Читать книгу Fallujah Awakens - Bill Ardolino - Страница 11

MAP 1 The Fallujah Peninsula

On the walk to the meeting, Maj. Dan Whisnant thought about what he would say to the sheikh. “What will he ask for?” he wondered. “What are we prepared to give?”¹ Accompanying Whisnant to the midnight parley were an Iraqi interpreter nicknamed “Caesar,” a military intelligence Marine, and five well-armed infantrymen. The small party was leaving the security of their base for one of the sheikh’s houses a few hundred meters outside the wire.

A crescent moon and a quilt of bright desert stars barely illuminated a wall of twelve-foot concrete barriers and sharp rings of razor wire that guarded the eastern face of the American compound. The men picked their way through a maze of lower barriers crisscrossing a section of road running through the entrance, the serpentine configuration preventing suicide car bombers from penetrating their lines. A young Marine manning an M-240 machine gun atop a wooden observation tower silently watched as a member of Whisnant’s detail held up a coil of the edged wire and replaced it behind them after all had exited the gap. The group turned sharply left along a grass and gravel path hugging the fence line running due south. They moved in silence broken by an occasional softly spoken command, the crunch of boots, and the rustle of weapons and body armor.²

It was a chilly evening on December 26, 2006. From Forward Operating Base Black, Whisnant commanded a company of Marines in charge of the rural peninsula south of the famously restive city of Fallujah. He and his men were tasked with leaving an eighty-square-kilometer area at the heart of Iraq’s violent insurgency in better shape than they had found it. About three months into their tour, Whisnant’s Marines had detained and killed some of the enemy, lost some of their own, and made fitful progress. But the clock was ticking on their six-month deployment.

Whisnant believed that the key to beating the area’s resilient insurgency was information. His men needed to win the cooperation of the people, or at the least alienate them less than the rebels did. To this end, he prioritized getting to know the locals. His men were ordered to be respectful and follow sensible rules of engagement to minimize civilian casualties in their frequent battles with insurgents. Regardless of conscientious doctrine and careful execution, it was exasperating, uncertain work. The population of the area of operations (AO) had proven apathetic, uncooperative at best, and enthusiastically deadly at their worst. The major couldn’t discount the possibility that his Marines were wasting their time.³ The visit to the sheikh might produce a breakthrough.

It would be Whisnant’s first chance to negotiate in secret with one of the sheikhs of the Albu Issa, an old and quarrelsome tribe that effectively administered the Fallujah peninsula and represented a large share of the citizenry within the city.⁴ Then again, the late night conference might wind up in the familiar fashion of more public meetings with tribal leaders: sweet tea and cigarettes, flowery Arabic rhetoric, inexhaustible complaints, and ethereal promises of cooperation that would evaporate with the morning sun. Whisnant cautiously hoped for the best.

Intelligence documents were murky, but hinted that the man they would meet, Sheikh Aifan Sadoun Aifan al-Issawi, might have ties to the insurgency. One of the Iraqi’s older brothers had certainly funded it, and Aifan himself might have even fought the Marines. The sheikh had even claimed to have been shot by Americans, under unclear circumstances, before being jailed for a time in the Abu Ghraib prison.⁵ A dodgy past wasn’t, however, a disqualifying concern for negotiations with the Marines. Many proud military-age men in Fallujah had supported “the resistance against the occupiers” in one way or another during the early years of the war. The “City of Mosques” had been a town filled with and surrounded by barely governable hard cases long before Iraq’s Ottoman era, and the citizenry’s characteristic independence along with a series of unfortunate events had bred rebellion that arguably rivaled soccer and prayer as local pastimes after the U.S.-led invasion.⁶ The only things that might make Sheikh Aifan stand out in this regard were his noble tribal lineage and wealth.

Whisnant’s well-armed security team and the proximity of the sheikh’s house to his base meant the major wasn’t particularly concerned for his safety, even while meeting a possible insurgent in the middle of the night on the Iraqi’s terms. No, what occupied the 42-year-old company commander was sorting out his new contact’s status and motives. He wondered, “Who is this guy? What kind of influence does he wield?”⁷

Aifan was a notable sheikh, but in the bigger picture, he was merely a nephew of the paramount sheikh, the acknowledged leader of his tribe. In addition, the leaders of the Albu Issa are not, in any case, omnipotent. Tribes in Iraqi society are not monolithic, cohesive entities. Rather, they are loose confederations of subtribes, or hamulas, that roughly correspond with individual villages. The subtribes alternately compete with one another for resources or work together against outsiders in shifting patterns of segmentation and collectivism bred from their nomadic ancestors’ struggles to survive a harsh social, political, and desert environment. The paramount sheikh of the Albu Issa tribe nominally presides over twelve subtribes. This leader typically descends from one of the most prestigious khams, an extended family unit consisting of male children who share the same great-great-grandfather. Even under ideal circumstances, the authority of the paramount sheikh is limited, however. His tribe views him as the “father of his people,” influential and responsible for their well-being, but he is still required to consult with a council of sheikhs representing the various subtribes. The complete societal upheaval and loss of basic security after the 2003 invasion had weakened this delicate hierarchy and essentially threw the Albu Issa into chaos.⁸

The moneyed, foreign Islamist fighters who arrived to confront the Americans and their allies were initially welcomed, or at the least tolerated, by many of Anbar province’s Sunni tribes as allies. The newcomers’ thirst for power, however, soon threatened the traditional structure. They siphoned tribal manpower, co-opted or intimidated entire subtribes, casually plundered resources, and murdered competitors.⁹ As the insurgency against U.S. forces persisted, the Albu Issa descended into a parallel civil war for control of the Fallujah peninsula. Some local tribesmen sided with the Islamist radicals in grasping for a new order, while others clung to the status quo. By late 2006, no one sheikh appeared to speak for the tribe. The paramount sheikh and his family nevertheless remained influential figures among an intimidated population caught in the middle of a complex war between insurgents, criminals, Americans, and fellow tribesmen.¹⁰

Gen. David G. Reist and other Marine leaders had recently courted Khamis Hasnawi Aifan al-Issawi, the Albu Issa’s paramount sheikh and titular leader, in Jordan, where some of the tribe’s leadership had taken refuge when al Qaeda began assassinating those who did not bow to the authority of the Islamic State of Iraq, their shadow government. The Marines had attempted to convince Khamis and his family that the United States would support and protect them if they returned from exile and formed an alliance against the radical insurgents.¹¹ Khamis, Sheikh Aifan, and other sheikhs of the Albu Aifan, a subtribe of the Albu Issa, had come home only days prior to the meeting with Major Whisnant. Their return was motivated by the American promises, a sense of duty, and fear that their influence would disappear permanently as other tribes in Anbar province grew in stature and bargained with the Americans, while al Qaeda–backed elements expanded control of the peninsula in their absence. Consummate survivalists, most of the sheikhs remained aloof from U.S. overtures as they assessed prevailing winds.¹² The man Whisnant set out to meet on the night of December 26, however, claimed to be different.

Sheikh Aifan had been actively petitioning to fight the radical insurgents. Unfortunately for American interests, he was only the paramount sheikh’s nephew and the fifteenth of sixteen sons within his kham at that.¹³ The Marines didn’t really know him, wondered about his motives, and were skeptical about his influence within the tribe. Whisnant and his military intelligence sergeant were intrigued, however, by Aifan’s unusual request to meet secretly and considered him a possible inroad toward gaining his powerful uncle’s confidence. They were willing to “keep an open mind” and engage the upstart as a first step toward generating local support.¹⁴

More than three years into the war, the sheikhs of the Albu Issa remained an enigma to the Americans. While a number of them had courted the U.S. military after the invasion, some of these same individuals concurrently supported the then-nascent insurgency.¹⁵ Such double-dealing is a common characteristic of Middle Eastern politics and tribal relations. Nonetheless, the authors of a study on tribes published a few months prior to Whisnant’s deployment had singled out the Albu Issa for their alleged duplicity. The researchers, a group of academics and former military officers, used an old Middle Eastern proverb to describe the tribe: “Put a black turban on a scorpion and you still have a scorpion.”¹⁶

The Albu Issa included some conservative religious firebrands, but the everyday tribesmen weren’t particularly radical in their practice of Islam, and they had no great love for the memory of Saddam Hussein or the Baath Party. They were, however, fierce Iraqi nationalists and members of the newly disenfranchised Sunni minority. Thus, the tribal study determined that the Albu Issa would maintain some support for the insurgency and cynically play both ends to achieve its overriding interests: the economic and political welfare of the tribe and the hasty ejection of foreign forces from Iraq. The authors regarded the possibility of successful cooperation between the Americans and sheikhs of the Albu Issa as unlikely.¹⁷

Past meetings with tribal leaders almost always took place in public and tended to run in rhetorical circles. The superficial dialogue frustrated American—and especially military—sensibilities. Sheikhs would make vague promises while issuing a litany of requests and platitudes, rarely offering actionable intelligence or assistance against the insurgency. Experienced U.S. negotiators had learned to limit promises and obtain concrete support before making significant concessions.

Whisnant knew the game, and on this first visit to the sheikh, he couldn’t promise much anyway. The major had no instructions on how to play things. In fact, the chain of command had not even briefed him about the U.S. mission to woo the tribe’s sheikhs in Jordan. Thus, Whisnant was neither sure of Sheikh Aifan’s position within the tribe’s leadership nor what he was authorized to offer him. Their meeting would be limited to tentative overtures and appraisal. Whisnant later recalled that he was simply there to “assess the man. Get something of value before promising anything of value. And keep an open mind.”¹⁸

The group of Marines and the interpreter walked by a row of houses situated in the village of Zuwiyah. The loosely spaced residences were typical, if relatively affluent examples of the area’s architecture. One- and two-story concrete block structures of muted earth tones lined the road, surrounded by tall brick walls usually split by a metal gate. Here and there palm trees flanked or peeked over the courtyard walls, and scraggly green bushes of hardy flora burst from the powdered dirt shoulders of the road. Whisnant’s delegation soon arrived at their destination—a simple two-story house. Oddly, all of the lights in the neighborhood were out.

The major posted his security element around the building and crossed the courtyard to the front door with his interpreter and the military intelligence Marine whose radio call sign was “Saint One.” One of the homeowners, a tall, reed-thin man named Ma’an Khalid Aifan al-Issawi, was waiting at the door. A smile flashed from his dark brown skin, and the young man gave each of the visitors a soft handshake. “Welcome,” he said in thickly accented English.¹⁹

Ma’an was glad to be hosting the meeting. It might mark an opportunity to fight back against the groups who were threatening his tribe and close family members. Ma’an’s grievances were many: the insurgents practiced a radical form of Islam alien to the local tradition and killed all who disagreed with them; his tribesmen considered themselves to be pious Muslims, but the radical insurgent takfiris (those who accuse others of apostasy) considered any Muslim who failed to meet their draconian litmus test to be kafir, a nonbeliever. And they murdered kafirs, often in creatively cruel ways. The radicals had even forced marriages between foreign insurgents and women of Anbar province’s tribes.

While many of Ma’an’s fellow tribesmen had hesitated, the twenty-four-year-old lawyer by training had joined his cousin Aifan’s lonely vanguard of fighters itching to wage war against al Qaeda and traitorous tribesmen working on its behalf. The enemy, however, was strong. The foreign radicals had plenty of money to back their murderous ideology, and corrupted some Iraqis with it. They also wielded the sword with ruthless impunity at a time when local fighters could not openly carry weapons to defend themselves, lest they get shot or imprisoned by Marines as suspected insurgents.²⁰ Ma’an and Sheikh Aifan wanted U.S. military resources to launch their fight against the radicals, to be sure. More fundamentally, they needed the Americans to let them openly carry arms and recruit fighters to guard their village and attack the irhabiyin (terrorists).²¹

Ma’an hoped that the meeting with the Americans would go well, although he had skepticism borne of experience. Previous U.S. units had failed to deliver on their promises, and it seemed that one group of soldiers had barely arrived before new ones replaced them. Still, he held out hope that a deal was possible. His cousin Sheikh Aifan was strong willed and easy to anger, but he was willing to fight. And the sheikh also wasn’t shy about telling anyone who would listen what he needed to begin that fight. From Ma’an’s experience with Americans, he had a feeling that they would like his cousin’s aggressive style.²²

Ma’an led the men into his darkened house. A smattering of candles flickered low light over a typically hospitable Arab spread of dates, fruit, vegetables, and bread atop a row of TV trays in a main room. The visitors removed their gear and placed their rifles against a wall as a show of good faith; they kept their sidearms. Ma’an motioned them over to chairs set up in front of the trays, putting their backs to the entrance of the house. A man got up from his position on a low couch opposite the chairs. He wore pale robes under a dark suit jacket, and his head was enigmatically wrapped in a red-and-white checkered shemagh. Only passionate brown eyes and the top of his nose remained visible. He offered a loose handshake and spoke in surprisingly good English.²³

“Greetings sir, welcome sir. Thank you for coming. Call me ‘Dark.’”²⁴ Sheikh Aifan, now “Dark,” was doing his best to cast an atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue over the late-night rendezvous. This was an understandable precaution. Al Qaeda inevitably attempted to kill (brutally, if possible, to set an example) anyone openly meeting with Americans. Regardless, Whisnant still chuckled to himself at the cloak-and-dagger theatrics. The odds of neighbors failing to notice the retinue of armored Marines traipsing through their village and entering this house defied any prospects for secrecy.

Everyone sat, and the Americans politely sampled the food. Dark began speaking in an Arabic that even the Marines recognized as a particularly formal dialect. Caesar translated the sheikh’s brief pleasantries, which were followed by a list of grievances against al Qaeda and his other enemies. Dark said he hoped for U.S. support and an active alliance with his men, who would provide intelligence and identify the insurgents for the Marines. He enthusiastically handed them leaflets he had created denigrating the foreign radicals and “traitors.” As the sheikh continued, his formality ebbed. His words became casual Arabic, then English, and the forthright passion of his nature surfaced. He removed his head covering, revealing a neatly trimmed beard bordering the full face of a man who looked to be in his thirties.²⁵

“Give me the support I’ve been promised [by Americans] in Jordan,” Dark said. The Marines were perplexed. They knew of no specific promises. The sheikh also expressed that he needed his men to be able to carry weapons, and he asked for the release of some tribesmen who had been detained by the Marines.

“What authority do you have to speak for the tribe?” queried Saint One, the military intelligence Marine. He then specifically asked Dark whether he had the support of the paramount sheikh, Khamis. Dark bristled at the question. The American continued probing along these lines, asking the young sheikh about his motivation and placement, while Whisnant silently observed.

“Sheikh Khamis is an old man,” came the response. “He doesn’t have the will to fight al Qaeda like I do,” said Dark. Still, the Marines emphasized that they would need assurances from Khamis about the younger sheikh’s authority to speak for the tribe.²⁶

Ma’an had considered how he might help deliver what the Americans were requesting. Dark and Khamis weren’t close and didn’t see eye-to-eye on how to deal with the mujahidin. Khamis was indeed old and careful; he was shrewdly hesitant about the idea of openly declaring war on the radicals and doubted Dark’s enthusiasm. Ma’an, however, was favored by the paramount sheikh, his uncle. He could serve as a link between Khamis and Dark, and believed he could even help persuade Khamis to show enough support for his cousin to set in motion a deal with the Americans.²⁷

Dark was as eager to work with the Marines as Khamis was hesitant. The young sheikh wanted weapons to destroy the takfiris and business contracts to increase his stature within the tribe.²⁸ As only the fifteenth son of the first son of Sadoun Aifan, the patriarch of the leading family, he lacked the lineage and experience of the paramount sheikh, his other uncles, and several older brothers. At the same time, while birth order is important in Arab tribes, it is not the only thing. Three idealized, traditional virtues signify great men: a sheikh’s courage, leadership, and luck (hadn). Dark’s burning ambition fueled the first two traits. God’s will would determine his luck.

A sheikh is also elevated as a leader based on the unspoken criteria of the security and largess he can obtain for the tribe. Dark had a plan to acquire both.²⁹ He had followed the meteoric rise of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, an ambitious sheikh to the west, near Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. Sattar was a relatively young sheikh heading the Abu Risha, a historically minor tribe, but was transforming his cooperation with the Americans and his brave willingness to stand up to al Qaeda into victories against the radicals and rapid advancement for himself and his people. His name rang out in Anbar.

Dark knew Sattar personally and admired his path, while undoubtedly viewing him as a competitor for regional power and business. While some of the Albu Issa had stood up to insurgents at about the same time, Sattar’s formation of the Anbar Salvation Council, a confederation against al Qaeda, had obtained license from both the Americans and the government of Iraq to organize and fight. In the near term, Dark hoped to borrow some of Sattar’s “emergency response units” for a nearby fight south of Fallujah while building his own local force modeled on the Abu Rishas’ example.³⁰ God willing, he would be the man who killed or drove the hated irhabiyin from Fallujah, claiming security and stature. If only the Americans—who bumbled and missed as often as they fought or imprisoned the right people—would let him and his men loose on his enemies. Release some of his detained tribesmen and allow them to openly fight al Qaeda, and the insurgency would be finished. He had to convince the Marines, make them understand. They must act, now.³¹ That sentiment—expressed in Dark’s formal preamble, itemized list of demands, and conclusion—ultimately defined the two-hour meeting. The garrulous young sheikh reminded Whisnant of a phrase from Alec Baldwin’s aggressive salesman in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross: “A-B-C. Always be closing.”

“I am tired of waiting. I am tired of sitting around in circles and talking. I want action now,” said Dark.³² The meeting ended with smiles, handshakes, and a cordial agreement to hold a subsequent parley with paramount sheikh Khamis. The Marines gathered their weapons and armor and left the house. Whisnant’s security element formed up and spread into a small protective column for the short walk back to the base.

The major had been careful to promise little, only to follow up on the support of radios and weapons allegedly promised by Americans in Jordan. He was too cautious to be overly optimistic, and he couldn’t suppress thoughts about the oddness of his situation and the man he had just met. The Reservist Marine officer was worlds away from his civilian life—a Baptist family man from Michigan was cutting midnight deals with an upstart sheikh from a dangerous and ancient tribe rooted in the “Cradle of Civilization.”

Whisnant and Saint One compared notes. They both had a good feeling about Dark. He was smart and motivated. The Marines dared to wonder if they had finally found an effective local partner.

“Here is a guy who wants to get something done,” Whisnant thought. “Let’s hope it pans out.”³³