Last spring, an Afghan man everyone called Uncle Satar pushed at me plates of rice, creamed spinach, and lamb across a canvas dastarkhan spread over the earthen floor, and heaped salad onto my plate. He had just showed me a hill on which he had fought against the Soviets 17 years ago; and another hill, on which he had fought against members of a rival militia a few years later.
There was a third hill, too, where he had wintered once. Now the Taliban controlled it, and Uncle Satar, who had laid down his gun a few years back and was now working as a driver, was sitting cross-legged at the farmhouse of a relative, plying me with food. Eat, he said, and made little lifting motions with his hands, hands as familiar with the wooden barrel of a Kalashnikov as with a loaf of home-baked bread. Eat, he commanded: because I was too thin, because I ate too little — but, mostly, because I was his guest and he wanted to show me a good time.
So what if his homeland was a war zone?
Many people say that outsiders don’t understand Afghanistan. Perhaps this is because to the world, most Afghans are voiceless. Two-thirds of Afghans over the age of 15 cannot read or write. Much of the country is believed to be so dangerous that few Western reporters venture into the outer provinces without the armed escort of NATO troops. The haunting images of war that confront us from the front pages of newspapers and from television screens show young men and women in NATO uniform staring at the world through the barrels of their guns, or through eyes hollowed out by combat trauma; American mothers weeping over their dead children here, in the States; and two-dimensional stick figures of anonymous, veiled women and robed men moving and collapsing like plywood stage props against the cauterized backdrop of the Central Asian battlefield.
But 28 million Afghans live and die — often violently — in the land where American troops perish. They raise crops, graze sheep, cuddle their children. They dispatch their preteen sons to haul cement to augment meager family earnings. They fall in and out of love, go to sleep hungry, quarrel, cook rice. Their land has the second-highest child mortality rate on the planet and supplies most of the world’s opium; it is ticking with millions of landmines and has known no peace pretty much since the beginning of recorded history. Somehow, in this violence and privation, they find strength for hospitality.
The hopes, the dreams, the resentments of a driver from Balkh or a wheat farmer from Kunduz may not seem significant. But they are: Every man here is a potential warrior, and sooner or later, he may throw his weight — and maybe his antiquated Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifle, its barrels decorated, incongruously, in Hubba Bubba wrappers — behind one force or another. Ultimately, these people will determine the future of Afghanistan. What kind of future do they have in mind?
Their answers are rarely heard because it is difficult, or dangerous, or not expedient to document them, or because they are hard to fit into cut-and-dried made-for-TV snippets. As we ponder Afghanistan’s future, we need to sit down in an Afghan living room, and listen to their stories. Preferably over a meal served on a tattered dastarkhan stretched on the floor of mud and straw.
The following is an excerpt from “Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories” (Free Press), a collection of stories and recipes from lives and meals in war zones.
The restaurant was like many others that interrupt the pale monotony of northern Afghanistan’s half-marked roads: a house of mud and straw propped up on exposed, crooked wooden beams, with no name, no tables, and no chairs. Along the dining room walls ran a wide, wooden seating area that resembled a stage; upon it, the diners sat cross-legged, with their shoes off. Elevating the floor was the easiest way to keep the food from being mixed with too much dust. Plastic dastarkhans lay spread on wooden planks before the diners. Unlike the scarlet beauties hand-embroidered with magical flowers and birds that wealthier Afghans save for meals served to important guests, the dastarkhans in these roadside diners were essentially linoleum runners that usually came in thick rolls. One end of the runner was always rolled up over yards and yards of extra plastic, like wrapping paper; the free end was reused until it became too tattered or grimy to be considered presentable, even by Afghan roadside diner standards. At such a time, the owner of the dastarkhan snipped off the tattered end and tossed it away, into the vast desert. This was not littering. Nomads or paupers always recycled the plastic as shelter material.
To accommodate Berget and his friends — these, at the moment, included several Northern Alliance militiamen, Wahid the translator, Ghulam Sakhib the driver, David, and me — the restaurant owner had rolled out several feet of dastarkhan before us. The fighters rested their battered Kalashnikov rifles, muzzle up, within their reach, against uneven mud-brick walls. They ate unhurriedly, deliberately tearing off small pieces of thin, flat nan bread and wrapping them around tiny pieces of marinated lamb meat and fat cooked over hot coals on sharp metal skewers. They pulled the meat off the skewers with elegant, long fingers that looked more like they belonged to violinists than to gunmen.
We had met Berget earlier that day, in the middle of a vast, harvested rice field that separated two armies: the embattled troops of the ruling Taliban and the bedraggled soldiers of the Northern Alliance. It was the same field where I first had been told to hide from Taliban snipers behind a wall, and then invited to the other side of the wall for a hot cuppa. It was the same scorched, dry field Berget had crossed three days earlier, when he had abandoned his post on the Taliban side and joined the Northern Alliance.
Berget, at twenty-six a skinny, pale man with a straggly beard, had joined the Taliban of his own volition, in 1995. Rival warlords had been battling over control of the country, razing entire villages and raping their way through Kabul block by city block, laying waste even further to a land that had not yet recovered from the decade-long Soviet occupation. People like Berget — who, even after his defection, recalled fondly the way Taliban troops had confiscated all weapons from Kabul’s residents and stopped, at least temporarily, the pillaging — had seen the militia as a unifying force that could restore order. (Berget had been less enthralled by the new regime’s moral police and strict rules that banned all movies and music.) The reason for his defection, Berget explained, was that many Taliban commanders were Pakistanis or Arabs. If there is one thing all Afghans have agreed on since time immemorial, it is that foreigners have no business running their country.
“I thought that if the fighting ever ends and the opposition wins, how would I look my brothers in the eye if I were fighting on the same side as foreigners?” Berget said. Maybe there was a lesson or two there for American troops who were trying to quash the Taliban’s network. Nine years after that dinner with Berget, the White House — now under President Barack Obama — was still trying to defeat the Afghan insurgency, which, rather than die down, had grown stronger with time.
Now, the young Tajik was a Northern Alliance fighter. He was eating kebab, bragging about Taliban losses at the hands of American air strikes and rebel mortar fire as though they had been all his doing (“Since the beginning of the U.S. strikes, most of the Taliban have been killed, and a lot of their ammunition and radar installations have been destroyed”), and telling jokes (Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar* at a Friday prayer: “Do not listen to music, because it is a sin. Do not shave your beards, because it is a sin. Above all, do not watch movies, because it is the gravest sin of all sins, and it will make your souls sink to the bottom of the ocean, like Leonardo DiCaprio in the blockbuster Titanic”). Berget’s new comrades, weathered, sinewy fighters whose gray and brown plastic flip-flops sat in a neat row at the foot of the eating stage, listened and laughed with him as though he had not trained his gun on them — and they, on him — just days before. From time to time, the men sitting to Berget’s left and right would drape their slender hands around his shoulders, in the universal gesture of brotherly love.
Berget’s swift transition from enemy to ally was not at all extraordinary. As our smuggler-host Mahbuhbullah had taught me, switching sides was common among Afghan fighters, be it a foot soldier who would rather defect than be captured or killed, or a renowned warlord like his former Uzbek commander, Dostum. Acquaintance, family relations, and simple survival were often more important than political affiliation. The local rebel commander, incidentally, turned out to have been a friend of Berget’s family.
“I fought” — this had been against the Soviet troops — “alongside his father and brothers,” the commander had recalled when I had sat with him and Berget in the middle of the harvested rice field, before our meal. “He,” the commander had pointed at the defector with his bearded chin, “used to bring us lunch to the front lines.”
And now we were all sharing a meal of kebab. All’s well that ends with a few skewers of lamb over a plastic dastarkhan.
Especially that cursed, hungry year.
It was late fall, and the first winter frost had hit prematurely the previous week, destroying whatever crops had managed to push through the dehydrated desert floor. Ice had encrusted the massive tangle of the Hindu Kush. Snow had silenced the mountain passes. In the spring, the snowmelt would run off the crumpled peaks, nourishing the thirsty valleys below. But right now, snow was bad news, possibly a killer of millions. It had blocked the Northern Alliance supply routes to the militiamen fighting on the southern frontier: the rickety old Soviet eighteen-wheelers that the guerrillas were using to transport ammunition and artillery to the front lines could not make it through the ice and snow. Relief agencies no longer had a way of getting food and clothing to Kabul’s northern outskirts: because of the air war, all helicopters and planes that were not part of the U.S.-led military campaign had been grounded. Some anti-Taliban commanders worried that American air strikes, which were supposed to give the mujahedin an edge over the ruling militia, were not going to produce enough momentum to defeat the Taliban before it became too cold to fight. If the standoff were to continue into the winter the skies would remain off-limits to relief agencies, and no humanitarian aid would be delivered to millions of Afghans suffering from famine after the fourth consecutive year of drought. While we were turning up our noses at too much kebab, the United Nations was reporting that more than five million people — one quarter of Afghanistan’s population — were on the verge of starvation.
The military campaign that was supposed to deliver Afghanistan from an inhumane regime was delivering a new humanitarian catastrophe. We left Mahbuhbullah’s house and his vegetable patch, shared a meal with Berget, and headed south, toward Kabul.
At the end of each day, Ghulam Sakhib, Wahid, David, and I would find an eatery where unshod patrons sat on a wooden table-stage. We would take off our own mud-caked boots and climb onto the podium as well, swatting away flies and making a true spectacle of ourselves: two Afghan men, a foreigner with long hair, and an unveiled woman with a crew cut who smoked cigarettes and ate with the men. Almost always, I was the only woman in these chaikhanas. Almost always, we were the only unarmed diners. Every time we dined out, we were the entertainment: everyone would stare at the foreigners as they ate.
The restaurant owner would approach to take our order. Inevitably, we would order “kebab, garm” — hot, one of the most important words in Dari for foreign travelers who believe that heat kills bacteria — and a few minutes later, the man would reappear with a pewter tray laden with bouquets of thin skewers spearing juicy meat.
Around the world, grilled meat on a skewer is the ultimate bonding dish, the object of envy and the subject of mockery, the source of bitter disputes between friends and rivals, and the meal of celebrations. In Somalia, it was made with goat. At the al Hamra Hotel and Suites in Baghdad, chicken tikka was a reliably overcooked (and barely edible) staple. At the palace of one Iraqi sheikh in Saddam Hussein’s tribal village of Auja, kebab was made with lamb (not as good as the meat we had had in Afghanistan, sorry). The photojournalist Kim Komenich and I were in Auja in 2005 to report on an American army doctor making house calls as part of the U.S. military’s “hearts and minds” strategy for winning over hostile Sunni tribes. The doctor, a full colonel, was a woman, which was why everybody assumed that it was Kim — with his imposing 280-pound frame and a neatly trimmed gray beard, both clear signs of superiority — who was the guest of honor. While the rest of us were handed plates with moist, perfectly spiced red meat, Kim, with much ceremony and to everyone’s amusement, was served a pair of grilled lamb testicles.
Sometimes the owner or the other diners would join us, telling stories of loss: of family members killed in the quarter century of fighting; of wealth and youth robbed by wars and droughts; of fertile gardens left behind when the Taliban invaded their villages, forcing all men to either join the militia’s ranks or run away. Kitchen help — boys barely in their teens, tomorrow’s warriors, who had known no heroes or role models other than rebel field commanders — would listen politely, waiting for the older men to ask the question that was the most important to everyone, the question we had no answer for: how soon would the war end, how soon would the men of Afghanistan be able to put down their guns and return to their fields?
Afghan Lamb Kebab
Serves 8
In Afghanistan, fat-bottomed sheep wander the pastures everywhere, oblivious of the land mines, so there is never any question about the freshness of the meat on your skewer. The lamb you’ll buy in the United States is most likely imported from Australia, therefore you should allow it to marinate overnight to make it more tender. If you can, use a charcoal or wood grill.
Ingredients
- 3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
- 4 cloves garlic, crushed
- Salt and white pepper, to taste
- 2 pounds boneless lamb (leg will work)
- 8 ounces lamb fat, cut into thumbnail-size cubes
- Ground sumac (sumac is a crimson spice you can get in most Middle Eastern groceries)
- Lemon wedges, for serving
- 4 loaves fresh lavash or other flatbread
Directions
- Combine the lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add the lamb and lamb fat. Mix well, cover and marinate in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.
- Skewer the lamb, threading 4 pieces of meat and 2 or 3 pieces of fat onto each skewer. Alternate the meat and the fat so that the fat nuggets are skewered between pieces of meat. (You don’t have to eat the fat, although Berget and his crew did; its main purpose is to keep the meat moist while you’re grilling it.)
- Grill, turning frequently, over smoldering coals for about 15 minutes, until the lamb is brown and cooked through (when you pierce the meat with a fork or a sharp knife, juices should run clear).
- Sprinkle with ground sumac and serve with lemon wedges, flatbread, and hot black tea, preferably very sweet.
Anna Badkhen’s new book, “Peace Meals: Candy-Wrapped Kalashnikovs and Other War Stories,“ a travelogue about war, food and humanity, came out this month.
In the dust-caked maze of tents and barracks of a U.S. Army base in Baghdad, Iraqi twins Tammy and Lucy are easy to spot: They dress in form-fitting, colorful T-shirts and tight jeans, their raven-black hair cascades down their backs almost to their knees, and their sweet perfume lingers in the hot air after they walk by. But the women, who work as translators, say they would never dress like this outside the safe confines of the American base.
The conservative Muslim militias that just a year ago fought pitched battles for control of Iraq are mostly gone from the streets. There are signs that the tight grip of the hard-line clerics who had exerted control over Iraqis’ private lives for most of the past five years is loosening somewhat. But women here still feel threatened.
One can’t yet see a pervasive shift in the way women dress. They continue to wear the conservative clothing that the militias began compelling them to wear after the U.S. invasion. Most women remain cocooned in shapeless, black abaya dresses and hijab scarves that covered their hair.
“If I wore something like this” in the streets of Iraq, Tammy said, gesturing at her T-shirt and jeans, “I’d be killed.” Like other Iraqi translators working for American forces, Tammy, 21, uses a nickname to protect herself and her family from anti-American militias.
Before the war, Tammy says, she could walk down the streets of her hometown, the southern and heavily Shia Iraqi port city of Basra, dressed like most teenagers in the United States — in jeans and no head scarf. Saddam Hussein’s regime was one of the world’s most despotic, but it was secular and allowed Iraqi women personal rights and freedoms unparalleled in the Persian Gulf. Women, who make up more than half of the country’s population, could drive, travel abroad alone, serve in Iraqi security forces and work side-by-side with men. They chose whom to marry and whether to marry at all, and were among the most educated in the region.
“Sometimes in the street I got some comments, but never any threats,” Tammy said.
After the U.S. invasion in 2003, conservative Muslim clerics called for Iraq to become an Islamic state. In the name of Islamic values, they eroded the liberties women here enjoyed even under Saddam’s oppressive regime. Schools, once coed, became segregated by gender; women were afraid to go outside without a head scarf. As sectarian violence engulfed Baghdad and other parts of the country in 2006, it brought in its wake even more constraints on women’s freedoms.
Even in the most prosperous and educated neighborhoods of Baghdad, Iraq’s most progressive city, women were threatened and killed for attending college, working, driving cars, or wearing clothes the militias considered immodest — anything less than abaya and hijab. Some women began to wear black burqas that covered everything but their eyes. Tammy and Lucy’s father got a call from men who said they would kill the women — both of whom attended medical school in Basra — if they didn’t wear the conservative Muslim dress. The women took the threat seriously.
“I know some girls who were killed because they weren’t covered up,” Tammy said.
In recent months, Iraq has begun to recover from the sectarian fighting and the strict Islamic rule that accompanied it. Barbers, whom some militias had persecuted for shaving men’s beards, are doing swift business late into the night. In Dora, a middle-class Sunni district of Baghdad that was a hotbed of Sunni militias linked to al-Qaida a year ago, elderly men again smoke flavored hookahs and play cards and dominos at Hussein al-Jabouri’s recently reopened gambling parlor. In Saidiyah, a religiously mixed Baghdad neighborhood that was the site of some of the worst sectarian fighting, Jasem al-Naami opened a hair salon for women, where she also sells nail polish and lingerie. Around the corner from al-Naami’s shop, Sun City Foods, a popular burger joint, blares Arabic pop music through large speakers into the crowded street.
“I notice a lot of change,” said Sundus, a female security guard who searches women entering the bustling Dora Market, famous across Baghdad for its cheap clothes and fresh fish and vegetables.
“For two years I couldn’t even attend college — the al-Qaida militias in the area forbade us from going to college,” she said. Sundus, 29, had completed two years of studies at the Pedagogical Institute of Baghdad, and wants to become a biology teacher. “But in November I am going back to school.”
But Sundus was not comfortable enough to give her last name — or to take off her black abaya, embroidered with tiny white beads, even in the safe confines of the booth where she pats down female shoppers. Even the women she searches can be members of militias: Since the beginning of this year, 24 women suicide bombers detonated themselves in Iraq, three times as many as in all of 2007.
Although violence in Iraq has fallen to a four-year low, concerns about security still exist. Iraqis are less likely to go out at night than before the war, and, because of curfew in some areas and electricity shortages across the country, rarely stay out as late. But while men get to socialize during the day with their co-workers and friends, Iraqi women, for whom evening visits to friends have traditionally played a central role in their social lives, feel isolated.
“I remember the weddings — we used to stay up all night and dance till morning,” said Zakiyah Al-Ameri, 51, who lives in Saidiyah with her husband, five grown sons and their wives and children. “Now the weddings are over by 9 at night, and then the groom takes the bride to his house, and it’s over.”
Shops selling women’s wear are reopening, but for many Iraqi women, impoverished by the war and the staggering unemployment it brought, nice clothes are now out of reach. Many women who had to don the abaya because they feared punishment from hard-line militias are now wearing it because it conceals the shabby clothes they have underneath, said Tahrir, 28, who sells fresh cheese and yogurt from a rusted stall at the Dora Market.
“Before the war, I never wore an abaya — I wore a skirt and a shirt, and a colorful scarf,” said Tahrir, 28, who did not give her last name. She wore a tattered black abaya and a brown headdress. “Then the militias came, the fighting began, and we couldn’t work. My family’s financial situation has changed. I can’t afford fancy clothes anymore.”
“Everything is so expensive,” said Dagrid Khalid, 27, who makes about $250 a month teaching English at a school. “There are all these clothes, but I can’t afford to buy anything. At the salon, they charge $8 to do your hair.”
Money is one of the major concerns for everyone in Iraq, where unemployment is estimated at 35 to 50 percent. Many of Iraq’s most educated women have fled the country, moving to Jordan, Syria and beyond to escape the danger of fighting and because they felt that they would not be able to work in their field in a country that has adopted a conservative view of the role of women in society. Tammy and Lucy, who want to become surgeons, think they don’t have a chance of finding jobs here.
“It’s pretty much impossible to become a surgeon in Iraq if you are a female,” Tammy said. “There is no law that prohibits it but there are a lot of obstacles.”
They became translators for American troops when they heard that after a year of doing this, they will become eligible for expedited immigrant visas to the United States. Recognizing the dangers of this job — at least 250 Iraqi interpreters have been killed so far, mostly in revenge killings — Washington has established a program that allows some interpreters who have worked with American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq for at least 12 months to move to the United States with their families.
“We want to go to the States to complete our studies, that’s why we’re here,” Lucy said. “We started working last November, so in November, we will be eligible for a visa.”
In a few swift movements, an Iraqi policeman hooked his right foot under U.S. Army Capt. Patrick Soule’s ankle and pushed the American soldier down to the parched ground. A second later, the policeman had his hands on the American’s throat, his knees pushing into Soule’s abdomen, until Soule wrestled his legs free, kicked the Iraqi in the shin, flipped him over and grabbed his head in a deadlock.
Around the two men, Americans cheered — not so much to celebrate the win of their peer as to congratulate the Iraqi for coming so close to victory. The Iraqi is one of 23 members of an elite Baghdad police unit that Soule and his soldiers are training to become one of Iraq’s first SWAT teams, which, when the training is complete, will be hunting down suspected sectarian militia members, kidnappers and murderers. The sooner this SWAT unit and other Iraqi security forces are ready to fight the militias and gangs that have devastated this country, as U.S. government and military officials like to say, the sooner American troops can go home.
“As far as their level of professionalism, they’re pretty good,” said Soule, a member of the 2-4 Infantry Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division. When the three-week training program is over at the end of August, Soule said, “they will be ready to operate on their own.”
But the Iraqis say the idea of securing Iraq without American assistance remains terrifying to them.
“No!” exclaimed Haidar, a 29-year-old SWAT trainee who has been a police officer since 2004, with an expression of shock on his face. “We are not going to be ready to do it without the Americans!”
The United States has spent four years and more than $20 billion on training and building Iraqi security forces; American instructors say the Iraqis are now mostly able to fight insurgents and sectarian militias on their own. Iraq says it has more than half a million people in its security forces (although the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction for the U.S. Defense Department has questioned the numbers, saying that many of those have been wounded, been killed or gone AWOL). They wear uniforms and body armor, move in organized formations, almost always carry their weapons correctly and, for the most part, act professionally during missions.
But despite such a vote of confidence from the Americans, and despite Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s repeated assurances that Iraq is ready to provide its own security, members of Iraqi security forces say they are still years away from being able to defend their country and its citizens without direct American support.
“We still need American troops to stay here,” said Iraqi police Capt. Ali al-Shimeri, the SWAT team commander who observed the training late last week, reiterating a lack of confidence in the force’s readiness many other Iraqi officers share. “It would be a big mistake to withdraw the Americans now. American troops … provide us security.”
His sentiment may reflect a sense of discomfort his force — made up mostly of Shiite Iraqis — feels in the particular part of Baghdad where al-Shimeri’s policemen are stationed: Dora, an almost homogenously Sunni area. A year ago, Dora was a hotbed of Sunni extremists affiliated with al-Qaida. There were vicious fights between Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias and the Iraqi police units affiliated with them, such as the infamous Iraqi police Wolf Brigade, which acted as a Shiite militia in its own right, killing and torturing Sunnis.
That fighting is over, and no major acts of violence have taken place in Dora since last year. But a legacy of those battles is the simmering mistrust of the police force among Dora’s residents. “Most of our population trust the police if they are patrolling alongside coalition forces in the neighborhood, but not on their own,” said Hashem Ajili, deputy chairman of the council of leaders in northern Dora.
Such cautiousness is not unfounded. Al-Shimeri acknowledged that to join the police force, which is appealing to many Iraqis because it provides a stable income of about $550 a month, many recruits pay bribes or use family connections. Sometimes, he said, such recruits can be linked to sectarian militias. “That is the reality,” he said. “I never did anything like that — I’m going to look for good, hard workers. I’m not going to ask them whether they are Sunni, Shia, what their tribe is. But that is still happening.”
Lt. Col. Steven Stover, the spokesman for the U.S. Army’s 4th Infantry Division in Baghdad, said American troops have arrested Iraqi soldiers and policemen for assisting in sectarian attacks, although he could not say how many. “If an IED [improvised explosive device] goes off 50 meters away from the checkpoint, either they are the most worthless I.P.s in the country or they are complicit,” Stover said.
Although they are far better equipped than two years ago, the Iraqi forces still lack basic equipment such as batteries, rubber gloves and fuel, which the Iraqi authorities are slow to provide, despite the country’s recently reported $79 billion budget surplus. The United States has provided the Iraqi army with armored Humvees, but Iraq still has no facilities to fix them when they break down or get blown up.
Despite all this, the Iraqi forces have made huge leaps forward, Americans say. The Iraqi army, after a clumsy effort to wrench control of Iraq’s southern port of Basra from Shiite militias, took the lead role in counterinsurgency operations in Baghdad’s Shiite slums of Sadr City, the northern city of Mosul and, most recently, the Sunni heartland of Diyala, to the west of Baghdad. In two sections of the capital’s Dora neighborhood, Americans have handed over security to the Iraqi National Police, a predominantly Shiite paramilitary force that receives more advanced training than the regular Iraqi police. “Admittedly, small sections, stabilized sections, but they are patrolling them without any American support,” said Capt. Brett Walker of the 2-4 Infantry.
And during the SWAT instruction last week, American instructors hailed the trainees’ skills in hand-to-hand combat, their understanding of the basics of searching cars and people, and, above all, their determination.
At the beginning of the SWAT team’s fifth day of training, police Capt. al-Shimeri ordered the trainees to lie down on the ground and roll 200 yards down a road covered with sharp gravel. Later, after the policemen jogged for 15 minutes in 110-degree heat, Iraqi police Lt. Ashraf at-Tamimi ordered them to squat, put their hands behind their heads and duck-walk like that across a volleyball court as fast as they could.
The men protested: “We can’t do this!” they moaned, with one declaring, “Saddam tortured us like this!” But they did as they were told, panting in the blistering sun.
“It’s amazing, because American police complain that the [training] mats aren’t thick enough. And these guys are grubbing around in the dirt,” said an American civilian SWAT trainer who helped the 2-4 train the Iraqis. (He asked that his name not be used because his participation in the training is classified.)
In fact, the Iraqis even seemed to enjoy the training. “Before, we thought the insurgents had better training than the Iraqi police,” said Haidar, who did not give his last name out of fear of retribution from militias who still target Iraqi forces and their relatives. “Now we are being trained by the best army in the world.”
But Haidar said that it would be months, maybe even years, before he is comfortable conducting raids without any American presence. “We are not ready for that yet,” he said. “There are still too many bad guys in Iraq.”
When politicians in Baghdad and Washington make decisions about Iraqi forces’ capabilities, they should take such lack of confidence into account, Capt. Walker said. “If they’re saying they’re not comfortable, then we should continue to train them,” he said. “We don’t know all the issues here and they do. They’re the people who would ultimately know what it takes to secure Baghdad and Iraq.”
Donning pale yellow shirts with Iraqi flags stitched on the chest, Alah al-Janabi and Mahmoud al-Samorai stood recently in the blistering sun at the crowded entrance to the bustling Dora Market. Al-Janabi, 30, proudly displayed a shiny black pistol on his hip; al-Samorai, 25, slung his Kalashnikov assault rifle over his shoulder as he patted down a shopper entering the market. Nine months ago, the two men joined the Sons of Iraq — the U.S.-funded, mostly Sunni organization of 103,000 armed guards that functions as part neighborhood security watch and part paramilitary force, and has been instrumental in tamping down violence in Iraq.
What these men did prior to this work — when sectarian militias and Iraqi security forces fought pitched battles through the Dora neighborhood, killing and wounding scores of people — is unclear. When asked, the two looked at each other and shrugged. “There were no jobs,” al-Samorai finally said. Maybe he and his colleague hid in their homes while sectarian fighting raged outside. But it is also possible that they fought alongside the Sunni militias, as did many Sons of Iraq members, according to American forces that patrol the area.
“When the SOIs stood up, we were basically hiring terrorists,” said Lt. Justin Chabalko, using the military acronym for the Sons of Iraq. Chabalko’s 2-4 Infantry Battalion of the 4th Brigade, 10th Mountain Division frequently patrols the Dora Market.
The Sons of Iraq was formed in 2007, when Sunni tribal leaders, tired of violence and disillusioned with Islamic fundamentalists such as al-Qaida in Iraq, encouraged tribal members — including some former militia members — to guard Sunni and mixed neighborhoods against takeover by sectarian gangs. The Americans touted the creation of the Sons of Iraq as a major diplomatic success and agreed to finance the organization, paying each member a monthly salary of $300, despite the protests from the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, which never liked the idea of legitimizing the Sunni-dominated fighting force.
The force helped quell the Sunni insurgency in Baghdad and in Iraq’s tribal heartlands, such as the restive Anbar province. But what a year ago looked like a brilliant solution to sectarian violence is now looking like a time bomb. Many of the force’s members once fought alongside al-Qaida in Iraq and other Sunni insurgency organizations against American troops and the predominantly Shiite Iraqi security forces. And now, a joint U.S.-Iraqi government plan to disband the force could put up to 80,000 men out of work — and leave them armed and disgruntled.
As Iraq becomes safer, the Sons of Iraq are less essential to security. Under a draft plan by U.S. forces and the Iraqi government, 20 percent of the force will be gradually folded into Iraqi security forces, after careful screening and additional training. The rest, Americans say, will be offered basic vocational training, which would allow them to take up such jobs as janitors, secretaries, electricians and plumbers. As of June, approximately 17,000 Sons of Iraq members have joined Iraqi security forces.
But conversations with the Sons of Iraq members and their leaders suggest that the majority of them do not want to do anything that does not involve carrying weapons, traditionally an honorable status in Iraqi society.
“A lot of them would prefer doing that because it gives them power of carrying a weapon and providing security,” said Capt. Emiliano Tellado, a member of the 2-4 Infantry Battalion.
Potentially, 80,000 armed and trained fighters could soon find themselves unemployed, or employed in jobs they do not want — and angry at the American forces and Iraqi government because they didn’t get picked for service in the security forces.
Al-Janabi and al-Samorai applied for jobs in the Iraqi police nine months ago for the first time, and reapplied twice since. They have not heard back from the Iraqi government, and they could well be among the many thousands who don’t get to join Iraqi security forces. But both dismissed the idea that they would lay down their guns and take up other work tools.
“That is not my job,” al-Samorai responded, firmly.
“I want to defend my people,” said al-Janabi.
A key question is, to what extent have members of the Sons of Iraq such as these severed their past allegiances. Working as U.S.-paid neighborhood guards was supposed to rehabilitate those who once fought against American and Iraqi forces, said Capt. Brett Walker, the spokesman for the 2-4 Infantry Battalion. Over time, approximately 18,000 Shiite members joined the force as well, working mostly in Shiite and mixed neighborhoods and ostensibly bringing some sense of sectarian rapprochement.
But some of the organization’s Sunni members may still be cooperating with sectarian militias, acknowledged Tellado. Even if the Sons of Iraq continues to function in its current format, the organization is a wild card as far as its members’ loyalties are concerned.
Several months ago, the 2-4′s soldiers detained one Sons of Iraq leader who was once associated with al-Qaida in Iraq, Tellado said. “He had a bad background, and it finally caught up with him,” he explained. “There was a possibility that he was still active” in the extremist Sunni organization. The man is now in Camp Bucca, a giant American detention center in southern Iraq.
“Sometimes they don’t reform,” Tellado said.
Chabalko said that some Sons of Iraq in his area use their positions “as an opportunity to play both sides of the fence, usually the guys at checkpoints.” American soldiers say that Sunni members of the force extorted money from Shiite civilians and attacked people they believed were members of Shiite militias.
In Baghdad’s religiously mixed Risala neighborhood in May, U.S. Army medics treated a man who had been beaten and kicked in the face and torso by Sons of Iraq, who believed that the man was an informant for the Mahdi army, the militia loyal to the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The man survived because the local Sons of Iraq leader, Karim al-Gortani, happened by and ordered them to stop, said U.S. Army Capt. Sean Chase, whose soldiers treated the man. Chase suspects that Gortani, a former Iraqi army colonel under Saddam Hussein, at one point was either a member of al-Qaida in Iraq or Jaish al-Islami, another Sunni extremist group.
In Dora, where 450,000 people live, the Sons of Iraq have not carried out any overt acts of violence, U.S. soldiers say — at least not to the Americans’ knowledge. But that could be because Dora, a middle-class neighborhood that is home to many former officials of Saddam Hussein’s government, is almost homogenously Sunni.
Yet, even here the Sons of Iraq have a potential nemesis — the Iraqi National Police, a SWAT-like organization that patrols Dora. On many streets, members of the two armed groups man checkpoints together, but there is little amicability between them. “At first there was no open conflict, but there was open verbal conflict,” Tellado recalls.
In order to create a rapport between the Sunni guards and the Shiite officers, who also enjoy little trust from Dora’s Sunni population, the Americans have made the Sons of Iraq formally subordinate to the police force.
“On payday, I hand the money over to the [National Police] supervisor, and he hands the money to the SOI leader, and that guy hands the money to SOI members,” Tellado said. “It literally takes place in the same room.”
American military leaders understand the fragility of the peace between the Sons of Iraq and Shiite security forces, and the importance of keeping the Sunni force happy. “We’re gonna continue to pay the SOI guys until the government takes over or until they transition into other jobs,” said 4th Infantry Division Lt. Col. Steven Stover, the spokesman for American troops in Baghdad.
“These Sons of Iraq will eventually go away, and now the most important thing is to find jobs for all those individuals,” Lt. Col. Timothy Watson, the 2-4 commander, recently told a gathering of Sunni leaders in Dora. “It’s just as important providing jobs as it is security.”
Nonetheless, local leaders say the Sons of Iraq remains suspicious of the policemen. Hashem Ajili, one of the senior neighborhood leaders in northern Dora, said American presence is crucial to mediate any potential conflicts between the two groups.
“Currently the relations are getting better — with the support of coalition forces,” Ajili said. If the Americans leave, will the two groups be at each other’s throats? Ajili smiled, and responded diplomatically: “If the coalition forces go back to the States, I am afraid I don’t know what will happen between those two elements.”
Eddie Bello, an Iraqi-born cultural advisor to the American military in Iraq, was more specific. “It is like sitting on a volcano,” he said. “You never know when it will explode.”
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?”
But the neighborhood where he spoke is now separated from the rest of the city by 12-foot concrete barriers, erected by U.S. forces to contain sectarian and anti-American violence. There are only a few ways into the neighborhood, and Iraqi security forces and Sons of Iraq members guard each gate around the clock. Such walls have segregated most of Baghdad, and Americans say they are efficient in hindering the activities of insurgents and Shiite militias. They have proved efficient in keeping militias out of many neighborhoods — but it is unclear what happens if and when the walls go down and Iraqis are allowed to travel unimpaired to any part of Baghdad at any time. Despite the walls, violence occurs, like the bombing that killed 12 people on Sunday in central Baghdad. And somebody must have sneaked into the coffee shop basement in Western Dora to hide the two hand grenades.
“If we don’t put security walls around the mahallas [neighborhoods], we don’t know where terrorists are coming from,” said Lt. Greg Garhart, from Manchester, N.J., who was on patrol with Orona. “If we leave soon, then the terrorists will take over the places where we have made it safe, and we’ll have to come back and make it safe again, and there will be more violence.”
“There’s still more AQI activity in Dora district,” said Sgt. Anthony Montalvo, a native of Ocala, Fla., using the military acronym for al-Qaida in Iraq. “AQI, JAM” — the Mahdi army of the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr — “they’re all here.”
To bring reconciliation to a city torn by deadly sectarian strife, American forces, in coordination with the Iraqi government, have come up with the idea of releasing some prisoners who had been detained for attacking U.S. and Iraqi troops and civilians to their home neighborhoods. After public rituals at local community centers, the prisoners are released in exchange for vows to renounce violence and written guarantees from upstanding members of their neighborhood communities. Since the program began this year, the U.S. military has released more than 10,000 detainees (it is still holding about 21,000 people in two giant detention facilities), and says that fewer than 1 percent of those it has released have been detained again.
“If they were bad before, the Iraqi government says they have changed, we’re giving you a new chance,” explained U.S. Army Lt. Justin Chabalko, who has been patrolling the Dora Market.
But none of this is convincing enough for Iraqis like Mohammed Abbas, who works for a local contractor on a $900,000, U.S.-funded project to fix sewage, water, roads and facades in the market.
“They are still enemies, bad people,” Abbas told Chabalko. “How will it be safe? We trust no one.”
“I don’t trust in the government. A lot of parties, a lot of gangs,” he said. “We’d like [the Americans] to stay until it’s better than now. If they leave now … we’ll be in real danger as the Iraqi people. We need them to stay longer.”
At an Iraqi government-run clinic not far from the Dora Market, chief doctor Mohammed Jasem praised the American and Iraqi forces for improving security in his neighborhood.
“We receive about 300 to 400 visitors per day. A year ago, [we had] maybe a quarter as many patients,” Jasem said. “This is an indicator for improvement.”
His clinic, refurbished with the help of a U.S. grant, is now running on its own, and the 70 members of its staff receive regular paychecks from the Iraqi government. Scores of mothers with infants and children sit on benches in a large waiting room; adult patients wait for their appointments in clean hallways. At the gate, clients have to pass through a small booth where two Iraqi security guards, a male and a female, search every visitor for weapons and explosives. To direct clients to the booth, clinic personnel have sealed off the gate with yellow police tape that reads, in English, “crime scene.”
Jasem credits both American and Iraqi forces with the success of his clinic. Now that it is up and running, and the neighborhood seems to prosper, can Americans leave? No, said Jasem. “We don’t have a mature government yet. The Iraqi forces need more time.”
What would happen if the Americans were to pull out?
Jasem thought for a second. Then he said: “Maybe chaos.”
They certainly got the profanity right.
It’s 15 minutes into the first episode of “Generation Kill,” the new HBO miniseries that starts on Sunday about a Marine battalion in Iraq, and I am already inundated with the familiar cacophony of racial and homophobic slurs, military jargon, graphic homoerotic passages and explicit diatribes you may not want your mother to hear. This is language I learned to understand well, if not speak it, during the time I spent as an embedded reporter with American troops in Iraq.
Such invective-laced tirades serve a purpose that is as much a fundamental part of the Marine Corps as “semper fi”: The men spew out expletives and they bond. No one gets offended; this is just how they communicate with each other in their testosterone-loaded world, where swearing approaches an art form, almost any sentence uttered requires a translation into standard modern English, and the words “cocky motherfuckers,” uttered by the battalion commander, are as close as it gets to terms of endearment.
The veracity of Marines’ communication habits is not the only thing the creators of “Generation Kill” got right. For the most part, the miniseries’ take on the Marines who helped invade Iraq in the spring of 2003 rings as true as a drill instructor’s upbraiding of a teenage recruit about life in the Suck.
As in the real Iraq, in “Generation Kill” — which is based on the book of the same name by Evan Wright, a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with 1st Recon Marines during the invasion — Marines bitch about food, their officers, faulty equipment, the inconvenience of defecating during wartime, and the shortage of opportunities to kill some “hajis” (the derogatory term for Muslims that has been almost universally adopted by American troops in Iraq). As in the real Iraq, they stuff dip under their lips and then spit it out into empty Gatorade bottles. They spend their downtime masturbating over photos of other people’s girlfriends and guffawing in contempt of peace-loving letters they get from schoolchildren back in the States. The miniseries even got right the mismatched Marine uniforms — the corps in 2003 was in the process of transitioning from the old desert camouflage uniform, which Marines shared with the rest of the military, to the new, pixelated camouflage pattern (commonly referred to as “digi-cammies”) they currently wear — and the sheets of orange cloth that all U.S. land forces stretched over the hoods of their humvees to signal to American warplanes that these are friendly vehicles. Kudos to Sgt. Eric Kocher, the series’ military advisor who was a member of 1st Recon Marines during the invasion.
Most important, “Generation Kill’s” action scenes crackle with the real-life confusion of the Iraqi battlefield, which is nothing like the cut-and-dried heroics of, say, the “Sands of Iwo Jima.”
In the war zone that has no clearly defined front lines and where the elusive enemy wears no uniform, one of the toughest tasks is making decisions under fire. For the most part, the Marines don’t want to act improperly, but even in such a well-trained military as that of the United States, the extreme stress of war — and the conundrums war brings — sometimes can push people to lose self-control. Often, the situation forces them to make decisions many will question — like the time the 3-6 Marine battalion, with which I spent some time as an embedded reporter in the fall of 2005, fired a tank through a civilian house to respond to a rocket-propelled grenade round someone had shot at them from behind the house. An Iraqi family was inside the house; the American tank shell badly injured a baby.
But this was Karabila, a border town near Syria that American military believed al-Qaida used to smuggle fighters and weapons into Iraq, and an al-Qaida stronghold where billboards encouraging Iraqis to kill Americans lined the roads the same way that billboards in the States encourage Americans to buy the latest Toyota SUVs. This was Operation Iron Fist, a massive American offensive the goal of which was to reclaim control of the border towns on the Euphrates River from insurgents in time for the referendum on Iraq’s first post-Saddam Hussein constitution. The tense offensive — during which about 1,000 Marines swept through four towns, down perilously booby-trapped roads, taking fire from Iraqi snipers and dodging enemy mortars and rockets — showed the ability of the Marines to go into enemy territory and kick ass, but also showed the limitations of that kind of head-on approach in towns where civilians live. Earlier during the offensive, the same Marines led bomb-sniffing dogs — animals that Islam considers almost as unclean as pigs — into a mosque they had suspected was being used for weapons storage.
The Marines in “Generation Kill” confront similar quandaries in almost every one of the seven episodes. In the first segment, they are told to abandon a group of surrendered Iraqi Republican Guard members even though these Iraqis will almost certainly be killed by Hussein’s vicious Fedayeen Saddam death squads — and even though it violates the Geneva Conventions, which obligate a fighting force to protect surrendered enemy combatants. In another episode, 1st Recon Marines choose not to send a child they had wounded to a field hospital because the resulting delay would be detrimental to their push north toward Baghdad, and even though leaving the boy without elaborate medical care means he would almost certainly die. These decisions — and the Marines’ mixed reaction to them — are as realistic as the scenes of nighttime battles, when tracers light up the sky like deadly fireflies.
But as much as watching “Generation Kill” made me feel like I was, once again, riding in the back of a dusty, sweat-drenched humvee, I could not help noticing some inconsistencies. Out of necessity, the miniseries was filmed in Africa, where the vegetation (and lack thereof) is similar to the barren wastelands of Mesopotamia (shooting in Iraq was obviously a no-go). However, a few slanted rooftops give away that the Marines on the screen are not in the ancestral land of Iraqi Shia tribesmen, who would never put a slanted roof on top of their mud-brick huts, since that would deprive them of a place to store water, dry laundry, and stay cool during Iraq’s impossibly hot summer nights.
Also, in the miniseries almost no one smokes. Good for them, of course, but I have rarely met a man who carried an M-16 and didn’t carry a pack of Newports or Marlboro Reds (or bum them off someone who did). Even as they wait stealthily for a nighttime raid or set up mortars under a moonless Iraqi sky, most real-life American combat troops smoke, carefully cupping their hands over the butts so that enemy snipers don’t see them.
And as close as “Generation Kill” comes to nailing the particular vernacular of American Marines, I found it odd that the film’s Marines had no standard greeting. In the Army, the battle cry “hooah!” is commonly used as a way of saying hi. The 3-6 Marines, the unit I was embedded with in 2005, growled at each other, apparently celebrating the elite fighting force’s nickname “Devil Dogs” (which dates back to World War I, but the origins of which are disputed). And, despite the obscenity-laced and military jargon-saturated nature of the dialogue in “Generation Kill,” sometimes the conversation seemed a bit too stilted. More than once, Cpl. Ray Person (played by James Ransone), whose comrades identify him as “whiskey tango” (Marine-speak for “white trash”), launches into diatribes that are far too sophisticated and scripted for any enlisted Marine I’ve met.
“And although peace probably appeals to tree-loving bisexuals like you and your parents, I happen to be a death-dealing, blood-crazed warrior who wakes up every day just hoping for a chance to dismember my enemies and defile their civilizations”? I don’t think so. “I’m gonna go fuck me up some hajis” is much more like it.
Oddly enough, it’s the Rolling Stone reporter that the miniseries gets really wrong. For someone who spent two months riding through vicious battles with an elite Marine unit, the Evan Wright character is too often surprised, too often afraid, too often caught unaware. Everyone knows that reporters embedded with units are not exactly the brawniest of warriors. But in order to produce the detailed, insightful stories from the front, and, later, write the book on which the miniseries is based, Wright had to win the trust of the troops, and I’m sure he didn’t do that cowering in his seat.
But most amazingly, Wright’s character in the movie almost never asks questions. The real Wright must have talked up a lot of Marines, asked a lot of questions and taken a ton of notes. The on-screen Wright (played by Lee Tergesen) spends most of the time on the screen riding around in the back of the humvee silently, with a look of trepidation or surprise on his face — and his notebook very rarely comes out. Trust me, even the most lily-livered, panicked reporter will jot down something — “They’re trying to kill us again,” or “Oh, shit!” if nothing else, out of a knee-jerk reaction to fear.
Even watching “Generation Kill,” I found myself taking notes as though I would need to write up the action I was witnessing — a testimony to the veracity of the battle scenes. But in a film that got so much right about Marines in this war, they messed up on the journalist. My colleague on-screen rarely wrote a word.
Afghan women prepare a meal. 
