counterinsurgency. Nagl’s book emphasized the importance of the military becoming a learning organization, adapting to the needs of a different type of war. “Of course, prior to deployment we had a number of leader teaches and seminars to discuss the fight we were going into,” Kuehl said. “This study culminated with the COIN Academy in Taji, which I thought was an excellent course.”
The first large IED to hit one of Kuehl’s patrols occurred one February morning in Khadra. The IED was planted at an intersection and tore off the driver’s door. The driver lost both legs. After securing the site Kuehl took his patrol to a nearby street and started questioning locals. He talked to one man who asked him if the patrol was a combined one with the Iraqi National Police. “I told him it was not, it was a U.S.-only patrol. His response was a bit startling. He said, ‘That is not supposed to happen.’ I pressed him to explain. He just repeated that our patrols were not supposed to get attacked. He also asked why the INP observation post on a nearby bridge did not see the IED go in. It should have been able to. He was a bit upset himself, showing a piece of shrapnel that landed in his yard where his daughter was playing.”
Kuehl left him to see for himself, passing through the same intersection that had just been bombed. Just as he was looking up to see the window from the observation post that overlooked the intersection, his vehicle was hit by another IED. “It flattened a couple tires and took some chunks out of our windows, but everyone was okay. From this incident I realized that there were definitely different insurgent groups working in the area. The locals knew what was going on with at least one of these groups, and it sounded like they were not targeting U.S. troops. But this other group definitely was.” He did not know it then, but this was the start of Al Qaeda flexing its muscles in the area. They had been pushed out of other areas, like Haifa Street and Anbar, and were trying to take over Mansour. Compounding this was the influx of displaced people from Hurriya to the north and Amil and Jihad from the south. “Locals kept complaining that the violence was coming from people outside the area. We kept dismissing this, but to a large extent I think they were correct,” Kuehl said.
At the COIN Academy in October 2006, General Casey informed Kuehl and his team that the goal was to hand security in Baghdad over to the ISF by the summer of 2007 so that the Americans could depart as soon as possible. This was based on the not-unreasonable notion, advocated even by Centcom commander General Abizaid, that the American presence in Iraq was the cause of most of the violence in Iraq. But once in Baghdad, Kuehl was convinced that Casey’s goal was unrealistic because of the sectarian violence and the sectarian nature of the government and ISF. He began to focus on protecting the population, even before General Petraeus arrived and formalized the new approach.
Previous attempts had been made to rid Amriya of Al Qaeda, such as Operation Together Forward in August 2006 and Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 in April 2007. Yet in May 2007 Amriya was even more violent. According to Kuehl, previous operations had failed because of poor intelligence, which led to imprecise targeting. Once an area was cleared of Al Qaeda there were not enough troops to hold it, and Sunnis did not trust the ISF. During Operation Arrowhead Strike 9 Al Qaeda men fled or blended into the population, avoiding the operations. As a result of the Americans’ inability to provide security, they could not move on to rebuild the area. When Kuehl and his men changed their focus from handing over authority to the ISF and instead tried to protect the population, he said they began to see gains in security.
In January 2007 the Mahdi Army seized the Hurriya neighborhood and moved on to the Amil and Jihad districts. “We couldn’t do anything and the Iraqi Army chose not to do anything,” Kuehl later wrote. “Instead, we watched helplessly as thousands of Sunnis were forced out of their homes getting pushed into Mansour.” Sunni militias were forced to collaborate with Al Qaeda to protect their areas from the Mahdi army, but the Americans offered an alternative that, in the short term at least, proved more tempting. Kuehl hypothesized that Al Qaeda controlled Amriya but only as an active minority that intimidated the neutral majority. In February 2007 he began to have clandestine meetings with clerics in Amriya late at night. Sheikh Walid was already organizing against Al Qaeda, but he was not ready to act. That month Kuehl also met with community leaders and assured them of his commitment to defeating Al Qaeda and protecting Amriya from Shiite militias.
Kuehl inherited Gentile’s wall around Amriya, but it was too short and had a lot of holes in it. “We fought to keep it closed, and AQI fought to keep it open,” he said. “Our first casualty was a sergeant killed while trying to put one of these barriers back in place.” Kuehl spent a couple of days in personal reconnaissance figuring out how to get from Abu Ghraib to central Baghdad without running into a checkpoint. It was all too easy, he found. One evening he traced out this route to his boss, Colonel Burton. From there the brigade developed a plan to wall off a good portion of northwest Baghdad, starting with Route Sword, south of Ghazaliya. Then they built blast walls along the airport road. By June Amriya was closed up. “The final point was establishing the entry control points into Amriya,” he said. “I knew they would be targets, so I wanted to make it look formidable, like the Green Zone.”
A similar approach had proved useful in the rural Anbar province, which had been dominated by Al Qaeda and foreign fighters. American Special Forces reintroduced a tough police chief whose tribe was disliked and feared, and they built a vast earthen berm around the city, restricting all vehicles.
At first the locals of Amriya did not like it, “but they grew to appreciate the security that it helped to bring,” Kuehl said of the walls he built. “I especially had trouble with the shop owners at the entrance to Amriya. We were able to accommodate some of their concerns, but I left them up. I did want to open up Amriya to more vehicle traffic through the checkpoint, but I met resistance from many of the locals. This was not completely resolved before we left.”
The local police were also a hindrance to Kuehl’s ambitions to improve the security environment: they were, he said, “incompetent, poorly led, poorly trained, poorly equipped.” Stationed in Khadra, its leadership was Sunni and, to make things even more difficult, may have had Al Qaeda links. The lower ranks were filled by Shiites, generally from outside Baghdad. “No one was local, which was one of the biggest drawbacks to the police,” Kuehl said. “They pretty much spent most of their time in the station and collected reports and statements from people who came in. We would take them with us in patrols in Khadra, but they could not come into Amriya without getting shot at.”
The Iraqi National Police were another problem, Kuehl said, lacking strong leadership skills. “It was like having three hundred privates, no sergeants, and only a dozen officers. They were not equipped as well as the Iraqi Army, which was a challenge given the lethality of the environment. We conducted joint patrols with them, but their primary focus was on conducting checkpoints, which was a sore point with the locals.” The INPs were also known to do the sectarian bidding of their political superiors. Kuehl recalled being approached by a group of imams because ten Sunnis were suddenly detained after someone from the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry turned up at a couple of checkpoints with a list of people to detain. When Kuehl went to the local police headquarters to find out what was going on, no one could produce the list. Eventually Kuehl managed to get a copy of the names of all the men detained. He went to the holding cell and talked to each one. “A couple months after their arrest I inquired on their status,” Kuehl said. “It took over a week for someone to figure out that they were still being held. I finally was able to get their families to be able to see them. I suspect this was all sectarian-driven. They were then pushed up to the jail at FOB Justice, an ironic name, and were still being held when we left over six months later.”
The Iraqi army, Kuehl said, was the most competent of the security forces they worked with. Of the army battalions he worked with, Second Battalion, First Brigade, Sixth Division, was the most competent. But, he added, the battalion “went through a string of commanders, and their performance directly correlated with the quality of battalion commander. The first commander I worked with was Colonel Ahmed, a Sunni. Very competent, I really respected him. Although his formation was mostly Shiite, I think they respected him.” Ahmed was being targeted by Al Qaeda, though, and after his sons were attacked, he requested and received a transfer. “The guy who replaced him was basically honest but not a great commander. He was replaced in May by Colonel Sabah, who was previously in Ghazaliya. He had a terrible reputation among the Sunni population, and there was a lot of concern about him. He was basically competent, but he was ruthless and crooked. We suspected him of extortion, coercion, and rape. We got the reports on Sabah from people in Iraqi Family Village, which was just outside of Liberty. Sabah kept an apartment there. We got a lot of reports on him. Must caveat to say that none were proven, just lots of reports.” Another regarded him as “the worst Iraqi battalion commander I have ever seen. He clearly had a sectarian agenda and was implicated by locals in a weapons-selling scheme where he would sell weapons found in weapons caches, potentially back to the Shiite militias.” In contrast to Sabah, Lieutenant Wael, his replacement, was a true professional, according to Kuehl. “He was smart yet lacked the arrogance I saw in most Iraqi officers. Initially he was a bit wary about working with the SOI, but I think he quickly saw how effective they were. Wael was a solid officer and another Sunni, which was a plus to the area. I do not think Brigadier General Ghassan [a local Iraqi army commander in western Baghdad] liked him working so close with Abul Abed [the founder of the
