The 9/11 Wars (22 page)

AN INSURGENCY GETS UNDERWAY

As the spring had passed and the long, hot summer months went on, violence began to rise steadily. Much of it remained the work of uncoordinated groups who took direction, if at all, from local clerics or from former senior regime members. These groups were bands of friends or former colleagues, men who prayed at the same mosque, went to the same café or even, in the case of one group of insurgents the author interviewed in Baghdad, half a dozen fathers whose children went to the same school.
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Some were former professional soldiers, almost all knew how to handle weapons though not usually place bombs or fire mortars. They were professors, businessmen, civil servants, mechanics and the unemployed.
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They included men like ‘Abu Mujahed’, as he called himself, a thirty-year-old bureaucrat. A Sunni from the big Baghdad neighbourhood of Adhamiyah, Abu Mujahed had never been a member of the Ba’ath Party and said he had been ‘very happy’ to hear that the Americans were coming to ‘liberate Iraq’. American culture had symbolized freedom, meritocracy and opportunity and Bon Jovi, the stadium rock band, he remembered. The process of disillusionment was rapid, however. First came the images of civilian casualties broadcast by Arabic-language satellite channels and watched on an illicit dish during the war itself. Then there was the sight of Americans troops doing nothing to stop the looting of Baghdad. The latter, Abu Mujahed said, had convinced him that the Americans were not here to help the Iraqis but ‘to destroy them’. This was not enough in itself to push Abu Mujahed into violent militancy. Over several months other factors each furthered his progression towards taking up arms. One significant moment, he remembered, came when the Americans started ‘killing and arresting’ his ‘own people’. Another was when he realized that, with food prices rising rapidly since the invasion, his pay as a minor government functionary was no longer sufficient to feed his family decently. ‘I could no longer afford a chicken to put on the table in the evening,’ he said. In addition, he said, none of the advantages he had hoped for from the invasion had come to pass. There was no democracy, he claimed, especially for Iraq’s Sunni Muslim minority, and no electricity or proper sanitation either.

It would have been difficult to describe Abu Mujahed as an ‘Islamic militant’. Certainly his beliefs and values had little in common with those of a reactionary cleric or an autodidact extremist organizer and propagandist like bin Laden. He only went to mosque on a Friday and rarely prayed five times a day except during Ramadan. However, religion clearly played a significant part in his worldview and was particularly important in unifying his group and, crucially, legitimizing its actions. ‘Always we discuss what we are going to do in religious terms so we can say we are fighting for the sake of religion,’ he said. ‘We have formed our group to fight for religion, and the main thing for our group is religion.’ Abu Mujahed said that above all he felt ‘humiliated’.

Over a period of weeks a group of six or seven like-minded men came together. There was no major effort at recruitment, certainly no direction from above or outside, just a band of people sharing a fairly indistinct goal and similar sentiments. The group contained, Abu Mujahed said, ‘one man fighting for his nation, another fighting for a principle’, as well as someone who was ‘very religious’. He was the leader but not through any formal mechanism. More because ‘someone has to organize things a bit’, he said. Nor was the process by which his group sourced the various basic elements that all militants and terrorists require – weapons, expertise and somewhere to train and rest and hide – any less amateurish or haphazard. Careful if casual inquiries established that there was an underground network of arms suppliers already in existence. Saddam had distributed vast numbers of weapons, and the locations of dumps – often left untouched and unsecured by American troops for fear of lethal chemical or biological weapons – were known to many. Finding people who had the specialized knowledge that the group needed to use the arms that were available took longer, but step by step Abu Mujahed and his friends were able to locate experts in weapons, concealment and communications among demobilized members of the Iraqi army. ‘They would help us out as a favour and did things like show us how to use a mortar in the front room of someone’s house,’ he said. ‘Bit by bit, we learned what we needed to know.’ One former army officer joined the group.

Abu Mujahed and his friends soon began establishing contacts with other similar groups, all of which paid nominal allegiance to a single tribal sheikh. There were no specific commands as such but merely broad direction from more senior tribal leaders. Over the next months the group tried various tactics: sniping at Americans, learning about remote-controlled bombs, laying mines where they knew patrols would pass and using mortars.

In every way, Abu Mujahed’s operations were typical of those of such men in Iraq and in many other theatres of the 9/11 Wars. His motivations or those of the others in his group – a mixture of disappointed expectations, wounded pride, concepts of tribal and national honour, socio-economic hardship and a desire to avenge killed, injured or humiliated loved ones or associates, the smooth fusion of global Islamic narratives with local nationalist or sectarian ones – were broadly representative. The emergence and instrumentalization of religion was classic too as Islam, as we have seen in early chapters, has consistently played a role as a rallying flag and a discourse to concentrate, express and unify diverse grievances. The deteriorating economic situation of the last years of Saddam Hussein’s regime had also seen a strengthening of kinship and tribal ties. These tribal and family associations sometimes clashed with more nationalist and religious identities but were often easily combined – as in the case of Abu Mujahed’s band.

However, the activities of men like Abu Mujahed were still of little strategic significance in the summer of 2003. There were others who were much more organized and who targeted their efforts much more carefully. Before the war, defence officials in London and Washington had briefed reporters on the new form of warfare that the conflict in Iraq would demonstrate. The intention was to reinforce domestic support for the war while simultaneously undermining morale in Iraq. One aide to the British secretary of state for defence explained to the author over lunch off Trafalgar Square how ‘networkcentric’ warfare would incapacitate the key internal communications systems of an opposing force, effectively ending its ability to respond to orders, manoeuvre and fight. A key element of networkcentric warfare, he said, involved getting inside the enemy’s ‘decision loop’ or more technically ‘Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time’ (OODA), effectively acting repeatedly before the opponent had had time to react and thus, like a boxer with a winning combination, landing a flurry of blows of such power and rapidity that the total collapse of all opposition was assured. In the event, it was the insurgents who successfully got inside the OODA of the coalition forces and seized the tactical and strategic initiative. They were to hold it for at least three, arguably four, years.

Within only a few weeks of the invasion powerful bombs began to go off. The attacks, largely massive suicide blasts, could have directly targeted the Americans. Instead, they were focused on all other actors whose presence in Iraq could render the occupation of Iraq more legitimate in the eyes of locals and the international community. The massive bomb that destroyed much of the United Nations’ Canal Road headquarters and killed twenty-three, including Sergio Viera de Mello, the UN’s well-liked and competent special envoy to Iraq, on August 19 was just the most spectacular of the series. The target was justified in the eyes of many Iraqis as the UN’s role in administering the sanctions that limited medicine and other essentials all the while keeping Saddam in power (and providing good jobs to hundreds of foreigners) during the 1990s meant that it was widely disliked. One poll in 2003 revealed that 69 per cent of Iraqis thought the UN would hurt rather than help Iraq over the next five years.
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Senior UN staff were blissfully unaware of this, and the bombing effectively removed any major United Nations presence from Iraq and prompted other major multilateral entities like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to leave too.
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A series of attacks on NGOs such as the Red Cross and Save the Children had a similar effect.

Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim – head of SCIRI and the most senior Iraqi political figure to publicly back the occupation – died in a massive blast that sent a very clear message about what was likely to happen to anyone contemplating taking a similar stance. Other attacks hit diplomatic representations – such as those of the Turks and the Jordanians – whose presence might too have been seen to legitimize the occupiers’ presence in the Arab or Muslim worlds. American coalition allies, such as the Italians, were also targeted. The tactic was an old one, familiar to Saddam’s intelligence services. Rather than directly attack an individual, particularly one who might still have some residual ability to cause harm, Saddam’s intelligence services would pick off those around him, threatening, abducting, raping, beating family members and associates, leaving their real target more and more exposed and weaker and weaker until finally little effort was needed to finish him off. Though the background hum of violence might have been the work of men like Abu Mujahed, the string of major ‘headline’ attacks throughout the summer of 2003 was the work of senior and middle-ranking officials from within the security establishment of the former regime. They used both Iraqi and foreign volunteers as suicide bombers to deliver the bombs, an example of the ‘odd couples’ the 9/11 Wars sometimes threw together. The bombs progressively isolated the Americans as all those around them who could lend legitimacy and capacity to their rule fell away.

As autumn approached, a second series of targets began to be developed too: the Shia community and anything that could possibly provide any nascent government with an effective security infrastructure. Shia targets and security targets often coincided as few Sunni policemen had remained at their posts. Those standing for hours in the unprotected recruitment queues were almost all Shia too. When the Red Cross had been attacked, three police stations were hit with it. And when SCIRI leader al-Hakim died so did nearly 100 others, all Shia, in Najaf, the holy city. That those behind the attacks knew exactly what they were doing was evident. Their identity, however, was still a mystery to the coalition.

SIX DEAD MEN

If Afghanistan was a war of far hills and valleys, Iraq was going to be a war of scruffy streets in hard-scrabble towns. Their names would become depressingly familiar over the coming years. One such place was Majjar al-Kabir, a chaos of cement-and-brick tenements, houses and slums by the Tigris 100 miles north of Basra and 250 miles south-east of Baghdad, which was the site of a short and brutal engagement in late June 2003 typical of much of the fighting that was to come.
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As such, it is worth looking at in some detail.

Majjar al-Kabir, home to around 35,000, had been one of the many places in Iraq to liberate itself during the invasion. When American troops had arrived in the town they had found it already under the control of former anti-Saddam fighters. The US units had none too diplomatically sidelined the locals and had then handed over to the British troops moving up from the south. By June, it was a senior soldier, a British Parachute Regiment colonel, who was, despite the presence of the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority and a variety of now fairly disgruntled local actors, the de facto authority in the town.

The British decided that the priority needed to be establishing a ‘secure’ environment and that this aim could not be achieved without disarming the local population. Every rural household in Iraq has at least one small arm and many have heavier weapons too. Majjar al-Kabir had been close to the battle fronts of the Iran–Iraq war, had seen an anti-Saddam insurgency as well as decades of internecine tribal warfare, widespread banditry and smuggling and as a result was heavily armed even by local standards. As the population was not going to hand in their weapons voluntarily, the troops had to search for them. This they did in the same way as they had done in Afghanistan and with similar results. It did not take long for locals to make their anger at the disarmament operations very clear. At the small village of Abu Ala, a collection of breeze-block homesteads ringed with thorn bushes, thin-ribbed sheep and filthy children on the outskirts of Majjar al-Kabir, there were scuffles as locals reacted angrily to British troops entering women’s quarters and using dogs, seen as unclean in many Islamic societies. ‘They came into our houses with no respect,’ Mohammed Ayub, a forty-five-year-old farmer, told the author.
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The incensed villagers organized a demonstration in the main town which degenerated into a small riot ending with British troops, pelted with stones, firing into the air. To calm tempers, a long meeting was held between British officers and local representatives, mainly elders and clerics, and an agreement drawn up. The locals would hand in their heavy weapons within a month, and the British would stop the searches. In the meantime, there would be no British presence in the town.
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The problem lay in differing interpretations of the latter phrase. The British took it to mean
permanent
presence, locals thought it meant
any
presence. When the British sent a patrol through Majjar al-Kabir the day after the agreement it encountered no trouble. When twenty-four hours later another patrol set out it quickly found itself hemmed in by an angry, rock-throwing crowd. The troops fired rubber bullets and then, when they had no more non-lethal ammunition, fired live rounds into the air. The crowd withdrew a little, allowing the British soldiers to reach the town’s marketplace, at which point someone opened fire from a top-floor window of a nearby building. The gunman was shot dead, but two others started shooting from another direction. These too were hit, but soon, in the laconic description of the official report into the events, ‘numerous members of the crowd were firing on the patrol’. For the next hour there was a chaotic street battle as more and more locals joined the fight, and the cornered British troops tried to defend themselves.
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A Chinook helicopter carrying reinforcements was badly shot up as it flew over the town and, with half a dozen of the troops it was carrying seriously wounded, had to return to the British forces’ base at Amarah ‘pissing blood and oil’, in the words of Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Tootal, in the operations room at the main base of the British force outside the town of Amarah, 15 miles away. ‘We looked at each other. We thought the wheels were coming off, that this was our Blackhawk Down,’ Tootal remembered.