The Widow's Network (Kindle Single)

by Nick McDonell

  In the late spring of 2016, I visited the Iraqi city of Tikrit to see America’s war against the Islamic State. It had been nearly two years since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate beneath the leaning minaret of Mosul’s al-Nuri Mosque and sent his forces south, through the fertile basin of the Tigris, to conquer the world. In those first days, they consolidated a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom, imposing their fanatical law across the deserts of Anbar, block to block through Ramadi, Fallujah, and dozens of Iraq’s ancient villages and towns. Tikrit’s fall was a particularly dark day. The city lay less than 125 miles from what was once known as the Green Zone—and if Tikrit could fall, Iraqis realized, Baghdad itself was in jeopardy. The Iraqi government and a hastily assembled international coalition, led by the Americans, struck back, but the battle was bloody and slow, and it was not until the following April that Tikrit was liberated. On the hot afternoon when I arrived a year later, much of the city still lay in ruins. I had come to interview a mother who claimed to have lost nine children in an air strike.1

  We met in her family’s squat, dusty house, on a street scarred by gunfire, in a neighborhood called Kadisiya Two, near the Tigris in northern Tikrit. In the dark living room, as the mother wept, several cousins and sisters and I began to work out the specifics of the incident. Within the family, memories of the catastrophic day differed slightly, but as we detailed the names and ages of the sons and daughters, a clear picture emerged.

  A little way into the interview, all but one of the relatives went to the kitchen to prepare tea, leaving me and my interpreter alone with Sabrine, a slender young aunt to the dead children. Sabrine had been part of the conversation, but not its center. Just then, we’d been talking about how the coalition picked targets and how it might have mistaken a house full of children for an ISIS base. Sabrine suggested that, sometimes, people provided the local intelligence services with bad information, which led to bad air strikes.

  Wondering how she might know such a thing, I asked Sabrine if she herself ever gave information to the intelligence services.

  “No, no,” she told me. “I worked for the spy bureau.”

  I didn’t quite understand, so Sabrine clarified, leaning forward, her hijab loose about her light brown hair. Her son, a large-eyed boy named Mohammed, was shyly pressing his forehead against her knee as she spoke.

  “I was a spy for the government.”2

  Sabrine said no one in her family knew, and when her relatives returned, we dropped the topic. Throughout the rest of the meeting, Sabrine looked at me with some mischief in her eyes. As I was leaving, I asked quietly if we could discuss her work, in private, another time. She agreed, and then, as I was heading to the car, she pulled me aside.

  “Look,” she told me, taking a flip phone from the pocket of her long black skirt.

  She scrolled to a selfie in which she wore form-fitting camouflage, brandished a semiautomatic pistol, and scowled.

  “This,” she said, “is the real me.”3

  Sabrine, I would come to learn, served in a unit of women living undercover as the “wives” of ISIS fighters, providing information on targets for coalition air strikes. Faced with forced marriage to the militants, they embraced their horrific situation for the sake of the cause, rather than flee, hide, or fight to preserve the lives they’d known before. It was an unusual unit, driven by revenge and marked by astonishing courage and tolerance for suffering. For Sabrine and her colleagues, enslavement and rape attended the more typical challenges of clandestine intelligence operations. Like America’s wider war against ISIS, theirs was treacherous work, less precise and far more brutal than usually understood.

  Sabrine grew up in al-Alam, a village of concrete and cinder block on the banks of the Tigris River, 105 miles north of Baghdad. The village lies on the outskirts of Tikrit, in an area famous as the birthplace of Saddam Hussein. Several of his palaces loom among the city’s low-slung apartment blocks and shops, which have harbored insurgents, kidnappers, and every iteration of al-Qaeda since the Americans arrived in 2003, when Sabrine was fourteen.

  By then, she had dropped out of school to stay home with her mother and sisters and to take care of the modest household. Income for the family came from the government—her father was a retired policeman—and her world consisted of house, market, mosque, occasional visits to family members, and the assumption of marriage. In Sabrine’s teenage years, Tikrit was troubled by violence between the Americans and insurgents, but she and her immediate family survived unscathed.

  When Sabrine was twenty, in 2009, a cousin who’d seen her at a wedding approached her aunts to negotiate a marriage. Her family consented, and the second time Sabrine met this cousin, they wed. Nine months later, she gave birth to a son, Mohammed. But before her first anniversary, Sabrine decided she wanted a divorce. Her family and friends weren’t surprised, even though divorce in Iraq was unusual, particularly among conservative Sunnis in Tikrit. Sabrine had always been opinionated and bold within the confines of her upbringing. Now she claimed that her husband was disrespecting and beating her, and she wanted out. She moved out of his house and back in with her family.

  Sabrine’s father agreed to support the divorce application, and together they went to the courthouse. The judge who decided the case applied Iraqi law as he understood it. The wife needed four witnesses to testify that the husband was disrespecting her. No matter what, all property would go to the husband, because he was responsible for the marriage, because the Koran said so. The process took a year, but Sabrine got her divorce.4

  At twenty-one, she didn’t want to live with her parents anymore, or remarry. She moved in with a married sister who resided in the Kadisiya Two neighborhood. Not knowing what to do next, she kept doing what she’d done all that year—she went to court. Though the divorce had been difficult, she enjoyed the legal proceedings and liked being at the courthouse. It was better than being home all day. She had friends there and had been particularly taken under the wing of a confident, soft-spoken lawyer named Igrah Jabouri, who favored platform shoes, gold jewelry, and fancifully embroidered hijabs.

  From 2010 to 2014, while Mohammed stayed home with his aunt, Sabrine went to court frequently, to listen, chat with Igrah, and watch dramas unfold. She became such a fixture that sometimes people approached her, thinking she was a lawyer, and she had to tell them, “Sorry, no, I’m not.” She thought she’d like to become a lawyer, but had never gone to secondary school, and certainly didn’t have the money to enroll in law school. She doubted she ever would.

  What little money Sabrine did have, about eighty-five dollars a month,5 came from the government’s Office of Assistance for Divorced Women and Widows in Tikrit. For three generations, war has skewed Iraq’s demographics; in 2011, Iraq’s Ministry of Planning estimated that one in ten Iraqi women were widows.6 Then as now, the Office of Assistance was slow moving, and it became another place, like the courthouse, where Sabrine took to hanging out, chatting with young widows and divorcées while they waited to file paperwork or collect money. It was on an otherwise unremarkable morning in that office, in April of 2012, that Igrah, the kindly lawyer, introduced Sabrine to Wahida Muhammad.

  Wahida was magnetic. She wore the black uniform of the Iraqi special forces and traveled with several armed men who obeyed her swiftly and unquestioningly. Wahida had been married to an Iraqi Army brigadier general killed by al-Qaeda, and she was there to collect her widow’s payment. But she was also looking for recruits. She told Sabrine that she was at war with al-Qaeda and, as Sabrine knew, that al-Qaeda operated throughout the country, even in the government, even in the courts. Did Sabrine want to help?

  She did, especia
lly when Wahida told her she’d be paid. Over the next two years, the women grew close. Wahida told Sabrine to keep going to the courthouse, and called regularly to talk about what was going on there and around Tikrit. Sometimes Wahida visited, but mostly they spoke by phone. Sabrine started to feel like an adopted daughter. Wahida was decisive, powerful, unlike any other women she’d met. Sabrine called her for advice about everything. Once, when Sabrine received a marriage proposal, she even asked if she should accept. No, Wahida advised, and Sabrine didn’t.

  She was therefore unmarried on June 11, 2014, when Islamic State fighters drove their black-flagged pickup trucks into Tikrit.

  The city had been relatively calm since the Americans withdrew, but Sabrine was not surprised that some of her neighbors—and relatives—were indifferent or sympathetic to the long-haired ISIS fighters who fanned across Tikrit that early-summer day. The local Sunni population felt largely disenfranchised and threatened by the United States and the Iranian-backed, Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. The Iraqi Army, many Tikritis thought, was as dangerous as any Sunni insurgent group.

  ISIS quickly proved its brutality. The Iraqi Army fled as ISIS fighters occupied the local military base, blew up the courthouse, and hanged police officers in the street. On their second day in Tikrit, ISIS fighters executed more than 1,700 Iraqi Air Force cadets from nearby Camp Speicher, bulldozing many of the bodies into shallow mass graves on the outskirts of the city.7 The organization began to impose its draconian laws throughout the city, threatening to kill those who attempted escape. Sabrine recalled watching the beheading of eight people in al-Alam’s traffic circle.8

  The militants couldn’t be everywhere at once, though, and in careful defiance, Sabrine kept her phone. She hid it in her underwear, sometimes even in her vagina, if she was especially concerned about being searched. She resaved Wahida’s number under a single word, “lawyer,” and began calling with information: mental lists, composed on the way to the market. She provided checkpoint locations, numbers of men, types of weapons, names.

  A few weeks into the occupation, Sabrine gathered an important piece of intelligence about a building in Kadisiya Two. In this instance, she relayed it not only to Wahida, but, on her own initiative, to another intelligence officer, Talat Issa Khalaf. He was in the same agency and lived ten minutes down the road. Sabrine knew him from around the neighborhood. Like most senior officials, he had fled before Tikrit fell—but Sabrine thought he should know that ISIS was using his big house as its local headquarters.

  When Talat received the call from Sabrine, he’d been a member of Iraq’s security forces for twenty-five years. Originally, he’d been in the army—like his father, who, in retirement, had lived in the big house in Kadisiya Two before fleeing with his son. Talat had lost his position when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the army in 2003, but he’d been able to get a job with Interior Intelligence. In this capacity, he’d been fighting and spying on insurgents for eleven years by the time ISIS emerged. He’d risen to become an influential colonel—essentially a spymaster for Saladin Province, of which Tikrit was the capital. He knew Wahida and her cells of women, and Sabrine. It was his job to know everything, and the sudden assault by ISIS was probably the biggest failure of his career. He did not, however, see any irony in the request he would make on the basis of Sabrine’s intelligence. At forty-eight, driven from his hometown, shrapnel lodged in his thick torso from campaigns gone by, he would request the destruction of his own house.

  Talat in front of his destroyed house

  As Talat remembered it, he cried as he made the decision but never had any doubts. There needed to be an air strike, and he had at least two channels to the Americans who were joining the fight against ISIS that summer. One was up through the hierarchy, to the generals beginning to discuss strategy with their officially returning coalition partners. The other was to a twenty-six-year-old member of the Saladin SWAT team who went by the name Fat Mike.

  Mike, who spoke slangy English and had a tattoo across his forearm in the gothic style favored by US soldiers—No one jajing of me exipt my god—received Talat’s call in Samarra. A city of mosques and shrines about halfway between Tikrit and Baghdad, Samarra plays a key role in Iraq’s recent history. The destruction of its golden-domed al-Askari Mosque in 2006 is often cited as the event that sparked the sectarian civil war. The mosque was rebuilt, and a second destruction by insurgents became a nightmare scenario for sectarian relations. Mike’s SWAT team was among the assembled security forces that, a few weeks before Talat’s call, had stopped ISIS’s invasion of Samarra a mile and a quarter from al-Askari, preventing that catastrophe.9

  The last time insurgents had swarmed Samarra, in the fall of 2004, American forces had freed the city—among them, the 25th Infantry Division, with whom Mike eventually worked. He started with the Americans in May of 2004, when he was sixteen. Employed successively by the contractors L-3 Communications and Global Linguist Solutions, he interpreted for the 82nd and 101st Airborne, as well as the 25th, as all fought for control of Saladin. When the US Army left in 2010, he joined a personal security detail for RTI International, a North Carolina–based nonprofit organization that had a contract with USAID to “foster local governance” in Saladin.10

  Throughout the war and after, Mike’s American colleagues came and went, but one in particular stayed in touch. When they’d met in 2004, the fellow had been in the army, but when he came back in 2006, he seemed to be a civilian. He’d been coming to Iraq ever since. Mike had him saved in his phone as “Marius.” He believed Marius worked for the CIA, and Mike regularly passed him information. That summer of 2014, the information was often grid coordinates for ISIS weapons caches, bomb factories, or bases.11

  The coordinates weren’t in standard GPS form. Instead, Mike sent twelve-digit alpha-numeric codes associated with a real-time mapping software system called the Android Tactical Assault Kit, or ATAK, developed by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York.12 The ATAK icon, on a smartphone, resembles the Star Wars robot R2-D2, but holding an assault rifle. Once open, the application looks like Google Maps, but with its own coordinate system, and an array of icons indicating the position of various units and targets.

  After Talat called Mike with Sabrine’s information, the two of them confirmed the grid coordinates of Talat’s house on ATAK. Then Mike texted them to Marius.

  A text containing ATAK coordinates on Wahida’s phone

  Fat Mike’s tattoo

  On September 15, 2014, ten minutes down the road from Sabrine’s sister’s house in Kadisiya Two, Nazhan Mohammed and his wife, Sundus, were finishing lunch in their living room, and the kids had just gotten up to play, when an enormous explosion blew out the windows of their house. Nazhan, a thirty-year-old accountant at the Tikrit College of Nursing, was stunned and thrown to the ground. When he regained his senses, the dust was so thick, he couldn’t see anything. Sundus’s screams were the first thing he remembered hearing. In the choking gloom, he found his wife and three youngest children, but not his eldest, six-year-old Sara.

  Sara had always been a challenge. Since she was a toddler, she’d suffered difficulty breathing and bouts of fever and lethargy. Nazhan had taken her to doctors in Tikrit, Baghdad, and Erbil; had asked favors at the College of Nursing on her behalf; and had even appealed to the governor of Baghdad Province for help—but no one had been able to provide an accurate diagnosis or successful treatment. And so, in early 2014, Nazhan divided his house in two and sold half to afford a consultation at a hospital in Delhi, India. The trip paid off. Indian doctors diagnosed a hole in one of his daughter’s heart valves and performed surgery. Sara improved immediately. The doctors told Nazhan that she must be treated with care—always kept calm, if possible—and that she would require another operation, but the prognosis was good. Father and daughter returned to Tikrit optimistically in the spring of 2014.

  ISIS’s arrival in June, however, paralyzed the city. Nazhan saw
fighters coming and going from the big house across the street from his own, and soon he noticed guards posted. A grim summer began. Two of his brothers-in-law were police officers, and both were shot dead. ISIS didn’t shut down the College of Nursing, but Nazhan was too frightened to go to work. He went out only once a month, to buy food. And three times that summer, ISIS fighters knocked on the family’s door. The first time, he froze, was silent, and pretended no one was home. The second time, the same. The third time, they shouted through the door that they wanted water, and kept shouting. So Nazhan opened the door. He told the masked fighters, “We don’t have any water.” They pushed him out of the way and tried the tap—but nothing came out. To Nazhan’s relief, they left.

  Nazhan didn’t know what to do. He felt increasingly trapped. There were food shortages, prices spiked, and he was worried about Sara’s health. Every day, Sundus said they should take the children and flee. Nazhan wanted to leave, too, but he was afraid ISIS would catch them, and, anyway, he didn’t know where to go. His whole family was from Tikrit, and he didn’t have much money to rent a place somewhere else. He considered following a friend who had fled to Kirkuk—a nearby city that had escaped ISIS’s onslaught—but when he called to ask about conditions there, the news was bad. His friend couldn’t find a place to stay; refugees were filling the city.

  Still, Nazhan was considering the move until his brother reported a phone call with Talat Issa Khalaf, the owner of the big house across the street, now occupied by ISIS. Talat was known in the neighborhood as someone with an important security services job. Nazhan didn’t know exactly what, and he didn’t like to ask about such things, but his brother was more talkative, friendly with Talat, and had called him for advice. Talat had said the people who escaped to Kirkuk were sleeping on the streets. Nazhan decided to stay put.