By Ilana Ozernoy
U.S. News and World Report, 04 October 2004
CAMP FALLUJAH, IRAQ--On the outskirts of this U.S. Marine base in hostile Anbar province west of Baghdad, an Iraqi military chant in Arabic cuts through the hazy stillness of the afternoon. “I’m a bayonet, and my strike is hard! I’m ready for death, not for shame!” shout a group of Iraqi men in military garb, their arms swinging and knees pumping to the beat of the song as they march in haphazard formation. “We’re the Iraqi marines!” declares one of their officers, a 39-year-old man calling himself Major Haidr. “We’re the Specialized Special Forces.”
What makes this force really special is not that they are trained to rappel from helicopters or shoot with sniper precision, but that they are, effectively, an Iraqi militia under American command. U.S. Marine commanders hope the Iraqi force will bolster their units’ strength in an area where the key to finding the enemy may be simply knowing whom to ask. “We’re up against a country where we don’t speak their language and don’t know their culture,” says U.S. Marine Capt. Jason Vose, 31, who works with the new Iraqi militia. These Iraqis, he says, “can go and identify the problems and the bad guys. They’re sent into mosques that we can’t go into. We’ve had them on the border; we’ve had them in Fallujah. And they just perform.”
That’s more than can be said of Iraq’s regular security forces--the Army, National Guard, and police--whose training has been problematic and whose performance has been, even charitably put, discouraging. The lack of trained, reliable Iraqi forces is a major hurdle to U.S. hopes to put an Iraqi face on a major military offensive against insurgents before the elections still planned for January. In the meantime, however, the stakes are rising, with insurgents seemingly emboldened by their refuges in towns like Fallujah, effectively a no-go zone for the U.S. Marines.
Switching sides. The Marines call their allied Iraqi militiamen “Shahwanis,” after their founder, Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the recently appointed head of Iraqi intelligence, who fled Iraq in 1990 and was a key figure (along with current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi) in the unsuccessful 1996 CIA-backed coup against Saddam Hussein. After then occupation chief Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army--a decision now widely viewed as a mistake that left a large pool of angry, disaffected Iraqis--Shahwani rounded up a few ousted Army generals and a group of former special forces instructors and last spring united them with U.S. Marines looking for a creative solution to handling the violent Anbar province. Now 700 strong, this force falls under the command of the U.S. Marines, not Iraq’s Defense Ministry. “A lot of guys,” Vose says, “see them as the Marine Corps’s militia.”
The Iraqis are recruited by existing Shahwani members and vetted by their commanding general, not by U.S. forces. The marines show still more trust in their Shahwani sidekicks by not making them check their weapons at night, a requirement for other Iraqi security forces working alongside the U.S. military. And the pay, about $500 a month, is twice that of members of the Iraqi National Guard.
Previous efforts by the U.S. military to arm and train Iraqi security forces produced lackluster results. Too scared or defiant to fight, many Iraqi National Guard and New Iraqi Army soldiers put down their arms midbattle. Last April, after U.S. Marines pulled out of Fallujah, they installed the so-called Fallujah Brigade to keep law and order--but it was dismantled after the local members were found to be aiding and arming the insurgency. “We were basically paying and securing terrorists for two months,” says Marine 1st Lt. Zachary Iscol, who commands forward operating base India, where a company of Shahwanis lives and trains. “It’s difficult to ask someone to fight against their brother or cousin, and one of the reasons the Shahwani have been so successful is that they’re not being asked to do that.”
Loyalties. According to U.S. Marine officers, because of their value in the battlefield, the newly minted Shahwanis are in hot demand. “It is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Vose says. “Every unit is beginning to get the Specialized Special Forces embedded with them.” Even the Army has made a request to integrate the Shahwanis into its repertoire, but the Shahwanis say they are loyal to their Marine benefactors; so far, they’ve refused to work with anyone else.
In Baghdad, U.S. military commanders have been wary of supporting militias outside the control of Iraq’s interim government. How (and whether) the Shahwanis will integrate into Iraq’s security forces remains to be seen. Once the Marines pull out, the Shahwanis could turn out to be just another group of armed, ex-Mukhabarat (secret police) thugs. But marines say success in this experiment could be instrumental in establishing law and order in the no-go zones. Col. John Coleman, chief of staff for the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, says, “Our meal ticket home is an apparatus that doesn’t realize our absence when we’re no longer here.”
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Citation: Ilana Ozernoy. “Sending in the ‘Shahwanis’“, U.S. News and World Report, 04 October 2004.
Original URL: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/041004/4marines.htm
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