Men in Black
Why Iraq's Shiite militias are so brutally effective. What can be done to stop them?
BAGHDAD-When U.S. Army Maj. Mark Brady drives through a once well-heeled section of western Baghdad, he is often greeted by flocks of doves, released in advance of his patrol's arrival. Symbols of peace and welcome? Not here, not now. What they are is a warning signal by militia lookouts that U.S. and Iraqi government forces are in the area.
The doves are the least of Brady's worries. As an adviser to the 5th Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Army Division, he is most concerned about the brigade's own soldiers, who use their cellphones to tip off allies in the militia. It's information that's particularly helpful to members of the Mahdi Army, followers of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who have set up checkpoints and
lately stepped up attacks on Sunni enclaves, reprisals for the recent bombings that killed more than 200 in the the capital's Sadr City neighborhood. So now, for operational security, brigade commanders collect soldiers' cellphones before presenting the day's plans. "The cellphones," Brady says, "were killing us."
Tit for tat. As the violence in Baghdad grows worse, the militias are gaining strength, in part by promising safety and services for Iraqis in desperate need of both-and by delivering retribution in the tit-for-tat cycle of sectarian attacks by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. In its report last week, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group stressed the corrosive effect of Shiite militia activities that "undermine the authority of the Iraqi government and security forces, as well as the ability of Sunnis to join a peaceful political process." Reining in the militias is just one of the hurdles to implementing the panel's prescriptions for national reconciliation (Page 38). The committee's report raises doubts about the willingness and ability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki even to confront the militia problem: "He owes his office in large part to Sadr and has shown little willingness to take on him or his Mahdi Army."
Taking on the militias will be no easy task, as they are now woven into the fabric of so many communities. "Militias exist when, in the eyes of the people, the standing government isn't providing something-and in this case that something would be security," Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the senior American commander in Iraq responsible for training and equipping Iraqi security forces, tells U.S. News. "It seems to me that the issue we're all concerned about is the degree of militia influence on serving members of the Army and police."
To complicate matters, the greatest fear among some U.S. military officials here is that some of the militia directives may be coming from within Iraqi government ministries. Col. Steven Duke, a brigade military transition teams commander and adviser to the 6th Iraqi Army Division in Baghdad, cites a raid last month in which company commanders captured two members of the Mahdi Army. Upon hearing of the Mahdi Army connection, Iraqi Army officials turned their new prisoners over to U.S. forces. "They thought they would get pressured by the MOD [Ministry of Defense] to let these guys go," says Duke.
Lately, calls have also been coming in from within the Ministry of Defense to more junior members of the 6th Iraqi Army Division as ministry officials bypass senior commanders to make requests of what they believe to be more pliable subordinates, according to U.S. and Iraqi military sources. An Iraqi brigade commander Duke advises was livid that one of his soldiers was called to remove an Iraqi Army checkpoint last week in the Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad. "Now why would you ask someone to do that?" asks Duke, who suspects the call came directly from government officials as a courtesy to Mahdi Army members conducting operations in the neighborhood. The area has seen an influx of Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi-which in turn has attracted Shiite militias trying to drive them out. Every day, there are six to 12 Iraqi bodies found in the brigade's operating area. "All of the intimidation happens at night," says Brady. "We find notes on the doors of Sunni houses saying, 'You need to leave.' Then Shia families move in. They tell us, 'They gave us this house.'"
The Ministry of the Interior had drawn particular scrutiny over militia infiltration and concerns about death squads operating within its forces. In October, the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Iraqi National Police Brigade was implicated in a raid on a meat-packing plant in which more than 20 Sunnis were kidnapped and seven killed by gunmen in police commando uniforms. At the time, says Duke, the National Police Brigade was composed of 93 percent Shiite, and 7 percent Sunni, cops. In the wake of the raid, the battalion commander was arrested, and the entire brigade was pulled off the streets.
"A blind eye." Today, retraining for the 8th Brigade is taking place at Numaniyah, southeast of Baghdad, where police take classes in human rights, learn the dangers of authoritarian rule, and perform drills designed to teach them basic policing skills. They also discuss, for example, "how psychological stress may affect the performances of cadets," says Gen. Ali Ibrahim, the new 8th Brigade commander. And they participate in role-playing scenarios-some of which were changed to "make them more Iraqi-like," explains one trainer. "Instead of entering a room with a bunch of drunk individuals, we changed it to a Ramadan festival that's more enthusiastic than it should have been."
The training is particularly important for a 25,000-strong paramilitary police force designed to be a bridge between the Iraqi Army and beat cops-the latter of whom are outnumbered and outgunned on the streets. Many of these National Police have had lots of battle experience but little to no police training, says Maj. Gen. Kenneth Hunzeker, the new commander of the Civilian Police Assistance Training Team in Iraq. Such training, adds a senior military official, is vital for forces vying for the trust of the people in areas where, "to a large extent, the militias filled the vacuum that occurred in between the ground war and us trying to re-establish a government and a police force."
When Hunzeker and Ibrahim met in Numaniyah recently, their first topic of conversation was another security problem: the proliferation of police uniforms on the black market. In the past six months, according to Ibrahim, there have been at least 50 instances of National Police uniforms being worn by people committing crimes. "They're gold," says Hunzeker. The Americans and Iraqis recently designed a difficult-to-duplicate uniform, an improvement over the six National Police uniform variants floating around. "So far, the new uniforms have not been copied-yet," says Ibrahim, who outlines his plan to keep control of the three newly designed uniforms issued to each recently re-trained cop. The new police officers will get one uniform each, says Ibrahim-the other two will be kept under lock and key. It's a vital control given that U.S. military officials assume a 20 percent attrition rate among new National Police recruits, says Hunzeker.
Equally important is screening the soldiers who will be wearing the uniforms, who might find themselves under the influence of militias in a variety of ways. "There's what I would describe as passive influence," says Dempsey, "which is to say turning a blind eye to the activities of militia, allowing them to go through checkpoints, things like that. Then there's active participation-where they might let them use uniforms, let them use vehicles, or participate themselves." Recruits at Numaniyah are biometrically screened, then their names are cross-checked against criminal records formerly maintained by once powerful Ba'ath Party. The goal, says Hunzeker, is to "get at the criminal element-the people most vulnerable to being recruited by militias." Since arriving here, General Ibrahim has fired 189 policeman. "Most were thieves," he says. "The rest were useless."
"Mystique." But it's a tough slog, given that in some neighborhoods informants may be coerced, or simply seeking security. And there is what Duke calls the growing "mystique" of the Mahdi Army among youths in some neighborhoods. "They're perceived as having the power," he says. Recently, a gang claiming to be members of the Mahdi Army attacked an Iraqi Army checkpoint in Mansour, says Duke. "They said, 'Leave now, or we will kill you-we own this checkpoint.'" They added, "'By the way, Sadr will no longer support the Iraqi government. We are no longer supporting the Iraqi government-we're in charge now.'"
Just who that "we" is can be hard to figure out. CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate committee last month that sectarian forces are "descending into smaller and smaller groups fighting over smaller and smaller issues and over smaller and smaller pieces of territory." The Iraq Study Group says the Mahdi Army may have as many as 60,000 fighters, some of whom may no longer be under Sadr's control.
Senior U.S. commanders here estimate that the Mahdi Army [also known as Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM] has spawned 18 to 24 offshoots. "How much is under Sadr's influence is tough to call," says a top American military official in Baghdad. "Clearly, he has some groups that he has very little control over." There have also been indications, Dempsey tells U.S. News, that Sadr "is trying to distance himself" from the more extreme elements. "I would suggest to you that the JAM is not a monolithic, homogenous beast. It's probably some combination of unemployed young men who think they're doing a decent thing watching their neighborhood, criminal opportunists in the middle, and some Shia religious extremists on the other end. The ones we're worried about are Shia religious extremists who are not trying to reconcile with the Sunni side, just as on the Sunni side there are Sunni religious extremists, who we typically call al Qaeda."
One reason curbing the militia violence will be so difficult, as General Hayden explained in recent Senate testimony, is that "internal divisions and power struggles among the Shia make it difficult for Shia leaders to take actions that might ease Sunni fears of domination. Radical Shia militias and splinter groups stoke the violence," Hayden continued, "while brutal Sunni attacks make even moderate Shia question whether it is possible to reconcile the Sunnis to the new Shia-dominated power structures."
"Pick your battles." And that could determine whether the present government survives. Last month, Duke was asked by an Iraqi Army battalion commander why U.S. forces had buckled under Sadr's pressure and dismantled its checkpoints in Sadr City. Duke posed the question to Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, the next time he saw him. "His answer," says Duke, "was that if we're leaving this place anytime soon, the Iraqi government has to make the decisions. He said, in general, to pick your battles."
American military officials here are increasingly worried that those battles are getting more complex-and they're frustrated at the pace of change within Iraqi government ministries. In Diyala province, according to U.S. News sources, the Shiite police chief in the hotly contested town of Baqubah, Ghassan al-Bawi, hired some 250 Mahdi Army members in late October to come north to Baqubah to work as a local highway patrol-enabling Shiites to control roads and checkpoints. "Now you've got whole [Sunni] villages thinking that they're defending themselves against this Shia force coming in and doing a raid," says a senior U.S. military official in the region. American and Iraqi provincial officials in Diyala want the police chief fired, but they are waiting on the decision from the Ministry of Interior. In the meantime, says the official, "we have to keep meeting with him and supporting him."
That reality, says another senior military official in Baghdad, puts America in a precarious position. "What other places are they operating out of that we cannot go into or influence?" he asks. "How do we deal with that? And how long do we wait?"
This story appears in the December 18, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.