Arming our enemies?

An interview with journalist Martin Smith, the maker of a new PBS documentary on Iraqi militias, about how the U.S. strategy of Iraqification could backfire.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: Politics, PBS, News, Iraq, Frontline, Mahdi Army, Alex Koppelman, Nouri al-Maliki, Badr Corps

Photo by Rainmedia.net

Martin Smith interviewing locals on the streets of Mosul.

Feb. 6, 2007 | Our strategy in Iraq has long been based on training homegrown security forces there; in the formulation of the president, "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." But what happens if the Iraqi soldiers and police we stand up have their own agenda, not that of a unified Iraq but that of the sectarian militias that are tearing apart the country, and especially of Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who controls the powerful Mahdi Army? According to some observers, including Tom Lasseter, a reporter for the McClatchy chain of newspapers, that's what's happening.

Martin Smith has seen the situation up close. In more than 30 years working for ABC News, for PBS's "Frontline" and for his own independent production company, RAIN media, Smith has won every major television journalism award, including the Emmy and the Alfred I. duPont. "Gangs of Iraq," an episode of an upcoming PBS series of documentaries called "America at a Crossroads," which will debut in April, is his fourth movie about the country since the U.S. invasion. It looks at the influence of militias in the country, and how that has hampered the U.S. effort to raise and train functional Iraqi army and police forces. Some of the scenes show just how serious the infiltration of militia and sectarian influence has been -- one, for example, depicts Shiite Iraqi soldiers, on a raid with their American trainers, realizing that a bigger arms cache than the one they've found is held by a Shiite cleric to whom they are loyal. The Iraqi soldiers don't tell their American allies.

Salon spoke with Smith on Feb. 2.

What's the extent of Mahdi Army sympathy or involvement, within the Iraqi army, that you saw while you were in Iraq?

Well, it's all anecdotal because there's no scientific measure of this, but if you talk to commanders, whether they're American advisors to the police or to the army, or if you talk to Iraqi commanders, they'll all tell you it's a problem. And you see it most graphically in [U.S. commanders'] refusal to inform the Iraqis of the missions they're going on. When they're going out with the Army, the Iraqis are not informed as to where they are going. In [one case] they were told they were going away for several days so they wouldn't even suspect that the raid was [to occur] less than a mile away from the base.

We were with the police on some routine patrolling, and before the patrol set out, the American in charge, the American who was embedded with the Iraqi police team, frisked all of the policemen, looking for cellphones. And when we asked him why he had to do that, he said, "Because they could call up their friends in the militias" -- he was talking about the Mahdi Army in this particular case -- "and inform them as to our whereabouts and that we're coming to this place or that place." So that's kind of the sum of what we saw.

Did you get the sense that what the U.S. is doing is essentially training the Mahdi Army?

We're not training the Mahdi Army by intent, but we're providing training for people who may take our training program and then go join the militias. This is another problem that we found, and again the American commanders can tell you this; there's no good accounting system. When police -- and I should add that the problem is greater in the police than it is in the army -- [graduate] from the training program, [the trainers] don't have a good way to monitor where they go after that. Because the police go into small villages or into a neighborhood, there's no effective system set up for figuring out if they in fact after training go and rejoin their regional [police] units. [U.S. and Iraqi authorities] know, in fact, that some of them don't. As early as August '04, there are photographs of uniformed Iraqi police celebrating with the Mahdi Army after a battle in Najaf. Starting in April '04, with the first assault on Fallujah, a battalion refused to go fight; they told their American commander that they didn't sign up to fight other Iraqis.

There's a disturbing scene in your film, in which Iraqi soldiers go on a raid with U.S. troops and you catch the Iraqi soldiers talking about how the weapons they found are "child's play," not a real arms cache. Can you describe that scene?

We went in on this raid with the Iraqi army in Mahmoudiya, which is in the so-called triangle of death south of Baghdad. We were going into a Shiite neighborhood, and we were told, although the Iraqi army wasn't told, that we were going to raid what they call a "JAM cache," a Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army, arms cache. When we got there, a cameraman and I, we were both filming; we didn't have an [Arabic] translator with us because our translator had not been able to join us because his brother had been kidnapped and tortured. So without a translator, we were just filming what we could. And it was pure instinct of Tim Grucza, the cameraman, to film these guys as they were muttering off to the side. We had no way of knowing what they were saying. And when we got back to the editing room here and we had it translated, we discovered that what [the Iraqi soldiers] were talking about, at this raid, was that the weapons the soldiers had collected were just "kids stuff," and that the real stuff was at [their cleric's] place. They muttered on about how this was just child's play or kids stuff, and they didn't tell the Americans anything about this. It clearly shows that they're not really pulling with their U.S. buddies.

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