Sons of Iraq in Amriya], so he got transferred to Washash, and Lieutenant Hassan was brought in from there in December 2007, just before we left. Hassan was okay, but not as smart and creative as Wael.”
IN FEBRUARY 2007 there was an effort by the Iraqi Security Forces to go after some of the Sunni leadership in Mansour. In a forty-eight-hour period three of the top Sunnis Kuehl was working with were targeted by the Iraqi army. This included Adnan Dulaimi in Adil, a powerful politician belonging to the Iraqi Accord Front who lived along the border between Hateen and Yarmuk, and Sheikh Khalid in Amriya. Part of the problem with the politicians, as Kuehl recalled, was that they had well-armed security detachments and the Iraqi army was very suspicious of them. One night Kuehl had to position himself between Dulaimi’s security force and the army to prevent a confrontation. Soon after he was called to an incident at another politician’s location, where he kept him from getting arrested. Two days later the 2/1/6 Iraqi army battalion raided Khalid’s mosque in Amriya.
After these incidents Kuehl met Ghassan and his commanders at his headquarters in the Green Zone. “I told them that I thought they needed to be a little more aware of the appearance of their actions to include excessive detentions and the targeting of these political figures. The commander responsible for Yarmuk took offense at my remarks and did not like me interfering with his operations. We got into a nice little shouting match, and he later stormed out. Ghassan did not appreciate this, and our relationship was never the same.”
Staff sergeant “Yosef ” (his preferred nickname) was an American soldier who served in the First ID, Second Brigade Reconnaissance Troop (Second BRT), which was outsourced to Kuehl’s 1-5 Cav. Under their platoon leader, Capt. Brian Weightman, the troop set up a joint security station in an abandoned shopping mall in the Adil neighborhood in February 2007, at a point where two freeways met close to Dulaimi’s home. Yosef worked with Dulaimi’s bodyguards, a variety of Iraqi Security Forces, and eventually with the Awakening group in Amriya.
On one occasion, Yosef recalled, he was on the roof of a police station in a Sunni neighborhood, talking with a police guard who spoke great English but initially didn’t want anything to do with him. Yosef managed to establish a rapport with him. The guard confided that every policeman at the station was off-duty Mahdi Army. This made sense to him.
On another day Yosef ’s patrol group heard a loud exchange of gunfire. They got a report that a police truck had been blown up on the ramp, just southwest of the mall they were patrolling. When Yosef’s men showed up, “the police were shooting the shit out of an apartment building.” Under a colonel’s direction, the police seemed to be systematically shooting along every story of the apartment complex, story by story. “He was standing out in the middle of the street, pointing and yelling to gun trucks that were more or less on line with one another, pumping the building full of rounds. When we asked him if he needed any help, he kind of blew us off,” Yosef said. When the group asked the colonel what the police were doing, the colonel reported they had taken fire from the building and were returning fire, but it seemed to Yosef’s men that they were just shooting the whole side of the building up.
“We inquired where he was taking fire from, and he answered with a kind of a grin and said that they had it under control,” Yosef said. This was at a time when the military were harping on Iraqi Security Forces taking responsibility, so Yosef ’s men left the scene, knowing there were probably no insurgents in the building.
Like Kuehl, Yosef was impressed by the professionalism and nonsectarianism he found among some who served in the Iraqi army. Yosef told me of a lieutenant called Mustafa, who epitomized this. He was, Yosef reported, a physical giant, with the physique and face of an old boxer: strong legs, big belly, broad shoulders, and a beat-up face with a crooked, mashed nose. He was a Sunni who had been in Iraqi Special Forces before the war. He spoke perfect English, but never around his men or other Iraqis. He carried a short AK-47 with a hundred-round drum.
“We patrolled with him on and off for a couple of months,” Yosef said. “One day he found something my whole platoon passed up: a nervous-looking taxi driver in a long line of cars waiting for gas, who had an IED initiator under his driver’s seat. Mustafa choke-slammed the poor dude with one hand and calmly restrained him under one of his heavy boots pressed down on the dude’s back.” His techniques in the neighborhood worked well— perhaps too well, Yosef suggested. Under Mustafa’s leadership the neighborhood had become relatively peaceful, but he wasn’t arresting enough people to satisfy his command. They had him moved into another neighborhood.
When Yosef next saw him, a few months later, he was further north, in a demilitarized zone between Shiite forces in Ghazaliya to the north and established Sunni forces in the south. Yosef was with his boss, Captain Weightman, when they joined Mustafa in his office, a barren room in a large house on a block of other large houses looking north from Mansour. He told them that his name had been leaked to some Al Qaeda forces near his home, and they had kidnapped his brother and tortured him extensively to get to him. “He showed us the pictures of his brother’s back with lashings and his brother’s battered face,” Yosef said. “In the end they accepted a ransom from Mustafa for his brother. I think the amount was ten thousand dollars.” Mustafa told them that when his command had moved him up to the neighborhood, they removed all of his Humvees, so he had to patrol his neighborhood on foot. “It was obvious that his good intentions weren’t appreciated by his command. But Mustafa didn’t hide, and he was out on foot with his men every day,” Yosef said. Observed Weightman, “We worked well together, and he genuinely tried to help the people of the areas he was assigned to. He was not sectarian. He couldn’t get promoted above second lieutenant.”
ONE DAY, EARLY ON in their deployment, Yosef and his men were the first to the scene of a devastating vehicle-borne IED strike on an army checkpoint at the intersection of what the Americans called Phone Card Road and Route Huskies, just southeast of Adil. The blast was so large that it destroyed two Humvees, took the front off three stories of two buildings, and sent another Humvee deep into the coffee shop in the same building. The planners of the VBIED had timed it to explode as the army unit was changing guard. Seventeen soldiers were killed. Yosef discovered that that the son of Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi was a VBIED builder in the area of the bombing and was suspected of being involved.
Dulaimi was the leader of the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament at the time. He had been living in Hurriya but had left—along with thousands of other Sunnis—because of Mahdi Army intimidation and killings of Sunnis, and moved to Adel. Before Kuehl’s company established a combat outpost in Adel, Dulaimi’s thugs prevented sectarian killings of Sunnis in the area by their mere presence. His house—modest by an Iraqi politician’s standards, protected by low concrete barriers, with a small yard in the front—sat in the center of the neighborhood and provided a good view of the area.
At this time Kuehl’s company was stretched thin and thought Dulaimi could be co-opted because of his participation in government. “We just couldn’t be there all the time with such a large area, having only three platoons, and the active portion of the insurgency that was combating our troop in Jamia.” But Dulaimi was known, in the words of an American major, to be a “sleazeball,” even though Kuehl’s company had no specific evidence to detain him. “Even if we did, politicians had complete immunity with respect to U.S. forces. We weren’t allowed to search his house,” the major said.
Dulaimi’s compound was right down the street from the joint security station established at the Adil mall. It was there that Yosef tried to establish a relationship with the guards stationed outside the compound. Yosef ’s company had moved into the deserted five-story mall with the hesitant approval of Dulaimi, who remembered the help Weightman’s platoon had offered a few months earlier when they responded to a firefight on his street between Mahdi Army forces and Dulaimi’s guards and helped repel the Mahdi Army.
Soon after they were settled at the new joint security station Yosef was out patrolling with Weightman in a convoy of four Humvees when Uday, Dulaimi’s head bodyguard, requested a meeting. At the time Dulaimi was having trouble with the Iraqi police patrolling the neighborhood. There were accusations from the police that Dulaimi was harboring insurgents among his staff and that his family members were attacking police checkpoints and patrols. However, there were also allegations that the police were behaving aggressively toward Dulaimi’s neighbors and arresting innocent people.
During the conversation with Weightman, Uday became angry and stated, “If by the next night, you don’t convince the IP to get out of the neighborhood, then all you have done here will be ruined!” Weightman’s response was measured and without anger. “I think this impressed Uday. Even though Uday had pressure on him from the extremists among his ranks to go to war with the Americans living in their neighborhood as well as to continue their open war with the Iraqi Security Forces, Captain Weightman’s response diffused the situation, and we ended up having a relatively safe, although sometimes rocky, working relationship with Uday and Dulaimi’s compound security
