The expanding sectarian warfare was made evident with the daily dumping of dead bodies on the streets of the district. The Iraqi army battalion commander who served with Gentile speculated that the bodies were Sunnis, killed elsewhere in Baghdad and then dumped on the streets of Amriya to intimidate the Sunnis there. “I saw it differently,” Gentile said. “They were mostly Shiites who were still living in or coming into Amriya, and the Sunnis killed them as a way of ‘cleansing’ their district. Any semblance of trust had broken down completely between Shiite and Sunni, and the Sunnis in Amriya, I believed, saw any remaining Shiite in the district as a threat and link to marauding Shiite militia that could still enter the district and kill, since they were aligned with Iraqi Security Forces.
“The Iraqi army battalion in Amriya had turned Route Cedar, the main market street, into a kinetic civil-war attack zone,” Gentile said. The Iraqi soldiers had two checkpoints on either end of the street and fighting outposts on roofs and inside buildings on nearly every block. The constant fighting, IEDs, suicide bombs, and car bombs had shut down all the businesses. Gentile thought that he could win “local hearts and minds” if he improved conditions on the road. He was authorized to remove the two checkpoints and the other outposts. He stationed one of his cavalry troops on the street and focused on reopening businesses. In mid-August 2006 he started building short concrete barriers—Jersey barriers, in American military parlance—around the entire district, with a single entry point run by the Iraqi army. “I initially started to build it in order to try and prevent Sunni insurgent infiltration into the district bringing in IED, car bomb materials, etc., from Ghazaliya to the north and Abu Ghraib to the west. But after it went up—especially the southern wall, which isolated Amriya from the Shiite-dominated West Rashid to the south of it—I found that the locals actually liked it because it prevented marauding Shiite militias from entering into it.” All of this led to a much-improved state of security for the local Sunnis, Gentile said, but the increased security for Sunnis made the area more lethal for the remaining Shiites because it gave the Sunni militias greater freedom of movement. They no longer had to fear Shiite militias.
This was the beginning of the massive population transfer: Sunnis from areas of Baghdad being taken over by Shiites were moving to Amriya. Any family moving out from Amriya was Shiite. “I knew it was going on, but there was no way to stop it,” Gentile said. “We tried through moral suasion, but the locals and their leaders denied to us that it was happening. We tried driving bans, but that became impractical. How does one stop a civil war at the barrel of a gun with only a seven-hundred-man cavalry squadron in a district of close to a hundred thousand people?”
I spoke to Gentile some time after his tour in Amriya. I was curious to know what difference the new counterinsurgency doctrine made. “People like Tom Ricks will tell you that during the surge, units operated differently and adopted new COIN tactics. That just did not happen. What was decisive and made the fundamental difference in Amriya was the co-opting of our former enemies—the non-Al Qaeda Sunni insurgents who became known as the SOI, the Sons of Iraq.”
Amriya came to be seen as a critical piece of terrain because it physically linked the western parts of Baghdad with eastern Anbar. It was also important because it was so close to the Baghdad International Airport and a relatively easy and safe trip for Sunni leaders coming back to Baghdad from the west. “But for the Sunnis in the area, after I built the wall around the place, and after we got the main market street back up and running, and after I established close operations with the Iraqi army battalion, it did actually get better,” Gentile says.
Gentile says he had enough troops to “secure Amriya” but that he was challenged by an enemy that was a mix of Al Qaeda and other Sunni insurgent groups. But since he did not have the Sons of Iraq on his watch—they would emerge later, after Gentile left Baghdad—he never had the local intelligence to discover who set off an IED or fired a sniper round. His efforts were also complicated by the fact that Sunnis were using their increased security to attack the remaining Shiites in the district. The Sunnis also saw the Iraqi army battalion that Gentile was partnered with as an enemy.
Although Gentile was in Baghdad before the surge, he insists he was using the COIN principle already and that every time he was visited by Admiral Giambastiani and Generals Abizaid, Casey, and Chiarelli, he briefed them on how he was using “clear, hold, and build.” “The notion that method started with the surge of troops in Baghdad is hokum,” he says.
The Iraq army battalion Gentile’s squadron partnered with in Amriya was “an exceptionally strong outfit,” he said. “The battalion commander, a Sunni and a professional army officer who served in Saddam Hussein’s army for twenty years prior, was highly competent, professional, and principled. Tactically the battalion was effective too: it could move, shoot, and communicate, and had competent leaders. Yet the problem with it was that aside from its battalion commander and a handful of soldiers, it was almost completely Shiite.” Gentile never believed that there were active links between this battalion and Shiite militias, unlike the police units he had worked with in West Rashid, where the links were clear. “But one could not get away from the fact that they were Shiite and when you boiled it all down with them, especially at times when they were angry over a killing or attack, they saw every Sunni resident in Amriya as their mortal enemy. How would a more robust MITT [military transition] team, more combined patrols with me, more parts for their Humvees, change that basic condition?”
Though Gentile was skeptical that COIN was a cure-all, he knew that he could not kill his way out of the problems he was facing in the district either, so he started fraternizing with local religious leaders, even those with strong links to insurgent groups. He met regularly with Sheikh Walid of the Tikriti Mosque, Sheikh Khalid of the Abbas Mosque, and the imam of the Hassanein Mosque. “I spent a lot of personal time with them, and I think it made a difference in terms of how we were perceived in the area,” he says. “I actually became close to them and considered them my friends.” He even visited two mosques—close to where his battalion was often pounded by IED strikes—that were considered to be strongly influenced by Al Qaeda and befriended Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque.
“Sheikh Walid and Sheikh Khalid both were extremely important to me and my squadron. I did not consider them anti-American at all. Both of them became key conduits for me for information in the area and in resolving problems.” Khalid’s influence and importance in the area became clear to Gentile. He spent many hours in discussion with Khalid, to the extent that Khalid began to start hinting to him that things were slowly changing. “It was becoming clear to the Sunnis in Baghdad that the Americans were finally starting to understand their position. He and Walid and I had agreed on the opening of an Amriya police station that would be manned by local Sunnis from Amriya,” Gentile said. The problem was getting this approved by the Shiite government. This plan was clearly a forerunner of what would become the Awakening.
In October 2006 Sheikh Khalid said something to Gentile that caught his attention at the time and that he has never forgotten. “For some reason I asked him about insurgent attacks in the area and about Al Qaeda,” Gentile said. “He then pulled me off to the side a bit, out of earshot range of his mosque guards, and my troops knew what to do by placing themselves between me and the imam and his guards. He then very breezily dismissed Al Qaeda as an important factor in the future of the area and the country. I thought that odd at the time, since AQI seemed to be behind so much of the violence. But it later occurred to me that what he was essentially saying and reflecting were the early and fundamental changes that were occurring in Anbar with the Awakening and his sense that it would very possibly be soon spreading to Baghdad.”
As it turned out, Sheikh Khalid was a key player in the eventual link of U.S. forces in Amriya with the Sons of Iraq. Gentile’s successor, Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl, commanded the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, in Amriya from November 2006 until January 2008. “Amriya was pretty violent when we got there, as was Khadra just to the north,” he told me. “Soon after we took over the entire Mansour Security District, which includes all of Mansour area except Ghazaliya, which 2-12 Cav was responsible for. Most of the violence seemed to be directed at the Iraqi Security Forces, especially the Iraqi police. They could not come into Amriya without getting attacked. A lot of violence was also directed at the populace, especially against the Shiites. Kidnapping was also common. The going rate for ransom was between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand dollars. Civil society had completely broken down. I think many people responded with random and vengeful violence. However, I also believe that JAM special groups working with elements within the Iraqi government were trying to push the Sunnis out of Baghdad. I also think that AQI and other extremist groups were trying to establish a Sunni enclave to stop the JAM encroachment.”
It was Kuehl’s first deployment in Iraq, but he was well schooled in counterinsurgency. He had written his master’s thesis on civilians on the battlefield in the Korean War and had studied Mao Zedong’s theories on guerrilla warfare. Just before taking command of the 1-5 Cav, he read
