The myth of the surge

Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and al-Qaeda, the upscale Baghdad district if Dora is now a ghost town. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush’s much-heralded “surge”, it feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. 

 

Osama, 31, grew up in Dora. He points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the US occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the Americans stripped the Iraqi army of their jobs, the Mahdi Army led by Muqtada al-Sadr took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama’s, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

 

Under siege by Shiite militias and the US military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance and turned to al-Qaeda or other jihadist groups for protection. Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides – and General David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The US has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq, it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the US military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq’s central government. The Americans call the units Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs). The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or “the Awakening”.

 

But the Americans are learning that purchased loyalty can be extremely fickle. Only months ago, members of Sahwa were planting IEDs and ambushing US soldiers, or were snipers and assassins who sang songs in honour of Fallujah and fighting a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists and insurgents. 

 

Osama himself makes no secret of his hatred for the Shiite government and its security forces. As we walk by a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi National Police, which is comprised almost entirely of Shiites, Osama looks at the uniformed officers in disgust. “I want to kill them,” he says, “but the Americans make us work together.”

 

Only after the arrest of Sabrin al-Haqir, an alleged leader of the Mahdi Army, are they released. Three are taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin in an IED attack, and an American captain instructs them to list who did what, where, when and how. Abu Salih, the militia leader, walks by and tells the men to implicate Sabrin in an attack. They dutifully obey, telling the Americans what they want to hear so they will be released.

 

Sahwa may, to the Americans, represent a grand process of reconciliation, but most Shiites believe that they’re merely terrorists. Children chase after the soldiers asking them for candy, but the also say how much they like the Mahdi Army. “The Americans are donkeys,” one boy says. “When they are here we say, ‘I love you’, but when they leave we say, ‘F**k you’.”

 

At Falah’s house, the INPs move quickly, climbing over the wall and breaking the main gate. Bursting into the house, they herd the women and children into the living room while they bind Mohammad’s hands with strips of cloth. Arkan tells the women the brothers are being held for questioning and describes where his base is. 

The next day, Sunni leaders from the area meet with the American soldiers. The two brothers, they claim, are innocent and that the 172 INP had a history of going on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians. The Americans know that the entire raid may have been simply another witch hunt. The INP, US officers concede, use Al-Qaeda as a “scare word” to describe all Sunni suspects.

 

“Yeah, the moral ambiguity of what we do is not lost on me,” Maj. Gottlieb tells me. “We have no way of knowing if those guys did what they say they did.”

 

Captain Arkan, though, has tried to remain non-sectarian. “Most of the officers that came back to the police are former army officers,” he says. “Their loyalty is to their country.” His father is Shiite, but Arkan was forced to leave his home in the majority-Shiite district of Shaab after he was threatened by the Mahdi Army, who demanded that he obtain weapons for them. He had paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but he was denied the job until a friend intervened. “Before the war, it was just one party,” Arkan tells me. “Now we have 100,000 parties.”

The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups – until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, and intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

 

Arkan, in a sense, is a man in the middle. “Sahwa is the same people who used to be attacking us,” he says. “But three-quarters of my own INP are Mahdi Army!” He was even threatened by a Mahdi Army leader when some his own passed on information about his activities against Shiite militias. Yet the Americans are threatening him if he doesn’t pursue the Mahdi Army more aggressively.

 

Arkan knows that the US “surge” has succeeded only in exacerbating the tension among Iraq’s warring parties and that the Iraqi government is nonexistent outside the Green Zone. While US-built walls have sealed off neighborhoods in Baghdad, Shiite militias are battling one another in the south over oil and the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Anbar Province is in the hands of Sunni militias who battle each other, and the north is the scene of a nascent civil war between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. Sunnis and even some Shiites have quit the government, which is unable to provide any services, and the prime minister has circumvented parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that parliament would have opposed.

 

Ultimately, street politics trump any illusory laws passed in the safety of the Green Zone. As Sahwa gains power, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. “The situation won’t get better,” Arkan says softly. Even an officer of the Iraqi National Police is now reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighbourhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And there’s very little prospect of them giving up either.

 

For the full version of tis article, See NOX21.