telecommunications towers? If you are fighting the occupation, why would you steal from the shops of the Muslims? They did that with the excuse, this is Shiite and that is Christian. Did the Prophet do that? The Prophet had a Jewish neighbor, and he never did that to him. Is taking rich people’s money a form of jihad? Is this against occupation? No, it is not.” Al Qaeda, he said, is a dirty gang using the cover of Islam. They dragged people from their cars and filled the streets of Amriya with corpses. The smell of these bodies was everywhere, but people were prohibited from removing them because IEDs were placed just underneath them. “This is not jihad, this is destruction!” Abul Abed said. “All the shops were closed, food never entered the area because people were afraid to come into the area. If a man looks at them in a strange way, they killed him, and many other issues that we can’t count. The garbage accumulated and made mountains two meters high in the streets of Amriya. The government was about to attack Amriya. Day after day they said, ‘We must attack Amriya, we must bomb Amriya.’
“It started when Al Qaeda kidnapped two young guys from the Dulaimi tribe in Amriya. The father of the two guys came into the mosque and was crying. Two days earlier Sheikh Walid was passing by the Munadhama Street when he saw a very old woman. She was a Christian, white, and she was wearing a skirt that was not long, and she was fat. The woman’s husband was taken by Al Qaeda, and his body was in the back of their car and his leg was outside the car. The woman was holding her husband’s leg, not letting it go. The woman was on the ground and they were hitting her with their pistols. The sheikh and I were asking if this was jihad. No, this is not jihad. We knew then that fighting these people is the jihad itself, in order to protect people from them, to protect their money and to protect their honors. Al Qaeda destroyed people’s lives.”
What actually sparked the war between the Islamic Army fighters and Al Qaeda in Amriya was the murder of an Islamic Army leader called Zeid, or Abu Teiba, who was a good friend of Sheikh Hussein of the Maluki Mosque. Abu Teiba was a law school graduate who also provided security for the Maluki Mosque. Sheikh Hussein had been detained by the Americans, and Al Qaeda had taken over his mosque. Al Qaeda men captured Abu Teiba and brought him to the mosque, where they filmed his torture and accused him of being an infidel. “Zeid, he was one of the best guys in Amriya,” Abul Abed told me. “He was an Arabic teacher, he was teaching the Koran, he was teaching Islamic religious beliefs and Islamic religious law, he was popular in mosques, he was popular in the area. They tortured him until he died. He was in the Maluki Mosque, he was in the house of God. When I started the fight, Zeid used to always protect the mosques. We have a video of him being tortured, tortured according to the Sharia law. A guy from the Islamic State of Iraq was slapping him while he was bleeding. He was not allowed to discuss why they tortured him because in their view he was an apostate. They were telling him, ‘You are a criminal. Abul Abed told you to fight the mujahideen.’”
Abul Abed was in the Dubat neighborhood of Amriya, supplying his men with weapons and vehicles, when one of his men told him about Sabah, the so-called “white lion,” who led Al Qaeda in Amriya. Sabah was standing on a corner with his assistant. Abul Abed walked to him accompanied by three or four of his men, carrying his charged pistol. They stood face to face.
After Abul Abed challenged him, Sabah stepped back, pulled his pistol, and shot at him, but his weapon didn’t work. Abul Abed pulled his pistol too. He shot Sabah, and Sabah ran. While he was running he charged his weapon again and pulled the trigger, but again it didn’t work. He was using Iraqi bullets. Abul Abed kept shooting at him until he fell; then he took his gun. “I always carry it with me,” Abul Abed said. “I replaced the bullets with good foreign bullets.”
Abul Abed recited the names of other Al Qaeda leaders he had fought and killed. “Let me tell you one point. They have announced themselves as an Islamic country. They all came up as leaders. Some of them presented themselves as a minister of defense, minister of interior, and mosque leaders, and security and intelligence and army and patrols. They were all known to the people of Amriya. We knew their names and their faces. We knew them all. They were not working only secretly but also publicly. They didn’t even cover their faces. The Iraqi and national forces were unable to enter the area.” Abul Abed told me his unit lost about twenty martyrs in the battle of Amriya. The day before I met him the Iraqi National Guard and the Thuwar raided a home and confiscated weapons.
Abul Abed no longer bragged about being a former resistance fighter. He had become more cautious after Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s controversial profile of him appeared in the
I told him that the government maintained that the Awakening men were former insurgents and that it did not trust them. “Let’s say I am strong and you are also strong and I want to fight you but you can’t fight me, and I have caused you so many injuries, and made you dizzy, and you can’t win the fight with me despite your capabilities,” Abul Abed said. “And then I tell you I won’t fight you anymore and give you my hands. I ask you to put your hands in mine, and I say, ‘Let’s build Iraq and forget our problems.’ If you are a nationalist and love your country and don’t have loyalties to neighboring countries, you would accept me as a friend, not because you are weak. But if you are loyal to a neighboring country and you have an interest in this fight, when I give you my hand you will beat my hand. That is fine, let’s fight again. This is Iran’s interest. I’m giving an example that if there were, as they say, armed resistance groups who offered their hands to the government, the government should accept them. If I push the resistance groups in the corner, they will give up and become more violent than before.”
I asked him if Al Qaeda was the only threat to Iraq. “Not only Al Qaeda,” he said. “We have the Mahdi Army. I think the Mahdi Army has a very short life.” I asked him if he trusted the Mahdi Army cease-fire. “No,” he said.
Abul Abed believed there was an Iranian occupation in Iraq. “The American occupation in Iraq is 20 percent, and the Iranian occupation is 80 percent in Iraq. We started being terminated. I experienced this during the time when Bayan Jabr Solagh was the minister of interior. I saw fifty police cars equipped with big machine guns. They entered Amriya from 4 a.m. till 7 a.m. They took my four older brothers. Since then they said they are in the ministry for interrogation. We went there and found their names in the detainee list. We went there more than once. After a while we heard there were more than twenty-one bodies found in the Iraqi-Iranian border in a town called Badra wa Jasan. When they transferred the bodies to the morgue, my four brothers were among the corpses. Their arms were cut, their eyes were taken out, their fingers were cut, their skin was burned with acid. Why? This is a question that I always direct to the Iraqi government. I say, Why? Because they are Sunnis, they always accuse us of being terrorists. If we were terrorists, what have we done? Why were my relatives terminated? Because Iran wants to terminate us.”
I asked him if he was accusing the Iraqi government of being Iranian. He smiled. “I never said the government. I said Iran has the bigger hand in Iraq. . . . I am not accusing the journalists, but journalists often make problems for us with the government, and there are some parties in the government who want these problems. I am sure you understand my concerns. Journalism is a two-edged sword: one edge that can cut with it and the other edge might cut the user. I have been visited by a journalist from the
When I mentioned the walls that Kuehl had erected in Amriya, Abul Abed denied that the walls made it like a prison. “Keep in mind that it is not only our area that is walled. Amriya is walled, Khadra is walled, Dora is walled, Hatin is walled, Adhamiya is walled. If we take off the walls, you will see how many car bombs will attack civilians. Qaeda attacked children and women in Ramadi with massive trucks filled with chlorine.” But he expected that the walls would shortly come down. “We are planning to open a police station manned by local inhabitants of this area. An official police station. Khadra police station is manned by Khadra people, Adhamiya police station is manned by Adhamiya people. Dora the same, and Fadhil the same.”
Of his 600 men only 333 received salaries under the American contract, he said. “We are not here for the money. Ask any soldier of the Awakening if they have come for money. Is he risking his life, his family’s life, his children’s life, his wife’s life, for two hundred dollars? He might get killed, slaughtered, killed in car bombs for this simple amount of money. No, he is here for his beliefs and his principles.” Abul Abed told me that he planned to open a police station in Amriya. Only 233 of the 600 candidates he had offered to the police academy had been accepted. He complained that his men were abused there. “The officers in the training center take our guys every night at about 2 a.m. into interrogation rooms. It’s like they were in a detention center, not a training center. The
