The 9/11 Wars (74 page)

In the evening, as the sun began to dip, life returned to the streets. The traffic choked once again at the checkpoints. In the upmarket central Karada neighbourhood, where barber Jaffar had reopened his shop after returning to Baghdad after eighteen months in Jordan, the pavements filled with shoppers inspecting windows of shops selling furniture and white goods. Jaffar’s own barber shop, newly refurbished, was full. On days after bombings, few chanced his ground-floor salon with its open glass windows, but as there had been a week’s calm, business was good. Near by, new cars dropped off wealthy families in front of newly opened restaurants. On Abu Nawas Street by the Tigris, cafés served the traditional grilled fish and beer to groups of men, and couples walked through the nearby park along the riverside. Across the city, a thousand games of football were underway. By late evening, the promenaders, who had grown more numerous as the temperatures dropped, began to thin. A few revellers sought further entertainment. Most went home before the midnight curfew, and for the first four hours of the next day the streets were empty but for the patrols until, finally, at 4 a.m., as the eastern sky began to lighten, the bakers and the faithful once more headed out, and the roof sleepers again rolled up their bedding and set a pot to boil water for tea.

The Iraq of 2009 was not that of 2008 and was profoundly different from that of 2007. Each year had seen a new combination of the kaleidoscope of different elements, internal and external, that determined the overall evolution of the battered country. None of the successive Iraqs were ‘very pretty’, as one US State Department official who had rotated in and out of Baghdad over the previous thirty-six months commented. ‘We are talking degrees of ugliness,’ he explained. ‘And the degree of ugliness today is a bit less ugly than yesterday.’
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For compared to what had gone before, it was difficult to argue that the situation in Iraq had not improved. The country was more fragmented than perhaps it had ever been, split along ethnic, sectarian and political lines, with significant external interference, rampant corruption, patchy rule of law, deep poverty, poor security and high levels of criminal, political and extremist violence but, eighteen months after the first of the American troops that had been deployed for the Surge had begun to pull out, there were few who still predicted the imminent catastrophic collapse of order in the country. Indeed, those looking at Iraq from Washington or London, and there were a diminishing number of them, given the focus on the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, saw something that was beginning to resemble the ‘messy, sloppy status quo’ that the then Senator Obama had described back in April 2008 as an acceptable endstate for the US mission there. ‘If we had presented the Iraq of today in a Powerpoint five years ago and said this is what you get for a trillion dollars: four thousand dead American servicemen and women and pretty much all our diplomatic capital in the Arab world, the Islamic world and beyond, then I don’t suppose anyone would have been particularly impressed,’ a State Department official said. ‘But we are … where we are. And where we are is better than where we were.’
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If the situation in Iraq in 2009 was undoubtedly better than it had been two or three years previously, it was much more difficult to be sure that any progress would be maintained in the future. Iraq had stepped back from the brink, but quite what happened next was still very unclear. The optimistic scenario saw the country treading a slow, haphazard but steady path towards relative stability and prosperity, gradually resolving the thorny outstanding issues such as the sharing of its immense oil wealth between its various communities, the contested status of the northern city of Kirkuk, its exact relationship with neighbours like Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and how to integrate its Sunni minority into a majority Shia state. The pessimistic scenario saw a gradual loss of all the ground made up since 2007, accelerating violence, a resurgent al-Qaeda, a new civil war and worse chaos than ever previously seen. The two divergent paths naturally started from the same point: the precarious fragility of the immediate post-Surge period.

The critical period in consolidating the gains made during the Surge had been the long year from the end of operations in November 2007 through to the provincial elections of January 2009. As discussed in
Chapter 11
, critical to the success of the Surge had been four major factors: the effective victory of the Shias in the civil war and the resultant redundancy of Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army as well as the organization’s internal problems; the ‘Awakening’ of the Sunni tribes; the continuing structural weaknesses of al-Qaeda in Iraq; and the actions of regional powers. Since the end of the Surge, two of these major trends had definitively progressed in a positive direction, deepening and broadening, contributing enormously to the relative stabilization of the situation. A third, the continued interference in Iraq by its neighbours, did not immediately look likely to send the country back to the cusp of total breakdown. The evolution of the fourth, the retreat of the jihadi militants, was harder to chart.

The effective collapse of the al-Mahdi Army as a fighting and social force had been evident within months of the end of the Surge. Its authority, coherence and legitimacy had already been undermined by indiscipline, criminality and growing interference from Tehran. With the threat in Baghdad from Sunni death squads greatly reduced, the militia’s role as protector of Shia communities had disappeared and with it much of its popular support. In a series of rolling offensives ordered by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki through the spring of 2008, first Basra and the smaller southern cities and then Sadr City in Baghdad were all retaken by government security forces backed by American airpower and logistics. Fragmented, discredited and with its leader in self-imposed exile in the holy city of Qom in Iran, the al-Mahdi Army was unable to sustain any serious resistance, losing up to 1,000 fighters by May 2008.
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The force was soon effectively ‘stood down’, and within weeks its authority had evaporated even in those former strongholds where it had retained a presence. The tens of thousands of young men who had joined al-Sadr’s organization over previous years remained in their homes or on the street, but the balance of power had clearly shifted. ‘The Iraqi government broke their branches and took down their tree,’ Abu Amjad, a civil servant in the northern Baghdad district of Sadr City said.
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Radical Shia groups, some trained, equipped and directed by elements within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, continued campaigns of violence and intimidation in much of the south and were still present, if less active, in Baghdad, and al-Sadr, who appeared to be hoping to convert the mass militia he once led into a political and cultural movement with an armed wing along the lines of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, still retained the loyalty and even adulation of a significant portion of young, poor, working-class, urban Shia men. ‘Moqtada al-Sadr is a great man and a perfect leader, and without him all the Shia in Iraq would have been killed or live their lives oppressed and humiliated, and Iraq would have been destroyed by the occupiers and al-Qaeda,’ said Qahtan Ali Hussein, a twenty-four-year-old al-Mahdi Army fighter.
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But the days of major street battles with American or Iraqi security forces seemed to be definitively over. The Friday prayers and sermons that had once seen frenzied demonstrations of support for the young cleric still drew big crowds but were now quieter affairs. In the areas they had once controlled, the al-Mahdi Army’s strictures on Western haircuts, dress and music were no longer enforced or obeyed. Local leaders no longer received their protection money, and the lucrative rackets the Army had run had disintegrated. ‘I can buy [cooking] gas for a tenth of what it was, I can listen to what I want to, I don’t have to hide my trade either,’ said Jaffar, the barber.
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Marginalized politically, former al-Mahdi Army fighters turned on those marginalized socially, attacking, torturing and killing hundreds of local homosexuals.
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A measure of stability, it had been frequently said, would come to Iraq when the Shia had recognized they were the winners and the Sunni minority understood they were the losers in the deposition of Saddam Hussein and the civil conflict that had followed. The Awakening, which had seen the Sunni tribes of Anbar and eventually Baghdad and surrounding provinces join with the Americans against al-Qaeda-affiliated or inspired groups, had been rooted in part in the realization that continuing resistance to either foreign occupying forces or the demographically stronger Shia community was likely to be counterproductive. Through 2008, the forlorn plight of the Sunni fighters who had turned against the religious extremists in Anbar and elsewhere underlined the degree to which the community had lost out in the fighting in 2006 and 2007. Promised jobs in the new Iraqi security forces, the ‘Sons of Iraq’ found themselves shut out by Iraq’s predominantly Shia political leaders and largely abandoned by those they had once fought alongside. The Americans, though they pressed for more of the 130,000-odd fighters they had recruited to end up wearing Iraqi National Army or police uniforms, understood too that the government they protected neither had the will nor the means to incorporate such a large number of men, many of whom had played significant roles in the sectarian violence of previous years, into the new security forces.
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In Anbar, former ‘Sons of Iraq’ had found jobs in local police forces, but in Baghdad itself or in provinces like Diyala they were largely left to their own devices, their salaries paid late if at all, their relatives regularly targeted by those they had fought against over previous years. Without their powerful allies in the American military, the Sons of Iraq were vulnerable, and in the twelve months after the Surge, around 550 had been killed.
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‘We became victims,’ Hassan Abdel Karim, who led one Baghdad group, said with disgust.
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Dyaa Jameil, a thirty-five-year-old member of an Awakening council from the tough Sunni Baghdad neighbourhood of al-Doura, described his and his comrades’ future as ‘like a dark night without the light of the moon’.
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That these men, who had been in the vanguard of the insurgency back in 2003 and 2004, appeared to reject any return to armed resistance to the government was an indication of just how weak they judged their own position to be. In the provincial elections of January 2009, Sunnis voted, and even if the turn-out in Anbar was only 40 per cent, it was still a vast improvement. Some even voted for al-Maliki, who, though a conservative Shia, had acquired some credibility as a ‘national’ leader through dismantling the al-Mahdi Army the previous spring. For the first time in any of the polls held since the invasion of 2003, security for the elections, which passed off relatively uneventfully, was provided by local Iraqi forces. Only 191 Iraqis were reported to have died in violence during January, the lowest monthly toll since American and British tanks had crossed the berm from Kuwait just under six years before.
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Optimists saw the low casualty figures as evidence that the al-Qaeda threat in Iraq was over. As ever, gauging the potential danger posed by radical Sunni jihadi extremism within Iraq was problematic – as it was more generally. Compared to the darkest days of 2004, 2005 or 2006, when ‘al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers’, or al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), had posed a genuine strategic threat to Iraq and to the region, the situation in 2009 was undoubtedly much improved. The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the successor of AQI, had failed in its core project of establishing a local bridgehead from which to wage a campaign to create a new caliphate in the Middle East.
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Even within Iraq, the capabilities of the jihadi militants had been much reduced. Though the narrative of global jihad continued to draw some foreign volunteers, the numbers were negligible compared to the earlier period of 2003 to 2006. As in the Middle East more generally, the Islamic militants in Iraq had been geographically marginalized, forced successively out of Anbar and Baghdad, then out of the densely populated semi-agricultural zones around the city where they had once been well implanted, and finally restricted to Nineveh province in the north-west. The extremist groups were scattered and fragmented and had suffered significant casualties; their senior and middle-level operatives had been decimated by the increasingly sophisticated and effective American-trained Iraqi special forces. The use of female suicide bombers, as well as that of the very young and the mentally ill or disabled, reinforced their loss of broad popular legitimacy.

Yet the tenacity of the ‘jihadis’ nonetheless surprised many observers. The evolution of radical militancy in Iraq had mirrored that in other theatres of the 9/11 Wars. The huge pressure under which the groups had existed for many years had forced radical evolution. Hierarchies had been flattened, capability sacrificed for resilience, mass mobilization based on the appeal of a radical ideology had been replaced by recruitment determined by association, family links, shared tribal or other community connections. Local militants now dominated the various fragmented groups that together constituted the phenomenon of al-Qaeda-style militancy in Iraq.
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In Mosul, the capital of Nineveh province and a metropolis with a population of 1.8 million, a variety of specific local conditions had been leveraged by the extremists to secure a base.
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Chief amongst them was the ongoing tension between the newly confident Kurds and the large local Sunni Arab community, which allowed the extremists to fulfil the same role as in the early days in Anbar and Baghdad, posing as protectors of the latter against the former. With limited rule of law in the city, there were few alternatives for Sunnis scared of losing their homes and livelihoods other than to turn to the militant groups. Another factor helping the militants was the city’s geographic position astride the trails that led through the desert from the Syrian border. These allowed extremist groups both to receive supplies from over the frontier and, crucially, to build mutually beneficial relationships with local tribes which had long earned their living from smuggling.
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Avoiding the errors of the 2003 to 2006 period, the extremists cooperated with local sheikhs rather than trying to appropriate their businesses. Finally, as Mosul had been home to a high number of Ba’athist former army officers who themselves had taken up arms against the Americans and the Baghdad government and continued to be responsible for the bulk of attacks on government or American forces in the area, the extremists found willing allies on the ground.
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The steady ideological convergence between the once aggressively secular Ba’athists and the ‘jihadis’ also helped smooth relations. And despite successive operations by Iraqi security forces, which the militants tended simply to avoid confronting, and the election of a hardline Sunni chauvinist provincial government and governor, Nineveh province remained ‘bandit country’ throughout 2008 and 2009. It thus constituted the single most significant base of violent radical activism between Morocco and the Afghan–Iranian border. Western intelligence services judged the threat that this base posed to be ‘relatively restricted’, pointing out that the militants based there showed little interest in exporting violence overseas. However, as repeated statements by local extremist strategists made clear, the Iraqi extremists’ aim was not to wage ‘international jihad’ immediately but to plunge their country into chaos to allow them to take power, establish an ‘Islamic state’ and then launch such global operations on a large stage at a later stage, if they were necessary. The al-Qaeda-linked groups demonstrated that they retained significant capabilities despite the pressure on them with a series of massive and technically sophisticated bombs directed at ministries, hotels, embassies and Shia targets through the summer of 2009.