The big sleep

• Last Updated: April 24. 2009 3:03PM UAE / April 24. 2009 11:03AM GMT

The Sunni militiamen of the Awakening movement have outlived their usefulness to American forces and the Iraqi government. Some worry these unemployed fighters will relaunch the insurgency they left behind – but they don't stand a chance. Nir Rosen reports.

On March 28, clashes erupted in Baghdad’s Fadhil district after Iraqi troops arrested the leader of the local Awakening Council, Adil al Mashhadani, one of many former Sunni insurgents who had allied with American forces in the fight against al Qaeda-inspired Salafi militants in Iraq. Mashhadani’s men staged a two-day uprising, which was put down by Iraqis with considerable help from American troops fighting against their former allies.

In Baghdad Mashhadani was a notorious figure, one of many Awakenings men suspected of serious crimes before he went on the American payroll and of continuing them afterwards. I had heard complaints about him since 2007 from Shiites, and especially from supporters of Muqtada al Sadr, who were outraged that a man they accused of the indiscriminate slaughter of Shiite civilians had been empowered by the Americans. An American intelligence officer in Washington told me that the US had possessed incriminating information on Mashhadani for several years – but that he had been one of the first insurgents to see which way the wind was blowing and sign on with the Americans.

Mashhadani’s men and their allies complained that the Americans had betrayed them, and threatened to renew their insurgency unless their leader was released; the clashes in Fadhil provoked new speculation that the failure to integrate the Awakenings into the Iraqi security forces would lead to renewed sectarian strife, if not a return to full-scale civil war. But the brief uprising was quickly put down, and Mashhadani’s arrest demonstrated quite clearly that the civil war is over: there is no organised force in Iraq today capable of challenging, or attempting to overthrow, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.

In early April, Maliki appeared on Iraqi state television to say that the fighting in Fadhil was not against the Awakening but against remnants of the outlawed Baath Party: what happened in Fadhil, he said, was a message to other Awakening leaders in contact with the Baath Party that they would be next. The Awakening, Maliki said, was over, and its men would now serve the state or hang up their guns.

The arrest of Mashhadani and other Awakening leaders – and Maliki’s remarks – would seem to mark the beginning of the end for what was a controversial and potentially dangerous component of the American strategy in Iraq, the creation and funding of Sunni militias outside the authority of the state. By 2005 there was no doubt that Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites were engaged in a bloody civil war, and the increasingly aggressive, Shiite-dominated Iraqi Security Forces began to punish Sunni civilians for attacks conducted by al Qa’eda and other Sunni radicals against Shiites. The bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February 2006 triggered a wave of retaliatory violence and escalated attacks by Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade, who served as the storm troopers of the increasingly powerful Shiite bloc. They effectively depopulated Baghdad of its Sunnis, who fled to Jordan, Syria or Anbar province. When I met with Sunni resistance leaders in Amman and Damascus in 2006, they openly admitted defeat.

The cleansing of Sunnis from much of Baghdad deprived Sunni insurgents of sanctuary among the population as they were losing battles with al Qa’eda, the Americans and Shiite militias. The Shiite bloc had numerical superiority, backed by the force of the Iraqi state and its security forces. And so, one by one, groups of Sunni resistance fighters struck ceasefire agreements with the Americans and joined the fight against al Qa’eda and other radical elements.

The “surge” of American forces allowed Maliki to strengthen the authority of the state and its security forces, while the establishment of the Awakening groups neutralised anti-government Sunni militias (in some cases simply by paying them salaries not to fight the state). The decline in sectarian violence gave Maliki space to weaken competing Shiite militias, who had been integral to cleansing Sunnis from mixed areas and establishing Shiite dominance but whose presence prevented his fully consolidating control.

The prevailing order in Iraq today is a Shiite-dominated one, but the balance of power is not divided along exclusively sectarian lines: it is between those close to the state and those without its backing – as some wags put it, between the “powers that be” and the “powers that aren’t”. Maliki has pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy among Sunnis, rewarding some local leaders with prestige and privileges while arresting or crushing others. Many Sunnis are more than willing to accept an authoritarian prime minister in exchange for a reduction in violence.

What has not followed the drop in violence is a political settlement: for the past year analysts have worried that the failure to disarm or integrate the Sunni Awakening groups into the state risked sowing the seeds of a new insurgency. But the tepid response to the arrest of Mashhadani and other Awakening men suggests that a political reconciliation may not have been necessary. The burgeoning Iraqi state, embodied by Maliki himself, can simply continue to expand its power and crush any rivals. One US Army Iraq expert, who worked closely with General David Petraeus to plan and implement the surge, told me in 2008 that the civil war would end when the Shiites realised they had won and the Sunnis realised they had lost. Based on the conversations I had during a trip through Iraq last month, both sides seem to accept that this is the case.

In September 2008 Maliki – in a concession to the Americans – issued an order calling for the integration of 20 per cent of the eligible Awakening men into the ministries of defence and interior. The following month the government of Iraq began to assume responsibility (financial and otherwise) over the Awakening groups. But as of today less than five per cent have joined the Iraqi Security Forces. At the same time, senior Awakening leaders and many of their men have been arrested, while others have been relieved of their duties (and their pay) and told to go home. It is a quiet and slow process, but one that continues to emasculate one of the last groups that rivalled the authority of the Iraqi state.

There is nothing the Awakening groups can do. As guerrillas and insurgents they were only effective when they operated covertly, underground, blending in among a Sunni population that has now mostly been dispersed. Now the former resistance fighters-turned-paid guards are publicly known, and their names, addresses and biometric data are in the hands of American and Iraqi forces. They cannot return to an underground that has been cleared, and they still face the wrath of radical Sunnis who view them as traitors. They have failed to unite and as their stories demonstrate, they are on the run.

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In December 2007 I met a 30-year-old man named Osama who had a contract with the US Army to provide 300 Iraqi Security Volunteers, as the Americans called the Awakening men. (They were also known, less formally, as the “Sons of Iraq”.) Osama’s men guarded a sector in the Mekanik area of south Baghdad’s volatile Dora district. He wore jeans, a sweater and baseball cap and had a slight baby face concealed by stubble.

“People loved al Qa’eda at first,” Osama said, “they protected the neighbourhood from the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi police, but they got more powerful and they kidnapped Sunnis and Christians.” Most of his fighters had belonged to Sunni insurgent groups like the Army of the Mujahideen, the Islamic Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigades. These men began to turn against al Qa’eda after IEDs placed in civilian areas began to kill Iraqis as well. Together with men called Abu Yasser (formerly of the Army of the Mujahideen) and Abu Salih (of the 1920 Revolution Brigades), Osama began to tip off the Americans about the location of IEDs. Soon they were calling the Americans for assistance when Shiite militias attacked the neighbourhood and passing on information about the whereabouts of suspected al Qa’eda militants.

Abu Yasser told me then that he decided to work with the Americans and the Awakening “because of Iranians getting more power in Iraq,” he told me. “They are occupying Sunni areas. They are the bigger enemy.” He admitted that Sunnis made a strategic blunder by boycotting the Iraqi political process in the early days of the occupation, and Sunni clerics made a mistake by issuing fatwas prohibiting Sunnis from joining the nascent security forces the Americans were creating. “This is the result now. Because we didn’t join the police and army, they got full of the Mahdi Army and Badr.” Abu Yasser hoped to join the police one day, but added, “if the government doesn’t let us join we’ll stay here protecting our area”.

But the Awakening groups never had a chance against the centralised authority of the Iraqi state: from the beginning they were divided against one another, squabbling over the power they had previously been denied. In February 2008, I accompanied Abu Salih and his men to Ramadi, where they had been summoned to a meeting by the head of the Awakening Council, Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha. Osama was excited at the prospect of discussing the future of the movement – he wanted the Awakening groups to form a government for Sunnis with Abu Risha, he told me, “because the Iraqi government doesn’t do sh**”.

But in Ramadi the order of the day was seeing off several rivals from their own neighbourhood, who had appealed to the Sheikh in Ramadi to be recognised as movement’s official representatives in Dora in advance of the next elections. Abu Salih traded insults and accusations with the competition, with each faction accusing the other of al Qa’eda membership and claiming to have single-handedly protected the neighbourhood. After an hour of contentious argument, Abu Salih left, proudly carrying the Awakening Council flag: they were Dora’s new political bosses.

It did them little good: the following month Osama threatened to quit and withdraw all his men after an assault by the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Police, who opened fire on the neighbourhood and beat some of Osama’s men with rifles. The Americans did nothing, Osama complained, and they were late with payments. “They are killing me,” he said, “like I’m begging money from them, every day the same bullsh**, people don’t believe that they’re late, they think I’m keeping money.”

In October 2008, two weeks after authority over Dora’s Awakening groups passed to the Iraqi government, Osama’s deputy Abu Yasser was arrested by the National Police. Osama told me he was taken to the police headquarters, hung by his arms, and tortured. He confessed to murders he hadn’t committed – but the victims he named were still alive. Still, he remains in prison. He has already paid $20,000 toward his release, Osama told me, but “they can’t release him without money, everything costs money.” Abu Yasser was worried that al Qa’eda men in prison with him would find out that he was with the Awakening and kill him.

After Abu Yasser’s arrest, Abu Salih arranged a lunch to celebrate Eid; he invited the local American army unit as well. In the meantime he had achieved a measure of fame, and even Abud Qanbar, the commander of Iraqi security forces in Baghdad, came to Dora and shook his hand, accompanied by television cameras. “Abu Salih helped many Shiite families come back and protected them,” Osama told me, but said that not long after the lunch, a new American unit showed up in the area and arrested Abu Salih. He was taken to the serious crimes unit of the Iraqi police and accused of terrorism. Osama said that he too was tortured and hung by his arms, and now has trouble walking. Abu Salih also paid about $20,000, according to Osama, and his family expect him to be released when more money is paid. At least eight other men I knew from Osama’s group had been arrested since the Iraqi government took over.

When I met Osama in March, he was hiding in an apartment on the northern edge of Baghdad – there was a warrant out for his arrest as well, and he could not return to Dora to visit his parents. Osama felt betrayed. “The Americans were only with us when they needed us,” he said. When he called the Americans to complain that Abu Yassir had been arrested, they told him it was an Iraqi affair.

“The Sons of Iraq was never supposed to be an amnesty programme,” one American embassy official in Baghdad told me when I recounted this story to him. A Shiite Iraqi Army captain who fought both al Qa’eda and the Mahdi Army put it this way: “the Mahdi Army was taking over Sunni areas so the Americans came up with the Awakening to create a balance between Shiites and Sunnis. We knew the Awakening, we had their names, we knew that they were wanted men. The first time I heard about it I was against it – armed guys on the street. But the Americans said ‘cooperate with them, use them now and we’ll arrest them later.’”

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Many of the Awakening leaders I saw in Baghdad and its environs in March told similar stories. In the Mukhabarat area of Baghdad’s Jihad district, I visited Ibrahim Saleh, also known as Abu Abdallah Hamdani. The area was walled off, and the entrance was guarded by a tense Awakening man and some members of the National Police. Inside I drove by a large lake of sewage and rubbish alongside a dirt road that led to Saleh’s large house, still under construction at the top of a hill.

Saleh took charge of 160 Awakening men in August 2008, after the National Police arrested his brother Taher, the area’s previous leader. He said that he and his brother joined the Awakening because they wanted to protect the area, and because there were no other jobs. “The Friendly Forces,” as he called the Americans, “came to us and asked Taher my brother to protect the area and give information. The Awakening was established here in July 2007.” He claimed his brother had a good relationship with the National Police, but one day they came to patrol the area, and Taher invited them to lunch. “After they finished eating they arrested him,” Saleh told me. “They accused him of murder and stealing. In the beginning they beat him badly, he passed out for two days.”

Ibrahim claimed that both al Qa’eda and Shiite militias had tried to assassinate him. Two weeks before I met him one of his Awakening men was arrested and beaten until he confessed to murder. I asked him what he expected would come next. “This is the reality,” he said. “I will be arrested, 100 per cent. As soon as they finish with me they will arrest me.” He too felt betrayed. “We were with the government of Iraq and the Americans. The arrests can’t happen without the permission of the Americans.”

Ibrahim’s men get 345,000 Iraqi dinars (Dhs1093, or about $300) a month. Since the handover many of his men have not received their salaries. None of his men were integrated into the security forces, he said, and he claimed that at the nearby Furat Police Academy, any Sunni recruit was rejected.

Along the banks of the Tigris in south Baghdad is an idyllic rural area, called Arab Jubur, which was the scene of some of the worst al Qa’eda violence of the war. As I drove there from Dora with a local friend, past groves of palm trees, he pointed to empty fields where he said al Qa’eda used to dump bodies, many of them Shiites kidnapped on the nearby motorway. “They would take whole Kia buses full of people,” he said. We drove through numerous checkpoints where Awakening men stood alongside Iraqi soldiers. The road was scarred by IEDs and the holes were filled with dirt.

I stopped to chat with two Awakening men at a checkpoint outside Arab Jubur. My friend told me that both men had been with the Army of the Mujahideen, but joined the Awakening in 2007. Neither they nor their comrades had succeeded in joining the Iraqi Security Forces. “We all tried,” they said. “It was only promises.” They had also not been paid in two months. A 17-year-old boy from the neighbourhood hopped in our car to take us to the house of the local Awakening leader. “It became normal to see dead bodies here on the side of the road,” he said as we drove.

Inside the house I met Tahsin Abdallah Khalal al Rabia, of the Jubur tribe. Only 25, he was one of the first men in the area to join the Awakening, which was led in the area by his brother Amer. He told me that three of his brothers had been killed by al Qa’eda even before they established an Awakening group, and one after. As we spoke, Amer showed up, wearing a loose fitting suit with a pistol tucked in his pants. A 24-year veteran of the Iraqi Army, Amer led the Awakening groups in the villages of Zunbaraniya, Uleimiya and Beijia. Under the Americans he led 629 men, but the Iraqis had been reducing his numbers, firing men every month, and he was down to only 490. He too said that none of his men had managed to join the Iraqi Security Forces.

A few months earlier, he said, two of his men captured two al Qa’eda fighters and brought them to Dora to hand them over to the National Police. But Amer’s men were arrested as well, and remained in prison in Dora.

“The Iraqi army pays us now,” he said, “and many negative things have happened. They reduced salaries: I used to get $600 a month, now I get $300 a month like my men. The Americans used to come here to pay us, now we have to go to Iraqi army battalion, wait on long lines, sometimes for two or three days. We are treated with disrespect. For the last two months there is no salary. It’s all fake promises.”

Iraqi soldiers, he complained, had beaten one of his men and insulted him because he did not salute them. “We are targeted by al Qa’eda and we have no protection,” he told me. He said that he had been falsely accused of murder, and there was now a warrant for his arrest in Baghdad. Sectarianism persisted in Iraq, but it was now covert, he told me. “Why did terrorism happen?” he asked. “Because of the vacuum. If they don’t put the Awakening groups in the Iraqi army or Iraqi police, problems will happen.”

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In Adhamiya, the last Sunni enclave in east Baghdad, I met Abu Omar, also known as Khalil Ibrahim, one of the Awakening leaders there. The neighbourhood is home to the important Abu Hanifa mosque, where Saddam Hussein made his last public appearance, surrounded by adoring supporters, on April 8, 2003. I sat with Abu Omar on some plastic chairs and drank tea in the main square, which was adorned with posters of slain Awakening fighters, including two of Abu Omar’s sons. I worried about suicide bombers, who had killed several of Adhamiya’s Awakening leaders inside the neighbourhood. As we sat, small boys ran around us. One of them, whose father was a slain Awakening fighter, played with a plastic pistol, shooting at us.

“If the Awakening wasn’t here,” he said proudly, “in 20 years the Iraqi army and US army wouldn’t be able to come in.” He bragged that it was the “third hottest area in Iraq” and noted that the neighbourhood held out against American troops for a day longer than much of the rest of Baghdad. Then Abu Omar was fighting the Americans as well, and I asked him how he could collaborate with his former enemies. “The Americans are leaving, but the Iranians are staying,” he told me.

In November 2007 he joined the Awakening with 13 other family members. He had been a non-commissioned intelligence officer in the Iraqi army, and claims that after the war he was jobless and sold gasoline on the black market.

At first Abu Omar’s men clashed with the Iraqi Army. “We don’t accept the Iraqi police here,” he told me, “they can only come with army. We don’t like them, they’re all militias.” Out of the hundreds of Awakening men in his area, only four had managed to join the police. “The government is sectarian,” he said. “They want to destroy the Awakening.”

Under the Americans, he said, his men were paid on time, and he was given gas, bullets and money for food. But when we spoke, the salaries were 52 days late, and 84 of his men had been relieved of their duties. When the Americans withdraw, he said, the civil war will resume. I asked him why he did not unite with other Awakening leaders to form a stronger front. “We tried in 2008,” he told me. “Awakening leaders couldn’t join together because they couldn’t agree among themselves.”

When they were first established, the Awakening groups were a formidable force. But it may seem now to many of the former insurgents that they miscalculated: their cooperation has not resulted in political power or even incorporation into the security forces. Awakening men are not the only people in Iraq today who can’t find work – that problem is widespread – but former Shiite militiamen, by comparison, have much less trouble joining the security forces.

Several Awakening men told me that some of their leaders were fleeing, out of fear of arrest, and that others were contemplating a return to violence in response to the increased pressure they faced from the government. In recent weeks scores of Awakening men have been arrested in Dora and Arab Jubur, and there were reports in April that an American air strike killed a group of Awakening fighters allegedly planting IEDs in north Baghdad.

The failed uprising in Fadhil at the end of March was a distinct sign, however, that no united Sunni front is likely to emerge. The deadly insurgency that followed the American invasion was spread across a wide swath of the country; resistance from isolated local Sunni groups poses no such problem for the strengthened Iraqi state, and the failure of other Awakening leaders to come to Mashhadani’s defence makes it clear there will be no widespread uprising.

At the beginning of April, a few days after Mashhadani was arrested, Thamir al Tamimi, also known as Abu Azzam, a senior Awakening Council leader from Anbar who is a liaison to the government, downplayed the significance of the arrest in an interview and said that joining the Awakening did not provide a person with immunity.

Hamid al Hayis, an early founder of the Awakening in Anbar, gave a similar interview to the Saudi-owned Asharq al Awsat, in which he defended the arrest of Mashhadani. The Awakening, he said, was now only a political organisation, and only Iraqi government forces should be armed; other men carrying weapons, he said, were nothing more than militias.

A spate of bombings followed the clashes in Fadhil, giving rise to more concern about a return to sectarian conflict. Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad were struck by coordinated car bombs, and attacks against American soldiers, Iraqi Security Forces and Awakening members also increased.

Some of these attacks may represent a warning by Awakening leaders that they can still obstruct American goals in Iraq; they are more likely an opportunistic attempt by al Qa’eda-like groups to take advantage of Sunni grievances and provoke further violence. But there is little prospect for another outbreak of war: today there is no area controlled by al Qa’eda in Iraq, and it does not appear likely the group can seize any territory.

The remaining Awakening men have burnt their bridges with their more radical former allies and are now hunted by them; the Iraqi Security Forces have improved their intelligence and strike capability and have little problem tracking those men they want to arrest. Sunni civilians have no interest in backing a new insurgency after their own bitter experience – and they no longer feel targeted by Shiite militias.

The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil. It would be naive to say that Iraq’s future is certain, or even likely, to be a peaceful one, but the war between Sunnis and Shiites is now over.


Nir Rosen is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. He is finishing a book about the civil war in Iraq.