Published: 19 November 2008

Between 2007 and 2008, I got to know a man in South Baghdad whose codename was “Bishop.”  This is the short story of his life.

His parents were Kurdish Sunnis.  They moved to Baghdad 34 years ago – recently married and excited to make a new life for themselves and create a family.  Bishop’s real name was Bashar Akram Ameen; the name given to him when he was born on October 6, 1978 in the Abu Ghraib apartments in Baghdad.  Bashar had three sisters and one brother.  His schooling included graduating from a Baghdad high school in the class of ’96 and attending the Agriculture College of Baghdad University from 1997 until 2002 when he graduated.  America had just set its sights on toppling Saddam.
 
Shortly after graduating, Bashar began service in the Iraqi Army Reserve, but that lasted only three months, because the U.S. crushed a great part of the Iraqi Army and then officially dissolved the rest.  For three months, Bashar was one of those unemployed young men we worried about.  He got a job in October of 2003 as a bodyguard for an Iraqi judge.  His first job didn’t last long because insurgents assassinated the judge.  Feeling lost and a bit frightened, Bashar decided to look for a “safer” job, and began interpreting for, as he called it, “the Sally Port Security Company” in al-Mansour, Baghdad.  Insurgents in his neighborhood figured out that he was working for an American company, and on February 21, 2006, as he left his job at 6:00 pm, they started shooting at him in his car, “…but I miraculously survived,” Bashar  explained to me, “and that was the reason to leave my job at that company.”

His own safety, and therefore that of his loved ones, was in jeopardy, and so, as Bashar recalled, “I quit visiting my family for over four months.”  Though he had used caution, his family was forced to flee in order to avoid imminent suffering or death from the insurgents. Bashar explained, “They had killed our neighbor’s son, so their father gave the key of his house to my father to keep the house safe until maybe the situation getting better.  Then, on the next day, the same killers of our neighbors came to my father and asked him about the key, so he refused to give it away and he said that he don’t have it and he don’t know anything about it.”  The insurgents warned Bashar’s father that they would check the validity of his information, and if it was untrue, “they will teach my father and us a lesson.” His family, doing what they must to survive, reluctantly left their home.  Bashar wrote to me, “My father packed some basic stuff and moved from our own house in Ameriya, Baghdad; Iraq.”

By now, the civil war was raging in Baghdad.
 
Not everything was so bleak.  Even at the height of the civil war, life went on.  Bashar met a woman named Alyaa, who worked in legal administration at the “Sally Port Security Company.”  They courted for a year, and got married on September 14, 2006 –  all the while, sectarian violence raged around Iraq.  A year later their first son, Mustafa, was born. Around that time, however, the local Shia militia (called Jaish al-Mahdi, or JAM) figured out that Bashar, who is Sunni, had worked for the Americans at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Falcon (where he got the codename “Bishop”). “They began coming around to bother my wife while I was at work,” he recalls. “So we moved again to live in al-Mansour, Baghdad. And since then, I stopped making any type of relationships with the neighbors just because you can’t trust anybody.  In al-Mansour, we had very quiet time….”
 
And so Bashar began working for the American Army as an interpreter, for various units, at the time of peak fighting.  I first met Bishop when he worked for 1-4 Cav in South Baghdad.  The 1-4 Cav soldiers kept Bishop busy, working him hard, and he became one of the team.  As the months rolled by and I came back to 1-4 on several occasions, their area had become quieter and quieter until, really, there was nothing going on except progress.  The younger infantrymen were proud of the progress, but wanted to get up to Mosul or out to Afghanistan, where the fighting was.  But not Bishop.  He’d seen the worst of it and did not want to see any more war.  He was old beyond his years and wanted peace.
 

The two most dangerous jobs for Iraqis were probably journalist and interpreter.  Bishop wanted to come to the United States.  As a result, 1-4 Cav Commander, LTC James Crider, and some of the soldiers Bishop had worked with helped with the paperwork.
 
Just a small aside: LTC Crider and his battalion were serious contributors to success in Iraq.  I got e-mails from LTC Crider about his struggles with Iraqi bureaucracy on behalf of Bishop, even after he went home to America.  I’d seen this LTC Crider go to bat for Iraqis over and over again in Iraq.  In just one example, Crider and his staff waded for months through the Iraqi legal labyrinth to try to free a man who had been wrongfully detained for a bombing he could not have committed; the bombing had never occurred.  Crider and his battalion were welcome fixtures in that neighborhood, because he and his men had brought peace and serenity to a place that had previously been one of the most perilous places in Iraq.  The last time I was there, I walked around with no body armor or helmet, and bought popcorn on the street.  (I was just there again on about November 15; the progress continues without violence.)

I heard that many Iraqis cried when 1-4 redeployed to America.  One captain had even been offered a home if he would come back to live in the neighborhood.  The captain knew how to get things done, while still making the time to learn the names of every kid there.  And he knew their mothers and fathers, too.  But that was it; 1-4 went home and Bishop was left behind, with his family scattered by the war.
 
His father died in July 2007, his mother and two sisters still live in Baghdad, his brother in Kirkuk, and another sister in Syria.
 
LTC Crider and others struggled…and struggled…and finally succeeded.  On November 6, 2008, Bishop emigrated to America, landing in [Nashville], Tennessee along with his wife, Alyaa (who is carrying their second child), and their son, Mustafa.  And the amazing 1-4 Cav keeps winning battles, without firing a shot, long after leaving the war.

So now, Bashar is no longer “Bishop,” and he has begun an American life, with the many ups and downs we all have to face.  His next fight is to find a job in our troubled economy and overcome a high-voltage dose of culture shock.  He will come to understand that our culture is just as complicated as the one he left behind – but without the violence, threats and scars of war.

Many people have welcomed him to America.  I think Bashar can be of particular value to America at this time, simply by getting on the radio stations and talking to reporters and telling his story – the story of Iraq –  and showing people how it really is over here.  (I write this from Iraq.)  Perhaps he can explain why many of us think that it was all worth it.  I asked Bashar if I could publish his e-mail address, and he agreed.

This is not just a happy ending, but a happy beginning.  Please welcome this new family to America and pass this story to your local papers and radio stations.  Ask them to talk with a real Iraqi who just got here.  People need to know what happened in Iraq.   

Bashar can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

10 November 2008

The Iraq war is over.  Barring the unforeseen, the darkest days are behind, though we are still losing soldiers to low-level fighting with enemies that are true “dead-enders.”  Last month we lost seven Americans in combat in Iraq.  Peace, however, is not upon us.  Another thirty or so Iraqis died today in suicide attacks.  Nobody suffers more at the hands of Islamic terrorists than other Muslims.

A new President will soon begin to make critical decisions about Iraq and Afghanistan, the economic crisis at home, and countless other matters.  While the Iraq war began, then boiled and finally cooled before President-elect Obama will be sworn into office on January 20th, 2009, the Afghanistan-Pakistan spectacle is just getting started.  He was always a fierce opponent of our involvement in Iraq.  And, as with so many Democrats in the Senate, he argued frequently, during the campaign, that we should have been focused on Afghanistan all along, because it is the real incubator of the international terrorist threat.  Timing being everything, our new President will get his wish.  Afghanistan now moves to center stage.  The conflicts in Afghanistan and between Afghanistan and Pakistan have the simmering potential to overshadow anything we’ve seen in Iraq.  Here are a few things I hope he understands:
 
Our enemies are winning.  The enemies know it.  We know it.  Who are they?  The Taliban, with its deep local roots is enemy number one.  Al Qaeda is hanging around to make trouble.  Some Paks, who don't want to see a thriving Pushtun state on their border, are our enemies.  They fund and shelter the Taliban even though we rely on them to help us defeat it.  Nothing is straightforward in this part of the world.  We have other enemies in Afghanistan who hate the Taliban.

Most of our allies are not very helpful. With the exception of the British, Canadians, Dutch and a few others such as the Aussies, we are not fighting this with an “A-team” of international allies. With a few exceptions, our allies on the ground are comprised of several dozens of countries that mostly refuse to fight.  The bulk of NATO amounts to little more than a “Taliban” Piñata.  The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is proving nearly worthless and provides no credible threat to Armed Opposition Groups (AOGs) in Afghanistan.  Most of the NATO member countries seem to break out in a cold sweat at the mere mention of “Taliban.”  They piled in when the war looked easy, and largely humanitarian.  But now that it’s getting harder and more dangerous, they would like to pile out.

Success or failure in Afghanistan depends on the handful of countries that step up -- and a multi-pronged, combat/political/nation-building strategy. The Brits field excellent soldiers but are short of enabling equipment, such as helicopters, armor and UAVs, that could greatly enhance their combat effectiveness.  Nevertheless, an outstanding British-led operation to deliver a 200-ton hydroelectric turbine to Kajaki dam could eventually deliver electricity to 1.8 million people.  This dam, with its potential to bring light, heat and the ability to begin industrializing, is a true and serious victory for the good guys.  So, let me stipulate that it's still a real fight. While the AOGs are making progress on some fronts, success is no more assured for them than for us. Mostly they destroy things that their countrymen want -- including peace, and prospect of increased prosperity.  They cut off lips and noses and douse women with gasoline and burn them alive.  Just recently, a group of enemies apparently tried to bait us into killing a wedding party.  If we are going to get groups to the negotiating table, we must pose a credible threat against enemies, and credible promise to the rest.  What we don’t want is the current situation, where it’s actually the AOGs that are forcing us to the table, largely due to NATO's general apathy and unwillingness to fight.

To ensure that we have influence on the outcome, we need more soldiers in Afghanistan, and fast.  They need to be U.S. forces, British, Canadian, Aussie; we cannot depend on NATO in general and they don’t know how to fight anyway.  Unless President-elect Obama knows some kind of magic spell, he will not be able to persuade most NATO countries to do the right thing.  Springtime 2009 will likely bring very heavy fighting in Afghanistan.  We will not have credible negotiating positions while we remain outgunned by a bunch of old rifles and dinged up RPGs.

While security in Iraq continues to improve, Afghanistan is drowning in a frothing quicksand.  While most of the 2008 fighting season is over, we can be assured that the Afghan national sport – guerrilla warfare – will become the 2009 Taliban Olympics by April.  They know this is a marathon.

Whatever else, Mr. President-elect, this is no time to go wobbly. It is important to note that some top British and U.S. commanders believe that we can make a “success” out of Afghanistan.  We’ve learned a few things over the past seven years.  We’ve truly got a “dream-team” of military commanders with great in-theater experience, to advise and guide the next phase. They saved Iraq. Use them well, Sir.

President-elect Obama says he is serious about Afghanistan.  (Just don’t fumble Iraq, please.)  As he must be learning in intelligence briefings, it's going to be tough stuff.  It will be like solving a human Rubik’s Cube during a firefight while the media screams every time you make a wrong move – or what is perceived as a wrong move, and there is a clock ticking and at some unknown point the cube self-destructs.

Maybe his recent training in the combat of a two-year election cycle will have toughened him up for the international challenges ahead.

Today I am in Kuwait, heading back into Iraq for an end-of-year round-up.  Then it’s back to the war in Afghanistan for one heck of a fight.  Please stay tuned.  Your soldiers are locked in a deadly struggle tonight.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.

30 October 2008

Big Media is taking a big hit during this global economic avalanche. As New York Times reporter Richard Perez-Pena noted in the October 23, 2008, paper of record, “The New York Times Company reported a 51.4 percent decline in third-quarter profit on Thursday and swung to a loss on continuing operations as deeper-than-expected expense cuts could not keep pace with falling revenue.”

27 October 2008

Yesterday, U.S. special operations forces struck positions across the Syrian-Iraq order, inside of Syria, apparently killing nine people, most of whom were non-Syrian Arab fighters on their way into Iraq. Of course there is a great cry rising from the Syrians today.

For years, tons of explosives and a long line of foreign terrorists have streamed across the Syrian border into Anbar Province and Nineveh Province, Iraq.  I must have spent a total of about nine months in Nineveh, about eight of which were in the capital of Mosul, and another month in Anbar.

02 November 2008

Many esteemed and influential people have been privately debating the question: “Is it Possible to Win the U.S. Presidency by Fraud and Deception?”  We already know the answer, don’t we?

Published: 26 October 2008 

In a war where information can be more powerful than massed forces, the cellphone is a weapon.  Insurgents the world over use cellphones to transmit messages, record photos and videos, and sometimes just to chat.  They can record video of an attack, and transmit that video within a minute.  U.S. and other technologically adept forces use machines to target cell phones.

This is no secret.  Not to the enemy, at least.

I am especially careful not to compromise operational security (OPSEC).  There are many photographs and potential dispatches that will never be published here because I do not want to risk jeopardizing our effort.  The military forces with which I embed have clear guidelines to protect OPSEC.  But war correspondents can learn just as much, or even more, while unembedded, and those times are not covered by guidelines.  Still, I am just as cautious while unilateral.  Often OPSEC is compromised, not because journalists knowingly publish sensitive information, but because they don’t know what the enemy might learn from the news they share with their audience. Others just don’t care, or publicize sensitive information for one-upmanship or profit.

We are at war – and I want us to win.  An important aspect of this war is the information campaign, on both sides.  Citizens of the countries fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq have the right to know what their soldiers and governments are doing.  Our soldiers wear our flag.  They represent us and they use our resources.  We have a right to know what our soldiers are doing.  We also have a right to know how our civilian leadership is spending the blood of our family, friends and compatriots who wear the uniform.  At the same time, our soldiers can be endangered by the release of certain information that the enemy can use to their advantage.  I’m not talking about propaganda, but hard facts – like how much damage a specific IED can do to a Humvee, or the description of tactical maneuvers.  Regarding cellphones, some readers are rightly concerned that I have given away secrets that might endanger our soldiers and their allies.  Yet some well-intentioned readers are not tracking the ground situation as closely as I am.  When reporting specific information, it is carefully considered and I often run it by informed sources to make sure the information will not compromise OPSEC.   And when someone gives me a good reason (avoiding embarrassment is not a good reason) not to divulge certain information, I keep a lid on it.  Sometimes to my own detriment.  On several occasions I have been “scooped” by other journalists who published information that I withheld.  They did not exercise the same constraints, either because of journalistic competitiveness, or an understanding with the source who provided the information.  I was the first correspondent to see the famous letter where Ayman al-Zawahiri told Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to stop the videotaped beheadings because they were a propaganda debacle.  Since I was told it would compromise intelligence operations, I did not mention the letter in my dispatches until it was published elsewhere.  This was a major loss for me.

Sometimes the military itself spills the beans, whether through carelessness, incompetence, or one tentacle of the bureaucratic octopus not knowing what the other is articulating.  The criticality of OPSEC and the desire to publish news often are in conflict, but in the end, OPSEC wins with me.  Many, including myself, have family and close friends in harm’s way.  However, please be aware, that if we accidentally bomb a village, and I am a witness, I will report it.  Like the time I reported seeing our forces accidentally shoot an innocent taxi driver in Mosul.

In a recent dispatch (The Road to Hell ) I mentioned that people can be targeted through their cell phones.   One reader complained publicly, and others privately, that I was giving away secrets.  The enemy is aware that cell phones can get them killed.  They’ve known this for years.   We know they know.  And they know we know.   That’s why we see stories like this:

Taliban orders mobile shutdown in Afghan province
Tue Oct 21, 2008 5:20AM EDT

GHAZNI, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban insurgents said Tuesday they had told mobile phone operators to shut down their networks during the day in the Ghazni province, southwest of Kabul, saying signals help track insurgent fighters.

The warning comes on top of a Taliban order earlier this year for phone operators to turn off their networks throughout the country at night.

"We have informed mobile companies operating in Ghazni to turn off their signals during the daytime now as it endangers the lives of our fighters," Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman told Reuters.

"We want the companies to cut off their signal for 10 days from now," he said, adding that the order might be extended.

I’m more interested to know what might be planned for those 10 days.   An offensive?  A Taliban convention?   Osama Bin Laden coming up for air?

The article goes on:

Five mobile operators, three of them foreign companies, with an estimated investment of several hundred million of dollars, have set up business in Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001.

We’ve been at war in Afghanistan since 2001, and the enemy has figured out some things over that time.  Tracking cell phones is no more difficult than tracking strobe lights.  Anything that radiates can be tracked.  Osama bin Laden, for instance, realized that having any electronics around him could be a death sentence.  He reportedly used an intentional deception plan using his own phone, by sending it off with a decoy while he escaped in another direction.   CBS reported:

Osama's Satellite Phone Switcheroo
NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 2003

(CBS) Osama bin Laden escaped capture in Afghanistan, fooling sophisticated American satellites, by simply having an aide carry his satellite phone in a different direction, a newspaper reports.

The Washington Post reports that with U.S. forces closing in around bin Laden's refuge in the Tora Bora mountains in late 2001, a Moroccan bodyguard named Abdallah Tabarak took the terrorist mastermind's satellite phone and split off from his boss.

Bin Laden believed the U.S. was using the phone signal to trace him.

He was apparently right. Tabarak had the phone when he was captured, and bin Laden got away.

"He agreed to be captured or die. That's the level of his fanaticism for bin Laden," A Moroccan official told the Post. "It wasn't a lot of time, but it was enough. There is a saying: 'Where there is a frog, the serpent is not far away.'" 

The Columbia Journalism Review reports that President Bush confirms the tactics:

The debate over the shuttering of bin Laden’s cell phone got started on Monday during a press conference in which President Bush asserted that in 1998 bin Laden shut off his phone after seeing a reference to it in an American newspaper — thus throwing off U.S. surveillance of the terrorist’s activities.

“And again, I want to repeat what I said about Osama bin Laden, the man who ordered the attack that killed 3,000 Americans,” said the President. “We were listening to him. He was using a type of cell phone, or a type of phone, and we put it in the newspaper — somebody put it in the newspaper that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed.”

So  the enemy has known about cell phones since 1998.  Yet this begs the question: If we were listening to OBL at that time, we could have saved ourselves a great deal of blood and fortune if we had killed him then.  Why didn’t we?

Now it’s 2008.  The enemy knows the risks of cell phones, but the potential benefits are also great.   Sometimes they get careless; other times we get lucky.  When operations get too hot, some enemies in Afghanistan try to shut down the network.  While they take advantage of modern technology, primitive chaos works for them as well.  In Iraq, when the tide started turning against al Qaeda, AQI destroyed cell towers because people were calling in tips.  It’s easy for AOG (Armed Opposition Groups) in Afghanistan to threaten or coerce the communications companies.

Afghans continue to learn English, and now they have cell phones galore.  I met a Bedouin out in Iraq just near the Iranian border down in Maysan Province, who charged his cell phone on his motorbike.  In some ways, we might be centuries apart, but when it comes to the global neural network of communications, the camel herders and shepherds are connected, too.  Many of the AOG in Afghanistan don’t even need cell phones.  They use walkie-talkies.  Walkie-talkies, or PTTs (Push To Talks) make more sense for combat, though, of course, the enemy knows we listen and track PTTs because they talk back at us sometimes.  They even sing to each other at night.  The AOG have established repeater stations where they can communicate long distances using PTTs.  One intercept of PTT communications revealed an enemy deep inside Afghanistan who was talking with someone in Pakistan in real time – both of them apparently were Taliban.  The man in Afghanistan wanted to know when Ramadan started.  The man in Pakistan told him, and the man in Afghanistan asked how he knew.  The man in Pakistan said that he had been told by a friend in America.  The guy in America could have been calling from a Starbucks.

Nearly everything – and everyone – is connected.

Modern communications are so useful to insurgent networks that sometimes governments curtail them.  During the war in Nepal, PTTs were outlawed, and the cell phones were shut down at times, not by the Maoists, but by the government.  After people get used to cell phones, the phones become “essential.”  So whoever cuts off the cell phones, be it insurgents or the government, alienates people.  This happened in Nepal.  If the AOG starts whacking down those communications towers, which they can do at whim, they will lose support of many people.  And certainly there is little doubt that some of those hundreds of millions of dollars being invested into Afghanistan cell systems must be going to AOG leaders.  Twisted, isn’t it?

The photo above has a communications tower in the background.   I Skyped one of the phone numbers on the board and it worked.  So if any reader needs some metal work done near Kandahar, give them a call.  Cell phones are a boon for developing countries.  The infrastructure required to wire landline phones is incredibly costly and time-consuming.  But cell systems can be installed quickly, and suddenly everyone can talk to just about anyone on the globe.  The owner of AH. L.T.D could call the National Public Radio hotline and end up being another “Joe the Plumber.”

People used to talk about six degrees of separation from any single human on the planet to another.  Today, when nearly everybody all over the globe uses cell phones, there’s only one degree of separation – if that person has your number.  And if they don’t, there still are ways to find you.

Please support this mission by making a direct contribution. Without your support, the mission will end. Thank you for helping me tell the full story of the struggle for Iraq and Afghanistan.