The Story (4 page)

“Dear Comrades,” stated one from the Ba'ath Party People's Command in Zakho, dated June 14, 1987. “The entry of any kind of human cargo, nutritional supplies, or mechanical instruments into the security-prohibited villages . . . is strictly prohibited. It is your duty to kill any human being or animal found in these areas.” In a cover story for the
New York Times Magazine
, I wrote that the tattered, partly burned, and water-stained documents, often held together in characteristic Iraqi fashion with shoelaces and pins, constituted the best evidence to date of Saddam's genocidal campaign against his Kurdish minority.

What I saw inside the Kurdish area of Iraq in 1993 was even worse.
Having taken pride in America's swift expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, I was forced to confront the conflict's human wreckage. What most officials and many reporters, including me, had acclaimed as a decisive military victory for the American-led coalition, seemed decidedly less glorious as I stood next to yet another newly discovered Kurdish mass grave. The stench of human decomposition was overwhelming—a smell no one ever forgets. The remains were carefully catalogued by human rights workers to present as physical evidence at a future trial for genocide. But no nation was willing to bring charges against Iraq. Saddam's oil had let him escape justice.

Joost Hiltermann, a Dutch researcher for Middle East Watch who had spent months investigating human rights abuses in Kurdistan, estimated that Saddam's forces had leveled about four thousand villages and killed some 180,000 Kurds in Anfal—a “counterinsurgency gone wild,” I wrote.
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Thousands had been shot and buried in mass graves. Others had starved to death in desert prisons, or been gassed in Halabja, Iraqi Kurdistan, where between 3,500 and 5,000 civilian adults and children had died on a single day in March 1988. Saddam had used chemical weapons against the Shiites in the south, but his attack in Halabja remains the world's largest chemical attack against a civilian-populated area in history. When I visited the city again in 2006, the cemetery for those who had perished in chemical attacks and other Anfal victims was still the town's largest open space. Gravestones stretched as far as I could see.

What I saw in Kuwait (and later in Iraqi Kurdistan) made me ashamed that the United States was continuing to ignore Saddam's brutality because it did not affect Americans directly. As victory parades were being held in New York in the spring of 1991, Saddam's forces were draining the marshes of southern Iraq and slaughtering their inhabitants—descendants of a distinctive river culture—and mowing down other Shiite Muslims who had challenged the regime, as President Bush had urged them to do. Opponents whom Saddam did not kill had fled Iraqi terror. Tens of thousands of Kurds had huddled for weeks, hungry and homeless, in the mountains of neighboring Turkey. Saddam's depraved repression—captured on film by CNN—finally shamed Washington into establishing no-fly zones in Iraq, first in the north to protect the Kurds, and eighteen months later, over
southern Iraq as well. The no-go zone was a godsend to the Kurds, who quickly began using the safety assured by American-patrolled skies to build their own independent economic, cultural, and political institutions. But by the time the no-fly zone was extended to the south, as I wrote bitterly at the time, Saddam had crushed the Shiite uprising. The Iraqi Shia, I would later learn, never forgave America for encouraging and then ignoring the uprising.

I thought about the savagery I had covered in Iraq and the hope I had felt about Bush's decision to topple Saddam in March 2003 as Ryan Cutchin and I sipped our drinks in forlorn Anbar Province and caught up on what had happened since my last trip here two years earlier.

This was Ryan's fourth deployment since we had first met—one was in Afghanistan—and my fourth trip back to Iraq since my frustrating WMD embed. But in July 2010 Major Cutchin was no longer hunting for WMDs or even seeing much combat. He was overseeing “civil affairs” work for the First Brigade, Eighty-Second Airborne Division, the “build” part of the military's counterinsurgency mantra of “clear, hold, build.” He had spent the past eight months trying to win Iraqi “hearts and minds” to get intelligence about the identity and whereabouts of remaining insurgents in the area and their weapons caches. Ryan's mission, part of the 2007 shift to a counterinsurgency strategy and the surge of US forces, was to train Iraqi soldiers and police and to help civilians create new institutions, or resuscitate those paralyzed by Saddam's twenty-nine-year reign of terror and the ensuing anarchy and civil war in the wake of America's invasion. Ryan knew he would not be returning to Iraq. We were done here.

Ryan was tired. His eyes showed the strain of too many deployments in too few years. This last had begun only a week after his third child, a son, was born. The endless series of counterinsurgency campaigns had stretched American military capacity to its limits and beyond. But Ryan insisted that his mission in Anbar, the scene of half the fighting and nearly half the US deaths in Iraq, had largely succeeded. The war against terrorism in Anbar, at least for now, he told me, had “irreversible momentum.”

There were few signs of Ryan's “big mo” as we drove the next day to
Ramadi, the provincial capital. Ryan had succeeded in hitching us a ride in an MRAP, a heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected transport tank, to the provincial governor's compound. Taking the MRAP meant putting on protective gear in the scorching heat—an extra twenty pounds of armor that included a bulletproof Kevlar vest and helmet, protective glasses and gloves, all for a fifteen-minute ride. But Ryan said that it beat walking in the heat or getting blown up by an IED, an improvised explosive device—or as we civilians called it, a homemade bomb. At roughly $850,000 apiece, the MRAP could withstand all but the latest versions of Iranian-designed and -supplied IEDs. Soldiers told me that it was just a matter of time before “irreconcilables” in Iraq or Afghanistan found a weakness in the vehicle.

The 1.5 million people of this deeply tribal Sunni province roughly the size of South Carolina seemed to be adjusting resentfully to second-class status in Iraq led by the increasingly autocratic Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. There were no longer overt signs of Al Qaeda, which had sunk roots among the province's fellow Sunni Muslims soon after the American invasion. Anbar had been one leg of that infamous Sunni Triangle where so many Americans had died. In early 2007 Al Qaeda's black flag had flown here. Young Muslim militants with guns had snapped orders to the proud elders of Anbar's thirty major tribes—even to the province's “paramount sheikhs.” But their brutality and fanatical disrespect for Anbar's tribal ways had been their undoing.
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Fed up with the impudent extremists—and above all, with their greedy interference with the local sheikhs' profitable smuggling—Anbaris had turned on Al Qaeda, ending what had always been, at best, a marriage of convenience.

The Sahawa al-Anbar, “Anbar Awakening,” spread quickly through the Sunni heartland, stunning even the US military. By mid-2008, one hundred thousand Sunni self-designated “Sons of Iraq,” many of them former insurgents, or Shia militia members, had joined the Americans. A year earlier, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of US and coalition forces in Iraq, and his operational commanders had developed a plan that persuaded President Bush to support these new Iraqi allies with weapons and later money and to increase US forces here to help protect the people from a
resurgence of Al Qaeda and extremist Shiites. The American shift in strategy from keeping soldiers on US bases to adding thirty thousand new US troops and deploying them to villages and neighborhoods to recruit Iraqis and later pay them to help destroy Sunni and Shiite extremists became known as the “surge.” The gamble succeeded, at least through 2011, beyond expectations.
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Within the United States, Bush's belated but bold decision in 2007 to surge US forces in Iraq had been savaged by American politicians and many journalists. The Iraq Study Group headed by Republican guru James Baker and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton had urged Bush to accelerate the training of Iraqi forces so that America could
withdraw
all of its own forces as soon as possible. Senator Hillary Clinton had opposed the surge. So, too, had Senator Joe Biden. The “surge,” he predicted, stood “zero” chance of success. “Victory is no longer an option,” the
New York Times
declared after Bush announced the increase. Senator Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican and former Vietnam War hero, called it “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” Even Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quietly warning the president she had advised earlier as director of the National Security Council that the surge might not work.

In Iraq, striking a balance between assuring Iraqis sufficient protection and promising to leave once the country was stable had been tough. General Mattis recalled his effort to assure Sunni Iraqis that America would not abandon them prematurely. Americans would not leave until they wanted them to go, he said; in fact, he was going to retire in Iraq. “I found a little piece of property down on the Euphrates,” he told them.
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Despite their pivotal role in reversing the fortunes of America's ineptly prosecuted war, Iraqi Sunnis, who compose no more than 20 percent of the population, feared they were destined to be the losers of America's invasion. Those who had once ruled Iraq, repressing the Kurds and the Shiite majority, were now a relatively powerless minority. Their bitterness was palpable.

The reception hall inside the provincial governor's compound in downtown Ramadi was still a wreck from a suicide bombing less than a week before my arrival. The bomber had ignited his explosives on a
Sunday—“grievance day,” when widows and other women traditionally sought help here. As Ryan and I walked through the charred hallway, remnants of the strike were visible. While the largest pieces of embedded flesh had been removed from the walls, the orange-brown streaks of dried blood remained. This had been the fourth suicide bombing near or within the governor's compound that year, plus one near miss. In fact, Iraq, on any given day, still remained statistically more dangerous than Afghanistan. I was suddenly grateful that Ryan had made me wear my armor.

Deputy Governor Fouad Hikmat welcomed us in his office, undamaged by the suicide bomb. At the center of the ornate, wood-paneled, heavily air-conditioned room was a giant mock-up of “New Ramadi,” a $6 billion plan for a new city, the governor's dream. Designed by a South Korean company to help win a huge construction contract, New Ramadi was to include sixteen thousand homes and villas, office space, cafés, and restaurants—even an international exhibition center. Since virtually no new housing had been built here in decades, Anbar needed at least eighty-three thousand new housing units just to meet the province's birthrate, Hikmat said.

But the grand vision demanded good security, which despite the surge of US forces, was still a challenge. Hikmat himself was proof of that. In office for only eighteen months, he had been shot at thirty times, he told us; Allah had protected him, “all praise be unto him,” the translator added. But neither God nor the Anbaris' American protectors had yet provided this Sunni region with enough clean water, electricity, or real jobs to meet local needs. Anbaris averaged less than four hours of power a day. The province lacked essential services. Though Ramadi was less than sixty miles from Baghdad, security checkpoints made the trip a three-hour drive. But even if security in the province improved, as Ryan and his commanders predicted it would, “New Ramadi” seemed a pipedream.

Qasim Mohammad Abed al-Fahadawi, the dynamic fifty-five-year-old provincial governor, sounded even more bullish about Anbar's future. Prime Minister Maliki and the central government in Baghdad had routinely shortchanged his region, he complained. But somehow he would find financing for his pet project. Iraqis loved visiting Anbar, he asserted.
Under Saddam, the province had been a vacation destination. Tourism would rebound, and Iraqis would vacation once more at the resort at Lake Habbaniyah.

I glanced at Ryan, whose poker face hid even a hint of skepticism. It was hard to imagine Iraqi families braving Baghdad's gauntlet of security checkpoints and still-dangerous roads to vacation at the dilapidated, rubbish-strewn, state-owned villas on a lake that was evaporating in a five-year drought compounded by upriver damming and massive overuse. Privately, American development officials were calling the ruin of a resort a “do-over.” Ditto the giant state-owned glass factory on the edge of town that hadn't produced a single glass since a bombing in 2006. The government still paid salaries of the roughly 5,500 employees, but those payments would end soon. Where would they find work?

The governor had paid dearly for the lack of security. Widely admired by Americans for his role in the Sunni Awakening, he had lost his left hand in the province's deadliest suicide bombing at his compound in late 2009. The US military had saved his life. Rushed for treatment to a nearby military hospital, Qassim was later flown to the United States and given a new, state-of-the-art robotic hand.

When his compound was hit yet again on July 4, 2010, shortly before my visit, the Iraqis whom Ryan's First Brigade had trained made none of their earlier mistakes. Anticipating a second strike, the task force chief established an outer perimeter to prevent people from entering the crime scene. He left dead bodies in place: the hardest thing for an Iraqi officer to do, Ryan told me. His team ferried the wounded to medical care and collected evidence. As their American advisers looked on, the Iraqis had cased, photographed, and mapped the site, systematically collecting body parts, blast fragments, glass, wire, cement chips—anything that might help identify the bomb and its maker. The evidence was then bagged, sealed, and registered. After locating the bomber's head and upper torso, they severed his head, plucked out his eye, and sent it in an ambulance to a nearby forensics lab, also American equipped and funded. Though the iris did not find a match in a US biometrics database of jihadis, the compound's security video revealed that the bomber, clearly visible on camera, had been
escorted into the compound by a provincial passport officer. This had been an inside job.