by Mark Urban
12
THE AWAKENING
On 17 August 2006 a Marine Corps colonel named Peter Devlin fired off a secret assessment entitled ‘State of the Insurgency in al-Anbar’. His job, as the top intelligence officer for the US force operating in the west of Iraq, meant that he was party to the most sensitive information at his country’s disposal. His first paragraph concluded, ‘The social and political situation has deteriorated to such a point that MNF and ISF are no longer capable of defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.’ The colonel’s stark judgement shocked many, and was promptly leaked to the press, feeding a sense in Washington that President Bush’s great project in Iraq had been defeated.
Who, then, had won? ‘AQI is the dominant organisation of influence in al-Anbar, surpassing nationalist insurgents, the Iraqi government and MNF in its ability to control the day to day life of the average Sunni,’ wrote Devlin. But if he was party to much of the same intelligence reporting as Lieutenant-General Stan McChrystal, how had they reached such different conclusions about the ability of Coalition forces to prevail against al-Qaeda?
At the time of his report, and despite British encouragement to shift the focus of US operations to Baghdad, al-Anbar Province was still the most difficult and bloody part of Iraq for US forces. In August 2006, for example, thirty-two of the seventy Americans who lost their lives across the whole of Iraq perished in Anbar – twice as many as were lost in the greater Baghdad area. Al-Qaeda cells that mounted bombing attacks into the capital from towns like Abu Ghraib or Yusufiyah in fact relied upon a secure line of communication through Anbar, and the organisation viewed the province as central to its project of declaring a caliphate. Between February and August 2006, violent attacks in Anbar increased by 57 per cent.
For anybody trying to secure it, the province presented a host of challenges. Its main cities, Fallujah and Ramadi were, like the US bases, islands of population in a sea of desert. The back-streets of the provincial capital, Ramadi, were probably the toughest urban environment that any Coalition troops faced in Iraq. As for the human geography, there were stark contrasts between the civic divisions of districts or ministries so important to soldiers with a western mindset and the tribal identities that defined so many Anbaris.
Since 2004’s crescendo of violence in Fallujah, the centre of militant resistance had been displaced to Ramadi. American intelligence estimated that around five thousand al-Qaeda fighters lurked among the city’s population of four hundred thousand. American patrols into the city were usually attacked, and the local resistance groups were reckoned to be setting eight IEDs per day for them. A systematic campaign of assassination against those who sided with the Baghdad government had by mid-2006 left the province almost without leadership. As for the police, it illustrated well the hollowness of many of the statistics about Iraqi forces reeled off by Coalition spokesmen. The city had posts for 3386, of which only 420 were filled and most of them did not turn up for work. On a normal day, there were around a hundred police on duty in Ramadi.
On 18 June the Americans had launched a concerted attempt to ‘retake’ Ramadi. A new commander, Colonel Sean MacFarland of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the Germany-based 1st Armoured Division, had come in with a bold plan to wrest control from the militants. He intended to establish combat outposts across the city in order to challenge AQI. Their fighters picked up the gauntlet and Ramadi was soon the scene of intense daily firefights in which the Americans, with their Predator drones, armour and Humvees, were pitted against snipers, roadside bombs and suicide bombers driving trucks full of high explosive. MacFarland’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was equipped for heavy armoured warfare on the plains of Germany, fielding Abrams tanks and Bradley infantry fighting vehicles – the most heavily protected types in the US inventory. Bitter experience had however shown that even this level of armoured protection was not always adequate when faced with a hail of RPGs or huge IEDs buried under the roads in Anbar.
The intensity of the combat can be judged by two medal citations for US Navy commandos killed at the time. They belonged to Seal Team 3, a special operations force used to stiffen Iraqi troops in the fighting. One was killed on 2 August after evacuating a wounded team-mate during fighting that involved dozens of insurgents and American tanks. Another, Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael Monsoor, was nominated for his country’s highest bravery award after falling on 29 September. Monsoor’s citation for the Medal of Honor noted that the 25-year-old special operator had been in a rooftop position with three other American commandos and eight Iraqi soldiers during operations in Ramadi. They were providing sniper cover to American troops fighting their way through the city. Monsoor’s position became a target for the insurgents, who first fired an RPG at it before closing in with small arms. One threw a grenade onto the rooftop. According to an internet source, ‘Monsoor yelled “Grenade!” and dropped on top of the grenade prior to it exploding. Monsoor’s body shielded the others from the brunt of the fragmentation blast and two other SEALs were only wounded by the remaining blast.’
That Seal team operating in Ramadi was part of the Tier 2 effort, bolstering local Iraqi forces, rather than McChrystal’s Tier 1 JSOC. It had a stake in the battle in the form of Task Force Blue, based at al-Asad airbase. Like Green, the Delta operators, the Seals from Task Force Blue mounted takedown operations against al-Qaeda targets on the basis of high-level intelligence. Neither Blue nor Britain’s Task Force Knight, which rarely ventured into Anbar, were to have much of a part to play in MacFarland’s plan for Ramadi. For, alongside the visible axis of his advance – the city’s main thoroughfares, such as Route Michigan – was his operation based on social lines – his plan to turn the tribes. Many had tried and failed to enlist the support of Anbari tribal sheikhs but the effort was about to produce dramatic results. Like many a success, this one has many fathers – or those who would claim credit – but the British role in this secret business is little understood.
The origins of the Force Strategic Engagement Cell lay in instructions given by General Casey to Lieutenant-General Rob Fry in May 2006. This task fell to the British in part because the Deputy Commanding General swept up all sorts of other business on behalf of his US Army boss. The cell was a working group of several officers, led by the British military but including the Americans and closely involving the CIA as well as MI6. Its business, as ‘strategic’ implied, was the turning of key power brokers. Placing this effort under British leadership may also have been an attempt by the American general to insulate himself from responsibility if it all went wrong. A senior member of one of the civilian intelligence agencies involved in the effort to turn tribes into new militias notes, ‘Casey’s concern was that would be unacceptable in Washington and could be interpreted in Iraq as a sign of weakness.’ The US military was very nervous about arming such militias, but not so the CIA. One of the Brits involved insists that ‘the CIA contribution was absolutely pivotal’. The Agency not only pinpointed targets for cultivation, based on its long work in this area since the invasion, but was ready to arm Sunnis in a way that gave the US military shudders of anxiety.
From its earliest days in the country, the CIA had tried to woo the tribes. These efforts had yielded little for a variety of reasons. The 2004 Fallujah operation poisoned a good deal of rural opinion in Anbar. It also, in the shape of the Fallujah Brigade formed from former Ba’athists in November 2004, temporarily discredited the option of arming local Sunni militias. They had simply gone over to the insurgency. During 2005 the bitter fights in the Upper Euphrates had opened rifts, particularly between local communities and foreign fighters, but al-Qaeda had been so successful in killing or driving away any community leader who stood up against them that contacts remained tentative.
During May and June Fry received a couple of important delegations at his office in the Green Zone. The first came from Abu Ghraib and the second from Diyala, a province to the north-east of the capital. The nature of these meetings meant they had to be clandestine. The t
ribal leaders were picked up in covert vehicles for transport to the Green Zone. After discussions they were returned to a discreet drop-off point. These early discussions proved inconclusive: the sheikhs were polite and emollient, but seemed vague about how many men they might be able to field as militia or when they might actually do it. But around the time of Peter Devlin’s memo on the hopelessness of the situation in Anbar, a meeting was arranged with some key people from that troubled province. The CIA Station Chief in Baghdad was instrumental in spotting the individuals, and so was the Iraqi governor. One figure who was party to early discussions hosted by Rob Fry noted, ‘The last to become involved were the Anbaris but they had far greater cohesion than the others.’ The Coalition and some power brokers from Anbar had taken a good look at one another and it seemed they might be able to do business.
That these Sunni sheikhs were risking their lives in meeting Lieutenant-General Fry or US officers was obvious. An attempt late in 2005 to organise an anti-al-Qaeda front called the Anbar People’s Council had produced intense violence. These local dignitaries had helped secure elections in December 2005, but following this, as Devlin wrote in his secret report, ‘Faced with this blatant challenge to their hegemony, AQI destroyed the Anbar People’s Council… through a highly efficient and comprehensive assassination campaign.’ To side with the Americans often meant not only death but torture, beheading or the desecration of your body, with the video of these acts going on sale in Ramadi’s bazaars.
Sheikh Abu Ali al-Jassim came forward with a pledge to induct his men into the Iraqi police and history seemed to be repeating itself as he was soon targeted by al-Qaeda. They abducted and killed him, hiding his body for four days before telling his relatives where to find it. This violation of the Islamic principles concerning treatment of the dead was a step too far. Ramadi had experienced blistering violence since the fall of Saddam, not least in the security drive launched by MacFarland that June. Countless buildings had been flattened and stray American bullets and bombs had killed hundreds if not thousands by the time that Sheikh Jassim was murdered. Despite this catalogue of horrors and, just like the Samarra bombing, it was al-Qaeda’s symbolic act of desecration that proved so powerful.
Over glasses of tea in the diwans of their family compounds, with tissues ready to hand to mop their brows in the crazy heat, the sheikhs talked and their views began to coalesce. Halas – enough. Some of them were people whom the CIA, MacFarland’s officers or the Strategic Engagement Cell had cultivated, but many were not. On 9 September 2006 they went public.
The newly formed Sahwa al-Anbar or Anbar Awakening embraced twenty different tribes under the chairmanship of Sheikh Sittar abu Risha. A stately figure whose manicured beard and robes gave him an appearance older than his actual age, Sittar’s grandfather had been part of the 1920 anti-British rising and his father fought them again in 1941. His reputation in the western part of Ramadi, where he came from, was as a minor sheikh and major smuggler whose influence had grown because of the murder or emigration of more senior figures. Given his family’s lineage in the nationalist resistance he was an unlikely partner for the British-run Strategic Engagement Cell, but those involved confirm that is precisely what he became. Less than a month after Peter Devlin’s pessimistic memo there had been a change of strategic importance in Iraq’s biggest province. The Awakening initially committed 1300 men to the police, but US military records suggest that in the second half of 2006 four thousand or so actually joined in Anbar.
Faced with this counter-revolt, al-Qaeda responded both with agitation and violence. In mid-October it announced the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq, with Ramadi as its capital, but this attempt to fulfil the vision of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other jihadists had come far too late. Al-Jazeera and other Arab networks were given pictures showing public celebrations of the formation of the breakaway Sunni state. This venture would involve not just the imposition of strict sharia but also the deliberate dismemberment of the country. Innately conservative Iraqi nationalists such as the sheikhs did not want any part of this – and it wasn’t hard for them to convince their people of the futility of following the al-Qaeda lead. On the streets and in villages tit-for-tat violence intensified as vendettas escalated between the jihadists and tribes. At several crucial moments American tanks and aircraft joined the onslaught in defence of their new ‘police’ allies. The official death toll for Colonel MacFarland’s area of operations in Ramadi between June 2006 and February 2007 was 750 insurgents killed (eighty-five US troops died and five hundred were wounded in the same timeframe). This might have been the toll for the ‘official’ fight, but rumour and dark anecdote surround what happened between those who took sides following the formation of the Anbar Awakening.
During the intense battles of October and November 2006, al-Qaeda was largely eliminated from Ramadi. When I asked one senior Coalition officer how this had happened, he replied without hesitation: ‘Sittar and his boys went out and killed them.’ Panic began to spread through the insurgent organisation. The foreign fighters in particular stood out, and the Awakening people often knew where to find them. Some suggested that this killing spree was triggered by the murder and beheading of several teenagers belonging to an Awakening tribe. One American lieutenant serving in Ramadi explained:
The mosques in the city went crazy. The imams screamed jihad from the loudspeakers. We went to the roof of the outpost and braced for a major assault. Our interpreter joined us. Hold on, he said. They aren’t screaming jihad against us. They are screaming jihad against the insurgents. *
How far this beheading incident triggered subsequent events remains open to debate. The fact is that an estimated five thousand al-Qaeda in Ramadi disappeared between June 2006 and early 2007. Hundreds fled. Teams of militants turned up in Baghdad and elsewhere during the following weeks. Many others may have melted back into the community, for al-Qaeda had always relied on casual help in the planting of bombs or sniping at patrols. But the suspicion remains that many more than the official 750 met their deaths. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were dispatched by the Awakening and lie in unmarked graves in the desert.
By October Britain had switched its senior officer in Baghdad under the six-monthly rotation that the Americans found so exasperating. In Rob Fry’s place came Graeme Lamb, returning to Iraq after his visits as Director of Special Forces and time as commander of the British division in Basra. Lamb had a particular knack for getting on with the American commanders, many of whom he knew from these earlier tours. In company with some of his more strait-laced cousins Lamb even moderated the swearing with which his personal staff was so familiar. As this language suggested, he was a particularly aggressive general whose experience with the SAS and friendship with Stan McChrystal led him to take a particular view of the business started by his predecessor.
Under Lamb the Strategic Engagement Cell stepped up its activities considerably. Meetings with tribal leaders became more frequent. Some were held in the ornate diwan at Maude House, the military residence where the general stayed next to the embassy. Despite this very British-sounding name, the place was fitted out in the style of an Iraqi power broker, the reception room replete with gilt sofas, polished marble floors and chandeliers. Other meetings were held nearby, at the house of Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister in the area known as Little Venice, a section of luxury homes where the artificial waterways had long since gone green and fetid. A few were held in the sheikhs’ own homes. Mindful of the duties of the Arab host, when on home ground Graeme Lamb was careful to serve his guests their tea personally.
Lamb soon saw the potential for locking together the tribal strategy and JSOC’s industrial counterterrorist drive. One of those present in a meeting recalls an Iraqi potentate, active in the resistance, telling the British general, ‘The Iraqis are just sheep. You must find the shepherds.’ The sheikhs were excellent sources of intelligence about who was killing whom in their home areas. In some cases, too, the alignment of a particular neighbo
ur or village with the jihadists prevented a friendly leader from declaring for the Awakening. If the local AQI emir could be taken down, in one stroke the militants would suffer a blow in the district, an element of intimidation would be removed and a new sheikh could declare himself in support of the government. Lamb co-opted an SAS major – initially the officer who had led B Squadron during the invasion – into the Strategic Engagement Cell to act as the linkman between his charm and JSOC’s harm offensives.
It was at this time, autumn 2006, that a change of language became apparent at Camp Victory and the US Embassy. ‘We started using the terms “reconcilable” and “irreconcilable”,’ recalls one key player. ‘This was taking away the simplicity of language of saying “enemy” or “insurgent”.’ Some Americans credit their British deputy commanding general with this change of emphasis, arguing that it became central to his Awakening strategy. Others claim that the ‘irreconcilable’ label had been around for a while out west, courtesy of the Marines. Whether or not Lamb coined the term or simply picked it up and ran with it, it started to figure in his e-mail exchanges with his old colleague General David Petraeus. Petraeus had already spent much time in Iraq, as commander of a division during the invasion and its aftermath, as well as in senior staff jobs. The failure of General Casey’s Baghdad Security Plan was causing people in Washington to question his future. Some were already touting Petraeus as his successor.
Although the events that followed soon after Peter Devlin’s intelligence assessment might seem to have proven him a man with a singular lack of understanding of the underlying situation, his main failing was one common to a great many other officers at that time: a pessimism born of repeated reverses, notably in the assassination of leaders who tried to support the Coalition. But the colonel had identified the connection between this insecurity and troop strengths in Iraq, arguing extra marines were needed to turn around the situation. Increasingly the understanding that more soldiers were required if the US was to prevail spread among America’s military leadership.
