Nir Rosen: All Publications, Events and Press

Hamas Has Been Targeted Since It Was Elected

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:55:00 -0500

Again the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live, on television. The western media justifies it. Even some Arab outlets equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. None of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt. The international community is guilty for this latest massacre. Will it

Riding Shotgun

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 12:42:00 -0500

I’m in the driver’s seat of a 2.5-ton armoured truck somewhere west of Baghdad in December 2007, navigating a main supply route used by the American military. Next to me is a Lebanese private security contractor named Abu Layla, who is monitoring the roadside for potential bombs. Suddenly, we get ambushed – a “contact,” as contractors call a violent encounter with Iraqi insurgents, sectarian fighters or al Qa’eda. I hit the panic button on the dashboard, and our signal alerts the nearest US military unit. I take one hand off the wheel to remove the safety of my

Songs for the Mahdi Army

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:02:00 -0500

One day in Iraq, a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad's Mansur district and took me to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We drove past checkpoints manned by "Awakening" militias created by the Americans to counteract the Shiite-led Mahdi Army militia. My friend, a Shiite himself from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player. "Now we are the Mahdi Army," my friend laughed, as the singing started. The songs praised populist anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the Iraqi militia loyal to him, which frequently

The Broken State

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 17:46:00 -0500

In August of this year I flew in to Kabul, a bustling city undergoing a construction boom, with shopping malls, new banks, restaurants and traffic jams, where I stayed in a hotel catering to weary journalists and aid workers. I arranged to meet two Taliban commanders who agreed to take me to their province, Ghazni – about 100 miles south of the capital. They picked me up one day from a posh Kabul neighbourhood in an innocuous-looking car and we headed south. We drove past barren rocky mountains, desolate Afghan

How We Lost the War We Won

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:02:00 -0400

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.

By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.

We drive by a tractor-trailer still smoldering from an attack the day before, and the charred, skeletal remains of a truck from an attack a month earlier. At a gas station, a crowd of Afghans has gathered. Smoke rises from the road several hundred yards ahead.

"Jang," says Ibrahim, who is sitting in the front passenger seat next to Shafiq. "War. The Americans are fighting the Taliban."

Shafiq and Ibrahim use their cellphones to call their friends in the Taliban, hoping to find out what is going on. Suddenly, the chatter of machine-gun fire erupts, followed by the thud of mortar fire and several loud explosions that shake the car. I flinch and duck in the back seat, cursing as Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh at me.

"Tawakkal al Allah," Shafiq lectures me. "Depend on God."

This highway -- the only one in all Afghanistan -- was touted as a showpiece by the Bush administration after it was rebuilt. It provides the only viable route between the two main American bases, Bagram to the north and Kandahar to the south. Now coalition forces travel along it at their own risk. In June, the Taliban attacked a supply convoy of 54 trucks passing through Salar, destroying 51 of them and seizing three escort vehicles. In early September, not far from here, another convoy was attacked and 29 trucks were destroyed. On August 13th, a few days before I pass through Salar, the Taliban staged an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the U.S.-backed governor of Ghazni, wounding two of his guards.

As we wait at the gas station, Shafiq and Ibrahim display none of the noisy indignation that Americans would exhibit over a comparable traffic jam. To them, a military battle is a routine inconvenience, part of life on the road. Taking advantage of the break, they buy a syrupy, Taiwanese version of Red Bull called Energy at a small shop next door. At one point, two green armored personnel carriers from NATO zip by, racing toward Kabul. Shafiq and Ibrahim laugh: It looks like the coalition forces are fleeing the battle.

"Bulgarians," Shafiq says, shaking his head in amusement.

After an hour, the fighting ends, and we get back in the car. A few minutes later, we pass the broken remains of a British supply convoy. Dozens of trucks -- some smoldering, others still ablaze -- line the side of the road, which is strewn with huge chunks of blasted asphalt. The trucks carried drinks for the Americans, Ibrahim tells me as we drive past. Hundreds of plastic water bottles with white labels spill out of the trucks, littering the highway.

Farther down the road, American armored vehicles block our path. Smoke pours from the road behind them. Warned by other drivers that the Americans are shooting at approaching cars, Shafiq slowly maneuvers to the front of the line and stops. When the Americans finally move, we all follow cautiously, like a nervous herd. We drive by yet more burning trucks. Ibrahim points to three destroyed vehicles, the remains of an attack four days earlier.

A few miles later, at a lonely desert checkpoint manned by the Afghan army, several soldiers with AK-47s make small talk with Shafiq and Ibrahim, asking them about the battle before waving us through. As night falls, we pass a police station. We have reached Ghazni province.

Shafiq laughs. "The Russians were stronger than the Americans," he says. "More fierce. We will put the Americans in their graves.

It has been seven years since the United States invaded Afghanistan in the wake of September 11th. The military victory over the Taliban was swift, and the Bush administration soon turned its attention to rebuilding schools and roads and setting up a new government under President Hamid Karzai. By May 2003, only 18 months after the beginning of the war, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld all but declared victory in Afghanistan. "We are at a point where we clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction," Rumsfeld announced during a visit to Kabul. The security situation in Afghanistan, in his view, was better than it had been for 25 years.

But even as Rumsfeld spoke, the Taliban beginning their reconquest of Afghanistan. The Pentagon, already focused on invading Iraq, assumed that the Afghan militias it had bought with American money would be enough to secure the country. Instead, the militias proved far more interested in extorting bribes and seizing land than pursuing the hardened Taliban veterans who had taken refuge across the border in Pakistan. The parliamentary elections in 2005 returned power to the warlords who had terrorized the before the Taliban imposed order. "The American intervention issued a blank check to these guys," says a senior aid official in Kabul. "They threw money, weapons, vehicles at them. But the warlords never abandoned their bad habits -- they're abusing people and filling their pockets.

By contrast, aid for rebuilding schools and clinics has been paltry. In the critical first two years after the invasion, international assistance amounted to only $57 per citizen -- compared with $679 in Bosnia. As U.S. contractors botched reconstruction jobs and fed corruption, little of the money intended to rebuild Afghanistan reached those in need. Even , the sudden infusion of international aid drove up real estate and food prices, increasing poverty and fueling widespread resentment.

The government of Pakistan, seeking to retain influence over what it views as its back yard, began helping the Taliban regroup. With the Bush administration focused on the war in Iraq, money poured into Afghanistan from Al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, who were eager to maintain a second front against the American invaders. The Taliban -- once an isolated and impoverished group of religious students who knew little about the rest of the world and cared only about liberating their country from oppressive warlords -- are now among the best-armed and most experienced insurgents in the world, linked to a global movement of jihadists that stretches from Pakistan and Iraq to Chechnya and the Philippines.

The numbers tell the story. Attacks on coalition and Afghan forces are up 44 percent since last year, the highest level since the war began. By October, 135 American troops had been killed in Afghanistan this year -- already surpassing the total of 117 fatalities for all of 2007. The Taliban are also intensifying their attacks on aid workers: In a particularly brazen assault in August, a group of Taliban fighters opened fire on the car of a U.S. aid group, the International Rescue Committee, killing three Western women and their Afghan driver on the main road to Kabul.

The Bush administration, belatedly aware that it was losing Afghanistan, responded to the violence as it did in Iraq: by calling for more troops. Speaking at the National Defense University on September 9th, the president announced a "quiet surge" of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, saying additional forces are necessary to stabilize "Afghanistan's young democracy." But the very next day, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered a sharply different assessment. His prepared testimony, approved by the secretary of defense and the White House, read, "I am convinced we can win the war in Afghanistan." But when Mullen sat down before Congress, he deviated from his prepared statement. "I am not convinced we are winning it in Afghanistan," he testified bluntly.

In early October, the president's plan for a surge was once again contradicted by his top advisers. American intelligence agencies drafting a classified report on the war warned that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" fueled by worsening violence and rampant corruption. Defense Secretary Robert Gates also admitted to Congress that the Pentagon is stretched so thin in Iraq, it will be unable to meet even a modest request for 10,000 more troops in Afghanistan until next spring at the earliest.

But those closest to the chaos in Afghanistan say that throwing more soldiers into combat won't help. "More troops are not the answer," a senior United Nations official in Kabul tells me. "You will not make more babies by having many guys screw the same woman."

It is a point echoed in dozens of off-the-record interviews I conducted in Kabul with leading Western diplomats, security experts, former mujahedeen and Taliban commanders, and senior officials with the U.N. and prominent aid organizations. All agree that the situation is, in the words of one official, "incredibly bleak." Using suicide bombers and other tactics imported from Iraq, the Taliban have cut Kabul off from the rest of the country and established themselves as the only law in many rural villages. "People don't want the Taliban back, but they're afraid to back the government," says one top diplomat. "They know the Taliban will ride into the village and behead anybody who has made a deal with the coalition."

According to the diplomat, military solutions are simply no longer viable. "The analysis of our intelligence people is that things are getting worse," he says. "CIA analysts are extremely gloomy and worried. You have an extremely weak president in Afghanistan, a corrupt and ineffective ministry of the interior, an army with no command or control, and a dysfunctional international alliance."

As one top official with a Western aid organization put it, "We're simply not up to the task of success in Afghanistan. I'm increasingly unsure about a way forward -- except that we should start preparing our exit strategy."

To travel with the Taliban and see firsthand how they operate, I contacted a well-connected Afghan friend in Kabul and asked him to make the introductions. He knew many groups of fighters in Afghanistan, but said he would only trust my security if those I accompanied knew that they and their families would be killed if anything happened to me. Through a respected dignitary, I was connected with Mullah Ibrahim, who commands 500 men in the Dih Yak district of Ghazni. We met at my friend's office in Kabul on a hot, sunny afternoon. Midlevel Taliban leaders like Ibrahim move freely about the capital, like any other Afghan: U.S. forces lack the intelligence and manpower to identify enemy commanders, let alone apprehend them. (To protect Ibrahim's identity, I agreed to change his name.)

Now in his 40s, Ibrahim has been fighting with the Taliban since the 1990s. He walks with a pronounced limp: He lost his right leg below the knee in the country's civil war, and he had undergone surgery only the week before to repair nerve damage he suffered in a recent firefight. At first he told me his wounds were from an American bullet, but I later learned he had been injured in a clash with a rival Taliban commander.

After our meeting, Ibrahim promised to contact the Taliban minister of defense and request approval for my trip. As I waited for word, I went to a market in Kabul and bought several sets of salwar kameez, the traditional tunic and baggy pants worn by Afghan men. I had grown my beard longer to pass as an Afghan, and before leaving New York I had supplemented my Arabic and basic Farsi with a week of Berlitz classes in Pashtu, the language spoken by the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban. Pashtu is not exactly in high demand, and the book Berlitz gave me was clearly designed for military purposes. It contained a list of military ranks, including "General of the Air Force," and offered a helpful list of weapons, including "land mines" and "bullets." It also provided the Pashtu translation for a host of important phrases: Show me your ID card. Let the vehicle pass. You are a prisoner. Hands up. Surrender. If I wanted to arrest an Afghan, I was now prepared. The book did not include the phrase I needed most: Ze talibano milmayam. "I am a guest of the Taliban."

On a Saturday afternoon, Ibrahim picks me up in a white Toyota Corolla, its dashboard covered in fake gray fur. His friend Shafiq is behind the wheel, wearing a cap embroidered with rhinestones. Afghan culture places a premium on courtesy, and Shafiq comes across as unfailingly polite. At one point, almost casually, he mentions that he has personally executed some 200 spies, usually by beheading them. "First I warn people to stop," he says, emphasizing his fair-mindedness. "If they continue, I kill them."

Shafiq, who fought the Soviets with the mujahedeen, now commands Taliban fighters in the Andar district of Ghazni. "Andar is a very bad place," an intelligence officer in Kabul tells me. "The Taliban show a lot of confidence and freedom of movement there." While coalition forces have focused on driving the insurgents from the south, they failed to maintain a buffer in central regions like Ghazni, where the Taliban now routinely pull people off buses and execute them. "They have that level of control right on Kabul's front door," the officer adds. "Environments regarded as extreme two years ago are much worse now. There has been a staggering intensification."

As we head south, Shafiq tells me that fighters from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan have come through the Andar district. Most are suicide bombers, but some fight alongside the Taliban. He is impressed with their skill, but like many Taliban, he doesn't care for their politics. "Pakistan and Iran are not friends of Afghanistan," Shafiq says dismissively. "They don't want peace in Afghanistan -- they want to take Afghanistan." Despite their extremely conservative views on religion, most Taliban are fundamentally nationalist and Afghan-centric. They accept the support of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't mean they approve of its tactics. "Suicide attacks are not good because they kill Muslims," Shafiq says.

In the darkness, we roll into the village of Nughi. We no longer have cellphone reception; the Taliban shut down the phone towers after sunset, when they stop for the night, to prevent U.S. surveillance from pinpointing their position. It is the holiday of Shaab eh Barat, when Muslims believe God determines a person's destiny for the coming year. Young boys from the village gather to swing balls of fire attached to wires. Like orange stars, hundreds of fiery circles glow far into the distance. The practice is haram -- one of many traditions banned by the Taliban, who consider it forbidden under Islam. The fact that it is being tolerated is the first indication I have that the Taliban are not as doctrinaire as they were during their seven years of rule.

Shafiq maneuvers the car on the bumpy dirt road between mud houses. After a few stops in the village we are led to a house where a group of young Taliban fighters emerges. Several of them are carrying weapons. We greet the traditional way, each man placing his right hand on the other's heart, leaning in but not fully embracing, inquiring about the other's health and family. Ibrahim, who had promised to protect me on the trip, decides to go home, leaving Shafiq to guide me the rest of the way.

With the moon lighting our path, Shafiq and I follow the Taliban on foot to another house, entering through a low door into a guest room with a red carpet on the floor and wooden beams on the ceiling.

A dim bulb barely illuminates the room. A PKM belt-fed machine gun and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher lean against a wall, next to several rockets. We are joined by Mullah Yusuf, Ibrahim's nephew, who serves as a senior commander in Andar.

Yusuf has dark reddish skin and a handsome face. He wears a black turban with thin gold stripes and carries an AK-47. A boy brings a pitcher and basin and we rinse our hands. We drink green tea and eat a soup of mushy bread called shurwa with our hands, followed by meat and grapes.

Yusuf became a commander last year, when the Americans killed his superior officer. He sleeps in a different house every night to avoid detection. Only 30 years old, he has big ears and an almost elfin air; the ringtone on his cellphone is a bells-and-cymbals version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice theme. A year and a half ago, Yusuf was injured in his thigh by a U.S. helicopter strike, and now walks with a limp. He joined the Taliban in 2003 after studying at a religious school in North Waziristan, the border region of Pakistan where many Afghan refugees live. He seems less motivated by religious ideals than by defending his homeland: He took up jihad, he tells me, because foreigners have come to Afghanistan and are fighting Afghans and poor people.

"The Americans are not good," he says. "They go into houses and put people in jail. Fifteen days ago the Americans bombed here and killed a civilian."

The U.S. campaign in Afghanistan has not been helped by its rash of misguided bombings. This year, according to the United Nations, 1,445 Afghan civilians were killed by coalition forces through August -- two-thirds of them in airstrikes. On July 6th, a bombing raid killed 47 members of a wedding party -- including 39 women and children -- near the village of Kacu. On August 22nd, more than 90 civilians -- again mostly women and children -- were killed in an airstrike in Azizabad.

Yusuf makes it clear that it is only the Americans he has a problem with. Once the foreigners leave, he insists, the Taliban will negotiate peace with the Afghan army and police: "They are brothers, Muslims." What's more, he says, girls will be allowed to go to school, and women will be allowed to work. It is a stance I will hear echoed by many Taliban leaders. In recent years, recognizing that their harsher strictures had alienated the population, the Taliban have grown more tolerant. To improve their operations, they have even been forced to adopt technologies they once banned: computers, television, films, the Internet.

After we finish eating, we walk to a mud shed. Shafiq opens its wooden doors to reveal another white Toyota Corolla. The men load the RPG launcher and four rockets into the car, along with the PKM machine gun. We drive through the moonlit desert on dirt paths to the village of Kharkhasha, where Shafiq lives. On the way, Shafiq pops in a cassette of Taliban chants. They are in Pashtu and without instrumentation, which is forbidden by the Taliban.

Arriving at Shafiq's house, we enter the guest room in darkness and sit on thin mattresses. A small gas lamp is brought out, as well as grapes and green tea. Shafiq says he fought the Soviets in the 1980s and spent five years in jail. But following the Soviet withdrawal, as the mujahedeen turned on one another, Shafiq felt they had become robbers. He joined the Taliban in 1994, he says, because they wanted peace and Islam.

Shafiq has met Osama bin Laden twice -- once before the Taliban took over, and once during the Taliban reign. He was impressed by bin Laden's knowledge of Pashtu. He has also met Mullah Muhammed Omar, the one-eyed cleric who calls himself the "commander of the faithful." Omar, who served as leader of the Taliban government, is now in hiding across the border in Pakistan, where he rebuilt the Taliban with the help and protection of Pakistani intelligence. Shafiq hopes that Omar will return to lead the country, but other Taliban leaders no longer view him as the only option. The shift is significant -- a sign that the Taliban are not fighting merely to restore the hard-line government they had before but are prepared to move forward with a greater degree of flexibility and pragmatism than they have shown in the past.

The next morning, we get back into the Corolla, loading the PKM, the RPG launcher and four rockets into the trunk. Shafiq and the machine gun are in the front passenger seat. Yusuf drives, his AK-47 beside him. Another Taliban fighter rides a Honda motorcycle alongside us, an AK-47 strapped to his shoulder. They have promised to take me to see the Taliban in action: going out on patrols, conducting attacks, adjudicating disputes and providing security against bandits and police. As we head deeper into the province, the land becomes increasingly flat and arid. Everything is the color of sand. Even the dilapidated mud homes, bleached almost white by the sun, look like sand castles after the first wave has hit them.

Yusuf points to a police checkpoint. The police know him, he says, but do nothing to stop him. "Every night I go on patrol, and they don't fight me," he says. "They don't have guns, and they are afraid."

The police, in fact, often defect to the Taliban. Shafiq recently bought two jeeps from the police, who later told the Interior Ministry that the vehicles were destroyed in an attack. "The police are highly corrupt," a senior U.N. official in Kabul tells me. "They are at the center of the collapse of the Karzai government -- their corruption makes people support the Taliban." The cops have even taken to robbing U.S. contractors. "The police will raid foreign companies and just steal everything -- iPods, money, weapons, radios," says an intelligence officer. "People might hate the Taliban, but they hate the government just as much. At least the Taliban have rules. This government, they're just parasites fucking with you."

In the village of Khodzai, we visit a commander at a mosque where eight men and two boys sit on the floor, drinking tea. When they aren't attacking checkpoints or ambushing convoys, the Taliban spend most of their time praying or listening to religious lectures. The men ambushed the Afghan army two days earlier in a nearby village, killing 20 Afghan soldiers. "The Americans do not come here," their commander says proudly. "We control this area. The Taliban is the government here."

Outside, in a sunny courtyard, the men get ready to go on patrol, checking their ammunition and slinging their AK-47s over their shoulders. Suddenly, a coalition military helicopter swoops low overhead, nearly coming to a hover above us. Throughout the war, the U.S. has compensated for its lack of troops by relying on aerial shows of force: It's possible to go for days in Ghazni without seeing a single coalition soldier. I clench my fists in terror, waiting for the helicopter to fire at us, but the men ignore it and laugh at me. One tells me he fired an RPG at a helicopter yesterday, and will fire a rocket at this one if it attacks us. My fear may be comic, but it's not misplaced: A month after I leave, an airstrike in Andar will kill seven suspected Taliban fighters.

To my relief, the helicopter flies off. The men leave on their motorcycles to patrol the countryside. As the Taliban have attempted to counter the Americans by adopting the tactics of Iraqi insurgents, they have become far more brutal than they were when they ruled Afghanistan. To sow insecurity, they routinely enter villages and bypass traditional tribal mechanisms, waging a harsh campaign of social terror.

"They're killing more and more tribal elders," one intelligence officer tells me. "We can't expect communities to show solidarity with the government when we can't provide for their security -- it's ridiculous."

As we leave the mosque, Shafiq tells me of the trials that the Taliban frequently hold to prosecute collaborators. The suspects are given a hearing by a qazi, or judge, who orders those convicted to be beheaded. As he drives, Shafiq plays more Taliban songs about brave boys going to fight.

As the Taliban insurgency spreads, it has fallen victim to the tribal rivalries and violent infighting that are endemic to Afghanistan, which is home to hundreds of distinct tribal groups. "The leadership is totally fragmented," a senior U.N. official says. "There is a lot of criminality within the Taliban." With the targeting of civilians now sanctioned by the Taliban, top commanders compete for prize catches, stopping cars in broad daylight and checking the cellphones of foreigners to determine if they are worthwhile captives. As we drive deeper into Ghazni, we are entering territory where such factionalization is now as lethal as the rocket launcher stuffed in the Corolla's trunk.

In the middle of a sandstorm, we head to a local shop, pulling up with the PKM in plain view and the Taliban chants blaring from the car's speakers. The people in the shop greet Yusuf warmly. He buys shoulder straps for AK-47s. Then, as we're passing through a nearby village, we are stopped by a bearded man on a motorcycle. An AK-47 is slung over his shoulder, his face partially concealed by a scarf.

He demands to know who I am. Shafiq tells him I am a guest. The man asks me if I am Pashtun. "Pukhtu Nayam," I say, drawing on my Berlitz lessons. "I am not Pashtun." He glares at me and rides off.

Arriving at another mosque, we find a dozen men inside. A large shoulder-fired missile is on the floor, an anti-armor weapon. Shafiq tells me we are waiting to meet the commander who will approve my trip.

This is news to me. I thought my trip had already been approved by the Taliban defense minister. Suddenly, as I am talking to one of the fighters, the angry man on the motorcycle bursts in holding a walkie-talkie. He barks at the fighter to stop talking to me until the men's commander shows up. A judge, he says, will decide what will happen to me. Upon hearing the Pashtu word qazi, I start to panic. As Shafiq made clear earlier, a meeting with a judge could end with decapitation.

I am ordered to get into a car with the angry man and the other strangers, who will take me to the judge. To my alarm, Shafiq says he will join Yusuf, who is praying in the mosque, and catch up with us later. He seems to be washing his hands of me.

I have been held by militias in both Iraq and Lebanon, but in those situations I could speak the language and talk my way out of trouble. Now I am in one of the most desolate places I have ever seen, far from any help and unable to speak more than a few garbled words of Pashtu. Trying to contain my mounting sense of helplessness, I tell Shafiq that I am not leaving him -- I am his guest. Once I am out of his control, I will be at the mercy of men who kill almost as routinely as they pray. Brandishing their rifles, the men shout at me to get into their car.

Yusuf comes out and tells me to get into our Corolla. He won't leave me, he says. He puts another man with an AK-47 in the car to guard me. As I wait, a standoff ensues. Frantic, I send text messages to my contacts back in Kabul to tell them I'm in trouble. In the tense silence, my guard's cellphone abruptly goes off: The ringtone is machine-gun fire, accompanied by a song about the Taliban being born for martyrdom.

My mouth goes dry from fear; I feel as though I have lost my voice. My friend in Kabul who helped arrange the trip manages to get through to Shafiq. He tells him he should not leave me, that I am Shafiq's responsibility and he will hold him personally responsible if anything happens to me.

We sit in the car for more than an hour, windows up. The sandstorm is still raging, and it's impossible to see more than a few yards. Outside, men with guns flicker into view, only to vanish in the blinding haze. Finally, Shafiq tells me I can get out. The angry man and his companions depart, taking the rocket launcher with them. Thinking it is over, I put my hand on my heart as they leave, to indicate no ill will. Then Shafiq tells me there has been a change of plan. He has been ordered to escort me to visit a rival commander -- a man called Dr. Khalil -- who will determine what will happen to me.

I later learn that I have been caught in the midst of the bitter and often violent infighting that divides the Taliban. Ibrahim's recent injury, it turns out, was the result of a clash between his forces and a group of foreign fighters under the command of Dr. Khalil. The foreigners wanted to close down a girls' school, sparking a battle. Two Arabs and 11 Pakistanis commanded by Dr. Khalil had been killed by Ibrahim's men.

As we leave to meet Dr. Khalil, the car jolts forward in the sandstorm, rocking back and forth on the stony path. I feel as though I am in a boat being tossed about by waves. Yusuf tells me not to worry -- if Dr. Khalil tries to take me, he will fight them. It is the only reassurance I have. Throughout all our time in Ghazni, we have seen no authority other than the Taliban. Even if American helicopters were to appear suddenly, that would hardly be a relief -- it would only be to target us in an airstrike.

I struggle to find a signal for my phone, cursing as the bars appear and disappear. I reach another of my contacts. "I spoke to Dr. Khalil," he says. "If they behave bad with you, don't worry -- they just want to punish you." Shafiq also tells me not to worry -- that he will die defending me if necessary. My only hope, I realize, is the Pashtun code of hospitality known as Pashtunwali -- the same tradition that forbade the Taliban from handing over Osama bin Laden to the Bush administration after September 11th. Unfortunately, as young Taliban fighters have substituted their own authority for tribal customs, more and more insurgents now ignore the code. "All the old rules have broken down," an aid official who has spent two decades in Afghanistan tells me. The guarantees of safety that once protected civilians have been replaced by a new generation removed from traditional society -- one for whom jihad is the only law.

Our car crawls through the empty desert. I can see nothing on the horizon. I ask Shafiq if Dr. Khalil is a good guy. "He's like you," Shafiq answers. "No Muslim is a bad man." His faith in the brotherhood of Islam does little to reassure me. "Don't worry," Shafiq says. "The Doctor has a gun, and I have a gun."

Ibrahim calls to say that he has reached a Taliban leader in Pakistan, as well as someone in the United Arab Emirates, and they have promised to call the Doctor and tell him not to harm me. "The Doctor will fight with me, not with you," says Shafiq, who seems to be warming to the idea of bloodshed. My contact in Kabul calls again. "They might slap you, but they won't kill you," he tells me. "It's just to punish you for coming without permission. They might keep you overnight as a guest. You are lucky you called me." Later, he tells me that the Doctor had assured him that he would not "do anything that isn't Sharia," or Islamic law. This was little consolation, even after the fact, since the Taliban's interpretation of Sharia includes beheading.

"I'm a martyr, I'm a star," the Taliban on the car's tape deck chants. "I will testify on behalf of my mother on Judgment Day. When I was small, my mother put me on her lap and spoke sweetly to me...."

We finally arrive at a mosque somewhere between the villages of Gabari and Sher Kala. The Doctor, I am told, is waiting for us inside. As I enter, I inadvertently step on a pair of Prada sunglasses -- just as the Doctor walks into the room.

A burly man with light skin and a dark brown beard, the Doctor picks up the bent glasses and examines them somberly. His hands are thick, enormous. He wears a white cap, with palm trees and suns embroidered in white thread. He straightens the glasses and puts them on -- it turns out they're his. My heart sinks. Not the best beginning, perhaps.

After everyone prays, the Doctor orders the others to leave the room, except for Yusuf. His voice is low and gruff. We sit on the floor. "Deir Obekhi," I say, apologizing for entering his territory without permission. He accuses me of being a spy for the Afghan army. He asks how I got a visa to Afghanistan. I tell him I am here to write about the mujahedeen and tell their story. If I like them so much, he sneers, why don't I join them?

The Doctor asks about my contact. I say he fought with the mujahedeen from Jamiat-i Islami. The Doctor scoffs, saying the man never fought the Soviets. Then he gets to his feet and announces that he is going to make phone calls to Pakistan to investigate me. We will have to spend the night in the mosque, and he will come back for us in the morning. As I try to protest, he stalks out.

I sit glumly on the floor in the guest room. A few minutes later, Shafiq sticks his head in and says, "Yallah" -- Arabic for "come on." I jump up, relieved to get out of there. The Talib fighters sitting with us insist that we drink the tea they have made. I hurriedly gulp it down and step out into the darkness, eager to get away from the mosque. But Shafiq has more bad news: We will have to return in the morning. My mind flashes to the videos I have seen on the Internet of victims being decapitated by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We get in the car and Shafiq drives slowly, winding through nearly invisible paths, the moonlight obscured by dust. When we reach Shafiq's house, he carries a television into the guest room and turns on the generator. Reading the English titles on the program guide, he finds Al-Jazeera, the Arabic news channel. We watch coverage of the attacks we drove by the day before. Shafiq switches to an Afghan channel, and we watch an Indian soap opera dubbed in Dari. The women are dressed in revealing Western attire. I am amazed that Shafiq would watch something so anathema to the Taliban. It's OK, he tells me -- "it's a drama about a family." Later he puts on a satellite channel devoted to Iranian-American pop music. We watch as a portly singer with stubble and hair imitates bad Eighties rock, but in Farsi. The next video features an Iranian pop singer dressed in leather fringe and a tank top, like a cross between Davy Crockett and Richard Simmons. The Taliban commander watches, mesmerized.

In the morning, I awake to the drone of military planes overhead. Stepping outside, I see a convoy of American armored vehicles a mile away. I fight the urge to walk to them and beg for rescue. Even if they don't mistake me for Taliban and shoot me themselves, approaching them would doom everybody who had helped me.

I wait impatiently for the phone network to go back up. When it does, one of my contacts in Kabul tells me that he had spoken to senior Taliban officials who told the Doctor not to harm me, but the Doctor continued to insist that I am a spy. He thinks the Doctor is just trying to assert his independence and exchange me for a ransom. He tells me that Mullah Nasir, a one-armed Kandahari who serves as Taliban governor for Ghazni, is also trying to secure my release. I try to convince Shafiq to drive me to Ghazni's capital, but he says that if he doesn't return me to Dr. Khalil, the Doctor will arrest him.

In the end, I am saved by the same official who authorized my trip. According to my contact, the Taliban minister of defense called Dr. Khalil and ordered him to release me, warning the Doctor that "he would be fucked" if anything happens to me. My contact tells me I will be let go this afternoon but that once we are on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones, to prevent anyone from tracking us. "This Doctor, he is a very nasty guy," he says. "He might send somebody to kidnap you on the way, and then I can do nothing for you."

As we wait for the Doctor to arrive, Shafiq has other problems to deal with. His nephew has been arrested by a Taliban patrol after being spotted walking with a girl. After Shafiq secures his release, other Talib fighters call to complain that they heard music coming from his house the night before. Exasperated, Shafiq protests that it was only Al-Jazeera. He doesn't mention the Iranian pop singer.

A few hours later, Dr. Khalil finally shows up. He examines my passport and leafs through my notebooks, asking me to show him the photos I took. "Zaibullah Mujahed said I should hit you," he says, referring to the chief Taliban spokesman. "But I will not." Rifling through my bags, he seems particularly fascinated by my toothbrush. Puzzled, he riffles the bristles with his finger, trying to deduce their purpose.

For a man who has spent much of the past 24 hours contemplating whether I was worth more to him dead or alive, the Doctor is now surprisingly friendly. "What can I do for you?" he asks, a model of courtesy. I cautiously ask him a few questions. The Doctor tells me he studied at an Islamic school in Pakistan before entering medical school in Afghanistan. He joined the Taliban early, eventually serving as a commander in a northern district. He says he is fighting to restore a government of Islamic law, but that Mullah Omar does not have to be the leader again. God willing, he adds, it will take no more than 30 years to rid Afghanistan of foreigners. Like the other Taliban leaders I've spoken with, he says he is prepared to allow women to attend school and to work.

We pile into the Corolla and drive off to meet Ibrahim, loading an RPG into the trunk just in case. Dr. Khalil gets behind the wheel, with Shafiq beside him holding the PKM. After an hour of driving, the car gets stuck, and we all collect rocks to put beneath the tires. As we drive through the Doctor's village, he points to its outer limits. "This is the border between the Taliban and the government," he says, stressing his control. He is now jocular and relaxed.

At the edge of town, close to the main road, the Doctor gets out of the car, followed by Shafiq, holding his PKM. The locals appear stunned. Everyone stops and stares, immobilized, their daily routine interrupted by the sudden appearance of two heavily armed Taliban commanders escorting a large foreign man in ill-fitting salwar kameez. The Doctor stops a pickup truck and orders the driver to take us to the bazaar. We part warmly.

Arriving at the bazaar in the back of the pickup truck, we find a tense and apologetic Ibrahim waiting for us. Like my contact, he was worried that the Doctor had set up an ambush for me on the road. "I should not have left you," Ibrahim says. "I was lazy. That was my mistake."

On the way back to Kabul, we dodge more craters in the highway. The military trucks I saw burning two days earlier are still smoldering by the road. Children play on the blackened vehicles, removing pieces for salvage. I tease Ibrahim that the Taliban have made our drive more difficult by destroying the highway. To my surprise, he agrees.

Back in Kabul, we all have lunch together at the office of my friend where I first met Ibrahim. My friend teases me for sending him so many text messages -- more than a dozen -- and reads some of them aloud. Everyone laughs, relieved that the ordeal is over. I look at Ibrahim, wondering if he would have taken me hostage himself under different circumstances. He again surprises me by expressing disapproval of the Taliban for harming civilians in what he views as a war for national liberation. There used to be rules. Now, for many Taliban, there is only killing. "They are not acting like Afghans," he says.

To return to Kabul from a feudal province like Ghazni is to experience a form of time travel. The city is thoroughly modern, for those who can afford it: five-star hotels, shiny new shopping malls and well-guarded restaurants where foreigners eat meals that cost as much as most Afghans make in a month, cooked with ingredients imported from abroad. If you can avoid falling into the sewage canals at every crosswalk, and evade the suicide bombers who occasionally rock the city, you can enjoy the safety of Afghanistan's version of the Green Zone.

But the barbarians are at the gate, and major attacks are getting closer and closer to the city each day. Upon my return to Kabul, I discover that the Taliban have fired rockets at the airport and at the NATO base; the United Nations has been on a four-day curfew; and President Karzai has canceled his public appearances. The city is being slowly but systematically severed from the rest of the country.

"The road from Kabul to Ghazni is gone," an intelligence officer tells me, "and most of the rest of the roads are going. The ambushes are routine now, which tells you that the Taliban have a routine capability." The Parwan province, which borders Kabul to the north, has also become dangerous. "All of a sudden we see IEDs on the main road in Parwan and attacks on police checkpoints," the intelligence officer says. "It's the last remaining key arterial route connecting Kabul to the rest of the country."

The Bush administration is placing its hopes on presidential elections in Afghanistan next year, but everyone I speak with in Kabul agrees that the elections will be a joke. "The Americans are gung-ho about elections," a longtime nongovernmental official tells me. "But it will only exacerbate ethnic tensions." In Pashtun areas controlled by the Taliban, registration would be virtually impossible, and voting would invoke a death sentence -- effectively disenfranchising the country's dominant ethnic group. "You can't fix the insurgency with an election," a senior U.N. official tells me. "It's a socioeconomic phenomenon that goes well beyond the border of Afghanistan." Real elections would require the cooperation of the Taliban -- and that, in turn, would require negotiations with the Taliban. The war, in effect, is already lost.

"This can't be solved other than by talking to the Taliban," says a top diplomat in Kabul. A leading aid official adds that it is important to understand the ideological goal of the Taliban: "They don't have an international-terrorist agenda -- they have an Afghanistan agenda. We might not agree with their agenda for the country, but that's not our war." Former Taliban leaders agree that only talks will end the war. "If the U.S. deals with Pakistan and negotiates with higher-level Taliban," says one, "then it could reach a deal."

Negotiating with the Taliban would also enable the Americans to take advantage of the sharp divisions within the insurgency. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, has been openly criticized by a rival named Siirajudin Haqqani, who has called for Omar to be replaced. In provinces like Ghazni, the Taliban leadership is now divided between commanders loyal to Omar and men who follow Haqqani. A recent meeting between supporters of the two men in the Pakistani city of Peshawar reportedly descended into fighting when an Omar official threw his tea glass at a Haqqani man. The internal split provides an opening -- if U.S. intelligence is smart enough to exploit it.

"The U.S. should try to weaken the Taliban," a former Taliban commander tells me. "They should make groups, divide and conquer. If someone wants to use the division between Haqqani and Omar, they can."

The Bush administration believes it can stop the Taliban by throwing money into clinics and schools. But even humanitarian officials scoff at the idea. "If you gave jobs to the Viet Cong, would they stop fighting?" asks one. "Two years ago you could build a road or a bridge in a village and say, 'Please don't let the Taliban come in.' But now you've reached the stage where the hearts-and-minds business doesn't work."

Officials on the ground in Afghanistan say it is foolhardy to believe that the Americans can prevail where the Russians failed. At the height of the occupation, the Soviets had 120,000 of their own troops in Afghanistan, buttressed by roughly 300,000 Afghan troops. The Americans and their allies, by contrast, have 65,000 troops on the ground, backed up by only 137,000 Afghan security forces -- and they face a Taliban who enjoy the support of a well-funded and highly organized network of Islamic extremists. "The end for the Americans will be just like for the Russians," says a former commander who served in the Taliban government. "The Americans will never succeed in containing the conflict. There will be more bleeding. It's coming to the same situation as it did for the communist forces, who found themselves confined to the provincial capitals."

Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" -- or even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement -- to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them.

"The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now -- or are even nominally allied with the government -- are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan "are all theaters in the same overall struggle," the president declared, linking his administration's three greatest foreign-policy disasters in one broad vision. In the end, Bush said, we must have "faith in the power of freedom."

But the Taliban have their own faith, and so far, they are winning. On my last day in Kabul, a Western aid official reminds me of the words of a high-ranking Taliban leader, who recently explained why the United States will never prevail in Afghanistan.

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

NYC EVENT: Afghanistan Today

Communications — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 07:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
10/17/2008 - 9:00am

As the U.S. engages in a simmering war as well as in continued attempts at building infrastructure, the conference will consider a wide-ranging set of questions in order to clarify policy choices regarding both military and civilian investment in the country. What is the current state of the Taliban? What might the reversion of Afghanistan into failed-state status mean? How prevalent -- and how effective -- has counterinsurgency been in the country? What are the possibilities for increasing the size… more

Nir Rosen on Democracy Now | 'How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan'

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:54:00 -0400

Investigative journalist Nir Rosen has just returned from Afghanistan, where he embedded with the Taliban and traveled far from capital city of Kabul, “Afghanistan’s version of the Green Zone.” He doesn’t think the US-led NATO occupation is winning in Afghanistan. His latest article for Rolling Stone magazine is “How We Lost the War We Won: A Journey into Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan.” LINK to video and transcript

Nir Rosen on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer Online | 'Journalist Recounts His Experiences With Taliban in Afghanistan'

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 15:52:00 -0400

When journalist Nir Rosen traveled to Afghanistan last summer, his plan was to travel with a group of Taliban fighters for 10 days and report on their activity. Instead, he was detained by a rival Taliban commander and accused of being a spy. Rosen describes his experiences to Robert Zeliger of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. LINK to audio and transcript

Al Qaeda 3.0

Communications — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:15:00 -0400

A New America Event
10/10/2008 - 8:45am

Panel 1: The Future of Al-Qaeda

Frances Fragos Townsend noted that the two foiled Al-Qaeda plots in 2004 and 2006 prove that Al-Qaeda ought to still be taken seriously. She stated that “North Africa is more significant than most people talk about…[and] is a threat to the U.S. because of immigration through Western Europe.” The recent attacks on the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad,

Al Qaeda 3.0: The "War on Terror" after the Bush Administration

Communications — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:37:00 -0400

Washington, DC - The next U.S. president, whether Republican or Democrat, will face serious questions about American policy toward the threat of Islamist extremism, one of the most important security challenges of the 21^st century.

On October 10, six panels of leading policymakers, journalists, law enforcement officials, and scholars will explore and debate what steps the next administration should take in combating al Qaeda and its affiliates both at home and abroad.

The conference, convened by the newly-launched Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative at the New America Foundation and NYU's Center on Law and Security, will feature analysis from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright, the FBI/National Security Branch's Philip Mudd, Terrorism Experts Bruce Hoffman and Marc Sageman, President Bush's former Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, Peter Bergen and Abdel Bari Atwan, both of whom have interviewed Osama bin Laden, among many others.

Panels will cover the future of Al Qaeda, the war of ideas, the current state of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda's presence in the wider Arab world and in Europe, counter-radicalization, and counterterrorism measures in America. For a complete list of panels, click here.

For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be WEBCAST LIVE on the event web page and www.thewashingtonnote.com.

New America's Steve Coll, Peter Bergen, Nir Rosen, and Eliza Griswold are available for interviews and media appearances. For additional information about the Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative or to arrange interviews, please call Erin Drankoski at 202-997-8727 or e-mail drankoski@newamerica.net.

Additional Information:
Event Agenda: www.newamerica.net/files/AQ3.0Agenda.pdf
RSVP to Al Qaeda 3.0 Event: www.newamerica.net/events/2008/al_qaeda_3_0
Panelist Bios: www.newamerica.net/files/AQ3.0PanelistBios.pdf
Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency Initiative: www.newamerica.net/cci

We Run the Road

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 11:06:00 -0400

On May 12, a few days after street fighting erupted in Beirut, I drove to Majd al Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa, close to the Syrian border, where gunmen were still blocking the motorway from Beirut to Damascus.

At the edge of town, several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, pistols and hand grenades stood before earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command – this was a mob, not a militia. The men were angry, afraid, suspicious, shouting at strangers and each other, each one an authority unto himself, carelessly swinging weapons around, oblivious to where they were pointing. Some rested the barrels of their rifles on top of their feet, a sign they had no professional training.

Lebanese soldiers stationed at the intersection perched indolently atop their armored personnel carriers, phlegmatically watching the anarchy. The road was blocked to vehicles, but hundreds of Syrian labourers descended from buses to walk through the roadblock toward the border. Two old men were detained as they passed through the mob – their identity cards revealed they were Shiites, and locals sitting nearby swarmed around them. Rifles were loaded and a frisson of blood passed through the crowd, but the men were eventually released.

Majd al Anjar occupies a strategic location on the road to Syria, but it is also a crossroads for the sectarian fervour unleashed across the region by the American invasion of Iraq. The town has dispatched numerous suicide bombers and fighters to Iraq, where they have targeted American troops and Shiite civilians alike. The war – and the rise of a US-backed Shiite government in Iraq has stoked fury here that borders on racism, fired by irrational fears of a “Shiite crescent” encircling vulnerable Sunnis.

Analysts talked of the “Lebanonization” of Iraq as the country spiralled into civil war after the fall of Saddam, and now Lebanon – a weak state awash in oceans of arms – faces the spectre of Iraqification. In Majd al Anjar, angry young men are not waiting for leaders to emerge; they are prepared to take matters into their own hands.

***

By 2007 Lebanon had come to feel more and more like post-war Iraq, with new neighbourhood militias arming themselves and sectarian tensions rising to a boil. The conflict, ostensibly over politics, pitted Sunnis against Shiites, with Christians essentially marginalised and politically insignificant. After the war in Iraq – which empowered Shiite Islamists and removed a key opponent to Iran, Saddam Hussein – and Hezbollah’s July 2006 war with Israel, many analysts suggested a “Shiite revival” was underway. But as the Lebanese political scientist Amer Mohsen told me, it would be more accurate to talk of a general resurgence of sectarian identities across the Middle East: “There is a Shiite revival, a Sunni revival, a Druze revival, an Alawite revival and a Kurdish revival – all happening simultaneously.”

In the summer of 2007, tensions had deepened and a sense of foreboding was widespread. The July war was a fresh memory, and many feared that neither Israel nor Hizbollah considered it settled.

A third war – “the next civil war” – loomed on the horizon, and the fighting in the camps and the street clashes between Sunnis and Shiites earlier in 2007 seemed to indicate that the chaos unleashed in Iraq was spilling across its borders as fighters, weapons, tactics and sectarian conflicts migrated to Lebanon.

Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites exploded in May 2008, when Hizbollah and its allies – alarmed by moves against its communications network – closed down the road to Beirut’s airport. Demonstrations turned into clashes, and Hizbollah quickly took control of the streets, vanquishing poorly trained Sunni militias in and around Beirut. By the second day of fighting Hizbollah men were patrolling the streets of the capital, calling into question their prior commitment never to use their weapons inside Lebanon. The conflict quickly spread, stirring the more militant Sunnis of the Bekaa and northern Lebanon, and on May 9, the irate shabab of Majd al Anjar closed the motorway to Damascus.

***

Few roads lead into the tightly connected homes and narrow streets of Majd al Anjar – whose many mosques and ethos of austerity and solidarity have always reminded me of Fallujah. At the makeshift roadblock I met one of the local leaders, a red-headed 34-year-old whom I will call Omar. He carried a tiny pistol he could hide in his pocket and wore a ski mask, but raised it above his brow so we could speak. Omar talked like the takfiris I knew in Iraq, radical Sunnis who declare other Muslims, especially Shiites, to be kufar – infidels. He used an anti-Shiite slur, “rafidha” (meaning rejectionists), and said Lebanon’s Shiites had been armed by “nusayris”, an insulting term for Alawites – meaning the Syrian regime. The Shiites, he claimed, were agents of the Israelis; if Shiite holy sites in Iraq had not been liberated from American occupiers, he asked, how could Hizbollah claim it would liberate Jerusalem from Israel?

“Resistance,” he continued, referring to Hizbollah, “is not about entering Beirut and humiliating its people. This roadblock is for victory in Beirut and the Sunnis. We won’t open the road until they open the airport.” To Omar, Hizbollah – “the Party of God” – was “Hizb al Lat”, the Party of Lot, meaning the party of sin. Like many other salafists, he also called them “Hizb ash Shaitan”, the party of the devil. “We are the shabab of Majd al Anjar,” he said, “we fight the ‘rafidha’. We are known as fighters. We ruled for hundreds of years. We have many mujahideen and martyrs in Iraq.” He told me that many jihadist websites had published calls for Sunni volunteers to come fight in Lebanon: “If the Sunnis of Beirut call us we will come.”

Omar had no formal military training, though “from age 10 I’m using weapons,” he said, “and many guys from here are like that.” But Omar’s life changed when he fell under the influence of a man named Abu Mohammed, a local of Kurdish descent also known as Abu Shahid al Lubnani – who served as a deputy to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the slain founder of al Qa’eda in Iraq. Abu Mohammed also died fighting in Iraq, in a failed attack on Abu Ghraib prison. “Abu Mohammed gave me my creed,” Omar said, explaining that he became devout seven years earlier under the older man’s influence.

Abu Mohammed was trained in Afghanistan and took part in the first appearance of al Qa’eda in Lebanon – when jihadists led by a Lebanese veteran of the Afghan and Bosnian wars named Basim al Kanj battled the Lebanese army at the end of 1999. Kanj recruited fighters from slums and camps to set up his own network, which included some men from Majd al Anjar. He set up training camps in Dinniyeh, east of Tripoli, and soon clashed with the army in a bloody standoff that killed 15 of the Islamists along with 11 soldiers and five civilians. The Dinniyeh group was not large, but dozens of salafis around the country were arrested – and radicalised in prison. Abu Mohammed was eventually arrested at a mosque in Majd al Anjar in 2002, but he was able to use connections and pay his way out of jail after only four months. He headed to Iraq, where he was said to have dispatched the car bomb that killed the Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

At least seven other young men from Majd al Anjar were martyred in Iraq, and Omar had a plaque in their honour mounted in his living room. His own brother-in-law was killed fighting in Rawa, in Anbar province, in June 2003. I had visited Rawa the day after Omar’s brother-in-law died, one of dozens of Iraqi and foreign fighters killed in a desert camp by the Americans; locals buried them near a mosque, placing their ID cards in bottles that served as makeshift tombstones. One of them was the son of Abu Mohammed – this is why he was also called Abu Shahid, the father of the martyr.

Omar was arrested in 2004, accused of plotting to bomb western embassies. But he was released in 2005, along with other jihadists, at the same time as Samir Geagea, the leader of the right-wing Christian Lebanese Forces, who had been convicted of war crimes – in a move widely regarded as an attempt to bolster the Sunni credentials of the Future Movement.

After the invasion of Iraq, he told me, Omar worked smuggling weapons and fighters into Syria and then on to Iraq. Abu Mohammed would come in from Iraq and meet him in Damascus. Omar delivered truckloads of weapons – bombs, explosives, missiles and silencers. The two men bribed Syrian customs officials and moved goods on clandestine dirt roads. Omar’s friend Ismail Khatib purchased the weapons and handled communications with their comrades in Iraq. “We were a very tight group,” Omar said, “we couldn’t be penetrated.” But after a fighter from the group was killed in Iraq and two lorries of weapons were seized, the authorities began to watch them, and Omar was arrested in September 2004, two months after his last delivery of weapons to Syria.

Majd al Anjar had become a critical smuggling centre, an important stop in the network that moved fighters into Iraq from Lebanon and its Palestinian camps, especially Ain al Hilweh. Dozens of men from the camp had become martyrs in Iraq, among them a friend of Omar’s named Abu Jaafar al Qiblawi, who was killed alongside Zarqawi in June 2006. Omar had smuggled Abu Jaafar into Syria and Ismail took him into Iraq – in Zarqawi’s last video, Abu Jaafar can be seen handing him a machine gun. In Abu Jaafar’s own last will, filmed on the banks of a river in 2005, he addresses his parents, gun in hand, calling on his brothers to join the jihad.

Omar and his associates were caught with fifty kilograms of TNT and five kilograms of C4. All of the men were tortured by members of the Ministry of Interior’s Information Branch, Omar said – he was hit in the back of the head with a club and his legs remained bruised for months after the beatings. Ismail died in custody – allegedly tortured to death, though the authorities denied it – and news of his demise sparked riots and demonstrations in Majd al Anjar, while Sunni politicians called for the resignation of interior minister Elias Murr.

After Ismail died, Omar lost his connections to Iraq, and there was no more work smuggling for the jihad. He bragged wistfully about those days: “We are al Qa’eda,” he told me, “we had connections to Abu Shahid.” Omar knew seven or eight men in town who had returned from Iraq, and he said there were others as well. I met one middle-aged Iraqi Baathist who was said to have been in the resistance, but he refused to discuss his past except to say that he served the state. “I’m wanted for terrorism in Syria,” Omar told me, adding that he was wanted in Lebanon as well, for opening fire in a fight.

***

Shortly after I arrived at the roadblock, a convoy of expensive cars arrived carrying Sheikh Mohammed Abdel Rahman, the head of the Sunni religious endowment in the Bekaa. A loudspeaker was set up and hundreds of the men surrounded him as he addressed the crowd.

The Sunni elite feared young men like Omar over whom they had little control, and Sheikh Mohammed had come to attempt to exert some influence. Representatives of the Future Movement, Omar told me, had asked them to lift the roadblock, but they refused to back down. Locals voted for the Future Movement out of Sunni solidarity, according to Omar, but they did not belong to the party.

Sheikh Mohammed addressed them directly. “You represent Majd al Anjar,” he said, “the decision to open the road is yours. It’s impossible to open the road without your agreement. The decision must protect the interest of the town and the people of the town and the shabab of the town.” The issue was protecting the Sunni sect, its dignity and autonomy, he said. “The Islamic Sunni resistance begins today,” he said. “We work for Lebanon, and they work for Iran.” Young men shot into the air as he spoke.

The following Friday I visited the Abdel Rahman Auf mosque in Majd al Anjar, known locally as the “wahabbi” mosque. Omar met us at the edge of town and took us to the mosque, where he handed us off to a chubby, bearded friend. Expensive cars were squeezed into every available space outside the mosque, which was full of boys and young men. In his sermon, Sheikh Adnan al Umama described Hizbollah’s “barbaric raid” on Beirut and condemned Iran.

There was a battle of creeds, he said: “These people who came against us are secular and infidels, and if they are honest about what they say then we have to be ready to fight them. We saw them invading Beirut with hearts full of hate and accusing us of the murder of Hussein.” It was time for Sunnis to stop being afraid of “them” – meaning Shiites – and time to start rising. “From this podium, I say that until the government is able to defend us we insist on carrying our guns,” he said, “and we will resist with our women and children and all the power we have. I praise our heroes who blocked the road. Yes, they did the right thing. And for those who invaded us under the name of resistance, we wont forget that your guns that invaded Beirut under the name of resistance are not resistance weapons anymore.”

Before the end of the sermon, a thick older man with a long gray beard snatched my friend’s notebook and demanded mine as well. After the prayer ended, a group of men surrounded us, but Omar’s friend vouched for our presence.

The next day I visited Sheikh Adnan at his home. Landscape paintings and gaudy European art decorated his living room. He was young and quick with a smile, more jovial than I had expected after the tone of his sermon. He usually tried to avoid talking about politics, he said, and to focus on religion, because politics always change.

Shiites in Lebanon, he continued, were acting as they had in Iraq – but the Sunnis in Iraq were stronger because they had at their disposal weapons belonging to the former regime. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, he said, erred when they called for al Qa’eda to come to Lebanon because they did not understand the country: it was too divided and mixed for jihadist groups to establish a stronghold.

But after the Hizbollah takeover of Beirut, he argued, it was natural that Sunnis would want to arm themselves. His sermon, he explained, was not a call for fitna – internal Muslim conflict – but a warning of the danger facing Sunnis. He felt that Lebanon’s Sunnis were still searching for a leader to represent them; the Future Movement, he said, had no creed, only the desire for money; Lebanon’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Qabbani, was too close to the Saudis and the Future Movement and did nothing to respond to Hezbollah’s actions in Beirut.

Afterwards we went to see Omar at his house. “We are not in line with Shiekh Adnan,” he told me. “He is moderate, as they say.” Omar and his friends followed the fatwas of scholars associated with al Qa’eda.

Omar’s sitting room was a shrine to jihad: he had a large collection of ammunition shells and grenades on display in a cabinet and framed pictures of the September 11 attacks – the Twin Towers aflame and a smouldering Pentagon – greeted visitors near the doorway. When his little boy wandered in, Omar asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and the child, grinning, said “a mujahid!”

A tall, thick man – wearing jeans and a T-shirt that were both too tight, in the true Lebanese style – came to see Omar, wearing a pistol on his belt. He introduced himself as Walid, and Omar explained he had been one of the organisers of the roadblock. Motioning to the pistol, I asked if he was police. “No,” he said, “I’m a mujahid.” He explained that the decision to close the road had been taken spontaneously by the shabab. “Our conscience and our honour made us close it,” he said, “I smoke hashish, I’m not religious. It was something from the inside.”

***

I visited often in the spring and summer. Omar was never without his 9mm Glock pistol; it was always in his hand, his lap, or next to him on the table. The gun was another symbol of the spread of the Iraq war – like many Glocks I had seen in Lebanon, it had been smuggled into the country after being issued by the Americans to the Iraqi security forces.

One day in June, as I was sitting with Omar, he picked up the phone and then grabbed the pistol and ran out the door. Three unfamiliar cars with tinted windows had driven into town. He called Walid to report the news. “They might be military,” he said. “Park your car and I”ll send someone to pick you up – they’re raiding your house.” “Don’t worry about me, I’ll start shooting if they get close to my house.” Omar took out a walkie talkie and contacted other men in their network. Before long Walid burst through the door with a thuggish-looking friend, sweating and out of breath. He was carrying a new AK-47 with a scope and flashlight. His friend carried a belt-fed machine gun. “If Saddam Hussein was alive he would help us with ammunition,” Walid said. “That’s why they killed him.”

“I never carried a rifle before,” Walid went on, “but since the Shiites attacked I started carrying one.” He wore an vest laden with extra ammunition and several American hand grenades that he said cost $50 a piece. Walid claimed he had forced Shiite officials at the Masnaa border crossing to stop working there. This was why security officers were paying a visit to the town. His thuggish friend put it succinctly: “We and the state are opposed.”

“Before May 8 I used to love life,” Walid said, “I would never sleep, I was into women, drugs, alcohol, I was living life to the fullest. Something happened in my heart I cant explain to anybody. Since May 8 I am a different person. I started praying five times a day, feeling more confident when I’m fighting.” Now he fantasised about becoming a suicide bomber. “I should be doing martyrdom operations too,” he told me, his eyes darting to Omar, looking for approval. “I would like to blow myself up during Nasrallah’s speech when there is a large group of people.”

He got so much pleasure from shooting, he said, and he surmised that if he went on a martyrdom operation his soul would feel even better. Omar, for his part, said he expected suicide operations to begin against Shiites in Lebanon. “I wont be surprised if it happened, and we are waiting for it to happen,” he said.

Omar didn’t seem to have a job, but I soon realised he had a lucrative underground business selling weapons. One afternoon as we drove through the narrow alley leading to Omar’s house, a man casually stopped the car and stuck his head in the window – as if it was the most natural thing in the world – to ask if he could buy 2000 rounds of ammunition. “Come to my house,” Omar said, and when we arrived his living room looked like an armory. He had an RPG launcher, boxes of ammunition, eight rifles, two machine guns. In a box that once contained a dress from Syria, Omar had stuffed an assortment of grenades. To my displeasure, he took some out to play with, showing me how to take them apart. He also had some Israeli C4, which he brandished as if to prove that anything can be smuggled.

I asked him if he was worried about the authorities. “The army is not allowed in here,” he replied, and I asked who prevented them from coming. “We don’t allow them,” he said, “none of them will survive. Do they want another Nahr al Bared?” The police were also barred, he added: “if they come the whole town will fight.”

Opponents of Hizbollah like to describe it as a state within a state. But outside of Beirut there are few signs of any state in Lebanon, or any authority willing to assert itself – and for Sunnis, in Majd al Anjar and elsewhere, there is no Hizbollah to step into the vacuum.

Omar referred to a man called Abu Hudheifa as his sheikh and emir. When I met him he had just been released from a 10-month stay in prison; in 2004 he was arrested in Syria for trying to enter Iraq and spent eight months in a Syrian jail and three more in a Lebanese prison; he was tortured in both countries, he said.

Abu Hudheifa told me he thought Majd al Anjar was special because it had a lot of religious people of the same colour – meaning Sunni. “We have a lot of people who went to Iraq and were killed there so we have people who love jihad,” he said.

One night in June close to midnight Omar called to tell me they had just received word that two local boys, Abdallah Abdel Khalaq and Firas Yamin, had blown themselves up in Iraq on two consecutive days. 20-year-old Abdallah had called his family to say goodbye and announce his plan. At noon the next day he blew himself up while driving down a crowded Baghdad street. Two hours later his companions informed his parents, who proudly distributed sweets to celebrate. “If I had a chance” to go to Iraq, Omar said, “I would go.”

But the ideology of jihad often seemed less important than the sheer will to fight – against whoever could be found. One night the Lebanese army arrested one of their men in Masnaa; the next morning we drove through Majd al Anjar with one of Omar’s friends. “We are ready,” he said to a woman on the phone. “Still ready. We didn’t sleep last night.” The men skirmished regularly with nearby Shiites, whom the men called Hizbollah, probably inaccurately. “Last night we went down to Marj,” Omar’s friend said, “patrolling with our cars with tinted windows, driving back and forth in the main streets of Majd al Anjar and Marj. We had guns, we were ready.”

Another one of Omar’s friends, who they called Dr Saadi because he had a PhD in history, had been imprisoned for his alleged involvement in the 2000 Millennium plot to blow up hotels and Christian sites in Jordan, and travelled to Fallujah after his release. There was no true Sunni party in Lebanon, he complained: the Future Movement were mercenaries without belief who controlled Lebanon’s Sunnis but obeyed orders from the Americans. But one day soon, he promised, salafists would raise the Sunni flag in Lebanon.

As we talked bursts of AK-47 fire rang out nearby, and all the men laughed, especially when they saw me flinch. A friend had been released from prison, Omar explained, and was firing rounds into the air. “Army intelligence captured him,” Omar explained, “but we threatened to block the roads, and now he is celebrating.”

Like many salafis I have met, Saadi was openly envious of Hezbollah’s confrontation with Israel but contemptuous of its failure to fight beyond Lebanon’s borders. “Hizbollah protects the Jewish border with orders from the Syrian regime,” he said. The goal of Hizbollah’s “takeover” of Beirut was to weaken Sunnis in the Arab world, he argued.

“Sunnis have woken up,” Saadi continued. “Sunnis around the world are mad after what happened in Beirut. The result will be a thousand Zarqawis going after Hizbollah.”

Nir Rosen quoted in the Khaleej Times | 'It's the Oil, Stupid!'

Communications — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:34:00 -0400

...Nir Rosen, one of the most astute and knowledgeable correspondents in the region, observes that the main target of the US-Maliki military operations, Moktada Al Sadr, is disliked by Iran as well: He's independent and has popular support, therefore dangerous.

Iran "clearly supported Prime Minister Maliki and the Iraqi government against what they described as 'illegal armed groups' (of Moktada's Mahdi army) in the recent conflict in Basra," Rosen writes, "which is not surprising given that their main proxy in Iraq, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council dominates the Iraqi state and is Maliki's main backer."

"There is no proxy war in Iraq," Rosen concludes, "because the U.S. and Iran share the same proxy..." LINK

The Great Divide

Ron Tang — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:49:00 -0400

Five years after a war allegedly launched to liberate Iraq’s Shiite majority, American forces have been bombing Shiite neighbourhoods in Basra and Baghdad while their snipers and tanks remain on the ground in places like Sadr City.

Iraq seems to have emerged from the worst phase of its civil war, but the victorious Shiite factions have turned their arms on one another in a fight over the spoils, battling for political power in advance of the upcoming provincial elections.

But as the Americans attempt to secure an agreement with the government of Nouri al Maliki to legalise the long-term presence of troops in Iraq, Muqtada al Sadr and his followers remain a formidable obstacle. Whether or not Sadr has been weakened by the clashes in Basra and Sadr City, marginalising the Sadrists will be almost impossible, for they remain the only genuine mass movement in Iraq, with roots that long predate the fall of Saddam.

Until 2007 Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi Army, co-operated with the Badr Organisation, the armed wing of the Iranian-created Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), to purge Sunnis from Baghdad and Iraq. They were very effective, and their success is the best explanation for the decrease in violence.

There are fewer people dying today because there are fewer left to kill; Sunnis and Shiites now inhabit separate walled enclaves, run by warlords and militias who have consolidated their control after mixed neighbourhoods were cleansed along sectarian lines.

Since April 2007, American forces have erected a series of concrete walls and checkpoints throughout the city to divide warring Sunnis and Shiites. Though these walls helped dampen sectarian violence, they may have bolstered sectarianism, isolating Iraqis from their neighbours and leaving them dependent on militias like the Mahdi Army for food, supplies and protection.

Last December a friend picked me up from the house in Baghdad’s Mansour district where I was staying, and we headed to the Shaab district of east Baghdad. We passed by an old Iraqi air force base that had been taken over by squatters after the war; poor Shiites lived in makeshift homes constructed of whatever bits of brick, aluminium and even cow dung could be found.

Donkeys and other livestock sifted through mounds of rubbish, and sewage flooded the dirt roads. Barefoot children with matted hair ignored us as our car ponderously navigated a circuitous route to avoid certain checkpoints.

My friend, who is from Shaab, put a tape in the cassette player: songs for the Mahdi Army. The singing was in praise of Muqtada al Sadr, and the men chanted that Muqtada had not left his home, that he preferred death to leaving Iraq; it had evidently been written in response to accusations Muqtada had fled to Iran for safety, which he had indeed done. My friend laughed: “Now we are the Mahdi Army!”

We drove past checkpoints manned by the new Sahwa, or “Awakening”, militias. There are about 90,000 of them, but almost all are former Sunni insurgents now backed by the Americans to fight al Qa’eda. The guards at these checkpoints belonged to one of the few Shiite Awakening groups, which the Americans set up in an attempt to counter the influence of the Mahdi Army in the area. But the Awakening men wore masks to conceal their faces and avoid retaliation, and they were protected by Iraqi police who also manned the checkpoints.

When I visited Shaab and the neighbouring Ur district in 2006 and 2007, I saw Mahdi Army men openly manning checkpoints with Kalashnikovs and other weapons, carrying the Glock pistols the Americans had given to the Iraqi police as well as police-issue handcuffs. But by August 2007 the Mahdi Army’s reputation had been tarnished by its sectarian killings, and many of its members were out of control.

The American “surge” was going to focus on Baghdad, much of which was controlled by the Mahdi Army, so Muqtada knew his men were sure to be targets. Following clashes with ISCI in Karbala, Muqtada declared a “freeze” with the stated goal of “reforming” his army. Violence in Baghdad plummeted, demonstrating that the Mahdi Army bore much responsibility for the carnage.

But by the beginning of this year, the same Mahdi Army men stood on corners, observing the streets -- only their weapons were at home. Nearly all of the area’s Sunnis had been expelled, I was told; only the “clean” ones had been allowed to remain.

The Mustafa mosque, in the Ur district, was once a Baath party office, but Sadrists took it over after the war. By 2006 they had converted it into a command centre from which to launch missions to arrest or kill radical Sunnis and former Baathists. That March, American and Iraqi forces raided the mosque, killing up to 17 men. In 2007, Safaa al Tamimi, the mosque’s Sadrist imam, fled to Qom in Iran for safety, but his assistant Abu Hassan, the mosque’s caretaker, remained.

Born in 1972, Abu Hassan is a muscular and voluble man, the informal leader of the Ur district. His father, he told us, had come up to Baghdad from southern Iraq as a child, married two women and fathered eleven children. In the 1950s, the state gave his family land in what is now Sadr City, where Abu Hassan was born.

He was always a Sadrist, he told me with a smile, having followed Muqtada’s father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al Sadr, until his assassination in 1999. After the elder Sadr’s murder, Abu Hassan said, he and his friends had established an underground armed resistance cell, though they failed to conduct any successful operations.

Following the war, he and Sheikh Safaa took over the Baath party office and converted it into a mosque. Though the mosque had recently been demolished so that it could be rebuilt, Abu Hassan maintained an office in an adjacent one-room structure, where he sat on the floor to receive guests and supplicants from among the local Shiites dependent on the Sadrist office for food and supplies.

Some materials for the repair of the mosque, he said, had been donated, but the government-run Shiite religious endowment was controlled by the rival ISCI. “We always have problems with the Supreme Council”, complained Abu Hassan. “They are untrustworthy and just want power.”

He was no less suspicious of the Sunni Awakening militias: “There is an Awakening group in the Fadhil neighbourhood,” he said, “there is a man there who has killed hundreds of Shiites, beheaded many Shiites. He is well known by people for his terrible crimes. But later on they made him head of the Awakening in that neighbourhood. He is a criminal, he should be prosecuted. This is not logical.”

In December, long before the March clashes, Abu Hassan was comparing the Supreme Council, which dominates the government, with Saddam Hussein. “Why did Saddam kill Shiites?” he asked me. “He was also afraid of Shiite masses. The Supreme Council doesn’t reject occupation or even talk about it.” “The Sadr Movement represents seventy five per cent of Iraqi Shiites and is a popular movement,” he said, “only the Sadr Movement helps the poor and represents them.”

His office, he said, supported one thousand families of martyrs and three thousand families of prisoners. Most of the displaced families they helped lived in other people’s homes, he said, but many still lived in tents in the nearby Shishan, or Chechen, neighbourhood, so named because Iraqis thought Chechnya was very poor. The family of an unmarried Mahdi Army martyr receives seventy five thousand dinars a month (about $60), as does the family of an arrested man, though the family of a married Mahdi Army martyr receives twice as much.

Abu Hassan’s office was rarely empty, and in one of my visits I found him distributing bags of clothes and rations to poor women in black abayas, many of whom were from displaced families, expelled by Sunni militias.

Before the war, 80 per cent of Iraqis depended on the Public Distribution System, an efficient ration system established in 1996 that provided essential items for all Iraqi families. But the system has now stopped functioning because of security problems, corruption and sectarianism. Most families do not even receive 50 per cent of what they used to, and displaced Iraqis, especially Sunnis, receive nothing at all. In the meantime, the Sadrist movement has become Iraq’s largest humanitarian organisation.

On another visit, the crowd at Abu Hassan’s office included two young men working for the Iraqi security forces. One was a member of the Facility Protection Service, which protects ministries and government offices but is notoriously lawless and loyal to sectarian Shiite militias. The other man belonged to the Iraqi National Guard. Both proudly told me they were also members of the Mahdi Army.

“We want you to know that most of the Sadrists are working for the government,” said the FPS member. They listed their many friends who had been killed by Sunni militias. “I have been a solider in Iraqi army, the Iraqi National Guard, for three years,” his friend said. “We saw that none of the political parties or movements are working for the benefit of the people except this movement. The Sadrists are devoting their time and effort to help Iraqi people. I thought the best way to help the people is by joining them.”

One man had absconded to Abu Hassan’s office because the Americans were looking for him. “They came to our house,” he told me, “they arrested my brother, and after destroying our furniture they said that I’m wanted by them. They took him because he is my brother.” Several men were seated on the floor awaiting Abu Hassan’s arbitration services in a legal dispute over real estate. “We can’t reach the registration directorate,” they explained, because it is in the Sunni stronghold of Adhamiya. “We might get killed if we go there.”

Abu Hassan’s faithful assistant was a handsome young man called Haidar, thin and muscular with the dark skin of southern Iraqis. He assiduously did Abu Hassan’s bidding, as well as feeding guests and making tea.

Haidar and his family had lived in Abu Ghraib, in Anbar province west of Baghdad. He insisted that there had been no sectarian tensions before the war in this majority Sunni area; he played football together with Sunnis, he said. But after the battles in Fallujah in 2004, Haidar said, foreign Sunnis appeared in the neighbourhood, killing those they accused of being spies and threatening to slaughter the local Shiites. He and his family were forced to leave in 2006; Sunni radicals had begun to kill Shiite clerics and to distribute leaflets warning Shiites that they were apostates and had to leave.

Before they moved away, Haidar says, a six-year-old Shiite neighbour was killed by Sunni militiamen. Two hours after Haidar and his family left their home they received a call from Sunni neighbours in Abu Ghraib warning them that the militia had come looking for them as well. The family moved to the Shaab district, where the Sadrist movement eventually found them a home -- a house that belonged Sunni who was forced out.

“This house belonged to a terrorist and he was expelled. Not only him, others were also expelled,” he said. There were many radical Sunnis in Shaab, Haidar says, until the Mahdi Army got rid of them.

“I don’t think I’m able to go back,” Haidar says of his old home, “because the tribes there now are against Shiites.” Although the Anbar province is now more stable because of the powerful Awakening militia there, Haidar and his family, like other Shiites, do not feel reassured. “The Awakening are the same, they are the terrorists,” he said. Haidar told me he would still like to take revenge for the death of one of his brothers, a policeman who was killed by Sunni militiamen.

Some 2.7 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes and forced to seek shelter elsewhere in Iraq. No system has been put in place to register their property or adjudicate property disputes, and few are likely to ever return home.

In February, Haidar took me to the nearby Saddeh area, where hundreds of impoverished Shiites, many of them displaced by Sunni militias, live in makeshift homes on the outskirts of the city. There are about 300 houses, each with ten or twenty residents.

Locals complain that they are harassed by the Americans and say the only help they receive is from the local Sadrists. Jasim Muhamad is an Iraqi Army veteran wounded during the American invasion of 2003. He and seventeen of his relatives, including eight children, now live in three shacks. They lived in Haswa, near Fallujah, until they received a letter from a Sunni group demanding that “infidel families” leave the neighbourhood within five days or they would be killed in retaliation for the murder and expulsion of Sunnis in Baghdad; those who ignored the warning, like Jasim’s brother-in-law, were killed.

They told me that some women were killed when they returned to Haswa to transfer their children’s school papers to Baghdad; since then no one has tried to return. “If I go back I will get killed,” Jasim’s wife said.

Some three thousand families from Haswa were displaced, according to Jasim and his wife, and their homes looted; the Iraqi army told them to leave Haswa because it had become unsafe for them. But they believe that the Awakening Council members are the same people who expelled them -- and that these same men would threaten them if they tried to return.

The Ministry of Migration provided them with beds, blankets and a small kerosine cooker, but nothing else. The Sadrist movement provides them with food, though they have no running water and rarely get electricity from the grid.

Jasim has been unable to register for his pension as a wounded veteran because the ministries are not properly functioning. His brother has found occasional work in the sewage system, the family’s only source of income. Only their older children attend school. The family members voted in the most recent elections for the Shiite Iraqi Alliance list but they complain that they have not received anything from the government, not even security.

Sadr City and other poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Baghdad are in a shocking state of disrepair, the fruits of a deliberate neglect that dates back to reign of Saddam. But in central Baghdad, the majority-Shiite Washash neighbourhood sits in squalor right next to the upscale Mansour district, where wealthy Baghdadis once packed stores and restaurants until sectarian fighting closed stores and drove pedestrians off the streets.

The unpaved streets of Washash are flooded with filth, and electric cables hang low from rooftops, criss-crossing like old cobwebs. The Mahdi Army men in Washash -- who are notorious, even among the Sadrists, for their brutality -- used the neighbourhood as a staging point for attacks against Sunni militants and forays into Mansour, and the neighbourhood was among the first Shiite enclaves to be surrounded by concrete walls; there is only one entrance for cars, guarded by Iraqi soldiers.

Elsewhere a few narrow openings in the concrete blocks allow pedestrians to squeeze through, one at a time. Almost all of the Sunnis who once lived in Washash were forced out or killed by the Mahdi Army. I saw more posters and banners of Muqtada and his father in Washash than anywhere else in Baghdad.

My driver, whose cousin lived in Washash, arranged in advance for us to meet the head of the tribal council, Sheikh Kazim, who guaranteed my safety. A Sadrist himself, he introduced me to Mahdi Army men as we strolled through his neighbourhood’s dirt streets.

Many displaced Shiites from wealthier majority-Sunni neighbourhoods have been forced to flee to Washash, where they settle in homes that belong to Sunnis purged or killed by the Sadrists; they scrape by with meagre incomes from whatever work they can find. “We are helping the people who have been displaced from other cities because of the sectarianism,” Kazim told me.

Neighbourhoods like Washash and Shaab have become like refugee camps for Iraq’s internal displaced. One man in Washash, who came from Dora, in south Baghdad, told me that Shiites were the minority there “and they started killing us in our houses. They did not get my son because he was at his college and we came to this area because it is has a Shiite majority”.

But one month after fleeing to Washash from Dora, he said, “the Americans and the Iraqi army came to our street and they blew up the door to our house and they arrested us and some of our neighbours, we don’t know why. I was arrested by the American army with my son for eleven months and six days. Without any charges. The accused me of being terrorist and they don’t have any proof. They released me and they kept my son and we don’t know for what reason.”

“As you know we consider the Iraqi army to be our sons and brothers,” Kazim told me. “But unfortunately the army unit that is surrounding the area is giving false information about us. When the Iraqi army raid houses, they steal the mobile phones and money, attack the elderly people and falsely accuse people.”

In Washash, Kazim and his neighbours talked about the local Iraqi Army unit in the same way Sunnis would describe the Iraqi Police. While the police, whose ranks are filled with recruits from the Badr Organisation and the Sadr Movement, have often been implicated in the murder of Sunnis, many Sadrists perceive elements of the majority-Shiite Army -- whose units are often loyal to Maliki or ISCI -- as enemies.

“They are dealing with us in a sectarian way,” Kazim said, “not one hundred per cent, one thousand per cent.” The Iraqi police were different, he said. “The Iraqi police can come without weapons and see if anyone would shoot one bullet. We will be responsible for them. It is only the unit of the Iraqi army that surrounds this area who are passing false information [to the Americans]. We don’t have any problem with the police.”

We passed men wheeling in goods for sale on pushcarts and at an intersection I found a tractor the Sadrists had provided as a rubbish lorry to clean the streets. On the corner, women in abayas sat by dozens of colourful jerrycans; they were waiting for kerosene that was supposed to be delivered by the Mahdi Army, but they claimed the Iraqi Army was preventing it from arriving. They had been waiting for four days.

I was surprised by how eager they were to talk to me. “My dear,” said an elderly woman with tribal tattoos on her chin, “we don’t have electricity, kerosene, or gas and we are surrounded and we have been insulted. Where should we go? To whom should we complain? Only the Mahdi Army brings us kerosene but now the Iraqi army is not allowing them.” The Mahdi Army, they said, also cleaned the streets and provided security at night. “It is not true that the Mahdi Army are terrorists,” she said, “the Americans are the real terrorists.”

The Sadrists have often been characterised as a movement of angry young men, but these women were unabashed in their enthusiasm. A younger woman explained to me that “without the Mahdi Army our women or girls could not go outside. We are under a lot of pressure. They are defending us like they are defending their own sisters.”

She had been expelled from the majority Sunni town of Mahmudiya, she told me, after two of her sons were murdered. “The Mahdi Army are the only ones who gave me a shelter and they are protecting me and my daughters. The terrorists killed my sons with a car bomb. One of them was married and he left behind four children and I have twelve people to look after. May god bless the Mahdi Army.”

“It is like a prison inside Washash,” one man said. “Tell me what is the difference between here and prison? We are surrounded by a wall which prevents us from going to other neighbourhoods. Our sons and daughters cannot go to the schools in the Arabi neighbourhood, which is the closest area. Only this wall divides us. What is the use of this wall?

"Nobody is helping us. Nothing. No education, no electricity, no water. Our children are not going to schools anymore. The services we have are only through the help of the Sadrists, may god bless them. They are cleaning, they are helping the ones who need some money. They are bringing the kerosene and giving it to families.”

The relative calm that has followed the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s neighbourhoods may not hold for long. One local elder warned that “if it is going to be like this for a long time the young men will lose their minds. Maybe we will too. We can’t control our sons. It will be very bad. We can’t keep our sons quiet anymore.”

They led me through the market that served the neighbourhoods around Washash before the wall was built. “This wall ruined our life and our business,” one shopkeeper said. “Would you accept to walk in this mud?” a man asked me, “people are holding their sons in order to cross the pools of water on their way to the schools. It’s as if Washash is not on the map. Even the government doesn’t care about it. There are no services, no schools and we are not on the map.” For these Iraqis there is essentially no state; they are dependent on the Sadrists for sustenance and security, which the central government cannot provide.

“The policy of walls is wrong,” a tribal leader told me. “The Americans think that they are providing security for the people. But what is the use of safety? If a man is hungry, he will do bad things because he is hungry.” We walked up to the walls separating Washash from Mansour. They showed me the narrow opening between the barriers; behind it was an Iraqi army checkpoint. When the soldiers saw me filming, they walked toward the opening, but the men were unfazed. “He won’t dare come in,” one said. “We will **** him up.”

Reports from Lebanon and Video Coverage of the New America Foundation's "Briefing on Beirut"

Communications — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:55:00 -0400

On Tuesday, May 13, the New America Foundation hosted an event featuring two journalists reporting from Beirut on the unfolding security and political crisis in Lebanon. Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of the Daily Star, discussed the large scale political and social trends have led to the current crisis. Nir Rosen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, reported live from the streets of Beirut on the tactical gains made by Hezbollah as well as its broader strategy. They were joined by a panel discussion featuring Daniel Levy, former Israeli negotiator and advisor to the Israeli prime minister's office, and current director of New America's Middle East Policy Initiative, Senior Fellow Flynt Leverett, who directs the Geopolitics of Energy Initiative, and Al Arabiyah's U.S. Bureau Chief Hisham Melhem. Director of the New America Foundation's American Strategy Program Steven Clemons, who publishes The Washington Note blog, moderated the event.

Video from the event is on our website: http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/briefing_beirut

Some notable quotes from the event speakers:

"The people of Lebanon are caught between two cultural and political influences, the West in the form of America and Europe and the East in the form of Iran. A distinct possibility is the formation of a unity government that is secured by a powersharing arrangement between the U.S. and Iran," said Rami Khouri.

"'Bush's policy of attaching onto the leaders of the Ceder Revolution' and 'using it as a fulcrum to push for the withdrawal of Syrian troops' has failed miserably. It has damaged the United State's ability to influence more important actors such as Iran. In fact, Iranian influence has only increased," remarked Flynt Leverett.

"Hezbollah has essentially won the first round. They are extremely competent and well trained and they were aided by the Lebanese army," remarked Hisham Melhem.

"There does not appear to be any ethnic cleansing taking place. Hezbollah is not attempting to segregate religiously mixed neighborhoods at this point," said Nir Rosen.

"'Does the internal trump the external?' Will external influences play a larger role in diffusing Lebanon's political crisis than internal political developments?" asks Daniel Levy.

To arrange an interview with Daniel Levy, Nir Rosen, or Steven Clemons contact: Erin Drankoski, New America Foundation, (202.997.8727; drankoski@newamerica.net)

About the New America Foundation:
The New America Foundation is an independent, nonprofit public policy institute whose purpose is to bring exceptionally promising new voices and new ideas to the fore of our nation's public discourse. Relying on a venture capital approach, the Foundation invests in outstanding individuals and policy solutions that transcend the conventional political spectrum. New America is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and also has offices in California.

Flynt Leverett and Nir Rosen in IPS News | "Lebanon Crisis Shows Hues of Iraq"

Communications — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:55:00 -0400

Full article

. . . "This is more and more becoming a Sunni-Shi'a conflict. It really does feel like Iraq," said journalist Nir Rosen in a conference call with analysts and reporters at the New American Foundation.

"Sunni militias, backed by the Future Movement, formed over the last year, and have been a complete failure, perhaps because they were fighting for money. They just disappeared and caused a great sense of betrayal and shock among Sunnis," said Rosen, adding that the perceived victimisation of Sunnis had instigated more radical circles in Tripoli to fight against the "apostate Shi'a", that they appeared "eager to start this battle", according to Rosen. . .

Rosen, who is currently in Beirut and accompanied Shi'a Amal fighters as they battled on the streets, described Hezbollah fighters acting "hand in hand" with the army on the commercial strip of Hamra Street in West Beirut. Most of the targets captured by Hezbollah and their allies were subsequently turned over to the army. "They are not trying to change the demographic balance in Beirut, it is to make a show of force to let rival militias know [Hezbollah] could have a real political coup," said Rosen.… more

Briefing on Beirut

Communications — Tue, 13 May 2008 06:30:00 -0400

A New America Event
05/13/2008 - 9:30am

On May 13th the American Strategy Program brought together five leading experts on Middle East and Foreign Policy to discuss the current crisis in Lebanon: a political standoff between the prominent militia Hezbollah and Lebanon’s government. Those participating in the discussion were Rami Khouri, the Editor-at-large of the Daily Star, Hisham Melhem, the DC Bureau Chief of Al Arabiyah, Nir Rosen, a fellow at NYU’s Center on Law and Security and New America, Daniel Levy, the Director of New America’s… more

Nir Rosen in IPS News | "Bush Tour Diminished by Hezbollah Show of Force"

Communications — Mon, 12 May 2008 11:03:00 -0400

Full article

. . . "These Sunni militiamen proved a complete failure, and America's proxies in Lebanon barely put up a fight despite their strident anti-Shiite rhetoric," noted Nir Rosen, a regional expert at the New America Foundation who described Hezbollah's offensive as "the death throes of the Bush plan for the 'New Middle East'."

"Now it is clear that Beirut is firmly in the hands of Hezbollah, and nothing the Americans can do will dislodge or weaken this popular movement, just as they cannot weaken the Sadrists in Iraq or Hamas in Gaza," he said. . .

Uprooted And Unstable

Ron Tang — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:44:00 -0400

Five years after the US -led invasion, Iraq remains a deeply violent and divided society. Faced with one of the largest displacement and humanitarian crises in the world, Iraqi civilians are in urgent need of assistance. Particularly vulnerable are the 2.7 million internally displaced Iraqis who have fled their homes for safer locations inside Iraq. Unable to access their food rations and often unemployed, they live in squalid conditions, have run out of resources and find it extremely difficult to access essential services. The US, the government of Iraq and the international community must begin to address the consequences of leaving Iraqis’ humanitarian needs unmet.

As a result of the vacuum created by the failure of both the Iraqi Government and the international community to act in a timely and adequate manner, non-state actors play a major role in providing assistance to vulnerable Iraqis. Militias of all denominations are improving their local base of support by providing social services in the neighborhoods and towns they control. Through a “Hezbollah-like” scheme, the Shiite Sadrist movement has established itself as the main service provider in the country. Similarly, other Shiite and Sunni groups are gaining ground and support through the delivery of food, oil, electricity, clothes and money to the civilians living in their fiefdoms. Not only do these militias now have a quasi-monopoly in the large-scale provision of assistance in Iraq, they are also recruiting an increasing number of civilians to their militias -- including displaced Iraqis.

Since the beginning of the crisis, the Government of Iraq has proven to be unwilling and unable to respond to the needs of vulnerable Iraqis. Although it has access to large sums of money, it is divided along sectarian lines, lacking both the capacity and the political will to use its important resources to address humanitarian needs. As a result, the government does not have any credibility left with Iraqis. The little assistance provided by the government is perceived by most as being biased in favor of the Shiite population, especially when it comes to the delivery of government services such as electricity or food ration cards from the Public Distribution System.

The international community has been largely in denial over the disastrous humanitarian situation in Iraq, and has until recently seen Iraq through the prism of reconstruction and development, and failed to address urgent needs. Only recently has the United Nations issued a common humanitarian appeal for Iraq, recognizing the nature of the situation and the need for all agencies to step up and address humanitarian needs.

Hindered by its political mandate in Iraq, and its lack of access to most of the country, the UN has no other choice than to rely on local partners to reach out to the communities most in need. By taking advantage of the “balkanization” of Iraq to identify interlocutors who can facilitate access throughout the country, the UN can create a larger space to meet humanitarian needs. Identifying and supporting local, non-governmental organizations that are known and trusted by the communities they serve will also be essential if the UN is to take a more important role in humanitarian assistance inside Iraq.

Ongoing violence in Diyala and Mosul, as well as recent events in Basra and Baghdad, have proven that the situation in Iraq is still too unstable and violent for people to return home. Of those Iraqis who have returned from Syria, most were unable to go back to their homes, as they would likely be attacked again, and had to move into homogenous, sectarian areas. Others found their homes occupied, and were unable to recover them.

While everyone hopes that Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people will be able to return to their homes in the future, the necessary conditions for returns to take place in safety and in dignity do not exist. All relevant actors should discourage returns until the violence subsides and people can receive adequate assistance and protection. In particular, the Government of Iraq should no longer use returns as an indicator of success in stabilizing the country. Returns -- like the rest of the humanitarian situation -- should not be used as a political tool by any of the parties to the conflict.

It is also difficult for people to return home because they have minimal access to basic services and the Government of Iraq does not have a clear strategy to handle returns. Moreover, property disputes are already emerging, as many houses of people who previously fled are now occupied by others who will be reluctant to give them up. Disputes are currently settled in an ad hoc manner, by a variety of actors such as the Iraqi army, the Iraqi police, or the militia in control of the neighborhood. For any return movement to be sustainable, the Iraqi Government, with the support and expertise of the international community, must devise a strategy to deal with property disputes, in a larger transitional justice framework. In the meantime, the Iraqi Government must ensure that property rights -- and their violations -- are documented.

Current Iraqi and American strategies for responding to Iraqi displacement assume that security will improve steadily over the next two years. However, the situation in Iraq remains volatile, and the Government of Iraq, the UN, the US government and other members of the international community must develop plans for Iraq based on all possible scenarios, including a deterioration of the security situation. Negotiations must begin with regional and local governments to ensure that people will be allowed to seek asylum in both Iraq and in the region in case violence increases and displacement resumes in large numbers. For Iraq to have any future, international donors must ensure that resources are allocated to the humanitarian response, and that all appeals are fully funded. As for the UN, it needs to develop its network of local actors, and reach out to all vulnerable Iraqis -- whether or not they are displaced.

Failure to address the needs of Iraqis will have dramatic impacts on security inside Iraq. The hope that does exist lies in the efforts of Iraq’s citizens. Iraqi organizations are providing lifesaving assistance throughout the country and the international community must increase efforts to reach out to these groups and provide them with the funds to continue their work. Ultimately, only Iraqis can save Iraq.

For the full text of the report, please see the PDF attached below.

The Myth of the Surge

Ron Tang — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily. House after house is deserted, bullet holes pockmarking their walls, their doors open and unguarded, many emptied of furniture. What few furnishings remain are covered by a thick layer of the fine dust that invades every space in Iraq. Looming over the homes are twelve-foot-high security walls built by the Americans to separate warring factions and confine people to their own neighborhood. Emptied and destroyed by civil war, walled off by President Bush's much-heralded "surge," Dora feels more like a desolate, post-apocalyptic maze of concrete tunnels than a living, inhabited neighborhood. Apart from our footsteps, there is complete silence.

My guide, a thirty-one-year-old named Osama who grew up in Dora, points to shops he used to go to, now abandoned or destroyed: a barbershop, a hardware store. Since the U.S. occupation began, Osama has watched civil war turn the streets where he grew up into an ethnic killing field. After the fall of Saddam, the Americans allowed looters and gangs to take over the streets, and Iraqi security forces were stripped of their jobs. The Mahdi Army, the powerful Shiite paramilitary force led by the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, took advantage of the power shift to retaliate in areas such as Dora, where Shiites had been driven from their homes. Shiite forces tried to cleanse the district of Sunni families like Osama's, burning or confiscating their homes and torturing or killing those who refused to leave.

"The Mahdi Army was killing people here," Osama says, pointing to a now-destroyed Shiite mosque that in earlier times had been a cafe and before that an office for Saddam's Baath Party. Later, driving in the nearby district of Baya, Osama shows me a gas station. "They killed my uncle here. He didn't accept to leave. Twenty guys came to his house, the women were screaming. He ran to the back, but they caught him, tortured him and killed him." Under siege by Shiite militias and the U.S. military, who viewed Sunnis as Saddam supporters, and largely cut out of the Shiite-dominated government, many Sunnis joined the resistance. Others turned to Al Qaeda and other jihadists for protection.

Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the civil war, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides -- and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq -- it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government. The Americans call the units by a variety of euphemisms: Iraqi Security Volunteers (ISVs), neighborhood watch groups, Concerned Local Citizens, Critical Infrastructure Security. The militias prefer a simpler and more dramatic name: They call themselves Sahwa, or "the Awakening."

At least 80,000 men across Iraq are now employed by the Americans as ISVs. Nearly all are Sunnis, with the exception of a few thousand Shiites. Operating as a contractor, Osama runs 300 of these new militiamen, former resistance fighters whom the U.S. now counts as allies because they are cashing our checks. The Americans pay Osama once a month; he in turn provides his men with uniforms and pays them ten dollars a day to man checkpoints in the Dora district -- a paltry sum even by Iraqi standards. A former contractor for KBR, Osama is now running an armed network on behalf of the United States government. "We use our own guns," he tells me, expressing regret that his units have not been able to obtain the heavy-caliber machine guns brandished by other Sunni militias.

The American forces responsible for overseeing "volunteer" militias like Osama's have no illusions about their loyalty. "The only reason anything works or anybody deals with us is because we give them money," says a young Army intelligence officer. The 2nd Squadron, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, which patrols Osama's territory, is handing out $32 million to Iraqis in the district, including $6 million to build the towering walls that, in the words of one U.S. officer, serve only to "make Iraqis more divided than they already are." In districts like Dora, the strategy of the surge seems simple: to buy off every Iraqi in sight. All told, the U.S. is now backing more than 600,000 Iraqi men in the security sector -- more than half the number Saddam had at the height of his power. With the ISVs in place, the Americans are now arming both sides in the civil war. "Iraqi solutions for Iraqi problems," as U.S. strategists like to say. David Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. Petraeus, calls it "balancing competing armed interest groups."

But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.

"We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future."

Maj. Pat Garrett, who works with the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, is already having trouble figuring out what to do with all the new militiamen in his district. There are too few openings in the Iraqi security forces to absorb them all, even if the Shiite-dominated government agreed to integrate them. Garrett is placing his hopes on vocational-training centers that offer instruction in auto repair, carpentry, blacksmithing and English. "At the end of the day, they want a legitimate living," Garrett says. "That's why they're joining the ISVs."

But men who have taken up arms to defend themselves against both the Shiites and the Americans won't be easily persuaded to abandon their weapons in return for a socket wrench. After meeting recently in Baghdad, U.S. officials concluded in an internal report, "Most young Concerned Local Citizens would probably not agree to transition from armed defenders of their communities to the local garbage men or rubble cleanup crew working under the gaze of U.S. soldiers and their own families." The new militias have given members of the Awakening their first official foothold in occupied Iraq. They are not likely to surrender that position without a fight. The Shiite government is doing little to find jobs for them, because it doesn't want them back, and violence in Iraq is already starting to escalate. By funding the ISVs and rearming the Sunnis who were stripped of their weapons at the start of the occupation, America has created a vast, uncoordinated security establishment. If the Shiite government of Iraq does not allow Sunnis in the new militias to join the country's security forces, warns one leader of the Awakening, "It will be worse than before."

****

Osama, for his part, seems like everything that American forces would want in a Sunni militiaman. He speaks fluent English, wears jeans and baseball caps, and is well-connected from his days with KBR. Before the ISVs were set up, Osama and a dozen of his original men were known to U.S. troops as "the Heroes" for their work in pointing out Al Qaeda suspects and uncovering improvised explosive devices in Dora. Osama's men helped find at least sixty of these deadly bombs. In today's Baghdad, the trust of the American overlords is a valuable commodity. Osama's power stems almost entirely from his access to U.S. contracts.

As a result, members of the Awakening who had previously attacked Americans and Shiites are now collaborating with Osama. "To a large extent they are former insurgents," says Capt. Travis Cox of the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment. Most of Osama's men had belonged to Sunni resistance groups such as the Army of the Mujahedeen, the Islamic Army and the 1920 Revolution Brigades, named for the uprising against the British occupation that year. Even Osama admits that some of his men's loyalty is questionable. "Yesterday we arrested three guys as Al Qaeda infiltrators," he tells me. "They thought that they were powerful because they are ISV, so no one will touch them. You got to watch them every day."

Osama himself makes no secret of his hatred for the Shiite government and its security forces. As we walk by a checkpoint manned by the Iraqi National Police, which is comprised almost entirely of Shiites, Osama looks at the uniformed officers in disgust. "I want to kill them," he tells me, "but the Americans make us work together."

Although Osama insists that he has no connections to Al Qaeda or other jihadists, his fellow leaders of the ISVs in Dora are directly tied to the Sunni resistance. Since the Americans often require that each mahala, or neighborhood, have two ISV bosses, Osama has given half of his 300 men to Abu Salih, a man with dark reddish skin, a sharp nose and small piercing eyes. "We know Abu Salih is former Al Qaeda of Iraq," a U.S. Army officer from the area tells me. In fact, when I meet with him, Abu Salih freely admits that some of his men belonged to Al Qaeda. They joined the American-sponsored militias, he says, so they could have an identity card as protection should they get arrested.

The other leader working with Osama is Abu Yasser, a handsome and jovial man who wears a matching green sweatshirt and sweatpants, with a pistol in a shoulder holster. "Abu Yasser is the real boss," says an American intelligence officer. "That guy's an animal -- he's crazy." A former member of Saddam's General Security Service, Abu Yasser had joined the Army of the Mujahedeen, a resistance organization that fought the U.S. occupation in Mosul and south Baghdad. He still has scars on his arms from the battles, and he put my hand on his forearm to feel the shrapnel embedded within. Like Osama and Abu Salih, he views the Shiite-led government as the real enemy. "There is no difference between the Mahdi Army and Iran," he tells me. Now that he is working for the Americans, he has no intention of laying down his arms. "If the government doesn't let us join the police," he says, "we'll stay here protecting our area."

To watch the ISVs in action, I accompany U.S. soldiers from the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment on a mission in the neighborhood. After meeting up with Osama, Abu Salih and Abu Yasser at a police checkpoint, we walk down Sixtieth Street to the Tawhid Mosque, followed by Stryker armored vehicles from the 2-2 SCR. First Lt. Shawn Spainhour, a contracting officer with the unit, asks the sheik at the mosque what help he needs. The mosque's generator has been shot up by armed Shiites, and the sheik requests $3,000 to fix it. Spainhour takes notes. "I probably can do that," he says.

The sheik also asks for a Neighborhood Advisory Council to be set up in his area "so it will see our problems." The NACs, as they're known, are being created and funded by the Americans to give power to Sunnis cut out of the political process. As with the ISVs, however, the councils effectively operate as independent institutions that do not answer to the central Iraqi government. Many Shiites in the Iraqi National Police consider the NACs as little more than a front for insurgents: One top-ranking officer accused the leader of a council in Dora of being an Al Qaeda terrorist. "I have an order from the Ministry of Interior to arrest him," the officer told me.

As Spainhour talks to the sheik at the mosque, two bearded, middle-aged men in sweaters suddenly walk up to the Americans with a tip. Two men down the street, they insist, are members of the Mahdi Army. The soldiers quickly get back into the Strykers, as do Osama and his men, and they all race to Mahala 830. There they find a group of young men stringing electrical cables across the street. Some of the men manage to run off, but the eleven who remain are forced into a courtyard and made to squat facing the walls. They all wear flip-flops. Soldiers from the unit take their pictures one by one. The grunts are frustrated: For most of them, this is as close to combat as they have gotten, and they're eager for action.

"Somebody move!" shouts one soldier. "I'm in the mood to hit somebody!"

Another soldier pushes a suspect against the wall. "You know Abu Ghraib?" he taunts.

The Iraqis do not resist -- they are accustomed to such treatment. Raids by U.S. forces have become part of the daily routine in Iraq, a systematic form of violence imposed on an entire nation. A foreign military occupation is, by its very nature, a terrifying and brutal thing, and even the most innocuous American patrols inevitably involve terrorizing innocent Iraqi civilians. Every man in a market is rounded up and searched at gunpoint. Soldiers, their faces barely visible behind helmets and goggles, burst into a home late at night, rip the place apart looking for weapons, blindfold and handcuff the men as the children look on, whimpering and traumatized. U.S. soldiers are the only law in Iraq, and you are at their whim. Raids like this one are scenes in a long-running drama, and by now everyone knows their part by heart. "I bet there's an Iraqi rap song about being arrested by us," an American soldier jokes to me at one point.

As the soldiers storm into nearby homes, the two men who had tipped off the Americans come up to me, thinking I am a military translator. They look bemused. The Americans, they tell me in Arabic, have got the wrong men. The eleven squatting in the courtyard are all Sunnis, not Shiites; some are even members of the Awakening and had helped identify the Mahdi Army suspects.

I try to tell the soldiers they've made a mistake -- it looks like the Iraqis had been trying to connect a house to a generator -- but the Americans don't listen. All they see are the wires on the ground: To them, that means the Iraqis must have been trying to lay an improvised explosive device. "If an IED is on the ground," one tells me, "we arrest everybody in a 100-meter radius." As the soldiers blindfold and handcuff the eleven Iraqis, the two tipsters look on, puzzled to see U.S. troops arresting their own allies.

In a nearby house, the soldiers find Mahdi Army "propaganda" and arrest several men, including one called Sabrin al-Haqir, or Sabrin "the mean," an alleged leader of the Mahdi Army. The Strykers transport the prisoners, including the men from the courtyard, to Combat Outpost Blackfoot. Inside, Osama and Abu Salih drink sodas and eat muffins and thank the Americans for arresting Sabrin. Everyone agrees that the mission was a great success -- the kind of street-to-street collaboration that the ISVs were designed to encourage.

The Sunnis from the first house the Americans raided are released, the plastic cuffs that have been digging into their wrists cut off, and three of them are taken to sign sworn statements implicating Sabrin. An American captain instructs them to list who did what, where, when and how. Abu Salih, the militia leader, walks by and tells the men in Arabic to implicate Sabrin in an attack. They dutifully obey, telling the Americans what they want to hear so they will be released.

Osama, meanwhile, uses the opportunity to lobby the Americans for more weapons. Meeting with a sergeant from the unit, he asks if he can have a PKC, or heavy-caliber machine gun, to put on top of his pickup truck.

"No," the sergeant says.

"But we can hide it," Osama pleads.

After processing, Sabrin is moved to a "detainee holding facility" at Forward Operating Base Prosperity. At least 25,000 Iraqis are now in such U.S. facilities -- up from 16,000 only a year ago. "We were able to confirm through independent reporting that he was a bad guy" from the Mahdi Army, a U.S. intelligence officer tells me. "He was involved in EJKs" -- extrajudicial killings, a military euphemism for murders.

****

To the Americans, the Awakening represents a grand process of reconciliation, a way to draw more Sunnis into the fold. But whatever reconciliation the ISVs offer lies between the Americans and the Iraqis, not among Iraqis themselves. Most Shiites I speak with believe that the same Sunnis who have been slaughtering Shiites throughout Iraq are now being empowered and legitimized by the Americans as members of the ISVs. On one raid with U.S. troops, I see children chasing after the soldiers, asking them for candy. But when they learn I speak Arabic, they tell me how much they like the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al-Sadr. "The Americans are donkeys," one boy says. "When they are here we say, 'I love you,' but when they leave we say, 'Fuck you.'"

In an ominous sign for the future, some of the Iraqis who are angriest about the new militias are those who are supposed to bring peace and security to the country: the Iraqi National Police. More paramilitary force than street cops, the INP resembles the National Guard in the U.S. Along with the local Iraqi police and the Iraqi army, the INP is populated mainly by members and supporters of the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias. The police had fought in the civil war, often targeting Sunni civilians and cleansing Sunni areas. One morning I accompany Lt. Col. Myron Reineke of the 2-2 SCR to a meeting at the headquarters of the 7th Brigade of the Iraqi National Police. The brigade is housed in a former home of Ali Hassan al-Majid, the notorious "Chemical Ali." Now called a JSS, or joint security station, it is particularly feared by Sunnis, who were frequently kidnapped by the National Police and released for ransom, if they were lucky. The station is also rumored to have been used as a base by Shiite militias for torturing Sunnis.

Reineke finds the brigade's commander, Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Abud, sitting behind a large wooden desk surrounded by plastic flowers. Behind him is a photograph of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. To his side is a shotgun. Five or six of his officers, all Shiites, surround him. Karim and his men greet the delegation of Americans warmly -- but then, the Americans are greeted warmly wherever they go. They assume that this means they are liked, but Iraqis have nothing to lose -- and everything to gain -- by pretending to be their friends.

Karim begins the meeting by accusing the Awakening of being a front for terrorists. "We have information that the Baath Party and Al Qaeda have infiltrated Sahwa," he tells Reineke. "It's very dangerous. Sahwa is killing people in Seidiya."

A few days later, I return to meet with Karim without the Americans present. I find him talking to several high-ranking Shiite officers in the Iraqi army about members of the Awakening, who have been taking over homes in Dora that once belonged to Shiites. "We need to bring back the Shiites, but the Sunnis are in the houses," one colonel tells Karim. "This battle is bigger than the other battles -- this is the battle of the displaced." To these men, the Awakening is reviled: Eavesdropping on their Arabic conversation, I hear him angrily condemn "killers, terrorists, ugly pigs!"

Karim's phone rings, and he begins talking with a superior officer about a clash the previous day between the Awakening and armed Shiite militias. The ISVs had battled the Mahdi Army, but Karim blames U.S. troops for establishing an ISV unit in the area. "American officers took Sahwa men to a sector where they shouldn't be," he says. "Residents saw armed men not in uniforms and shot at them from buildings. Four Sahwa were injured. My battalion was called in to help." After listening for a moment, he agrees with his superior officer on a solution: Members of the Awakening must be forced out. "Yes, sir," he says. "Sahwa will withdraw from that area. They started the problem."

Away from the Americans, Karim and his men make no secret of their hatred for the Awakening. One of the most frequent visitors to Karim's headquarters is a stern and thuggish man named Abu Jaafar. A Shiite known to the Americans as Sheik Ali, Abu Jaafar has his own ISV unit of 100 men in the Saha neighborhood of Dora. "He may not be JAM," an American major tells me, using the common shorthand for the Mahdi Army, "but he has a lot of JAM friends."

The Awakening, Abu Jaafar tells me, is full of men who once belonged not just to the 1920 Revolution Brigades and the Army of the Mujahedeen but also to Al Qaeda. He pulls out a list of forty-six people from the neighborhood. "Criminals in Sahwa," he says. He points to two names. "The Americans told me, 'If you see these two men, you can kill them or bring them to us.' Now they are wearing the Sahwa uniform. They say they have reconciled."

Abu Jaafar looks at me and smiles. Shiites, he says, do not need the Awakening. "We are already awake," he says. "Our eyes are open. We know everything. We're just waiting."

****

U.S. troops who work with the Iraqi National Police realize that beyond their gaze, the country's security forces do not act anything like police. "The INPs here are almost all Shiites," says Maj. Jeffrey Gottlieb, a lanky tank officer who oversees a unit charged with training Iraqi police. "Orders from their chain of command are usually to arrest Sunnis, not Shiites." The police have also been conducting what Gottlieb calls "United Van Lines missions" -- resettling displaced Shiite families in homes abandoned by Sunnis. "The National Police ask, 'Can you help us move a family's furniture?' We don't know if the people coming back were even from here originally." Gottlieb shrugs. "We don't know as much as we could, because we don't know Arabic," he says.

Gottlieb had recently conducted an inventory of the weapons assigned to the 172 INP -- short for 1st Battalion, 7th Brigade, 2nd Division. There were 550 weapons missing, including pistols, rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "Guys take weapons when they go AWOL," he says. The police were also reporting fake engagements and then transferring to Shiite militias the ammunition they had supposedly fired. "It was funny how they always expended 400 rounds of ammunition," Gottlieb says.

Then there is the problem of "ghost police." Although 542 men officially belong to the 172 INP on paper, only 200 or so show up at any given time. Some are on leave, but many simply do not exist, their salaries pocketed by officers. "Officers get a certain number of ghosts," Gottlieb tells me. He looks at a passing American soldier. "I need some ghosts," he jokes. "How much are you making?"

When I go to visit the 172 INP, American officers from the 2-2 SCR admonish me to wear my body armor -- to protect myself from accidental discharges by the Iraqi police. "I did convoy security in the Sunni Triangle and was hit by numerous IEDs, complex attacks, small arms," Capt. Cox tells me. "But I never felt closer to death than when I was working with Iraqi security forces."

The night I arrive, thirty-five members of the Iraqi National Police are going out on a joint raid with Americans from the National Police Training Team. The raid is being led by Capt. Arkan Hashim Ali, a trim thirty-year-old Iraqi with a shaved head and a sharp gaze. Because seventy-five percent of all officer positions in the INP are vacant, officers like Arkan often end up assuming many roles at once. Arkan gathers his men in an empty room for a mission briefing. Cardboard and Styrofoam models have been arranged to replicate the Humvees and pickup trucks they will be using. The men all wear the same blue uniforms, but they sport a hodgepodge of helmets, flak jackets and boots.

"Today we have an operation in Mahala 830," Arkan announces. "Do you know it? Our target is an Al Qaeda guy." Salah and Muhamad, two brothers suspected of working with Al Qaeda, would be visiting their brother Falah's home that night. Falah was known as Falah al-Awar, or "the one-eyed," because he had lost one of his eyes. Arrested two weeks earlier by the Americans, he had revealed under interrogation that his brothers were involved in attacking and kidnapping Americans. "He dimed his brothers out," an American officer tells me.

The briefing over, Arkan asks his men to repeat his instructions, ordering them to shout the answers. Then they head out on the raid.

At Falah's house, the INPs move quickly, climbing over the wall and breaking the main gate. Bursting into the house, they herd the women and children into the living room while they bind Muhamad's hands with strips of cloth. Muhamad begins to cry. "My father is dead," he sobs. Arkan reassures him but also controls him, holding the top of Muhamad's head with his hand, as if he were palming a basketball. The women in the house ask how long the two brothers will be taken for. Arkan tells them they are being held for questioning and describes where his base is. Then the INPs speed off in their pickup trucks, causing the Americans to smile at their rush to get away.

"We just picked up some Sunnis," jokes an American sergeant. "We're getting the fuck outta here."

The next day, Sunni leaders from the area meet with the American soldiers. The two brothers, they claim, are innocent. Before the 2-2 SCR arrived, the 172 INP had a history of going on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians. Fearing for their safety, the Sunni leaders ask if the two brothers can be transferred to American custody.

The Americans know that the entire raid may have been simply another witch hunt, a way for the Shiite police to intimidate Sunni civilians. The INP, U.S. officers concede, use Al Qaeda as a "scare word" to describe all Sunni suspects.

"Yeah, the moral ambiguity of what we do is not lost on me," Maj. Gottlieb tells me. "We have no way of knowing if those guys did what they say they did."

****

With American forces now arming both sides in the civil war, the violence in Iraq has once again started to escalate. In January, some 100 members of the new Sunni militias -- whom the Americans have now taken to calling "the Sons of Iraq" -- were assassinated in Baghdad and other urban areas. In one attack, a teenage bomber blew himself up at a meeting of Awakening leaders in Anbar Province, killing several members of the group. Most of the attacks came from Al Qaeda and other Sunni factions, some of whom are fighting for positions of power in the new militias.

One day in early February, I accompany several of the ISV leaders from Dora to the Sahwa Council, the Awakening's headquarters in Ramadi. They are hoping to translate their local military gains into a political advantage by gaining the council's stamp of approval. On the way, Abu Salih admires a pickup truck outfitted with a Dushka, a large Russian anti-aircraft gun. "Now that's Sahwa," Abu Salih says, gazing wistfully at the weapon. Then he spots more Sahwa men driving Humvees armed with belt-fed machine guns. "Ooh," he murmurs, "look at that PKC."

At Sahwa headquarters, in an opulent guest hall, Abu Salih meets Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, brother of the slain founder of the movement, who sits on an ornate, thronelike chair. "How is Dora?" he asks Abu Salih, sounding like a king inquiring about his subject's estate. Then he leads us into a smaller office, where three of Abu Salih's rivals from Dora are gathered. All of the men refer to Abu Risha with deference, calling him "our older brother" and "our father." It is a strange reversal of past roles: urban Sunnis from Baghdad pledging their allegiance to a desert tribal leader, looking to the periphery for protection and political representation. But the Americans have empowered Abu Risha, and Baghdad's Sunni militiamen hope to unite with him to fight their Shiite rivals.

It doesn't take long, however, for the meeting to devolve into open hostility. One of the rivals dismisses Abu Salih and his men as mere guards, not true Sahwa. "You are military, and we are political," he jeers, accusing Abu Salih of having been a member of Al Qaeda. Abu Salih turns red and waves his arms over his head. "Nobody lies about Abu Salih!" he shouts.

Abu Risha's political adviser attempts to calm the men. "Are we in the time of Saddam Hussein?" he asks. The rivals should hold elections in Dora, he suggests, to decide who will represent the Awakening there. In the end, though, Abu Salih emerges from the meeting with official recognition from the council. All of the men speak with respect for the resistance and jihad. To them, the Awakening is merely a hudna, or cease-fire, with the American occupation. The real goal is their common enemy: Iraq's Shiites.

Some of the escalating violence in recent weeks is the work of the Mahdi Army and other Shiite paramilitary forces to intimidate Sunnis like Abu Salih and prevent members of the Awakening from cooperating with the Americans. Even members of the Iraqi National Police who refuse to take sides in the bloody rivalry are being targeted. Capt. Arkan, the Iraqi who led the raid for the 172 INP, has tried to remain nonsectarian in the midst of the bitter new divisiveness that is tearing Iraq apart. Like others who served in the Iraqi army before the U.S. occupation, he sees himself as a soldier first and foremost. "Most of the officers that came back to the police are former army officers," he says. "Their loyalty is to their country." His father is Shiite, but Arkan was forced to leave his home in the majority-Shiite district of Shaab after he was threatened by the Mahdi Army, who demanded that he obtain weapons for them. He had paid a standard $600 bribe to join the police, but he was denied the job until a friend intervened.

"Before the war, it was just one party," Arkan tells me. "Now we have 100,000 parties. I have Sunni officer friends, but nobody lets them get back into service. First they take money, then they ask if you are Sunni or Shiite. If you are Shiite, good." He dreams of returning to the days when the Iraqi army served the entire country. "In Saddam's time, nobody knew what is Sunni and what is Shiite," he says. The Bush administration based its strategy in Iraq on the mistaken notion that, under Saddam, the Sunni minority ruled the Shiite majority. In fact, Iraq had no history of serious sectarian violence or civil war between the two groups until the Americans invaded. Most Iraqis viewed themselves as Iraqis first, with their religious sects having only personal importance. Intermarriage was widespread, and many Iraqi tribes included both Sunnis and Shiites. Under Saddam, both the ruling Baath Party and the Iraqi army were majority Shiite.

Arkan, in a sense, is a man in the middle. He believes that members of the Awakening have the right to join the Iraqi security forces, but he also knows that their ranks are filled with Al Qaeda and other insurgents. "Sahwa is the same people who used to be attacking us," he says. Yet he does not trust his own men in the INP. "Three-fourths of them are Mahdi Army," he tells me, locking his door before speaking. His own men pass information on him to the Shiite forces, which have threatened him for cooperating with the new Sunni militias. One day, Arkan was summoned to meet with the commander of his brigade's intelligence sector. When he arrived, he found a leader of the Mahdi Army named Wujud waiting for him.

"Arkan, be careful -- we will kill you," Wujud told him. "I know where you live. My guys will put you in the trunk of a car."

I ask Arkan why he had not arrested Wujud. "They know us," he says. "I'm not scared for myself. I've had thirty-eight IEDs go off next to me. But I'm scared for my family."

Later I accompany Arkan to his home. As we approach an INP checkpoint, he grows nervous. Even though he is an INP officer, he does not want the police to know who he is, lest his own men inform the Mahdi Army about his attitude and the local INPs, who are loyal to the Mahdi Army, target him and his family. At his home, his two boys are watching television in the small living room. "I've decided to leave my job," Arkan tells me. "No one supports us." The Americans are threatening him if he doesn't pursue the Mahdi Army more aggressively, while his own superiors are seeking to fire him for the feeble attempts he has made to target the Mahdi Army.

On my final visit with Arkan, he picks me up in his van. For lack of anywhere safe to talk, we sit in the front seat as he nervously scans every man who walks by. He is not optimistic for the future. Arkan knows that the U.S. "surge" has succeeded only in exacerbating the tension among Iraq's warring parties and bickering politicians. The Iraqi government is still nonexistent outside the Green Zone. While U.S.-built walls have sealed off neighborhoods in Baghdad, Shiite militias are battling one another in the south over oil and control of the lucrative pilgrimage industry. Anbar Province is in the hands of Sunni militias who battle each other, and the north is the scene of a nascent civil war between Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen. The jobs promised to members of the Awakening have not materialized: An internal U.S. report concludes that "there is no coherent plan at this time" to employ them, and the U.S. Agency for International Development "is reluctant to accept any responsibility" for the jobs program because it has a "high likelihood of failure." Sunnis and even some Shiites have quit the government, which is unable to provide any services, and the prime minister has circumvented parliament to issue decrees and sign agreements with the Americans that parliament would have opposed.

But such political maneuvers don't really matter in Iraq. Here, street politics trump any illusory laws passed in the safety of the Green Zone. As the Awakening gains power, Al Qaeda lies dormant throughout Baghdad, the Mahdi Army and other Shiite forces prepare for the next battle, and political assassinations and suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. The violence, Arkan says, is getting worse again.

"The situation won't get better," he says softly. An officer of the Iraqi National Police, a man charged with bringing peace to his country, he has been reduced to hiding in his van, unable to speak openly in the very neighborhood he patrols. Thanks to the surge, both the Shiites and the Sunnis now have weapons and legitimacy. And what can come of that, Arkan asks, except more fighting?

"Many people in Sahwa work for Al Qaeda," he says. "The national police are all loyal to the Mahdi Army." He shakes his head. "You work hard to build a house, and somebody blows up your house. Will they accept Sunnis back to Shiite areas and Shiites back to Sunni areas? If someone kills your brother, can you forget his killer?"

Al Qaeda in Lebanon

Ron Tang — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:18:00 -0500

Just before 4:30 one afternoon last July, calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in Ayn al Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Sidon, south of Beirut. First built in 1948 for refugees from northern Palestine, the camp has grown into a ramshackle ghetto. Concrete and cinderblock line tight alleys with cobwebs of low-hung electrical cables. On the walls are layers of faded political posters -- some for Hamas, some for Fatah, and still others for Saddam and even Hezbollah leader Seyid Hassan Nasrallah -- marking the divisions among Palestinian resistance factions.