Members of the Abu Nidal Organization also provided a.s.sistance, including weapons, to Fatah al-Islam in Nahr al-Barid, and some of the Abu Nidal men who were wanted by Lebanese security forces even stayed behind and fought alongside Fatah al-Islam. Over the next three months the Lebanese army regularly announced that it had vanquished Fatah al-Islam, but despite destroying the camp and making forty thousand Palestinians homeless, the fighting continued, and Lebanese soldiers continued to die. Absi had not been seeking a confrontation with the Lebanese army, but once the fighting started he might have hoped that other supporters and Salafis would rise up throughout Lebanon and its camps. Negotiations faltered over the demand to hand over wanted Lebanese men among his ranks. Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesperson, blamed the Future Movement for inciting hatred against them. He admitted that there were many foreign Muslims among them. Even though they had no organizational ties to Al Qaeda, they considered them their brethren.
In early June it was Jund al-Sham"s turn to clash with the army, in Ayn al-Hilweh. There had been fears that the fighting in Nahr al-Barid would spread south, and now it was happening. Usbat al-Ansar, which was already part of the camp"s executive committee, played a key role in securing the camp. The Lebanese government gave Usbat al-Ansar a new status by recognizing it as a power broker and partner it could deal with. This negotiated solution allowed the Palestinians to continue policing themselves. It was a stark contrast to the military solution offered in Nahr al-Barid.
In June Lebanese security forces arrested four people in the Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. They also found a large amount of explosives and money. One of the suspects was a Saudi carrying fake Iraqi ident.i.ty papers. Two Syrians and a Palestinian were found with him. By then another thirty-two Fatah al-Islam prisoners had been captured, most of whom were Lebanese. The Saudi authorities asked for their citizens to be repatriated so that they could learn more about similar groups in the Kingdom, and Lebanon consented. South of Tripoli Lebanese security forces killed five Islamist fighters, at least two of whom were Saudis. In July, after Fatah al-Islam began firing missiles outside the camp, Abu Salim Taha, the Fatah al-Islam spokesman, explained that the group was targeting the army and some missiles had reached Lebanese towns because of miscalculations. He asked the Sunnis to accept his apology. Lebanon"s many Salafist jihadist groups refused to back Fatah al-Islam, as did Al Qaeda. Their focus was fighting Israel, and none of them wanted to jeopardize their position in Lebanon by provoking the authorities.
By late June most of the Palestinian refugees from Nahr al-Barid had fled to the nearby Bedawi refugee camp. In a schoolyard there I was stopped by Abu Hadi, born in Haifa in 1946. "I am a person without an address," he told me. "I wish I was a donkey or a horse so I would have doctors and lawyers for my rights." He pulled out a notebook. "My office is my pocket," he said. He showed me a plastic bag with a sponge and a towel. "My bathroom is in my hand." A peaceful demonstration of hundreds of civilians, including women and children, marched from Bedawi toward their former homes, asking for the right to return there. Lebanese soldiers opened fire at close range, killing two demonstrators and wounding at least twenty. As the demonstrators fled they were attacked by Sunni civilians from the region, beaten and stabbed. Palestinian families seeking to recover the corpses of their relatives killed by the army"s indiscriminate sh.e.l.ling were told to sign statements affirming that the men had been with Fatah al-Islam or were killed by the group. At the Interior Ministry"s Qibba base near Nahr al-Barid, where many Palestinians were interrogated, at least one of the officers had graduated from an American military program in interrogation described as "debriefing, interviewing, and elicitation." Numerous Palestinian men reported being detained and tortured for many days. Palestinians throughout Lebanon were beaten at checkpoints.
A SENSE OF FOREBODING united people in Lebanon and throughout the region in response to the destabilizing occupation of Iraq. It also made Sunnis feel vulnerable. North of Tripoli, by the village of Qubat Shamra, where a boy was selling watermelons off the side of the road the day I visited, there was a stretch of broken wall with two lines of graffiti. "We tell you, oh rulers, of treachery and tyranny, the blood of the martyr Hariri is not to be forgotten," said one. The other listed the successors of the Prophet Muhammad whom Sunnis revere and warned that "the blood of Sunnis is boiling." It was signed by an unknown group called the Mujahideen Battalions of Tel Hayat, in reference to a nearby village. Further up the road toward the Syrian border, past tall pine and eucalyptus trees, one side of an apartment building was covered with a large painting of Rafiq al-Hariri. "They feared you so they killed you," it said. "Truly they are pigs." It quoted from the Koran as well, an example of the strange juxtaposition of Islamism and the Hariri cult. I stopped at Kusha and met a twenty-three-year-old third-year law student called Muhamad, who had learned English from listening to rap music. Muhamad had joined the Interior Ministry"s new Information Branch earlier that year as a volunteer "because of the Shiite campaign against this government," he said. "You have to do something." His responsibility was to "keep an eye open for anything strange in town."
According to Muhamad, Lebanon"s Sunnis had finally come to believe that Lebanon was their country. "After they killed Hariri we woke up," he said. "Shiites hate us. After Hariri"s death I started feeling hatred of Shiites. I hate Shiites after they thanked Syria in the demonstration." He also hated Shiites for reacting positively to Saddam Hussein"s execution. "At the end Saddam was a Sunni," he said. "I love Saddam. He subjugated Shiites. He was a leader in every sense of the word." Muhamad believed he was helping to defend Lebanon from the "Shiite crescent." "They"re trying to extend their principles through all of Lebanon. The biggest danger is coming from Shiites, not Israel. The priority is Shiites, to confront their project. I would take a gun and face Shiites, not only me but many people here."
In the village of Masha I drove by the main mosque, which had a large picture of Hariri on one wall. Above the mosque a large blue sign said, "Palestine and Iraq are calling you, boycott American products." Elsewhere in town a small shop had the obligatory picture of Saddam with his two sons at his side. A local sheikh had praised Fatah al-Islam as mujahideen.
Throughout Sunni towns in the north and Sunni neighborhoods in Tripoli and Beirut one finds images of Saddam and graffiti praising the executed former Iraqi leader. "The nation that gave birth to Saddam Hussein will not bow," said one in the Beqaa. In Beirut"s Sunni stronghold of Tariq al-Jadida I found posters of "the martyred leader" Saddam with the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem behind him. On the road to Mishmish, a small mountain town in Akkar, I pa.s.sed a wall where someone had written "Long live the hero Saddam Hussein." Entering the town I drove under many banners honoring the army. "Only your pure blood draws the red line," said one, in reference to Nasrallah"s recent speech. When I visited in late July 2007, the all-Sunni town had already lost three of its men to Fatah al-Islam; eight other soldiers from Mishmish were wounded. "People are very angry at the Palestinians," mayor Hanzar Amr Din told me. He did not believe the anger would subside after the fighting. "If they think of coming back to the camp, people will destroy it," he said. "People here were very upset at Nasrallah"s words about red lines," he said. "Last summer people were happy with Nasrallah for fighting Israel, but saying that the camp is a red line means he is backing Palestinians against the army."
That summer I found similar sentiments in the Sunni town of Bibnine. A laborer in a sandwich shop compared the situation to the 1970 Black September fighting, when the Jordanians had gotten rid of Palestinians. "I swear on the Koran," he told me, "if I see a Palestinian I would slaughter him and drink his blood." I asked him what he thought of Hizballah. "I hope they get rid of them too," he said. The walls of Bibnine were plastered with pictures of the ten soldiers killed in the fighting, and I was reminded of the similar pictures festooning Shiite towns a year before in honor of the Hizballah soldiers who had died. On a wall near children playing on a road, someone had written with chalk, "Saddam Hussein is the martyr of the nation." Khuzaimi, a twelve-year-old boy, told me that "we all want to grow up to join the army to destroy this infidel al-Absi." But since Fatah al-Islam would be destroyed by then, he said, "then we will all go fight Israel."
Most of the townsmen had taken their weapons to Nahr al-Barid in the first days of the fighting to "help the army," I was told by Qais, a member of the Internal Security Forces from the town. "Anybody above sixteen went down," he said-122 soldiers in all. "There is no family in Bibnine without somebody down there," he said, adding that his family had fifteen men there. "There is a big anger at the Palestinians," he said. "We consider them responsible for this." When I visited Bibnine on July 31 the sh.e.l.ling of Nahr al-Barid echoed up to the town. Many of the townsmen worked as fishermen off the coast of Tripoli, but since the fighting had begun they had been forced to stay at home.
"They should be put on the border in the south so they can smell Palestine soil and remember it," said Abu Muhamad, whose son Osama, a twenty-six-year-old soldier, had died in Nahr al-Barid. He blamed Syria for sending Fatah al-Islam to Lebanon. "My son the martyr, from childhood he wanted to be in the army. He grew up in a military house. I am a retired soldier. I am proud of him. He was brave, not a coward." Abu Muhamad had two other sons in the army, one of whom was wounded in the battle. "Our first martyr was Rafiq al-Hariri," he told me. "He was a martyr to the nation, and we all want to be martyrs to the nation."
From his balcony Abu Muhamad could view the camp smoldering down on the coast. His face was lined and weathered. He looked tired but tried to smile. "The people won"t allow the camp to be rebuilt," he said. "As soon as the fighting stops, people will go down to prevent it from being rebuilt." Another guest, the father of a soldier still fighting in the camp, repeated an oft-heard slander that the Palestinians had sold Palestine to the Jews in 1948 and now had sold Nahr al-Barid to the jihadists. "That gang bought their camp," the man said. He had been among the first armed men to descend on the camp, he told me. "All towns around the camp went down and took the arms of soldiers who were killed," he said. "Now there is a blood feud between Lebanese and Palestinians," said Abu Muhamad. "The big problem is not with the Palestinians." The real problem was not the Nahr al-Barid camp but the one in downtown Beirut, he said, meaning the Shiite protesters. Like most Sunnis in the north, he had been angered by Nasrallah"s "red lines" speech in May. "Call it red lines or green lines or whatever you want," he said. "Your lines won"t stop us."
The forty thousand homeless Palestinians of Nahr al-Barid were housed in local schools in the nearby Bedawi camp and in Tripoli, watching from afar as their homes were obliterated. Nahr al-Barid was a thoroughly urban camp, with many low apartment buildings. It was located right off the Mediterranean beach, and the view would have afforded its residents some respite from their fate. At least forty-two Palestinian civilians had been killed by September 2, when the army and media declared a great victory-some even called it a victory over Nahr al-Barid rather than Fatah al-Islam. It was only on October 10 that the army finally began to allow a trickle of Palestinians back to their homes, and only in the so-called "new camp," a small area that had housed two thousand families on the outskirts of the original camp. The army had been in control of the new camp, and fighting had not taken place there.
About one thousand families obtained the permits from the army and pa.s.sed through the checkpoints, where soldiers and Lebanese demonstrators heckled them. They found only destruction. It was as if a giant plague of locusts had ravaged the camp. Every single home, building, apartment, and shop was destroyed. Most were also burned from the inside, and signs of the flammable liquids the soldiers had used abounded on the walls. The empty fuel canisters were left behind on the floors. Ceilings and walls were riddled with bullets shot from inside for sport. Lebanese soldiers had defecated in kitchens, on plates, bowls, and pots, as well as on mattresses. They had urinated into jars of olive oil. Most homes had been emptied of all their belongings. Furniture, appliances, sinks, toilets, televisions, refrigerators, gold jewelry, cash-all were stolen. Even the charred walls the Palestinians had been left with were not spared: insulting graffiti had been written on them, along with threats, signed by various army units. The media were not permitted in, and with few exceptions they were ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, if not reveling in it. The army"s behavior confused observers. While it seemed to ignore Fatah al-Islam targets, it systematically destroyed other parts of the camp. Following the battle the army continued to treat the camp as a military zone and imposed an army engineer onto the committee planning the reconstruction, informing other members of what the army wanted done.
The army, which had never been used to defend Lebanon from external threats such as Israel, only to suppress internal dissent, and which had struggled to defeat a small band of extremists, had systematically gone through every bit of the camp and ravaged the infrastructure, destroying six decades of life to render it impossible for the Palestinians to return. All the windows were broken, electrical wiring was pulled out, copper wires stolen for resale or reuse, water pumps removed or destroyed, generators stolen or shot up. The columns typical in the camp, which supported homes, had been shot up so that the concrete was turned to rubble and the rebar exposed. Those few computers that were not stolen had been picked apart, and the RAM and hard drives were all missing. Photo alb.u.ms had been torn to shreds. Every car in the camp was burned, shot up, or crushed by tanks or bulldozers. Much of the looting and destruction had taken place after the fighting ceased, or in areas where fighting never occurred. The many businesses and shops that had served much of northern Lebanon had been looted of their wares, as had pharmacies and health clinics. Palestinians reported seeing their belongings on sale in the main outdoor market in Tripoli. The camp had once been imbricated into the local economy and culture. Now the Palestinians were unwanted and rejected. For some it was not just the second time they were refugees. Apart from 1948, in 1976 many arrived from Tel al-Zaatar, a camp near Beirut that had housed twenty thousand refugees until Lebanese Christian militias besieged it, ma.s.sacred many of its inhabitants, and then leveled the camp to prevent the Palestinians" return. "It is our destiny," one man said without emotion in his blackened home in Nahr al-Barid, standing by excrement the Lebanese soldiers had left behind on the kitchen floor. The total loss of life from Nahr al-Barid was fifty civilians, 179 soldiers, and 226 suspected Fatah al-Islam militants. About six thousand families lost their homes.
Palestinian children"s art from this period depicts the Lebanese soldiers and Lebanese tanks destroying the camp as Israelis. Videos filmed by Lebanese soldiers circulated on the Internet, showing medical staff from the Civil Defense brigade abusing corpses and beating prisoners. Hundreds of Palestinians had been abused or tortured in Lebanese detention, and some had died from medical neglect of treatable wounds. Although still facing hara.s.sment and the occasional beating by Lebanese soldiers, hundreds of Palestinians were at work emptying their homes of rubble. One woman stood on her balcony throwing rubble from inside her home onto the broken street, where it was piled up on the sides. The majority of the Palestinians were still unable to access their homes, and could only wonder what was stolen, broken, and excreted upon. On the roof of a taller building in the new camp, I found Farhan Said Mansur, a sanitation officer standing with his wife and gazing silently across to their distant home, whose broken roof they could just make out-as if looking at Palestine, where he was born. "It is a calamity to all Palestinians," he said.
Many Salafi jihadists had escaped to the Bedawi camp. Other cells had remained in Bedawi during the fighting. The camp"s security committee still had them under surveillance. Outside Bedawi I stopped with my photographer as he shot a bony horse grazing on a hill. Palestinian mechanics in the area surrounded him, holding his hand and warning him not to take pictures, because it was a Palestinian military position. We noticed concrete bunkers on the top of hills belonging to the pro-Syrian PFLP-GC. Just beyond was the army. In November the influential American-allied Lebanese leader Walid Jumblatt threatened that the Burj al-Barajneh camp in Beirut would be the next Nahr al-Barid, and the Palestinian community felt even more vulnerable. That month the Lebanese cabinet warned that Islamist militants were infiltrating other Palestinian camps. The phenomenon would be dealt with as it had in Nahr al-Barid, said the minister of information, Ghazi al-Aridi. n.o.body thought to address the actual condition of Palestinians in the camps.
As the Lebanese Army celebrated its "victory" over Fatah al-Islam, its commander, Michel Suleiman, was to become the next president. He would not be the first president to have punished the Palestinians. Between 1958 and 1964, President Fouad Shehab created an elaborate, ruthless secret-service network to monitor the Palestinian camps. During his 1970-76 reign, President Suleiman Franjieh clashed with Palestinian factions, even using the air force to bomb a neighborhood thought to be pro-Palestinian. I"ve heard followers of a.s.sa.s.sinated president-elect Bashir Gemayel, whose Maronite Christian militia ma.s.sacred Palestinians in 1976, brag that he was stopped at a checkpoint in the early years of the country"s 1975-90 civil war with a trunk full of the skulls of dead Palestinians. And the leading opposition Christian leader is Michel Aoun, a retired general who partic.i.p.ated in the 1976 killings.
"Social confinement is leading the youth to religious radicalism," says Bernard Rougier. "Youngsters are socialized by religious clerics who tell them how to understand the world and the "true reasons" of their social exclusion. To end that situation, refugees should be allowed to work in the Lebanese society, in order for them to live under new and different influences (with a restriction: nothing should be done to naturalize them, because it could upset the Lebanese balance of power, and Palestinian refugees would be, once again, caught in the Lebanese inner contradictions; in addition to that, such naturalization would dissolve the negotiations about the right of return). So what needs to be done is to distinguish between the issues, between what is social (the right to work), what is political (and should be discussed at the regional level), and what is linked to the legal situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. In order to do that, Lebanese parties would have to stop frightening the Lebanese society about the risk of tawtin (a condition almost impossible to meet in Lebanon)."
As Iraq became a less hospitable place for jihadists and foreign fighters, or as there were less American targets to go after, these veterans, experienced at fighting the most advanced army in the world, were looking for new battles. Andrew Exum is a former U.S. Army officer who led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and then led a platoon of Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004. He lived in Beirut from 2004 until 2006, and now researches insurgencies and militant Islamist groups at the Center for New American Security in Washington, D.C. "The fighting in Nahr al-Bared is, unfortunately, just the first round in what I fear will be a series of battles fought in the aftermath of the Iraq War," he says. "On Internet chat rooms, we"re seeing militants turn away volunteers to go fight in Iraq and promising the next fight will be in Lebanon and the Gulf. Lebanon, especially, is a magnet for Sunni extremists. You not only have a haven for these groups in the Palestinian camps-with security services from rival Arab states competing for their loyalty and attention-you also have two tempting targets: both the pro-Western ruling coalition in Beirut as well as the opposition, led by a powerful bloc of Shiite parties. How can we not expect these Sunni militants, who have spent the past four years waging war on the Shiites of Iraq, to try and carry that fight onto the large, politically active Shiite population in Lebanon? Or onto the pro-Western regime that precariously hangs onto power?"
FOLLOWING THE CIVIL WAR Iraq became a less prominent topic on the jihadi web forums. In part the novelty factor wore off. But Iraq was a loss for the jihadists, and as it grew bloodier, with more civilians being targeted, it was less inspiring for aspiring jihadists than merely fighting against the crusader and occupier. But there was very little soul-searching on the forums; jihadis seemed to have moved on without a lot of serious public discussion of what went wrong. This was partly because fighting picked up in other places after 2005, especially in Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Somalia.
And while America"s militaristic ambitions will likely engender violent resistance movements regardless of the ideological environment, a major reason for the growth of Al Qaeda is now something beyond anti-Americanism. It is the internal war between Sunnis and Shiites in places like Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, and even Yemen. Al Qaeda can no longer be seen as just a force against U.S. encroachments; it is now part of these local phenomena. In this internal war in the Muslim world, Al Qaeda has become a major driving force of Sunni-Shiite hatred. Al Qaeda in this case means something more general than the actual organization. Even in moderate Lebanon, sectarian Sunnis have been Salafized. They may not have been religious beforehand, but they view Al Qaeda as an effective way to combat perceived Shiite expansion and a potent symbol for them to reclaim their masculinity. One of the many ramifications of this is that the United States is yet again involving itself in forms of spiraling violence whose outcomes are unpredictable and whose unintended consequences will be keeping it busy for decades to come.
Part Three.
THE SURGE.
CHAPTER SEVEN.
"Iraqi Solutions for Iraqi Problems"
BY LATE 2006 IRAQ SEEMED LOST, A FAILED STATE, HEADING TOWARD Rwanda and threatening to provoke a regional conflict. There was finally a sense among Americans in Baghdad that things were going wrong. The First Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army-known as the "First Team"-took over the headquarters of Multi-National Division Baghdad (MND-B), the major U.S. military unit responsible for the city of Baghdad, in November 2006. Before its arrival, military policy was directed to handing over more authority to the Iraqi Security Forces. As one embedded planner with the Fourth Infantry, who were previously in charge of Multi-National Division Baghdad, told me, "[We were] struggling to control violence when the prime directive was to downsize and turn over responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces as fast as humanly possible. Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army filled the void and were trying to "cleanse" the opposing sect from their perceived areas of influence." But the Iraqi Security Forces were hugely compromised. I was told that every new Iraqi army unit being deployed to Baghdad would first spend two weeks in the Bismaya range in Diyala to train. While training there, the Mahdi Army would contact these units and tell them to leave them alone. "The Iraqi army couldn"t do the right thing if they wanted to, because politicians would pressure them," one deputy brigade commander told me.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, commander of the First Cavalry Division, who in November 2006 became the commanding general of MND-B, told a subordinate in September 2006, "I don"t know what we are going to do in Baghdad. I do know we are not going to keep doing what they"re doing." "We were all very vested in Baghdad," a key author of the change in American strategy from the First Cavalry told me. "First Cav felt very possessive of the place and realized it was burning and that the old ways weren"t working."
The new priority was to focus on protecting the Iraqi population from violence and slow down the transition to the Iraqi Security Forces. The increase in troops that would become known as the "surge" would be much more than an additional thirty thousand American troops. It heralded a change in doctrine and tactics. The Americans would live in the neighborhoods, not merely in ma.s.sive Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) cordoned off from the general population, from where they would "commute to work." They would implement population-centric counterinsurgency, designed to secure, or control, the population and win their allegiance at the expense of rival guerrilla forces.
Before the surge the Americans would take Iraqi National Police (INP) units offline for extra training, including on the rule of law and human rights. It was called a "reblueing exercise," but it never worked. The Americans would go in and clear an area, leaving the INP there. In operations such as Together Forward I and II, from 2006, the American unit would report that it cleared one thousand houses and twenty mosques, and confiscated twenty AK-47s. Then they would leave the INP, and violence would get worse, as happened in Ghazaliya. It took Zarqawi to push the Iraqi Security Forces to take their work seriously, and they did this with the help of power drills and death squads, punishing Sunnis en ma.s.se until the will of the resistance was broken. It wasn"t in the counterinsurgency manual, but it worked.
Baghdad was the sine qua non for everything the Americans were trying to do, but at the National Security Council they realized it was falling apart. Brett McGurk, the NSC"s director for Iraq, was writing daily reports for President Bush about security in Baghdad, arguing that the military strategy was not working. In August 2006 National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley asked McGurk and Meghan O"Sullivan to work on a review of Iraq policy. All the Iraqis McGurk knew from his time in the country in 2004 were fleeing, hiding in the Green Zone, or dead. The son of one Iraqi judge he was friends with was killed right outside the Green Zone.
McGurk looked at past similar civil wars and concluded that it took a neutral force to provide a presence and stabilize the country, but the ISF wasn"t neutral (and neither, of course, were the Americans). McGurk believed that the Americans did not have enough troops to achieve their ends, that their mission was not properly resourced. In the summer of 2006, he made his position clear to the president. Hadley knew that McGurk and O"Sullivan were advocates of a troop surge, but he didn"t want the media to say the NSC supported such a surge, because it would immediately form antibodies before they could even do a review. He told them never to use the word "surge." Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, was opposed to an increase in troops, as were Secretary of State Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
McGurk and O"Sullivan challenged Abizaid"s a.s.sumptions. They saw that in battles during 2005, in the mid-Euphrates, in Al Qaim, Tal Afar, Heet, Haditha, and elsewhere, whenever the U.S. military stayed, the population turned against the insurgency and became cooperative. The Marines told them that mayors of towns had asked them not to leave. The pair were also skeptical that the Iraqi Security Forces could handle the levels of violence in Iraq, and proved that they couldn"t. The Interior Ministry was mistrusted, and the Iraqi army was at risk of fracturing or disbanding, as it had in 2004, when the Americans had to restart it.
In the spring of 2006 President Bush gave a speech highlighting Nineveh province"s Tal Afar to show that American strategy was working, but Tal Afar-where the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment had cleared, held, and built-was not part of the American strategy; it was an exception. McGurk and O"Sullivan were cynical that political reconciliation could end violence. People on the street were not fighting each other because the Iraqi Parliament could not agree on an oil law, they argued. They felt they could show empirically that more U.S. forces, with a different strategy, could stabilize the country and lead to security. They spoke to old Iraq hands at the CIA and saw that the agency"s findings supported their position. To them a troop surge was not intended to open a s.p.a.ce for political reconciliation; it was about building up the Iraqi Security Forces so they could hold the line and allow politics to take its course. Although many CIA a.n.a.lysts thought a surge would be throwing good money after bad, and was coming too late to be effective, McGurk and O"Sullivan were zealous about the need for more troops.
By the end of the summer of 2006, Bush was finally focused on changing course in Iraq. He no longer trusted Casey and Abizaid, and he wouldn"t defer to the generals anymore. Although Bush was briefed every morning by a CIA official about events around the world, he asked for a special briefing by the CIA every Monday only on Iraq. But he didn"t want his regular briefer from the agency; he wanted a young a.n.a.lyst. It was unusual for a young a.n.a.lyst to have that kind of access to the president. A typical a.n.a.lyst was a geek in an argyle sweater who was terrified by the idea of briefing the president, especially since an a.n.a.lyst might approach Iraq as an intellectual challenge, while Bush often flaunted his anti-intellectual credentials. When he was briefed about how the Mahdi Army was providing services to its supporters and beginning to resemble Lebanese Hizballah in its early stages, Bush was not curious and did not inquire how and why. Instead he asked, Should we kill Sadr? And what do we do to stop it? But Bush was also beginning to understand Iraqi political dynamics. He talked to Maliki regularly, one on one, through a translator. He gave Maliki advice. Bush wanted to build a special relationship with Maliki, as one leader to another leader. Others in the administration said he should not engage so frequently because he would lose leverage.
In November 2006 Bush met with Maliki in Amman. He told Maliki he would send more troops to stabilize Baghdad, but he needed his Iraqi counterpart"s support. U.S. military leaders were skeptical of Maliki. They said he was sectarian and knew what was going on in the streets. But McGurk sympathized with his position; he knew Maliki would lose if he took on the Mahdi Army. Maliki wanted to work Shiite politics and weaken the Shiite militia before taking them on. The Iraqi prime minister gave Bush his commitment.
EVEN THOUGH THE SURGE was controversial at its inception, its success would become something of a proverbial truth, and the proponents of the new counterinsurgency strategy-known by its acronym, COIN-would soon become very influential over the American defense establishment. Gen. David Petraeus, with whom the surge would become identified, had spent the course of 2006 reshaping how the U.S. military thought about counterinsurgency. He effectively had a yearlong graduate course in COIN while based at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center (USACAC) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he served as commanding general. There, along with Conrad Crane, John Nagl, Marine Gen. James Mattis, and others, he wrote the U.S. military"s manual on COIN. According to the manual, called FM 3-24, the purpose was to "relearn the principles of counterinsurgency," create better learning organizations in the military, and change the Army and Marine Corps. It was not just about winning Iraq and Afghanistan; it was written "to help Army and Marine Corps leaders to conduct COIN operations anywhere in the world" [emphasis added].
Some in the CIA and the National Security Agency were wary when Petraeus was appointed to run the war in Iraq. In 2004 he had been in charge of training the Iraqi Security Forces. The Iraqi army had performed poorly in the battles of Najaf and Falluja, even though Petraeus was still briefing the U.S. government about how great the Iraqi Security Forces were. Battalion-level commanders were complaining that 80 percent of the Iraqi army were absent without leave and that the ones who did show were incompetent. Petraeus was considered a liar by these figures within the CIA and NSA-typical military, refusing to admit there was a problem. But Petraeus could be candid among his fellow military officers, so it was likely that in his briefing to civilians he was constrained by Rumsfeld"s worldview, which obstinately refused to see the reality of disaster in Iraq.
Petraeus was not one to publicly undermine policy. He would be hailed as a "warrior scholar," but in 2004 he was still part of the "stay the course" school. In fact, in 2004 he wrote an optimistic op-ed in the Washington Post about the war in Iraq, which was perceived to be entering the political debate during an election year, something usually taboo for someone so high in the chain of command. In the op-ed, t.i.tled "Battling for Iraq," he listed the numbers of recruits and graduates from the Iraqi Security Forces. "I see tangible progress," he wrote. "Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt from the ground up. . . . Iraqi leaders are stepping forward, leading their country and their security forces courageously." Though he admitted there were setbacks, he insisted there were "reasons for optimism." "Iraq"s security forces are, however, developing steadily and they are in the fight. Momentum has gathered in recent months. With strong Iraqi leaders out front and with continued coalition-and now NATO-support, this trend will continue. It will not be easy, but few worthwhile things are."
Perhaps a clue to Petraeus"s real thinking is the fact that by the end of 2005 he was back in the United States working on the new counterinsurgency manual, which turned out to be a scathing critique of how the military had been fighting the war in Iraq. Similarly, between 2003 and 2004, he had opposed Bremer"s de-Baathification, dismissal of the Iraqi army, and free-market reforms in Iraq. He e-mailed his men, telling them to ignore Bremer, basically urging insubordination. Petraeus wanted to provide stability in Iraq and knew Bremer was destabilizing the country.
Petraeus was a masterful bureaucrat. He took an Army that was focused on fighting a conventional war-whose standard practice, in the words of a State Department official I spoke to, was to place their boots on the heads of Iraqi men they were detaining-and got it to "turn on a dime to fight an insurgency." Petraeus would become the most influential U.S. general since George C. Marshall. The surge would also be seen as a panacea to U.S. problems in Afghanistan. The story I tell in the next chapters is more complicated than both Petraeus"s hagiographers and critics claim.
ALMOST ON ARRIVAL in February 2007 Petraeus headed straight to Ramadi, capital of the Anbar province, to see Col. Sean McFarland of the First Brigade, First Armored Division. McFarland"s brigade had been in Ramadi since June 2006. Before that they had been in Tal Afar, where soldiers were practicing an approach called "clear, hold, and build" and living in combat outposts (COPs) with the townspeople. While these outposts initially suffered heavy attacks, in battle the Americans usually dominated, and attacks fell after the first summer.
(Capt. Robert Chamberlin believed the real reason Tal Afar was pacified was the cleansing of its Sunnis and the tacit American support this received. After serving in Tal Afar he wrote an article in Military Review in 2008. "Shiites now dominate a community that was formerly 70 percent Sunni," he explained. "Shiites made up 98 percent of the applicant pool in a July 2007 recruiting drive for the local police. The Sunnis moved to nearby villages and sought shelter with families and tribes, but they still think of Tal Afar as "their" city.") Living in COPs allowed the Americans to have greater access to Ramadi"s infrastructure and to reach out to local leaders. In the early days of the U.S. invasion, these leaders had generally supported the resistance. They eventually turned against Al Qaeda, but their attempts to expel the group in 2005 failed. The tribes were crushed, killed, and forced to flee. This time they had American support; that made a difference.
McFarland initially found a city dominated by Al Qaeda-linked groups with almost no Iraqi Security Forces. He set up tribal militias called provisional auxiliary police and stationed them so they could protect their own area. The Americans protected the homes of collaborating tribal leaders. Instead of warning that they would soon be leaving, the Americans promised to remain as long as it took. McFarland believed it was his attempt to recruit thousands of locals to the Iraqi police that led to what would be called the Sons of Iraq program-known in Arabic as Al Sahwa (the Awakening)-in which previously antagonistic Sunni militias began to cooperate with the Americans. Brutal Al Qaeda retaliatory attacks on police and the tribal leaders who backed them increased local hatred of the group.
The Americans found a young "sheikh" called Sattar Abu Risha. He was not exactly a tribal leader, and he was not exactly fighting for freedom, but he was willing to fight Al Qaeda in return for American support. Unlike past rebellions against Al Qaeda, this time the Americans propped up their new ally. They had two Marine battalions in downtown Ramadi, and they parked a tank in Abu Risha"s front yard and visited him twice a day. In September 2007 Abu Risha held a conference establishing the Anbar Awakening. More and more tribes in the area joined. When Awakening tribes were attacked, the Americans provided air and armor support and rescued them.
"The enemy overplayed its hand and the people were tired of Al-Qaeda," McFarland wrote in a 2008 article in Military Review. "A series of a.s.sa.s.sinations had elevated younger, more aggressive tribal leaders to positions of influence. A growing concern that the U.S. would leave Iraq and leave the Sunnis defenseless against Al-Qaeda and Iranian-supported militias made these younger leaders open to our overtures. Our willingness to adapt our plans based on the advice of the sheiks, our staunch and timely support for them in times of danger and need, and our ability to deliver on our promises convinced them that they could do business with us. Our forward presence kept them rea.s.sured." Petraeus supported the introduction of the Awakening phenomenon elsewhere. Paying people who used to shoot at Americans was a radical step, but he did not consult his chain of command. "Petraeus did what he wanted to do and sought approval after, and he had enough clout to do it," an American intelligence official told me.
IN DECEMBER 2006, when Washington began to push new troops to Baghdad, General Casey, the head of Multi-National Forces Iraq (MNF-I)-the U.S. military formation that provided overall command and control for operations in Iraq-summoned the Iraqis and laid out the new "surge" plan with Prime Minister Maliki, Defense Minister Abdul Qader Muhammad Ja.s.sim, Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani, and the First Cavalry team. The Americans called it the Baghdad Security Plan, while the Iraqis called it Fard al-Qanun (Imposing the Law). Maliki approved the concept and committed to bringing in more Iraqi troops and letting the Americans "target all criminals," which included Shiite militias and Sadrists. It was a momentous step for Maliki, whose collaboration with Shiite militias was viewed by the Americans as an obstacle to their goals.
Proponents of counterinsurgency obsessively study the history of so-called "small wars," such as the British war in Malaya, the American war in the Philippines, the French war in Algeria, and the wars in Vietnam. Their doctrine emphasizes using the least amount of violence against the enemy, becoming familiar with the occupied country"s culture, and working to remove support for the insurgents. While this requires killing those who cannot be "reconciled," it also requires creating local proxy forces and finding political solutions that the civilian population can see as a better alternative to backing insurgents. Proponents of COIN strategy realized that American tactics in Iraq had until then relied on brute force and killing.
COIN theorists never answered (or even asked) questions such as, Should the Americans have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan in the first place, or should they be occupying other countries? Instead they focused on practical matters such as implementation. To them the American reliance on brute force was counterproductive, and the numerous "decapitation operations" in which insurgent leaders were a.s.sa.s.sinated were not useful. They exhorted less violence, fewer "kinetic operations," which only alienated people. They urged military and civilian agencies to collaborate and to understand the concerns of the people and address them, providing security and responding to their grievances.
American casualties peaked when their forces were involved in clearing insurgents from the belts. Once they transitioned to the hold-and-build phase, U.S. casualties declined drastically. But the extent to which the Americans protected the Iraqi population during the surge has been romanticized. American airstrikes killed more than 250 civilians in Iraq in 2006 but more than 940 in 2007 and another 400 in 2008. Thus, Americans killed more civilians in 2008 than in 2006, at the peak of the civil war-this despite the fact that the much-lauded scripture of the military"s COIN manual states, "The employment of airpower in the strike role should be done with exceptional care. . . . Even when justified under the law of war, bombing a target that results in civilian casualties will bring media coverage that works to the benefit of the insurgents." In addition, artillery was used often during the surge for the purpose of "terrain denial," even when that terrain was a populated area. This must not have felt very population-centric to the population.
On January 11, 2007, the "Crisis Committee" had its first meeting in Baghdad, at which the Baghdad Operation Center was set up and Lieut. Gen. Abud Qanbar was designated as its commander. The BOC was formed to give the Americans a counterpart in the battle of Baghdad, to be Maliki"s face in Fard al-Qanun.
Initially, the Americans didn"t want the BOC to be under Maliki"s direct control; they wanted it to be under the Defense Ministry"s command. Nor did they want Qanbar to lead it at first. The Iraqi general seemed too Soviet in his style and was too close to Maliki, but Qanbar proved flexible and able to learn. Brig. Gen. John Campbell, deputy commander of the First Cavalry Regiment, mentored Qanbar and also played a vital role in the success of the Awakening. He took Qanbar to meet some of the Awakening men, and Qanbar realized he knew them from the Saddam-era military. "Brigadier General Campbell had exceptional rapport with our Iraqi partners," observed Maj. Andy Morgado, who served as a division maneuver planner and later as a combined arms battalion operations officer.
Multi-National Forces-Iraq-headed by General Casey at the beginning of the surge, then by General Petraeus, and then by Gen. Raymond Odierno-was the overall strategic headquarters for U.S. coalition forces. Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I), the tactical unit responsible for command and control of operations in Iraq, was supposed to coordinate the actions of its subordinate divisions: Multi-National Division-Baghdad and Multi-National Division-Center, which was responsible for area south of Baghdad.
Lieut. Col. Steve Miska, who served as a deputy brigade commander throughout Baghdad during the surge, told me that the additional soldiers provided a greater density of troops for more effective partnership with the Iraqi Security Forces. But another factor was important. In Baghdad, before the surge, none of the boundaries separating American forces matched those used by Iraqi forces, and none of those boundaries matched the political lines of baladiyas (local munic.i.p.alities). As a result it was difficult to synchronize with local politicians or security forces, and there was little American integration or coordination with the ISF. The surge realigned the military boundaries with the political boundaries. "That allowed for sustained relationships between the Iraqi army, coalition forces, and political leaders," Miska explained. "It restored confidence among the populace in many cases. The overall surge strategy realigned the Iraqi army boundaries to match the district boundaries in Baghdad. We did the same for the U.S. boundaries. The effect was that now the same U.S. and Iraqi commanders would work with the same local politicians to resolve issues."
The lines for the ten Baghdad "security districts" were drawn on a map by Lieut. Col. Douglas Ollivant, chief of plans for MND-B, and Major General Ali of the Iraqi Ministry defense staff, who had studied at Sandhurst (in 1971), the Indian Staff College, and the NATO staff college in Italy, and who spoke English well. Each of the districts would be under the authority of an Iraqi army or Iraqi National Police headquarters. This was a key meeting, where strategic boundaries were being drawn, and yet n.o.body from Corps, as Odierno"s staff was called, was present except for a very junior major who was there only as a note-taker. The surge plan was drawn up by Brigadier General Campbell, Colonel Toby Green, and Lieutenant Colonel Ollivant with little guidance from Multi-National Corps-Iraq. General Casey was present, however, giving very specific guidance. It was Casey who suggested creating joint security stations in Baghdad.
In addition to the role played by McGurk and O"Sullivan, two outsiders played a crucial role in the push for more troops. Fred Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane are controversial figures: the former is a neoconservative military historian with no experience or specialization in the Middle East; the latter an imposing and intimidating retired general with a forceful personality. But they were effective because they provided a public voice arguing that a troop surge could work. While working on this book I met American officials who loved them or hated them, who attributed the whole surge to them or denied they had any significant role. "Success has many fathers," one lieutenant colonel explained, and the surge was the only positive development anyone could point to in America"s catastrophic occupation of Iraq.
In 2006 there were many voices calling for either an American withdrawal or an increase in American troops. Colin Kahl of Georgetown University and then the Center for New American Security visited Iraq in the summer of that year. Based on his experience he called for more troops or for a withdrawal, but he was ignored as an outsider and a Democratic partisan. (President Obama would later install him as Deputy a.s.sistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East.) There was a joint push for more troops coming from the NSC and the Keane/Kagan duo. Keane, who looked at Iraq from a purely military view, was the most consistent and longstanding advocate of a troop increase. "He was always poking," one NSC member told me. J.D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, hosted an Iraq review in December 2006. He convened small groups in which he appeared neutral, but he steered skeptics to the surge-and then convinced his boss, Stephen Hadley. One lieutenant colonel involved in the surge described Kagan as "just a blowhard who could be counted on to give the party line in print when he returned from each of his Petraeus-sponsored trips." But another lieutenant colonel described him as a brilliant and rigorous thinker. "Kagan is the main guy behind the push for more troops, and Keane is an idiot," he told me, adding, for good measure, that Casey and Fil were also idiots. Although neoconservatives have traditionally been advocates of increased reliance on airpower, Kagan broke with this neoconservative predilection for "shock and awe" tactics. Instead he believed that war was about influencing people on the ground, and thus required more troops. Kagan provided Bush with an alternative to the Senate"s Iraq Study Group report, which advocated a reduction in troops.
An internal NSC review and Keane"s force of will persuaded the president to change course in Iraq. The push out of Washington for more troops was then utilized by Multi-National Division-Baghdad, with some oversight from General Casey, to secure Baghdad. General Odierno had a very different concept, his critics told me. "He wanted to use the troops out in the "Baghdad belts" to go kill Sunnis," one senior American officer said. Odierno"s role was "totally blown out of proportion," according to one of the architects of the surge in Baghdad, "and I don"t think he really figures in the picture." Major Morgado strongly disagrees: "Though Baghdad was a large problem set, it was not the only problem set," he said.
There was a serious and heated internal debate among the Americans in Baghdad, both between different headquarters and within them, over whether they should focus on population security or continue to capture and kill. Advocates of the latter approach, of which Odierno apparently was the champion, saw which way the wind was blowing, aped the new COIN language, and called their method "clearing," as in "clear, hold, and build" or "clear, control, and retain."
But Morgado disagreed with this description of Odierno"s philosophy. "Maliki wanted to go and kill Sunnis," he told me. "By putting a larger American presence in the belts, it stopped Maliki from pursuing this aim, and it allowed Americans to effectively interdict lines of communication and thereby stop accelerants of the violence. The Awakening would have been hard-pressed to happen if Maliki was allowed to unleash a one-sided a.s.sault on the Sunnis in the belts."
General Petraeus and the bulk of MND-B were focused on providing security to the Iraqi population. Odierno and some other elements-most notably the Third Stryker Brigade combat team, Second Infantry Division, under the command of Steve Townsend-wanted to keep "clearing," the most violent part of the "clear, hold, and build" process. Odierno tasked the Third Infantry Division to lead the organization of Multi-National Division-Central and facilitate the fight in the belts outside Baghdad. As airpower advocates have noted, more bombs were dropped in 2007 in MND-C"s area of operations than at any time earlier in the war. While Baghdad was focused on population security (despite some internal dissidents and occasional lapses), MND-C was still killing and capturing until much later, when the Awakening groups were established there too.
Odierno wanted to reduce the influence of MND-B (the major inst.i.tutional proponent of executing the surge) and transfer terrain to the other units that shared his focus on killing and capturing. Odierno could never directly say, "Don"t secure the population," since Petraeus would overturn that, but he could nibble away at MND-B"s influence. (Morgado denied that his old boss had any obsession with killing. "I believe General Odierno sensed weakness in General Fil," he said. "Odierno used to talk about reconciling with various parties back in 2003 to 2004. This was not a new concept for him.") Most interlocutors I dealt with from the military and National Security Council agreed that Odierno was neither a visionary nor a strategist. "Petraeus is an A who hires A-pluses," one American intelligence a.n.a.lyst dealing with Iraq told me. "Odierno is a B who hires Cs." Petraeus also had the star power to handpick whomever he wanted, which led to the creation of a coterie of West Point graduates and within that a smaller group of graduates from West Point"s social sciences department. Petraeus made COIN the universal policy, and thanks to his status he was able to sell an increase in troops to the American people and Congress despite their growing antiwar mood.
Though the surge was Baghdad-oriented, the increased troop numbers also allowed the Americans to operate in the "belts" that surrounded the city. Odierno"s role in the belts was a key element. He took the concept of the surge and decided where to put troops. "He is not a bright guy, and he didn"t have bright guys around him, but he figured out how to fight the battle of Baghdad," one insider told me. If Doug Ollivant and others at First Cav were the architects of the surge, Odierno was the builder, the operational realizer. Morgado served in Balad, north of Baghdad, between July and November 2007. "Al Qaeda in Iraq had freedom of maneuver in the belts," he explained. "This gave them unlimited opportunities to marshal resources in the hinterlands, use multiple avenues to infiltrate supplies and weapons into Baghdad, and conduct attacks. Al Qaeda, with this lat.i.tude, was free to conduct attacks on Shiites and act as an accelerant for retribution by the Mahdi Army or other Shiites.
"While U.S. and Iraqi forces kept the Shiites under control in Baghdad, U.S.-led efforts in the belts kept the Sunnis/Al Qaeda off-balance. Both efforts depended on the other, but the belts clearly supported the efforts within Baghdad. I thought it was critical for U.S. forces to lead in the belts. We stood up the Sons of Iraq and brought the Sunnis into the "good guy" side of the ledger. I don"t think this was feasible or desirable by a Maliki-led effort. His solution to the Sunni problem would have been "Kill them all" and only would have exacerbated the problem. Though the Sons of Iraq pose a political problem now and in the future, these are much better conditions."
Balad is a Shiite-dominated town surrounded by rural Sunni communities. By the time Morgado arrived in Balad, the Mahdi Army had been largely put down, while most Sunnis within the town had been chased out or killed. Morgado"s princ.i.p.al threat remained Al Qaeda in Iraq and a.s.sociated groups. "We were tight along the Salahaddin/Diyala fault line," he said. "Their lines of communication ran from Samarra and Anbar in the west, from Baquba in the east, and Mosul to the north. In turn, they would use the Balad area to stage attacks in Baghdad/Taji area in the south."
The first Sons of Iraq group was "stood up" in Balad in August 2007. Morgado"s battalion cultivated six of these groups, putting about 200 individuals on the payroll. "They were extremely effective. Once these groups stood up, Al Qaeda went after them hard, but they remained resilient. With largely Sons of Iraq influence, we began capturing or killing every major high-value target we had, and attacks in our zone decreased dramatically. It was clear with the Sons of Iraq that part of their motivation was monetary, but largely they were tired of the violence. Their allegiance with Al Qaeda only brought them death and instability. By working with us, they realized they could stabilize the community. Knowing that we were providing support to these groups, monetarily and operationally, gave them a lot of confidence."
When Bush announced his surge in January 2007, I thought it was too late for the Americans to make a difference. I had spent four years writing about the oppressive nature of the American occupation, and I didn"t see how enlarging it could make things better. General Petraeus himself a.s.serted that military gains would be ephemeral if Iraq"s factions did not reach political deals. It seemed as if more troops might only provoke further resistance, or if not, that a few thousand more troops couldn"t possibly halt the civil war and affect the situation in Iraq strategically. But the addition of more American troops also forced other armed factions in Iraq to change their plans and actions.
According to Lieutenant Colonel Miska, the introduction of combat outposts, smaller bases inside neighborhoods, and joint security stations where Americans lived and worked with Iraqi security forces allowed the Americans to integrate the Iraqi army, Iraqi police, and U.S. forces into an overall security plan. "We were commuting to work, but an insurgent lives among the people, so you must do it too," he told me. "We started doing this in Ghazaliya before the surge. Ghazaliya was a killing field. The Mahdi Army was attacking from Shula and the north, Al Qaeda was attacking from the south. The first combat outpost we put in was on the sectarian fault line between the two sides. We set it up with the Iraqi army, and within a week some stores opened up, people came in. We were there in a sustained presence and wouldn"t leave them. It helped set up Sons of Iraq; people realized Americans could be an ally."
Miska said that the Sons of Iraq were originally organized to fill a gap in local security, predominantly because the local police would not provide security to the Sunni population areas. During the surge, the Americans started placing combat outposts (COPs) and joint security stations ( JSSs) along the sectarian fault lines and right in the Sunni areas because the need was greatest there. "Al Qaeda held the Sunni population hostage in neighborhoods like Amriya, where the flagpole of Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia was planted," he said. "I think part of the reason the Sons of Iraq came to us in Amriya and Ghazaliya was that they saw the Americans were committed to protecting the Sunni people. n.o.body else had a stake in the game-not the police, not the Iraqi army or the Iraqi government."
More than the surge itself, the declaration of the surge forced armed factions in Iraq to change their calculations. Sunni militias who resented Al Qaeda or were already in conflict realized that the Americans were no longer aiding the "Iranians" whom Sunnis saw as their fundamental enemy. Instead they saw the Americans acting to limit Iranian influence. They saw that the Americans would back them against Al Qaeda and would not abandon them, as they had previously done with Sunni collaborators. Controlling the Anbar province and cutting it off from Sunni strongholds in western Baghdad denied Al Qaeda some of its strategic depth and access to its hinterland. This weakened it and allowed Sunni groups opposed to Al Qaeda to take advantage of the opening. These Sunni groups might have been more skeptical of the Americans had they not seen the success of their Anbari brethren, who began collaborating with Americans against Al Qaeda groups in the summer of 2006 and helped turn one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq into one of the least violent.
There had always been infighting between Sunni resistance groups, but they tried to minimize these publicly to maintain the appearance of a united front. Al Qaeda tried to Iraqify itself after the death of Zarqawi, with Iraqis as its official leaders, controlling the Mujahideen Advisory Council. The increased sectarian violence and aggressive Shiite push forced Sunni groups to rally together and work with Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda members acted like gang leaders, terrorizing local populations more than fighting the occupier. Local religious, tribal, and traditional leaders, as well as educated elites, were either killed, co-opted, or expelled. Often the population followed them out, turning areas into ghost towns.
In October 2006 Al Qaeda announced the creation of its Islamic state in Iraq. It was not about liberating Iraq from the occupation; it was about a larger global war. But most of the Iraqi resistance had no appet.i.te for this sort of global jihad. Resistance groups began to feud with Al Qaeda, as leaders were a.s.sa.s.sinated. In 2007 the Islamic Army of Iraq publicly broke with Al Qaeda, condemning its tactics and claiming that thirty members of the Islamic Army had been killed by Al Qaeda. These clashes began in Amriya. That year three leading resistance groups established the Jihad and Reform Front, which condemned Al Qaeda"s tactics (such as targeting civilians) and goals.
Al Qaeda men condemned tribal traditions for being un-Islamic, and actively undermined or usurped traditional authority. This alienated local communities. During the modernizing era of the 1970s, tribes were marginalized as the state a.s.serted itself. But in the "80s tribes were co-opted and armed in the war against Iran. Tribalism was used by the regime, and tribal leaders who proved loyal servants were empowered. Although tribal leaders were initially ignored by the occupation, the Americans also began to co-opt and collaborate with them during the surge, empowering them to rebel against Al Qaeda.
Sunnis in Anbar might have opposed the occupation, but they also wanted stability, and Al Qaeda brought only chaos. The Sunni tribal "Awakening" began in Anbar, led by Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha. Soon other tribal leaders joined him. Many were not important or powerful until the Americans empowered them. Abu Risha himself was widely known as a highway robber, operating on the highway between Baghdad and Amman. His conflict with Al Qaeda might have had more to do with a dispute over looted goods than ideology. But when Al Qaeda killed his tribesmen, a blood feud between it and the tribes started. Al Qaeda taxes on smuggling also made tribal leaders chafe. The explicit American shift in emphasis from killing the enemy to protecting the population allowed it to be more subtle when dealing with resistance groups. By the end of 2006, the Syrians had also cracked down on illegal border crossings, closing some of the routes Al Qaeda relied on for personnel and supplies. As for Sheikh Sattar, shortly after meeting President Bush, he was blown up outside his home in September 2007, which was probably convenient for both the Iraqi government and the Americans, who now no longer had the problem of disposing of him once he outlived his usefulness.
At the same time, the Sadrists were facing a backlash from fatigued Shiites who saw them as an onerous gang. An increase in American troops focusing on Baghdad was guaranteed to lead to a crackdown on the Mahdi Army, and Muqtada al-Sadr always retreated before the Americans could defeat him, a lesson from his 2004 experience in Najaf. But if his people could lie low and wait for the Americans to reduce their troops once more, they could emerge unscathed and even benefit by letting the Americans cull his ranks of disobedient and criminal-minded elements, strengthening his control.
By the summer of 2007, tension between Maliki and the Sadrists had increased. Though the Sadrists had backed Maliki"s rise to power, they now withdrew from the government, hoping to weaken him. Maliki went so far as to compare Sadrists with Baathists. On the other hand, many of the Sadrists in the government were viewed as corrupt and brutal, so it is also possible that Muqtada withdrew them to clean his movement"s image. The year 2006 was supposed to be the year of the police, according to the Americans. Instead it was the year the police and Mahdi Army became one. The rank and file were dominated by Sadrists. Officers were terrified of their own men. The Mahdi Army took for granted its authority over certain areas. n.o.body could challenge the Sadrists-not the Iraqi Security Forces and not the Americans. Just like Sunni criminals using fatwas to justify their crimes under the guise of Al Qaeda, so too did Shiite criminals profit from the booty they seized from Sunnis und