By Martin Fletcher
The Times, UK, 20 November 2006
A power struggle is taking place in the Sunni triangle, with tribal leaders and coalition forces aligning against a common enemy
A convoy of five US military humvees, each with radios crackling and a machine-gunner poking through its roof, sped The Times to a large compound on the northeastern edge of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province and most dangerous city in Iraq’s infamous Sunni triangle. The surrounding land had been cleared of trees and brush.A tank stood sentinel beneath the reinforced walls and watchtowers. Inside the heavy steel gates stood a fleet of Iraqi police vehicles bristling with weaponry. It was not your everyday interview.
We halted beside one of the three mini-palaces in the compound, and there on a shaded verandah, dressed in a long black dishdash and white headdress, was the beneficiary of all this protection: Sheikh Abd Sittar Bezea Ftikhan, a Sunni tribal leader on whose unlikely shoulders rest American hopes of reclaiming Ramadi and defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq.
While the world’s attention has been focused on Baghdad’s slide into sectarian warfare, something remarkable has been happening in Ramadi, a city of 400,000 inhabitants that al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies have controlled since mid-2004 and would like to make the capital of their cherished Islamic caliphate.
A power struggle has erupted: al-Qaeda’s reign of terror is being challenged. Sheikh Sittar and many of his fellow tribal leaders have cast their lot with the once-reviled US military. They are persuading hundreds of their followers to sign up for the previously defunct Iraqi police. American troops are moving into a city that was, until recently, a virtual no-go area. A battle is raging for the allegiance of Ramadi’s battered and terrified citizens and the outcome could have far-reaching consequences.
Ramadi has been the insurgency’s stronghold for the past two years. It is the conduit for weapons and foreign fighters arriving from Syria and Saudi Arabia. To reclaim it would deal a severe blow to the insurgency throughout the Sunni triangle and counter mounting criticism of the war back in America.
Sheikh Sittar and US commanders believe that the tide is turning in their favour. “Most of the people are now convinced that coalition forces are friends, and that the enemy is al-Qaeda,” the 35-year-old Sheikh claimed in his first face-to-face interview with a Western newspaper.
“Al-Qaeda is now on the run,” Colonel Sean MacFarland, commander of the 5,000 US troops in Ramadi, told The Times at his headquarters just outside the city. But the four days The Times spent embedded with US forces in Ramadi last week suggest that al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies are far from defeated, and that this is a battle with a long way yet to run.
“These are the worst days in Ramadi . . . the main groups are all fighting for control of the city,” said one resident, a health worker named Galib Awda.
More than fifty US soldiers have been killed in the city since Colonel MacFarland’s First Brigade Combat Team, part of the 1st Armoured Division, arrived in June, bringing the total to well over 250. US marine helicopters will fly to Ramadi only under cover of darkness.
Before being driven into the city from one of the four big US bases that surround it, I was instructed how, in an emergency, to pass fresh ammunition to the humvee’s machine-gunner. What could be seen through the vehicle’s bullet-proof windows was startling. Once a prosperous trading centre much favoured by Saddam Hussein, Ramadi has been laid waste by two years of warfare. Houses stand shattered and abandoned. Shops are shuttered up. The streets are littered with rubble, wrecked cars, fallen trees, broken lampposts and piles of rubbish.
Fetid water stands in craters. The pavements are overgrown. Walls are pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel. Side roads have been shut off with concrete barriers to thwart car bombs. Everything is coated in grey dust even the palm trees. The city has no functioning government, no telephones, and practically no basic services except sporadic electricity and water supplies. It has been reduced to a subsistence economy.
There are stray cats and wild dogs, but few cars or humans. Ramadi’s inhabitants have either fled, or learnt to stay indoors.
My destination was Eagle’s Nest, a “Combat Outpost” or COP, next to the wreckage of Ramadi’s football stadium where about 120 American and Iraqi troops have been posted since the summer to establish a presence in the city, monitor the terrorists and launch raids.
It consists of a dozen commandeered homes fortified with concrete blast walls, razor wire and Bradley fighting vehicles — the only reminder of past domesticity being discarded children’s toys and broken furniture. Every window is sandbagged top to bottom. Holes have been punched in walls to create passages sheltered from sniper fire. The post has been targeted by suicide bombers, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, and the reinforced glass of the COP’s several observation posts has been cracked by umpteen bullets. In what was once a living room the US troops have amassed a fine collection of insurgent rifles, shells and mortars.
The 24 hours that The Times spent there was punctuated by the constant rattle of gunfire from across the city, regular explosions and the thump of mortars. US troops killed at least 11 insurgents in that short period after a Bradley was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED). An hour before we left another IED blew up beneath an Iraqi humvee 200 yards from the COP. “
It’s very hostile,” said First Lieutenant Matthew McGraw, the US platoon leader. “We get attacked every day.” But not all the fighting is between al-Qaeda and US or Iraqi troops.
Much of it is what the US military calls “red on red”. There are many factions battling for control in Ramadi — al-Qaeda, hardline nationalists, Islamic radicals, former Baathists and the tribal leaders — and that is the background to Sheikh Sittar’s unlikely alliance with the Americans. As one US officer put it, the sheikhs are only “pro-American in the sense that they are fighting the same enemy”.
Sheikh Sittar is a wealthy man. He owns homes in Oman and Dubai and several luxury cars. He and the other tribal leaders unquestionably prospered under Saddam Hussein, as did Ramadi’s many Baathists. Few cities had more cause to lament the dictator’s downfall, US troops made matters worse with their insensitive early conduct and al-Qaeda skillfully exploited the people’s anger with its promise to expel the infidel.
As al-Qaeda’s fighters tightened their grip on Ramadi, they became increasingly repressive and challenged the tribal leaders’ power. Soon they were kidnapping and beheading innocent people as part of a campaign of extortion and intimidation.
Some sheikhs fled to Jordan and Syria. Sheikh Sittar’s father and three brothers were killed, his father during the holy month of Ramadan, and he says he has himself survived several kidnap attempts. This summer a fellow sheikh was ambushed and beheaded by al-Qaeda supporters, who piled insult on injury by keeping his body so it could not be buried immediately, as demanded by custom.
“We began to see what they were actually doing in Anbar province. They were not respecting us or honouring us in any way, said Sheikh Sittar, speaking through an interpreter.” Their tactics were not acceptable.”
During the late summer he began enlisting his fellow sheikhs in a movement called the Sahawat or Awakening, whose goal is to drive al-Qaeda from Anbar province.
The US military wooed the sheikhs over what one US officer described as “hundreds of cups of chai and thousands of cigarettes”. They agreed that their chosen instrument should be the police force, which was practically defunct thanks to al-Qaeda death threats against anyone who dared to sign up. In June there were only 35 recruits; in July Sheikh Sittar sent 300 members of his 30,000-strong Resha tribe for training.
Last month a record 409 new recruits were dispatched to the police academy in Jordan, and 1,300 are now signed up, many of them former Baathists. The US and Iraqi armies have armed and protected them against al-Qaeda attacks, and as fear of al-Qaeda has dissipated, so the process has accelerated.
The beauty of the police is that they serve — unlike the Iraqi army — in their own communities. They know exactly who the enemies are. “The Iraqi police are absolutely the most potent weapon we have right now because they are of the people, by the people and for the people,” says Colonel MacFarland.
“Instead of being afraid of al-Qaeda, now al-Qaeda is afraid of the police. It’s going underground, moving out, and the folks who were sitting on the fence are now coming on our side.”
Inside the heavily fortified Abu Faraj police station, just north of Ramadi, the recruits all said that they had been too frightened to join before. “Right now almost all the tribes are fighting the terrorists — the women, the children and even the dogs are fighting them,” said Major Saidey Saleh, the station commander and former Saddam army officer who bears the scars of four al-Qaeda bullet wounds in his right thigh. At the same time Colonel MacFarland, who arrived in Ramadi fresh from pacifying the much smaller town of Tall’Afar near the Syrian border, has abandoned his predecessor’s policy of merely surrounding the city. He has instead adopted an aggressive “inkblot” strategy of seizing and securing key points within it then radiating outwards.
Helped by the flood of new recruits he has already established a chain of 19 COPs and police stations designed to curtail the terrorists’ freedom of movement within Ramadi. Previously, he said, the US military “controlled” just one road into the city and had to fight its way up and down that.
Colonel MacFarland and his officers say that they are already seeing dividends. They claim to have killed 750 terrorists since June, that the number of foreign fighters has fallen from more than 1,000 to the “low hundreds” and that US and Iraqi forces now control 70 per cent of the city.
They recently found the graves of 200 foreign fighters in a former park. When they recaptured Ramadi’s general hospital they found it occupied by only four wounded insurgents.
They say that the number of attacks has fallen from 20 to 15 a day, that the number of IEDs has fallen from about ten a day to three and that al-Qaeda can no longer stage mass attacks on Iraqi police or army posts. The US installed a mayor last week whose brief is to get Ramadi’s administration back up and running.
Colonel MacFarland estimates that 70 per cent of Ramadi’s population now openly backs the security forces, and says that his priority is to get the telephones working so that people can provide tips about weapons caches without fear of reprisals.
He predicts that by some time next year the Iraqi security forces will be able to take over from the US military and “dominate the security environment in Ramadi”.
There is no way of corroborating such claims in a city that is still so dangerous and inaccessible. There is no guarantee that the new police force will not eventually disintegrate into armed militias loyal to the sheikhs. But for once the insurgents are bleating. Harith al-Dhari, head of the hardline Muslim Scholars Association, denounced Sheikh Sittar’s tribal leaders last week as “thieves and hijackers” fighting the “honourable resistance”.
Taking the battle to the terrorists
Fallujah April and November 2004
US troops fought their way briefly into this insurgent stronghold after the killing of four American contractors in April. Seven months later a force of 15,000 retook the city in a week-long battle. More than 1,200 insurgents and 38 US soldiers killed
Najaf August 2004
US marines fought 22-day battle with 2,000 members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in and around the Imam Ali mosque, one of the holiest Shia shrines. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani finally brokered peace. Hundreds of rebels were killed but al-Sadr's stature boosted
Samarra October 2004
5,000 US and Iraqi troops reclaim Sunni-dominated city from rebelsin a two-day battle. More than 200 insurgents killed or captured
Mosul November 2004
2,500 US and Iraqi troops quell uprising in support of Fallujah insurgency
Tall'Afar September 2005
11,000 US and Iraqi troops drive out al-Qaeda fighters from key town near Syrian border in battle that last several days. 600 insurgents killed
West Baghdad August 2006
12,000 additional US and Iraqi troops sent in to stop sectarian warfare in parts of west Baghdad. Operation continues and has yet to succeed
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Citation: Martin Fletcher. "Fighting back: the city determined not to become al-Qaeda's capital," The Times, UK, 20 November 2006.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2461268,00.html
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