some cases, insurgent and opposition elements.” This was a challenge for the military, which needs a formula or system for everything it does, even building relationships. Petraeus formalized KLE because developments like the Awakening were occurring with little involvement or support from the Iraqi government. As a result the government was very suspicious of the Awakening and the Americans’ motives. In addition, Petraeus had no body of his own through which to coordinate these local developments or approach them strategically.
“You cannot kill or capture your way out of an insurgency,” Petraeus said. He hoped to establish a dialogue between members of the resistance, or at least influential supporters, and the Iraqi government. This would facilitate the American and Iraqi forces’ takeover of areas controlled by the resistance without requiring combat in village after village. Of course, those in the resistance, whether Sunni or Shiite, who were “irreconcilable” would be killed or captured. FSEC was composed of a few dozen mostly military officers, although the American ambassador appointed a civilian from the State Department to work with them. “Engagers” working for FSEC developed “lanes” to reach out to the Iraqi government and resistance.
“We gave insurgents a place to come see us, to realize we weren’t ogres,” Dermer said. “The Awakening was also a movement within Sunnis at large, but they didn’t realize what they wanted. Some wanted to take over from the Shiites, others just wanted to go back to normal life. We were getting deeper and deeper [with the Sunni resistance], further up the hierarchy, and having more success. But Sunnis were way too divided.” Dermer met leaders of the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunna, the Jihad and Reform Front, and some people connected to the 1920 Revolution Brigades.
Dermer would meet these resistance men in Jordanian hotels. In Jordan and Syria he also met with Iraqi businessmen and expatriates who were in touch with the resistance but were not driving it. In 2003 he had been involved in the creation of the new Iraqi Defense Ministry. Many of the former military officers he had met then were now influential in the resistance.
The Iraqi government’s Implementation and Follow-up Committee for National Reconciliation (IFCNR), led by the notorious Dr. Bassima al-Jadri, was set up by Maliki to work on “reconciliation” issues with the Americans and to deal with the Awakening movement. “The Awakening wasn’t a reconciliation with the Iraqis but with the power to be in the battlefield,” Dermer explained. “The purpose of Maliki’s reconciliation committee was also to thwart whatever we wanted to do. The reconciliation committee was all Shiite except for a couple of token Sunnis. They did a good job of making us believe we were making progress. It was clear to me from dealing with the Iraqi army, Bassima, Adnan [a Shiite former intelligence officer under Saddam], that they [the Awakening] were doomed from the beginning. We kept a nice face on it with all this talk about jobs, yeah yeah, blah blah. The Iraqi government was flabbergasted when we told them how many [Awakening men] we had on the payroll. But it worked. It settled down the killing to a manageable degree. Abud Qanbar hated tribal sheikhs. He’s urban. ‘They had their chance,’ he said. The Iraqis wanted to arrest all the Awakening leaders, and the minute space developed they went after them. Maliki was smart; he created the reconciliation committee. He was building tribal councils, the mirror image [of the Awakening] but Shiites. Bassima and Adnan were involved in building the tribal councils. You could get something done if you had a good relationship with Bassima and Adnan. The tribal support councils were meant to manipulate tribes to be on Maliki’s side, like the Ottomans and Saddam. Bassima was Maliki’s watchdog to mitigate the Awakening and the Sunnis. Some senior insurgent guys were FREs [former regime elements], generals I met in 2003.”
Though Jadri was a friend and confidante of Maliki, everybody else around her hated her. “Bassima had issues being a woman in a man’s world,” Dermer told me. “Iraqi generals kissed her ass.” Jadri and Adnan wanted to meet the Awakening men, so the Americans brokered it. “Sunnis wouldn’t engage with the Iraqi government without American interlocution,” Dermer said. “The Shiites wanted us out of the way. We brought in Raad from Ghazaliya, Abul Abed from Amriya, and Abu Azzam al-Tamimi from Abu Ghraib.” These were important Awakening leaders in Baghdad. “We brought them into the palace to meet Bassima and Adnan,” he said. “It took a lot of work.”
Dermer mocked the notion of “key leader engagement,” which in practice meant trying to have as many meetings as possible and using that as a measure of progress. FSEC was originally led by Graeme Lamb, a British general who was Petraeus’s deputy and who had experience establishing a dialogue with armed groups in Northern Ireland. “Lamb was replaced by an idiot British general and an idiot State Department guy,” Dermer complained bitterly. “The guys in charge of FSEC didn’t get it. It takes very unique people for this office. These fuckers are killers. You can’t be a starry-eyed thirty-year-old or Harvard grad, but it was a lot of PowerPoint briefings, six-month rotations—it was bureaucratic. People hated success, like getting high in the insurgency. The agency [CIA] fought us, State [Department] hated us. Once you put it in a bureaucracy, it won’t work. It was a brilliant idea, but we didn’t know what we were doing.”
FSEC also saw the prison population as a group with potential to be “reconciled,” and also as a possible source of intelligence on the resistance. Some prisoners were resistance leaders and could actually encourage their supporters outside to reach an accommodation with the Americans or the Iraqi government. In American prisons Dermer and his colleagues met with leaders of the Mahdi Army and special groups.
Throughout the American occupation the majority of Iraqis seized and imprisoned by the Americans were innocent, even innocent of conducting attacks against the Americans. Few of the tens of thousands of Iraqis detained in the American-run gulags were ever even charged with anything. Few Americans question whether they had a right to invade a foreign country and arrest scores of its men every day on scant evidence. When the men were eventually released, the Americans staged shows of fanfare and magnanimity.
In December 2007 the 1-28 Infantry Division, which controlled the Jihad district, staged one of these slightly absurd “reconciliation” ceremonies when it released fifteen Shiite men. Col. Pat Frank of the 1-28, who supervised the ceremony, explained to me that Jihad was part of what the Americans had named Northwest Rashid, and was about 42 percent Shiite and 58 percent Sunni. There were a little over 1,800 ISVs in Northwest Rashid. There were also 985 Shiite police recruits and 834 Sunni police recruits; 850 of them came out of the ISVs. “Moderates have gained the momentum in the area and overtaken extremists,” Frank said.
Frank’s men staged a reconciliation accord between Sunnis and Shiites as a gesture and requested a list of local men they had imprisoned that the district’s leaders wanted to be released. “They were suspected of Shiite militant activity,” Frank said, but were screened by the Americans and Iraqi government before their release. “Some people on the list were rejected at senior levels” by the Americans, he told me. Only fifteen men had been approved. The Americans built a “reconciliation hall” for the “Reconciliation Committee.” Frank showed neighborhood leaders charts in which he gave them red stars or green stars depending on whether violence had gone down in their area. He gave a metal emblem of the black lion, which symbolized his unit, to a female American correspondent in case she ever had problems. “The Iraqis know us and love us,” he said. “Just show it to them and you’ll be fine.”
The fifteen prisoners were brought in to the building in handcuffs. The few journalists present were ordered not to take pictures until the cuffs were removed. The event was clumsily choreographed. Journalists, council members, and local dignitaries were herded into a separate room and guarded by soldiers. Tahsin Ali Samarai, of the Reconciliation Council’s security committee complained that they had given the Americans a list of 562 prisoners from their area that they wanted released. The Iraqi army colonel in charge of the area told me that all the men were innocent. Another tribal sheikh agreed. “The Americans arrest people randomly,” he said, adding that some of the men had been imprisoned for nearly two years. Sheikh Awad Abdul Wahel, also known as Abu Muhammad, was president of the tribal sheikh council, which had submitted seven hundred names of prisoners from the Jihad district alone. “I serve my people, not the Americans,” he said. “They were never accused or found guilty,” Sheikh Hussein Karim al-Kinani said. “American accusations and arrests are random.”
Outside one angry young woman called Leila waited with her two children. Her husband, Muhammad, was arrested sixteen months earlier while sleeping on his roof to avoid the summer heat. A neighbor was shot and Muhammad was rounded up with all the other men of military age in the area. Their son was born while he was in prison. Leila blamed the Americans for the civil war and did not want to talk about reconciliation. One woman in an
Inside the prisoners were boisterous. They were seated in alphabetical order, and behind them sat “guarantors” for a “bond” they would have to sign. “It’s not an oath on the Koran,” Frank explained. “It’s on their honor. A guarantor is a mentor, just like in the U.S., when an individual runs in trouble with law and somebody steps up to mentor them. The reconciliation committee wants to see these fifteen men do well.” The Iraqis seemed
