"If they find out I told you, they will kill me"

In a Baghdad neighborhood pacified by the surge, the locals fear the day the U.S. military departs, because they don't trust their own government to keep them safe.

By Anna Badkhen

Read more: Politics, News, Iraq, Iraq War, Muqtada al-Sadr, Mahdi Army, Anna Badkhen

Reuters/Damir Sagolj

A U.S. soldier from the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment during a joint operation with Iraqi police near Muqtadiyah in Diyala province July 24, 2008.

Aug. 5, 2008 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The middle-aged man in brown cutoff gym pants and a matching T-shirt approached as soon as U.S. Army Lt. Nelson Orona's patrol pulled into the garbage-strewn street in southern Baghdad's upscale Dora neighborhood. He made sure his neighbors were out of earshot, and leaned close to Orona's interpreter, who goes by the nickname "Ice," to report, in an urgent whisper, a problem: The night before, when he was looking for his rental agreement in his decrepit coffee shop's basement, he found instead two large hand grenades.

The man's eyes darted nervously up and down the street, making sure the young Iraqi man smoking idly by a gate strafed with bullet holes wasn't listening.

"If they find out I told you, they will kill me," the man told Orona. But the people he feared were not just the absent owners of the grenades. He was also afraid to be spotted by any of the Iraqi authorities to whom he might have been expected to report the grenades, meaning those Iraqis who will be responsible for preventing violence when the Americans finally leave.

Just a year ago, sectarian war still raged in Western Dora. At the time of the U.S. invasion, Dora was a largely Sunni neighborhood that had been home to many employees of the Sunni-dominated Saddam Hussein government. Following the invasion, Dora became one of the more violent precincts of the city. Many of the Sunnis associated with Saddam's regime fled to Syria and Jordan in 2004. That same year the neighborhood's Christian minority fled following the bombing of two churches. In 2005, many of the local Shiites followed. More recently, however, since the surge, many residents have returned, and Western Dora has become one of the safest areas in Baghdad.

It is now patrolled by Lt. Orona's 2-4 Infantry Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. Since Orona's company arrived here eight months ago, only four roadside bombs targeting American troops have gone off; no one was hurt. A few blocks away from the street where the man found grenades in his coffee shop's basement, the crowded Dora Market, one of the largest in Baghdad, bustles with restaurants and traders peddling produce, clothes, stationery and shoes from several hundred stalls. Just around the corner from the coffee shop, a steady stream of men and women enters the neighborhood in an orderly fashion through a checkpoint manned, cooperatively, by armed men from Iraq's two main (and rival) religious faiths. The Shias are represented by the mostly Shia Iraqi National Police -- an organization trained by the Americans and resembling a mega-version of an American police SWAT team -- and the Sunnis are represented by armed neighborhood guards called Sons of Iraq, many drawn from the Sunni militias that were responsible for the area's pre-surge violence.

For now, the police and the Sons of Iraq are working together to keep Dora free of violence. But the coffee shop owner said telling either the police or the Sons of Iraq about his deadly find of grenades was out of the question.

"If I tell the Iraqi police or the Sons of Iraq they will tell the wrong people, and I will be killed. I don't trust them," explained the man, whose name is not published to protect his identity for security reasons. "If I tell the Americans, they'll tell no one how they found out about the grenades."

The level of violence in Baghdad has hit its lowest point since 2004, and random acts of sectarian violence are, for the most part, things of the past. Iraqi security forces proved their mettle in successful recent battles against armed militias in Basra, Sadr City and Mosul, and have taken over security in swaths of Baghdad -- including several sections of Dora, where American troops no longer patrol.

But as the debate over whether American combat troops should pull out in the next two years or stay in Iraq for years takes center stage in the presidential campaigns of Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, Iraqis grapple with a fundamental deficiency that may be harder to fix than bullet-strafed streets or leaking sewage: a lack of trust between citizens and their government, Sunnis and Shias, civilians and their own security forces that are supposed to protect them. Some of this wariness was born of post-invasion instability, caused by the vicious sectarian killings that swept through the country in the last three years; some dates from Saddam Hussein's rule, when secret police infiltrated every office, college and late-night party, and when any carelessly uttered criticism of the regime could spell a prison term, or a death sentence. But the distrust persists in the relative peace of the surge, meaning that even in a neighborhood that is one of Baghdad's success stories, the locals still lack faith in the institutions of the Iraqi government that will be responsible for their safety when the U.S. departs.

Lt. Orona thinks that if the Americans pulled out, Iraqis would be forced to forge trust within their communities faster than if they knew they could always seek help from U.S. forces. As he waited in front of the coffee shop for a U.S. explosive ordnance disposal unit to arrive and take the grenades, following a U.S. military rule that specially trained sappers remove or demolish all explosives found by the troops, he told me he believes that the U.S. can't always hold the Iraqis' hands, and that now might be the time to let go.

"If there's ever been a time" to withdraw American troops, at least from Dora, "now's the time," Orona said. "Since I've been here nobody has shot at me and I haven't shot at anybody, so why not capitalize on this?"

Next page: "We'd like [the Americans] to stay until it's better than now. If they leave now ... we'll be in real danger"