Giving the war a more Iraqi face
Homegrown Fighters
SHATRAH, IRAQ--"No shots fired." That's how one Green Beret summed up the first, successful mission of the self-proclaimed Free Iraqi Forces. The new FIF conducted their first operation last Friday, backed up by U.S. Special Forces, by entering this city nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The long-repressed Shiite population gave them a jubilant welcome. Men and children danced and clapped while women in black chadors waved and ululated greetings. Said a burly Special Forces soldier: "It brought tears to my eyes."
But the FIF's presence in Iraq has already become a political football. The main reason for their entry into Shatrah was to change the face of the war from "America versus Iraq to the U.S. coming to liberate Iraq with Iraqis," said Karem Aras, a civil engineer who is the commander of the new force. No U.S. or British forces had previously entered this city, and the Americans last week attributed their warm welcome to the presence of the FIF. Aras hopes the FIF will become the core of a new Iraqi Army, and in this, their first outing, they showed themselves to be disciplined and capable, maintaining appropriate security while allowing the crowd to let off steam and uncork emotions long repressed under Saddam Hussein.
Warming up. The FIF leaders say their army would have been ready far sooner if the United States had not taken so long to vet the 4,000 names submitted for security clearance six months ago. Finally, a few weeks before the war started, 1,000 fighters began receiving training in northern Iraq. Earlier this month, some 600 flew south to begin preparing for combat operations alongside American forces. On April 5, a planeload of FIF arrived at a desolate, rubble-strewn base near Nasiriyah. Soon U.S. soldiers were uncrating AK-47s and RPK machine guns and handing out ammunition to the newly minted FIF fighters. The Americans put 331 FIF recruits through their paces on the firing range and ran house and vehicle search drills, preparing them to man checkpoints and assume other security duties. About one third of the FIF force has prior military experience, Aras says.
But there's a hitch: The FIF is closely identified with a prominent Iraqi opposition leader, Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the exile-dominated Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi flew into this hidden base to watch over the FIF as it launches operations, and he and his daughter Tamara, a Harvard Ph.D., are camping out a stone's throw from the Special Forces' compound. There they have been entertaining a stream of local sheiks and tribal leaders who have come to pay their respects. Aras and his deputies all swear loyalty to Chalabi. But Aras vows that he will soon pass on the role of commander to someone else. "Because I am the chief operations guy and the chief intelligence guy, I have to be in this position, [but] for a while only," he says. "I hate uniforms." -Linda Robinson
This story appears in the April 21, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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