The LTC and the Sheik
In a dim, chilly tent, lit by a single fluorescent tube and the gray winter light creeping in through the flap, Lieutenant Colonel Mario Diaz sits across the table from sheik Hussein al-Tamimi, an influential Shia sheik in the rural region northwest of Baghdad, sipping Pepsi and trading pleasantries.
Diaz made the drive to combat outpost Courage for this meeting from his headquarters at Camp Liberty, which is part of the staggeringly vast Baghdad airport military complex southeast of here. The string of American camps that abut the airport house a number of American bases kept running by an army of civilian contractors who are protected by Ugandan guards, all of whom live in a world carved into shape by rows of high concrete T-walls that separate the complex into discrete cells of activity. The place is so cut off from the country that surrounds it that it could be anywhere—Kosovo, Korea, Afghanistan, or Alaska—but out here, at Courage, there’s no such separation. Plopped down in a farm field and ringed simply by a row of T-walls no more than two city blocks in size, Courage is unmistakably part of today’s Iraq.
Diaz and Sheik Hussein are still feeling each other out, performing the slow dance that Arab culture prescribes strongmen perform with one another, complimenting, then pushing, declaring friendship, then starting all over again. “I purposefully have met with very few people in the first couple weeks,” Diaz tells him, “because I first want to meet with important people.” The sheik, the implication goes, is one of these important people. It’s a nice gambit in this year-old counter-insurgency campaign that places emphasis on building relationships at the local level, in hopes that each new brick will build a strong enough wall to keep law-abiding Iraqis on one side, and insurgents, terrorists and foreign fighters on the other.
Diaz is the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion “Gimlets” of the 21st Infantry, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. At the time of this meeting in late January, the 2nd SBCT had only been in country for a little over a month, and was still going through the arduous process of getting to know the local power players – something that takes many meetings, gallons of tooth-achingly sweet chai tea, and lots of expressions of mutual trust, admiration and respect.
Sheik Hussein, involved in the SOI movement, as all sheiks are, informed Diaz that some SOI checkpoints had recently been fired on by people he says were Shia fighters, part of a rival “awakening” movement that had been infiltrated by al Qaeda, and that his people were investigating the incident and would turn over the names of suspects soon. Unconfirmed rumors to be sure, but I heard enough rumblings among some officers that the Sunni al Qaeda had started to team up with elements of the Shia Madhi militia, a development that has the potential to sow chaos in the mixed region, if realized.
Comments