The two hundred or so clerics in town mostly preached the prevailing anti-American sentiment. Drinkwine couldn’t distinguish between the city elders who were keeping their mouths shut to stay alive and those who were the true insurgents. The special operations task forces believed the dangerous insurgent leaders rarely showed up in public when American forces were present. Some were in Syria, and those who lived in the city kept a low profile.
Gradually, from wiretaps, intercepts, informers, and the like, the task forces compiled wire diagrams detailing how money moved from former Baathists in hiding through middlemen on the city council and into the hands of the foot soldiers: $50 for a lookout, $100 to dig the hole for an IED, $200 to trigger the device. There was good money to be made if you caught on with one of the right “families.”
Sheikh Ghazi, the wealthiest trader, worked through four levels of contractors, leaving no paper trail. Some suspected he was moving funds from Syria to contacts inside the city, with Sheikh Barakat acting as paymaster for local attacks. Barakat’s son had bragged about setting off an IED. The senior imam, Jamal, was suspected of hiding insurgents inside his complex and aiding Barakat in payouts after IED attacks. Drinkwine had secured permission from Col Smith to plant listening devices inside Jamal’s mosque, risking a riot if the bugs were discovered.
Drinkwine warned the city elders that the Americans were not fools, but the warning produced no change. On October 20 a platoon on the eastern edge of the city (called East Manhattan) noticed that the vendors selling jugs of gasoline to passing motorists were walking away quickly. When a paratrooper stepped on a hidden pressure plate, an oil barrel containing two ninety-pound 155mm shells exploded, sending chunks of red-hot metal in all directions. Sergeant P. J. Johnson was killed and seven paratroopers wounded. Small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades hit the platoon from the suburban streets to the northeast. The fighting raged for several hours before Drinkwine could extract his wounded. The pressure plate was the work of a demolitions expert whom the CIA called the “Rocket Man,” a local resident.
Furious, Drinkwine turned up the heat on the sheikhs and imams. The special task forces pored over intercepts and captured documents, tying together seven items pointing to the mufti Jamal and Sheikh Barakat. Arresting an imam required gaining special permission. Smith, the regimental commander, listened to a recording of Jamal inciting his followers to kill the Americans and a telephone intercept instructing Jamal to hide a terrorist in his compound. In addition, he had three handwritten letters detailing rebel activities. Smith ordered Jamal and Barakat arrested.
The raid team seized Jamal and found the terrorist—a Yemeni—hiding in a small room in his house. Jamal was brought to Drinkwine’s ops center and politely offered tea.
As Jamal was sipping his tea, Specialist Dudin looked at his watch and said, “We have to move you. The party’s about to begin.”
A perplexed Jamal looked around for partygoers. As they moved across the courtyard, the nightly mortar rounds crashed in nearby. Dudin sheltered Jamal and hurried him inside a bunker. A fifty-eight-year-old man of medium build and scholarly mien, Jamal was shaken by the attack.
“See how dangerous this is?” Dudin asked in his impeccable Arabic.
“Sure, sure,” Jamal said.
Badly shaken by the nearby explosions, Jamal wrote a letter confessing that he had been hiding a “fundamentalist” and inciting violence. The next day Drinkwine invited a half-dozen imams to meet privately with Jamal, who again acknowledged what he and Barakat had done. After the two were driven to Abu Ghraib prison, more than seventy sheikhs and imams gathered at city hall to protest the arrests. The head sheikhs, though, showed them Jamal’s letters and the protest fizzled out. Drinkwine took this as a positive sign.
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On the last day of October, a bomb went off inside the Government Center, and a mob gathered, accusing Mayor Taha Bedawi of profiting from American contracts. The protest was a put-up job, soon punctuated by rifle shots that escalated into a full-scale firefight. Drinkwine rushed in two reinforced platoons, covered by armed helicopters. The ensuing firefight raged for thirty hours. When it ended, the town hall was a smoking shell, and Mayor Taha, who had been staunchly pro-American, had fled town.
Ra’ad replaced Taha as mayor, and it looked like Ghazi had out-maneuvered old Sheikh Khamis and set himself up for future contracts. Assured of temporary immunity, a dozen former senior Baathists attended a clandestine meeting hosted by Drinkwine, who wanted to hear their version of the causes of the violence. They asked for a reduced American presence in the city and a return of Baathists to government jobs. They complained that the 82nd was too quick to apply too much firepower. They preferred the approach of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which kept its soldiers outside the city and left the day-to-day security duties to the police and local militia.
“They understood us better,” Sheikh Khamis said. “They didn’t provoke the people like they are doing now. Using more force will not solve the problems here.”
The commander of Drinkwine’s regiment disagreed with the sheikh.
“Because there was an economy of force early on [during the summer of 2003], former regime loyalists, senior Baathists, and some extremists have created a safe haven,” Col Smith said. “What we’re seeing is a reaction to our increased activities.”
The reaction quickly turned deadly. On November 2 two antiaircraft missiles were fired at a CH-47 Chinook helicopter flying over a cornfield outside Fallujah. In the ensuing crash fifteen Americans died and twenty were wounded. It was the heaviest death toll in a single action since the invasion of Iraq. The news touched off celebrations inside the city, where hatred laced the conversations, children refused candy, and American engineers dared not venture to repair clogged sewer mains and decrepit electric power generators.
The initial reaction from the JTF in Baghdad was to order the 82nd to surround Fallujah and root out the insurgents and their arms caches, block by block. Smith and Drinkwine opposed the planned four-battalion operation, called Dodge City. They argued—in phrases the Marines would echo five months later—that such an attack would drive the youths of the city onto the side of the rebels.
“This is not the way to go,” Drinkwine said. “If we overreact, we give legitimacy to what are now gangs.”
Gen Abizaid, who flew in for an assessment, agreed. Instead of seizing the city block by block, he met with the sheikhs, demanding that they show leadership and stop the violence. There were as many attacks on the outskirts of Fallujah, where the sheikhs had power, as inside the city, where the clerics dominated. Under the current circumstances, he told them in Arabic, there can be no rebuilding, no contracts, no jobs, no progress toward a better future.
In a separate meeting with the sheikhs Major General Charles H. Swannack, commander of the 82nd, was equally forceful. “I am not going to tolerate these attacks anymore,” he said. “I know the sheikhs have the ability to control their tribes.”
The sheikhs protested that the 82nd didn’t appreciate the limits of their power. Threatening them would do no good. Improvement projects made no difference to the men with the guns. In the eyes of the sheikhs, power had shifted from them to the young clerics in Fallujah preaching that America was waging war against Islam and was bringing in Jews to rule Iraq. That message had inflamed the youth of the city, making it impossible for other clerics to retain a following if they preached moderation. In the mosques, the sermons called for the Americans to be driven out.
“It’s a kind of religious belief that they should not accept occupation,” said Saadi Muhammad, a schoolteacher in Fallujah.
A few days after the Chinook helicopter was shot down, an American soldier was killed near the city by an IED. In response, aircraft dropped thousand-pound bombs on suspected ambush sites and houses with arms caches. When mortar rounds were fired at 82nd positions, counterbattery radars traced the arc of the rounds to their point of origin, and 155mm howitzers fired in response. The fighting escalated through the fall.
“I expect to get attacked every day—every single day,” Drinkwine said. “That may come in the form of a mortar attack, a drive-by shooting at the mayor’s office, a vehicle ambush, or a combination of all three.”
MajGen Swannack approved a get-tough approach, called Operation Iron Hammer, a series of sweeps for weapons caches and raids to seize insurgent leaders. “This is war,” he said. “I am going to use a sledgehammer to crush a walnut.”
It was a war the 82nd was fighting alone. Drinkwine’s nine-hundred-man battalion was fighting a guerrilla war in a city containing 43,000 potential insurgents. With Sheikh Jamal in jail, the imam who filled the void with the most inflammatory sermons was Abdullah Al Janabi, a saturnine, pinched-faced man in his early fifties. Ra’ad warned Drinkwine that Janabi was a fundamentalist who had fled arrest under Saddam; he was a nervous man, difficult to approach. When Drinkwine asked him to tone things down, Janabi launched into a diatribe about infidels, Shiites, and apostates, meaning anyone who cooperated with the Americans. He seemed to be daring Drinkwine to arrest him and provoke a riot.
Drinkwine drove back to his base by the artificial lake east of the city and wrote Janabi a letter, warning that he would be arrested if he continued with seditious sermons. Knowing his mosque near the Government Center was probably bugged and his apprehension imminent, Janabi temporarily left the city.
The paratroopers didn’t know who supported them in the city. During the day they patrolled the outer highways and drove through town in shows of force, searching vehicles at random. At night they conducted raids. It was their favorite tactic: they would drive with night-vision goggles, roar down a street in the pitch black with the lights out, scale a courtyard wall, then rush through the front door and up the steps into the sleeping quarters; sometimes a masked informer would point someone out or shake his head no.
Specialist Dudin said that the people called them the
bou-bous
. “In the States we say watch out for the boogeyman,” Dudin said. “In Iraq a mother will say to her kids, ‘Stop doing that, or the bou-bou monster will get you.’ We were the bou-bous.”
In early November, the raid that was most satisfying to the paratroopers occurred when they entered a house and found nothing incriminating. The occupants, however, pointed to a house across the street. Rushing over, the soldiers found a man crouched over a computer monitor in his downstairs study. Open on the screen was a sketch of a sophisticated IED. They arrested Brigadier General Al Mahadaai, Ph.D., aka the Rocket Man, the top trainer and supplier of the IED teams and the man believed responsible for Sgt Johnson’s death.
The city elders protested vehemently against the increased use of force, the raids, and the bursts of gunfire whenever an IED exploded, arguing that it was driving the people to the side of the insurgents. MajGen Swannack did release several women, who were being held because they were relatives of insurgents. But that was one of his few concessions. The get-tough policy seemed to be showing results. By mid-November attacks by explosive devices had decreased from two to one per day.
A month later the relentless American campaign to hunt down the top Baathists reached its zenith when television networks broadcast the pictures of a disheveled Saddam Hussein with his mouth open, meekly submitting to a medical exam by his American captors. To many Iraqis, Saddam had been the devil who could not be killed. His capture removed the fear that he would again seize power and wreak revenge on his enemies, as he had after the Gulf War in 1991.
In Fallujah, however, the hope for a dwindling in the insurgent spirit was quickly extinguished. While Baghdad celebrated Saddam’s capture, Fallujah rioted. Supporters of the old regime stormed the Government Center, firing AKs in the air and shouting that the fight against the American occupiers would continue. A company of paratroopers in Bradleys and Humvees responded, RPG rockets bounced off several of the vehicles, and one Iraqi was killed.
A few weeks later a visitor to an elementary school in the city asked about American soldiers. “We must resist them!” the children shouted. “We must force them to leave, with bombs, with explosives! I am ready to fight now!”
Inside the insurgent movement the fundamentalist clerics in the city were competing with the former regime elements who had previously dominated them. Saddam’s ignominious capture had shifted the balance of power toward the jihadists without weakening the intensity of the insurgency.
As December drew to a close, the minimum force Drinkwine would send into Fallujah was a platoon mounted in six vehicles, and they could not stay in any one place for more than half an hour before the insurgents would sneak up and fire at them. Iraqi National Guardsmen wouldn’t be available until midwinter. In the meantime, if the police accompanied the paratroopers, they could warn them about suspicious characters. The police wouldn’t have to fight; the paratroopers would take it from there.
The police refused to help.
“We tell them, no, we can’t do that,” a police captain said. “The mujahedeen would say we are collaborators. You work with the Americans, you die.”
4
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A BACKWATER PROBLEM
AS THE SEASON OF PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS began, the Democratic Party increased its criticisms of Bush’s Iraqi policies. Since the president had declared major hostilities at an end, 344 Americans had died in Iraq. With the presidential election ten months away, two Democratic candidates—retired general Wesley Clark and Massachusetts senator John Kerry—were emphasizing their military records to give weight to their criticisms, while a third, former governor Howard Dean, was running on an antiwar platform.
The capture of Saddam in mid-December gave the president a temporary bump up to a 60 percent approval rating for his handling of Iraq, but in January 2004 that rating settled back to 50 percent, not a reassuring number for someone facing reelection.