“The Sunni and the Shia are like the Tigris and the Euphrates”

A slim, slightly weathered-looking man with flecks of gray in his hair, Colonel Ehssan—leader of the local Sons of Iraq group—sat behind his desk, looking unhappy. We had driven from COP Courage this morning to his “office”—a first floor room in an old building set far back from the main road on a narrow dirt strip, only a few miles from the American base. The room, and the building, is typically Iraqi, meaning typically shabby, with sand-caked windows, peeling yellow paint on the walls, and a few long couches turned toward the colonel’s desk. A space heater sits in the middle of the room, providing whatever heat it can muster.

With Charlie company’s Stryker vehicles idling out in the courtyard, where I had accidentally kicked a rusted AK-47 clip laying in the dirt on the way in, Captain Helberg and his interpreter settle in for their meeting with the colonel. On the surface, things really aren’t all that bad for Ehssan: his 250 SOIs are all under contract, meaning the American military pays them each $300 a month to man checkpoints in their area and his men have all been entered into the HYDE system, which American forces use to take their biometric information and enter them into a central database. If any prospective SOI member is already in the system, that means that they’d been fingerprinted and photographed doing something that made the Americans unhappy at some point in the past, making them ineligible. On top of this, he has the backing of the local sheiks, and up to this point has had little interference from the Iraqi Police or Army. Still, there’s the local bogeyman, the Iraqi Army’s Muthana brigade, to contend with. The colonel assures Helberg that he has no problem with the Iraqi army as an institution, just with the Muthana brigade, which he calls “sectarian.” He’s concerned that the IA recently shot at one of his checkpoints stationed on a bridge, but Helberg thinks that the only reason they were shot at is because they weren’t wearing the tan SOI uniforms they had recently been issued, and they were camped out on a bridge, raising the IA’s suspicions. The uniform issue is one that I had seen come up several times before, especially as the SOIs go outside the bounds of their contract and become more “expeditionary” as one officer charitably put it to me, meaning that some of them are heading out on patrols or are trying to hunt down insurgents, when they’re supposed to be nothing more than a stationary guard outfit.

It’s a perfect example of how the American military is, in a very real way, caught between three distinct groups of armed men trying to assert their place in the new Iraq. It’s difficult to try and appease, strengthen and support the SOI, the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi Army when each group has its own ideas about how things should be run, and rarely consults with one another as to their plans—driven as they are by different leadership groups, agendas and tribal and sectarian interests. As Charlie company’s First Sergeant Kenny Clayborne would tell me later, if Muthana comes in to the area, “then there’s no need for the SOI guys to man the checkpoints any longer, and they’ll be out of jobs. Right now the SOI guys have some level of control of what is going on in their area, who comes in and out,” and understandably, they like this control, and being able to keep the peace.

Part of the problem is that the Iraqi government and its security forces have been absent from the area for so long. The local Sunnis don’t know what to expect when the government—a Shia-controlled government to boot—comes back. Clayborne tells me that when he served in Kirkuk in 2005, American forces were operating with Iraqi security forces “in ways that they haven’t even begun to do here.” He adds that “a lot of other places in Iraq are a lot further down the road in their partnership with Iraqi security forces. I never expected that I’d be in an area where I was operating pretty much independently of Iraqi security forces.”

But that is changing, albeit slowly. The local police outpost boasts 455 police officers, led by Colonel Hamed, who has proclaimed his willingness to work with both the SOI and the Iraqi Army. But there are still sectarian intrigues. During one meeting I sat in on between Helberg and Col. Hamed, the IP chief let slip that the head of the Muthana brigade, General Nasser, was planning to meet with the local Shia sheiks of the al Tamimi tribe. No Sunnis had been invited. Helberg hadn’t heard anything about this meeting before this, and was obviously unhappy that the delicate balance he was working so hard to maintain might be undercut by backroom maneuverings of the Iraq Army.   

But here with Col. Ehssan, Helberg is busy explaining that he can’t control what the Iraqi government chooses to do with its army, and that Muthana is, after all, the official security force of the Iraqi government. While Helberg and Ehssan are squaring off over the issue, a new wrinkle presents itself: a group of robed Sunni sheiks suddenly begins to file into the room, causing Helberg to crack a pained smile and mutter, “here we go…”

But the colonel is hardly done, claiming that Muthana will either arrest or kill all the young men in the area, and that with the Army will come the feared Shia group Jaish al Mahdi. Finishing with a cigarette-waiving flourish, the colonel claims that he will be among the first arrested. The sheiks eagerly join in, threatening to take their tribes and move out of the area if the Muthana brigade comes in. One, who says he is speaking on behalf of all his fellow sheiks, tells Cpt. Helberg that if the Americans start working with the Muthana brigade, the Sunni sheiks won’t work with the Americans any more. “The Iraqi government is against the sheiks,” he proclaims.

Things have hit an impasse, but one of the sheiks gives Helberg the opening he needs to regain control of the situation: he asks what the Captain thinks of the sheiks. Helberg takes a few seconds, collects his thoughts, and starts by telling them that he knows they’re all honorable men, and that they’re respected by the people. He respects them. They’re leaders. The sheiks like this, and nod. But then comes the hammer: “You tell me that you want to work for a better Iraq, but your actions show me otherwise.” A charge goes through the room, and you can feel the sheiks bristle. He brings up the sheik meeting he had called the day before, where only the Shia sheiks showed up. The Sunnis plead ignorance, claiming that they figured all the Shia were at the Muthana ceremony, so they didn’t bother going. Helberg turns this back on them, telling them that the Shia could have been at the ceremony, but felt that the meeting—and working together with the Sunnis—was more important. It’s a crushing blow. A few of the sheiks try turning the tables, saying that the Shia are stabbing them in the back by working with the Muthana brigade. One sheik rolls out an old Iraqi saying, “The Sunni and the Shia are like the Tigris and the Euphrates,” explaining that he doesn’t want to dump sewage in the rivers, but the Iranians, who back the Shia government in Iraq, are the sewage.

In the end, Helberg manages to wring promises out of the Sunni sheiks to work with their Shia counterparts, but it’s hard to be convinced that these words will be followed up by much effort at reconciliation. Walking back out to the Stryker vehicles for the trip back to Courage, I ask Helberg if he thinks the sheiks are serious about moving. “Some will move,” he says, shrugging. “I believe that. Some will take off their [SOI] uniforms and remove the happy faces and fight back, and some will go to ground and try to exist like they’ve done for years.” And without a strong, non-sectarian national government in Baghdad to stop this from happening, Helberg’s prediction is probably pretty close to being right on the money.

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[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 02/26/2008 News and Personal dispatches from the front lines.
http://thunderrun.blogspot.com/2008/02/from-front-02262008.html