Between these meetings, whenever he could manage a moment free, Graeme stole away from his office and went to the area across from the MNF-I headquarters in the Green Zone, where, behind tall blast walls, lay the combat support hospital. Called “the cash” from its acronym, it was the Coalition’s main emergency room. Helicopters descended and departed throughout the day and night as nurses and medics waited on the edges of the helipad poised with stretchers. Inside, its hallways were filled with the injured, beneath blankets and clear plastic tubing that snaked around them like vines. Graeme spent time with the young medics and staff, men and women with thousand-yard stares. Their long days and nights were spent taking in the ruined frames of young people who had come to Iraq in the peak of their physical fitness. Graeme met men and women with everything to live for who arrived at the hospital, quite literally, in bits.
Graeme carried that emotional weight into the room each time he sat down across from men whose groups were fighting our own. These meetings were not negotiations—no rewards were offered. Graeme tried instead to slowly forge a mutual respect—even a contemptuous one—based upon an understanding of the other’s character and motivations and a recognition that both men were trying to do right by their clans. This meant getting beyond the bluster of who could outlast the other, whose force had more men and limbs to sacrifice in the contest.
In the case of Ansar, FSEC sought to convince its leadership of the truth from the Coalition’s perspective. First, the Coalition was not there to convert them to Christianity, as they had feared. Second, Ansar would be better off the further they were from Al Qaeda, which had shown a disregard for Iraqi aspirations and a contempt for Iraqi life. Third, AQI was one of the main reasons that the Coalition remained in Iraq. Finally, in the sectarian war AQI continued to provoke, the Iranian-backed militias—or “Safavids,” as the Sunni insurgents sneeringly called them—were going to win, and the Sunnis faced potential slaughter. The sooner AQI was neutralized, the better it would be for Iraqi Sunnis and the quicker Ansar would see the Coalition leave.
Ansar would not turn and fight with the Coalition. But leaders who had seen the light might lead the group to downgrade from an AQI-allied jihadist force to another insurgent organization with political demands. Short of that, these leaders could sow doubt and discord.
Graeme’s discussions had already showed promise, and given greater latitude by Petraeus, the reconciliation cell pressed hard on other fronts. Graeme expanded his efforts wider than the Ansar leadership. Among others, Graeme contacted and vetted Abu Azzam, a former Sunni insurgent leader who wanted to partner with the Iraqi government; by July, Azzam had twenty-three hundred men patrolling the streets of Abu Ghraib city. Graeme met that winter and spring with the mayor of Sadr City, Rahim al-Daraji, working to check the sectarian killing emanating from the slum and seeking to win safe passage for Coalition forces to enter in advance of the surge campaign to control Baghdad that summer. Their talks were cut short when Daraji was ambushed on March 15, 2007, near Habibiyah Square in Baghdad, leaving the Sadr City police chief dead and the mayor riddled with shrapnel.
The Ansar efforts, meanwhile, continued to show promise. So it fell to John Christian to meet with a particularly unsavory leader of Ansar captured the previous November. An avowed enemy of our task force, Abu Mustafa was a founding member of Ansar and the leader of its operations in Iraq. Most notorious, he masterminded the suicide attack two years earlier on the mess tent in FOB Marez that had killed an operative from our task force. John flew regularly to Camp Cropper, where he met with Mustafa—a big, smelly man with a large head, thick mustache, and bulbous nose. And yet in spite of everything unseemly about this man, FSEC became convinced that Abu Mustafa, like Abu Wail, believed and could in turn convince a core mass of AAS that AQI’s program would ultimately spell disaster for Iraqi Sunnis. Thus, FSEC worked to prevent a potential merger of the two groups.
Because Petraeus, as MNF-I commander, had the sole authority to release prisoners, FSEC would need to present its case to him at our weekly meetings. It would be a difficult decision.