The 2003 U.S. military intervention in Iraq divided the city of Baghdad into two zones, green and red, green being the safest area in the city. The actions of the occupation authorities contributed to the creation of “hot zones” within the Red Zone. Hot zones were, in Baghdadi parlance, sites of intense armed conflict. They were areas in which armed groups sought to impose their own zones of control, fighting U.S. forces or other armed groups. They often targeted civilian populations, expelling those whom they believed would challenge their identity-based claims to power and extorting money and goods from those who remained.
In this chapter, I tell the story of how insecurity was experienced by people living in Baghdad in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion—a story that shows how insecurity is inextricably linked to exclusion, which is expressed through zoning. I focus on the neighborhood of Al Ghazaliyya in the western outskirts of Baghdad, bordering on Anbar province. It became a site of intense conflict between U.S. forces and armed groups emanating from various hinterlands that earlier had provided a refuge, based on kinship ties, from the intense bombing campaign that preceded the invasion.
Broadly speaking, there were two main processes of exclusion,1 which were part of a process I describe in detail elsewhere as the systemic discarding of populations2—because they become superfluous, and possibly threatening, to political regimes that emerge from systemic transformations. First, the dismantling of the army and the de-Ba’athification undertaken by Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) established after the invasion, involved systemically discarding the majority of those who had worked in both military and civil capacities for the former regime. Second, as Shia exile groups came to dominate the Iraqi government that was supposed to replace the CPA, Sunnis were systemically discarded from many public positions as a consequence of an emerging sectarian politics. Sunnis became a marginalized minority in a system that apportioned power in Iraq on the basis of communal identity, favoring Shias and Kurds.3
The discarding process led to the rise of armed groups, most of whom engaged in violent identity politics, criminal activities, and efforts to control space in the city through the violent demographic reordering. They attempted to establish zones of control within the Red Zone, challenging the presence of U.S. forces and rival armed groups and attacking populations that they believed were likely to challenge their identity-based claims to power. The initial U.S. response was to engage in brutal military tactics under the guise of the war on terror, transforming those areas into hot zones.
The peak of the violence took place in 2006–7—a mixture of insurgency and counterinsurgency, sectarian conflict, and violent organized crime. Then came the so-called surge, an American plan to return security to the country by increasing troops and applying a shift in counterinsurgency strategy toward what was known as a population-centric approach that was relatively and surprisingly successful, considering the odds (ICG 2008). From mid-2007, some of the militias were defeated, but the effects of their violence—the separation of Baghdad into communally unmixed zones—have been frozen into place by a network of concrete walls. Today some neighborhoods remain encircled with concrete walls three meters high and with only a handful of access points guarded by police or soldiers.4 To the division of Baghdad into Red and Green Zone was added a new set of sectarian zoning arrangements.
The testimonies of Iraqis in this chapter provide case studies of how Baghdadis experienced the violent zoning in the city.5 They were collected using narrative interview methods during fieldwork in Syria in 2010 about their experiences of daily life in Baghdad between 2003 and 2010. The narratives of Adnaan, Um Ahmed, and her daughter, Baan, are featured at length in this chapter as illustrative, but not representative, case studies. Adnaan, a former military officer, was discarded by the new postinvasion order but later worked with U.S. forces in his neighborhood to counter the dangers caused by armed groups. The narratives of Um Ahmed and Baan relate the dangers of living in a hot zone in more detail. They show how they addressed those dangers and how they eventually decided that leaving the neighborhood was the safest option. Less detailed testimonies from other Baghdadis are also presented in the chapter.
The Baghdad Context
Iraq’s capital, like others, is a melting pot for the rest of the country. Before the Gulf wars, people moved there to work, study, and enjoy a life in the metropolis that was unavailable elsewhere in the country. The city was populated by rural migrants, residents from other cities, Kurds, Arabs, Christians, Mandaeans, professional classes, working classes, traders, refugees, students from Arab states that did not provide free education, and migrant laborers from Sudan and Egypt.
The 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent period of sanctions stripped the city, and the country, of most of its foreign residents. There had been a large number of Egyptian laborers, a legacy of the labor shortages from the Iran–Iraq war. But in 2000, a few remained, along with Sudanese migrant workers. There remained a population of Palestinian refugees at that time, although most had resided in the city since the 1950s and were very much a part of the city’s fabric.6 Also remaining were students from Arab states—especially neighboring Jordan—who came to Baghdad University for the low tuition fees it charged while offering a qualification that was still respected at that time. That qualification was a legacy of the huge resources that had been invested in public educational institutions over many decades.
Although the round City of Peace7 was commissioned in 758 AD by the Caliph Mansur, little remains of ancient Baghdad, compared with other cities in the region, such as Damascus and Cairo, both of which retain extensive old cities with features from ancient eras. Historic buildings still stand in Baghdad, among them Al Mustansariyya school (1234), one of the first universities in the world.8 But contemporary Baghdad, the inhabited space of the city, is modern. The population in 1947 was around 515,000 (Batatu 2004, 35, 133; Al-Qazzaz 2019). The 2004 estimate was 6.5 million.9 The vast majority of its residential units are thus twentieth-century constructions that accommodated the rapidly expanding population of the capital after 1947.
After Iraq became a republic in 1958, Iraqi architects embraced Western building designs and materials such as concrete, iron, and cement, all of which are unsuited to the intense heat of the local climate (Al-Taie et. al 2012) and increase the urban heat island effect. British architects introduced these materials to Iraq during the British Mandate (1920–32), as well as modern urban planning. As a result, houses were built in straight lines adjacent to new streets; the English-Baghdadi style saw houses built far from one another along the banks of the Tigris, in contrast to the narrow alleyways of the Ottoman era, when houses were made of clay, gypsum, and wage—materials that naturally repelled heat (Al-Taie et al 2012). In 1980 the city had a $7 billion facelift as the government prepared to host the Non-Aligned Nations conference in 1982, though the group did not convene there because of the Iran–Iraq War (Al-Qazzaz 2019). Across the city, the government built new highways, wider streets, five-star hotels, and high-rises, as well as new bridges across the Tigris (Al-Qazzaz 2019).
High-rises are present in the central areas of the city, but the residential areas outside the center are low-rise, except for the minarets of mosques that dot the urban landscape, the towers of churches in Christian neighborhoods, and the majestic date palms to which many Baghdadis feel an emotional attachment. Most residential units outside the city center are houses rather than apartments, although this is changing because of the steep increase in land prices. In poor neighborhoods, houses are small and tightly packed, some with tiny yards. In the middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods, the houses are larger and there is more space between them, owing in part to the larger gardens, almost every one of which has a date palm. The houses have flat roofs, on which Baghdadis used to sleep at night when they felt safe enough to do so.
The streets are wide, and most offer little respite from the blazing sun. Baghdad’s autumns and winters are short, and the spring and summer months are long and oppressively hot. The mean daily temperature from June to September is above 40°C with no rain.10 August temperatures regularly hit the high 40s and can reach 50°C. Before the 2003 war, and after the recent improvements to security in the city, most socializing took place after sunset for respite from the scorching heat. The heat is a strong feature of the lived experience in Baghdad.
Despite Baghdad’s being a large city, its residents maintain relations with their neighbors, ranging at the positive end of the scale from regular conversations to relations that resemble family ties. Commonly relations involve sharing food and visiting during Eid, and the children of the households play together. However, the Baghdadis I interviewed said this dynamic has changed since the “events”—the euphemism they use to describe the collection of horrors the city experienced under military occupation. As displacements took place, some neighbors protected one another’s homes, but in some cases neighbors were involved in the expulsions. There was a climate of fear and generalized violence that led to neighbors of years—sometimes decades—being replaced with new households, the extent of whose relationship to a militia was unknown. Neighbors were a source of both security and insecurity, as later examples in this chapter illustrate.
Exit from the City: Safety in the Hinterlands
Many residents expected the entire city to be unsafe during the period of bombing and the battle to dislodge Saddam Hussein in 2003. However, there was no immediate mass exodus from Iraq, despite expectations from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in the run-up to the invasion. UNHCR established emergency camps at the border regions of neighboring countries to deal with a million anticipated refugees (Marfleet & Chatty 2009). But “no substantial movements” were reported across Iraq’s international borders in March 2003, and only “small numbers” were “trickling into Jordan and Syria” in April (UNHCR 2003a and 2003b). UNHCR prepared to supervise refugee returns and reintegration until general insecurity in Iraq prompted changes to the agency’s policy statements in 2004 (Marfleet 2007, 406). The Iraqis I interviewed in Syria recalled that the major exodus was from Baghdad to the hinterlands, to escape the threat of bombing.
The city changed in the run-up to invasion. Majeed and other Baghdadis I interviewed described the changes, such as oil fires being lit by the Iraqi army. Plumes of smoke covered the sky over Baghdad, which the Iraqi army hoped would disrupt U.S. Air Force radar.11 There was an increased military presence in the city; positions were manned by the Popular Army, a reserve force that included older men. News programs reported intensive diplomatic activity with world leaders who were visiting Saddam Hussein.
Mohsin, one interviewee, observed changes in Baghdad, noting a heavily increased security presence, which indicated to him that war was imminent. He also observed Baghdadis leaving the city in large numbers for the provinces. Anwar, another interviewee, recalled how the highways leading out of Baghdad were full of cars heading to the provinces. For a time, his own street was almost deserted. Mohsin’s relatives left for an agricultural area near Ramadi, where his uncle owned land. Najmeh’s family fled to Al-Qadisiya in southern Iraq, where her relatives owned agricultural land. Anwar’s relatives left for Salah ad-Din province. Farah’s family spent two months away from Baghdad in their village of origin in northern Iraq.
When they returned to their city, Baghdadis found it divided between the Green Zone and the Red Zone. The Green Zone was a secure space equipped like an American suburb. People living there were sheltered from the lawlessness and privations that plagued the rest of Baghdad, what they referred to as the Red Zone (Chandrasekaran 2007, 18–19). Life in Baghdad’s Red Zones contrasted sharply with that of the Green Zone. Only a few months into the occupation, “security officers insisted that Baghdad was insecure. The only safe place was inside the walls. That’s why they called it the Green Zone” (Chandrasekaran 2007, 18). The U.S.-led coalition chose an already gated area in central Baghdad in which to base itself. On the western bank of the Tigris river stood a compound that included Saddam’s Republican Palace, government buildings, and villas for his aides and bodyguards. The streets were greener and cleaner, and fewer people lived there than in the rest of Baghdad (Chandrasekaran 2007, 13). Saddam had built a tall brick wall around it with three guarded entrances. The Americans expanded the neighborhood by a few blocks and “fortified the perimeter with seventeen-foot-high blast barriers made of foot thick concrete topped with coils of razor wire” (Chandrasekaran 2007, 8–13). They quickly made it into “Baghdad’s Little America”; a mural of the World Trade Center adorned one of the entrances to the main canteen, which served only American food (Chandrasekaran 2007, 8–13). The rest of Baghdad was a Red Zone of major insecurity.
Life in the Red Zone was extremely dangerous. Deaths, injuries, and destruction of infrastructure and housing were commonplace, and daily life was disrupted by the violence and the collapse of the state, in terms of essential public services and the security it provided. Many of the country’s public institutions were systematically looted. The security situation immediately after the fall of Saddam’s regime varied between different areas of Baghdad and of the country overall, but the general picture was one of decline. That decline reached a nadir from early 2006 until late 2007 after the bombing of the Shia Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra and a confluence of factors led to a state of violence in Iraq, in contradistinction to a state of law (Harling 2011). Basic services such as electricity and water supplies, the ordering of traffic, and law enforcement were no longer guaranteed by the state for some years after 2003.12 Although the city’s capacity to maintain such services had been weakened during 13 years of a harsh international blockade, Baghdadis could, for example, still expect electricity from the national grid. Mohsin’s neighborhood expected between four and six hours a day of power cuts before 2003 but received only two hours’ worth of electricity from the national grid after 2003.
Mobility was constrained by the prevailing circumstances. The climate of insecurity led people to make fewer and fewer outings after dark, and many women stopped driving because of the stories of carjacking and kidnapping. The growing number of checkpoints, concrete blast barriers, and dividing walls in the city increased journey times significantly. This was exacerbated by the reported flood of new cars arriving in the country, and the armored patrols of U.S. forces, which, said Baghdadis, after six months into the occupation began shooting at vehicles that approached too closely or too quickly.
Najmeh described her shock at the rampant crime, insecurity, and the presence of U.S. military forces on the city’s streets: “there was no going out at night at all…. It was a whole month till we got some electricity.” Shaykh Rami’s sister lived close to a government compound where vehicles were stored; they were stolen by criminal gangs. Gangs were robbing and killing residents and one another. The growing insecurity and the number of armed checkpoints meant that outings were restricted to daytime and to those of absolute necessity. This restricted travel was highly problematic for a city like Baghdad, where the weather is hot and the evenings represent a period of relative respite from the oppressive heat of the day. This was compounded by the collapse of electricity provision from the national grid in many areas. Residents were compelled to depend on private generators, either purchasing their own or subscribing to a larger street generator, although the generators were not always reliable.13 The city was thus defaced with ugly generator cables that weaved across the streets of many neighborhoods, sagging clumps of metal and plastic, an ever-present reminder of the ineptitude and corruption of successive Iraqi governments and occupation authorities. This was daily life in the occupied Red Zone.
A Hot Zone: Al Ghazaliyya and the Relationship to the Hinterlands
Al Ghazaliyya became part of the Red Zone after 2003. As Iraq descended into a state of violence and rival armed groups sought to impose their control through violent demographic transformations, Al Ghazaliyya became a hot zone.
The area was originally a mixed and sprawling residential neighborhood built on land given to government employees during the 1960s and 1970s. Its original inhabitants included officers from state security and armed forces, many of whom sold their properties soon after receiving them (Harling 2011, 53). The area was “punctured by large avenues and devoid of any deep economic or interpersonal neighborhood ties” and would have been vulnerable to a takeover by the Mehdi Army militia had it not been for its close relationship to the hinterland of Anbar, a hub of Sunni insurgent activity (Harling 2011, 53). Before the U.S. invasion, migrants from Anbar settled there, given that it was the urban setting closest to their places of origin. During escalating U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Anbar in 2004, an influx of displaced people sought refuge there; similarly, when violence escalated in Ghazaliyya, residents fled to nearby places in Anbar, such as Abu Ghraib (Harling 2011, 53).
The U.S. forces’ approach to security in Iraq was shaped by the narrative of the war on terror and an outdated military logic (Kaldor 2012). In the early years after the invasion, they used brutal counterinsurgency methods similar to those seen in Vietnam and Algeria (Kaldor 2012, 166), including
excessive use of force, widespread detention and torture and abuse as a means of extracting information, and the attempts to destroy the safe havens of the insurgents through the attacks on places such as Fallujah, Samarra, Najaf, or al-Sadr City. (Kaldor 2012, 166)
The war on terror spilled over from the hinterlands of Anbar into Al Ghazaliyya, and vice versa. Insurgent groups fought back. They used Al Ghazaliyya as a gateway into Baghdad, and consequently it “progressively fused with Anbar”; “its connection to the rural hinterland ensured the flow of resources necessary to hold off a determined Sadrist attempt to cleanse the area” (Harling 2011, 53).
The Sadrists’ loosely organized militia, the Mehdi Army, largely composed of poor Shi’ia, also had its origins in the hinterlands. Their strongholds in Baghdad were the former sarayif of Sadr City, Shu’la, Washshaash, and Fudhayliyya (Harling 2011, 49). The sarayif were once shantytowns in Baghdad with poor sanitation and populated by southern Iraqis thought to be landless peasants from Amara. The sarayif were turned into residential units with sanitation in the 1950s (Batatu 1986 2004). Their populations remained on the socioeconomic margins, and hostility toward them was mobilized in instrumental ways by the regime of Saddam Hussein during the 1990s (Haddad 2011). The Mehdi Army recruited many of its Baghdadi members from these areas. Intensive fighting in Ghazaliyya, between the Mehdi Army in neighboring Shu’la, and Sunni insurgent groups based in Ghazaliyya, turned it into a hot zone. Ghazaliyya was strategically important in the battle for Baghdad because it was the gateway to the city from Anbar. To its immediate north was the Shu’la neighborhood; a canal with crossing points separated the two. U.S. forces had outposts in Ghazaliyya but were aloof when it came to the fighting between the Mehdi Army and armed groups fighting them, and the American forces did not proactively defend civilians from militias until later during the surge.
After the attack on the sacred Shi’ia symbol, the Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra in February 2006, the Mehdi Army embarked on a campaign of sectarian cleansing, expanding from the sarayif neighborhoods to mixed and middle-class areas (Harling 2011, 49–50). The Mehdi Army’s methods were systematic. Harling (2011) noted that they established offices to ensure residents of their commitment to protecting the area, supported neighborhoods to form vigilante groups, and brought in reinforcements from other Sadrist strongholds to defend the area. Further, methodical attacks on shopkeepers aimed at disrupting the social fabric of neighborhoods, forcing residents to leave because of a lack of supplies (Harling 2011). They turned urban capabilities in on themselves. Mehdi Army forces aimed to isolate Sunni neighborhoods from each other and from the hinterlands of Anbar, particularly on the lifelines between Ghazaliyya and Al A’amiriya—another Sunni bastion in western Baghdad—and the nearby district of Abu Ghraib in Anbar (Harling 2011, 49–50).
Adnaan: Systemically Discarded
Adnaan was an officer in the Republican Guard. He lived with his family in an apartment that was part of a residential compound owned by the government in the heart of east Baghdad. It was close to the Tigris river, which meanders and divides the city between east and west. He told me that when the occupation began, he was prepared to give the United States a chance to fulfill the promises it had made about democracy and prosperity. “I thought that Iraqis might be living with the prosperity of the Gulf States, but that they would control their own destiny.” However, as an army officer, his security was immediately affected by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s dissolution of the Iraqi army, Adnaan was systemically discarded. He lost his income and became convinced that armed resistance was the solution to end the occupation, but later he changed his outlook.14
Shortly afterward, he had to leave his apartment in central Baghdad, after an exile party—the Iraqi National Accord (INA)—opened an office in the residential compound. There were six buildings in the compound, nine floors high with 38 apartments in each building, inhabited mainly by officers and their families. The threats came six months after the occupation began, on the basis that the apartments were distributed to people who were “part of the former regime.” Although some of Adnaan’s neighbors joined the INA, they warned his family that its members were looking for him because he was an army officer. “They started asking around: where is so and so? That question asked in that situation means that they are looking for you…. So I left the apartment, but my family remained.”
INA members continued to inquire about him, asking his wife where he was. Later his family rented an apartment elsewhere. In 2004 he bought a house in Al Ghazaliyya. But with no salary or pension, Adnaan earned money by using his private car as a taxi. He had lost his military position and pension through different phases of the purge of the old order, and it was a segment of the new order, the INA, that forced him to leave his home.
The legitimacy of the nascent state was violently contested and was manifested in the streets. Government ministers and employees received frequent death threats. In addition to the exclusions from purges, Adnaan suffered from the side effects of this heightened sense of insecurity resulting from the new order. One day he waited with a passenger by a mosque where he had arranged to meet someone. Little did Adnaan know that the mosque was close to the home of the then–Minister of Justice, who had received death threats. The cigarette sellers nearby, who spotted Adnaan and his passenger waiting, were from the Secret Police. Armed men in civilian clothes soon arrived and detained Adnaan and his passenger at the Serious Crime Office. He was held by Iraqi forces for four days, then detained by U.S. forces for eight months. After his release he returned to Al Ghazaliyya.
The purge of Adnaan did not end there. He later worked with U.S. forces to secure his neighborhood from criminals and terrorists. His story continues after Um Ahmed and Baan explain what it was like living in the hot zone.
Living in the Hot Zone: Um Ahmed and Baan
Um Ahmed lived with her husband, two daughters, and son in Al Ghazaliyya. Her husband worked in the information technology section of the Iraqi army, creating and operating administrative databases. He had retired some years before the invasion, partly out of concern that if he had risen too high in the ranks, someone would make problems for him because he was a Shia. He opened a bookstore in nearby Amiriya while Um Ahmed worked as a teacher.
The school her teenage daughter, Baan, attended was in a hot zone in Khadhraa’, just southeast of Ghazaliyya on what locals called “the road of death.” Along its northern and southern edges ran two important highways going eastward into central Baghdad and westward to Anbar, leading to Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and Ramadi and toward the border with Jordan and Syria. One of the highways ran along Camp Liberty, a vast U.S. military base, immediately to the south of which lies Baghdad International Airport, where U.S. forces also based themselves.
Baan’s school was on a road that ran north to south between the two highways, with residential streets branching off on both sides. Frequent clashes between U.S. forces and different armed groups took place in Al Khadraa’, which affected Baan’s school. “We had an indoor playground, and we all had to stay on the ground. I remember there were bullet holes in some of the windows.” One pupil survived a stray bullet that hit her leg. Many firefights took place around the school, prompting Baan’s parents to move her to an inferior school that was closer to their home, reducing the time spent traveling.
It was while moving from place to place that Baghdadis felt most insecure. That was the reason given to Baan for her parents’ refusal to take her to basketball sessions in the evening. “It was about survival at this time, they didn’t want to take risks for ‘play.’” But Baan’s brother, a young man who was able to drive, was allowed to venture out alone. However, for many Baghdadis at this time, leaving the house entailed too much risk for unnecessary trips. Many remained in their homes except for journeys to school and workplaces or to buy food and medicine. While driving home past the school, Um Ahmed was at the front of the row of traffic when a U.S. Humvee emerged, chasing a black Opel with armed men inside. The Humvee was firing its mounted rotating cannon at the car while chasing it through the streets, mounting the pavement before crashing into the vehicle. “They were shooting at them, until we could see it in front of us, the Humvee climbed on top of the Opel. They killed them on the spot.”
Baan often saw armed men hiding in the side streets dressed in black and carrying rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) while on the bus to and from school. One day, armed men boarded the bus and attempted to take her away because she was the only student on the bus not wearing a head scarf. The driver begged them not to, assuring them she was from a “good family”; luckily, they were persuaded. Her all-female school enforced a compulsory head scarf dress code for all students, apparently after religious fundamentalists threatened the school.
Baan also saw two corpses that had been left in the street. Baghdadis learned to leave bodies alone and to wait for the National Guard to pick them up. Armed groups often targeted those who approached corpses, even setting snipers to shoot at people who approached the corpses at sites that became dumping grounds for the dead.
Al Ghazaliyya became an extremely violent place. Baan’s brother and his friends routinely stood on the street outside their homes to socialize and observe the changes. Baan told me there was little else to do at times, especially when electricity was unreliable and their generator could not provide enough power to cool the whole house. However, as a young woman she was not permitted to spend time watching events on the street. Her brother witnessed armed men killing an entire family in their car. Armed men on the streets from Ghazaliyya pressured them to carry weapons and fight “because the people from Shu’la are coming to attack, you must be ready to defend this area.” The reference was to the Mehdi Army but also to Shias more generally.
Posters supportive of al-Qaeda in Iraq, “Omar Al Baghdadi’s Brigade,” appeared in Al Ghazaliyya, as did anti-Shia slogans. The groups marked their territory this way and struck fear into the Shia families who remained. Mortar fire was exchanged between groups in Shu’la and Al Ghazaliyya, killing a neighbor’s daughter a few roads away from Um Ahmed’s home.
One by one, the Shia families on their street left after receiving threat letters. Um Ahmed’s family were shocked to realize that in one case, it was one of their neighbors who had been leaving the notes. This action was illustrative of the puzzling dynamics of civil violence in which private and personal vendettas mix with the master cleavages of a conflict (Kalyvas 2003). “He hated Shias, but he liked my husband and our family. It was strange, he would say that he didn’t like Shias, but that we were okay.” Um Ahmed wanted to move quickly to another neighborhood, out of the hot zone, but her husband refused, believing they would be fine because they had not been threatened. However, she did not want to wait, fearing they would have to leave hastily if they were threatened and had to abandon all of their belongings.
There were four or five Shia families on their street. When Um Ahmed saw the last family leaving, her husband finally agreed that they could go. That they had to wait for her husband’s permission was telling of the power imbalance in gender relations—he had the veto. At times I felt that she was making a point to her husband while telling me this story: he was the “ghostly audience,” not physically present but strongly present in the narrator’s conscience (Langellier 2001,174, in Andrews 2007, 17). The point was that Um Ahmed’s actions saved the family, and her husband’s inaction put the family at risk.
In order to relocate securely, Um Ahmed devised a plan to move in secret. She told me that her son had witnessed a Shia family’s belongings being burned as they moved out of Al Ghazaliyya. She decided to pack their belongings and furniture gradually. At night they loaded the car. In the morning, after driving Baan to school, they drove to Baan’s grandfather’s house and unloaded the belongings; they completed the process after ten days. What remained were large items of furniture and white goods. To move those items, they employed a driver who specialized in taking the belongings of Shia families out of Al Ghazaliyya to other neighborhoods.
Although one neighbor made them feel insecure, others helped and protected their home while it was empty. Across Baghdad, participants reported that empty houses were seized by armed groups to house “their” people—those who had been displaced from elsewhere—or to store weapons. At times the police would break into empty houses to check for explosives.
Armed men came to Um Ahmed’s home when it was empty and demanded that their neighbors tell them if the house “belonged to Shias.” Their neighbors denied this and the armed men left, believing Sunnis owned it. Elsewhere in Al Ghazaliyya and Shu’la, Baghdadis temporarily swapped homes with others to protect each other’s properties. Um Ahmed told me that Sunni and Shia families temporarily exchanged houses by mutual agreement to safeguard each other’s properties and lives.
After staying temporarily with relatives, Um Ahmed chose to live in an apartment close to her place of work in a relatively safe area away from the main road. It was a mostly Sunni neighborhood where several Shia families lived. Her husband was not comfortable with the idea, fearing further displacement. However, she persuaded him and created the impression for their new neighbors that they were Sunnis from Mosul. Their family name was attributed to both sects, and Um Ahmed made sure to speak loudly in Mosul dialect with her sister, which added to the illusion. Her identification card was issued in a part of Iraq associated with having a Sunni population, and this helped maintain the idea that they were Sunnis.
The Sons of Iraq in Al Ghazaliyya
Meanwhile, in Al Ghazaliyya, violence continued. Adnaan recounted how he and a number of others—former officers, doctors, and engineers—approached U.S. forces in one of the outposts that had been set up in Al Ghazaliyya. They proposed ways to improve security through the creation of a civilian force to monitor the streets for suspicious activity.
The Iraqi government rejected the proposal, considering it to be a militia. At this point the government would allow only its own militias to be present in the field. Adnaan believed the government feared that those militias might work against the government in the near future and “wreck its project of displacement, of separation.” Soon after, U.S. forces provided the men with salaries as well as night-vision and photographic equipment. The men used cameras to collect evidence of events when U.S. forces did not believe their accounts. The American forces also provided uniforms, which Adnaan designed. “We called ourselves the Sons of Iraq.” The project was formalized in July 2006. The men had no helmets or bullet-proof armor. After earning the trust of U.S. forces, Adnaan and his colleagues were permitted to carry a small number of rifles for self-defense.
The benefits of the security project were quickly felt as the Sons of Iraq group helped U.S. forces capture Mehdi Army and al-Qaeda groups infiltrating Al Ghazaliyya. Each street had a checkpoint, and the militia and criminal groups ceased operations in the area, knowing they would likely be caught. With security returning to the area, the Iraqi government and U.S. forces were able to provide services. They started cleaning up the area, building schools, and fixing the water delivery, electricity, and sewage systems, among other actions. Adnaan said that businesses started opening and some displaced families returned to their homes. The success of the project surprised everyone, according to Adnaan, who also said everyone involved was afraid of it at first. After its success he was visited by the U.S. ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan and by U.S. and Iraqi generals, including David Petraeus. The Iraqi minister of defense visited to show the world that on the whole, things were getting better.
The sense of security was short-lived for Adnaan and his Sons of Iraq unit as they were soon targeted by the security forces of the nascent Iraqi state.
The Purge Continues
Adnaan and the Sons of Iraq unit continued working successfully with U.S. forces until 2009, when operations were handed over to the Iraqi government. “I was immediately arrested by the Iraqis…. Seven allegations including terrorism and murder.” The Americans intervened to fast-track his case to court, where it emerged that the only evidence was a 2006 report written against him by a “secret informer.”
Adnaan’s men were harassed by Iraqi forces, expelled from their sleeping quarters, and accused of terrorism. Iraqi forces frequently raided the Sons of Iraq’s quarters in Al Ghazaliyya where his men rested when off duty, smashing furniture each time they “searched for explosives.” Iraqi forces arrested many of them.
Iraqi Special Operations raided Adnaan’s home at 1:30 in the morning; men with rifles broke into his home and handcuffed and interrogated him in front his wife and children for several hours, and searched the house for explosives. They found nothing incriminating, then said that they had actually been looking for someone else and left. Adnaan contacted U.S. forces for assistance but was told they could no longer intervene in internal Iraqi matters. “That was a signal to me that it was over.”
Adnaan rented a house in Baghdad in a location he disclosed to none of his men, for the sake of everyone’s security, and secretly moved into it with his family at the end of Ramadan in 2009. His men phoned him that evening: Iraqi Special Operations had broken into his Ghazaliyya home again, smashed the quarters of the Ghazaliyya Sons of Iraq, and arrested all of its members. They had asked specifically for Adnaan and his whereabouts. When Adnaan contacted the Iraqi army in Ghazaliyya for clarification, they said they were looking for someone else and he had nothing to worry about. “That was the end of it as far as I was concerned. I cut off all communications with them and changed my number.”
With his family, Adnaan left the city for the safety of the hinterlands, to Salah ad-Din province, where his brother lived. In March 2010, a friend in the mukhabarat (intelligence) services contacted his brother to warn him that orders were issued to arrest Adnaan and that he should leave the country. Adnaan moved to Syria shortly afterwards He was purged by the new order for belonging to the old one and deemed a threat to the “new” state-building project taking place in Iraq.
The U.S. military intervention had multiple tremendous implications for security in the city. The immediate effects of zoning were felt across Baghdad, most of which had become a dangerous Red Zone, in contradistinction to the secured enclave of the Green Zone. The exclusionary processes associated with the postinvasion period produced armed groups whose members contested the new political order and some of whom engaged in sectarian and criminal activities, with the main victims being civilian populations. Militias attempted to impose their own control over areas in the Red Zone—the Green Zone was almost impenetrable—contesting the authority of U.S. forces and of rival militias.
In places where this array of armed forces clashed violently for control, neighborhoods became hot zones, sites of intense armed conflict within the Red Zone. Al Ghazaliyya was one such neighborhood, and I have shown how specific Baghdadis managed the threats that pervaded these highly dangerous zones within a wider danger zone. I have also shown the implications of the hinterlands for Baghdadis’ security, before and during the invasion, and argued that the war on terror, as practiced by U.S. forces through brutal military tactics in the hinterlands of Anbar, spilled over into Baghdad in the gateway neighborhood of Al Ghazaliyya.
A tentative conclusion might be that security is achieved only through bottom-up inclusion and engagement, noting, of course, the catastrophic consequences that the invasion had for security in the first place. The most stable period for Al Ghazliyya under the occupation was during the surge, when American forces stationed in Baghdad responded to locally based initiatives, such as that proposed by Adnaan, to protect their neighborhoods. However, these limited achievements were not sustained, and the exclusionary sectarian practices of the Iraqi government after 2009 completely negated this approach. Although this is not part of the story told in this chapter, the continuance of systemic discarding helps to explain the subsequent rise of new extremist groups, most notably ISIS.
This chapter was supported by a number of generous research grants. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the University of East London, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, and the European Research Council for their support. I also thank Mary Kaldor, Saskia Sassen, Ruben Anderson, Sobie Ahmed, Mary Martin, Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Florian Weigand, and Johannes Rieken for their comments and feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. I am also grateful to to all the Iraqi participants for sharing their stories of life under occupation.
1. The transformation of the Iraqi state brought about by so-called regime change produced numerous forms of exclusion, often with lethal consequences. See Ali 2011.
3. This was amplified when many Iraqi Sunnis appeared to boycott the 2005 national elections, protesting—understandably—that parliamentary elections should not take place under foreign occupation.
4. Many blast walls were removed during the spring of 2019, opening up roads in the city, although some neighborhoods remain walled.
5. The names of participants have been changed to protect their anonymity.
6. Many were forced to leave Iraq after they were targeted by the nascent Iraqi state for alleged and, in some cases fabricated, involvement in terrorist attacks. See Zaman 2011.
12. Today, traffic police have restored some semblance of order to the city’s roads, and security has been much improved since the defeat, for now, of the so called Islamic State. However, electricity from the national grid is still limited to a few hours per day, and residents rely on subscriptions to privately run neighborhood generators of varying reliability.
13. The documentary film by Rashed Radwan and Carmen Marques, Generator Man, about the owner of a neighborhood generator in Sadr City, shows one example of this arrangement.
14. Adnaan did not say whether he was directly involved in armed resistance.
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