‘Strong Like Saddam’

At a recent meeting attended by U.S. officers, diplomats and Iraqi security officials, Qais sat at the head of a horseshoe-shaped table facing a slide projector. The general, who looks somewhat like a plump Albert Einstein, listened as the Americans talked about the need to incorporate 200 or so of Babil's own "concerned local citizens" into his police force. The "citizens" program, in Hillah as elsewhere, can be problematic. Legally, for instance, participating citizens are not supposed to carry weapons outside their homes, a ban that is often ignored, leading to clashes between the U.S.-supported guardians and other local armed groups. "What we're seeing is the de facto establishment of a militia," said a State Department official at the meeting, who declined to speak to NEWSWEEK on the record without embassy authorization. "We need to be very careful that we remain constitutionally correct." Another U.S. officer at the meeting, Col. Michael Garrett, added: "We've never addressed the fact that we're putting citizens outside what is now the current law." Qais said he agreed. "We don't want this group to become another militia," he said quietly. After the meeting, one American diplomat, who was not authorized to speak on the record, referred to the project derisively as a "guns and whisky" strategy.

As the meeting ended, Qais leaned over a tactical map with a smaller clutch of U.S. and Iraqi officers, making final preparations for a raid on a suspected Mahdi Army office. "We're going to shut those f–––ers down," the general said, to titters from his U.S. military counterparts. American officers mostly consider his personal bravado endearing. Yet they also recognize that relying on charismatic individuals for security carries its own risks. Qais's authority derives largely from "a personal allegiance to the general," says Lt. Col. Thomas Roth, an American officer who works closely with the police chief. The Scorpion Battalion might fall apart completely if the chief were to be assassinated, as enemies have tried to do several times in recent years. U.S. officers also worry about the health of the general, who is significantly overweight. "Give him anything, he'll drink it," says Roth, adding that Qais's brand of whisky is Jack Daniel's. "He'll smoke anything." If the general fell ill, Roth says, the local security effort could be set back significantly. "He's one-man deep," says the American officer. "There's nobody else."

If Hillah's security is one-man deep, Basra's political scene is stacked with competing actors, many of them sworn enemies. Perhaps the best-known warlord figure in the city is Muhammad al-Waeli, the provincial governor from the Islamist Fadhila party. Al-Waeli's men control the city's significant oil resources, protecting the facilities with a powerful militia. Yet a number of other militant groups compete with the governor for authority, including the 17,000-strong Mahdi Army and the Hakim family's Badr Corps. Earlier this summer the British military's remaining 5,500 soldiers withdrew to near the Basra airport, leaving the city's security largely in the hands of the various rival militias. Some observers believe the British military's "light touch" throughout the occupation has also contributed to the fragmentation of the city's local political scene.

Last week NEWSWEEK visited one of the city's most powerful young warlords, an Islamist in his early 40s named Yussef al-Mussawi, who leads Basra's Thar'Allah ("God's Revenge") Party. At the organization's heavily guarded complex a couple of miles north of the city, bodyguards milled about carrying Iraqi-made Tariq pistols; one guard had stationed himself inside an air-conditioning duct above the building's front door. In a reception room near the parking lot, supplicants queued up to ask the leader for favors. A group of four young men said they had come to get his help in finding their kidnapped brother. Upstairs in his office, Mussawi—dressed entirely in black and wearing a pinkie ring—sat at a desk covered with letters from petitioners asking his help. "The Iraqi government is weak and the Parliament is shallow," Mussawi told a caller. Later, when another caller asked for the Islamist's advice about a property dispute, Mussawi replied: "The sword is the solution"—meaning he believed force was the only thing that would get the man's property back.

Even to ambitious local sheiks like Kanan al-Sadid in Tikrit, the warlords' rise is a troubling development. "What century are we in?" he asks. "If we go back to the tribes—say goodbye to democracy." The businessman says he would prefer to hold an elected position in a modern, liberal state—provincial governor, perhaps. Yet he also acknowledges that with Tikrit's security still in chaos, that prospect seems a long way off. "Since the beginning," the sheik explains, "the tribes have depended on weapons. At first it was for the wolves. Then it was for humans." He smiles to himself, stamps out a Gauloise Blonde and then steps into his nearby BMW, which is always occupied by three armed guards.

With Larry Kaplow in Baghdad and an Iraqi Staff Reporter in Basra

© 2007