In August 2006, the 2nd Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division arrived in Mahmoudiya, a city and district of half a million people just south of Baghdad. In good times, Mahmoudiya is known as the Gateway to Baghdad. In bad times, such as 2006, it’s part of the Triangle of Death.
The city itself is mostly Shiite, while the outlying rural areas are largely Sunni. Before 2003 its only real industries were a weapons factory and a weapons storage facility, both of which were picked clean soon after the U.S. invasion. Extremists in both religious sects were fighting each other and the Americans, and the brigade would suffer one of the highest casualty rates in Iraq over the next 15 months: Fifty-two of its 3,500 members died during the deployment.
Lt. Col. John Laganelli, the brigade’s deputy commander, said that although he and his troops had to focus on the short-term requirements of the shooting war that they were waging with insurgents every day, he kept his eye on the longer-term goal of increasing overall security in the area, with the aim of restoring commerce and returning life to normal. “But you can’t increase security without those people who are threatening you, Sunni and Shiite, deciding to work with you,” he said.
The mayor of Mahmoudiya, a Shiite, wanted to bring about some sort of reconciliation, but he faced two problems. First, any perceived alliance with the Iraqi government or the Americans was an invitation to assassination. Second, the pivotal Sunni sheiks had taken refuge in Jordan, and no deal would work in Mahmoudiya without their support. “The sheiks were sending one son to a reconciliation meeting and another son to an Al Qaeda in Iraq meeting, just to cover their bases,” said Lt. Col. Joseph Cantlin, deputy head of the provincial reconstruction team embedded with the brigade. The PRT’s representative from the U.S. Agency for International Development suggested that the team ask the U.S. Institute of Peace for help.
USIP has 10 employees in Iraq, some American and some Iraqi, plus a network of 18 trained Iraqi facilitators that it hopes to increase to 118. It’s the institute’s first immersion project since its 1990s efforts in the Balkans. USIP staffers had briefly considered doing a full-blown Balkans-like project in Afghanistan in 2001 but decided against it after realizing that most of the people they would need to work with there were illiterate warlords. The institute has no problem working with warlords, but most of its tools are based on written texts.
Iraq, however, has an educated, literate society. USIP staff members had worked on Iraq before the invasion, writing prescient briefs outlining deficiencies in the Bush administration’s postwar plans and helping the State Department with its Future of Iraq project, which was ultimately ignored. In February 2003, Robert Perito, a specialist in civilian policing, gave a presentation to the Defense Department’s Advisory Board on the breakdown in order and the looting that would occur in Baghdad without a police presence. When the situation fell apart as predicted, USIP decided to see what it could do in Iraq.
At the time, the institute had a $16 million budget. It asked Congress for an additional $10 million over two years for its Iraq program. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, a longtime appropriations champion of USIP’s, and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, then-chairman of the Appropriations Committee, supported the request. By early 2004, the institute had its Baghdad office, where it started training the Iraqi facilitators and mediators, and creating education materials. USIP also provided nearly 800 Iraqi officials with a decision-making training program that it had developed in the Balkans.
In 2007, Cantlin asked Rusty Barber, USIP’s chief of party in Baghdad, for help in Mahmoudiya. According to Cantlin and Laganelli, the institute was a known quantity there because of its work in the Balkans. “The Iraqi senior leaders in Mahmoudiya knew about [USIP’s] work after the Dayton Accords,” Cantlin said.
Barber met with the mayor and other local Iraqis, including a Sunni shopkeeper who had lost his livelihood to Shiite extremists and was grimly determined to find an end to the violence. The group decided that it needed to meet with the sheiks who were living in Jordan to enlist their support. The mayor formed a delegation of Sunnis and Shiites composed of civilians, sheiks, and representatives from the Iraqi government and military. USIP, which underwrote the trip and sent four of its staffers along, helped cut through the red tape: The institute set up a meeting for the mayor with the Iraqi ministry of dialogue and reconciliation, and got the American Embassy to intervene with Jordan when Amman declined to issue visas.
At the recommendation of Daniel Serwer, who runs USIP’s Center for Post-Conflict Peace and Stability Operations, the delegation decided against a group meeting with the Iraqi sheiks in Jordan in favor of individual sessions. “I just thought it was going to be a hell of a lot easier to win these people over one by one than if they had to expose themselves in front of others,” Serwer said. “The picture people have of diplomacy and peace-building is of big meetings and microphones, but 95 percent of the work [is done] before you get to that meeting and after you leave it.”
As a result, the sheiks agreed to return to Iraq for a three-day reconciliation meeting slated for October 2007. The 2nd Brigade Combat Team provided funding, logistics, and security for the conference. USIP worked with local Iraqis to draw up an agenda and participant list; established an American support team composed of embassy staff, members of the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team, and U.S. military officers from coalition headquarters; and briefed a close aide to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
When the conference took place, however, American Embassy personnel and military officials stayed away until the last day while USIP-trained facilitators ran the show.
Normally, Iraqi tribal meetings involve sheiks taking turns making speeches. Not this one: Before the meeting began, USIP, its facilitator teams, and the Mahmoudiya locals studied the sheiks—18 Sunnis and 13 Shiites—individually and assigned them to working groups focused on governance, security, economic development, social well-being, rule-of-law, and society. The point of the groups was to get the power brokers to set goals and figure out how to achieve them.
On the first day, for example, the security working group’s facilitator, a former Iraqi army officer named Raid, asked each member to identify three security problems in Mahmoudiya. On the second day, he asked each attendee to describe what he wanted Mahmoudiya to look like in three years. The facilitator then listed the security problems on one side of a wall and the visions of the future on the other, and asked the group how to reconcile the two. At the end of the day, the working groups discussed their findings with one another and developed a final statement of goals and actions acceptable to everyone. On the third day, the media and American and Iraqi government officials were invited in to observe the final working-group presentations and the signing of the statement.
“Conflict was inevitable,” Barber’s final report noted drily. At one meeting, two sheiks got into a shouting match after one accused the other of murdering members of his tribe; facilitators and other sheiks separated the men, who settled back down to work soon after. Later, an Iraqi general grabbed the microphone and threatened to arrest the sheiks immediately if they didn’t start cooperating with the government. An American Army officer intervened, and the facilitators were able to get the discussion back on track.
After the conference, two Shiite sheiks stepped forward to offer safe passage home for two displaced Sunni tribes, and Sunni sheiks agreed to rebuild a Shiite mosque destroyed by violence. A group of Sunni and Shiite sheiks staged a walk-through of downtown Mahmoudiya to demonstrate that it was safe and to encourage residents to return. And the Iraqi High Judicial Council agreed to send a circuit judge to the district to hear a backlog of cases.
Participants say that USIP’s involvement was critical for several reasons. First, its people knew what needed to be done and how to do it. “USIP brought in a level of expertise and experience in this type of thing,” Laganelli said. “They did it a lot better than we could.”
“They were seen as impartial, not representing the U.S. government agenda but seen as wanting to help the peace.”--—Lt. Col. Joseph Cantlin
Second, USIP had access to American and Iraqi government officials that the brigade combat team and provincial reconstruction team didn’t have. Third, it presented a neutral civilian face. “Just the fact that they were coming to the table helped,” Cantlin said. “They were seen as impartial, not representing the U.S. government agenda but seen as wanting to help the peace.”
And fourth, the institute worked through local Iraqis first. “They’re not U.S. government and not the government of Iraq,” said Denise Marsh, head of governance for the Baghdad PRT. “They seem to best represent the voice of the grassroots folk.”
PRTs in other parts of Iraq have asked Barber to try to replicate the Mahmoudiya model in their areas; he’s visiting them now to see what USIP can do.
Raid and the other USIP-trained facilitators are working together on their own reconciliation projects both with and without the institute’s help. “The provincial reconstruction teams and the embassies are dealing with just the political parties, with people you can say are working in important organizations,” Raid said. “But USIP is dealing with normal people, maybe with authority, maybe not.”
Raid asked to be quoted using his full name, but National Journal declined out of concern for his security. “I cannot wait until the terrorists and bad guys give me permission to work for my country,” he said. “I have kids. I need them to see the future.”
He’s terrified that America will leave Iraq soon, Raid said. As the interview ended, he asked if he could add a message: “We’re just starting now. Don’t leave us alone. We are afraid that one day we will learn through the media that the Americans have decided to leave. We are just starting now. We need you to give your hand and help us move for the future.”
This article appeared in the Saturday, April 26, 2008 edition of National Journal.
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