several away to the INP HQ. It was a near nightmare getting them released, but the event was indicative of Karim’s belief that he controlled Dora and that only he would influence the security situation there.”
I returned on a different day to meet Abu Jaafar, who suggested Karim’s headquarters as a good location. Karim showed me a plaque on his wall that he said was an award from Prime Minister Maliki for being nonsectarian, and he pointed to medals on his desk that the Americans had given him—also, he said, for being nonsectarian. Next to them were a couple of traditional rings worn only by Shiites.
Before the war he had owned some minivans, he said. After the war he built the Shiite Imam al-Hassan Mosque in Saha. “When terrorist activities started in the area, I wasn’t involved,” he said, because it was not clear who was responsible. “When things got clear I saw that people needed somebody to lead them and command them according to God.” He explained that his men had taken the homes of “bad Sunnis” (meaning Al Qaeda) and inventoried their contents. “They don’t want to come back because they were killers,” he said. Problems in his area had started two years earlier, he said, with random assassinations. “My cousin was a school principal and a local council member, and he was shot to death walking home. And others were killed, and we didn’t know why or who killed them. After a while I knew that my neighbor was informing for the killers. Most of the dead were Shiites. I talked to the young men in our area and said, ‘If we don’t cooperate, we will be killed one by one.’ We started to guard our area.” Abu Jaafar and his militia used old refrigerators, cinder blocks, and earth to wall off their area. His enemies—Al Qaeda but also the 1920 Revolution Battalion and the Army of the Mujahideen—were, he claimed, these same people in the Awakening. Shiites did not need an Awakening. “We are already awake,” he said, smiling icily.
Abu Jaafar pulled out a list of forty-six people from Saha. “Criminals in the Awakening,” he said. “For two years I was naming these people.” He singled out Hamid, the Neighborhood Advisory Council boss in Hadhir. “Shiites could not join the local council,” he said. “They would be killed.” He blamed Hamid for dividing Saha in two, with Shiites controlling the south and Sunnis controlling the north. But in fact Shiites had pushed Sunnis out of northern Saha, and that area became a key front line in the civil war. Abu Jaafar pointed to two other names. “The Americans told me, ‘If you see these two men, you can kill them or bring them to us.’ Now they are wearing the Awakening uniform in Mahala 828. They said they have reconciled. I have to be patient. We are awake and our eyes are open.”
Al Qaeda had changed its name and now called itself the Awakening, Abu Jaafar insisted. He claimed that Sunnis were acting weak so that they could attack once they regained strength. I asked him about Awakening Council founder Sattar Abu Risha, who had incurred the wrath of Al Qaeda. “He was just a robber in the street, and they made him a leader,” Abu Jaafar said dismissively. I told him that many Awakening members claimed they were fighting Al Qaeda. “How did they fight Al Qaeda?” he scoffed. “Fight themselves? Fight their brothers? And where is Al Qaeda? Did it evaporate overnight? We know everything, but we’re just waiting.” I asked him how he knew Karim so well. “General Karim is a good guy,” he said. “During the battles I was here every day.”
Ghost Police
I visited JSS Cougar at the Walid INP station, where the First Battalion, Seventh Brigade, Second Division (172 INP Battalion) worked with a U.S. Army National Police Training Team (NPTT). This team, led by the cynical Major Gottlieb, covered the area of Baghdad the Americans called East Rashid. I turned up dressed very casually, in a T-shirt and jeans. Seeing this, American officers from the 2-2 SCR admonished me to wear my body armor to protect myself from accidental INP discharges. “I did convoy security in the Sunni Triangle and was hit by numerous IEDs, complex attacks, small arms, but I never felt closer to death than when I was working with Iraqi Security Forces,” joked Captain Cox.
A tall and lanky tank officer, Gottlieb underwent about seventy days of training with his men to prepare for this mission. “We don’t know as much as we could know because we don’t know Arabic,” he said. “The INPs here are almost all Shiites. Orders from their chain of command are usually to arrest Sunnis, not Shiites. But they don’t go on ‘Sunni hunts’ like the Second Brigade in Seidiya and a lot of other brigades.” The battalion he worked with was mostly from southern Iraq, especially Basra, and many were more loyal to the Badr militia. “At first they were encouraged to resign or given dangerous missions and were replaced by guys from Sadr City.” I asked him if he had any evidence of Sadrist sympathies among the men. “Today I was sitting in the office and the brigade finance officer’s phone rang, and the ring tone was a Sadr song,” he said. Pointing to the newly painted walls, he said, “It’s all cosmetic. They know if everything has fresh paint and looks squared away, we’ll think they’re squared away.” Local Iraqi National Police were resettling displaced Shiite families in empty Sunni homes in this area. Gottlieb called them “United Van Lines missions”: “The national police ask, ‘Can you help us move a family’s furniture?’ There are people coming back, and we don’t know if they were originally from here. Official U.S. policy is, we do not take part in any resettlement activity. I could make up a deed.”
Gottlieb conducted an inventory of the weapons that were supposed to have been assigned to the base. Five hundred and fifty weapons were missing, including pistols, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. “Guys take weapons when they go AWOL,” he explained. “It was funny how they always expended four hundred rounds of ammunition. They would have fake engagements and transfer the ammunition to militias.” There was also a problem of “ghost police,” he said. Although 542 INP men were assigned to his JSS on paper, only about 200 would show up at any time. Some would be on leave and some simply did not exist, their salaries pocketed by officers. “Officers get a certain number of ghosts,” he said. He looked at an American soldier nearby. “I need some ghosts. How much are you making?”
I accompanied the NPTT on a joint raid with the INPs. Captain Adil, a trim thirty-year-old with a shaved
