It Happened on the Way to War (35 page)

“Wa ‘alaikum as-salaam.”

“Alone, please.”

The captain nodded at his deputy, who stood and walked out, closing the steel door behind him with a clank. “My office is your office.” The captain smiled.

“You've been busy this morning, Captain. How are you doing?”

“
Naam
. Busy, very busy. No time for kebabs.” He chuckled. Fallujah was famous for its giant grilled meat kebabs “as big as a child's arm.” I frequently opened my source meetings with a proclamation of love for the city's signature dish.

“Are you interrogating them?”

“Not yet.”

“Where are they?”

“They're here.”

“In this building?”

“Naam.”

The captain didn't offer information. I asked for it. Although I never caught him in a lie, our interactions were filled with illusion. He was a professional case officer. He backstopped well.

“May I see them?” It wasn't a question. We controlled the city.

“Naam.”

The captain took me to the adjacent room. A rat scampered across the floor as we opened another steel door, flooding the dank room with sunlight. It was an old, abandoned bathroom with filthy white tiles and the stench of excrement.

There was a whimper. The captain pointed to a stained mattress propped against the corner of the room. He walked up and shifted the mattress flat to one side of the wall, like he was opening the side door of a Dodge Caravan. In the corner a small person knelt, hands bound behind his back, blindfolded and sniveling.

“Stand up,” the captain ordered.

It wasn't a man. It was a boy, a kid with a face full of acne, a mound of black, lice-infested hair, and an oversized T-shirt. He looked no older than thirteen and reeked of stale sweat.

“This is one of the assassins?” I was too surprised to conceal my disbelief.

“Naam.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen.”

“And the other?”

“Naam.”

“Is he here?”

“Naam.”
The captain glanced to a mattress in another corner of the room. Behind that mattress an even smaller boy crouched above a puddle of urine with a large wet spot at the crotch of his jogging pants. The captain placed one hand under the boy's armpit and lifted him like a sack. The boy was so short that the top of his head hardly reached my chest.

“How old?”

“Eleven years.”

“No. Really?” The rubber band in my chest was about to snap. I lost my breath.
Could boys be assassins?

“Naam.”

The boy overheard our conversation but remained expressionless. I told the captain to move him to another part of the room away from the urine. I could tell from the captain's face that he hated when I told him what to do. He moved the boy and escorted us out of the room.

The captain led us to the getaway car in a parking lot for confiscated and blown-apart vehicles. I assumed the car would be something small and ordinary, perhaps an Opel, one of those box-shaped four-door imports from Germany that were ubiquitous in Iraq. Instead, the captain pointed at a slick, black 700 series BMW.

Mike and I had worked together closely enough in tough situations that we could read each other's reactions instantly. We didn't believe the captain. We doubted the kids had killed Sheikh Kamal, and we didn't know what to think of the BMW.

“How'd they do it?” I asked.

“Drive-by. Shot out of the window.”

“Where's the weapon?”

“In my office,” the captain replied. I knew the game, but it still frustrated me that I had to ask.

Mike noted the Baghdad license plate number on the BMW and we returned to the captain's office, where I inspected the AK-47 and wrote down its serial number. On my request, the captain brought the eleven-year-old boy to his office and left us alone. Mike removed the boy's blindfold. He squinted as his eyes adjusted to the harsh light of the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. I would've begun with condolences and comforting words were it not for the boy's calm, self-assured look.
Maybe he did kill Sheikh Kamal?

“What's your name?” Mike translated to Arabic.

The boy's body language conveyed a defiance that was completely out of place for his small body.

“Do you know why you're here?”

“No.” The boy looked at Mike.

“Please, look at me. Is the older boy your brother?”

“No.”

“Who is he?”

He didn't respond.

“Who is he?”

“A friend.”

“What were you doing in the BMW?”

“Nothing.” He answered in a flat tone, neither belligerent nor convincing.

“So you were in the BMW but doing nothing?”

He hesitated.

“Yes?”

“No.” He looked to the floor.

“Then how did the police arrest you?”

He hesitated again. “I don't know.”

“Son”—I touched his shoulder and sounded like my father—“look at me.”

He looked up, a man's eyes in a boy's body.

“I need to know why you're here. Tell me about how the police arrested you and your friend this morning.”

Just then the steel door opened and the captain's brown dress shoes clicked against the floor. The captain apologized for the interruption and informed me that Colonel Berger was at General Salah's office and had requested my immediate presence. Frustrated though feigning indifference, I thanked the captain, blindfolded the boy, and walked out with Mike.

Colonel Berger was speaking with a handful of officers outside General Salah's office. When he saw me, he broke from the group.

“Captain, what do you know?”

“Well, it's going to take some time, sir.”

“Salah mentioned they were young. What ages?”

“Eleven and fifteen, sir.”

“Eleven?”

I nodded.

Colonel Berger released a deep sigh.

“Yes, sir. It's pathetic.”

He paused. “Yes, Captain, it is. What else do we know?”

I distilled what I knew and briefed the colonel in less than a minute.

“So do you think they did it?”

“I don't know, sir, maybe.” The manner in which the eleven-year-old answered my questions filled me with doubt.

The colonel sighed and shook his head. “Eleven years old and his life is already behind him.”

At a certain point most soldiers and Marines made mental transitions and blocked out pain and surprise to function effectively. Emotions could be dealt with later, if at all. I can't speak for the colonel, but I had reached such a point. We needed to stay focused on the next decisions because they were coming rapidly and were about things that we could affect. For Colonel Berger, his next decision challenged him to balance our desire to empower the Iraqi police against the reality of their often brutal tactics, especially when they knew we weren't watching. Many Iraqis didn't differentiate between interrogation and torture. When the topics came up in meetings, a number of my Sunni Iraqi sources had told me a story of Saddam allegedly ordering a bottle to be shoved into a suspected defector's rectum and shattered with a bat. It was hearsay, but the fact that it was believed and passed on by Sunni Iraqis hinted at the context of fear in which they lived. In such a world, human rights had little meaning.

Colonel Berger decided to let the police take custody of the kids for the rest of the day after warning General Salah that they were to be treated humanely. “This will be a test,” the colonel concluded, “we'll see if they get any useful information.”

I agreed with Colonel Berger's decision. With a warning to General Salah and such a short time of custody, the likelihood that the boys would be abused was low. The colonel was already viewing the boys as part of the enemy apparatus, and I had begun to see them that way as well.

While waiting for nightfall at the old youth center, I spent some time with Kael Weston from the State Department. Shaken by the assassination, Kael told me he felt some responsibility for Sheikh Kamal's death, even though the sheikh knew that he was stepping into one of the world's most dangerous jobs. Kael handed me Sheikh Kamal's identification card, bloodstained with a bullet hole through the center. “His brother brought it to me this morning,” Kael said, choking up.

Although Kael may have been the only American who grieved Sheikh Kamal's assassination, most senior officers with whom I spoke realized its significance and worried that it would intimidate other Iraqis from taking public office. We didn't know it then, but the brazen attacks against Iraqis such as Sheikh Kamal and Grand Mufti Sheikh Hamza were backfiring. Sunni public opinion was turning in our favor, and the seeds of what would later be called the Al Anbar Awakening were taking their roots. Iraqi nationalists, such as General Salah, forged closer relationships with the United States in order to battle Al Qaeda, with the hope that they would be included in the new Iraqi power structure forming in Baghdad.

DUSK CAME AND the muezzins sounded their final calls to prayer from the minarets of Fallujah's many mosques. I returned to the office of the Iraqi intelligence captain.

“You look good. The interrogation must have gone well.” I painted a smile across my face. The captain appeared as polished and fresh as he had eight hours earlier.

“What do you mean?”

“The interrogation, you were questioning the boys, right?”

“No, not me. My men.”

There was a pause.

“Oh, well, how'd it go? How'd they do?” It was annoying that I had to ask.

“Not well. The boys, they're stubborn.”

“Stubborn?” It was a curious choice of a word.

“Yes, they didn't say anything.”

“Are you sure they were the ones?”

“Naam.”

“May I see them?”

“
Naam
, but they aren't here. They're coming.”

“You didn't interrogate them here?” We didn't know of another police facility in the city.

“No.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Please show me.” I looked him in the eye and took out my laminated map with satellite imagery of every building in Fallujah. If nothing else, I would take that piece of information from him.

The captain placed the tip of his long pinkie fingernail on a square roof deep in Hai al-Shuhada, the Martyrs' District. I detected a scowl beneath his thick black mustache. It was the first true emotion I may have elicited from him.

“Thanks, Captain.
Shukran
.”

THE BOYS DIDN'T show any signs of abuse when I dropped them off at our detention facility back at Camp Fallujah with our interrogation team. Captain Joe Burke had recently moved with the division headquarters from Ramadi to Fallujah. He met me at the chow hall for a midnight dinner.

“Habari soldja?”
I greeted a strapping Ugandan guard in a creased khaki uniform outside the chow hall.

“Mzuri, Captain. Jambo,”
he replied, popping to attention.

Joe was fluent in Korean. He found our Swahili exchange amusing. “That comin' in handy?”

A year earlier a suicide bomber had attacked an army chow hall in northern Iraq and killed fifteen soldiers. The military reacted by sending private security contractors to every large chow hall in Iraq. Lured by the relatively high pay, our chow hall guards had been among the Ugandan military's most capable soldiers. I spoke with them from time to time about the Lord's Resistance Army, a terrorist group in northern Uganda known for conscripting child soldiers and mutilating civilians.

“Sounds like we could use them in the field instead of checking IDs,” Joe said, half-joking. The Ugandan guards were professional and vigilant, though they may have followed a more repressive approach to counterinsurgency.

“One more way to outsource this war,” I replied. By some estimates there were as many contractors in Iraq as U.S. military members. Unlike our Ugandan guards, most of our contractors worked in jobs that weren't directly related to security. Contractors ran our laundry service, the barbershop, and all the other stores on base. They served as mechanics and translated documents. Most of the contractors were foreigners who worked for the U.S. conglomerate Halliburton, which made a nice profit on each employee it hired from Bosnia, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and other developing nations. It would have helped economic development if the jobs went to Iraqis. Unfortunately, insurgents aggressively targeted the few Iraqis who had access to U.S. bases, especially our local interpreters. Joe and I had supervised numerous counterintelligence investigations on Iraqi employees blackmailed by threats to their families.

We sat down with our trays of food and griped about the chow hall. Proud of our ability to do without, we shared a disdain for the place. The all-you-can-eat buffet with Baskin-Robbins ice cream, a dozen flat-screen TVs, and other amenities was excessive. We felt guilty sitting there as most of our Marines were in the field conducting high-risk night operations and living for weeks on packaged military meals specially manufactured to induce constipation.

I gave Joe an update on Sheikh Kamal's assassination and mentioned the Iraqi captain's line about the boys being stubborn.

“It's true,” Joe reacted, “eleven-year-olds can be stubborn. Who's taking them into the booth?”

“Sergeant A.B.” He was one of our best interrogators.

“Good. We'll find out. May take time, but he'll get the info. You okay?” Joe asked, nudging me with his elbow.

“Yeah, yeah. I'm fine. I mean, just need some coffee.”

“So, what's next?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean after Iraq?” Joe, like his predecessor, Mike Dubrule, was a great commander. He cared about his Marines, and he took an active interest in their career development.