A Report From IraqAlthough the CLCs have cooperated closely with American troops in Baghdad, the much larger Jesh al Mahdi, Sadr’s Mahdi Army, has kept its distance. In two years, Baghdad has been transformed from a city of predominantly mixed districts to one in which some 70 percent are purely Shiite. The CLCs have emerged as the protectors of the remaining impoverished Sunni neighborhoods, with an American presence in outposts providing a quick reaction to any marauding shiite death squads. But in Khadamiya, in northwest Baghdad, and in Sadr City to the east, JAM operates as a shadow government, extorting money while sneering at the Maliki clique that accommodates them. "JAM itself isn’t bad or good," Captain Burroughs, a company commander who has been stationed in Sadr City and the adjoining district of Adamiyah for a year, told me. "People don’t trust the police, who have to be JAM to get a job. The average Shiite is exploited by the extreme Shiite. They’re criminals. We’ve arrested three JAM brigade commanders. We’ve told the fourth, ‘Play by our rules or go to Bucca,’” he said, referring to an American prison. Efforts have been made to recruit Shiites to stand up to the JAM, along the lines of the CLC. But unlike al-Qaeda in Iraq, JAM is well organized and has managed to intimidate opposition. We paid 600 Shiites in Adamiyah to set up neighborhood checkpoints. After JAM members paid a visit, 14 of the 16 checkpoints closed down. Lacking instructions to the contrary, American paratroopers have had no choice but to see JAM’s challenges as matters of internal Iraqi politics. "No one has told us the end state for Sadr City and JAM influence," Staff Sergeant Byrd, a squad leader on his third tour, told me. " We’re paratroopers. We’re fighters. We’ve done our job." With an unstable Sadr providing quixotic leadership, most JAM members are ambivalent about, rather than hostile to, the American presence. Knowing that coalition special forces are tracking down rogue gang members, at the start of 2008 the rank and file of the JAM militia decided not to pose a threat. The nightly prowls of death squads decreased dramatically. And although a single car bomb would change the numbers significantly, the murder rate in Baghdad has dropped precipitously. In recent months, the military campaign has shifted north of Baghdad. Driven from the city, the insurgents have tried to regroup in the thick vegetation of Diyala province. The coalition corps commander, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, anticipated this and sent forces from Anbar and Baghdad to root them out. Farther north, Mosul has become the final urban redoubt for al-Qaeda in Iraq. Al-Qaeda in Iraq elements have converged on battle-torn west Mosul, a 36-square-kilometer cluster of shattered houses and roads pockmarked by IED blasts. In early December 2007 Third Squadron of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment was told to hold west Mosul. The squadron sends out 25 armored patrols a day. In one month, 300 IEDs were found or detonated, in addition to 260 small arms engagements. The odds of a patrol encountering hostile fire are one in three.
Two weeks ago, the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Keith Barclay, took us into the city to meet with the local Iraqi commanders. Along the way, a radio report came in about a blue van driving erratically down a street parallel to ours. Its occupants had fired at an Iraqi checkpoint. After a helicopter put a Hellfire missile into the van, two survivors hopped out and ran toward a bombed-out house. One was cut down outside and seemed to be wearing a suicide vest. The soldiers had taken cover and called for a tank and an explosive ordnance team. As Barclay drove over to assess the scene, the streets were empty, except for a few men hurrying across the road in front of us. Right after that, our small convoy of four humvees hit an IED that blew the front off the lead vehicle. The soldiers inside were shaken but not seriously injured. A chunk from the engine hit an Iraqi civilian hiding in a store and he ran into the street screaming, his left arm ripped off. A burst of fire came from our left and Barclay ordered his humvee forward to protect the crumpled lead vehicle.
"Do you have positive ID?" Barclay asked his machine-gunner as rounds snapped overhead. "Negative," said the gunner, who did not return fire. A tank cut around in front of us and hit a second IED, put in by the Iraqis who had just crossed the street. With the tank out of action (it had a stripped tread) Iraqi soldiers from an outpost 100 meters away rushed forward to protect it. Soon afterward, a sharp explosion came from the next street, where the suicide vest had exploded. A second tank rolled up and put a 120mm round into the house, killing the other insurgent. He too was wearing a suicide vest. Every day in Iraq, there are about two such shoot-outs between American forces and extremists. They typify the nature of the fighting in this, the fifth year of the war. We turn to technology—electronic intercepts of conversations, airborne sensors, Hellfire missiles—to detect and box in the enemy. A soldier with a rifle then makes the arrests or double-taps the chests of insurgents with three-round bursts, as Barclay’s soldiers did. Based on what we have overheard of their conversations, what the extremists fear most is not our technology; it is our grunts, who close in and kill them. The press likes to depict our soldiers as victims, or as nice guys handing out candy and repairing schools. First and foremost, though, our infantrymen are hunters. And that scares the shit out of the al-Qaeda types. The defining signature of al-Qaeda in Iraq has been the suicide vest. Suicide murderers propelled, sustained, and transformed the Iraqi insurgency. They also dealt its death knell. The extent and impact of suicide bombers distinguishes Iraq from all prior insurgencies. Without the mass murder of Shiites, al-Qaeda in Iraq could not have provoked the civil war in Baghdad in 2006. And without the mass murder of Sunnis, the tribes would not have turned against the extremists. Like Robespierre, consumed by his own Reign of Terror, al-Qaeda in Iraq was eventually locked into a death struggle with the Sunni population it had set out to liberate by the lash and by decapitation. Al-Qaeda has a firm hold in west Mosul, where the stark, bombed-out landscape resembles Ramadi in late 2005. It will take months for dismounted infantry to clear each city block and hold the streets with Iraqi soldiers. If the provincial government were to provide the residents with any kind of services and win their support, the campaign would go much faster. The Iraqi battalion commander working with Barclay doubted that would happen. "The Sunni people get zero support from this governor," said Colonel Hamid, a burly officer who had been wounded twice. "The governor fires anyone who talks for the Sunnis. He says the coalition broke the city and they can fix it, not him." Last Thursday, on January 24, police in Mosul were lured to an apartment building that al-Qaeda operatives then blew sky-high, killing several policemen and more than 30 civilians. The next day, Mosul’s police chief came to inspect the damage and was blown up by a suicide murderer. Rumors about an influx of foreign fighters from Syria swirled around the city. On January 28, five American soldiers were killed by a powerful roadside bomb. Left unresolved is how to pressure Syria into choking off the pipeline of foreign fighters, suicide bombers, and insurgent leaders passing through Damascus airport and on into Iraq. The U.S. military proposed that Petraeus deliver a tough démarche in person to Assad, pointing out the routes and safe houses and naming the Syrian officials with Swiss bank accounts who are being paid off by the jihadists. The State Department was concerned that Assad would want a quid pro quo, like shelving the investigation into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. I was told by one official that there were other equities involved beyond Iraq. After leaving west Mosul, we visited the dreary city of Beji, home of an oil refinery generating billions of dollars. Yet Beji was depressed, bereft of home heating fuel, electricity, and jobs. In the empty market, our queries were greeted with cynical pessimism and a few pot shots. The police refused to go into the market with us, because they had lost two men on their last two forays. The most popular figure was the American company commander, Captain Tim Meadors, who had recruited a small band of Concerned Local Citizens, generating some stability and a little cash in a bleak neighborhood. A few days later, the 13-year-old son of a local al-Qaeda leader walked into a hall filled with CLC supporters and blew himself up, killing 17. Over the course of January, suicide murderers struck at CLC leaders in Ramadi, Fallujah, Beji, and two districts inside Baghdad. These weren’t foreigners; they were fellow Iraqis known by the locals who had no idea the assassins had embraced al-Qaeda. Whether al-Qaeda in Iraq—90 percent of whom are Iraqis—can continue to recruit Iraqis willing to commit suicide remains to be seen. So far, they have succeeded. These murders have not changed the course of the military campaign. They have further torn the fabric of trust and stirred hatred toward al-Qaeda inside Sunni communities. Given the biases of Al-Jazeera and other Arab news outlets, it will be years before the experience of the Iraqi Sunnis affects attitudes in neighboring countries like Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Al-Qaeda as a transnational pathology will be eradicated only when Islamic political and religious leaders publicly label suicide bombers as murderers who will go to hell rather than martyrs who will be rewarded in heaven. F. J. "Bing" West, who served as a marine in Vietnam and as an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan, is the author of The Village and No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah.
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