to him when he was working as a mechanic in Bayaa. “Honestly, I don’t wish what happened to us even on my enemy,” Haidar told me. “We were displaced from our area. We left our house without any reason. It was a big house with two floors. We don’t have issues with anybody. We left our house and came here to live in this dirty house while they came and lived in our house. We suffered lots of damages. Before I used to go with my brother and sell gas to earn a little money. Now I can’t anymore.”
I returned often to Amriya and saw a lot of Um Omar. Of the 104 students in her school, ten received free education, fourteen were orphans, thirteen had fathers in detention, and most of the rest had been displaced within the past year. “It is a very bad life,” Ms. Rasha, one of the teachers, told me about her students. “Our students, especially last year, we told them to study and focus on their school, especially the ones in the last year of the high school. They say, ‘What is the benefit? Let’s say we got into a good university, can we go study in that university?’” The students couldn’t go to university because of security problems and bombs, she told me, but also sectarianism. “Most of our students are named Omar. They say, ‘My name is Omar. When the teacher reads my name on the exam papers, they will mark it as failed and throw it away.’ Last year they canceled the results of the final high school examinations. Specifically they canceled the results of the students of Amriya, they didn’t mark their exam papers. The students made a second attempt on the exams and even a third attempt, but they’ve never received their results back.”
ABUL ABED WAS KNOWN for his brutality. He was a short, thin thirty-five-year-old who had broken his knuckles beating prisoners and suspected members of Al Qaeda. He destroyed the homes of Al Qaeda men and hung pictures of their dead bodies on the walls of Amriya. He claimed four of his brothers had been killed by Shiite militiamen, and he kept pictures of their broken and tortured bodies on his phone. He and his men blasted through Amriya, letting everybody know they were its new rulers. According to some stories, Abul Abed had been working with a network of informers for the Americans, targeting Al Qaeda and Iranian spies, finally infiltrating Al Qaeda in Amriya. Abul Abed also had a good relationship with politicians Saleh al-Mutlaq and Ali Baban, a Sunni Kurd who was minister of planning and who had been expelled by the Islamic Party. Many of Abul Abed’s men were displaced Sunnis from Mahdi Army-controlled areas like Hurriya, yet he claimed he helped seventy-five Shiite families return to Amriya.
I first met with Abul Abed in what looked like a school or ex-Baath Party headquarters that had been converted into an office, and I later interviewed him several times in his lavish home. (One morning I found him drinking a can of nonalcoholic beer.) The street where he lived was manned by his guards, who stood at roadblocks. He traveled in convoys of pickup trucks and SUVs with his men hanging out of windows, their rifles and pistols waving about, sirens blaring, a pale imitation of the Blackwater style. He was a former military officer and leader in the Islamic Army of Iraq, but much of his biography was apocryphal, and he had labored to construct a heroic legend about himself.
He claimed that in 2006 he and others from the Islamic Army decided to fight Al Qaeda, which had declared the Islamic State of Iraq and was trying to control other Sunni groups, insisting that they pledge allegiance to Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who would be the future caliph, and demanding a portion of their loot. The Islamic Army refused, and Abul Abed and his men began a clandestine war on Al Qaeda. The conflict started with assassinations but soon escalated into open warfare. Abul Abed claimed he had spent months collecting intelligence on Al Qaeda fighters who had sought sanctuary in Amriya after fleeing from other parts of Baghdad or the Anbar.
In May 2007, fourteen American soldiers were killed in Amriya. Until then Lieut. Col. Dale Kuehl had lost only three men in Amriya. On May 29 Sheikh Walid of the Fardus Mosque called Kuehl up and told him Abul Abed’s men would be attacking Al Qaeda in Amriya. They attacked an Al Qaeda base at the Maluki Mosque, and the next day Al Qaeda men struck back at Tikriti Mosque. Sheikh Walid contacted the Americans, who sent Stryker vehicles to assist Abul Abed’s fighters. The Americans helped defeat Al Qaeda in that battle and then provided medical assistance to Abul Abed’s wounded men. That first week Abul Abed and his men, along with the Americans, killed about ten Al Qaeda suspects and captured another fifteen.
The official name for Abul Abed’s Awakening group, the first of its kind in Baghdad, was the Fursan (Knights) of Mesopotamia. But Abul Abed and his men referred to themselves as the Thuwar (revolutionaries). Part of Kuehl’s deal was that he would help Abul Abed’s men if they did not torture prisoners or kill people who were not from Al Qaeda. They would be allowed to hold prisoners for only twenty-four hours. Kuehl knew that as an American, he would never know the area or its people as well as the local Awakening men. At first Kuehl’s men asked the Fursan to wear white headbands and sit in the American vehicles to identify Al Qaeda locations. But soon Al Qaeda men took to wearing white headbands. Riding along with the Americans also didn’t work because the windowless vehicles left the Fursan disoriented and unable to locate targets. The Fursan were given special reflective armbands that the Americans could see as well as handcuffs and flares to help send signals to the Americans. Kuehl collected their biometric data and agreed to provide them with some weapons.
At first Abul Abed believed he could spread his control into other Sunni areas in western Baghdad. When Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, of the Sunni Islamic Party, visited Amriya without coordinating with Abul Abed, the Fursan leader was furious and nearly clashed with Hashimi’s bodyguards. Abul Abed felt threatened by the Islamic Party, and that same night he raided the home of Abu Omar, Um Omar’s husband, and a subordinate commander who was allied with the party. Shots were fired and civilians were threatened. Abu Omar was not home, but Abul Abed arrested several of his men.
In November 2007 Abul Abed was interviewed by the London-based, Saudi-owned
When I met him again in early 2008 he had switched from wearing military uniforms to suits. “The situation is different now,” he said. “We have destroyed Qaeda. It is safe now, and it is very good for me—I am number one on the hit list of Qaeda. Just after the assassination of Sheikh Sattar, the next primary goal for Qaeda became me. If my fate is to die, then that is okay.” He repeated his claim that he had six hundred men in Amriya, and many outside. I asked where. “All of Baghdad,” he said. I asked how many; he said “a lot.” His main target was anyone who broke the law, he said, whether they were Al Qaeda or not. “We are against criminals, against killers, against the ones who make bombs and against the ones who destroy.” In the past his men had clashed with the Mahdi Army as well.
“Our areas and our sect were marginalized, which is what Al Qaeda used to initiate a sectarian war. Now we are working on fixing this and rehabilitat[ing] our areas in order to take our real positions in the government and in the country.” He would not run in elections, he said, but Iraq’s national security adviser had taken the surprising step of offering Abul Abed a position in the government. “I have been offered many positions from different big political parties. But I refused them. I explained from the beginning to the journalists that I didn’t come for money, nor for political reasons. I know lots of scornful people who put themselves in front of others and step on people’s shoulders to go up the ladder and take a chair or a position in the government. This is not my goal, and I have explained that to the channels that visited me. I am not running for any position, not going to take part of the political process. I have a goal that I would like to achieve, not only in Amriya but in all of Baghdad: reinstate the security in our areas and save innocent people’s lives. Only when I achieve these goals I will leave.
“Everybody knows how Al Qaeda used to control our areas. They destroyed the area, they killed civilian families, they filled the streets with bombs. Their work became barbaric, killing people for their identity, on suspicion. They started by killing Shiites, then they started killing Sunnis, then finally they started killing Christians with the excuse of establishing the Islamic State of Iraq. They said, ‘Since you are a Christian, you must pay a ransom.’ If the man had money to pay the ransom, he paid and lived in his home. If he didn’t, they killed him and threw his corpse in the trash. People advised them that this is destruction and far away of jihad, so they killed the ones who gave such advice. They acted like a gang—they kill and steal, and they look for new modern cars. They killed people under the name of jihad.”
Abul Abed told me that jihad had four conditions: to preserve the religion, the land, the honor, and the money. “These are four conditions, all of which Al Qaeda breached. Qaeda claimed that they are fighting the occupation. If you fight the occupation, why would you kill civilians? If you are fighting occupation, why would you steal the water pumps? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you take down the mobile
