The true ugliness of it all

Wikileaks is apparently set to release 400,000 classified reports of the Iraq war from 2004-2009. For those of you not familiar with the site, Wikileaks posts classified and sensitive information the site gains from anonymous sources. The information, from multiple governments and countries, is typically pretty benign stuff and rarely surprises anyone who is an expert in whatever area the information is covering. On occasion ripples are created such as when the site released video from an Apache attack helicopter that showed the pilots opening fire on two journalists who they thought were carrying weapons or when documents of the Afghanistan conflict were released without the names of Afghan informants censored, which could pose a very real threat to those individuals who would then be marked as spys.

Wired.com posted an article on what the author hopes will be covered in the reports. Included is a question about the sectarian violence (the author calls it "ethnic cleansing" which it was not, it was Arab on Arab) that occured in Baghdad in 2006-07. Two sentences jumped out at me:

It’s never been clear how much the U.S. military knew about the cleansing.
Low-level units watched it happen.

First off, what does the author mean by "low-level"? Does he mean platoons, companies, or battalions? Second, what exactly is he trying to get at by stating "it's never been clear"? Several authors and journalists wrote and have discussed the Shia on Sunni attacks that occured during that time period. There were near daily briefings to the press by MNF-I and MNC-I on the subject. Barriers were erected around neighborhoods to attempt to prevent incursions by "kill squads". A task force was even created to help figure out how to stop the violence.

In 2006 my brigade was up in Mosul, however, we had one of our infantry battalions and the cavalry squadron tasked to other brigades down in Baghdad. We would receive daily information from those two units about what they were facing. I've talked with several of the NCOs in 1-14 about what the situation was like in the '06-'07 time period. Each one stated that they would get hit by an IED nearly everytime they left the wire. Finding body dump sites was common. After several months, patrols would avoid the areas that were common dump sites because they were tired of finding half buried corpses and then having to pull security on site for 5 or 6 hours before Iraqi police showed up to take away the deceased.

When I was assigned to 1-23IN in April of '07 one my intel analysts like to tell a story of the task force I mentioned earlier. While flying a UAV over their battlespace late one night an ambulence surrounded by Iraqi police was noticed. The police were either taking bodies from the police station and putting them in the ambulence or vice versa. It was well known that the police were infiltrated by Shia miltias and would conduct "kill sweeps" of Sunni neighborhoods at night, often still dressed in police uniforms. The problem was that there weren't enough U.S. soldiers to be able to prevent the atrocities and most units were still living on the giant FOBs and rarely had soldiers out patroling at night. In this case it could not be determined if the police being watched were doing their job and just transporting bodies to the morgue, or if they had just killed the individuals in the ambulence. After watching for some time the battalion battle captain received a phone call from a colonel with the "anti sectarian violence task force". The colonel was watching the UAV feed and was ordering 1-23 to do something about the situation. The battle captain attempted to talk some sense into the colonel who was clearly trying to micro manage a battalion whom she had no authority over. To keep feathers from being too ruffled, a patrol was sent out a short time later but by the time they got to the scene the police and ambulence were already gone and nobody in the police station knew what the soldiers were talking about.

In December the entire brigade would move down to Baghdad and gain the mission of clearing neighborhoods in order to disrupt and defeat militias and insurgents in those neighborhoods. Since the most problematic neighborhoods were also mixed Sunni/Shia areas and thus sectarian fault lines we were ordered to document all evidence of sectarian violence. These reports, known as "storyboards" were then disseminated throughout the brigade as well as to higher in order to plan future missions and provide information on the problem. Several times a week I would get a storyboard of a body dump site and in many cases it became a macabre game of "Where's Waldo" only with body parts. A hand coming out of the ground here, a half buried face there, something that might be a torso over in the corner. I still get nightmares about some of the pictures.

By late 2007 the situation began to improve. Al Qaida was slowly defeated; the Shia militias claimed ceas-fires; Sunni insurgent groups began siding with the government. The sectarian violence would eventually cease, but I do not believe it was due to anything we or the Iraqi government did. There was just very little more killing to be done. Baghdad used to have predominately mixed neighborhoods of Shia and Sunni with only a few neighborhoods that were primarily Sunni or Shia. By the end of 2007 there were very few mixed neighborhoods. People either fled the violence or were slaughtered.

Man's inhumanity to man is a terrible thing to witness.