The Assassins' Gate (34 page)

“Sergio, answer me, are you alive?”

“
Oui,
Ghassan.”

Two floors had fallen on his legs. Soon American soldiers arrived and hustled Salamé out of the precarious building. From outside, he helped in the effort to remove debris. He kept talking so that the wounded man wouldn't lose consciousness, but after a while the voice stopped answering. At eight-fifteen that evening, soldiers finally succeeded in clearing away the rubble, and Salamé identified the body of his friend.

Twenty-one others died with Vieira de Mello, including close aides, foreign humanitarian workers, and Iraqi employees of the UN. Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks, the Iranian-born human rights official, had left her office directly below Vieira de Mello's a few minutes before the blast to get coffee, and so she survived. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, but there was also suspicion that some of the building's guards, holdovers from the former regime, might have been involved. Ten days later, at the end of Friday prayers, an even more powerful car bomb killed Mohamed Baqr al-Hakim, spiritual leader of the largest Shiite party, and almost a hundred others outside the holiest mosque of Shiite Islam, in Najaf. And on September 20, Aqila al-Hashemi was shot in the stomach as she left her house to drive to a meeting of the Governing Council; she died five days later. Within two months, the number of foreign UN personnel in Iraq would dwindle from 650 to about forty, with none in Baghdad.

Paul Bremer was among those at the airport who said farewell to Sergio Vieira de Mello's coffin as it was loaded onto a plane for Brazil. Then he returned to the Republican Palace and the job of governing Iraq alone.

7

T
HE
C
APTAIN

SHORTLY AFTER THE FALL OF BAGHDAD
, CNN aired footage of a Marine, confronted with a crowd of angry Iraqis, who shouts at them, “We're here for your fucking freedom! Now
back up!
”

When the war of liberation turned into an occupation, tens of thousands of soldiers who thought they would be home by June saw their rotations out postponed, and then again, and again. They soon became the occupation's most visible face. Combat engineers trained to blow up minefields sat through meetings of the Baghdad water department; airborne troops used to jumping in and out of missions in a matter of days spent months setting up the Kirkuk police department; soldiers of the Third Infantry Division who spearheaded the invasion passed out textbooks in a Baghdad girls' school. The peacekeeping missions in the Balkans had given some of them a certain amount of preparation, but there was never any training for the massive project that fell on the shoulders of soldiers in Iraq. The CPA was months away from setting up provincial offices. Ray Salvatore Jennings, a consultant to USAID, who wrote one of the forecasts on postconflict Iraq that ended up on Bremer's desk, kept coming across young officers trying to establish government in midsized cities who told him, “I'm doing the best I can but I don't know how to do this, I don't have a manual. You got a manual? Anything you can offer me I'd be profoundly grateful for.” A civil affairs captain asked Jennings's colleague Albert Cevallos for training in Robert's Rules of Order 101. Donald Rumsfeld's nightmare of an army of nation builders came to pass all over Iraq.

A rifle company commander named Captain John Prior showed me his war log for the spring of 2003. After Charlie Company of the Second Battalion, Sixth Infantry Regiment, First Armored Division had fought its way up from Kuwait to the Baghdad airport, Captain Prior's unit began an odyssey around central Iraq that lasted the better part of three months, before finally arriving at its permanent location in south Baghdad. Prior's war log tells one story of soldiers coming to realize that what President Bush, on May 1, called the end of “major combat operations” was only the beginning.

Prior was a twenty-nine-year-old from Indiana, six feet tall and stringy (he lost twenty-five pounds in his first five months in Iraq). He had joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps at a small engineering college in Indiana, then decided to make the military his career. His undergraduate's face, deadpan sarcasm, and bouncy slew-footed stride did not prepare you for his toughness. “Some people are just born to do something,” Prior said. By his own account, he loved Army life, the taking and giving of orders. “The sappy reasons people say they're in the military, and people say, ‘Nah, they can't be'—those are the reasons I'm in the military. When Peace Corps can't quite get it done and diplomacy fails and McDonald's can't build enough franchises to win Baghdad over, that's when the military comes in.”

Charlie Company's first mission after the fall of Baghdad sent Prior west to the city of Ramadi, to evacuate the body of an Argentinian journalist named Veronica Cabrera who had been killed in a highway accident. Prior and his soldiers were the first conventional forces to enter Ramadi, which was already—in late April—becoming a center of Baathist resistance. They were asked by Special Forces and the CIA to stay on for a few days and help patrol the town. As Prior's convoy of Bradleys, Humvees, and armored personnel carriers drove down the main east-west road, a mosque began blaring anti-American rhetoric, and soon a crowd of three or four hundred Iraqis gathered. Prior and his soldiers found themselves in the middle of a riot, with insults, fruit, shoes, two-by-fours, rocks, and finally chunks of concrete flying at them and their vehicles. The Americans didn't shoot and no one was seriously injured; in his log Prior commends his soldiers for their restraint. That night, Prior sent out another patrol along the same route, “to show the population of Ramadi that we are tougher and more resilient than they are and that we are here to stay.” This patrol came under small-arms fire from dark alleyways, but the shooters melted away before the Americans could find them.

In the following days in Ramadi, and then in nearby Falluja, Prior records a series of raids on houses and weapons markets. “Our soldiers are becoming experienced enough to know the difference between being nice and cordial to people and when it is time to not be nice and throw people to the ground.” Charlie Company is making the difficult transition from combat to stability operations—from Phase III to Phase IV—and Prior is pleased with his soldiers' resourcefulness. Then something new and strange enters the margins of his account: Iraqis.

In Ramadi, a man who speaks broken English among other Iraqis suddenly pulls Prior to the side, cups his hands around the captain's ear, and whispers in flawless English, “I am an American, take me with you.” When Prior tries to learn more, the man slips back into broken English and then clams up. On another day, another man, accompanied by his wife and small child, approaches a soldier at the gate of the university. Speaking perfect English with a British accent, he tells the soldier his story: He went to school in England, returned to Iraq in 1987, and has been unable to get out ever since. The man warns the soldier not to trust Iraqis, that things are not what they seem. Suddenly, a white truck pulls up and seven well-dressed men get out. The man at the gate quickly disappears with his wife and child before the Iraqis can speak to him. Prior and his first sergeant, Mark Lahan, track him down at home to find out whether he and his family are in danger. Now using broken English, the man tells them that everything is fine.

In another mysterious incident, an Iraqi approaches Lahan on a night patrol and bluntly asks, “How are things in Baghdad? Have there been any suicide bombings? Have any Americans been killed?” When Lahan replies that nothing of the sort has happened, the man looks surprised. Prior notes in his log, “It is interesting to see that here, after the bulk of the fighting is done in this country, the disinformation campaign by Iraqi hard-liners is still in effect, it will be a long time coming to get these people to be able to trust [one] another again and to understand how a government and law and order is supposed to work.” In fact, it isn't disinformation from regime diehards. The guerrilla war is about to begin.

“The entire situation seemed very weird,” Prior writes on April 26, after five days in Ramadi. “It is clear now that they are not as happy as they say that we are here. For the first time in awhile, I felt extremely nervous being in such close proximity to Iraqi nationals. I do not trust them.” In another entry, from Falluja, he writes: “The Iraqis are an interesting people. None of them have weapons, none of them know where weapons are, all the bad people have left Falluja, and they only want life to be normal again. Unfortunately, our compound was hit by RPG fire today so I am not inclined to believe them.”

Ramadi and Falluja are the major cities of Anbar province, a vast western desert region of conservative Sunni Arabs, home to large numbers of Iraqi military and intelligence officers. Anbar was the last province to fall to coalition forces, and it did so without a shot being fired. By the time American soldiers arrived, local leaders had taken control of the towns and prevented looting. Anbar is where the insurgency began, and tribal sheikhs later told me that it had all been unnecessary. The province was ready to cooperate with the coalition. If only the Americans had remained outside the cities, then crowds wouldn't have gathered to protest, and soldiers wouldn't have fired on the crowds, as they did in Falluja on April 28 and 30, killing eighteen civilians, and Iraqis wouldn't have retaliated with grenades and automatic weapons, and the second war wouldn't have begun.

There is a bit of truth to this account. The American units that took control of Ramadi and Falluja—the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment and the Eighty-second Airborne Division, respectively—were ill suited to urban operations, didn't want to be there, and overreacted when they were provoked. “I was not impressed with the 3rd ACR's operations in Ramadi,” Prior wrote, “they did not seem to have any idea what was going on, there was no sense of urgency, no one knew what the situation was anywhere in sector, none of the senior leadership could provide any guidance or answers.” Having arrived in Iraq too late for the war, amid sand and heat and unfriendly locals, the regiment seemed unable or unwilling to adjust to Phase IV: “They did not appear to be ready for nor understand the urban/peace operations mission they had been assigned. Their attitude in terms of Rules of Engagement suggested to me that they had not made the change from combat operations to stability operations.” Nor did it help that the house of a tribal leader in Ramadi, who had been cooperating with the CIA for years, was hit by an American air strike that killed him and seventeen members of his family. The Eighty-second in Falluja, clueless about Arab culture and lacking any civilian expertise (the CPA didn't come to Anbar until August), refused to compensate the families of the dead from the late April killings. By the time the Marines took control of Falluja in early 2004 and belatedly offered blood money, half the families refused it.

But Prior's log also shows that Anbar was set up for American failure. The CIA agents and Special Forces that first entered Falluja found no one to work with. “The local clerics, sheikhs, and government leaders have been complaining for some time that they need help to clear out the bad elements of their city,” Prior wrote, “this has been their major reason for not providing more assistance or why they have been dragging their feet on getting anything done.” But when the American agents summoned a small infantry unit for support, it was met with a riot, and the Eighty-second Airborne had to be called in to take control. Some American military analysts would later say that the problem in Anbar wasn't too much force but too little, and too late. The calibrations had to be finer than even the best-prepared units could make, and then each mistake played its part in deepening the ill will and hastening the insurgency.

Prior's soldiers drove a vehicle through a gate and smashed down a garden wall on their way to raiding the wrong house; when they hit the right house, which was next door, they picked up only two of the five brothers they were looking for. Prior recorded the raid as a success. But a few days earlier, he noted that professors at the bleak, sand-blown university in Ramadi, who had protected the property themselves with their own weapons, blamed the Americans for breaching the perimeter wire and inadvertently allowing looters in. No one was using the phrase “hearts and minds” yet, but Prior, unlike some of his superiors in Qatar and Washington, knew that it was a missed chance: “The university people seem neutral to the American cause and appear to be the typical university types, liberal, not appreciative of the military and looking to play both sides of the equation. The impression I got was that they did not care if Americans were there or if Fedayeen were there, they just do not want the university looted any more. Their loyalties appear to be able to be purchased for the protection of their university.”

Prior was among the first soldiers to encounter the hidden nature of things in an Iraq that was neither at war nor at peace. Nothing was as it seemed. Firepower and good intentions would be less important than learning to read the signs. Prior saw himself as a liberator, but there were people out there whose support remained to be won or lost, and nothing would come easily, and every judgment he made would have its small effect on the outcome. Iraqis, no longer the cheering crowds that had greeted the company on its way up to Baghdad, were now going to play an intimate role in Prior's life.

The raids in Ramadi and Falluja lasted almost a month; then Charlie Company was recalled to Baghdad. There Captain Prior's log ends. “We put trouble down, we left,” he told me later, “trouble came again.”

*   *   *

CHARLIE COMPANY
spent its first month back in Baghdad billeted at the zoo (the soldiers had already been there once in mid-April, on a mission to escort a truckload of frozen meat marked “A gift from the Kuwaiti people to the Iraqi people”). The unit spent a month pulling security in the area and setting up a neighborhood council. Then, in late June, the company was moved again, to a military academy in south Baghdad (the barracks were festooned with crepe-paper decorations from the last Ramadan), next to the bombed ruins of a vast military camp and airfield that had become home to five thousand displaced persons, looters, and criminals. The brigade's original lines hadn't been drawn to coincide with Baghdad's administrative districts, and Prior's unit lost crucial momentum. “We've been planning this war since freaking 12 September and it might have helped if someone had drawn a map before the war and figured out where everyone went,” he said. “All that stuff you did—you gotta move. So at the time it was not that cool. We'd made friends there.”