The Longest War (48 page)

Abdul Sattar announced to the crowd of some fifty sheikhs, “The coalition forces are friendly forces, not occupying forces!” Some of the tribal leaders seemed nervous about this idea but within six months many of them were also allied with the United States. This was quite a surprising development, as the insurgency then gripping Iraq was largely led by Sunni groups, and all the more so because the U.S. Marines, which had bases around Anbar, had assessed in a secret intelligence report just three weeks earlier that al-Qaeda
effectively ruled
the province.

But the Anbar Awakening sheikhs would soon change that. Jensen, who had learned Arabic in Syria and Morocco and was interpreting the exchanges between Colonel MacFarland and the Awakening tribal leaders, collared the American commander during a break in their first meeting with the sheikhs, saying, “I think
this is awesome
.” MacFarland enthused, “I love it.” Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the leader of the Awakening, would later be rewarded with a meeting with President Bush during one of his surprise visits to Iraq, but al-Qaeda still managed to kill him on September 13, 2007. However, killing the leader of the Anbar Awakening did not do anything to halt the spread of the tribal rebellion against Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

The American-Sunni tribal alliance would help to bring a measure of stability to Iraq. AQI, which more than any other group had brought the country to the brink of complete collapse, was by 2008 on life support. It was something of an assisted suicide because AQI had forced on the Sunni population Taliban-style strictures, which had alienated its natural allies. And American commanders in Iraq followed Napoleon’s excellent advice, “
Never interrupt
your enemy when he is making a mistake.” General George W. Casey, the ground commander in Iraq, had ordered Colonel MacFarland in 2006 not to take Ramadi in
an aggressive assault
, as the United States had done in neighboring Fallujah two years earlier.

At the same time that he was allying with the Anbar sheikhs, MacFarland started putting small American combat outposts into hot spots in Ramadi to
live side by side
with the population to protect them, a tactic that had worked the previous year in the anarchic city of Tal Afar in northern Iraq for Colonel H. R. McMaster, who is credited, among others, with developing the “clear, hold, and build” strategy that was to become a commonplace of American counterinsurgency operations. In Tal Afar, McMaster had established
twenty-nine small outposts
in the city to separate the Sunnis and Shia then waging a ghastly war in which headless corpses would be left to rot on the streets.

This was the exact opposite of the U.S. strategy of the time, which was to hand over ever more control to the Iraqi army and police and withdraw the bulk of American soldiers to massive (misnamed) “Forward Operating Bases,” known as FOBs. Camp Victory, the main U.S. base in Baghdad, housed an astonishing
fifty thousand soldiers
. This strategy gave birth to the wonderful neologism
fobbits
to describe the FOB dwellers, who enjoyed Starbucks-style coffee, giant flat-screen TVs, PXs that channeled Walmart and Target, and football-field-sized DFACs (dining facilities) groaning with enough food to feed the populations of small African countries. From the FOBs out would
sally armored Humvee patrols, which had
little or no understanding
of the country they were supposedly pacifying.

By contrast, the on-the-ground intelligence provided by Sunni tribesmen to American forces living “among the population” in Ramadi during the winter of 2006 meant that more and more IED caches were being found, as well as the hiding places of al-Qaeda cells in Anbar’s western deserts. The tribes also began providing recruits for the police, who now showed up for work in the thousands. As neighborhoods became safer, MacFarland poured Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP) funds into projects such as building schools, and a virtuous circle of rising security brought more jobs and reconstruction to Ramadi. By the summer of 2008 the city looked just like any other scrappy town in the Middle East with small shops open for business along its main roads. By then the surrounding Anbar province was also one of the safest regions in the country.

At the height of its power, on February 22, 2006, AQI bombed the Golden Mosque at Samarra, one of the most important pilgrimage sites for the Shia, turning the already nasty Iraqi sectarian conflict into a full-blown civil war. In addition, AQI controlled a good chunk of the exurban belts around Baghdad, the “Triangle of Death” to the south of the capital, and many of the towns north of it, up the Tigris River to the Syrian border. And in a country with an unemployment rate of something like 50 percent, AQI was paying its foot soldiers salaries and raking in money from various oil-smuggling scams, kidnapping rings, extortion schemes, and overseas donations.

In late April 2006, as AQI appeared to be unstoppable, the group’s shadowy leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, showed the world
his face for the first time
in a video posted to jihadist websites. Zarqawi was taped pontificating to a group of hooded acolytes and shooting off a machine gun in the desert, but within a couple of months he was dead.

The breakthrough
that nailed Zarqawi was the patient (noncoercive) interrogation of a Sunni insurgent who eventually told his American interrogators that the best way to find the al-Qaeda leader was by tracking his “spiritual advisor,” a man who would change cars several times before meeting with Zarqawi and who would invariably use a blue car just before the meeting took place. That information was enough to track Zarqawi to a remote desert compound, where he was killed with two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped from an F-16 on June 7, 2006.

In much of Shia Iraq there was celebratory gunfire, feasting, and cheers at the news of Zarqawi’s death. And privately Osama bin Laden might not have mourned Zarqawi’s death as excessively as he would publicly profess when he said on an audiotape released two weeks later, “The Muslim nation was
shocked by the death
of its courageous knight, the lion of jihad.” The thuggish Jordanian had proved difficult to control and had even managed the neat trick of tarnishing the al-Qaeda brand with his excessive violence.

Despite Zarqawi’s death, the violence in Iraq continued to spiral upward throughout the remainder of 2006,
reaching a peak around the New Year of 2007
. The civil war that Zarqawi had helped to precipitate was so much larger than any one man. Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), who had played a critical role in eliciting the information from the detainee that had led to locating Zarqawi, recalls, “It was obvious that just because Zarqawi was killed that Sunnis weren’t going to drop their arms and go, ‘
OK, you beat us
.’ And we could have killed every foreigner in Iraq and it wouldn’t have solved the insurgency.”

As its stock fell precipitously with Iraq’s Sunni population, al-Qaeda recognized belatedly that it needed to put a more Iraqi face on the group. Zarqawi was himself, of course, a Jordanian, and four months after his death AQI
changed its name
to the Islamic State of Iraq and appointed an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid al-Baghdadi, to be its nominal boss. But with the death of Zarqawi, AQI no longer had a charismatic leader.

A cache of al-Qaeda documents discovered in the fall of 2007 by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar provided the best account of what was then going on inside al-Qaeda’s operation. One of the Sinjar documents was an
unsigned oath of allegiance
to the group that was meant to be signed by tribal leaders in Diyala province; it well illustrated AQI’s tone-deaf approach to local politics. The leaders had to swear to reject tribal rules, not something that any self-respecting Sunni tribal leader could possibly agree to.

By early 2008 the
foreign-fighter flow
into Iraq had declined
from around 120 a month
to around forty-five a month, which was a key to peace, since roughly half of these foreign fighters were volunteers for suicide missions. And a year later the foreign-fighter flow had slowed to a dribble of only five or six a month. As a result AQI defaulted to increasingly using women as suicide attackers. Needless to say, this
did little for its poor image
in Iraq.

AQI was also demoralized; in November 2007 American soldiers raided a house in northern Iraq and found the diary of an al-Qaeda leader in the area,
a man who called himself Abu Tariq, “the emir of al-Layin and al Mashadah sectors.” The diary lamented that his force, which had once been six hundred strong, was down to twenty men. Abu Tariq blamed local Sunni tribes for “
changing course
” and bringing about his group’s present travails. Similarly, a letter found by the U.S. military around the same time and written by an unnamed emir of AQI referred to the situation in Anbar province in western Iraq as being “an exceptional crisis.” The letter also cited the difficulties foreign fighters eager to participate in suicide operations were having, forced to wait for months in the western desert regions of Iraq with nothing to do because the organization was
under such pressure
.

By early 2008, Al-Qaeda in Iraq was
a wounded organization
. U.S. military officials said that by then they had killed 2,400 suspected members of AQI and captured 8,800, whittling the group’s strength down to 3,500. The situation became so grave for AQI that in October 2007, bin Laden accused his Iraqi affiliate of fanaticism and exhorted the Sunni insurgent groups to unite. “
Beware of division
.… The Muslim world is waiting for you to gather under one banner,” he said.

Al-Qaeda’s untrammeled violence and imposition of Taliban ideology on the Sunni population provoked a countrywide Sunni backlash against AQI that took the form of the “Awakening” militias. Many of those militias were put on Uncle Sam’s payroll in a program known as the “Sons of Iraq.” The combination of the Sunni militias’ on-the-ground intelligence about their onetime AQI allies and American firepower proved devastating to al-Qaeda’s Iraqi franchise. And so, between 2006 and 2008, AQI shrank from an insurgent organization that controlled territory
larger than the size of New England
to a rump terrorist group that would still remain a spoiler of Iraq’s fragile peace, but it was never likely to regain its iron grip on much of Sunni Iraq.

The tribal revolt that spread from Anbar to many other provinces in Iraq was the most important development in the country since the 2003 invasion. In the summer of 2007, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, the fast-talking, erudite Australian anthropologist and infantry officer who was the senior counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, noted in a lengthy post on
Small Wars Journal
, the website that served as the internal bulletin board for the counterinsurgency community, that
85 percent
of Iraqis claim some tribal affiliation. In his post, Kilcullen concluded that “the tribal revolt is not some remote riot on a reservation: it’s a major social movement that could significantly influence most Iraqis where they live.”

Al-Qaeda not only drove the Sunni tribes into a quite unexpected alliance with the Americans; around the same time the terrorist organization made another error that was to anger its allies in other Sunni insurgent groups, such as the 1920s Brigade and Islamic Army of Iraq, by killing some of their leaders. This was a serious mistake because members of those groups also ended up on the American payroll in the Sons of Iraq program, which by the spring of 2009 had grown to around
100,000 men
. Many of those men used to be shooting at Americans; now they were shooting at al-Qaeda. This was in itself a surge of spectacular proportions—when 100,000 men who used to be shooting at you start shooting at your enemies it effectively adds 200,000 to your overall numbers.

In the spring of 2006, following al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Golden Mosque shrine at Samarra, it was obvious to senior Bush administration officials that Iraq was falling apart. National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley recalls that he kept a chart that showed incidents of violence per week, and this chart “
since 2003
, just goes up. And I say to my people, every time when they say, ‘Well, we’re making progress,’ in’04, ’05, ’06, and I would always say, ‘When I see this violence chart start to head down, I’ll believe we’re making progress.’”

The Samarra bombing was the final straw for the Shia, who had
generally not engaged in sectarian conflict
despite repeated provocations by al-Qaeda and other Sunni terrorist groups. This policy was largely the result of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, their most important spiritual leader, urging restraint on his flock. Hadley recalls: “The patience of the Shia finally gave out. Sistani had been holding them back from retaliating. But after the Samarra bombing, they lose confidence in the Iraqi forces. And Shia death squads start getting active.”

By the early summer, Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security advisor who had spent two years living in Iraq and who had the respect of the president, was able to communicate to him
her mounting concern
about the rising level of violence. Hadley recalls the conversation: “The president says, ‘How are your friends in Baghdad?’ She says, ‘They’re terrified, Mr. President. They’re more terrified than they’ve ever been. It’s impossible to live in that city.’ Well, this is from somebody the president knows, who knows Iraq, as much as any American can, has personal friends in Baghdad, and is committed to success. And she’s telling him, ‘Mr. President, this is a whole new game. And everybody’s terrified.’ That gets your attention.”

In the face of the accelerating civil war, O’Sullivan and her deputy, Brett McGurk, concluded that lowering the American profile in Iraq was going to lose the war and so they started secretly exploring a “surge” strategy that would instead send more troops to Iraq. They were both so convinced that this was the right approach that they privately dubbed themselves the “
surgios
.”