Chapter 2 of the U.S. Army’s second volume on the Iraq War covers the period after President Bush decided to surge troops into Iraq but before it was actually implemented. It showed more dysfunction within the U.S. government, while inside Iraq the warring factions were preparing for a final confrontation.
It would take almost 2 months from President Bush’s announcement of the Surge for his new commander General David Petraeus to arrive in Iraq. That transition period showed different officials continuing with their own agendas whether that aligned with the new policy or not.
General Ray Odierno for instance was the new ground forces commander in Iraq who wanted to send more troops into Baghdad to carry out offensive operations against the insurgency. That was more in line with what the Surge was to become.
Odierno however was contradicting his boss General George Casey’s plan to speed up the Americans turning over security to the Iraqis so that the U.S. could leave. That plan was facing continued failures.
The Americans proved capable of clearing a neighborhood in Baghdad but when they turned it over to the Iraqi army and police they carried out attacks upon Sunnis and couldn’t fight the insurgents on their own. Despite this Casey had been arguing for a U.S. withdrawal since he entered Iraq in 2005. The more the Iraqis faltered in their responsibilities and turned out to be sectarian actors fighting in the civil war the general pushed on with his idea that if the U.S. left the Iraqis would step up and solve their own problems.
Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had his own ideas. He wanted more control over the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) so that he could defeat the insurgency and establish Shiite control over Baghdad. He created a new Baghdad Operations Command which allowed him to circumvent the military’s chain of command and give direct orders to units. He also wanted a commander who was loyal to him and would target Sunnis. At first he suggested General Mohan al-Freiji but the U.S. rejected him as being too sectarian. Maliki then picked General Abdu Qanbar. A U.S. advisor to the Baghdad Operations Command said Qanbar had little military experience, had contempt for the U.S. and would probably follow sectarian policies. The general’s strategy turned out to be centered around checkpoints throughout the capitol which were used to control the population rather than any type of campaign against the insurgents.
The Iraqi government was also unofficially backing the militias to cleanse Sunnis from Baghdad and establish Shiite supremacy. They were moving into southern Baghdad province and northern Babil along with Sunni towns in the north which were insurgent hotbeds and sources of car bombs sent into Baghdad. The Mahdi Army for instance took Mahmudiya in the south in the fall of 2006 and used it to launch attacks upon other Sunni towns in the area.
The Iraqi militias were supported by Iran and its Quds Force under General Qasim Soleimani. Tehran had several supply lines into Iraq using Diyala and Maysan provinces as hubs. The Mahdi Army was the main group fighting in and around Baghdad but Iran found its leader Moqtada al-Sadr unreliable so it broke away factions from his militia and created new ones which it could better control. One of those was Kataib Hezbollah headed by Abu Muhandis who had worked closely with Iran since the 1980s. Iran also relied upon Lebanon’s Hezbollah to act as a liaison with the militias and train them.
The Americans took sides in this swarm of armed Shiite groups backing the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and its Badr Brigade against Sadr and his Mahdi Army and its breakaway groups. Badr had taken over the Interior Ministry and many of its special police forces in 2005 and carried out attacks upon Sunnis and yet the U.S. saw it as a more moderate group than Sadr and his militia because he was openly anti-American calling for with its expulsion from Iraq. Badr precipitated the civil war and yet the U.S. largely gave it free reign. This was facilitated by President Bush’s general ignorance about the actors in Iraq and his view of Sadr as a thug.
The the president’s position was shown when the Americans captured the head of the Quds Force’s operations department at the house of Badr leader Hadi Amiri in Baghdad. Some of the captured material included a map of Baghdad showing the sectarian breakdown of neighborhoods which Badr was fighting over as well as papers on Iranian arms shipments to the militia. Bush asked whether Badr and its parent organization the Supreme Council was involved with Iran and he was told yes. He asked if ISCI was responsible for killing US troops and he was informed that it wasn’t but it could be training those that did. The president didn’t know that ISCI and Badr were created in the 1980s to unify the Iraqi opposition to Saddam under Tehran’s leadership. Still, Bush didn’t change his position of seeing the Supreme Council as a partner. He thus unwittingly backed Iranian allies seizing control of sections of the Iraqi state.
The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) was also focusing upon Baghdad. It had divided the province into three districts, north, south and east. The insurgents wanted to cut Baghdad off from the south and Diyala to isolate the government and security forces there. Within the city the idea was to force Shiites out which would swamp the government with displaced. This showed that both the militias and the insurgency understood that the key to the battle for the capitol wasn’t just the city itself but the surrounding areas which were crucial for communication, manpower and supplies.
SOURCES
Musings On Iraq, “From Bad To Worse, How Militias Moved Into The Iraqi Police Force, And The United States Failed At Nation Building. Part Two Of An Interview With Jerry Burke, Former Advisor To The Baghdad Police And Interior Ministry,” 2/13/12
Nixon, John, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein, New York: Blue Rider Press, 2016
Rayburn, Colonel Joel, Sobchak, Colonel Frank, Editors, The U.S. Army In The Iraq War Volume 2, Surge And Withdrawal 2007-2011, Strategic Studies institute and U.S. Army War College Press, 2019
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