Black Flags (24 page)

Signs of Iraq’s unraveling lay scattered along the airport road. Barriers and checkpoints now dotted the ten-mile highway in a vain attempt to stop the daily shootings and bombings along what U.S. soldiers dubbed “Route Irish” and Iraqis called “Death Street.” A year earlier, getting from the airport to the international district had been as simple as catching a shuttle. Now a ride into town meant booking a secure taxi, outfitted with armed escorts and bulletproof glass, that might cost as much as a thousand dollars per trip. Or, for a senior member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, it meant a seat on the steel-plated embassy van that raced between the terminal and the Green Zone at terrifying speed.

“
Not a good sign,” Ford thought to himself.

By every measure, Iraq was a more sinister place, especially for Americans. Though Ford, at forty-six, was one of the State Department’s
top Arabists, his light brown hair and blue eyes marked him as a Westerner. During his last assignment in Iraq, Ford had been held at gunpoint for two hours by a group of Shiite militiamen. This stint, he suspected, would be even more eventful.

Ford’s earlier tour had been his own idea. Weeks after the fall of Baghdad, the State Department had issued an urgent appeal for Arabic-speaking volunteers to help the struggling U.S.-led interim government. Ford was then a veteran Middle East diplomat with near-flawless language skills and a comfortable post as the number two official at the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain. Like many of his colleagues, he had been dubious about the Bush administration’s Iraq adventure. Still, the need appeared genuine. He raised his hand, and soon afterward he was boarding a military transport to Iraq, arriving in August 2003 in a capital city still reeling from the UN headquarters bombing that killed Sergio Vieira de Mello. His first assignment landed him in the Shiite holy city of Najaf as a diplomatic liaison to a contingent of U.S. marines in charge of securing the town. But the marines he met were mostly interested in getting out of Iraq as quickly as possible, and local leaders were caught up in a bloody feud between rival Shiite militias the Americans were seeking to disarm.

The encounter with the Shiite militiamen occurred in his first week on the job. Ford had a habit of plunging headlong into challenges, and in Najaf he set out at once to meet community leaders and build relationships away from the marine base. One Saturday afternoon, as he was meeting with one of the city’s prominent clerics, a group of twenty-five militiamen burst into the house with guns drawn and clustered around Ford and a marine major who had accompanied him on the visit. The gunmen grabbed a young Iraqi translator and dragged him outside, where they savagely punched and kicked him.

Ford grasped for the only weapon available to him: a bluff. He pulled within a few inches of the man who seemed to be in charge.

“I’m Robert Ford, the coalition’s representative here from Baghdad,” he began in Arabic. “I have a meeting with your militia leader at midnight tonight. You can tell him I’m going to be late because you’re holding me.”

It worked. The Americans were released, and the militants scurried to their vehicles, first releasing the Iraqi translator, whose injuries
were severe enough to warrant hospitalization. Minutes later, Ford, undaunted, was pressing his marine escort to call on the militia group’s commander immediately to try to leverage the episode into an agreement on disarming.

The marine glared at Ford, this hyperenergetic diplomat with an apparent death wish.

“Goddamn nut!” he swore. The Americans returned to their base.

Ford’s attempts at bridge building resumed the very next day, but the disappointments and frustrations piled up quickly. Months later, when he was formally asked to return to Iraq for a second stint, it wasn’t the physical danger that compelled him to say no. Nor was it the awful weather, the Spartan living conditions, the freezing-cold showers, or the impossibly complex, constantly shifting nature of Iraq’s sectarian and tribal rifts. It was the sense of waste and futility that hovered over nearly every endeavor like a toxic cloud.

“Oh, no, no, no, no. I already volunteered for Iraq once, and I don’t want to go back,” Ford told his boss over the telephone when the new request came. “It’s hopeless there. It’s not a serious effort. I want nothing to do with it.”

And yet back he went. Back to the Green Zone, with all its surreal contrasts: the palaces and palm-lined swimming pools, and the dreary barracks, with walls of sandbags that offered scant protection from the mortar shells that fell randomly from the sky, like exploding lawn darts flung by a giant. Back, despite his wife’s anger and his own personal misgivings about losing another chunk of his life—and possibly more—to what was surely a hopeless cause. Back, because he felt he had no choice.

“You can’t say no unless you quit,” he said afterward. “And we didn’t have enough money to quit.”

In fact, Ford’s transfer orders had come from the very top of the State Department. The newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had asked Secretary of State Colin Powell to appoint Ford to the prestigious post of political counselor in the U.S. Embassy. Though relatively junior for such an assignment, Ford had won admiration at Foggy Bottom for his internal memos and e-mails candidly assessing the Iraq war’s impact on the region. He had also earned admiration from colleagues for his bravery after years of
unflinching service in some of the Middle East’s roughest neighborhoods. A former Peace Corps volunteer conversant in five languages, he spent most of his professional life in provincial towns from the Moroccan interior to coastal Turkey, working like a journalist to gain local knowledge and build a source network. Nothing seemed to intimidate him, friends remembered.

“
He spent his entire career in dangerous places,” Robert Neumann, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said of Ford. “He’s not someone who stays in the [embassy], but someone who gets out and develops a very broad range of contacts. If you constantly have to feel totally safe, you’re basically useless in those jobs.”

This time, Ford’s role would be different. The Bush administration, sensing its Iraq experiment slipping out of control, had moved to expedite the installation of an interim Iraqi government that would quickly assume primary responsibility for securing the country and organizing elections. The insurgency that U.S. officials had been so slow to acknowledge was now an indisputable fact, and the costs—financial, political, and human—were soaring. With a U.S. presidential election looming, Ford later recalled, “there was a drive, full speed ahead, to turn over sovereignty to the Iraqis and get us out.”

To that end, the Coalition Provisional Authority would go out of business to make way for an Iraqi interim government headed by a new interim prime minister named Iyad al-Allawi. The transition officially occurred on June 28, 2004, less than a week after Ford arrived in the country. The Americans pledged to stick around only until Iraq was strong enough to stand on its own. How long would that take? Months, surely; perhaps even a year? No one knew. The Sunni towns north and west of Baghdad were sliding rapidly into lawlessness, and parts of Fallujah and Ramadi were effectively controlled by insurgents, some of them foreigners who had traveled to Iraq for jihad. The new Iraqi leadership and its U.S. backers desperately needed Sunni allies: respected, credible Sunnis who could help pacify the region and lead the Sunni tribes through a democratic transition that included elections and a unity government that shared power equally among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds.

One of Ford’s assignments was to identify such allies and try to
win them over. In his first month on the job, he traveled to Fallujah and arranged meetings with U.S. military commanders and Arab diplomats to get a sense of the task ahead of him. It was worse than he imagined. In Fallujah, the capital of the insurgency and traditionally the most rebellious city in Iraq, townspeople were in no mood to negotiate. The marines picked off occasional targets from their base on the outskirts of town, but most of the city remained a “denied area” to Americans in the weeks after the killing of the four American security contractors, officers told Ford.

“
Insurgents and foreign fighters largely operate without constraint within the city,” read a classified State Department cable describing Ford’s meeting with the marines. “Coalition forces are still seeking to disrupt insurgents and foreign jihadists with surgical strikes against Abu Musab al Zarqawi–related targets within the town in order to prevent Fallujah from operating as a safe-haven for extremists.”

A Jordanian diplomat with extensive contacts within the Sunni tribes described the situation as all but hopeless. Sunnis remained bitterly opposed to the American presence in Iraq, and though some were conflicted about the presence of foreign insurgents, others welcomed them as a bulwark against persecution by Shiite militias seeking to settle scores after decades of Sunni rule. Out of desperation, some tribal elders had even taken up the idea of restoring the Iraqi monarchy that had been overthrown in the 1958 coup, the Jordanian said.

“Sunnis are hostile, divided, leaderless, and unable to envision a political solution acceptable to others,” the diplomat told Ford, according to a cable that bore eerie echoes of Zarqawi’s own analysis of the country’s Sunni minority.

There was still another obstacle, much harder to gauge from diplomatic interviews. Somewhere in the western desert, Zarqawi was also making his own plans for Iraqi’s Sunni heartland. He, too, was gathering intelligence, recruiting allies, and laying the groundwork for future governance, though his vision differed from the Americans’ in every conceivable way.

Ford’s decades of diplomatic experience had shown that political solutions existed for almost every conflict. Eventually, even Sunnis
and Shiites would weary of killings and destruction and grope toward a solution that would allow the sides to peacefully coexist as Iraqis. But Zarqawi was no Iraqi, and he had no interest in coexisting. Zarqawi’s objective was to raze and tear down, leaving a scorched terrain too depleted to support the return of a secular country called Iraq.

—

The Iraqi city of Ramadi was not yet the “capital of the Islamic state of Iraq,” as Zarqawi’s followers would soon call it. But already, in the early summer of 2004, there was little doubt about who controlled the town.

A sprawl of low-rise concrete buildings and palm trees on the Euphrates River an hour west of Baghdad, Ramadi had the post-apocalyptic feel of a city that had been a free-fire zone between powerful armies. Decapitated buildings lined an abandoned market street strewn with broken concrete and shattered glass. People and cars darted and weaved as though pursued by invisible assailants. From behind walls of sandbags and Hesco barriers on the city’s outskirts, the local U.S military commanders proclaimed Ramadi to be under U.S. control. In reality, the Americans’ jurisdiction extended only to their bases and outposts and the range of their heavy machine guns. Marine patrols into the city’s neighborhoods invariably sent insurgents scurrying through the alleys like cockroaches.

Zaydan al-Jabiri watched them run, and said nothing. The rancher and Sunni tribal leader who had once tried to mediate disputes between Iraqis and Americans had long since given up on peacemaking. It wasn’t merely a frustrating occupation; it was dangerous. One of the sheikh’s oldest friends, a physics professor at Anbar University, had taken a risk by agreeing to meet with visiting Coalition Provisional Authority officials to talk about ways to control the spasms of violence that had turned so much of Ramadi into rubble. The day after the meeting, the professor was pulled from his car at an intersection and shot dead in the middle of the street.

In many more instances, death was frighteningly random. In the weeks after sixteen U.S. marines had been killed in a series of ambushes around the city, the Americans were in a vengeful mood.
Firefights erupted daily in residential neighborhoods, and bullets tore through bedrooms where families slept. Checkpoint sentries reflexively shot at motorists who approached too quickly or failed to heed warnings shouted at them in English. In the desert outside Ramadi, forty-five Iraqis had died when American warplanes stuck a building that U.S. officials insisted was an insurgent safe house. Iraqis said the jets mistakenly struck a wedding celebration. Amateur video showed bodies of women as well as children and infants.

Outraged and humiliated, Ramadi’s Sunnis initially welcomed the resistance fighters, including the foreign Islamists who poured into the city promising to drive away the invaders. Compared with the local insurgents, the Islamists were organized, disciplined, and fearless. But it was soon clear that their plans included more than fighting Americans. The foreigners commandeered houses and forcibly collected “taxes” and supplies from shopkeepers. Declaring themselves in charge, they rolled into residential neighborhoods armed with heavy weapons and a harsh moral code that banned drinking, smoking, female education, and Western fashion and hairstyles. One Ramadi man defiantly lit a cigarette in front of such an Islamist patrol and was shot dead on the spot.

Businesses suffered as well, despite the insurgents’ crude attempts at establishing courts and maintaining essential services. It was quickly clear that the rebels had neither aptitude for nor interest in running anything. Their checkpoints and roadside bombs made transportation a high-risk enterprise, even when the cargo consisted, as in Zaydan’s case, of cows and sheep. In town, the hallmarks of modern civilized life slipped away, one by one: garbage collection, phone service, electricity. Shopkeepers who tried to stay open found themselves subjected to arbitrary and occasionally bizarre regulations. In some neighborhoods, grocers were threatened with punishment if they displayed cucumbers and tomatoes in the same stall. The jihadists maintained that the vegetables resembled male and female body parts and should not be permitted to mingle.

Despite the hardships, some merchants chose to back the Islamists anyway, hoping at least to enjoy a measure of protection. Zaydan demurred. The presence of foreign troops in his city irritated him. Yet he was equally resentful of what he saw as the Islamists’ impertinence
in challenging the traditional authority of the tribes. He was appalled by the Islamists’ tactics and disdainful of their thuggish, swaggering behavior. He complained to friends about the personality cult that seemed to be developing around the Jordanian named Zarqawi, the black-clad phantom whose exploits were already legendary in some of the city’s neighborhoods.