Imperial Life in the Emerald City (29 page)

Barzani smiled and said, “We will call them
peshmerga.
”

THE GREEN ZONE, SCENE XII

After Uday's menagerie was moved into Baghdad's zoo, most CPA staffers assumed that humans were the only species in the Green Zone, save for the bomb-sniffing dogs and the odd feral cat skittering among the housing trailers. The CPA's senior adviser to the Ministry of Environment pronounced the Emerald City a wasteland, devoid of wildlife.

Alex Dehgan knew better. He was a biologist who had spent three years observing animals in the wild. Every time he walked around the Green Zone, he kept his eyes peeled. He saw bats over the pool at night, barn owls in palm trees, and desert foxes in remote corners of the palace garden. “The Green Zone was filled with life,” he said. “It was beautiful, and it seemed like everyone in the Green Zone was unaware of them like they were unaware of many other things.”

The other humans did notice the cats—and kittens—scampering in the garden and the trailer parks. Staffers named them and played with them during breaks. They even stole cartons of milk and cheese from the dining hall for their newfound companions.

When Halliburton managers discovered the pets in their midst, they asked the marines guarding the palace to shoot the cats on sight lest they spread illnesses.

Dehgan deemed it bad science. “The danger of disease was probably infinitesimally small,” he said. “This wasn't done with any thought to the psychological value that these cats provided.”

When the execution orders were announced, CPA staffers saved their favorites, hiding them in trailers, in bathrooms, in the pool house. David Gompert, Bremer's security adviser, kept a cat he named Mickey in his palace office. Mickey was watched over by Gompert's security detail, but he still managed to chew through several sensitive documents.

The Halliburton cat killers finally got wise to the asylum strategy and deployed Filipino contract workers on a hunt-and-kill mission. They opened every trailer while the occupants were at work and rounded up every cat they found.

One night in June, a woman stood wailing outside her trailer. She was due to ship out in two days and had taken her cat to a veterinarian for the necessary shots for entrance to America. When she returned to her room, she found a note from the death squad informing her that her cat had been seized because it was against the rules to house animals in the trailers.

“They killed my pet,” she sobbed. “I hate them.”

15

Crazy, If Not Suicidal

FIRST SERGEANT JERRY SWOPE
groaned as his Humvee pulled out of the sand-swept base that had been his home for the past four days. It was 7:30 a.m. and he was in a foul mood. Because there were no vacant barracks, he had slept on the hood of his vehicle. His platoon had been on patrol until 2:00 a.m. in Sadr City, a sardine-packed slum in Baghdad, for one of the American military's regular shows of force. Desperate for every last minute of shut-eye, Swope skipped the scrambled eggs and bacon in the chow tent. Breakfast would have to be an MRE, one of the army's meals-in-a-bag, eaten on the run. Beef stew, perhaps. Or chili.

The mission that balmy Sunday morning was, quite literally, crap. Swope's platoon would be escorting three septic tank trucks through Sadr City as they vacuumed pools of sewage bubbling from corroded underground pipes. The truck drivers were hired and paid by Baghdad's city council, but if U.S. soldiers did not accompany them, they would demand bribes from residents before turning on the suction pumps.

Watching over the trucks was unpleasant work, but it was just the sort of thing Swope had expected to do in Iraq. He and other soldiers from the army's First Cavalry Division had planned to conduct “stability operations” upon their arrival in the Iraqi capital in late March 2004. By the time they got to Baghdad, the First Cav's commanders assumed the insurgency would be waning and they would be working as glorified policemen and municipal engineers, helping Iraqis to restore basic services and build the institutions of local government. Before their deployment, officers from the division, which is based at Fort Hood, Texas, had attended seminars conducted by city planners in nearby Austin. Other soldiers had been sent to a British school where police on their way to Northern Ireland are trained to deal with low-grade civil strife.

Nowhere in Baghdad was the challenge of restoring municipal services greater than in Sadr City, a squalid warren of 2.5 million Shiites four miles east of the Green Zone. Residents of the ghetto—known as Saddam City when the dictator was in power—were regarded as a threat by Saddam's government, which was dominated by Sunnis. His regime assiduously suppressed any acts of dissension within the slum's labyrinthine alleys. In a notorious 1999 incident, his elite Republican Guard gunned down as many as a hundred people protesting the government's assassination of a prominent Shiite cleric and his two sons. Precious little had been spent on constructing schools or hospitals in the area. The three-foot-wide sewage pipes that crisscrossed the neighborhood had not been cleaned since 1998. By the time U.S. troops arrived in Iraq, the underground arteries were 60 percent blocked, creating vast swamps of excrement. Seeing the putrid pools, the commander of the First Cav battalion in Sadr City, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Volesky, made sewage cleanup a top priority. Doing so, he assumed, would help promote goodwill toward American troops.

On the morning of April 4, 2004, that goodwill mission fell to Swope and his men. At thirty-three, Swope was the oldest and most experienced soldier in the platoon. He was solid but not stocky, with close-cropped hair and a tattoo of three interlinked skulls on his right wrist. He hung out with the battalion's older noncommissioned officers and smoked Marlboro Reds. Swope had been in the army for fifteen years, serving in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, and Macedonia. A native of Richmond, Missouri, he referred to the septic tankers as a Southerner would, calling them “honeydew trucks.”

Swope's boss was twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Shane Aguero, a former army brat who had enlisted after graduating from high school in 1994. A lanky father of two who wore wire-rimmed glasses, Aguero had spent eight years taking night classes at a college near Fort Hood to earn a bachelor's degree in international relations and global economics.

As the platoon drove through Sadr City, from one pond of sludge to another, everything appeared normal to Swope and Aguero. There were plenty of scowls and stares, and children even heaved rocks at Swope's Humvee, the last in the column. But he didn't pay much attention to the stones dinging off the armor plating. Back at Fort Hood, at a predeployment briefing on dangers in Baghdad, the soldiers had been shown a map of the city with red splotches denoting recent attacks. There were fewer in Sadr City than almost anywhere else. The improvised explosive devices—what everyone else referred to as roadside bombs—that bedeviled American soldiers in other parts of Baghdad almost never turned up in Sadr City. The only attack there of significance that Swope could remember was on October 9, when a patrol was ambushed and two soldiers were killed. All in all, he calculated, Sadr City was a pretty good place to be a soldier—if you could stand the stench.

The safety of Sadr City made sense to Swope. The Shiites were the people the Americans had come to liberate. Unlike the Sunnis, who had been privileged under Saddam, the downtrodden Shiites were thankful to be free of the dictator. The challenge wasn't going to be winning them over, he thought, it was going to be rebuilding a place that was more disgusting and dysfunctional than anything he'd ever seen.

After dumping the contents of the tankers into a canal on the edge of Sadr City at around 4:30 in the afternoon, the three Iraqi drivers refused to continue working. Through an interpreter, they told Aguero and Swope that residents had warned them earlier in the day against returning with the soldiers. “We'll be killed if we go back,” one of the drivers said. Then they drove off.

When Aguero radioed the tactical operations center at the base with news of the defecting drivers, he received new orders. On your way back to the base, drive down Route Delta—the neighborhood's main drag—to see if anything is going on there, one of Volesky's deputies told Aguero. That seemed pretty easy, Aguero thought. They'd be home in less than half an hour.

The platoon—eighteen soldiers and one interpreter—was traveling in a convoy of four Humvees. Aguero was in the lead vehicle because he knew his way around. Unlike the rest of the soldiers, who had arrived in Baghdad only four days earlier, he had been in Sadr City for a month to help the First Cav prepare to assume responsibility for the capital from the army's First Armored Division. Aguero's Humvee and Swope's in the rear had factory-built armoring. The windows were bulletproof, and the sides were made of thick reinforced steel. Atop both those Humvees was a fifty-caliber machine gun that could spit cigar-size bullets powerful enough to disable oncoming vehicles and punch through concrete walls. The two Humvees in the middle had only what soldiers called add-on armor. They were standard models with metal plates welded to the side and 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted on the roof. They were better protected than regular, soft-skinned Humvees, but their roofs, windshields, and engines had no extra fortification.

The platoon had been driving for only a few minutes when they saw two men with AK-47 assault rifles in the street. Aguero ordered the platoon to stop. The men were in clear defiance of orders issued by the U.S. occupation authority restricting the possession of such weapons to private property. The men insisted to the soldiers that they were guards at a nearby mosque. Aguero wanted to seize the guns, but he didn't want to provoke a confrontation with religious leaders. Eventually, they settled on a compromise: an Iraqi police colonel would take custody of the weapons. An hour after the platoon stopped, the colonel arrived, several black-turbaned clerics emerged, and the weapons were surrendered. As the soldiers remounted the Humvees and drove off, Swope thought,
Two more guns off the street. We're making this place safer.

The most important building along Route Delta was the local office of Moqtada al-Sadr. In the hierarchical Shiite establishment, al-Sadr was just a portly, low-ranking cleric with angry eyes, rotting teeth, an unkempt beard, and a ten-gallon black turban. But his father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was a revered ayatollah who had built up a mass following through control of clerical schools, a network of social services, and a metaphorical message of resistance to Saddam's rule. The senior al-Sadr's assassination in 1999 had unleashed bloody unrest in the slum that would later take his name. In the tumult that followed Saddam's fall, Moqtada emerged on the strength of his father's legacy, commanding the loyalty of rebellious, largely young clerics who bridled at the reticence and conservatism of the mainstream clergy. He was blunt in his criticism of the United States, blaming it for failing to support a Shiite uprising after the 1991 Persian Gulf War and for allowing the looting and lawlessness that erupted after Saddam was toppled. He denounced the American occupation and demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces, which won him legions of followers, most of them young, unemployed men who had believed that the American invasion would bring them prosperity and political power.

Despite Moqtada's fiery rhetoric, what he really wanted was a seat on the Governing Council. He figured there was no better way to get one than to demonstrate his street credibility to Jerry Bremer by drawing thousands to his Friday sermons. But CPA staffers rarely traveled into Sadr City and didn't know how popular al-Sadr had become. And SCIRI and Dawa, the two largest Shiite parties, didn't want a rival on the council. In August 2003, a month after the Governing Council was established, al-Sadr formed a militia called the Mahdi Army to protect himself and to give him leverage with other Shiite leaders. Six months later, as the First Cav arrived in Baghdad, the militia had an estimated ten thousand fighters across the country.

Members of the Mahdi Army harassed local government officials in Sadr City and in towns across southern Iraq, but other than in a few isolated incidents, the militia hadn't targeted American forces. Within the Republican Palace, however, al-Sadr's army was regarded as a gathering threat to the establishment of democracy that, if left unchecked, could be used to intimidate voters and government workers. By late 2003, members of the CPA's governance team began lobbying Bremer to arrest al-Sadr and dismantle his militia. But when Bremer raised the issue with American military commanders, and even with Rumsfeld, they punted. Al-Sadr isn't shooting at our soldiers, they said, so why should we pick a fight? We've got enough trouble with the radical Sunnis. No need to provoke the radical Shiites.

Bremer backed down. But by late March 2004, al-Sadr's militia once again commanded his attention. The interim constitution was done, and sovereignty would be handed over in three months. He felt there wasn't much time left. If democracy was going to flourish in Iraq, the militias had to go. David Gompert was working up a plan to deal with the
peshmerga
and SCIRI's Badr Corps, but Moqtada al-Sadr was unwilling to demobilize the Mahdi Army. To Bremer and others in the CPA, the time had come for a confrontation.

Exactly a week before Aguero and Swope's septic truck mission, Bremer ordered al-Sadr's newspaper shut down. For weeks,
al-Hawza
had been printing inaccurate and inflammatory articles about the American military and the CPA. The clincher for Bremer was a story in February headlined “Bremer Follows in the Footsteps of Saddam,” which accused him of deliberately starving the Iraqi people. On March 28, American troops ushered
al-Hawza
's staff into the street and snapped a padlock on the office gate.

Bremer had expected that shuttering the paper would pressure not just al-Sadr but also General John Abizaid, the overall American commander in the Middle East, and Lieutenant General Sanchez, the top commander in Iraq. Bremer and his staff assumed that al-Sadr would lash back through protests and small-scale attacks, instigating a manageable fight that would compel Abizaid and Sanchez to put the cleric out of business.

But al-Sadr's response was fiercer than Bremer and his staff had expected. Within hours, the cleric's deputies had ordered a full mobilization. Protesters flooded the traffic circle in front of the newspaper's offices for a noisy rally. They came back the next day. On the third day, hundreds of al-Sadr supporters marched in a tight military formation to the Assassin's Gate. “We are followers of al-Sadr!” they shouted. “All the people know us. We will not be humiliated!” Many of the young men were dressed entirely in black, save for green sashes on their brows. Marshals rushed between the units shouting warnings to keep the ranks sharp. Clerics in white turbans swept down the fringes with a proprietary air. “Just say the word, Moqtada,” they screamed, “and we'll resume the 1920 revolution!” Later, the chants became more ominous. “Today is peaceful,” they warned. “Tomorrow will be military.”

While the protests brought other parts of Baghdad to a standstill, life in Sadr City appeared to be no different. But on April 4, as the platoon swung a left on Route Delta to drive past al-Sadr's office, the normally bustling road had only a trickle of traffic. The sidewalks were empty.

Unbeknownst to Swope and Aguero, American Special Operations forces had arrested al-Sadr's top deputy the night before. At 4:30 p.m., al-Sadr issued an order to his followers from his headquarters in the town of Kufa, about one hundred miles south of the capital. “Terrorize your enemy,” the order read. “God will reward you well for what pleases him. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their violations.”