Blogebrity

To the Middle East of Europe

“Once upon a time, in a faraway part of Europe, behind seven mountains and seven rivers, there was a beautiful country called Yugoslavia.” From They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulić.

I’m out of Iraq material, and it’s time to travel again. But I’m not going to Iraq this time. I haven’t worked in any other country for over a year, and the story in Iraq is fairly static right now.

This trip will be to the part of the world that got me interested in geopolitics and war in the first place – the Balkans. I took a long hard look at the violent destruction of Yugoslavia before I ever took a serious look at the Middle East, and I understood the Middle East instinctively thanks to my grasp of Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo. The Turkish (Ottoman) Empire ruled over all these lands for hundreds of years, and the tragic events that unfolded in the wake of its destruction are eerily similar.

The Balkan Peninsula is the Middle East of Europe. There’s a reason why the violent fracturing in countries like Lebanon and Iraq is sometimes referred to as Balkanization. It should surprise no one that genocidal race and religious wars were fought there so recently, and that American troops remain on the ground to this day, as they likely will for a long time in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The region once known as Yugoslavia is where the West has collided violently with the East for hundreds of years. Millions of South Slavs in Bosnia were converted to Islam at sword point by imperialist Muslims from Turkey. Most Mediterranean Albanians – descendents of the ancient Greeks and Illyrians – likewise converted to Islam. The flag of Albania and Kosovo to this day is a centuries-old symbol of the Albanian Catholic anti-Turkish resistance.

Another civilizational fault line rips through the place – the one between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Genocidal wars were waged by the Orthodox Serbs against Catholics in Kosovo and Croatia, as well as against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. Croatia looks toward Rome. Belgrade looks to Moscow. Bosniaks, in the middle, look to Arabia and Istanbul. Kosovars look toward Tirana, and to New York and Washington. They could not coexist. Yugoslavia was drawn and quartered.

“Only part of us is sane. Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our 90s and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set life back to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.” – from Black Lamb and Gray Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West.

Kosovo is the world’s newest country, and its unilateral declaration of independence is more controversial than the existence of Israel. It should be only slightly surprising, then, that many Kosovars, though most are Muslims, identify to an large extent with the Israelis. “Kosovars used to identify with the Palestinians because we Albanians are Muslims and Christians and we saw Serbia and Israel both as usurpers of land,” a prominent Kosovar recent told journalist Stephen Schwartz. “Then we looked at a map and woke up. Israelis have a population of six million, their backs to the sea, and 300 million Arab enemies. Albanians have a total population of eight million, our backs to the sea, and 200 million Slav enemies. So why should we identify with the Arabs?”

Kosovo is perhaps the most pro-American country in all of Europe. It is almost undoubtedly the most pro-American country in the world of Islam. It exists thanks to NATO, but mostly thanks to the United States. And the Kosovars know it. President Bill Clinton is lionized there as a liberator just as President George W. Bush is hailed by the Kurds of Iraq. They are both indigenous people long-oppressed by empires of the East and more recently by ethnic-nationalist states. Both were saved by young American men from places like Indiana, Colorado, and Texas. Kosovars, unlike the more conservative Muslims in Bosnia, support the war in Iraq.

“In the hinterland of Dalmatia, especially in the Knin area, one can hear a kind of moaning song, a primitive archaic intonation, consisting of the well-known doleful modulations of the sounds o-oy…A few peasants, usually in a tavern, put their heads together and let their sorrowful modulations sound for hours, which constitutes a very grotesque sight for a European. And if they are asked why they sing like this, they give the answer: the lament for Kosovo!” - Vladimir Dvornikovic

The residents of Yugoslavia’s final breakaway state are under the gun from Serbia and its patron state Russia, and also from well-heeled Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia who would love to turn it into a fanatical jihad state in Southeastern Europe. All this goes on under the noses of American soldiers, and utterly beyond the eyes of the incurious media.

Bosnia and Kosovo are where the pacifism of my college years died and was buried. I have wanted, no, needed, to visit these places and write about them for more than ten years. I am not doing this on a whim.

“The whole world is a vast Kosovo, an abominable blood-logged plain.” From Black Lamb and Gray Falcon by Rebecca West.

Later this year I plan to visit Afghanistan – a country where the war is going badly from what I hear from people I trust. I have seen American troops under the command of General David Petraeus pull off the impossible in Iraq. No one like Petraeus is in charge in Afghanistan. NATO is in charge in Afghanistan, and NATO is a different animal than the United States Army and Marine Corps.

NATO is also in charge of Kosovo, and Kosovo isn’t the failure Afghanistan is – at least, I don’t think so. But there are those in Russia and Saudi Arabia who would like to reverse that. These are two of the same countries that played terrible roles in the destruction of Afghanistan. Soviet Russia paid dearly for that, but the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia never have. And they are at it again. The United States isn’t the only country that mucks around in the rest of the world, and it’s no coincidence that American forces have been drawn into both Kosovo and Afghanistan. Preventing the Islamic radicalization of Kosovars isn’t why NATO went in there, but it’s part of NATO’s job now, or at least it should be.

Someone needs to take a look at what’s happening in the world’s newest country and figure out where it’s going and what it all means. No one seems to want to go there but me. So I’m going, and I’m going in by ground through Bosnia from Serbia’s capital Belgrade. I leave in two days.

Post-script: I don’t get paid for these reports by anyone but readers of this Web site, and I can't afford to do this for free. If my dispatches are worth something to you, please consider a contribution and help make truly independent journalism economically viable.

You can make a one-time donation through Pay Pal:

Alternately, you can now make recurring monthly payments through Pay Pal. Please consider choosing this option and help me stabilize my expense account.

$10 monthly subscription:

$25 monthly subscription:

$50 monthly subscription:

$100 monthly subscription:

If you would like to donate for travel and equipment expenses and you don't want to send money over the Internet, please consider sending a check or money order to:

Michael Totten
P.O. Box 312
Portland, OR 97207-0312

Many thanks in advance.

The Case of Bilal Hussein

Last week, Associated Press photographer (and alleged insurgent collaborator) Bilal Hussein was released from custody after an Iraqi tribunal decided his case fell under an amnesty law passed earlier in 2008. The United States military had accused Hussein of working with insurgent groups in Anbar Province, in part because of his uncanny ability repeatedly to photograph insurgents in action.

I don’t know if he’s guilty or not, and he deserves the presumption of innocence. Either way, his case brings attention to an issue most consumers of news from Iraq rarely consider: the fact that large media companies—the Associated Press and other news wire agencies and newspapers—work with some sketchy characters in Iraq.

Iraq is full of such sketchy characters, as everyone knows, and large media companies require an enormous staff and network of locals to produce daily news coverage. They can’t cover breaking news every day in a low-intensity war zone without them, especially if violent activity—car bombs, fire fights, assassinations, and the like—are the bulk of what makes up the news. Someone is killed almost every day in Iraq, but the chances that an individual writer or photographer will happen to be present as an eyewitness are minuscule. Reporters who cover breaking daily news spend much of their time on the phone with stringers and sources. They don’t personally investigate every incident in the field. It just isn’t physically possible if they're required to write every day about what happens in a country the size of California, especially when it can take literally days to travel from one part of Baghdad to another.

I’m sure media companies are careful about who they hire, but it’s hard to make the right call every time in a bewildering and inscrutable place like Iraq. Terrorists and insurgents are and have been supported by a substantial percentage of the local population. It’s nearly impossible to build a firewall thick enough to keep them all out.

Read the rest in COMMENTARY Magazine.

Now They Have Turned to the Tribes

Sheikh Sattar Abu Risha, leader of the Iraq’s Anbar Salvation Council before he was murdered by a car bomb in front of his house in late 2007, summed up the Anbar Awakening movement in a few concise sentences to Johns Hopkins University Professor Fouad Ajami. “Our American friends had not understood us when they came,” he said. “They were proud, stubborn people and so were we. They worked with the opportunists, now they have turned to the tribes, and this is as it should be. The tribes hate religious parties and religious fakers.” The tribal system in Anbar Province is ancient. Attempts to overthrow it are not wise. Both Americans and Al Qaeda learned that the hard way.

Marine Captain Quintin Jones, commanding officer at Outpost Delta in the city of Karmah, told me he works with tribal authorities as well as the mayor every day and can’t get much done if he doesn’t.

Captain Quintin Jones and Mayor Abu Abdullah

MJT: So what kinds of things do you do with Sheikh Mishan and the mayor?

Captain Jones: I do everything with them. My battlespace is pretty big. We deal with the security issues. We get out to the surrounding areas. Karmah is Jamaeli-centric. The whole Jamaeli tribe covers Karmah, but we've got these others smaller tribes around. So we try to get the mayor out to see these other smaller villages around Karmah. That way people don't think everything in Karmah is all about the Jamaeli tribe. So we go out there. They need contracts in their areas to fix things like schools, businesses, stuff like that. That's generally what we do. We eat dinner together. We eat lunch together. And pretty much the same thing with Sheikh Mishan, but on the tribal level. Everything has to run through the head sheikh, and he's the head sheikh over all this area.

MJT: So who has more power? The sheikh or the mayor?

Captain Jones: The sheikh. Al Anbar is really tribal in everything that it does. Although they've had a city council in the past, a mayor in the past, a lot of the people in the city want to go to the rule of law through tribal law. Making that transition is really tough. It's a delicate line that we have to walk.

MJT: How compatible is tribal law with a democratic system? Are they merging the two systems, or basically still using the old-world authoritarian model?

Captain Jones: The way to approach it is, there is still a need for the tribal way of life, but we're trying to make it more democratic at the same time. They're parallel. The true part is run by the democratic process. If you look at countries like Bahrain or Dubai – the UAE – they still have a strong tribal base, but they’re somewhat democratic in their governance and the way they approach things. You can't move forward or progress as a country if you're stuck in the tribal way of life.

MJT: Right. But how do they merge them? I mean, nobody elected Sheikh Mishan.

Captain Jones: No. It's just passed down through generations.

MJT: So are some of the people below him elected democratically? Like the mayor. Was he elected, or was he appointed?

Captain Jones: A little bit of both. [Laughs.] They're going to hold elections. Once they hold elections, they will vote in an actual mayor and an actual city council. But because the sheikh is the biggest guy in the area, it defaults back to him if there's a dispute. They'll go to him and he'll try to resolve the issue.

MJT: Do you get the sense that this is the way the average person here wants it to be? Or is that just the way it is?

Captain Jones: It's just the way it is. They don't know what they don't know. If you've never been introduced to a democratic way of life, then you don't know it exists. You don't know that there is another way. So it's an education process.

MJT: Did this tribal system exist when Saddam Hussein was in charge?

Captain Jones: Yes. The sheikhs existed. They were just really suppressed by Saddam. They relegated themselves to tribal disputes and marriages.

MJT: So they were not a part of the state?

Captain Jones: That I can't answer.

MJT: How well do you get along with these guys?

Captain Jones: Pretty good. At this stage, if you want to succeed, it's all about personality. You have to have the personality to be able to go out and immerse yourself in this culture every day and understand, try to understand, what's going on. You'll never fully understand what's going on. For me it's a little easier. I've traveled a lot in my lifetime. My wife is European. She's from Italy. English is her second language. I helped her learn to speak English. So understanding a culture without a language, I've done it.

Last year I was on a military training team where I lived with Iraqis. This is basically my third shot at dealing with different cultures.

MJT: This training with Iraqis was in the States?

Captain Jones: No, it was here in Iraq. I was in an embedded training team with the Iraqi Army last year. But now I'm dealing more with governance than with tactics.

MJT: Have you been anywhere else in Iraq aside from that training?

Captain Jones: I was in Baghdad in '03.

MJT: How was that?

Captain Jones: In '03 it was totally different. I didn't deal with any Iraqis. I did site security assessments. Then I did security at the CPA building for Ambassador Bremer with a team of Marines I had. Last year I was in Haditha.

MJT: How is Karmah now compared with Haditha then?

Captain Jones: Every day Marines were getting hurt and sometimes killed.

MJT: By local insurgents?

Captain Jones: Locals insurgents. Al Qaeda in Iraq. Whoever.

MJT: The locals here and in Fallujah talk about the insurgents as though the insurgents are…not them. Like they are all from somewhere else. I know some of them are from somewhere else. Some aren't from Iraq at all. But a lot of them had to be local, right? At least they were protected by some of the local people.

Captain Jones: You have to understand that everything is tribal. So when the sheikhs came on board with the coalition, whatever the sheikh says to do, that's what they are going to do. The sheikhs said hey, we're not fighting the coalition anymore. They're helping us push out Al Qaeda. Some of these Al Qaeda guys were from here. And they have families that are still here. We work with them. Your brother, for example, might be Al Qaeda but you could be with the coalition. You may not want that way of life. I can't detain just someone because his brother is Al Qaeda.

MJT: When you get a situation like this where one brother is with you and the other is against you, will the one who is with you inform on his brother?

Captain Jones: It just depends. It is truly a case by case basis. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Sometimes he'll inform on his brother, but when you detain the brother he'll come back and say hey, he's a really good guy. Why did you detain him? That's his way of denying that he had anything to do with it. So you have those cases as well.

MJT: Did Sheikh Mishan switch sides?

Captain Jones: No. He has been pro-coalition from the beginning. He lost a couple of his sons. He lost one of his daughters back in September.

MJT: What happened?

Captain Jones: She was killed in a mortar attack.

MJT: A mortar attack on his house?

Captain Jones: Yeah. When we first came in, in late August, there was an area out to the east that was all bad guy country. We hadn't cleared it out yet. So in this area there were pockets where they would launch mortars. They hit Sheikh Mishan's house because they knew he was pro-coalition. So they shot mortars at his house and killed one of his daughters. Prior to that, a couple of his sons got killed and he fled to Syria. He stayed there until General Allen convinced him to come back and lead his tribe.

MJT: And when was this?

Captain Jones: I think it was in July of this year. I think it was July 5.

MJT: So what happened to his sons, exactly?

Captain Jones: Al Qaeda stormed the house. Or in gun battles outside the house. More of the usual.

MJT: Have you ever met anyone who you know has switched sides? I'm sure we have both met some of these people, but have you met anyone who has admitted it?

Captain Jones: Yep. There are some guys that were bad who we work with now. They say they got tired of that life, that they didn't have the right ideals. They were really all about power and money rather than pushing us out. They want safety and security now. There was also some reconciliation with some of the insurgents who decided to put down their guns. They didn't want to fight the coalition any more. We walked them back to the other side. The sheikhs had to vouch for these guys. They said these are not going to pick up arms against you again.

MJT: Do you believe that?

Captain Jones: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. [Laughs.] It's a case by case basis again. Some of these guys have done a lot of good things. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Some of them do revert back to their old ways. I don't mean they've started fighting us again. I mean…if they tortured people before and have switched sides now we have to say Hey, we don't torture people. You detain them and turn them in and let the professionals question them. It has been an ongoing process with some of these guys. We're training them in the laws of war, rules of engagement, and so forth. Sometimes it's a hard concept for them to grasp, and other times they get it, they understand it.

MJT: How's the Baath Party doing these days?

Captain Jones: That I don't know. That I'm trying to figure out myself.

MJT: This is Baath country. Or at least it was. I don't know if it is anymore.

Captain Jones: Right. I'm still trying to figure some of this out. A lot of the guys in this area say they are nationalists and want a greater Iraq. They don't necessarily support this ideal or that ideal. They just want the unification of Iraq. That's it.

MJT: Do you have any Shias here?

Captain Jones: No. They're all Sunnis.

MJT: And all Arabs. No Kurds.

Captain Jones: No Kurds. Not in my area.

MJT: What's the most important thing you still need to do while you're here, before you can leave, if you can only pick one?

Captain Jones: [Long pause.]

MJT: Or how about the top three things, if coming up with only one is hard.

Captain Jones: We'd like to kick start the government and the economy. That has been the big focus for me outside of security, which is obvious. Of course I need to make sure they have security, and that their security isn't porous. We can't have people infiltrating back in.

Now, there are always going to be some insurgents around because we don't know who they are. Only the Iraqis know who they are. So we need to keep the security maintained and set up a system where the government and economy are starting to push back in. I only have a few months left. There is no way I can achieve that in the seven month period we're given, let alone a three month period. So we're trying to set the stage where we have a no-kidding city council with a one- or two-year plan of things they need to achieve. We need to make sure it's running properly so it can be sustained after the Marines have left. That's really what I'm trying to work on here.

We need to give people hope in Karmah. The re-opening of the town square, that gave people hope. They saw that the very worst part of Karmah, the part that was constantly getting car bombs and IEDs, where the police station was constantly attacked because the insurgents see the government as a threat, was able to have so many people outside in that one area. Six months ago that never would have happened.

MJT: The Iraqi Army isn't here, are they?

Captain Jones: They're north of us. We do have meetings once a week where we coordinate with the Iraqi Police and the Iraqi Army. They're our neighbors, if you will, and we need to make sure we're all going in the right direction for the greater area. We do, on occasion, do joint operations. We did a clearing operation out to the east, and the Iraqi Army providing some blocking positions for us as the Iraqi Police pushed up and cleared the area. So we do work with them quite a bit.

MJT: How is the Iraqi Army in this part of the country?

Captain Jones: They're pretty professional. They have a good battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ali. He's a pretty good guy by Iraqi standards, compared to the Iraqi battalion I was working with last year. He's pretty articulate. He understands and can talk tactics. He has basic common sense. And he looks…he's very professional.

MJT: Are they mostly Shias?

Captain Jones: No, these guys are Sunnis.

MJT: Arabs also?

Captain Jones: Yep. And no Kurds, but that will probably change in a couple of years when they start deploying all over Iraq. Last year in Haditha, the Iraqi Army I worked with was Shia.

MJT: Did they have problems with the [Sunni] locals?

Captain Jones: Sometimes. But down south, in Baghdadi, the Iraqi Army also worked with the Baghdadi Police which is all Sunni. Initially there were some problems because people were saying these guys are thieves, and the others said, no, you're thieves. Blah blah blah blah blah. We had to squelch a lot of that crap. We said, look, we're here to get rid of insurgents, not fight each other. So I had to have them take a step back and look at all the things that the other culture had given to the other guys.

The Shia Iraqi Army, when they first went to Baghdadi, they didn't have anything. But the Sunni Iraqi Police went out and bought them flour, vegetables, and fruit, brought it to them, and gave it to them for free. Here. You're here to help us. Here you go. So I had to remind them what these guys were doing for them. And in the end we'd always go out on joint patrols. So we had Sunni and Shia going out on joint patrols. That's a good thing because when you're going into Sunni neighborhoods with Shias, you have some of their own people working with them. That definitely helped out a lot.

But we don't have any of that here.

MJT: What's the relationship like between the local government in Karmah and Baghdad? Or do they even have one?

Captain Jones: Well, they have the government of Al Anbar. They're the guys who are in contact with Baghdad. What that relationship is like, I have no idea. It doesn't affect me on my level. My local government ties into Fallujah, and Fallujah ties them into Ramadi.

MJT: Right.

Captain Jones: And that's what we're working with.

MJT: Do they have a good relationship with Fallujah?

Captain Jones: They're starting to have a good relationship with Fallujah. A lot of those lines were severed because of the insurgency, but now they're opening those lines back up. It's starting to work a lot better.

MJT: What's the biggest problem here?

Captain Jones: Probably the connection to Fallujah and Ramadi so they can get Iraqi dinars, rather than American dollars, into the army. That's their biggest issue. Once they can do that, we can take them off the coalition aid. So our focus is the transition from dollars to dinars.

MJT: Anything you'd like to add that I didn't ask you about? Anything you wish Americans knew about this place and don't know?

Captain Jones: I wish more Americans knew about the good things Marines are doing at the lower levels. They see a lot of things we're doing at the general level, but they don't see what the privates and lance corporals are doing to further this relationship with the Iraqis and help the Iraqi people. We came here in part to liberate the Iraqi people and help the Iraqi people. And truly we have, at the lowest level. As we move away from kinetic warfare, we have those diplomats if you will, the strategic corporals, who is out there every day, helping Iraqis paint their businesses, helping Iraqis open their businesses, helping disabled people out of their own pockets, starting the Adopt a School programs because they can't get school supplies through the Iraqi chain.

Schools back in the States, through family members, adopt some of these schools and they send school supplies out. Those kinds of things I wish the Americans could see. The actual good things. The progress. I wish Americans could see the number of kids who attached to you today. They were happy, they weren't throwing rocks at you. They were happy to see you and talk to you. They probably asked you for chocolate, but you know, still, they talk to you. That's the message. That's what I want them to know about.

Not all Iraqi people are bad. There are some really truly good people. The fact that they would not let you leave their house today until you ate their food, until you were full, things like that. A lot of people open up their homes when they see that Americans are actually here to help them.

Post-script: I don’t get paid for these reports by anyone but readers of this Web site, and I can't afford to do this for free. If these dispatches are worth something to you, please consider a contribution and help make true independent journalism economically viable.

You can make a one-time donation through Pay Pal:

Alternately, you can now make recurring monthly payments through Pal Pal. Please consider choosing this option and help me stabilize my expense account.

$10 monthly subscription:

$25 monthly subscription:

$50 monthly subscription:

$100 monthly subscription:

If you would like to donate for travel and equipment expenses and you don't want to send money over the Internet, please consider sending a check or money order to:

Michael Totten
P.O. Box 312
Portland, OR 97207-0312

Many thanks in advance.

Read more entries at Michael J. Totten »