War, the military, COIN and stuff

The Grunts and the Press

A handful of soldiers stood around a bonfire at Joint Security Station Tarmiya, feeding the flames by tossing empty cardboard boxes from that day’s mail delivery into the pit. The former youth sports complex that serves as the home base for the 180 men of C company has an open courtyard in the middle where a fire pit has been set up, and it has become the place where soldiers gather in the evenings to get out of the confining space of the building to smoke, listen to music, and more often than not, stare into the flames in silence.

In the middle of this daily routine one night this past February, the familiar crack of automatic gunfire broke the relative stillness just outside the walls of the base, causing a few soldiers to turn down the country music they had been listening to. Another pop went off, then nothing more. The silhouettes of the guards up on the roof could be seen darting back and forth looking for the source of the gunfire, but as so often happens, the shooter had melted away into the night.

At the time, I had been in the middle of a conversation with a soldier who, when I told him I was a reporter, said, “Man, you must be making a lot of money to be here.”

If a soldier had only said this to me once, I probably would have forgotten it; twice, a coincidence. But at least a half dozen times over the four weeks I spent with infantry units in Iraq, soldiers suggested I must be getting paid extra to be there. In a way, this disconnect between perception and reality is funny, because journalists often joke about how little money we make. When I would tell the soldiers that I was making just as much by coming to Iraq as I would sitting in my office in New York, they invariably asked why I had come. The grunts didn’t seem as worked up about the lack of coverage back home of the war, which in a way makes sense: they’re living it. But in writing this series, I’ve received enough e-mails from mothers, fathers, and wives of soldiers deployed in Iraq who told me how hard it is to get any news out of Iraq these days.

Five years into the war, news organizations have understandably cut back a bit, given the immense cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau. From life insurance for reporters to guards, armored cars (which not all bureaus have), and fortified houses outside of the Green Zone, reporting from Iraq is an incredibly expensive proposition.

But embedding with infantry units is free. Flights to Kuwait, where the Army public affairs team picks you up and puts you on a military aircraft to Iraq, and insurance still cost, but once you’re embedded, your expenses end. And that’s why I can’t understand why every major news organization doesn’t have one reporter embedded with a combat unit at all times. They won’t always be able to file stories, but they can contribute a steady stream of material about the fight—and the ground-level diplomacy—being waged by young American captains, lieutenants, and sergeants. The fact that I spent four weeks in Iraq and only ran into one stringer working for an American newspaper is testament to how few reporters are out in the field. Of course, there are reporters in Iraq, and my time bouncing between combat outposts constitutes an official census; but it is significant that in every unit I was with, I was the first reporter they had seen. It was the same story back in 2006, with I embedded with the 2nd Marine Division in Fallujah....

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The Enemy of My Enemy

Captain Christopher Loftis, commanding officer of C company, 2/25 in Tarmiya, was trying to feel out a group of Iraqi men who hoped to join the Sons of Iraq movement. The men were standing around a checkpoint that flew the yellow flag of the Anbar Awakening movement at an intersection a few miles outside of town, and he was asking them how things were going.

The response was the same each time: “more weapons” to fight the insurgents. Loftis would smile, shake the man’s hand, and move on. It was the usual request, always denied, but given that these men weren’t even under contract to provide security, the plea was a little premature. The captain had come out to this checkpoint in front of a former Saddam-era uranium processing plant not just to meet these men, but the men who organized them, along with about six hundred others who wanted a contract with the American Army to provide security.

The Sons of Iraq program, begun in the spring of 2007 and funded by U.S. taxpayers to the tune thus far of $123 million and counting, is basically a private militia—80,000 strong at this point—hired by the American military to help fight the insurgency. Not surprisingly, the success of the SOI has produced conflict with the Iraqi government. At a meeting the day before with the local Iraqi police commander, the police complained that two people had been kidnapped and released by an “illegal checkpoint” manned by the SOI the night before, and that some of the men at these new checkpoints were wearing masks. The police commander wanted to make some arrests, which brought the American civil affairs officer assigned to Tarmiya, Major Guidry, to the edge of his seat. “Just get their names and give them to us,” Guidry warned. “We don’t want to put you in a position where you’re in conflict with Abna al-Iraq [Arabic for Sons of Iraq],” The police colonel frowned, but agreed not to do anything drastic.

This is how easily things can turn in Iraq. If the police commander had rolled up on the checkpoint and tried to arrest the men staffing it, the situation could easily devolve into a gun battle between Iraqi government forces and the irregular forces being paid by, and deriving their legitimacy from, the Americans. It’s not a situation that anyone, for obvious reasons, wants. For starters, it would spotlight the fact that the American military is paying citizens to do the work that the Iraqi government security forces have been unable to do, therefore calling into question the effectiveness of the government itself. Also, in Iraq’s tribal society, such a confrontation would likely start a bloody cycle of revenge with U.S. forces caught in the middle.

In a piece about the increasing use military contractors by the American military, Michael Walzer wrote recently in The New Republic that:

the state is constituted by its monopoly on the use of force…This is what states are for; this is what they have to do before anything else—shut down the private wars, disarm the private armies, lock up the warlords. It is a very dangerous business to loosen the state’s grip on the use of violence…

But this loosening of the state’s grip on the monopoly of violence is the only way that the American military has found to pull Iraq back from the unrestrained chaos of 2007, which set records for American and Iraqi deaths. And for now it’s working, at least when it comes to keeping the American death toll lower than it had been for much of the past several years.

None of this is ever far from the minds of American commanders, and as Captain Loftis walked up to the gates of the factory he told me that, just a week earlier, “these guys were not on the radar screen. It actually kinda surprised us when we saw the first new checkpoint about a week ago and we were like, ‘Who are these guys?’”

Loftis continued, "We’re very cautious when we see Sons of Iraq groups, not so much because we’re worried that they’re doing some kind of nefarious activity, but it’s more of, we want to make sure they’re part of the security solution. Let’s make sure they’re part of the security solution, let’s embrace them and see who they are. We can’t be naïve about it, though. Some of these guys might be exactly the people we were fighting five or six months ago, maybe last week before they threw up the checkpoint. It could be a cover, but this is all about them making legitimate progress to secure their area....."

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

The Road to Tarmiya

Even with all of it’s high-tech communications and optics equipment, there are times when riding in a Stryker vehicle is like sitting in a sensory deprivation tank.

Unless you’re the vehicle commander up front or one of the two rear gunners, who stand partially exposed out of the top of the vehicle, your only chance to see what the world outside looks like is if you’re lucky enough to be positioned to see the .50 caliber machine gunner’s video screen, which he rotates back and forth to either side of the road, scanning for IEDs.

Ensconced inside this metal bubble is how I rode from combat outpost Courage to combat outpost IBA, and then from camp Taji north of Baghdad to Joint Security Station Tarmiya, the third company-sized combat outpost I would visit in Iraq.

After spending almost a week at IBA, I accompanied a convoy back to the big base—Camp Liberty—where the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team is based. Accommodations at Liberty are luxurious compared to life at the combat outposts. Part of the sprawling Victory-Liberty-Baghdad Airport megabase, Liberty features a massive PX where you can buy everything from DVDs to cases of non-alcoholic beer to flat-screen TVs. The dining facility, looks like an airplane hanger full of food stations staffed, as is everything, by foreign contractors and guarded by Ugandan security contractors. The dining facility offers a massive array of options, from burgers to various ethnic foods, and comes with a long salad bar and ice cream station. If that isn’t to your liking, across the road there are several trailers with fast food outlets like Pizza Hut and Burger King for that greasy taste of home.

All this only adds to the resentment that infantry soldiers have for “Fobbits”—slang for the soldiers who never leave the big, Forward Operating Bases (FOB). It’s telling that while sitting in the mess tent one night at outpost IBA, several soldiers were comparing how much weight they’ve lost since getting to Iraq, while at Liberty, I once heard two soldiers talking about how much weight they’ve put on since their deployment.

But it’s not like the soldiers out at the combat outposts never get to enjoy the relative comforts of the big bases. The infantry companies stationed at Courage and IBA send platoons back to Liberty on a regular basis for a day or two of refitting, sleeping, haircuts, and gorging on greasy food.

This rotation back to the big bases was how I got out to JSS Tarmiya, about thirty kilometers north of Baghdad. From Liberty, I caught a short helicopter ride north to Camp Taji, where I spent a night near an artillery battery (the 2nd Battalion, 11th Field Artillery Regiment, 2nd SBCT, 25th Infantry Division) firing illumination flares that rattled the walls of my room.

The next morning I was placed in the hands of 1st Lieutenant Matt Ives, who was taking his platoon from Taji back to Tarmiya—home of the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. There was a bit of excitement before I left Taji however. While waiting to leave the dining area one afternoon, word started trickling back that someone had—just minutes before—lobbed two rockets at the base, and they landed about fifty meters away from the DFAC near the PX. One round hit the trailer containing the beauty salon, leaving a hole in the side of the structure, while the other landed nearby. One soldier got a few scrapes, but other than that, no one was seriously wounded. It was another example of how, even at the big bases, the war is never far....

Read the rest of this story at the Columbia Journalism Review

The End of the Weapons Cache

We parked the Strykers next to a deep, wide canal, whose bright blue water rushed under a narrow bridge blocked by two concrete traffic barriers. Lieutenant Max Pappas went through the plan again: we would cross the bridge on foot, run a few hundred meters along a dirt road bordering a reed line, plunge through the canal at a narrow point and converge on the farmhouse where we had found the weapons cache the day before.

There had been reports that a few military-age males had been seen at the house after 1st platoon arrested the young man suspected of planting the weapons cache the day before, and Captain Higgins wanted to see if he could catch anyone poking around the house.

Once everyone had jumped over the yard-high concrete barriers on the bridge and started running down the narrow dirt road, I realized how weighed down American soldiers are by their heavy ballistic vests, M-4 rifles, extra ammunition clips, first aid pouches, and the other burdens of an infantryman at war. This is to say nothing of the soldiers carrying M-249 SAW rifles, which clock in at about fifteen pounds each, or the platoon’s radio officer, who lugs around cumbersome communications equipment. I moved much more lightly—my ballistic vest was smaller, and the only things I carried were a notebook, some pens, a voice recorder, a camera, and a few Power Bars I shoved in my pocket in case we found ourselves out all day.

As we huffed down the road, a few of the guys carrying heavier loads started to lag behind, but it didn’t take long for others to drop back and take up some of their load, making sure everyone kept the tight formation. We reached the spot in the reed line where the lieutenant wanted to cross, and the platoon plunged, single file, into the frigid, knee-deep water, scrambling across the canal and up the few feet of muddy bank on the far side. After the first few soldiers made it across, the splashing of the water made the canal banks even more slick, and footing became difficult. I was set to go across somewhere in the middle of the pack, and as the lone civilian, I was concentrating on not slowing up the process. I jumped in, waded across, and on the other side found that a soldier was struggling on the bank. I grabbed the bottom of his ballistic vest and pushed up, just as the soldier behind me began pushing me up in front of him, and suddenly, I was out of the reeds and standing, exposed, on a dirt road directly next to the farmhouse.

“Go, go!” Sergeant Flick bellowed as a squad with a SAW flopped down in the muddy bank of the canal to cover the rest of the platoon’s dash up to the house. I briefly wondered if I should run to the house, too, or hang back, but since I found myself running, figured that my legs had made the decision for me....   

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

Part II: The Suicide Bomber

Read Part I here.

I tried to squeeze into the Stryker to head to the site of the suicide bombing, but Captain Higgins needed the space for troops, not reporters, so I stayed to watch the EOD team pack the weapons cache with thirty pounds of C4 explosive and blow it in an impressive blast. At the same time, Lt. Pappas took the suspect to a larger forward operating base for processing and interrogation.

Leaving the farmhouse with Cpt. Higgins and the explosives team to investigate the suicide bomb site, we stopped at the IED that we had identified earlier—just long enough for the EOD team to frantically tell us that were sitting on top of an IED, and refuse to go any further. We moved on while they stayed behind to blow it.

By the time we made it to the scene of the suicide bombing, the force of the blast was evident. Twisted cars were still smoldering on the side of the road, walls of a makeshift guardhouse had been knocked down, and there was a blast pit ten feet by twelve feet, six feet deep. The bomb had killed one of the Sons of Iraq as well as the bomber, with fourteen others wounded, including eight that the Americans had helicoptered out for treatment. All that was left of the bomber were a few fingertips and the front halves of his feet, attached to blackish red slop that represented what once the bombers’ legs. When I started to photograph the remains, an Iraqi moved in to the frame to pose with them, then led me over to another pile of reddish black muck. He would point to it, then his stomach, and I assumed he was telling me that this was some part of the bomber’s intestines.

Abu Zakaria, the man whose house was hit, leads a group of 395 Sons of Iraq volunteers in the area, and apparently got the job because his brother is a big political player. Still, Higgins and the other officers at IBA sang his praises, telling me he ran a tight ship, and kept his men alert and well-disciplined. A short, solidly built thirty-six year-old with a neatly trimmed beard, Zakaria was clutching a small club behind his back when I saw him, and he looked shaken, but angry. He and Higgins walked through the crumbled bricks and the still-smoking debris, with Zarakia assuring Higgins that he was committed to staying put, and Higgins offering suggestions for securing his property.

One young Sons of Iraq member with cuts on his arms and face told me that he had seen the whole thing. A “foreigner” with a “pale face and a long beard” pulled around the corner in his car and stopped directly in front of the checkpoint in front of Zakaria’s house. Waiting to be checked, the driver pulled out a grenade and tossed it under a truck in front of him that was carrying large 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel, and just before the explosion, the young man said, he jumped into a canal across the street to save himself.

1st Lieutenant Pete Cox, a twenty-three year-old Class of 2006 West Point grad, was in the base at the time of the explosion, and helped coordinate the treatment of the wounded Iraqis. There were no interpreters on base at the time, so Cox and others had to rely on their rudimentary Arabic and sign language to communicate. “Remember that famous picture from Vietnam with the little girl running from the napalm?” he asked, “it reminded me of that scene. I’d never seen injuries like that, I’d never seen burns like that. You had some guys with small shrapnel cuts and burns, and then you had guys with compound fractures and cuts all over their body and burns all over their body.”

One of the injured was a young boy, who had been at Zakaria’s with his father. His face was badly burned. “He looked like his face had been exposed to the flame, but the rest of him was fine. It looked like he was behind a wall, maybe, and only his face was exposed.”

The explosion and the aftermath was a test Lt. Cox felt that the patrol base passed. “The soldiers were pretty inventive about where to hang the IV bags, and figure out ways to help these people. You only have so many medics and when you have a mass casualty situation like that, you just don’t have enough, you can’t tend them all at the same time.”

Within thirty minutes of the blast, two Army helicopters actually landed on the small patch of land inside the base to ferry the most badly wounded Iraqis to an Army hospital, a risky move that impressed Cox, and one he hoped impressed the Iraqis, as well. It showed the Iraqis, he believes, that while groups like al Qaeda want to sow death, the Americans are willing to risk their lives to save Iraqi lives.

The attack came at a time of increasing al Qaeda attacks on Sons of Iraq checkpoints, a gambit that doesn’t seem to be accomplishing its objective of getting Iraqis to quit the groups.

“That we’re taking more Iraqi casualties means that they’re getting involved,” Cox told me that evening. “And it’s not just bystanders but guys who are putting their life on the line. The fact that they were targeted—Abu Zakaria and the Sons of Iraq—means that they’re considered a threat. And if al Qaeda thinks they’re a threat that means that they’re doing something right.”

Still, while that may or may not be true, the events of a single day at combat outpost IBA show that this war is far from over, and the complex maneuverings of fighting a counterinsurgency are only now starting to become fully apparent.

Both parts can be read together at the Columbia Journalism Review

Part I: The Farmhouse

“Looks like most of this stuff has been placed here pretty recently,” Captain Jeffrey Higgins observed as we walked a reed line along a canal with Sergeant Jamie Giles, inspecting a weapons cache 1st platoon found there earlier that morning. The two noted that the jugs of homemade explosives, 155mm and 120mm projectiles, blasting caps, and command wire (commonly used for IEDs) looked relatively clean, meaning they hadn’t been sitting outside for very long. They also found a Soviet DSHK (“Dishka”) rifle, a mounted heavy machine gun that can burn through several hundred rounds a minute, which is a pretty heavy-duty piece of weaponry to have lying around.

The cache was spread over a couple hundred meters, and to walk the dirt road next to the canal was to find an insurgent arms bazaar. The canal ran smack up against a tan brick farmhouse, unremarkable in this part of the country, but close enough to the canal to deduce that even if the people who lived there didn’t place the stuff there, they certainly knew who did.

The house wasn’t set too far back from the main road, but the tall reeds mostly hid it from view of passing traffic. It was a small, two-story structure with a wire-mesh chicken coop and a donkey tied to a pole out back, and an empty black plastic water tank next to it. The place was occupied by a young man, two women and a little girl, about five years old. When the platoon first rolled up on the house earlier that morning, Lt. Max Pappas asked the young man if he had seen anything suspicious in the area. He said he hadn’t, but he “looked nervous. Even if the guy hadn’t placed the stuff in the canal himself, he told me, “there’s so much of it, and it’s so close to the house, he had to have at least known about it.”

Sgt. Giles told Captain Higgins that “the guy started off pretty cool, but right now he’s about to have a heart attack.” I asked Sgt. Giles why the guy would be so stupid as to hide weapons so close to his own house. The locals, he said, “hide things in the reeds in the canals because they consider it public property, and they think we can’t tie it to them when we find it.”

Like many houses in the region, the farmhouse had a large concrete front porch, and the soldiers not checking the reed line had brought the women out on the porch while they checked the house. Three women sat against a wall, staring hard at the ground. The little girl looked confused and frightened, but the women remained motionless.

After 1st platoon radioed back to the base that they were pulling a significant amount of munitions out of the canal, and I went with Cpt. Higgins to investigate. The drive to the site bore testament to the recent violence in the area—the roads were scarred with a number of old, deep-buried IED craters. And the danger hadn’t passed. The convoy passed over one known live IED that wasn’t charged to go off. The team saw the wires, but it was a command-detonated IED and there was no one there to blow it. It had been marked, and would be taken care of later.

Leaving the reed line, I joined the soldiers searching the house. It was empty of furniture, save for a bed in one room, and a few mats and a small stove with some cooking utensils in the other two rooms. On the narrow back porch the young man, skinny, wispy-bearded and probably in his mid-twenties, had been flexi-cuffed and was standing in front of a pile of ammunition and some blasting caps that had been placed before him. Dressed in dirty pants and a jacket, wearing only sandals in the winter cold, he seemed somehow detached from what was going on around him.

The suspect was told to kneel in front of the cache for a picture to submit for evidence. “Hey, tell him to look up!” one of the soldiers told the interpreter. The terp translated, and the suspect furtively glanced up, then back down. “Up, up! Hey, look at me!” The order was translated again, but the suspect couldn’t—or wouldn’t—keep his head up. Finally, the terp forcibly lifted his chin up. The pictures were taken, and the suspect was hauled to his feet.

Out front, a shouting match had erupted between one of the women and a local man from the Sons of Iraq movement who we had brought along because he claimed to have additional information on more weapons in the area.

The two were shouting and gesticulating wildly, and the man had started to get uncomfortably close to her—close enough to hit her, I thought—and I began to wonder if someone was going to put an end to it. The little girl started crying. Finally, Lt. Pappas quickly walked up and shoved the man back, “Jesus Christ, knock it off! Go! Go!” he yelled, pointing to the Strykers parked nearby. The guy backed off, but the woman kept at it, and according to the terp was accusing the soldiers of scaring the little girl. One of the soldiers turned to her and yelled “Just shut up already! You’re the one scaring her with your yelling! Fuck!” Some messages don’t need a translator to be understood and she finally stopped, and sat back down.

Come mid-afternoon, the cache had been assembled in a pit and photographed, and the Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) team had been summoned to blow it up.

By this time I had fanned out to the fields behind the house with 1st Lieutenant Mark Davis to check a few other smaller irrigation ditches and reed lines, where he found a tripod that he thought might be for a the DSKA rifle. We were walking back up the dirt path toward the farmhouse when the rest of the platoon up the porch started yelling “get down!” A second later, a deep “BOOM” rolled across the farmland behind us. We turned, and saw a plume of black smoke beginning to snake it’s way skyward. Lt. Davis, struggling under the weight of the heavy, rusted tripod, ran with it for a few steps before throwing it down. We got to the porch and knelt down near the other guys, and one of the men turned to me and said. “Dude, that was fucking big. We saw the fireball before the sound hit us.” Someone else chimed in, “That looks like it was back near the base.”

As we watched the line of black smoke rise, word came from the base that a bomb went off only about two hundred meters outside the gate at the house of the leader of the local Sons of Iraq group. A few minutes later we learned that the target of the attack, Abu Zakaria, had survived the suicide car bomb attack, but that it looked like a “mass casualty event.”

Captain Higgins ordered a quick response team to load up and head back to the base, not knowing if this was the start of a multiple bomb attack. A Sergeant told some his men to load up, but a few of them had ammunition in their pockets that they had picked up in the reed line. They started to dump the ammo before getting in the Stryker but one of the guys started yelling at a buddy for throwing ammo around. An NCO stepped in and yelled “Guys, calm down.” His voice grew louder, “calm the fuck down! Calm down!” He seemed to be saying this to himself as much as to his soldiers, since they actually weren’t making too much of a scene. They finally emptied their pockets of rusted rounds, loaded up a Stryker and headed out.

I would follow Cpt. Higgins to the scene of the suicide bomb attack as soon as the weapons cache was blown up and the suspect taken away for processing. The only thing we knew at this point was that a long day was about to get longer.

“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.

Full Spectrum Operations

I posted a set of pictures from my time with the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in central Iraq here . An in-depth series of posts, cross-posted at the Columbia Journalism Review, kicks off on Monday morning, complete with pictures and some video.

The Rejected

“They’re gonna see us going out, and know that we have to come back this way,” Captain Glenn Helberg cautioned his men. We were walking out of combat outpost Courage, northwest of Baghdad, just before nightfall. The message was simple: the enemy studies habits, trends, and patterns just as any other military outfit does; so as the platoon left the base, Helberg wanted to make sure that his men were not complacent on the way back in.

It was a hell of a way to walk to a neighbor’s house for dinner, but that was just what we were doing on this cold, clear January night. Sheik Munder, a prominent Shia in the area, had invited the captain over for dinner, and despite the fact that his house was less than a mile from the patrol base, we would be walking across open road, with flat, open land on either side, so every precaution would be taken. This rural area had been an al Qaeda stronghold until just a few months ago, before the Sons of Iraq—groups of local men paid $300 a month to man checkpoints and keep security in their area—came out in force. Given that some of these men are the same ones who were planting IEDs last year, American commanders are taking nothing for granted.

There is still plenty of daily combat going on—especially in the major remaining al Qaeda strongholds up north near Mosul, in the central “breadbasket” of Diyala, and south of Baghdad in Arab Jabour—but peaceful meetings like this are just as common. COIN strategy places a premium on what has been called the “strategic corporal,” soldiers who have to think like a infantryman, act like a diplomat, and be able to change from one to the other on the fly. This is how the game is being played in the new, relative quiet of Iraq—especially in areas where despite the lull in daily violence, the war is still far from over.

In 1999, Marine general Charles C. Krulak wrote of the “three-block war” where soldiers in irregular conflicts “will be confronted by the entire spectrum of tactical challenges in the span of a few hours and, potentially, within the space of three contiguous city blocks.” Most importantly for regions like the area around COP Courage, where the Iraqi national government is little more than a rumor, “the individual [American service member] will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy. His or her actions may not only influence the immediate tactical situation, but have operational and strategic implications as well.”

At heart, much of this work is done by cultivating relationships—showing the Iraqis that American soldiers are strong, but fair, and that they’re an honest broker in a country rife with corruption, double-dealing, and a government seen by most Sunnis as being sectarian at best, a tool of Shia Iran bent on violently subjugating the Sunni minority at worst.

Part of this relationship building is figuring out who the power players are in any given region. The term “sheik,” I discovered, has become one of the more overused terms in Iraq. Once the “awakening” movement started in Anbar in 2006, and then moved through different parts of the country in 2007, Iraqis began popping up, assuring the Americans that they were “sheiks.” Add the fact that Charlie company is new to the area, and “a lot of guys are coming out of the woodwork trying to assert themselves saying, ‘hey I’m a sheik, I’m in charge of this whole town,’ so you have to weigh that with what the old units told us about that guy operates,” Helberg told me as we walked to Munder’s house. Apparently, sheik Munder made the cut.

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review

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.

Read the rest at the Columbia Journalism Review