My Share of the Task(131)

                From that moment on, J.C. almost never stopped monitoring the screen. He slept minimally. Guys brought him food. He occasionally stole away for a VTC to keep the rest of the teams and us up at Balad informed, knowing that updates bought him time.


* * *

                On Saturday, May 20, as J.C. and his team spent a second day watching Abd al-Rahman in Baghdad, the Iraqi parliament gathered for a vote in an auditorium inside the Green Zone. With typical drama, including a group of Sunnis storming out, the parliamentarians approved the first permanent government since Saddam. After three years in which the Iraqis had a governing council, a transitional government, and then an interim one, they now had a constitutional administration. At its head was a Shiite member of parliament, Nouri al-Maliki, a balding man with glasses and a gourd-shaped head. He was influential within his Dawah Party but lesser known by most spectators. Fifty-five years old on that day, he had lived much of his life outside Iraq—he had fled to Iran via Syria and then, once able, moved back to Syria where he spent his adult life until 2003. It was hard to know what to make of al-Maliki. Would he be a Shiite hard-liner? Or would he prove the much-hoped-for conciliator? Would Iran and Syria have undue sway now? Would he be a democrat or an authoritarian in utero?

                In addition to selecting al-Maliki as the prime minister, Parliament also approved thirty-six of his cabinet posts, all except for three: the national security adviser and the ministers of both interior and defense. These most contentious positions were all connected to the security forces, which over the past year had been infiltrated by Shiite extremists. Wearing their light gray and deep blue uniforms and carrying the badge of the ministry of the interior, they had targeted Sunnis—young men, mostly—abducting and killing them. Sunnis worried Maliki’s temporary appointments would stay long enough that he could make them permanent.

                The urgent question, further delayed by these empty posts, was this: Would, or could, al-Maliki create a unified Iraqi government not defined by sectarian infiltration and divisions? If he did, would it slow the apparent slide to open civil war? That looked doubtful. Many of the politicians meeting in the auditorium that day supported—and were supported by—the Sunni and Shia groups who were meanwhile producing a thousand corpses each month in the streets outside the Green Zone.

                In April and May, I visited the task force screening facility more frequently, walking across the gravel path to sit in on the evening session of their twice-daily update. More informally, Scott Miller would stop in to my office for quick updates, or I would sit down next to him on the small bench in the back of his TF 16 JOC. One night, as we sat before the moving mosaic of current operations screens, Scott turned to me.

                “Sir, we’re really starting to get something out of Mubassir,” he said. “He’s starting to cooperate. We’ve never had someone who we can ask about what we’re seeing.”

                As J.C. and his team monitored Abd al-Rahman’s movements, they showed pictures—of buildings or people Abd al-Rahman visited—to Mubassir, who explained whom or what we were looking at. Most recently, Mubassir had identified a second house, belonging to Abd al-Rahman’s brother-in-law, where Abd al-Rahman had recently moved his family. The task force gradually built up fourteen sites throughout Baghdad that were part of Abd al-Rahman’s routine movement.

                I had heard people get excited about detainees before, but I listened to what he was saying. Across the gravel, where Mubassir was detained, the interrogators continued to build rapport. One day they set him up in one of the interrogation booths so he could watch a movie. At his request, his interrogators brought in their own chairs and took turns watching it with him. They had managed to find a copy of the film he had asked for, which he said was his favorite: The Exorcist.


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                J.C.’s focus remained controversial within the command. The squadron was doing its best with limited ISR, and during the weeks we watched Abd al-Rahman, it hit one or two targets a night throughout the country. But this was way below the operational tempo I had been pushing—and that I felt was necessary to keep Al Qaeda in Iraq disjointed and wheezing. The assault troop based out of that compound in Baghdad was essentially sitting on hold, as the squadron’s intelligence staff and 70 percent of its ISR assets were focused full time on Abd al-Rahman.