Casey moved swiftly, sending the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit to cordon off Sadr’s militia inside Najaf. The tactical challenge was to apply force while not damaging the holy sites that Sadr’s men were using as hideouts. Day by day in temperatures of 120 degrees, Battalion 1/4 inched forward. They fought from tombstone to crypt across the gigantic cemetery outside the Ali mosque where Sadr’s 120mm mortars fired with impunity from the courtyard. The tankers fought with IV needles inserted in their arms. Every three hours they got out of their tanks and lay on stretchers while pints of liquid flowed back into their veins. Once rehydrated, they went back into the fight.
In the second week in August, the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment joined the fight, bringing in armor to squeeze the militia from the east. Daily, the two battalion commanders—LtCol John Mayer (1/4) and Lieutenant Colonel Jim Rainey (2-7)—had to explain to their troops why they could not fire back at certain sites. The tactical end was in sight, but the soldiers and Marines weren’t permitted to capture Sadr or to finish off his militia due to concern about the political consequences. Instead, Prime Minister Allawi engaged in a tortuous minuet, attempting to negotiate through a maze of intermediaries with the crafty Sadr.
The relationship between American military force and Iraqi diplomacy was ambiguous. Allawi set the parameters, and Casey executed. The Americans did the fighting but could not finish the fight—that was Allawi’s call. Allawi proved as changeable as Sadr, issuing ultimatums, then backing down, then allowing the U.S. forces to press forward, then calling a halt and urging Sadr to negotiate. American forces pummeled Sadr’s militia for two weeks, drawing the noose around them tighter and tighter. On August 20 the militia was down to its last stand. Under pressure from Sistani, at the last minute Allawi allowed Sadr and his henchmen to go free. As in April, Sadr had provoked a rebellion, lost a battle, and remained at large.
The American military role in local governance had diminished since Casey had directed that local security be taken over by the Iraqis. It was no longer the responsibility of tactical leaders—battalion and company commanders—to meet daily with Iraqi politicians, sheikhs, and officials to work out the everyday problems of municipal governance. Much of the training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces would now be done by a training unit separate from the U.S. divisions, commanded by Army LtGen David Petraeus. The details and machinations characteristic of a colonial administration, such as trying to play one sheikh off against another, became less relevant once Iraq was again a sovereign nation.
The insurgency was a confederation of Baathists seeking a return to power, Islamic extremists, criminals, former military and intelligence officers, radical Sunni imams, and young men motivated by revenge or a desire to fight against the infidel occupiers. Americans could not drive ideological wedges among the various insurgent groups, but Allawi believed he could.
Allawi was playing a complicated game, reaching out with blandishments to the Sunni and Shiite rebels while employing the American forces as his hammer. He used the channels he had set up in April to continue to meet with Jamal and Janabi, who were sending insurgents in stolen police cars from Fallujah to join Sadr’s rebels. That military contribution was trivial; the morale implications were more troublesome. In Mattis’s view, the clandestine negotiations by the Iraqi government encouraged the insurgents and delayed the inevitable day of reckoning.
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While the major fight in Najaf was playing out, Col Toolan was working patiently to encourage the National Guard under LtCol Suleiman. A black belt in karate with a good sense of humor, Suleiman had become the regiment’s favorite Iraqi officer. He kept his word and never curried favor. He was trying to walk a fine line, staying independent of the Americans while avoiding a blood feud with the hard men in town.
In mid-July the house of Suleiman’s bodyguard had been blown up, and then the unfortunate man had been kidnapped and presumed killed. Flyers had been distributed in Fallujah urging the death of “Suleiman the traitor.” Although Toolan wanted his Marines to patrol with the Iraqi soldiers, he accepted in good faith Suleiman’s refusals.
“Colonel Suleiman is my friend. I’ve worked with him for five months,” he said in late July. “When he tells me ‘this I cannot do and keep my family alive,’ I believe him.”
On August 9 one of Suleiman’s officers, a captain, was kidnapped and taken to the Maqady Mosque in midtown Fallujah. An angry Suleiman called Toolan and said he was going to get the captain—a member of his tribe—back. Toolan asked him to wait for a backup force of Marines. No, Suleiman said, I have to take care of this myself.
Dressed in workout clothes, Suleiman raced over to the mosque with a dozen soldiers, where an imam accused him and the kidnapped officer of conniving with the Americans. Suleiman slapped him across the face and drove off, shouting that he expected the officer to be released or he was returning with his whole battalion. There were reports of an ambush and a brief firefight as Suleiman drove back to his compound on the peninsula. Over the next hour insurgents gathered outside the gates, brandishing RPGs.
Before shooting broke out, several imams arrived, assuring Suleiman that it had all been a mistake and that the officer was waiting for Suleiman to pick him up. When Suleiman drove back to the mosque, Janabi was waiting.
A few hours later Hadid called Toolan’s headquarters on Suleiman’s cell phone. The message was garbled, but the phone number was clear. Minutes later Hadid mockingly called Suleiman’s wife, who became hysterical, convinced that her two daughters would never again see their father.
Later that day LtCol Jabar, who commanded the other National Guard battalion, was also kidnapped. Toolan wanted to organize a raid but didn’t know where to look in the city. He called in the city elders and officers in the police and the Fallujah Brigade, warning them to secure Suleiman’s release. They professed knowing nothing. A day later they said it was all a mistake that was being taken care of. A day after that they reported more ominous garbage about Suleiman entering a mosque in a tracksuit instead of in uniform, so he did not merit the protection of the
shura
. Suleiman’s tribe was trying to buy him back. It sounded like he would be beaten, then released. That had been the punishment meted out to the son of a less powerful sheikh a week earlier. The soles of the man’s feet had been beaten to bloody pulps and he would walk with canes for the rest of his life, but he was alive.
Toolan hoped that Suleiman’s tribe—the Abu Mahdi—would react, but the tribe was cowed by the ruthlessness of Janabi and Hadid. Several days later Suleiman’s pulverized corpse was dumped on a road south of the mosque. The torso was burned pink, and the feet and legs were swollen and black. Toolan heard that Janabi and Hadid hadn’t set out to kill him. The usual beating had begun—bamboo canes lashing the soles of his feet, then proceeding up his legs. Instead of whimpering and agreeing to a confession, Suleiman had cursed his torturers, who responded by pouring boiling water on his chest. They then propped him up and videotaped his halting monologue that he was an American spy, working for Toolan. Hadid then sawed off his head.
The next day the videotapes circulated in town, showing a weeping Suleiman, moments before his death, begging forgiveness for betraying the Iraqi people and an abject, sobbing Jabar pleading for his life, claiming that Suleiman had been an American agent. Janabi sent his minions to the compounds of the two National Guard battalions, where the soldiers promptly deserted, leaving behind their trucks and weapons. Jabar was never seen again. Terror had spawned its own biogenesis, the malevolence passing from Zarqawi to Hadid to Janabi, who had mutated from business opportunist to gangster to zealot torturer.
When the CIA quickly turned up evidence that members of the police and the Fallujah Brigade had helped to engineer the kidnappings, Toolan exploded. In white-hot fury he summoned the leaders of the brigade, the police, and the National Guard to the Fallujah Liaison Center. There he accused them of betrayal and murder. The brigade and the police are finished, Toolan told them. “Insurgents have taken control of the town. I am not going to negotiate with them,” he said. “We fight right now to prevent losing Iraq, or else we’ll be paying the price for years to come.”
He said anyone loyal to the Iraqi government had one week to get his family out of town. After that the Marines were treating everyone in that city with a weapon as an enemy, to be dealt with accordingly. “Everyone who wants to fight for the new Iraq,” Toolan said, “join us. If not, we’ll see you inside the city.”
Staff officers in the MEF next door were furious that Toolan had taken matters into his own hands and had reacted without checking up the chain of command. But no senior Marine officer disagreed with Toolan’s command decision. At best the Fallujah Brigade had capitulated to the enemy; at worst it had been the enemy from the beginning.
LtGen Conway and MajGen Mattis had returned to Iraq in March intending to work alongside the Iraqi forces while respecting the Sunni population. The decision to seize Fallujah and then not to seize it had knocked that strategy off course. Well-intentioned compromise had emboldened the insurgents. Now the theory that secular Baathists and senior Iraqi officers aligned with Baghdad could reclaim status and power in Fallujah lay in ruins.
Mattis had made no secret of his judgment. “There’s only one way to disarm the Fallujah Brigade,” he said. “Kill it.”
Toolan rolled tanks south outside Queens. As he expected, the insurgents rushed to man the earthen berm they had thrown up around the outskirts of the city, firing barrages of RPGs. The Abrams tanks maneuvered forward and eagerly returned the fire. The battle raged for several hours; the sounds were clearly heard back at the regimental headquarters. The staff called the episode “Toolan Tunes.” The regiment was straining at the leash.
According to the
New York Times,
Allawi, despite Suleiman’s murder and UAV videos of terrorist safe houses, had promised not to permit large-scale American attacks while Janabi was considering halting insurgent attacks. “Keep the noise down,” higher headquarters in Baghdad told the MEF, not wanting a full-scale battle in Fallujah to upset Iraqi political maneuverings. The MEF was sympathetic with Toolan’s instinct but had to call him off. The tanks pulled back after a battle of several hours.
“Keep the noise down,” the MEF told a simmering division.
23
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ALL OF THIS FOR NOTHING?
WITH THE IRAQIS, IT WAS DIFFICULT sorting out friend from foe and what motivated resistance. Stability in the Sunni areas required an amalgam of political compromise, economic blandishment, and superior firepower. It was a Mafioso game that only Iraqis could master, and in late summer the new Iraqi government was off to a slow start.
Spontaneous professions of gratitude for the sacrifices Americans had made to liberate Iraq were few. When President Bush congratulated Iraq’s soccer team for its excellent play during the August Olympics in Athens, the team reacted with outrage. The coach exclaimed, “Bush helps destroy our country.” Ahmed Manajid, a midfielder and a resident of Fallujah, said his cousin had been killed fighting as an insurgent, and if he weren’t playing soccer, he too would be an insurgent. “I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?” Manajid said. “Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq.”
The best people, however, weren’t opposing the insurgents who had taken over their city. Finding volunteers for the National Guard in Fallujah while its athletes went to Athens was proving next to impossible. Under Ambassador Bremer’s plan of a year before, the U.S. Congress had authorized $18 billion in aid for Iraq over a two-year period; less than 20 percent of the funding was to go to Iraqi security forces. The CPA view was that the rebuilding of the infrastructures of electricity, oil, water, and sewage would provide the underpinnings for a burgeoning economy offering jobs and undercutting the insurgency. A year later most monies had not been spent due to the skyrocketing costs of protecting the workers, congressional “Buy America” restrictions, and the challenge of administering contracts during a war.
While the CPA had planned on deploying at least twelve thousand trained Iraqi soldiers by September, the actual number deployed was half that. The new U.S. ambassador, John Negroponte, had requested that the security budget proposed by Bremer be doubled to $6.6 billion. Money, though, wouldn’t put effective Iraqi soldiers on the streets in Ramadi or Fallujah as long as the insurgents were the intimidators fighting with the blessing of the Sunni imams.
Allawi’s strategic alternative was to reduce the number of insurgents by persuasion instead of by battle. Moderate Sunni Baathist insurgents appeared to be an oxymoron, but wooing them was the course Allawi doggedly was pursuing as the summer ended.
While in exile in London a decade earlier, Dr. Allawi and his wife had been severely wounded by Saddam’s ax-wielding assassins. Despite those terrible wounds Allawi tried to work with secular Baathists, believing that goodwill and dialogue could substitute for raw force and violence. At the least negotiations would indicate he had tried to be reasonable. Allawi was convinced that rational dialogue would yield beneficial results. “I said to them, and to [delegations from] Ramadi and Fallujah, ‘Okay, for the sake of argument, let me assume the multinational forces will leave. What do you think will happen?” Allawi said. “You know what they answered? I swear to God, they said: ‘Catastrophe. Iraq will be dismembered.’ ”
Allawi met in Baghdad with the leaders from Ramadi, pitching that Ramadi should not embrace impoverishment for the cause of radical Islam. Not one post in the Iraqi government was held by a representative from Anbar Province. Baghdad could treat Ramadi as hostile, controlled by military force and neglected economically, a mirror image of how the Sunnis had treated the Shiites and a sure guarantee of a never-ending insurgency. Allawi indicated that that path was self-defeating for all parties. Instead, the city elders had to marginalize the insurgents and turn them away. If they did not, Ramadi faced a bleak future.