As was the case so often, Sattar was motivated by a number of frustrations. As he realized AQI was his real enemy, not the Americans, whom he reimagined as his guests, pride motivated him to fight Al Qaeda. But so too did baser motives: He sat atop a number of lucrative criminal enterprises in Ramadi that were threatened by AQI incursions.
In any case, he was the partner Sean needed, and on September 9, Sheikh Abdul Sattar formally announced that the “Awakening” was officially under way. Eight days later, on behalf of twenty-five of Anbar’s thirty-one tribes, Sattar wrote to Nouri al-Maliki requesting money to fund and arm his tribal coalition to fight Al Qaeda. Maliki had agreed (perhaps because Ramadi was uniformly Sunni and so he was confident armed locals could target only AQI and not Shiites) and the Ramadi police recruits soon went on the Iraqi government payroll.
As the sheikh’s movement was gaining momentum, our task force commander for Anbar, Commander Ethan,* came to see Sean.
In command of a TF 714 SEAL squadron after gutsy, distinguished tours in Afghanistan, Ethan was on the vanguard of a growing trend within our force to be better linked to the battlespace owners, and worked to incorporate—and sometimes subordinate—his targeting teams to the conventional commanders. Bald, with a thick beard that gave him a slightly messianic look well suited to his passionate approach to leadership, Ethan came to Ramadi keen to see the city holistically, beyond his aperture of direction-action raids.
“Sir, what’s your center of gravity?” Ethan asked Sean MacFarland in his polite but direct manner.
“Well, it’s actually Sheikh Sattar,” Sean replied.
“Right. We’ve got to keep that guy alive.”
At Ethan’s suggestion, the brigade took an American M1 Abrams tank and parked it in front of Sheikh Sattar’s house. In addition to the protection offered by its menacing barrel, the tank itself came to be a set piece in the larger drama of Ramadi—and a bellwether for changing Sunni sentiment. At first, Sheikh Sattar did not like having an American tank in front of his house, and at his request, the Americans replaced it with an Iraqi one. When the Iraqi tank unit eventually left Ramadi, however, an American tank again sat in front of his house. By this time, however, Sattar and his American partners had become more credible, and the people around Ramadi now saw the American tank as evidence of the sheikh’s clout over the Americans. As the tribes turned, a liability was now a token of power.
The task force’s experience across Iraq increasingly resembled what was occurring in Ramadi—which was the first all-of-military counterinsurgency fight in the war. There, conventional and special operations coordinated, and it was a case study in the application of surgical strikes in support of the first two stages of what became known as the “clear-hold-build” process of counterinsurgency. Evolving from our first role of targeting Former Regime Elements, then AQI senior leaders, TF 714 was now heavily partnered with conventional forces and other government agencies. Our network enabled us to see and understand the broader situation rapidly, and our intentionally decentralized culture allowed us to act rapidly.
* * *
What Ethan and Sean had done with the tank in Ramadi, General Casey looked to do from his strategic perch: nurture and marshal the promising but fragile reconciliation movements. Casey understood that the dynamics needed to change. Simply grinding harder against the dual Sunni and Shia threats would not suffice. To this end, he found a deft weapon in my old friend Graeme Lamb, who arrived to Iraq the same week Sheikh Sattar announced the Awakening was under way in Ramadi.
Almost immediately upon Graeme’s arrival to be his deputy commanding general, Casey asked him to pursue strategic reconciliation—the process to bring opposition groups, even those currently fighting, toward a durable political solution. Graeme would help marshal “the Awakening,” which was not in its early stages nearly as monolithic nor as Damascene as the name conveyed. In the beginning, the Sunnis did not gather in a caucus and declare a national position.