I fought for my land against the US. Now I fight alongside them

An Iraqi tells our correspondent of his long and violent journey to the side of the alliance forces

As a loyal officer under Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi major never imagined that one day he would become an insurgent, but when Iraq fell five years ago he was left bitter, jobless and desperate to drive the invading forces out.

“I saw my country collapse right in front of my eyes,” said Abu Abdullah, who has since orchestrated countless attacks against the US military, spent time in the notorious Abu Ghraib detention centre and briefly joined forces with al-Qaeda.

Recalling the invasion, he told The Times: “I felt as though my freedom was being snatched from me. It was one of the darkest moments of my life.” In many ways Mr Abdullah’s story is the story of the insurgency in Iraq, where the changing allegiances of Sunni Arab fighters has dictated the pace of a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 2003.

He, like many Sunni Arab officers and other Saddam supporters, resorted to guerrilla warfare to kill better-equipped US soldiers but gradually found that his nationalistic resistance had fallen under the control of the militant Islamists of al-Qaeda.

Appalled at the cruelty of attacks sponsored by al-Qaeda, Mr Abdullah switched sides recently and is cooperating, albeit reluctantly, with the US military as part of a grassroots security drive that has spread across Iraq.

Five years ago, as Major Abdullah, he was holed up in the Iraqi city of al-Kut, south of Baghdad, listening to the sound of American combat aircraft dropping bombs on buildings and the thunder of invading tanks. “When the infantry entered al-Kut most of my soldiers stopped fighting. They realised that the US Army was much more powerful than ours,” he said. “We pulled out and returned to Baghdad. All my soldiers vanished. It was over.”

Mr Abdullah, a married father of one, drove his family to his parents’ house in Samarra, a predominantly Sunni Arab city north of the Iraqi capital, which eventually became a haven for al-Qaeda.

With the former army disbanded, he spent the next year at home defeated and with nothing to do – until he started meeting other former army officers at coffee shops in town.

“We started to discuss things and develop serious ideas. Eventually we agreed to form groups and start fighting,” Mr Abdullah said in a late-night interview at a Baghdad hotel, dressed in a maroon and blue tracksuit.

They were well prepared to begin an insurgency because, three months before the invasion, Iraqi military commanders had instructed all soldiers and officers to receive specific training in street fighting. Recruiting young men locally from April 2004, he started a branch of al-Tawhid wal Jihad, one of four main Sunni Arab insurgent groups that ultimately combined to become al-Qaeda in Iraq.

They had an abundance of rockets, guns, ammunition and bomb-making material, thanks to the many old Iraqi army warehouses dotted around the country that had been abandoned.

“Our objective was clear: to remove the occupying forces. We did not launch attacks in urban areas, just the outskirts of towns and on the main highways,” Mr Abdullah said, emphasising that his group also never targeted Iraqis.

They operated north of Baghdad up to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, firing rockets at American bases, planting roadside bombs against military convoys and, on occasion, following up with an armed ambush.

The first mission that Mr Abdullah planned, against a base in Tikrit, was a bit of a failure because he miscalculated the distance for a barrage of rockets to be fired. He became much more accurate over time.

“We had many successful operations,” he said, with a knowing smile when asked if he had killed any American soldiers. Mr Abdullah says that he lost 26 fighters. Over a ten-month period his men carried out attacks twice a day. Using their superior knowledge of the terrain they would creep down dirt tracks and hide in farm houses. “The Americans would never know where we were coming from.” Sharing intelligence at meetings with other insurgency groups, he recalled how praise was heaped on any fighter who pulled off a complex mission.

“That was motivational. When you heard of someone else’s successes you wanted to go out and do something better,” said Mr Abdullah, a tall, well-built man who used to be a boxer and is a martial arts expert.

The former officer’s attacking spree was halted when he was arrested by US troops driving away from the scene of his biggest mission – blowing up five American lorries with 12 roadside bombs as they travelled towards the once-restive city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, in March 2005.

“The soldiers told us that they were going to execute us by pushing us out of their helicopter. I thought to myself that I was just defending my country and if you want to kill me then go ahead,” he said.

Thrown into Abu Ghraib, the US-run detention centre that become infamous after American soldiers were pictured humiliating Iraqi prisoners, Mr Abdullah said that he was kept in a box-like cell that measured a metre square.Forced to sit squashed up because of his large frame, he said that he was held in there for 29 days, allowed out for only four hours a day.

He also claimed that he was beaten and interrogated repeatedly. “In one of the worst moments, which I will never forget for as long as I live, I was handcuffed to a chair and a female soldier hit me across the head with a metal pipe. You might be able to see the scar,” he said, touching his hair-line. “I started to bleed and she hit me on the arm, breaking it. They left me for a week without medical attention. As I experienced all of this I kept thinking about two things: my son and my country. I felt really sad for my country.”

Mr Abdullah, who said that he never admitted to any crime, spent three months in Abu Ghraib before being moved to Camp Buka, a larger detention centre in southern Iraq, where he said that conditions were much better.

After another six months he was released, but his time in captivity left him even more embittered towards the US forces and he vowed to return to the resistance. “When I arrived back in Samarra I found that a lot of things had changed. My group had become part of al-Qaeda and was killing members of the Iraqi security forces and even civilians,” he said.

Most of the people he had fought with had fled to Syria, being replaced by hired guns who were working for an influx of new commanders, many of them foreign. Mr Abdullah said that other Arab countries and Iran were helping to fund the operations.

Despite many misgivings, he rejoined the group at the end of 2005 but quickly regretted it. “I found out that my cousin had been killed because he had refused to join.” Mr Abdullah was also shown footage of two policemen being beheaded.

“I could not tolerate or accept how they were working, so in the end I fled to Syria. I felt quite disappointed with the way that the resistance had become.” After only a week Mr Abdullah returned to Iraq and took his family to Baghdad, where he used his car to work as a taxi driver. Leaving al-Qaeda meant that his life was in constant danger. Twice gunmen tried to shoot him and he was forced to move house four times.

Still opposed to the US military and increasingly against the Shia-led Government of Iraq, Mr Abdullah dreamt of starting up a fresh resistance. But in late 2007 he was approached by two uncles and a cousin who had joined a new security movement, which was established by Sunni Arab tribes who had turned against al-Qaeda in Anbar province, once the heart of the insurgency. The concept – arming local people and charging them with security for their neighbourhood – appealed to Mr Abdullah even though the group’s members, which number at least 90,000, were under the payroll of the US military.

“I started to feel that the Americans were better than the Iraqi Government at that moment. I still look at them as occupiers. My feelings towards them have not changed. But my main concern is to stop the Iraqi people’s suffering,” he said. Agreeing to help to set up branches of the so-called Awakening movement in Samarra and other towns north of Baghdad, Mr Abdullah attended his first meeting with the US military just over a week ago – something that he had resisted for months.

“When American soldiers turn up I feel very sad for myself, my country and the fact that I have to sit down and deal with them. I feel like wolves are eating my flesh during the meeting,” he said.

Mr Abdullah, however, believes that the largely Sunni Arab Awakening groups lack support from the Government, which has pledged to find all members jobs in the regular army or police or a civilian role.

Asked what would be the outcome if the Government failed to create new employment opportunities, the former insurgent responded: “An uprising.” As for his future, Mr Abdullah just wants security for his son, now 6, adding: “I am determined to raise him to be a fighter like me.”

“We promise God that the dog Bush will not enjoy peace of mind and that his army will not have a good life as long as our hearts are beating.”

(Just some meandering thoughts)

There was no loss of life, limb, or eyesight at Abu Gharib; stories to that end are unfounded and have been factually disproven every time they were investigated seriously. After Abu Gharib exploded in the media there were numerous in depth investigations of allegations made by certain former detainees which when checked up on, didn’t check out as accurate. However, detainee abuse sure did happen. The only deaths (outside of medical reasons) at Abu Gharib under our control were when Iraqi’s fired mortar rounds into the compound and killed their own!

As you correctly state, after the fact all of the prisoners ever interned there claimed to be abused and one thing must be kept in mind, they were there for a reason. Even this guy admits he was a terrorist, flat out.

Our biggest problem, and I'm not kidding, is that we tried to push things along “to fast” dropping the curfew, drawing down troops in Iraq, handing over authority to Iraqi units before they were ready....... We were trying to rush things, and in the end, it will take longer, and our attempt to be benevolent didn't help either. These people are largely stupid. They know how to build a pipe bomb, but have no clue what we are about, how they're being played by Iran, militia leaders like Sadr, etc. We tried to be “Mr. Nice Guy,” and in the end the media doesn’t care, most Iraqi’s don’t perceive that, etc. Many of these people we caught and knew 100% were terrorists we eventually let go, and frankly they should have been hanged. Like after the civil war, WWII etc., these sorts of people are dealt with like that. Instead we played a game of catch and release, and some of the dudes we caught and let go ended up going right back to what they were doing before, blowing things up, popping off RPGs at us, or sniping from some concealed location. This is another ironic aspect of Abu Gharib. Had we simply hanged or used the firing squad to rid ourselves of these people; the public outcry would probably have been less.

Realize that the “legend” of Abu Gharib dates back to pre Iraq war, something no one in the media really discloses or puts in context. This matters! Abu Gharib use to be a prison where inmates were executed and tortured by the thousands per year. They had a twin guillotine there where they would chop off people’s heads in sequence, so you could see the other guys head come off right before yours goes; great for father son combo executions, yea they did that! The reason why this matters is because this place already had a reputation, and when news broke of the abuse at Abu Gharib by US troops, the average Iraqi connects the dots. Going even a step further, although a moot point now, many of the pictures that were later released by the media are Iraqis on the torture devices which during the Saddam regime really were used! We more or less got the infamy for the abuse dished out by Saddam which our media never talks about. US troops never electrocuted anyone there, but they did hook Iraqi’s up to the pre-existing setup and took pictures.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satar_Jabar That picture went around the world. But here’s the irony, he never was electrocuted, but people were electrocuted in that spot during the Saddam regime. It would have been as if some US soldier takes German detainees after WWII and shoves them into a gas chamber, but never gasses them and takes pictures of them while in there scared $hitless. Later he gets punished for abusing them and the assumption by the whole world is that US soldiers gassed people. Does that make any sense?

What happened was wrong, but the popular perception of what happened at Abu Gharib is wrong as well. Why this perception exists is obvious. After the story broke the media took off running, they led people to believe that far more than there was happened, the spin meisters engaged, it became politicized (As a tool to score politically and attack the opposition, i.e. Bush, Rumsfeld etc.), foreign media especially saw this as their Schadenfreude argument to justify their anti-war position. Abu Gharib became far more than it was, even in the minds of the Iraqi’s, and that definitely damaged our communications with the people, whom we're trying to get on our side.

This particular piece of crud does not represent every Iraqi that is now fighting against Al Qaeda.

This guy does not hide his anti Americanism. He’s proud and boastful about it. If all or even most of the Iraqis now fighting by our side against Al Qaeda were like this, we would know about it.

This one only knows one thing...that he can’t stand the way the terrorists operate. Their savagery against the people where they take over is so horrible that this guy can’t stomach it. That’s the lesson from this. That’s why the situation has turned around for us among the Sunnis.

The lesson is NOT that this one guy represents every Iraqi who fights on the same side with us.

This guy, among other things, is a total dunce. He says he wants his young son to be safe and secure, then turns around and says he’s raising his son to be a fighter like himself. This guy is always having to fight. He can’t take success, or yes, much less peace, for an answer. He demands an enemy so he can spend his life fighting somebody.

Whereas, many Iraqis would like the fighting to stop and they want to engage in normal work and normal business. Petraeus knows this and is working this angle to bring about more normalcy, commerce and every day life in these formerly violence torn areas. Where this normalcy is restored, you see Iraqis from other parts of Iraq and who had fled to Jordan or Syria, returning in droves to live in the normal conditions.

THAT is the majority, not this imbecile.

I leave it to Petraeus and his fellow ground commanders to know what is going on there.

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