The 9/11 Wars (43 page)

The next morning two American infantry officers embedded with a force of new Iraqi ‘special police commandos’ in Samarra left their base at around 6.30 a.m. to set up a cordon and search operation in the neighbourhood adjacent to the mosque. It was the third such operation in three days. Though they had received no intelligence that the shrine might be attacked, they had been repeatedly told ammunition and explosives were being stored inside the rambling complex of buildings around the edifice of the main mosque. It was not clear, however, who was storing what, and as regulations prevented them searching religious sites without solid evidence the Americans had started combing the surrounding districts instead.
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The two operations the previous mornings had turned up nothing. This time, even before the search could begin, there was an explosion. Then came silence and then a second blast, much bigger than the first. ‘You blink and shudder and hunch down. You’re thinking: “What the heck happened there?” ’ Major Jeremy Lewis, one of the two US officers at the scene, later recalled. ‘My gunner says, “Sir, it’s fucking gone! It’s gone.” I’m like, “No it’s not gone, it’s not gone.” But then the wind carried the plume of smoke away.’
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The entire main dome of the shrine had indeed disappeared.

The Shia police commandos, Lewis remembered, were ‘very, very upset … like when one of them had died’. The al-Askariya mosque complex contained a shrine to the twelfth ‘hidden’ imam, ‘Muhammed al-Mahdi’, the ultimate saviour of human kind, kept from the world by God until the day of his return. It also contained the tombs of the tenth and eleventh of the Shia imams, the ultimate Mahdi’s immediate predecessors. A site of immense importance for all Shias, though particularly for those of the ‘Twelver’ strand, the Samarra shrine had been carefully chosen as a target to provoke a violent sectarian response. For a short period, almost as if people did not want to accept the implications of the act, the attack was blamed on the ‘Jews’ and ‘Americans’. But the bombing came at the end of a long series of similar strikes directed at the Shia by extremists in networks run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi which had killed hundreds of people over previous months and wounded thousands more.
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Only six weeks earlier around sixty had died when suicide bombers had hit a shrine in Karbala, and the culprits of this latest attack were fairly obvious even before the yellow dust of the ninth-century mosque had settled.
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Within hours, carloads of gunmen from the al-Mahdi Army were pouring out of Sadr City, the huge Shia slum in east Baghdad, and shooting up Sunni parts of the city. Across the country thirty Sunni mosques were rocketed, sprayed with automatic fire or incinerated. The next day, just to stoke the fires further, Sunni militants in police uniforms set up false roadblocks a few miles south of Sadr City and executed forty-five Shias.
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Similar incidents were occurring wherever Shia and Sunni communities lived close to one another, each designed to accelerate the plunge into all-out sectarian warfare. Over the next weeks, the pace of such killings picked up. ‘The day [the Samarra shrine] blew up every last one of us said it was the beginning of the civil war in Iraq,’ Major Lewis remembered in his post-tour interview.
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The signs of the impending civil war had been plain for some time. The conflict was partly a result of the longstanding tensions within Iraq and partly due to the total failure of the coalition’s military and political strategies from the second Falluja battle of November 2004 through to the summer of 2006. On the political front, the three national polls held during the period which had been supposed to provide the political architecture that would lead Iraq into a new era of democratic progress, multi-ethnic harmony and non-sectarian stability had instead exacerbated rather than healed the divisions between Iraq’s main communities. Largely boycotted by the Sunnis, they had resulted in successive victories for Iraq’s Shia. The big electoral gains of the United Iraqi Alliance, which broadly reflected the popular will and culture of the religiously and socially conservative Shia masses, meant control of most of the government apparatus was in Shia hands, and with the Sunni stranglehold on political power broken for ever, many in the Shia community felt there was no longer any need for the restraint once counselled by conservative religious leaders such as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. If anything, they believed, Shia dominance needed to be reinforced to ensure that there was no chance of the beaten Sunnis returning to power. Many simply sought power and money. Ibrahim Jafaari, the weak and incompetent compromise candidate eventually chosen as prime minister after months of negotiation, proved both unable and unwilling to rein in the growing excesses of either those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, whose representatives had done well enough in the polls to be rewarded with effective control of the Ministry of Health, or the hardline Islamists of the Iran-linked SCIRI, who had got the Ministry of the Interior, from which they ousted all Sunnis before turning the police into an armed Shia militia that collaborated in sectarian killings. With no effective administration or law enforcement and a legacy of graft from the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, corruption had flourished on an astonishing scale. Inevitably the meagre services that had been restored or maintained in 2004 had collapsed across much of the country, though Sunni areas suffered worse as resources were diverted to Shia communities by the now largely Shia-run central government. If, towards the end of the year, the flow of refugees from Iraq eased up, it was only because all those who could leave had already done so.
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Militarily, too, the situation had deteriorated. The American generals, driven by an administration whose policy was to make the Iraqis ‘stand up’ so American troops could ‘stand down’ and leave, were caught in vicious circle.
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Aiming to weaken the insurgents sufficiently to allow a handover to the still under-equipped, poorly trained, demoralized and politicized Iraqi security forces, they launched successive efforts with names like Operation Dagger, Sword, Spear, Quick Strike, Iron Fist and Steel Curtain in a bid to clear the crucial Anbar province. But the gruelling and resource-intensive battles fought along the Euphrates valley towards the Syrian border merely fuelled the insurgency. In 2004 the Americans had lost 848 dead and 7,989 wounded. In 2005 their casualties remained as high.
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Iraqi security forces lost many more, and at the end of the year were no nearer acquiring the capabilities to take over from the Americans than at the beginning. The US strategy was fundamentally flawed. It was based on handing over to a government that could both militarily defeat the insurgents and work towards national reconciliation. However, not only were the Iraqi government and its forces incapable of defeating anyone, but, certainly after the elections of 2005, their collective sectarian bias was probably the primary obstacle to any national unity.

Worse, in preparation for an eventual handover and departure, US troops were pulled back from city centres into huge Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) with massive defences behind which soldiers could sleep in air-conditioned barrack blocks, eat imported steaks and lobster tails in the vast dining facilities, buy DVDs, phone home and go to the gym. Relations with the local population for the bulk of the 140,000-odd American troops in Iraq were limited to relatively hostile encounters while on patrol. The US military existed in Iraq like some kind of hermetic circulatory system within the body of the country. Servicemen flew from the US, arrived in Iraq from Kuwait in army planes, drove in armoured vehicles, lived and ate behind triple blast walls in bases supplied by huge convoys that arrived from Kuwait or Turkey, carrying even water and salad. Flying over the truck parks of the huge logistic base at Balad, effectively the beating heart of the American military effort in Iraq, was the only way to appreciate the size of the undertaking and the degree to which it was self-sufficient. Hundreds and hundreds of vehicles needed to ferry the supplies consumed by the vast apparatus of the army formed queues for miles around the base, ready to be emptied or refilled. Returning to the base from a twelve-hour patrol with one unit, the author witnessed a grimly amusing argument between infantrymen and the military traffic policeman who tried to book them for speeding. The only Iraqis were menial staff, a few advisers, a handful of translators and an unknown number of detainees. The special forces units, who were supposed to show a degree of cultural sensitivity that was not expected from the average infantryman, were paradoxically among the most isolated as they were charged with picking up ‘high-value targets’ on night raids, an activity unlikely to engender any relations at all, let alone cordial ones, with local people. One special forces officer commented that he had never met an Iraqi who was not in handcuffs.
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Bases like that at Balad were the result of various factors. First was the weight of decades of previous practice. Back in Bagram in Afghanistan in 2002 there had never been any questions over what sort of base was going to be built there. It was always going to be a small corner of America transplanted to a foreign field. One influence, as mentioned earlier, was the example of the bases constructed in the Middle East for operations over Iraq in the 1990s. In Saudi Arabia, due to the sensitivity of the American presence in the Land of the Two Holy Places, all troops had effectively been confined to their bases even if, given the cultural gulf between most American servicemen and women and the societies around them, there had been limited reasons why any of the 10,000 or so who were stationed in the region would mix at all with locals.
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A second influence was the autonomy that had so marked American military communities based overseas in Europe or east Asia through much of the Cold War. The historic isolation of American forces deployed abroad thus had long roots. It reached, however, an entirely new scale with the deployments of the 9/11 Wars.

A second logic was that of General John P. Abizaid and other senior officers and officials in the US government. Abizaid, the commander of the US Central Command from 2003 to 2007 and one of the most intellectually able and aware of the American higher military command, had a Lebanese Christian Arab father and had learned Arabic and this, rightly or wrongly, gave his opinions significantly more weight than they might otherwise have had. Abizaid’s ‘antibody theory’ held that societies, especially Muslim and Arab societies, inevitably reject the foreign. The profile of American soldiers in Iraqi towns – as in Afghan towns – should thus be as low as possible. Their presence on the streets and amid the people should be minimized to avoid provoking automatic rejection due to wounded personal pride, a sense of national, religious or ethnic identity or simple misunderstanding. This had influenced strategic thinking in Afghanistan and, by 2005, coincided perfectly with the desire of the increasingly troubled Bush administration to limit casualties and its avowed belief that, when it comes to democracy, too much care can kill the patient. Again and again, the mantra ‘we will stand down as they stand up’ was repeated and the American military withdrew further, out of towns and major cities, into their huge bases, sending ever more optimistic assessments up their chain of command.

But the reality of war in Ramadi, Tal Afar, Kut and hundreds of other Iraqi towns and cities was very different, and the seemingly aimless and endless combat, the mounting casualties and of course the isolation inevitably took their toll on morale and discipline. While the second Falluja battle had been winding down, a unit of American marines in the upper Euphrates town of Haditha had shot dead twenty-four Iraqis in the aftermath of an IED attack that had killed a well-liked twenty-year-old corporal. At least fifteen of the casualties were unarmed Iraqis killed in their homes, including seven women and three children. ‘I couldn’t see their faces very well – only their guns sticking into the doorway. I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny,’ Eman Waleed, a nine-year-old child, told Tim McGirk of
Time
magazine.
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An old man in a wheelchair had been shot nine times.
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As bad as the incident itself was the profound lack of interest of the Marines’ senior officers. The killings, which provoked uproar in the USA when they were revealed, were indicative of a much broader malaise. A US army survey at the time showed 40 per cent of soldiers disliked the Iraqis and 38 per cent believed they did not have to treat them with respect.
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About two-thirds of Marines and about half of army troops said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian and 10 per cent admitted they had personally been involved in abuse.
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In the south, British confidence in their ‘softer’ touch, cultural sensitivity and discipline had long looked somewhat misplaced. The cheery ‘salaamaleikums’ and waves from the back of open-top Land Rovers of 2003 were a distant memory. Through 2005 British troops progressively withdrew into fortified bases in Basra and other southern cities which, if less luxurious than their American counterparts, were every bit as cut off from local populations. Their positions came under constant rocket and mortar fire, the local police were almost entirely infiltrated by various Shia Islamist groups and gangs fighting each other and foreign troops and central government control was nominal. Graffiti seen by the author on the inside of a bunker on one British post was telling: ‘I am in a world of shit,’ it read, a quote from Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 Vietnam war film
Full Metal Jacket
. The isolation of the troops had predictable consequences. These were compounded by the farcical idea that British forces somehow understood their environment better than their American counterparts. In September 2005 two British special forces soldiers were taken captive as they attempted to drive around Basra ‘undercover’ on a mission to build up a ‘pattern of life picture’.
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Astonishingly, the soldiers had believed that darkening their skins, wearing cheap local shirts and driving a local car would allow them to ‘blend in’. They were naturally as obvious as a group of Iraqi special forces trying to do something similar in a major British city would have been and were swiftly spotted and detained by Iraqi police. It took a full-scale armoured assault to free them.
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Over the next two years, the British troops would gradually leave Basra entirely, ending up cantoned out in a big base at the airport, from where they launched occasional raids into the city but otherwise did little.