Bring back the Baathists

Peter Oborne was impressed by the courage and confidence of the soldiers in Iraq, but says that a settlement cannot be reached until the Baathists are back in mainstream politics The insurgents must have been watching their target for weeks: when they struck their timing was immaculate. The Iraqi army checkpoint at Mufrek Circle, north of Baquba in eastern Iraq, was well enough manned. But the soldiers were taken completely by surprise. Most were asleep and their platoon commander was mysteriously absent from his post. This slackness would cause recriminations later.

The attackers struck first with machineguns and grenades, killing several soldiers. Reinforcements stormed out from the nearby barracks. The insurgents had anticipated this. A car bomber was on alert and waited as the Iraqi army soldiers sped up the road in vulnerable soft-skinned vehicles. He detonated as they ranged alongside.

Nine soldiers and three bystanders were slaughtered. One month earlier soldiers from the same battalion — commanded by Colonel Abdullah — had suffered an even more devastating assault. A suicide bomber infiltrated the catering hall, killing 25 Iraqi soldiers and wounding or maiming many more. The strength of Colonel Abdullah’s battalion — one of four based in the eastern Iraqi province of Diyala — had fallen to 800 from 1,000 in just two months thanks to fatalities, woundings and some deserters.

These kinds of atrocity are routine. Yet morale remains high. Both American and Iraqi generals are convinced not merely that they have the insurgency under control, but that they are actually winning the battle.

There was no doubting the prevailing air of optimism and purpose in Diyala province among both the American soldiers and the Iraqi police and armed forces. They are proud of the story they have to tell. They say that the security situation has improved beyond measure over the course of this year. American officers insist privately that they are on course for a near complete withdrawal next summer, with only a handful of advisory teams left behind.

This confidence is all the more striking since Diyala province is one of the most difficult in all Iraq. Stretching from eastern Baghdad right up to the Iranian border, it is a Baathist stronghold and used to be a major recruiting ground for Saddam Hussein’s army.

The balance of Diyala’s 1.8 million popula tion is not far off that of Iraq as a whole, though there is a higher proportion of Sunnis. Some 40 per cent are Sunnis, perhaps 35 per cent Shia, and 20 per cent Kurds. ‘We believe that Diyala mirrors Iraq,’ says Colonel Risberg, a US battalion commander. ‘If Diyala can succeed, then Iraq can succeed.’ This time last year Baquba, the provincial capital of Diyala, was practically a lawless town. ‘Last year the insurgents owned the night in the city,’ says Risberg. ‘There were fears it was going down the route of Fallujah.’ According to intelligence reports it has been visited on at least two occasions by al Musab al-Zarkawi, leader of al-Qa’eda in Mesopotamia and the main man behind the wave of beheadings and suicide bomb attacks in Iraq.

The US forces believed that they had brought an element of security to Baquba. Most of the insurgents had been driven from the main town itself and taken refuge in Buhriz, a comparatively prosperous suburb to the south. The insurgency in Buhriz obsessed the US forces while we were in Diyala province. On the night we arrived there were some confident boasts that they had the area under control. But then bombs went off and reports emerged that terrorists were moving freely in the area once again. An imam in the town was preaching jihad against the American forces, with the mayor of Buhriz seated among the congregation. The Coalition forces immediately ‘closed down’ the suburb by imposing a strict night-time curfew and sealing off all exits.

The Americans were agonisingly aware, however, that the insurgents could easily evade their roadblocks by using secret routes through dense palm groves on the edge of the town. They tried to prevent this by pounding the palm groves every 15 minutes or so throughout the night from giant artillery pieces in their camp five miles away. The Americans dismissed complaints from the infuriated Buhriz townsfolk, saying they would stop the shelling the moment Buhriz ceased to harbour insurgents.

The war cameraman James Brabazon and I accompanied the US and Iraqi forces as they swept through the area in night raids, ‘doorknocking’ and seizing terrorist suspects. The element of surprise on these expeditions was crucial. The US commanders are well aware that the insurgency has a superb intelligence system of its own, which monitors every move made from within the military bases in the area through spies and lookouts.

So the lumbering US convoys would seek to confuse the enemy by setting off at first in the wrong direction, before diverting back to their destinations along minor roads. Much of the journey, particularly when we approached checkpoints or bridges, took place in total darkness. Headlights were switched off and drivers relied on night vision goggles. Otherwise military vehicles are exposed as targets for attack by rocket-propelled grenades and other missiles.

More important still was security. The Iraqi army is riddled with informers. Its senior officers would be briefed a few hours before the operation began, and regular soldiers only at the very last minute. Extreme care was taken about communications. It was assumed that the insurgency listened in to all radio traffic.

On all these raids we were accompanied by one or more men wearing balaclava helmets. The job of these mysterious figures, who were nervous to the extent sometimes of appearing to shake with terror, was to lead us to our destination. These informers knew that if their identity was betrayed they would be executed, and in all probability their family as well. They were acting from a variety of motives. Sometimes, Iraqi commanders insisted, it was patriotism and disgust at the insurgency. One colonel cited examples of people who had come forward with bona fide information and indignantly turned down cash rewards when they were offered. Sometimes — one can speculate — it might be a desire to take revenge on a perhaps innocent neighbour.

Once, when we accompanied a raid to a vil lage south of Buhriz where insurgents were thought to be hiding, a villager came forward and offered intelligence to the Iraqi forces. In this case the motive was gratitude: US medical orderlies had given treatment to one of his relatives. Hard cash was another motive: the US reward lavishly those who come forward with information. (So, of course, do the leaders of the insurgency. According to intelligence reports, an ordinary Iraqi who planted a roadside bomb might get paid $100. If the attack was successful — and, better still, filmed for propaganda purposes — the amount might rise to $500, a vast sum for the average Iraqi. Practically the first action taken by Coalition forces upon arriving at the scene of a roadside bombing is to arrest anyone present with a video camera: they are automatically assumed to be insurgents. Sometimes, however, American soldiers say that they turn out to be representatives of local TV stations who have been briefed in advance about the attack.) Typically, though not always, the Coalition forces arrive at their destinations late at night. Moving silently in single file, they surround the home of the suspected insurgent. The most dangerous moment comes when soldiers knock on the door. But in a recent case (not in Diyala) the insurgents were hidden in the cellar, they opened up with AK-47 machineguns through the floor above, causing carnage. US soldiers wear heavy body armour while on operations, but have no protection in their groin area against shots from below.

Coalition forces used the secrecy of nighttime to make arrests. When daylight came, the informers would lead us to the hidden arms caches in Iraq’s palm groves. We accompanied Coalition soldiers as they thrashed through the foliage in the heat of the day. It all felt very much like beating through the undergrowth in a pheasant shoot. The dense palm groves that surround Buhriz are not simply the means of ingress and egress for terrorists. They are also the munitions dump for the insurgency. As everybody knew, these caches might well be booby-trapped: one reason US officers encouraged Iraqi soldiers to do the digging. We went on patrols with the American army through the narrow streets of Buhriz in convoys of Humvees, the heavily armoured jeeps which are ubiquitous in the US army. Outside in the ferocious Iraqi sun, the temperature would be climbing towards 50°C. But inside the air-conditioning kept us fairly cool, rock music blared, and a cold soda was available in a drinks box at the back of the jeep. Through our thick glass windows we looked out on the incomparable squalor of Iraq in 2005. All open spaces have been converted to rubbish dumps. Children swimming in filthy, stagnant waterways would wave to us in friendly fashion as we went past.

We rarely felt entirely safe. There was always the knowledge that without warning a roadside bomb might explode as we passed. All soldiers in Iraq are instructed to scan the roadside for telltale signs: wires, mobile phones, bags of rubbish that were not there the day before, even a dead fox, apparently a victim of road kill. There have been cases of live cows stuffed with explosives, then detonated as Coalition forces pass by. Many of the 2,000 US soldiers who have been killed in the conflict have died from these so-called improvised explosive devices, detonated by phones or radio transmitters controlled by observers hundreds of yards away.

More perilous still are VBIEDs — vehicleborne improvised explosive devices. It is the lonely job of the gunner on a Humvee to keep alert for that ever-present menace. A US army officer outlined the awesome difficulty of the decision that a gunner, perched on the top of his vehicle with his machine-gun, has to make. ‘You see a white car coming at you fast. You fire warning shots, you try to warn him off, but he’s still coming straight at you. You have had a briefing that there are VBIEDs operating in the area. Are you going to open fire and risk killing an innocent man?’ The damage done to the body of the suicide bomber when these events occur, as they do on a near daily basis, is catastrophic: among the severed limbs and maimed bodies of the victims it is quite common to find, for example, a perfectly preserved spinal cord. One soldier described to me how he came across a human tongue, quite unblemished, on the bonnet of a car 80 yards away from the original explosion. Another found a human face, again unmarked but disconnected from the bomber’s skull.

But when attacks come the US military machine is formidable. The insurgency cannot begin to match the armoured strength of the Coalition. Though we never came under fire while accompanying Coalition troops on operations, we witnessed one astonishing midnight fire fight from the safety of the operation rooms. These ops rooms have giant screens and we witnessed the battle unfold live before us, as pictured from an unmanned aircraft passing overhead.

A group of insurgents attacked a passing US convoy from within the Buhriz palm groves. It promptly returned fire. Soon Apache helicopters bore down on the insurgents as well. In due course the operations officer gave the co-ordinates of the attackers to the F16 bombers which endlessly circle the Iraqi night sky. There was a lull while Coalition forces withdrew to a respectful distance, and then the F16 deposited a 500lb bomb on the area. No bodies were found when US forces visited the area the following day, just a pair of sandals and the remains of a tee-shirt.

But these military operations will never win the war for the Coalition. The best the US and Iraqi forces can hope for is to disrupt enemy operations. Everybody knows that politics is the key to a solution to the daily tragedy of Iraq. But here too the US forces and their Iraqi allies in Diyala were far more optimistic than I expected.

The strategy is simple. In Diyala province, as in the rest of Sunni Iraq, the Coalition perceives two types of insurgency. First and foremost, there are the Baathists. For the most part these are former soldiers in Saddam Hussein’s army. Look down a list of the 40 most wanted insurgents in Diyala province, the ones with a price on their heads, and the majority are former Saddam officers or Baathist bureaucrats. They formed the ruling class under Saddam. They are overwhelmingly Sunni in religion, and deeply threatened by the Kurd and Shia dominance in the new Iraqi state. There is nothing difficult or complicated about what they want. They have been disfranchised by the US invasion, and want to regain their power. This insurgency is specific to Iraq.

The second half of the insurgency is religious in inspiration, and said to be predominantly made up of foreigners, much of it part of the worldwide Islamic jihad against the West. Its fanatics provide many of the suicide bombers who have visited such death and destruction upon Iraq. US intelligence officers use the phrase ‘terrorist’ to describe operatives for this secondary, exogenous insurrection. Major Dean Wollan, the brigade intelligence officer, told me that he believed it would be possible to negotiate with the insurgents. Indeed he even confessed that he could imagine a day, perhaps two decades down the road, when he could sit down over a drink and swap stories with insurgent commanders, rather as Napoleon and Wellington’s generals dined together convivially years after the battle of Waterloo. Major Wollan accepted that the Baathist insurgency was comparable, in terms of motivation and structure, to the IRA terrorist organisation which fought the British state in Northern Ireland over three decades. As with the IRA, the Baathist insurgency had conventional political aspirations. As with the IRA, legal political parties provide a public face for a secret military operation. As with the IRA, the Baathist insurgency is grounded in widespread popular support.

But Major Wollan was adamant that it was quite impossible to negotiate in any way with the Islamic fundamentalists who have come together with the Baathist insurgents to make common cause against the new Iraqi government. Apart from that common objective, the insurgents and terrorists have nothing whatever in common: indeed Saddam Hussein was a brutal and effective opponent of Islamic militants.

It must be the overriding objective of the United States and the Iraqi government to recreate this historic enmity between the Baathists and militant Islam. The way to do that is to bring the Baathists right back into mainstream Iraqi politics. If that can be achieved, the terrorists will lose popular consent and no longer be able to operate inside Iraq.

That is why the overwhelming priority for the Coalition forces — of far greater importance than its military operations — is to create a legitimate government in Iraq. In Diyala province the encouraging news is that the democratically elected Iraqi leaders are convinced they have made massive progress in this direction. The elections last January led to a first peaceful handover of power in Diyala. Major Wollan described the effect in dramatic terms. ‘It was a bullet in the heart of the insurgency,’ he said. The new governor, Ra’ad Rashid, is now, theoretically at least, the most powerful figure in the province. Colonel Salazar, the impressive US brigade commander in Diyala province, told me, ‘I treat him with exactly the same respect and deference as I would a state governor in the United States.’ While in Diyala we were given complete access not only to the military operations of the United States and Iraqi armies, but also to the inner workings of the provincial administration. It soon became clear that Governor Ra’ad’s independence and public legitimacy could be extremely vexatious to the Americans. The Governor and Colonel Salazar clashed fiercely (if that is the right phrase to express a difference of opinion expressed with great courtesy by both parties over many cups of chai) over the chief of police. Governor Ra’ad was determined to remove the chief, a former Saddam general called Brigadier Adil Molan, from office. Colonel Salazar was keen that Molan, who loved to boast that his term of office had coincided with a ‘90 per cent improvement’ in the security situation, should stay.

This issue of the leadership of the police force was crucial to the security of the province. Indeed we heard US staff officers say on a number of occasions that ‘nothing the insurgency could do would harm us as much as losing Adil Molan’. But in the end the American commander was powerless. I witnessed an emotional private conversation between Colonel Salazar and the police chief. ‘Let me tell you that I am not surprised by this. These people are being directed by Iranian intelligence,’ claimed Molan. At first this remark sounded paranoid. But as I stayed longer in Iraq I came to realise how accurately the police chief’s allegation reflected the dangerous and far from unreasonable belief that the new Shiite-dominated government in Iraq is heavily infiltrated by the Iranian security services. It may indeed have been the case that a new administration resented Molan’s ancient links with Saddam’s army, and preferred to appoint a new chief of police who was firmly in the Shiite camp.

On other issues, however, Governor Ra’ad’s independence and democratic legitimacy gave massive strength to the Coalition forces. He was a potent ally in the suppression of the insurgency in Buhriz. Ra’ad needed every ounce of his authority to force the Diyala provincial council to agree that the mayor of Buhriz, who was believed to be taking orders from insurgents, should be sacked (the mayor was later arrested).

This is how the Americans are trying to extricate themselves from Iraq: by the steady transition of power. There has already been one public symbol of handover. The main public buildings in Baquba, occupied by US forces in the aftermath of invasion, have been handed over to the new provincial government. The US plans soon to move out of many of Saddam’s old bases, leave the Iraqi army in charge, and become almost invisible. Strategists hope that the insurgency will then face a new and delicate problem. Attacking the American invaders is one thing, killing Iraqi troops reporting to an Arab government is another matter.

Meanwhile the new Iraqi army, composed of some unbelievably brave or stoical men, remains at the heart of this transition. It, and not the US army, takes the bulk of the casualties. The contrast is flagrant. The US soldiers move around in their Humvees, while the Iraqi troops straphang in soft-skinned Nissan pick-up trucks. The same roadside bomb that might injure or kill a couple of US soldiers at best will take out a dozen Iraqi soldiers. All American troops wear heavy armour. Even when the Iraqi troops are provided with this upper body protection, they can only with difficulty be persuaded to use it.

It is the Iraqis who carry out the exposed and perilous duties. They man checkpoints and guard public buildings. Already they take the lead in most operations, such as the nighttime seizures of suspects and search for hidden arms caches. The Iraqi army can move much more readily among the local population, and already provides the bulk of the forward intelligence which enables the Coalition to disrupt the insurgency. It is led by some formidably brave officers who pay a harrowing personal price. Eight members of the extended family of one of the most daring officers in Diyala province were recently beheaded by terrorists.

The great question is whether the Iraqi army will hang together once the Americans leave. The collapse of the Saddam regime has left resentments so raw they are hard to comprehend. The Iraqi army holds the key to a peaceful and united Iraq, but could break into murderous factions. We left Iraq with the agonised suspicion that, for all their brave and idealistic commitment to democracy and peace, the Americans may be taking sides in a civil war.