Quotes of the Day
Tough talk is cheap in Baghdad. But if the new interim government in Iraq is going to prevail in what Prime Minister Iyad Allawi vows will be a "showdown" with the insurgency ravaging the country, it will need to put serious muscle behind the bluster. That's where General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, the recently named boss of the newly formed Iraqi Intelligence Service, comes in. As Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh says of him, "Terrorism is fought best with intelligence."
And violence. The burly, cigar-smoking al-Shahwani has been in the war business most of his adult life and in the spy game for more than a decade. That's one reason he was chosen for the job: he provides the hard edge the fledgling government needs to combat elusive but ruthless enemies who seem only to get stronger. If they opt for mayhem, blood and death, then al-Shahwani is more than ready to trade fire with them. "We know how to play that game," he says. He also knows the cost of playing it: Saddam killed his three sons a decade ago after uncovering a coup that al-Shahwani was helping to plot.
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Iraqis are desperate for an end to the car bombs, gun battles, kidnappings and assassinations that make life in Iraq a fearful hell. Winning "that game" is Job One for Iraq's leaders. The very way the new government took power underscores the need. In a brief, stealthy ceremony improvised two days early to thwart feared attacks timed for the official date of June 30, U.S. proconsul L. Paul Bremer handed a blue folder to Prime Minister Allawi and with it sovereign responsibility for restoring Iraq to normality. Within an hour, Bremer was gone, his quick departure emblematic of Washington's exhausted efforts to birth a model nation.
Now the Bush Administration is betting that putting Iraqis in charge of their own country will take the steam out of the armed resistance. And in Allawi they hope they have found a man tough enough to back up his inaugural words: "I say that we will hunt them down to give them their just punishment." But many Iraqis regard this second appointed regime as just another set of American puppets. "Nothing has changed," says Harith al-Dhari, head of the Association of Muslim Scholars and a Sunni sheik who some U.S. officials say is linked to insurgents. "This is a government created by the U.S. that cannot exist without the U.S. They cannot make any difference." The only solution, he says, "is to get rid of the Americans." There are currently 138,000 U.S. troops and some 20,000 Americans working on private contracts.
Even Iraqi optimists know that their leaders face an uncommonly steep challenge. Too many citizens still have no jobs, electricity is erratic, and the water is filthy. And no nation can call itself sovereign if it cannot protect its people from terrorism and crime. The interim government is heavily dependent on U.S. soldiers for security and on U.S. dollars for reconstruction. As the restructured Iraqi National Guard began appearing on Iraqi streets, insurgents attacked a unit south of Baghdad, killing six and wounding five.
As a nonelected government of unknowns and former exiles, the new men come to power with shaky authority at best. So it was perhaps fitting that they spent most of their first week trading in symbols. Putting Saddam Hussein in the dock was a dramatic way to show that the new bosses mean business, a potent reminder of the tyranny Iraqis have escaped. But the insurgents delivered a few signals of their own: on the night of the hand-off, the group holding Army Specialist Keith Maupin since April said he had been shot dead. And late in the week, rockets exploded near two Baghdad hotels housing foreigners, including many journalists. Amid all the chaos, here's how the new government hopes to turn things around:
Know Your Enemy
On paper, at least, the new government knows what it has to do. The counteroffensive starts with al-Shahwani (who, for security reasons, declines to be photographed). For months, he has been quietly recruiting and schooling Iraqi agents and expanding his network of informants. Since he took the job three months ago, at least five classes have graduated from his covert college. At the same time, he has been weighing in with his own ideas as the Prime Minister's security team shapes a battle plan. Al-Shahwani calls for a mix of aggressive tactics, reinstating Saddam-era mukhabarat intelligence professionals and carefully picking fights that can be won. With as yet no army to speak of, the government is throwing al-Shahwani's agents straight into the trenches. Their prime targets are the global terrorists and foreign jihadis who take their cues from Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian acolyte of Osama bin Laden. The new government is blunt in its approach. "Be ruthless. Either they kill you or you kill them," National Security Adviser Muwaffak al-Rubaie tells TIME. "With them, there can be no mercy." Al-Rubaie thinks al-Zarqawi made a "fatal mistake" with the wave of bombings two weeks ago that killed more than 100 Iraqis in a single day: "That alienated everyone." It could help al-Shahwani quickly recruit informants and obtain the kind of intelligence that can flush out the jihad groups infesting western Iraq. "We might be starting from zero," he tells TIME, "but we will definitely do better than the coalition because we know this country. This is our life."
Al-Shahwani brings one other advantage to the job: intimate ties to the CIA. A onetime international athlete who won a gold medal in the decathlon at a 1963 athletic meet in Jakarta, he was sent to the U.S. for Ranger training four years later. By the time of Iraq's conflict with Iran in the 1980s, he had become commander of the Iraqi Special Forces School. During the war, the combat vet led a daring helicopter-borne recapture of Iraq's strategic Kardamand mountain, held by thousands of dug-in Iranian defenders. But Saddam distrusted such displays of talent and in 1984 put the general under mukhabarat surveillance.
By 1990 al-Shahwani had fled to London. As the first Gulf War approached, he moved to Jordan and joined the opposition as an intelligence collector. Four years later, he played a leading role in a CIA plot to mount an army coup against Saddam. But the dictator's secret police penetrated the network and aborted the attempt. Al-Shahwani escaped, but among the conspirators inside the military were his three sons. They were imprisoned and eventually executed. As the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq in 2003, he joined American covert teams in the western desert, though he declines to discuss the missions. "I came back to fight for my sons," he says. "We did what was required."
Al-Shahwani's current strategy is also fraught with risk. He helped broker the truce that ended the April uprising in Fallujah by setting up the Fallujah Brigade, drawn from the insurgents themselves, to police the restive city. It has left the place a sanctuary for terrorists. But he argues that the current cease-fire, flimsy as it is, serves to keep the lid on. "If we went to war there, we could lose thousands of people," he says. "Or we can have peace and capture the insurgents as they come and go from their safe haven." That, he says, is all the government can do for now.
Act Tough
The Prime Minister is moving fast. A mere 24 hours after taking over, Allawi's Cabinet approved three far-reaching security measures. First, it reinstated the death penalty, which Bremer suspended a year ago. It drew up an amnesty plan that is meant to siphon Iraqi nationals from the foreign insurgents. And the Cabinet promulgated a new public-safety law that gives the government broad — some say undemocratic — anti-insurgency powers. The edict stops short of the martial law Allawi had earlier hinted at, but only just. In designated areas — like Fallujah — the government will be able to restrict movement temporarily, set up checkpoints, declare curfews, prohibit public gatherings, set wiretaps and search without warrants. Suspects can be detained for as long as 180 days.
The law cracks down hard on incitement of all kinds — from urging sectarian violence to rebellion, riot and noncompliance. As for Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi'ite firebrand who whipped up mayhem in the sect's holy cities after his newspaper was shut down at the end of March, al-Rubaie brushes him aside. "This is a bubble that will burst, and we will see it go away," he says. Al-Sadr has indicated he plans to form a political party to compete in coming Iraqi elections. Meanwhile he is keeping up the heat and late last week preached a sermon urging his followers to continue their resistance against U.S. troops.
Build Up the Muscle
None of those measures will matter, though, if Iraq cannot put enough of its own boots on the ground. After Bremer disbanded Saddam's 400,000-man army in May 2003, he drew up plans for a different kind of security apparatus — a slenderized 35,000-man military, a 40,000-strong Civil Defense Corps (CDC) and 90,000 police. Opting for quantity over quality, the CDC and especially the police took in droves of recruits who remain undertrained, ill equipped and unreliable.
It has been a frustrating experience for men like police colonel Dawood Salman, a 25-year veteran of Baghdad's city force. He recently requested better arms for the Bab al-Sheikh station, where 103 men share five walkie-talkies and none have bulletproof body armor. The American MPs posted as advisers to the station, he says, "laughed at us. They said the guns would be stolen by gangs and used against Americans." Yet he and his men are expected both to crack down on the rampant crime that is terrorizing the city and to face off against insurgents.
Even if the police force is soon beefed up, real security will require nothing less than a functioning military capable of large-scale operations. Allawi reportedly wanted to bring back as many as five old military divisions that would have included a sizable cadre of former Baathist officers. But Saleh said the recall of army men would be done on a "case by case" basis that would involve rehiring good professional soldiers but integrating them into new divisions that would owe their allegiance "to Iraq, not to a regime or person." The Minister of Defense has asked the U.S. to help create a 1,500-man mobile strike force that could be flown in swiftly wherever trouble breaks out.
For the time being, Iraq's leaders will have to rely largely on coalition troops to carry out counterinsurgency raids and protect police stations and other facilities that are under constant threat of attack. But now, instead of running their own provocative raids, U.S. troops are supposed to draw back inside their bases and play a supporting role. They have been directed to invent partnership arrangements with local forces so that security operations will be conducted jointly by Iraqi and U.S. commanders.
Nevertheless, men like Saleh and al-Rubaie are convinced that they can put enough of an Iraqi cast on national security to make a difference. Sending even a few Iraqi officers to the front lines, they say, could begin to change the popular perception that Iraq is caught in the cross-fire of Washington's own war on terrorism. Those who characterize the bomb blasts and gun battles as resistance to foreign occupation, says Saleh, "will lose credibility."
His government is racing against time — it has just seven months before scheduled elections to convince ordinary citizens that the anti-jihad fight is theirs. "We have to do that," says Saleh. "Convince Iraqis that this should be a war of the government and people against the terrorists." And accomplish what the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) could not. According to the New York Times, a senior CPA official who returned last week to Washington confesses that in the past 15 months, U.S. intelligence hasn't cracked the insurgency's command and control or eroded its strength. "Our intelligence on this stuff," the source said, "was never as good as it should be." Al-Rubaie says this is the one area where his people have an edge: "This is our country. We know every single alleyway." That's the basis on which al-Shahwani will try to build a successful counterinsurgency — and a truly sovereign nation.
- Johanna Mcgeary/Baghdad