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Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

A sketch of a street in Iraq by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad from A Stranger in Your Own City

In July 2017, days after the Iraqi army crushed the last ISIS holdouts in the northern city of Mosul and effectively ended the Islamist extremists three-year occupation of large parts of the country, I drove south from Fallujah along the Euphrates River to observe the fallout from the conflict. ISIS had controlled territory as far south as Jurf al-Sakhar, a town surrounded by date palm groves around sixty miles south of Fallujah that I passed on the way. The Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces), a coalition of Shia militias, some of them financed and armed by Iran, had expelled ISIS fighters from Jurf al-Sakhar in October 2014 after a two-day battle, and later from all of Babil Governorate, but their success had come at a heavy cost: portraits of hundreds of Hashd al-Shaabi martyrs adorned a large mural outside police headquarters in Hillah, the capital of Babil. It was a faster victory than we had expected, the governorates police chief told me. He was deeply suspicious of the areas Sunnis, who he claimed had allowed ISIS militants to hide among them.

Since then the Hashd al-Shaabi have become the most powerful military force in Iraq. Along the Euphrates, groups of their fighters have carved out an autonomous enclave, which includes Jurf al-Sakhar. They have kept the area off limits to government officials and the Iraqi army and chased away much of the Sunni minority. Lately, though, as the effects of the IsraelHamas war radiate throughout the Middle East, the Hashd al-Shaabi have focused their attention on a different enemy: the United States. Since October 2023, militant Shia groups with close ties to Iran, responding to American support for Israel, have fired about 160 rockets and missiles at military installations in Iraq and Syria used by US troops to pursue a handful of remaining ISIS insurgents encamped in the desert. In November the US bombed two positions in Jurf al-Sakhar, killing eight members of Kataib Hezbollah, a part of the Hashd al-Shaabi coalition backed by the Quds Force, a branch of Irans Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that equips and trains Shia militias across the Middle East. One source told The New York Times last December that the enclave had become a forward operating base for Iran.

Then, in late January, the ongoing skirmishes between the US and Iran-backed militias took a dangerous turn. A Shia group believed to be Kataib Hezbollah launched an armed drone at a remote US outpost known as Tower 22 in Jordan, near the Syrian border, killing three American soldiers and injuring more than thirty. Reuters reported in February that Esmail Qaani, the commander of the Quds Force, rushed to Baghdad in late January, met representatives of several armed Shia groups, and urged them to refrain from further attacks, and Kataib Hezbollah announced a suspension of its operations. Around midnight on February 3, however, the Biden administration sent B1 bombers to destroy eighty-five targets in Syria and Iraq, including drone bases, weapons storage facilities, and other Hashd al-Shaabi and Quds Force military infrastructure. The attacks left dozens dead. As Iran considers how to respond to the US raid, a wider Middle East conflict, with Iraq at the center of it, remains a possibility.

The story of Iraqs disintegration has been told repeatedly over the past two decades, from the late Washington Post and New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadids Night Draws Near: Iraqs People in the Shadow of Americas War (2005) to James Verinis They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate (2019), an eyewitness account of ISISs last stand in the country. In A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle Easts Long War, an extraordinary account of the sectarian animosities, waves of violence, and foreign meddling that have convulsed his homeland since the US invasion in 2003, the Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad goes further than anyone else in documenting its bloody history. For twenty years, as a reporter for The Guardian and as a photographer, he has moved back and forth across Iraqs sectarian divide, earning the trust of Sunni insurgents and foreign jihadists, interviewing fighters from one of the Shia militias, the Mahdi Army, locked in a civil war with the Sunnis, and living with Iraqi special forces as they battled ISIS suicide bombers and meted out summary executions in Mosul.

Abdul-Ahad was one of the first reporters to cover Hashd al-Shaabi, which rose to prominence months after ISIS fighters invaded Iraq from Syria in late 2013. Following the collapse of the 250,000-man Iraqi army, ISIS captured Mosul, Iraqs second- largest city, and advanced almost to Baghdad. Abdul-Ahad describes a meeting at Kataib Hezbollahs compound in July 2014, where he encountered a disciplined and enthusiastic corps of fighters commanded by a turbaned cleric in a flowing black robe whose office was adorned with a portrait of Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and who saw himself as a holy warrior engaged in a religious conflict unfolding across the Middle East. The cleric, Abdul-Ahad observed, was the apotheosis of a new reality in Iraq set in motion by the US invasion:

A decade after the collapse of the [Iraqi] state, and the continuing civil wars, the sect was no longer simply a set of religious beliefs and cultural practices, it came to substitute for the national identity. The sect was their country, and serving it was a patriotic duty for those men. A new sectarian nationalism had emerged.

Born in 1975 to a middle-class family in Baghdad, Abdul-Ahad grew up under the repressive and stultifying rule of Saddam Hussein, who squandered the countrys oil wealth in an eight-year war against Iran in the 1980s that left hundreds of thousands of soldiers dead on both sides. On TVthey showed footage of trenches piled with the mangled and burned corpses, he writes about his earliest memories. We were told that these were the bodies of Iranian soldiers; mowed down, electrocuted or gassed. After each battle

we watched the Leaderon TV, gathering his generals in the gilded hall of one of his many opulent palaces. He took the Medals of Courage. As he pinned them to the generals chests, you could see them suck in the well-fed bellies that bulged through crisp military uniforms.

A succession of disasters followed: Saddams invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the Iraqi armys defeat by US-led forces, the imposition of crippling sanctions, and the countrys economic collapse.

Abdul-Ahad was living in a dreary one-room apartment in Baghdad, struggling to survive as an architect on a few dollars a month, when the US launched its shock and awe bombing campaign on March 17, 2003. Days later he watched a contingent of US marines roll into Firdos Square and, with a handful of Iraqi civilians, tear down the statue of Saddam Hussein. While welcoming the downfall of a dictator he despised, he was apprehensive about what would come next. Self-taught in English, mostly from watching the BBC, he began working as a translator for one of the many Western reporters who had flocked to Iraq to witness the countrys liberation. (I was one of them.) Soon he began selling his photographs to news agencies and then reporting for The Guardian as the US occupation devolved into chaos and the country began to split along religious lines. Large numbers of Shia exiles were returning, driven by a sense of madhloumiyahistorical injusticeand determined to grab power from the Sunnis, who despite being a minority had dominated Iraq under Saddams rule and who turned increasingly to armed resistance to preserve their privileges. A belligerent Sunni identity emerged, based on opposition and resistance to the new order, Abdul-Ahad writes. Tragically, their reaction to the Shia communal politics only bred further sectarianism.

Abdul-Ahad went to places that almost no Western reporters dared to go, including Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold in the so-called Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad. There he came to know both local Sunni fighters motivated by humiliation and anger over the US occupation and Islamist jihadists under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In a back alley of the city he met a young Saudi fighter from al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, a precursor to al-Qaeda in Iraq, who sought guidance from both the Quran and a thick volume entitled The Management of Savagery, which laid out what would become al-Zarqawis strategy: the use of extreme violence, including suicide bombings and the liquidation of hostages in a terrifying manner, to tear apart Iraqi civil society and establish a caliphate.

Abdul-Ahad also struck up an acquaintanceship with a senior rebel commander named Hameed, a former military officer in Saddams army who had once served with distinction in the General Security Apparatus in Basra. Hameed didnt support the slaughter of Shia civilians being carried out by al-Zarqawi and his Islamists, but like many former Baathists and Iraqi soldiers, he had joined forces with them in a marriage of convenience.

A series of US blundersincluding the overnight disbanding of Iraqs army by George W. Bushs viceroy, Paul Bremerfueled the insurgency. But Abdul-Ahad contends that a functioning civil society could never have emerged through the violent removal of the dictator and the imposition of a puppet government dominated by aggrieved Shia returnees and controlled by the American occupiers. A nation cant be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy, he writes. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation. As US troops were dragged deeper into the guerrilla war, Iraq was transformed into a hellscape in which civilians became the main victims. There were many ways to die in Baghdad, Abdul-Ahad writes of the bloody first few years after the US invasion:

killed by car bombs, taken out by militias working in tandem with security forces to target Sunnis; targeted by Sunni insurgents killing Shia and those deemed to be US collaborators. Translators and contractors and government employees were under fire. Journalists and even cleaning women working for the Americans were kidnapped. American retaliation meant the fairly indiscriminate killing of civilians; civilians also died at the hands of militias and insurgents when they found themselves in the midst of the fightingalways the collateral damage of war.

The devils bargain that the Sunnis made with the Islamists backfired when, in February 2006, al-Qaeda blew up the al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. Shia militants responded by murdering imams in Baghdad and then kidnapping and killing hundreds of Sunni civilians. Sunnis retaliated, and as al-Zarqawi (who was killed in an American drone strike in June 2006) had hoped, the country fell into civil war. After the Samarra bombing, most Western news organizations retreated to the Green Zone, the fortified government compound along the Tigris River in Baghdad.

While reporters cowered behind blast walls, forced to rely on secondhand information provided by their Iraqi drivers and translators, Abdul-Ahad moved back and forth between Sunni and Shia neighborhoods barricaded from each other by tree trunks, barrels and concrete blocks, and later concrete slabs and coiled barbed wire. He visited mortuaries and interviewed both killers and terrified families. The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did nothing to stop the violence, and some officials even sought to profit from it. As random street violence gave way to government-implemented jailings and torture, Abdul-Ahad met Rafiq, a well-connected Shia who sold his services to helpless Sunnis desperate to free their loved ones from the regimes horrific prisons or reduce their abuse while inside:

Rafiq was their savior, their tormentor and the symbol of the new Iraq: confident, brutal and corrupt. When I met him in the last week of December 2011, he was just closing a $5,000 deal with the family of a detainee. He promised them that he would send their son some blankets and food and assured them that the beating and torture would stop. The money was a down payment, the first of many. Further negotiations for a bribe to release him would follow. The threat of kidnappers, militias and insurgents was replaced by that of official arrest, yet the outcome is the same: pay money, keep fingers crossed, get released.

Abdul-Ahad was in Syria during the 20112012 uprising against President Bashar al-Assad and watched the nascent ISIS take advantage of the power vacuum left behind by Assads retreating army. Crossing the border from Turkey into ISIS-controlled territory, he confronted foreign fighters whose robotic hostility was unlike anything he had encountered, even in Fallujah. I wastrembling with fear, he writes of a meeting with an ISIS commander, after which he encountered a twelve-year-old militant who stared into his car as he prepared to leave:

I remember his eyes very vividly; they were filled with anger, ferocious anger, and his small fingers were wrapped tight around his Kalashnikov. I thought that the only thing stopping him from shooting us was his unwavering obedience to his commander; should the order come, he wouldnt hesitate a second.

A Stranger in Your Own City reaches an apocalyptic climax with the Iraqi armys assault on Mosul, which began on October 16, 2016. The last ISIS militants had hunkered down in the Old City, engaged in a fight to the death. As usual, Abdul-Ahad was in the heart of the battle. He captures both the courage of the Iraqi troops and their descent into take-no-prisoners barbarism. They had become so desensitized by the violence that they allowed Abdul-Ahad to watch them interrogate, torture, and execute suspected ISIS fighters, such as one ragged figure who insisted that hed been forced to serve as a medic in an ISIS hospital:

I have nothing to say, hissed the medic. Blood was pouring from the darkness of his mouth. Taha nodded to the soldier, who dropped the pipe and picked up a short M-4 rifle. He pulled the man to his feet, his legs wobbling, and leaned him against one of the large arched windows. In one quick move, the burly soldier flipped him out of the window, but kept a grip on his feet. Are you going to confess now? the soldier asked. What else is left for you? In the dark room, the soldiers and officers looked at the two feet, dirty and cracked, for a few seconds. Then the soldier let go, and they vanished from the window. The medic fell to the yard below with a muffled thud. The soldier leaned out of the window with his rifle and fired five bullets into the body that quivered on the uneven ground.

The damage inflicted on Iraq over the past two decades is almost immeasurable: at least 210,000 people, mostly civilians, killed; the destruction of Mosul; a flood of refugees desperate to escape from the country by any means possible; and millions of traumatized survivors. Even the democracy that was supposed to have emerged from Iraqs defeat of ISIS proved a mirage: one of the last scenes of this riveting book describes the bloody crackdown by Iraqi security forces against thousands of protesters who had gathered in Baghdads Tahrir Square in 2019 to demand an end to governmental corruption and incompetence. Taking stock, Abdul-Ahad offers a somber epitaph to the carnage and chaos:

The dead are forgotten, unknown, and their bodies are swallowed by the fertile earth, but the ruins remain: the destroyed refinery that is now a playground of mangled steel chimneys and rusting tankers; the crippled and desolate villages; the municipal buildings and schools with their flattened roofs like concrete wafersall stand witness to the horrors. The killersbandits, insurgents, militias, soldierswould keep traveling, deploying new tactics, implementing new horrors under different names, but they all remain the same peopleIraqis.

In Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization, the Irish writer Leon McCarron recounts his travels through much the same territory from which Abdul-Ahad has reported over the years. He embarked on his journey in 2021, four years after the defeat of ISIS, and his book serves as a kind of coda to the chaos and bloodshed that Abdul-Ahad documented. Conversant in Arabic after a monthslong immersion in the language in Erbil, McCarron begins at the rivers source in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey and reaches its mouth near Basra on the Persian Gulf seventy-one days later. Joining him are a British photojournalist, a Swiss filmmaker, and assorted local fixers, hydrologists, and environmental activists.

McCarron was inspired in part by Austen Henry Layard, the amateur archaeologist who excavated the ruins of the Assyrian Empire and who in April 1840 floated down the Tigris from Mosul to Baghdad on a kelek, a raft made from inflated goatskins. But his hopes for a pure river adventure are immediately dashed by twenty-first-century realities, including low water levels and heightened security along the way. So he and his team improvise a trip by minivan, fishing boat, and other vessels. His jaunty, highly informative, and ultimately sobering book abounds in pristine landscapes, war-ravaged towns, and evidence of environmental degradation.

The travelers set off in eastern Anatolia, where Kurdish political activists live in fear of arrest by the autocratic government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan and some of Turkeys archaeological treasures have been inundated by the regimes hydroelectric projects. They then pass through a sliver of Syria controlled by Kurdish forces, who drove out ISIS in fierce fighting and now maintain a fragile hold on the territory.

But its in Iraq where McCarrons journey becomes most interesting and most fraught. Four years after ISIS was chased out of Mosul, the country remains on high alert for attacks by insurgents camped in the semidesert. Hashd al-Shaabi forces, Kurdish Peshmerga troops, and units of the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, an elite nonsectarian force that had an important part in the recapture of Mosul, maintain tight control over the Tigris, often forcing McCarron and his team to find alternate routes. In some stretches, McCarron learns, people spotted on the river would be shot on sight.

Community after community bears the trauma inflicted by the Islamist militia. In Mosul McCarron meets the owner of a falafel shop [who] lost all his children in an airstrike. A man smoking a cigarette by a blackened wall said it used to be a public hammam where 130 civilians were executed in a day by ISIS. In Hamam al-Alil, a once-pleasant town of sulfur springs that had been occupied by ISIS for two and a half years, he encounters a man whose entire family fell victim to the extremists: ISIS executed one brother and dumped him in the Tigris; killed his cousin with hundreds of others in a mass execution at an agricultural college; and captured his friends father, an unsung hero who had helped hundreds of Iraqi soldiers escape to safety across the river, tore out his eyes, cut off his fingers, and hung his body in the town square.

The prospect of a resurgent ISIS goes hand in hand with other threats. At the Mosul Dam, formerly known as the Saddam Dam, opened by the dictator in 1986 to compete with similar grandiose hydroelectric projects in Syria and Turkey, four hundred billion cubic feet of water are being held back by a wall built on a foundation of porous gypsum that is slowly disintegrating. Engineers have kept the dam from collapsing by grouting the foundationsinjecting holes with liquid cementbut the solution is not sustainable:

In a worst-case scenario, a tsunami wave eighty-five feet high would crash over the earth-fill embankment, reaching the city of Mosul in an hour and forty minutes. Anyone within a three and a half mile radius of the river would be washed away. Further south, the majority of Iraqs wheat fields would be flooded as the wave engulfed Shirqat, Tikrit and Samarra, before arriving sixteen-feet high in Baghdad within four days. Between half a million and a million and a half people could die.

McCarron lingers in the marshes of southern Iraq, which epitomize both the glories and the fragility of life along the river. Formed by the merging of the Tigris and the Euphrates east of Nasiriyah, the marshes historically benefited from abundant winter rainfall in the Taurus Mountains that caused floods in the south. The wetlands absorb[ed] this excess like a sponge, swelling outwards with seasonal growth and then shrinking in the lean summers by draining to the Persian Gulf, McCarron writes. The inundations deposited silt from the mountains that fertilized the land, creating a diverse, lush ecosystem in an otherwise arid environment.

Saddam drained the marshes to root out Shia militants after the 19901991 Gulf War, and despite American and Iraqi efforts to refill them after the 2003 invasion, they have never recovered. Dam projects in Turkey have blocked the winter floods from reaching southern Iraq, and droughts likely caused by climate change have further reduced the flow to a trickle. Iraqi governments periodically promise ambitious projects to restore the rivers, but the lack of action has bred a sense of fatalism. When we asked about the future of the Tigris, McCarron writes,

and what the solution was, or who could help, one of the most common refrains we heard was Bas Allah. Only God. The river today is facing an existential threat, and those who rely on it are looking to the heavens for help, just as their predecessors did for millennia. But it had also become clear to me that the villainwas the avarice and carelessness of mankind, and if that didnt change, from source to the sea, then it was certain this river would dry up, until all of Mesopotamia and Iraq became a lifeless desert.

For most Iraqis, buffeted by the carnage and chaos of the last two decades, the prospect of a dead river, even one as vital as the Tigris, can seem a remote concern. During the past few months, the reverberations from the IsraelHamas war have undermined any sense that the country was gaining political stability. Iraqs prime minister, Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, who owes his position largely to the support of the armed Shia groups that have been firing on American troops, announced in January that he was taking Irans line: he wanted the Americans gone as quickly as possible. The justifications for [their] existence have ended, he said, referring to the threat from ISIS. Al-Sudani reiterated his demand a month later, after a US drone strike on a vehicle in eastern Baghdad on February 7 killed Abu Baqr al-Saadi, a leader of Kataib Hezbollah, and two other people.

Despite Al-Sudanis attempts to downplay the danger posed by ISIS, the Sunni militants remain a destabilizing force in the region. Two bomb blasts on January 3 near the burial site in southern Iran of Qasem Soleimanithe commander of the Quds Force who was assassinated in Baghdad by a US drone in January 2020killed at least eighty-four people in the countrys worst terrorist attack since the revolution of 1979. ISIS, which considers both Shia Muslims and the US its mortal enemies, claimed responsibility. But its Iran and its Shia proxies that appear to present the biggest threat to lasting peace in Iraq. The lethal drone attack on the US base in late January, apparently carried out without Irans prior knowledge, suggests that it has a worrisome lack of control over Kataib Hezbollah and other heavily armed Iraqi militias. And Irans hard-line factions may not be content with sitting idly following the US retaliation. The conflagration in Gaza seems to have opened a new chapter in Iraqs turbulent and bloody recent history.

February 21, 2024

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Iraq's Twenty Years of Carnage | Joshua Hammer - The New York Review of Books

KAMPALA, Uganda Thousands of Ugandans who guarded U.S. government buildings in war zones are preparing to sue their former employers who they claim failed to pay their agreed wages and cover medical bills, leaving many badly injured and mired in debt.

The workers guarded institutions and military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. invasion of both nations from 2005 to 2022. They were recruited by private security companies contracted by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

The guards, who were cheaper than American personnel, helped meet the need for increased security at U.S. buildings after they became targets for insurgent attacks following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The private security companies included Tennessee headquartered Explosives Ordnance Disposal Technology (EODT), Special Operations Consulting (SOC) and Constellis (formerly Triple Canopy) both based in Virginia and Sabre (Torres) International, among others.

Ugandas government last month gave its backing to former workers seeking restitution after they presented ministers with documents to support their claims, including letters of employment after a campaign by a group of more than 130,000 Ugandan ex-contractors.

Whoever is responsible will need to come clean [because] I havent seen anyone deny that these people were working for the Americans, said Ugandas Security Minister Jim Muhwezi.

The Special Returnees Association (SRA), a Ugandan umbrella organization of former security guards in Iraq and Afghanistan which has more than 130,000 members, told Semafor Africa it may pursue a mass legal action on behalf of thousands of its members to secure financial compensation and pay for the medical costs of those injured.

The claims would be against various companies, especially the biggest contractors, EODT, SOC and Constellis in the U.S. courts. The SRA said litigation would be an option if compensation could not be arranged through diplomatic channels involving Uganda governments security and labor ministries.

EODT, SOC and Constellis did not respond to emails and phone calls from Semafor Africa seeking comment in response to the allegations and the prospect of legal action.

We are aware of the labor dispute some Ugandans allegedly have with private security firms that were operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ellen Masi, the U.S. Mission Uganda Public Affairs Counselor, told Semafor Africa. We do not have any additional information at this time.

The Pentagon, in an email, said it was unable to comment and referred Semafor Africa to EODT and SOC.

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Thousands of Ugandans may sue over U.S. security work in Iraq, Afghanistan - Semafor

THE ACHILLES TRAP: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of Americas Invasion of Iraq, by Steve Coll

People love to imagine that world affairs are a game of chess, played by judicious leaders trying to outwit each other, acting with perfect self-knowledge and a clear understanding of what their opponent might do. But consider Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu or Yahya Sinwar. There can be a tragic mismatch between the interests of a nation and the self-interest of its leaders. The people running the show are people. They act on their whims, and with myopic agendas. They screw up. Call it the frail man theory of history.

This cosmic, unavoidable inefficiency is the real subject of Steve Colls excellent The Achilles Trap, a chronicle of the lead-up to the Iraq war. In telling this history, he offers a useful reminder that Americas omniscience is just as likely to be overestimated as are the capabilities and intentions of most world actors.

Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has written a suite of books about Americas entanglements in the Middle East. The Achilles Trap is clearly intended as a parallel project to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, a history of the C.I.A.s role in the wars in Afghanistan. The new book stretches from Saddam Husseins earliest days in power to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

At its heart lies an engrossing portrait of Hussein, which is drawn from interviews with U.S. officials, U.N. weapons inspectors and surviving members of the dictators government as well as what Coll calls the Saddam tapes: 2,000 hours of rarely accessed audio from high-level meetings that Hussein recorded as assiduously as Richard Nixon. The resulting details he assembles give a more intimate picture of the dictators thinking about world politics, local power and his relationship to the United States than has been seen before.

The American side of the lead-up to the Iraq war has been well documented, particularly the George W. Bush administrations megalomaniac ideologues and their intelligence failures. (And the C.I.A.s Iraq operation was nicknamed The House of Broken Toys long before anyone was talking about yellowcake or slam dunks.) Coll briskly moves past those preoccupations, which he chalks up, as others have, to confirmation bias: The United States assumed that Hussein was lying when he disavowed plans to possess and use weapons of mass destruction because hed possessed and used them before.

The richer narrative vein that Coll explores is the other confirmation bias thats been much less understood: that of Saddam Hussein, whose great mistake was in thinking that the United States was all-powerful and always competent. As Hussein later told U.S. investigators about his occupation of Kuwait in the early 1990s, If you didnt want me to go in, why didnt you tell me? Hussein also figured the C.I.A. knew he had no W.M.D.s. A C.I.A. capable of getting such a big question dead wrong on the facts, Coll writes, was not consistent with Saddams bedrock assumptions.

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Book Review: The Achilles Trap, by Steve Coll - The New York Times

The Federal Emergency Management Agency Office of the Chief Information Officer has tracked scores of employees bringing government mobile devices abroad, including to countries like China and Iraq, without authorization, according to a document obtained by FedScoop.

The issue was highlighted in a DHS inspector generals report published last July that pointed to concerns about how the emergency management agency handles the security of government-issued mobile devices.

Among other issues, the report centered on concerns with international travel. FEMA policies stipulate that employees cannot bring government devices abroad, while DHS policy requires the use of loaner devices and that any device detected internationally (without authorization) is turned off. The inspector general found that FEMA was not effectively tracking whether data on devices taken on international travel had been wiped.

FEMA is still working on fixes, originally expected in December of last year, to address the issue, which heightens security risks and violates broader Department of Homeland Security mobile device policy.

The document obtained by FedScoop similarly shows scores of devices detected abroad by FEMA. Many of them were tracked in countries that Americans commonly visit for vacation, including the Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. But the list which displays devices that had access restricted and were then beginning to be investigated after being used abroad also shows that employees brought government devices to countries that fall under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation country list.

The document provides some insight into how FEMA handles the issue. While most of the incidents are unlabeled, some note that a case was investigated, that there was a tracking action, or a request for comment was issued, a spokesperson for FEMA told FedScoop. The document also displays dates that refer to when there was an update to the device in DHSs Enterprise Incident Database, or ECOP, portal.

If youre a large government organization, I think its always better to err on the side of safety and caution and preparation and training rather than have employees not know the potential risks, said Kristin del Rosso, the public sector field chief technology officer at Sophos, a security and hardware firm. There are different countries that have different rules [and] some dont respect personal privacy If youre in a customs border zone [and] you dont have access to your devices, they can do what they want with those devices.

She said the OIG report didnt raise massive alarm bells but it was good the agency was addressing the problem.

Notably, in February 2022, the Federal CIO Council released the final version of its guidance for international travel and government devices. The guidance establishes that government devices taken abroad risk being stolen, compromised, or damaged physically while also potentially exposing personal and government application data and account information. A blog announcing the guidance noted that both government and industry employees could be targeted by foreign adversaries looking to procure government data.

For a sense of scope, FEMA maintains tens of thousands of mobile devices, the OIG report outlines. The agency uses a cloud-based management system for monitoring the data on these devices, as well as connecting them to FEMAs network. One particular branch of the agencys Office of Chief Information Officer, the Mobility Service Center, is in charge of sanitizing devices that encounter security concerns, while another section called the Security Operations Center is supposed to detect devices abroad.

Ultimately, the OIG report found that 227 mobile devices without authorization were detected by FEMA internationally, and, that within a sample of nine, only two were turned off those two were on the ITAR list. FEMA did not provide the OIG any documentation as to whether those devices were sanitized, according to the report. The audit looked at mobile device management between October 2020 and April 2022 a somewhat distinct source of data from the one obtained by FedScoop, which came from the OCIO and includes incidents between October 2021 and June 2022. Still, the OIG document also shows that employees took devices to countries like China and Iraq.

A FEMA spokesperson said: DHS and FEMA are committed to continuously improving our cybersecurity posture to ensure information stored on mobile devices remains secure while supporting employee productivity. We take this matter seriously and have protocols and tools in place to ensure devices are used securely and in accordance with policy, regardless of location. We recognize the sensitivity around devices being taken to countries with heightened security risks and have specific procedures for when employees travel with government devices.

To deal with this problem, FEMA concurred with several recommendations made by the DHS OIG in the report, including implementing new documentation of device wiping, modifying mobile technology sanitization procedures, communicating requirements to sanitize devices taking on authorized international travel, and updating FEMAs response playbook procedure to require disabling devices taken abroad without authorization.

But while FEMA initially said it would complete those recommendations by the end of 2023, an agency spokesperson told FedScoop that completing them is still an ongoing process. The DHS OIG did not confirm whether it had received an update from FEMA about its progress. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget both declined to comment and directed FedScoop to FEMA.

We take this matter seriously and have protocols and tools in place to ensure devices are used securely and in accordance with policy, regardless of location, said a spokesperson for DHS in a statement to FedScoop. We recognize the sensitivity around devices being taken to countries with heightened security risks and have specific procedures for when employees travel with government devices.

The DHS spokesperson continued: We appreciate DHS OIGs work which showed that there have been inconsistencies in following these policies and procedures in the past. FEMA has completed work to address each recommendation in OIGs July report and expects these recommendations to be resolved and closed following OIGs review of our documentation.

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FEMA employees brought government devices abroad without authorization, including to China and Iraq, document ... - FedScoop

Its been more than two decades since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, starting a war that ultimately lasted eight years, cost tens of thousands of lives, and destabilized the Middle East.

Countless books and news articles have been written about what led to the Iraq War. Told largely from the perspective of western officials, most of them have focused on the United States post-9/11 hunt for weapons of mass destruction that we now know didnt exist.

But a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll provides a fresh perspective on the origins of the war, one that explores the 2003 invasion through the two decades that preceded it and through the eyes of the brutal dictator at the center of it all: Saddam Hussein.

In The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the origins of Americas invasion of Iraq, Coll draws on a wide range of sources to tell a compelling, character-driven story about how the United States bungled its way into an avoidable war with Iraq. But some of the most revealing information in the more than 500-page book comes from transcripts of tape-recorded meetings from inside Saddams regime, including many materials never before published, which were captured by invading U.S. forces.

As Coll notes in the books introduction, he obtained a cache of 145 transcripts and files after settling a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Pentagon with free legal support from attorneys at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He also received additional records from the private archive of scholar Michael Brill.

By connecting these and additional parts of the captured files with other sources, including interviews with surviving participants, Coll writes, it became possible to see in new ways what drove Saddam in his struggle with Washington, and to understand how and why American thinking about him was often wrong, distorted, or incomplete.

Ahead of his book tour, the Reporters Committee spoke with Coll about why he decided to team up with RCFP attorneys for the project, how the Saddam tapes provided the books narrative voice, and what the U.S. government can learn from his research about how to deal with other authoritarian foreign leaders. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Primarily, I felt that the mystery of why Saddam did as he did was a neglected part of our understanding of the origins of the decision to invade. Our self-reflection and political arguments about the invasion had concentrated understandably almost exclusively on the decisionmaking in Washington and in London about the threat Saddam seemed to pose, about the bad WMD intelligence, about the public selling of the war, about the medias involvement. All of that had been the way that we had come to terms with the invasion and the discovery that the premise that Iraq had WMD was false.

But why had Saddam created the impression that he had WMD when he didnt? Why did he risk his long run in power and ultimately give up his life for weapons that he didnt possess? That was a question that was almost never asked. And when I learned about the tapes and the other records from his regime, I thought that perhaps there would be a way to tell a multi-sided story to include his part of the bargain into our understanding of where this came from.

I wasnt sure. There were a fair number of materials in a scattershot way that I could access to get a flavor for what they read like, what they felt like. There were conferences that had released excerpts of some transcripts and those materials were still publicly available. I thought they were interesting because they provided an authentic and very unusual case study of the thinking and decisionmaking of a dictator in a closed system, one whose actions and thinking ended up having an enormous impact through the Iraq War on the United States. Its just unusual to get that level of real-time transcripts, even in the U.S. political system.

My ambition was to add to the record substantially by filing a FOIA request that could draw out new materials that maybe had never been released or that were no longer available and still seemed to be important.

In a couple of previous books, I had filed FOIA requests on my own and had had slow but good experiences with extracting useful materials. In those cases, I had a sense of what I was looking for. I would send in my FOIA requests like a stranded survivor throwing a message in a bottle into the sea, hoping that something would come back. Sometimes, in the case of the Exxon book, I didnt hear anything for a long time and I thought, Oh, this is just pointless. Im never going to get anything. And then suddenly, these large envelopes started arriving at my home address some years after I had filed the requests, and I would rip them open and discover what turned out to be good and important materials.

This time, I thought, I cant afford to do it that way. I need professional assistance. I have to run on a more predictable timeline. These materials are too central to the project for me to go alone. So I called the Reporters Committee, and [RCFP Senior Staff Attorney] Adam [Marshall] ended up being my point of contact. He was incredibly helpful in just laying out a process for how I should proceed individually as a filer and what timeline to expect by way of the government failing to do its duty in responding, and then once enough time had passed, then we could talk about litigation. The whole plan made good sense to me, and so thats what we did. And it unfolded almost exactly the way Adam predicted.

My hypothesis about what I should file for was partly based on my own experience with federal FOIA, which is not a great system, the advice I got from Adam and the team, and my analyses of some indexes that were publicly available that provided lists of transcripts, tapes, and other documents with short descriptions saying what they described, and they had dates, so I could see when a conversation had taken place. So I looked through as many indexes as I could find, and I thought and Adam agreed that I should ask for files that were listed in these indexes because they had identification numbers that would make it very easy to locate them so that the government couldnt say, I cant find them, or I have to go dig around a warehouse in Qatar or something like that.

I limited my request to items that were indexed, and then I decided to ask heavily for more recent files because, looking at what was available through scholarship and detritus on the internet, there was a real absence of material from after 9/11 and right up until 9/11. There was a strong bias toward material from the 1980s and 1990s, and I think it was because of the controversies around WMD after the invasion drove a lot of the selection process in the first releases of these materials. People wanted to know, What was the history of the chemical weapons program? How did Saddam talk about using WMD?

There was less on the record about what Saddam was saying and thinking after 9/11. And I was very curious as to why that was and wondered if there was a political bias. Maybe the tapes were embarrassing in some way. I cant explain why there was so little of that material on the record, but once I saw some of those meetings, they were very interesting, and I think they worked really well to bring a completely fresh perspective and voicing onto the page in the part of the history that I figured would be the most familiar to readers, from 9/11 to the invasion. It was challenging because it was the more picked over part of the history, and I had these materials to kind of rewrite the history with Saddams voice very much present.

Well, theres some good stuff (laughs). Thats the main headline.

Its Saddams view of the world at critical junctures [leading up to the invasion of Iraq]. Its the totality of his mindset: his concerns, his paranoia, his conspiracy theories, his reading of the Americans. I would say that is probably over and over again the most interesting thing for the audience that I was trying to write for, which I think isnt just an American audience, but an international one as well. How did Saddam see his own adversaries? We had a theory of him, what was his theory of us? He was very shrewd about matters of power. Obviously he had taken power in very rough circumstances and held it under pressure for a long period of time, so it wasnt surprising to see that he was obsessed with his adversaries and with matters of power and competition among militaries and governments, but the way he thought about that, the way he read the Americans, the way he made his own decisions about whether to cooperate, whether to be aggressive, was absolutely fascinating.

The bonus points were that he was lively. He could be a drudge he rambled on about geopolitical matters and no one ever interrupted him because why would you interrupt someone like that? but he did have a sense of humor. He could be charismatic. There was just an energy in his presence that made it easier to write about him.

As a writer, I had the space to try to really empathize with Saddam, and I had the information available to try to do that in some depth and to try to see the world from behind his eyes. I think you cant help but come away with a sense that, in contemporary affairs, even though we may have a surface impression of adversarial authoritarians, the Saddam case cautions that, in such closed systems, there are almost always many layers of truth behind the surface presentation of a leader that will explain much more than whats visible.

One lesson is that it is in our national interest to maintain contact even with our enemies, even when its morally uncomfortable, even when its politically fraught, because these systems are so closed and there are limits to the insights that are available through other means. It doesnt have to be the president picking up the phone and calling his counterpart. But in Saddams case, we didnt have contact with Saddam or any of his envoys through any channel for like 12 years before the 2003 invasion. In hindsight, that was clearly a mistake. Would we have learned if we had been talking to him or his people that he had kind of lost interest in military affairs toward the end and was obsessed with novel writing? Would we have learned that he issued orders to scientists to make sure that all of the weapons were destroyed and that the documentation was eliminated? Would that have caused us to pause and think, Why is he issuing orders like that? Who knows, but we certainly didnt encounter those facts because we had no access at all.

Yeah, thats the answer. There was a conversation between [President Bill] Clinton and [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair in 1998, when theyre talking about Saddam, and Clinton asked Blair, Has anyone in your foreign ministry talked to Saddam over the last few years? And Blairs like, Id have to check. I dont think so. And Clinton says, If I could, Id pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch, but its so fraught in America that I would just be roasted if I did that, so I cant. But I sort of feel like we should be talking to him.

And its clear from the records that Saddam would have been happy to have a backchannel through his intelligence services or through his family members or any number of channels if we had appointed someone on our side to have those conversations. Would they have been very fruitful? Hard to say. But what is the cost of doing that? Not very high. Its only in domestic politics. And Clintons comment to Blair shows you how intense the pressure is in the White House not to be seen as compromising. And its not only about a presidents political or popular standing, its also that, in these cases, as today, we have sanctions regimes in place. And the effect of the sanctions regimes depends on compliance by allies. So there are good reasons why it doesnt happen, but youre asking an important question, which is, what can we learn from our past failures? And one of them is that you really cant afford to be silent if you think that this adversary can hurt you.

Its kind of the only way I know how to do things, to be honest (laughs). Its what I read, its what I have done before. My niche is to try to synthesize intelligence, political, and military history around Americas encounters with the world, particularly our failures, when we go out and struggle in complex and emerging countries like Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan. Im drawn to the challenge of trying to get the big picture into the book while making it readable. And to me, making it readable means you need characters and you need scenes and dialogue and action. And you need to keep it as brisk as you can while not compromising on the complexity of whats going on.

Ive been practicing this for a long time. And I felt like what was so satisfying about this project was that I could deliver a much higher ratio of fun characters and dialogue and action than I normally can because the transcripts were so lively, because Saddam was kind of a larger-than-life character, and because there was so much action behind the scenes: the defection of [Saddams] son in law, coup attempts by the Americans one after another, a couple of wars.

Working in this genre for so many years, I dont often have material that is like that, start to finish, and I was really grateful for it. It was fun. That was the gift of the transcripts. They provided a bedrock of narrative and voice and dialogue that is essential to make a complicated history like this readable.

The Reporters Committee was just invaluable to this whole project. It was a huge gift to have that collaboration. They are great lawyers. They are really committed to the goal of public interest work. They were very collaborative and careful to make sure that what we were doing was something that I understood and they gave me good, honest advice. I come from a family of lawyers, I live around lawyers, and so I appreciate them. But I also recognize best practices. And they were just excellent. I also thought they were hugely effective and efficient. We didnt waste a lot of time going down rabbit holes. They know their business so they were able to accurately predict and manage the process so that we got a great result without a lot of distraction.

The Reporters Committee regularly files friend-of-the-court briefs and its attorneys represent journalists and news organizations pro bono in court cases that involve First Amendment freedoms, the newsgathering rights of journalists and access to public information. Stay up-to-date on our work by signing up for our monthly newsletter and following us on Twitter or Instagram.

Original post:
Steve Coll discusses collaboration with RCFP attorneys for new book, "The Achilles Trap" - Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press