Baghdad Comes Alive

The last time I'd entered the neighborhood, for a quick visit to the hard-line Sunni Islamic Party of Iraq three years ago, I thought it was possibly the dumbest thing I had ever done. Even now, getting there is not reassuring; something like commuting to work in an armored submarine, actually just a convoy of Humvees with armor so thick it takes two hands to pull the doors closed. Six-foot-high walls surround the community of 25,000 people, many of them former officers in Saddam's Army (hence the success of the insurgency in recruiting here). Inside it's not a cheery-looking place, but it's bustling: 130 shops are open where only a few were last May. Most of the soldiers of the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment, in Ameriyah now patrol on foot some of the time, with little worry of being fired upon. Locals greet the American soldiers easily, and acquaintances come up and shake hands, even kiss cheeks in the Arab way.

The cheek-kissing begins in earnest when the Roughnecks, a company of police and military trainers attached to the battalion, arrives at the bustling headquarters of the Sunni volunteers, who here call themselves the Forsan al Rafideen, Knights of the Two Rivers. (The Americans shortened that to its acronym, FAR, until one of their interpreters pointed out that the word sounds like "mouse" in Arabic.) Capt. Eric Cosper, a big man to begin with, looks like a bear in his flak vest as he bends down to hug and kiss the FAR officers he knows best. "What you see here," he says proudly, "has taken six months to build." Like most of the American officers here, the captain is not on his first tour in Iraq, but it's the first one in which he's made a lot of Iraqi friends. "The last six months have been the most rewarding of my career, and my whole attitude to Iraqis has changed," he says.

That kind of sudden camaraderie has raised suspicions among Shiites in particular. They wonder if the Americans aren't letting their hunger for good news blind them to their new allies' true motives. The FAR commander, Abu Abed, is a former Iraqi Army intelligence major who the Americans say had joined a Sunni insurgent group aligned with Al Qaeda. (Abed politely maintains he never fought against the Americans, but his skill at dismantling IEDs has convinced them otherwise.) By way of introduction, he flips out his cell phone and scrolls through pictures, showing two of his brothers in the morgue, the victims of Shiite death squads. One has had his left hand cut off and his other fingers and toes removed; the other had a nail driven into his skull. Both had been taken from their homes by Iraqi police, and were found dumped with 20 others during the height of sectarian violence. The Sunnis of Ameriyah did not allow the police, dominated by Shiites, to build a post in the neighborhood then, and they still don't.

Abed sticks to the script, however. Though Shiite extremists killed his brothers, he blames Al Qaeda instead, for fueling the sectarian conflict that led to their deaths. And the tale of why he sided with the Americans, while familiar, doesn't sound contrived. In May, when two Qaeda fighters tried to kidnap an elderly Christian in the neighborhood, the man's wife clung to his leg. In dragging her away, the kidnappers pulled her skirt off. That touched a nerve with locals already fed up with all the bodies dumped in rubbish and booby-trapped, the 10-year-old boy who was beheaded and then eaten by dogs because everyone was too afraid to get involved. The imam of the Firduz mosque, Sheik Waleed al-Asawi, who witnessed the kidnap attempt, was so angry he went to the mosque and prayed for Allah to kill the Qaeda men. "We were guilty," he says, "because we made Ameriyah a safe place for Al Qaeda." Abu Abed and his men confronted the kidnappers and ended up in a fire fight that the terrorists looked to win, until the sheik called the Americans to come to their aid.

"My men thought I was nuts," says Lt. Col. Dale Kuehl, commander of the First Battalion. "I went into a house, surrounded by former insurgents, thinking this could go either way. They were ready to go on operations [against Al Qaeda] right away. It was surreal, fighters jumping on our vehicles." Since then the Americans have picked off one Qaeda cell after another with information Abed and his followers have provided.

Now Abed's men—300 paid fighters, and another 300 unpaid volunteers—play soccer with the Americans, and even with the Iraqi Army soldiers assigned to the area, who are mostly Shiite. Abed has become a regular at battalion headquarters, where Kuehl's staff officers bend the rules and let him come into their command post armed. "At first we were worried about them learning our TTP [tactics, techniques and procedures], but here they were giving us theirs," says Kuehl. Abed once showed the Americans how to search vehicles for weapons. "He said, 'Give me 20 seconds to hide this gun'," says Maj. Chip Daniels, the battalion's Ops officer, " 'and then I'll give you five minutes to find it'." The soldiers couldn't; he had broken it down and secreted it inside an armrest.