cause.”
“Unless they topple the current regime, they’re going to have to compromise,” the captain explained. “They’re going to have to work with others. They’re going to have to follow principles like due process. It’s not efficient, but that’s the point. Democracies are messy and slow and they put an emphasis on negotiation and accommodation. Those aren’t really traits that Abul Abed possesses. That’s why I like him.”
“As we handed over eastern Amriya upon our departure in January ’08,” Captain Gallagher said, “I told my replacement that this would be his number-one challenge: to ensure the volunteers were formally integrated into the security framework. I did not want to see us, or the Iraqi government, turn our backs on these men, because the blowback could be significant.”
Part 2
I returned to Amriya in December 2007. My friend Hassan pointed to a gap in the concrete walls the Americans had built around the Sunni bastion. “We call it the Rafah Crossing,” he joked, referring to the gate to besieged Gaza that another occupying army occasionally opened. Iraqi National Police loyal to the Mahdi Army had once regularly attacked Amriya, and Sunnis caught in their checkpoints, which we drove through anxiously, would have once ended up in the city morgue. Police had recently put up Shiite flags all around western Baghdad, which the residents of Amriya viewed as a provocation. Our car lined up behind dozens of others that had been registered with the local Iraqi army unit and were allowed to enter and exit the imprisoned neighborhood. It often took two or three hours to get past the American soldiers, Iraqi soldiers, or the Fursan (most people called them the Thuwar, or revolutionaries). When it was our turn, we exited the vehicle while Iraqi soldiers searched it and an American soldier led his dog around the car to sniff it. I was patted down by one of the Sunni militiamen, who asked me if I was a bodybuilder. Not knowing I was American, he reassured me: “Just let the dog and the dog that is with him finish with your car and you can go.” He laughed, and we laughed with him.
We drove past residents who were forced to trudge a long distance in and out of their neighborhood, past the tall concrete walls, because their cars had not been given permission to exit. Boys labored behind pushcarts, wheeling in goods for the shops that were open. One elderly woman in a black robe sat on a pushcart and complained loudly that the Americans were to blame for all her problems. Cars could not enter Amriya after 7:30 p.m. Once inside, we drove along roads scarred by massive IEDs.
I met with Um Omar, a stern woman who ran the Ethar Association, an independent NGO that provided aid, housing, and education to vulnerable families. She wore a tight head scarf and gloves on her hands as a sign of modesty. Um Omar had a degree in chemistry but had been a housewife before the war. “After the invasion, there were many needs,” she said. “My sister’s husband was killed and two of my uncles were killed. My sister’s husband was killed by random American fire. One of my uncles was killed by an American tank, which drove over his car while it was driving on the wrong side of the road, so he crashed into it. My other uncle was killed by the mujahideen during the battle of Falluja while he was providing aid to Falluja. The mujahideen suspected he was a collaborator with the Americans because they saw him talking to the Americans when they stopped him at the checkpoint and let him through.” Um Omar’s husband was a former Awakening man affiliated with the Islamic Party. He had been arrested by the Americans and was in a feud with Abul Abed, and so he lived outside Amriya.
Kuehl knew Um Omar. “If you have already talked to her, I am sure she had an unfavorable opinion of me,” he told me. “Her husband, Abu Omar, was one of Abul Abed’s lieutenants from the start. The two had a bit of a love/hate relationship, and we had to step in on a couple occasions. I had to counsel Abu Omar once for excessive use of force, and he was also arrested outside Amriya with a couple of weapons in the vehicle he was in. He was held for a couple days and then released. From the start I was convinced that Abu Omar was representing some other faction. For a while I had even considered him as an important counterweight to Abul Abed. However, he also happened to be the brother of Hajji Salman, our primary AQI target.”
The confrontation came to a head when the Americans, acting on a tip from a rival Fursan member, found a large weapons cache behind a false wall in Abu Omar’s house, Abu Omar claimed that they were put there by his brother. After he was arrested, the Iraqi Islamic Party pressured Kuehl for his release. Community leaders, including Um Omar, asked to meet. “I knew of her through her charity work but had not met her up to now,” Kuehl said. “She was pretty impressive. She was obviously well educated and passionate about getting the release of her husband. After about two weeks he was eventually released. Part of the condition for his release was that he would no longer work for the Fursan. Through this I pretty much determined that his affiliation was with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which had been trying to take control of the movement from the start.”
Um Omar’s main office was in Amriya, but the NGO also operated on the outskirts of Baghdad, Samarra, and Nasiriya. Most of its funds came from generous Iraqis. In Iraq a child was considered an orphan even if he or she had lost just one parent. The organization had registered 4,317 orphans. In Amriya alone it had 2,034 orphans. Before 2006 it had only 600 to 800 orphans in Amriya. “Their fathers were killed, their houses were burned,” Um Omar told me, “some of them were left without either parent.” Most of Amriya’s Sunnis were too scared to go to the Yarmuk hospital outside Amriya. “It’s a sectarian hospital,” Um Omar told me. “By sectarian, I mean this hospital has militias in it and people are afraid to go there. If you live in Amriya, you have to go to private hospitals, which are expensive for orphans, widows, and displaced families.”
When I first met Um Omar in January 2008, she had three thousand displaced families registered with her in Amriya alone. They were supposed to receive payments from the government, but she knew of no one who had. The Ethar Association had once received help from the Red Crescent, but now that aid was going to the local Awakening group. Since Amriya’s security was improving, many Sunnis who had fled to Syria were coming back, even if some of them were not originally from Amriya. At least 50 percent of the families in Amriya could not access their monthly rations, and Um Omar knew of families who had not received any rations at all during the previous year. “We experienced the most difficult five years,” she told me. “Iraq went through wars, the Iran war, the Kuwait war, the sanctions, but it wasn’t as hard or unmerciful like the days of the occupation. The number of orphans is so high, and as much as we find some people to adopt them, we see there are more orphans coming. We have many children whose fathers were arrested, and it’s been a long time that nobody knows where they are. There are the families of detainees: the husband has been arrested for three or four years, and nobody knows where he is. The Americans are easier in providing information and allowing contact with the detainee. In the first days of the occupation the detention by the occupation forces was ugly, as you saw in Abu Ghraib, but in the last year and now it’s preferable to be in the custody of the occupation forces than the MOI [Ministry of Interior].”
Ethar provided orphans with rations, blankets, and heaters for the winter—and medical care, thanks to volunteer doctors. Orphans also could attend their nursery school and subsequent education. Widows received medical care and vocational training as well as educational assistance, including university tuition. Ethar had a kitchen project where widows made pastries and sold them in local markets.
Um Omar took me to her nursery school. Among the orphans was a boy whose mother was killed beside him in cross fire. At first he did not talk to other students and remained isolated, but the teachers succeeded in making him more social. Um Omar had books full of files and photos of children in need of medical assistance, from a two-year-old bloated from cancer to a teenager who was shot by Americans and paralyzed. One seven-year-old girl called Hadia Abdallah had lost both her parents. Her father was killed by random American gunfire and then her mother was killed when Iraqi National Guardsmen opened fire indiscriminately. When the mother was shot she dropped Hadia on the ground, and the child was paralyzed from the waist down. Of the two thousand orphans Um Omar had registered in Amriya, 60 to 70 percent had lost a parent to fire by occupation forces, she told me. The rest were killed by terrorists.
Uday Ahmad was shot in the jaw. The boy’s jawbone was shattered, and he needed a simple operation so that he would not have to be fed through a plastic tube, but his family was afraid to visit hospitals because of the threat from Shiite militias. Another boy in her album was shot below the eye by the Americans.
“Every day I listen to the widows and see their tears, and I can’t get them enough help,” she said. “This morning a widow came in, her donor stopped providing help. Some donors get killed or got arrested and some of them got displaced. So they stop paying the help. She was waiting until the end of the month to come here to get paid. She came crying, saying it has been a month that she is feeding her children soup only. She did not buy fruit or
