Losing hearts and minds
A raid on Howeija netted “quality targets” but left a town appalled and hurt while George Ziyad looked on.

It was Tuesday 2 December and the 173rd Airborne Brigade, normally based in Italy, was readying itself for a major operation to root out resistance in a nearby town of Al Howeija. Howeija is a town of around 30,000 people which did well in the era of Saddam, providing senior Baathists, army and intelligence people for the regime, and the Americans saw it as the coordination center for attacks in the area which had killed five troops since September. The operation was also billed as the debut performance of the Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps (ICDC), a unit of local Iraqis trained to fight alongside the US army. The plan was to move at 2am in the bitter cold from a position just outside Kirkuk, a Kosovo-like town where Arabs and Kurds had conflicting claims to majority and historical precedence.

Some of the international press had been invited along for the show. Helicopters and Humvees would stream into the vicinity just before dawn for targeted raids on some 21 sites where the Americans hoped to find 15 men and detain whoever else was deemed suspicious. They didn’t tell us then, but one of them was Ezzat Ibrahim Al Douri, the deputy general of the Revolutionary Command Council and Saddam’s right-hand man. Before moving at 2am, I met Colonel Malik, the much-hyped Iraqi leader coordinating the ICDC. The militia force was made up entirely of Kurds. Malik and the band taking part tonight were only 30, and the entire force of 900-odd volunteers, sold by the US generals as one third Kurd, one third Arab and one third the other bits of Iraq’s ethnic and sectarian mosaic, was actually overwhelmingly Kurd with a few token Arabs. Malik was a man of few words and didn’t want his full name quoted in the press. “This is a big area of opponents who were favored by the past regime,” he said. He had been a teacher at military college in Baghdad, he said, which meant he didn’t have to fight in the recent war.

At the briefing on the moorland outside Kirkuk, it was clear that the fog was too thick for helicopters to take us to the tented HQ that had been set up just outside Howeija, let alone swoop into the center of the town. Master Sergeant Jeremiah Inman, who had been in charge of training the ICDC over the last two months, drove our Humvee in a night convoy towards the target town. The jeep was open on each side, bringing in a terrific breeze that made it feel even colder than it was. We were second in the convoy. Second or third, he pointed out, is normally the favorite choice for roadside bombers, and if we were hit, we should immediately run out of the vehicle and get in the one behind us. The one-and-half-hour drive was one of the more worrying periods of any journalist’s standard six weeks in Iraq, though Inman did assure us that night attacks were pretty rare. We arrived safely. It was too cold for this ragtag resistance.

Howeija didn’t know what had hit it. Up to 1,000 men from the world’s most sophisticated military stormed into the small town and surrounding villages at dawn, churning up the mud and puddles on streets that were already a mess. Guided by information gleaned from informers and GPS devices, they homed in on their list of houses, breaking down doors and stomping across living room carpets, in many cases only to be directed to a house further down the street. We stood around and watched 28-year-old Adel Ali Saleh being dragged out of his home and made to kneel on the muddy street as a yellow bag was placed over his head. “I’ve got breathing problems,” he protested. “They all say that,” the soldier guarding him said with a knowing smile. “He has fedayeen tattoos on his arm. He’s on our list.”

With his stubble and grubby pajamas, I couldn’t say if he fitted the fedayeen profile or not. For what it was worth, I asked him if he was. “Me? I don’t know,” he smiled, which seemed a waste of a good chance to deny it all to the media. A concerned neighbor turned up. “He’s a good man. He’s an Arab, I’m a Kurd, but we’re friends,” he said. Adel’s wife looked on quietly with a small child in her arms.

Others were less lucky, depending on the mood of the commanding officer. Whole families were forced to sit outside on the freezing ground as their fathers were tied up with a bag on their heads. Units in other parts of town rounded people up randomly off the streets in the vicinity of “target houses” simply because “he looks like a bad guy,” a phrase which brought to mind that pre-war taunt by Saddam Hussein that the United States was behaving like an international cowboy. Many of the rows of men gathered in open spaces were actually Shiite laborers from the south. If they weren’t resistance today, surely some would be tomorrow. We moved on.

The door-breaker (that’s “breacher” in military parlance) forced his way into the home of an elderly man named Hamza. Before the soldiers made their way through the house, he came out in his gallabiya and told one of the military translators—all minority Kurds, Assyrian Christians and Turkomen—that the man they were looking for didn’t live here at all but next door. Luckily the unit gave him the benefit of the doubt. “The problem is they’re using informers who give them wrong information,” I told him, in an effort to offer up some sympathy. “Probably some blood feud. We find informers give us information just to get revenge on people in blood feuds,” Major Doug Vincent explained.

Major Vincent was the head of the military public affairs office in Kirkuk; the man charged with winning those hearts and minds, or “giving lollipops to kids,” as he put it. That meant it was his job to clear up the PR mess the next day or during the event itself, if that was at all possible. This led to bizarre scenes in Howeija that December morning. “We’re very sorry,” Vincent told Hamza and handed him a flyer in English and Arabic. “The coalition forces apologize for any inconvenience you have experienced during the recent operations in your neighborhood. These operations were conducted with the local authorities to ensure your security and a more safe and free Iraq for all Iraqis,” it said. The only local authorities involved were the Kurdish ICDC from Kirkuk and a local council member who got caught up in the security dragnet. Never mind.

“We are committed to providing this community and country a safe and stable environment in which to raise your children and practice your religion without fear of oppression,” the flyer continued. “Coalition forces will leave this country when, and only when, this condition is met.”

That last sentence sounded more like a threat to a town they considered a hornet’s nest of anti-American sentiment. It was a town strewn with anti-US and pro-Saddam graffiti and posters, such as “Saddam is the pride of the Arabs, Death to the collaborators,” and “Don’t be armor for the Americans.” At the central square soldiers discovered that a monument bearing a mural of Saddam had recently been cleaned so that Saddam’s chipmunk features were fully visible again. A tank was brought in to smash it up. Townsfolk gathered in large crowds and stood in silence around the cordoned off center of the town—now a “secure zone.” But they erupted in anger when journalists came near them with questions.

“Frankly, I prefer Saddam. Now the streets are filthy, the electricity goes out and crime has become a big problem,” fumed one. “We’re importing oil from Turkey now, while this country is full of oil,” another said. None wanted to give their names.

We zoomed through the streets with Vincent, as he waved at bewildered residents standing in silence with a “assalamu aleikum.” He might as well have come from Mars. “Go round that puddle,” he suddenly shouted at the driver when an old man in Arab robes stepped up to the side of the road where he was sure to get soaked. Occasionally children, ever the ones to voice what the adults are too polite to say, ran after the jeeps shouting insults in Arabic, such as “you infidel dogs.”

“Their parents tell them to say that,” one of the interpreters working with the Americans assured me.

The children hanging around the jeeps on street corners were very interested in Egypt. I had seen this before, another time, when I was here. During Saddam’s birthday celebrations in nearby Tikrit in April 2002, a group of schoolgirls dressed as suicide bombers in a parade of thousands crowded round. “You’re from Egypt?” they asked. “How is Egypt? Is Egypt nice, masr helwa?” It was a look of longing tinged with sadness at the impossibility of visiting the mythical land. Egypt was a proper country, a proper Arab country, where there were films, dramas, singers, laughter and life. Back then, Egypt provided the popular culture that Iraq had been deprived of for years because of the mad dreams of heroic radicalism entertained by its eternal leader. Now here in Howeija, eons later, the same question. “Masr helwa?”

The children in Howeija were also fascinated by the military and their toys. They gathered around the soldiers asking them questions in their bare English. “Mister,” they would begin every staccato sentence, and the Americans, slightly threatened by their boldness, would talk back in sarcastic English that the children didn’t understand. Yet still they persisted. “Mister, pen?” “Mister, money?” There was no understanding here, none at all. The liberated disdained the liberator and the liberator feared the liberated. All the self-styled Good Occupier knew was the language of violence in the face of an enemy he did not understand, an enemy that extended to most of the Iraqi people bar the minority communities the Americans had enlisted to help them. An enemy left in the lurch by the rank failure of American foreign policy.

The logic of force also meant demolishing people’s houses. Israeli journalist Amira Hass discusses the tactic of house demolition in her study of the lives of Gazans under Israeli occupation, Drinking the Sea at Gaza. Demolition for Israel is one aspect of a policy meant to inculcate a searing sense of impotence and defeat, the ultimate means to realize the occupier’s goals, she says. “The demolition is brutal, usually carried out a few days after the suspect’s arrest, long before his guilt or innocence has been established in court,” Hass writes. “But when a family shows me the pile of ruins 10 or 20 years later, I cannot detect any signs of regret for the deed that caused the demolition.”

In Iraq, some weeks before Lightning Bayonet, the military had mown down an orchard of date palms near Tikrit—another echo of Palestine—and since the Americans launched Operation Iron Hammer in November massive firepower had been employed to blow up lone houses in fields around Tikrit and Baqouba. Half-built houses which the army said guerrillas had been using to plan operations were also pulled down around Tikrit, Saddam’s home town where US troops were also having problems.

In Howeija they wanted to pull down the house of Aziz Abdel Wahhab. Scouring the streets with Vincent we came upon a nicer part of town where the wide streets, still a mess, were lined with what you would call one-story villas. Military were stationed around one home in particular.

“This house is the heart of terrorism and if you’re going to harbor terrorism we’re going to remove you from the community,” First Lieutenant Steve Brignoli said, explaining an order to demolish the building. On the ground was a box full of the incriminating evidence that apparently warranted this move. It contained what looked like sticks of dynamite, electrical cables and switches, all of which would be used to put together improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. “Because of stuff like this we lost two paratroopers here. This is the stuff they typically use to take American lives,” Brignoli said. It was payback time. “This will be a show of force, to embolden the local authorities,” he explained.

A crowd of locals had gathered in the street by the time Aziz emerged on crutches with his wife Bushra from inside. “Tell him we found enough explosives to flatten this neighborhood,” a soldier ordered one of the army translators to tell him. The toothless old man could hardly talk, but mumbled a few words about his son Adel whose whereabouts he said he didn’t know. A bulldozer was now positioned in front of the house, and the translators were getting nervous.

“Where’s he going to go?” someone asked the unit commander Major Andrew Rohling. “He’s gonna go with his son who’s building the bombs,” he barked back angrily. At that point, Bushra, wrapped in a black cloak with hands covered in red henna in the manner of Iraqi fellaheen, offered some information. Maybe Adel was with his brother Sabah. “Okay, I’m not gonna destroy the house. Just the front, as a show of force,” Rohling announced, at which the bulldozer brought down the front wall of the compound and Bushra was bundled into a Humvee. “All of this is a crime against me after all the hardship I’ve suffered in life,” the old woman muttered. Adel was actually the son of another woman, since her husband had another wife. The soldiers guffawed at what seemed to them an ever-extending tissue of lies and more evidence of the mendacity of these Iraqis. “The bulldozer stays here until we find him,” were Vincent’s parting words to the crowd, hearts and minds temporarily off the list of priorities.

The convoy came to Sabah’s house. He came out willingly and agreed to lead the American troops to his brother on the fields he plows outside the town. “I’m only doing this because I don’t want them to destroy the house,” he told me as we arrived at the farmland outside town. “Adel’s just a farmer, he goes to the fields in the morning and comes back at night,” he added. After a 15-minute drive through muddy fields, the convoy came to Adel. There was no shoot-out, and he raised his hands behind his head and walked over to the jeeps.

“Farmers stored weapons in the house before the war. I haven’t touched them. Only one of the kalashnikovs is mine,” he told the translators. “I’m not even an Arab, I’m a Turkoman.” The soldiers, who had expected a more violent denouement, demurred. “We’ll take him to our detention center and intelligence will see if he changes his story,” Vincent said, and then made a point of having Adel’s hands untied from their awkward position behind his back. I suspected that was for our benefit since such niceties hadn’t characterized much else of the day’s procedures.

By now it was late afternoon and the operation was drawing to a close. At a high-level briefing in the center of the town, the top brass reviewed the situation. Twenty-seven men had been seized so far, including the leaders of two fedayeen cells, the commanders reported back, but there was still a “leader” out there. They wouldn’t give us names, but it later transpired this suspected leader had been none other than Ezzat Ibrahim Al Douri. He appeared to have slipped through their fingers, though they had briefly detained a relative of his then let him go.

“Every one of these guys we’ve got today are quality targets and have done something directly against us or our forces,” Colonel William Mayville told the gathering as the townsfolk looked on in the distance. A column ripped from the Saddam monument lay on the road beside us.

Amid the mud and the military in this miserable and confused town on a cold winter’s day, it was a scene of desolation. “This city is being held hostage. There are thugs, there are bullies, they are armed, and there’s a lot of folks would like to give us information but fear the consequences,” Mayville said.

Finally we were leaving. On the night trip back to Kirkuk the soldier driving our Humvee was curious about what the outside world was saying about the US military’s work in Iraq. “I’m interested to know what the outside world thinks. Here we only see one side of the story on Fox or CNN,” he said. I told him there was a debate going on in the media internationally about the occupation and there was a significant body of opinion that didn’t like what the Americans were doing at all. Demolishing houses didn’t help.

“We weren’t really going to do that. We’ve never done it, at least not in Kirkuk,” he answered in a tone of hurt and surprise. “But note the old lady only started talking when she saw the bulldozer.” Back in Kirkuk he came up to me to confess that “actually they did bulldoze that house”. I know, I said, just the front of it.