The Battle of Baghdad
Commentary: Iraq's most fearsome militia, the U.S. military, on the offensive.
March 24, 2008
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In early April, General David Petraeus, the flavor of the year in American military officers, will return to Washington to report to President Bush and the Democratic Congress on the state of post-surge Iraq. His report will be upbeat, with cautious notes thrown in, and the reception will be warm. The Republicans will congratulate the President, hoping that Americans will stop complaining and finally learn to tolerate, if not love, his war; the Democrats will be quietly unhappy because they would like Iraq to remain a major election issue.
In the meantime, the Iraqis will continue to endure the results of the surge, yet another brutal chapter in the endless war that once promised them liberation.
Over the course of five years, Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, has been transformed from a metropolis into an urban desert of half-destroyed buildings and next to no public services, dotted by partially deserted, mutually hostile mini-ghettos that used to be neighborhoods, surrounded by cement barriers reminiscent of medieval fortifications. The most prominent of these ghettos is the heavily fortified city-inside-a-city dubbed the Green Zone, where Iraq's most fearsome militia, the United States military, is headquartered. It is governed by the Americans and by the American-sponsored Iraqi government, headed by Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.
The remaining ghettos, large and small, are governed by local militias, most of them sworn enemies of the United States and the Maliki regime. In the expanding Shia areas of the capital, the local guardians are often members of the Mahdi Army, the militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr that has opposed the American presence since the occupation began. In the shrinking Sunni-controlled parts of the city, the local guardians are usually members of the Sahwa forces (the "Awakening" or, in U.S. military jargon, "Concerned Local Citizens"). The Americans have ceded to them control of their cement-enclosed domains as long as they discontinue insurgent attacks elsewhere.
As Baghdadi citizens continue to flee the threat of violence, ethnic cleansing, and economic destitution, the city waits—whether for a definitive military confrontation or some less violent change that will bring its long ordeal to an end.
How did this all come to be?
Ethnic Cleansing Arrives in Baghdad
When the American occupation of Baghdad began in April 2003, about half of the city's neighborhoods had no particular ethnic character. In late 2004, however, thousands of Sunnis, driven out of Falluja and other insurgent strongholds by American offensives, began arriving in Baghdad. In increasingly crowded neighborhoods, ethnic friction rose, as did Sunni anger at a Shia-dominated government that sent its troops into battle beside American ones.
Sunni militias, originally organized to deal with local crime (after the Americans dismantled the Iraqi police force) began to turn on Shia residents in some of the capital's 200 mixed neighborhoods. Eventually, scattered acts of harassment were transformed into systematic campaigns of expulsion, justified by the housing needs of a rapidly growing multitude of Sunni refugees, and as retaliation for government-supported assaults on Sunni cities. During 2005, the first stream of displaced Shia began arriving in Baghdad's vast, already overcrowded Shia slum of Sadr City and in the Shia cities of southern Iraq.
In January 2006, the bombing of the revered Shia shrine, the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, triggered sweeping Shia reprisals against Sunni communities. In the capital, a struggle for the dominance of mixed neighborhoods began. Deadly battles between Shia and Sunni militias featured all weapons and methods of slaughter available, including car bombs and death squads. Whichever side expelled the other, minority groups including Christians, Kurds, and Palestinians found themselves unwelcome and began to flee (or die). Ethnic cleansing now lay at the center of the spiraling violence in Baghdad.
The Americans Enter the Battle
In May 2006, American forces first joined "the battle for Baghdad" in a significant way. With the initiation of Operation Together Forward, the U.S. military began transferring combat brigades to the capital in an attempt to take control of Sunni and Shia militia strongholds.
This strategy, however, quickly proved itself ineffective. In August 2006, the New York Times reported that sectarian violence was "spiraling out of control." By the fall, the number of insurgents attacks in Baghdad had increased by 26%, and violent deaths reported at the city morgue had quadrupled. The seeming paradox of an American pacification campaign generating more violence can be explained by looking at the mechanics of the offensive.
Despite their involvement in ethnic violence, the Sunni and Shia militias that the Americans sought to root out were also the forces of law and order in Baghdad's otherwise lawless neighborhoods. They directed traffic, arrested and/or punished common criminals, and mediated disputes. They also protected neighborhoods from outsiders, including American or Iraqi soldiers, suicide bombers, death squads, and criminal gangs.
Before the Americans entered the fray, the militia strongholds had been the least vulnerable to sectarian attack. After all, their streets were saturated with armed men on the lookout for their enemies. Ethnic violence was largely taking place in contested mixed neighborhoods.
In entering these strongholds, the U.S. military won tactical victories, chasing surviving militia members off the streets or even out of neighborhoods, which, without their local police and defense forces, were suddenly vulnerable to sectarian attack.
This vulnerability was all-too-vividly illustrated in Sadr City, the stronghold of the Sadrist movement. As the home base of the Mahdi Army, this city-within-a-city had not experienced a car bomb attack in two years until American troops sealed it off, set up check points at key entrance and exit points, and began patrols aimed at hunting down Mahdi Army leaders they suspected of participating in death squads and of kidnapping an American soldier. Local residents told New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise that the operation had "forced Mahdi Army members who were patrolling the streets to vanish." Soon after, the first car bombs were detonated.
The violence reached a crescendo in November 2006, when a coordinated set of five car bombs killed at least 215 and wounded 257. Qusai Abdul-Wahab, a Sadrist member of parliament, spoke for many residents of the community when he told the Associated Press that the "occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts."
Such events generated immense bitterness among Shia, who took them as proof that the Americans and the Iraqi government were concerned only with attacking the Mahdis, not suppressing jihadist attacks. This encouraged their support of the death squads, which sought to exact retribution on the Sunni communities they believed were harboring the bombers.
The Americans had also facilitated these retaliatory attacks. Sunni insurgents in the Baghdad suburbs of Balad and Duluiyah, for example, were suspected of slaughtering 17 Shia workers in a particularly well publicized instance of sectarian brutality. American troops and their Iraqi allies cordoned off the two districts and invaded the neighborhoods. The invading forces quickly silenced the insurgent militias, leaving the streets unpatrolled. Soon after, Shia death squads made their appearance. Some of them had apparently been organized inside (Shia) Iraqi military units that accompanied the Americans into the Sunni communities. According to the Washington Post, "A police officer in Duluiyah, Capt. Qaid al-Azawi, accused American forces of standing by in Balad while [Shia] militiamen in police cars and police uniforms slaughtered Sunnis." In the face of these attacks, large numbers of residents began to flee.
And so the cycle of slaughter escalated on all sides, while neighborhoods began to be emptied of the members of whichever sect was losing ground locally. As with many other developments in the war, this unmitigated disaster for Baghdad residents was only a partial one for the American occupation. For the Bush administration, the storm of violence in the Iraqi capital had at least one silver lining: the occupation's two main enemies were now at each other's throats. As an American intelligence official told investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, "The White House believes that if American troops stay in Iraq long enough—with enough troops—the bad guys will end up killing each other."
The Surge
As Operation Together Forward continued, intense violence spread across the city. American combat fatalities reached a two-year high of 113 in November 2006, not in itself surprising since American troops were entering militia strongholds. Other statistics, however, defied American expectations.
The number of insurgent attacks, which should have declined, increased dramatically. A little under 100 a day through the first half of 2006, they jolted up to 140 a day soon after the offensive started, and then hovered between 160 and 180 for the rest of the year. The number of lethal bombings, a main target of the offensive, also rose. According to U.S. military statistics published by the Brookings Institution, in late 2005 they rose from under 20 to over 40 per month, and then started upward again as the American offensive began in the late spring of 2006, reaching 69 in December of that year. Deaths associated with these bombings soared from under 500 per month in early 2006 to almost 1,000 in the second half of the year. Population displacement also reached new heights—especially in communities where the Americans were most active.
In response, the Americans sought a new plan for pacifying Baghdad. It would become known as "the surge." Rather than altering the fundamental premises of Operation Together Forward, it diagnosed the ferocious response as evidence that insufficient force had been applied.
