Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on How to Disintegrate an Iraqi City

Tomgram: Michael Schwartz on How to Disintegrate an Iraqi City

By Tom Engelhardt

Created Mar 24 2008 - 8:54am

- from TomDispatch [1]

Once again last week, the President and his men surged into the headlines,

announcing that we had just zipped past yet another of those Iraqi "turning

points." Or, as George W. Bush put it [2] while speaking at the Pentagon

(and perhaps dreaming of the days back in 2005 when he could still happily

mention "victory" 15 times [3] and "progress" 28 times in a speech about

Iraq): "The surge is working. And as a return on our success in Iraq, we've

begun bringing some of our troops home. The surge has done more than turn

the situation in Iraq around -- it has opened the door to a major strategic

victory in the broader war on terror."

A few years ago, of course, the Bush administration was still "turning

corners" (around which, invariably, would be an unexpected group of

insurgents armed with RPGs and IEDs). Now, in a change of linguistic pace,

the corners have vanished (perhaps because we haven't liked who's lurking

there) and we're opening doors instead. If history is any guide, behind the

President's "door" will prove to be not the lady [4] but the tiger.

In the meantime, our surly Vice President has just surged past the American

people. In an interview [5] in Oman with ABC's Martha Raddatz, there was

this pungent exchange:

"Q: .Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq War]'s not worth fighting, and

they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives,

certainly, and Iraqi lives.

"THE VICE PRESIDENT: So?"

Perhaps the most revealing imagery of the week, however, came from the

President's candidate for the Oval Office in January 2009. On completing a

visit to "Iraq," Senator John McCain issued a ringing statement on the war

that began [6] this way: "Today in Iraq, America and our allies stand on the

precipice of winning a major victory against radical Islamic extremism." The

"precipice of victory" and, next perhaps, the "abyss of victory"?

Go back two years and that word "precipice" was a commonplace [7] in

Washington as a rattled Bush administration faced a sectarian civil war in

Iraq. Now, as any independent or foreign journalist would tell you [8]

(though the American press has generally been more upbeat), the Iraqis are

living in that abyss [9], down which Sen. McCain evidently stares and sees

victory. They are living in a hell [10], a country so thoroughly dismantled

that the brave British journalist Patrick Cockburn recently claimed [11]

"Iraq" was now little more than a "geographical expression."

Outside the heavily fortified Green Zone, much of Baghdad is a nightmare.

Just consider a walk that Nir Rosen took for Rolling Stone magazine [12] in

the Dora district of Baghdad (".now a ghost town. This is what 'victory'

looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage

fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of

the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through

them, whistling eerily..."); or watch a video shot by Iraqi journalist

Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the British Guardian portraying the massive walls [13]

that now encase so many Iraqi neighborhoods, or the cemeteries [14] he

visited that hold some of Iraq's recently slaughtered citizens.

Soon, General David Petraeus will report to the President and Congress on

"progress" in Iraq. In the meantime, Senator McCain's website just

"re-released" "Fighting Islamic Extremists: Progress in Iraq," [15] which

"features a four year timeline of John McCain's unrelenting call for a new

strategy for victory in Iraq."

Knowing that this may be their future, Iraqis must finally be on the verge

of erupting with joy in the streets of their capital, just as our Vice

President predicted [16] they would before this horror ever began. If,

however, you want to grasp the real nature of what's taken place in Baghdad

these last years, check out the latest monumental piece by Tomdispatch

regular Michael Schwartz, author of the upcoming book War Without End: The

Iraq Debacle in Context [17]. It's surely the first history of the full

"battle of Baghdad" from April 2003 to this moment.

-- Tom

The Battle of Baghdad: Iraq's Most Fearsome Militia, the U.S. military, on

the Offensive

By Michael Schwartz

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 [18]

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 [19] 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 [20] in Baghdad had

increased by 26%, and violent deaths reported at the city morgue had

quadrupled [21]. 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 [22] 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 [23] 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 [24] 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 [25] 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 [26], "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 [27], "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." [28] Rather than altering the fundamental

premises of Operation Together Forward, it diagnosed the ferocious response

as evidence that insufficient force had been applied.

Now, tens of thousands of new American troops would be poured into Baghdad,

and to Operaton Together Forward's strategy would be added tactics from the

2004 assault on the Sunni city of Falluja. Each target area would now first

be surrounded to prevent insurgents from escaping. Then, once the battle was

joined, overwhelming firepower would be brought to bear. As Captain Paul

Fowler had explained to Boston Globe reporter Anne Barnard [29] during the

Falluja fighting, ''The only way to root out [the insurgents] is to destroy

everything in your path."

As in Falluja, the new surge plan also called for the Americans to remain in

the community to prevent the insurgents from returning and to supervise the

Iraqi army units they had led into battle.

The Battle of Haifa Street

Even before the surge strategy was announced by President Bush, even before

the new troops arrived, the first battle was launched. Before dawn on

January 9, 2007, the Americans and Iraqis attacked a Sunni insurgent

stronghold on Haifa Street just outside the Green Zone. Washington Post

reporters [30] Sudarsan Raghavan and Joshua Partlow described the kind of

firepower brought to bear once the battle for the street began:

"From rooftops and doorways, the gunmen fired AK-47 assault rifles and

machine guns. Snipers also were targeting the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers. U.S.

soldiers started firing back with 50-caliber machine guns mounted on their

Stryker armored vehicles. They used TOW missiles and Mark-19 grenade

launchers. The F-15 fighter jets strafed rooftops with cannons, while the

[Apache helicopters] fired Hellfire missiles."

After 11 hours of death and devastation, 1,000 American and Iraqi troops

were able to begin house-to-house searches, arresting or killing suspected

insurgents.

One week later, McClatchy News [31] reporters Nancy Youssef and Zaineb Obeid

visited Haifa Street. They found massive destruction, omnipresent U.S.

military forces locking down virtually all activity, widespread suffering

among residents, and ongoing fighting. Elements of the Shia-dominated Iraqi

army had already begun a systematic campaign to push the Sunni majority from

the neighborhood:

"A 44-year-old Haifa Street resident, who asked to be identified only as

Abu Mohammed for security reasons, said that only three or four [sunni]

families of an estimated 60 families remained on his block. He said no

vehicles were allowed to drive through the area and that there was no

electricity, kerosene or running water. [u.S.] Snipers have taken positions

on the rooftops."

To the fleeing Sunnis, it seemed the Americans were sponsoring ethnic

cleansing. A resident commented: "The Americans are doing nothing, as if

they are backing the militias. If this plan continues for one more week, I

don't think you will find one family left on Haifa Street."

By the end of January, before the first surge reinforcements even arrived,

the battle of Haifa Street was over. A large contingent of American soldiers

would remain in the area, while a vast cement barrier with a handful of

heavily armored gates would be put in place, effectively separating the

community from the rest of the city. The dislodged insurgents retreated into

intermittent guerrilla war, organizing some 20 attacks on the Americans each

month -- a sharp reduction from the 74 much larger battles they had fought

in January. U.S. forces would mount an average of 34 combat patrols each day

aimed at capturing or suppressing them. In January 2008, plans for an

American departure [32] from Haifa Street were still tentative.

The Results of the Surge

Haifa Street would become typical of many Baghdad communities that soon felt

the full impact of the surge offensive. A year later, the neighborhood would

still bear all the marks of battle. There had been no effort to restore

public services, including the electrical grid or the system that should

have supplied potable water; there were no medical services, nor was there

any public transportation.

The New York Post's Ralph Peters [33] summarized the posture of the Maliki

government inside the Green Zone bluntly: "Iraq's government isn't much

help -- none, as far as Haifa Street's revival is concerned." The American

military commander on Haifa Street told him that the U.S. was relying on

"spontaneous economic development" -- local citizens were expected to

develop the area through their own efforts, with the help of a limited

number of "micro-loans" (a few hundred dollars each) from the military's

meager non-combat funds. It was no surprise, then, that, aside from a few

food markets, there was no economy to speak of.

In the meantime, tens of thousands of mainly Sunni residents had left, with

large parts of the area transformed from Sunni to Shia, and smaller sections

moving in the other direction.

In January 2008, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Aguto, the U.S. commander in Haifa

Street, estimated that some 50,000 of the area's 150,000 residents had been

displaced in the previous year. In Baghdad as a whole, the United Nations

High Commissioner on Refugees would estimate that the heavy surge fighting

in the first half of 2007 was producing 90,000 refugees a month, the bulk

from Baghdad; the 2007 total reached 800,000.

As ethnic cleansing in Haifa Street and elsewhere was completed, the rate of

refugee production began to drop, declining to 30,000 by December 2007.

Displaced Baghdadis searching desperately for places to settle faced the

overwhelming challenge of supporting families in a largely dormant economy

with dwindling government support. This was not, commented Lt. Col. Aguto, a

problem the Americans needed to address. "It is," he said, "the job of the

Iraqi government to sort this out." The Iraqi government remained mute on

the subject.

The Ebb of the Surge

As the battle of Haifa Street illustrated, the surge amplified violence in

the capital significantly, as for six months the Americans moved in on one

neighborhood after another, using all the firepower at their command. When

the heavy fighting ended in an invaded neighborhood, the Americans sought to

consolidate their military victory by erecting those now-ubiquitous concrete

barriers, ensuring the ethnic segregation of each neighborhood or partial

neighborhood. These became demarcation lines and no-go boundaries in the

city's civil war, the borders of a dis-integrated city.

The walls insured that there would be little or no physical, social, or

economic contact among ghettoized, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, even

ones that had previously depended upon such intercourse for daily

sustenance. The city's already compromised economy thus suffered another

body blow. Residents of these newly defined ghettos, unable to get to jobs,

became increasingly desperate, and, searching for solutions, lent support to

the local militias that spoke and acted on their behalf.

As displacement efforts continued, the Shia militias essentially moved east

to west across Baghdad, creating ever more Shia areas from previously mixed

and Sunni neighborhoods. Mainly in the western and southern parts of

Baghdad, the Sunni militias persevered, consolidating their control in areas

that the Americans did not invade.

The ghettoization of Baghdad, which had begun relatively modestly in early

2005, reached a crescendo in early 2007 with the American surge and was

largely completed by the fall of 2007. By that time, what had once been a

city split between Sunnis and Shia had been transformed into a 75% Shia

capital. The American military made its presence felt at checkpoints, at

many small bases established around the city, and by patrols into

neighborhoods now demarcated by cement barriers. The localities, however,

were still governed by the local militias in what was no longer a city, but

a ghettoized collection of micro-city-states.

The End of the Surge

After a spring and summer of heavy fighting, however, the Americans were

hardly close to pacifying the city. In a way, the surge had worsened the

situation. Before it began, in many neighborhoods neither Sunni nor Shia

militias were dominant; by the middle of 2007, virtually every community had

its own mini-government, usually dominated by a militia that was hostile

both to the occupation and the central government. To assert centralized

authority over the city, each neighborhood would have had to be invaded

again.

Without announcing a change in policy, the Americans functionally abandoned

the surge in the late summer 2007 in favor of a "live and let live" program

of cooptation. On the Sunni side of the street, the Americans adopted a

version of the Sunni "Awakening" movement that had arisen without American

encouragement in Anbar Province the previous year, negotiating armed truces

with their insurgent adversaries on a community-by-community basis. The

Americans conceded to the militias the right to police their own

communities, discontinued American offensives aimed at dislodging them, and

halted the hated home invasions aimed at arresting or killing suspected

insurgents. In exchange, the insurgents were to rein in attacks on American

troops and suppress jihadist activity in their neighborhoods, thus

curtailing the planning and execution of car bomb and other terrorist

attacks on nearby Shia communities.

On the Shia side, the Americans essentially negotiated a ceasefire with the

Mahdi Army, announced publicly as a unilateral stand-down by its leader

Moqtada Al Sadr. The Sadrists curtailed the planting of lethal roadside

bombs against the Americans and no longer sought to ambush American and

Iraqi army troops moving through their neighborhoods. The Americans

curtailed their raids and offensives in Sadrist neighborhoods and spent far

less effort hunting down and arresting Sadrist leaders, except when they

specifically broke the ceasefire.

The result of this double d