Iraqis take their politics and their elections very seriously. A bold statement for sure, but one I would argue is accurate. For the entirety of the Saddam regime and likely even previous to that politics was not something openly discussed by the average Iraqi. Elections were a joke. Much can be said of the American invasion and overthrow of the Saddam regime but one thing it did bring about was an intensity for the democratic process that you will never see in the States.
As one senior Iraqi leader told us following an assasination attempt on the mayor of As Sadiyah (his 6th or 7th since taking office in '06), "in America, when Hillary Clinton loses the nomination to Barack Obama she doesn't attempt to kill him, she joins his side. In Iraq, assasinations are just a form of politics."
The attack against the mayor was the first politically motivated attack we faced after taking over for 5-1 CAV in the beginning of September. There would be a few more and I would find it difficult at times attempting to distinguish between political violence from insurgent violence from ethnic violence as the trifecta of chaos often blurred lines. In each of our major towns, Mandali, As Sadiyah, Jalula, Qara Tapa, Kifri, and Khanaqin, there was a Kurdish mayor, often Shia. This wasn't an issue in Kifri, Khanaqin, or even Manadali as both Kifri and Khanaqin were majority Kurdish and Mandali had a barely a Sunni Arab majority. The reason the other towns had Kurdish mayors was because in the 2006 election the Sunni Arabs refused to vote and so the Kurdish political parties (PUK primarily) won the town council positions who then appointed the mayors. The Kurdish mayor in Qara Tapa appeared to be a popular fellow; he had been mayor for about 10 years which means he held the job during even Saddam's time. A survivor for sure. The mayor of Jalula was so ineffective and so despised by even the Kurds that he feared even leaving his office; the PUK would eventually kick him out of that party. Despite the several attempts on his life, the mayor of As Sadiyah refused to be intimidated and used his position to demand more security forces for the town.
The 2010 elections were originally scheduled for January. By late October and early November the squadron commander was actively pushing the local security leadership to begin planning, or at least think about planning, for the upcoming clusterfuck. He would bring it up in one-on-one meetings and in group sessions such as our bi-weekly "AO North Security Meeting". The responses were amusing in their similarity..."don't worry, we've done elections before. We will have meetings and everything will go smooth. Inshallah."
Always inshallah.
The elections were delayed, and then delayed again. Looking back it was probably good that they were in that it gave us more time to prepare and presented the opportunity to remove some more individuals who may have attempted to disrupt things. However, in the middle of the surge in attacks we faced in the run up to elections as well as the frustration and stress of coming up with a security plan everyone agreed on, my Iraq counterpart, MAJ Mustafa, stated what many of us were thinking, "if we had just had the elections in January, we'd be done and through with this shit."
It takes a lot to get an Iraqi to swear.
Eventually a plan was established, a plan very similar to what was used in the previous provincial elections in 2009. Throughout the province US forces would attempt to be as invisible as possible, mostly staying on our bases, except in 1-14's area. We of course could not stay behind our dirt and concrete walls because of the tripartite checkpoints that had been established a couple of months earlier. Due to the overt American presence already in the area and the sensitivity of our ethnic fault line it was determined that 1-14 would assist in manning several more Iraqi Army and police checkpoints.We even brought some Peshmerga along for fun.
There was another element to the plan. Because of the aforementioned fault line, UNAMI (United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq) decided they needed to place election monitoring people in key election sites to ensure no election rigging was conducted by either the Arabs or the Kurds. For some reason UNAMI could not determine which sites to monitor on their own and so asked for advice from the American Army. The Army of course turned to the one person in all of Diyala who could accurately tell them which sites would be most vulnerable to election fraud...
...wait for it...
...wait for it...
THIS GUY!
United States Forces Iraq (USFI, think GEN Ordierno) determined the best way to answer this inquiry from UNAMI would be to pass the buck off to the organization that runs day to day operations in Iraq...I Corps. I Corps of course decided division could best handle this question so pinged United States Division North (3rd Infantry Division). Division did a quick look to make sure no one was watching and slipped the question down to the brigade on the ground, 3-2 SBCT. Brigade did what brigade always does and asked the battalion level unit who owned the battlespace where UNAMI should place their observers. At this point the inquiry had become a military intelligence problem and not an operations problem and so I sat staring at an email wondering how many puppies I had kicked in a previous life to deserve this fate.
I wish I could say that I just dumped the issue onto the troops but this clearly was a staff problem so after chatting with all three commanders (including the C troop commander who was actively trying to avoid giving me information) I grabbed my warrant officer and NCO and commenced to staring at a map for 15 minutes. I may or may not have ripped out some of my hair.
We gave UNAMI 5 or 6 sites that we felt were most likely to see election fraud. In other words, we gave UNAMI 5 or 6 sites that "uh, I think this site is in a mixed neighborhood" / made sense to us.
Task fucking complete. What next?
A moment where I was professionally embarrased came next.
Most of my job is to make educated guesses. "Where is the enemy?" "What is he going to do next?" "Where and when are we going to get blown up?" Everyone knows I'm pretty much guessing. There are times when I am right and times when I am wrong. In officer basic we learned a good S2 is right 50% of the time; outstanding S2's are correct 51% of the time. I have no problem being wrong, but I prefer being wrong 48 hours or more after making a statement/wild ass guess.
A few days prior to elections we held an election rehearsal/briefing with all the key leaders of the squadron. Towards the end of the meeting one of the platoon leaders asked me of the likelihood of an attack against the checkpoint that his platoon would be manning. I told him that an attack against that checkpoint was extremely unlikely.
20 minutes later...and I'm not exagerating when I say 20 minutes...the checkpoint was attacked by a rocket.
That's going to sting for awhile.
On election day everyone on the brigade was expecting some violence but nothing serious. Nothing indicated an attempt to disrupt the voting and attack levels had been low for several months not including the occasional spike such as a coordinated suicide attack in Baqubah a few days prior to elections (that little guy? I wouldn't worry about that little guy).
By the end of the day the brigade saw more than 50 attacks and attempted attacks, mostly in the form of IEDs. Over half of those attacks came in 1-14's area. No other area in the division saw the level of violence we saw. The deputy division commander even came in to get a sense of what was going on. Most of the IEDs going off that day came in the early morning and were bottles of home made explosives set on timers. The purpose was likely to scare people off and keep them from voting.
1-14 CAV's area of operations saw the most attacks in all of Iraq that day.
We also had one of the highest voter turnouts that day at over 70%. Try getting that in the US when shit isn't exploding. I slept very well that night.
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