The 9/11 Wars (49 page)

Yet success and consequent expansion had brought grave structural problems. Since mid 2006 discipline in al-Sadr’s movement had begun to break down. By the summer of 2007 half a dozen different militias were operating as part of his al-Mahdi Army as well as scores of splinter groups.
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Their leaders often fought amongst themselves and many appeared more interested in money or local power than piety. Control of petrol distribution networks generated very significant sums, and racketeering became increasingly common, with Shia communities suffering as much as anyone else. Militia men were taking more than $10,000 per day from the four largest petrol stations in Sadr City alone as well as extorting substantial sums from private minibus services, electricity sub-stations, food and clothing markets, ice factories. Many even collected rent from squatters in houses whose Sunni owners had fled.
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Some groups aligned themselves closely with Iran – receiving large amounts of cash and weaponry (and some training) and increasingly rejecting al-Sadr’s leadership. The evidence for Iranian involvement in payments for attacks on coalition forces was irrefutable, though exactly which element of the sprawling and fragmented Iranian security establishment was responsible remained unclear.
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This naturally damaged the nationalist credentials that had always been important to the Sadrist movement. Also, the social and economic activism that had been an equal part of al-Sadr’s appeal – the street sweeping, the clinics, the distribution of food or water – became increasingly less apparent as the killing continued. With the Americans and the blast walls now between them and their Sunni enemies and with limited room for further expansion after the victories of the previous months, the strengths of the al-Mahdi Army became weaknesses, and the movement found itself overextended both geographically and financially. As their popularity plunged, discipline began to break down further, and, caught in a destructive logic familiar to many other such groups in Iraq and elsewhere, al-Sadr’s fighters found themselves increasingly forced to coerce the local communities which had once voluntarily offered their support.
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‘At the beginning, coming from a Shia family, I respected the al-Mahdi Army, because they stood up to protect us,’ said Amal Kamel, a twenty-year-old economy and administration student at Baghdad University. ‘But then I discovered they were savages and barbarians. They killed women for not wearing the veil or just for a simple reason such as their wearing make-up. They killed Sunnis like the three sons of my neighbours [in the predominantly Shia al-Hurriya neighbourhood] and forced them to flee.’ For Kamel, al-Sadr and his followers had plunged Baghdad into ‘a nightmare coloured by the blood of Iraqis’.
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There was more urgent pressure on the leadership of the movement too. Early in 2007 a change in the local political dynamics had diminished top-level government support for al-Sadr. This had allowed Petraeus to add the upper tier of al-Mahdi Army leaders to the list of Sunni and al-Qaeda insurgents that the increasingly numerous American (and some British) special forces were hunting.
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Through the late spring and summer, hundreds of senior al-Mahdi Army militia leaders were thus killed or captured, both in Baghdad and increasingly in small rural villages where they sought safety. This had two main consequences. One was political: al-Sadr and his key remaining lieutenants were all eminently rational tacticians who had little desire for death or detention, and, with the assassination campaign dramatically increasing and with it the potential personal cost of continuing to use violence against other Iraqis or against coalition forces, alternative strategies became more attractive to them. The second was primarily organizational, though it had major political consequences. As the more senior al-Mahdi Army leaders were killed or arrested, they were replaced by younger, inexperienced militants who were less bothered about retaining popular legitimacy or the ‘name’ of the movement and whose indiscriminate violence exacerbated even further the problem of retaining popular support.
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This too worried the leadership of the movement. So when al-Sadr finally declared a unilateral six-month ceasefire in August 2007, it was to save the lives of his close associates, to bolster the diminishing popular support and, last but not least, to restore some discipline and order among the rank and file by flushing out those who no longer recognized his authority. His decision had an important and immediate effect. In July, 73 per cent of American fatalities and injuries in Baghdad in July had been caused by Shiite fighters. Odierno later estimated that the truce brought an immediate drop of 20 per cent in the level of attacks on US troops in and around the city.
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Sadr himself then left for Iran to further his religious education.

The Shia militias were not, of course, the only Iraqi force to have alienated their own erstwhile supporters. The third major factor behind the success of the Surge was the continuing success of the Sunni Awakening or
Sahwa
that had flowed into the capital from Anbar down the same tribal, kinship and clerical channels as the nascent insurgency had flowed in the other direction four years previously. It was co-opted by Petraeus, who enrolled the armed gangs of Sunnis keen on taking on their former allies among the al-Qaeda-affiliated networks into ‘Concerned Local Citizens’ groups’. These went by various names including the ‘Sons of Iraq’ in Anbar or the ‘Amiriyah Freedom Fighters’ in the eponymous Baghdad neighbourhood and were very effective. By the end of the year, even the tough Sunni neighbourhood of al-Doura was back under government authority. It was the presence of these
Sahwa
fighters that had convinced Mohammed Hussain, the office administrator who had returned from self-imposed exile in Damascus, that he could stay in Baghdad. Very often the splits within the Sunni community ran along tribal lines, especially in the vital belts of mixed agricultural land and urban settlements around Baghdad. When the Zobai tribe, who provided many of the insurgents in the resilient and effective ‘1920 Revolution Brigades’, turned against al-Qaeda affiliated networks, largely from other rival tribes, the Americans needed simply to stand back and supply the Zobai with what they needed to eliminate their rivals. Eventually there were 100,000 or more of these Awakening auxiliaries receiving $300 a month from the American taxpayer and effectively securing their neighbourhoods, with US army and Iraqi security forces’ help, against the religious militants.
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A fourth element in the success of the Surge was the actions of regional powers. The growing chaos in Iraq, the risk of domestic militant ‘blowback’ and international pressure forced the Syrians to at least restrict the flow of militant volunteers and to close down many of the logistic networks that provided support to the insurgents. The actions of Damascus were self-serving, unpredictable and inconsistent but were, in some cases anyway, helpful nonetheless. As noted above, Jordanian intelligence was increasingly effective and motivated following the Amman attacks. The Saudi Arabians had at last recognized that hundreds of their citizens travelling to fight in Iraq was probably not a particularly positive development for their own domestic security, given that most then returned to homes in Jeddah, Medina, Riyadh or wherever, and finally had taken steps to limit their travel.
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Most significantly, support from Iran to various elements among the Shia militias and to their political masters remained carefully calibrated, partly as a result of the complex manoeuvres within the Iranian regime and partly as a result of the general perception that Iran’s interests would not be best served by Iraq collapsing into total chaos. No groups within Iraq thus received the kind of high-power weaponry provided by Tehran to the Lebanese Hezbollah, for example. It is also possible that Iran, after having infiltrated various al-Mahdi Army offshoots and splinter groups, had encouraged al-Sadr’s decision to call a ceasefire.

What Petraeus and Odierno were able to do with admirable acumen, imagination and courage was to exploit the strategic opportunities these trends represented. There had been the well-publicized decision to enrol the Sunni
Sahwa
forces. There were the ‘capture or kill’ operations launched against senior al-Mahdi figures. Then there was the vast secret effort against the remaining Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq and the other radical Islamic groups. By mid 2007, Joint Special Operations Command under the experienced and focused Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal comprised more than 5,000 special forces troops with enormous logistic and technical support. Key innovations over the previous years were paying fruit. Most Iraqis now had mobile phones and many of the leads that were fed to the special forces teams on the ground came from new network analysis, in part developed to track senior al-Qaeda figures in Pakistan, of call patterns. The American National Security Agency had access to the details – if not the content – of every call made in the country.
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Combined with innovative ways of patching together different streams of intelligence, of using local partners and of targeting the middle ranks of an organization rather than just ‘HVTs’ (high value targets), the pressure on the insurgents was immense. The famously ascetic McChrystal, who was said to eat a single meal a day, pushed his forces to maintain a relentless ‘operational tempo’. Joint Special Ops Command had estimated that by the end of 2006 they had killed 2,000 members of the Sunni jihadist groups as well as detaining many more over the previous two years.
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The count was higher in 2007.

Major decisions such as co-opting the Awakening Councils in and around Baghdad or targeting the al-Mahdi Army were clearly significant but so too were small changes. On the advice of David Kilcullen, Petraeus had his troops patrol on foot. Worried about leaving the safety of their ‘up-armoured’ Humvees, the troops were told to stay in pairs, separated by sufficient distances to avoid offering too great a single target. After early teething problems, the system worked well, allowing a much greater contact with local people and giving soldiers a much deeper understanding of their immediate ‘combat environment’. Other changes saw more culturally appropriate procedures for difficult and sensitive tasks such as paying compensation for damage or a civilian death for which US troops were responsible. Instead of handing cash directly to bereaved relatives, American officers began using tribal leaders as intermediaries, for example.
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The broad approach of Petraeus and Odierno meant varied reforms in discrete areas had a powerful cumulative effect. The prisons were one example. Despite the Abu Ghraib scandal, the detention system had remained a problem throughout 2005 and 2006. Petraeus appointed a Marine reservist, General Douglas Stone, to overhaul how insurgents were arrested, held, interrogated and released.

Stone’s starting point was that prisons allowed extremists immediate access to, and control over, large captive populations and thus opportunities for recruitment and radicalization. The same strategies that were applied in the suburbs of Baghdad thus needed to be applied in Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and in the other detention facilities that the US military ran. A counter-insurgency campaign was needed within the prisons themselves, Stone decided.
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One of Stone’s first acts was to establish exactly who the 24,000 detainees in the American military prison system in Iraq actually were. Comprehensive interviews found that prisoners had an average age of twenty-nine, making them exactly as old as British-based violent extremists were and providing further evidence that it was not simply impressionable teenagers who were a problem. Less than 1 per cent were ‘third country nationals’ from outside Iraq, not even a tenth could be considered ‘al-Qaeda-affiliated’, even fewer were from the al-Mahdi Army, more than two-thirds were illiterate and 78 per cent claimed that their involvement with violence against the government or American or other foreign troops had been motivated by the prospect of financial gain. The latter statistic was probably vastly exaggerated by detainees giving interviewers the answer that they felt was most acceptable to their questioners, but in general the men in the prison camps largely seemed to be Kilcullen’s ‘accidental guerrillas’. The factors that had led them into violence, said Stone, were ‘a sense of humiliation or lack of respect, the view their families might have of them, a sense of worthlessness, sexual frustration as well as the guidance offered by community, tribal and religious leaders’. Radical Islamic ideologies, as Pan-Arabism and revolutionary Socialism once had done, offered a sense of empowerment, a legitimacy, fellowship, respect, cash employment, upward social mobility, support for families and, in some cases, ‘the promise of the ultimate fulfilment of martyrdom’, he explained.
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Stone’s solution was a comprehensive programme involving the identification and segregation of extremists within prisons, the creation of teams of psychiatrists and psychologists to work with inmates as well as visiting clerics who organized religious discussion sessions in which detainees would be instructed in the basics of local more moderate and tolerant traditional strands of Islam. The latter started not with the relatively complex discussions about when jihad might or might not be justified but with the basics of prayer, ablutions and the fundamental tenets of belief. Visits from the International Confederation of the Red Cross were welcomed, a system of basic literacy classes introduced, family visits allowed, brick factories set up in which inmates could work to earn small amounts of money. On release, Iraqi judges sought pledges of good behaviour from detainees. In the first eight months of the programme, from June 2007 to February 2008, 7,000 men were released, of whom only five returned to jail. The only problematic prisoners were hardcore committed al-Qaeda-affiliated militants who, Stone said, feared just two things: that their families might be harassed or that they might be transferred to an Iraqi-run prison. This apparently small exception was later to be significant.