WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579405440767359448?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj For Iraq, he was a decorated war hero, severely wounded in battle. As an officer for the Iraqi army, Brigadier General Mustafa Al Mashhadani fought against Iran in the 1980s, against Kuwait in the early 1990s, and on his home turf against Americans in 2003.
But now, coming out of retirement at age 55, he is doing battle with a new enemy in his hometown of Fallujah: the army he served for decades. And he is doing it with a contingent of more than a hundred al Qaeda-linked fighters.
"Every time I fight, I whisper to myself, 'It's me, you idiots,' " said Gen. Mashhadani. "This could have been different."
His anguish is emblematic of some of the strange alliances that have cropped up since armed militants overtook the important city of Fallujah early this year and placed it under the control of the city's Sunni majority. That majority may hate al Qaeda and its rigid theocratic mores—but they despise Nouri Al Maliki, the Shiite prime minister, even more.
More than two years after U.S. forces withdrew from the country it occupied for almost a decade, Iraq is on a bloody downward spiral. Devastating terror attacks now kill dozens of people with horrifying regularity. Highly organized and well-armed militants, capable of bold strikes against police and military targets, have been able to take and hold territory.
Indeed, the past year of worsening sectarian tensions and violence has already produced death tolls reminiscent of Iraq's not-so-distant past. At least 7,818 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2013, the highest annual total since 17,956 were killed in 2007, the year the sectarian civil war first began to subside, according to the United Nations. And the violence hasn't let up: In Baghdad on Saturday, a car bombing—a style of attack that has become routine—killed 19 people.
Experts say that as the crisis deepens, the country risks returning to the kind of sectarian civil war that, at its zenith in 2005 and 2006, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly tore the country apart.
Nowhere are signs of the country's crumbling more evident than in Fallujah, a city seared in the minds of U.S. Marines who did fierce battle with insurgents there. Mr. Maliki, who is vying for a third term in parliamentary elections at the end of April, has sought to portray the occupation of Fallujah as an al Qaeda uprising with international links. And U.S. officials, concerned about the deteriorating security there, have responded. In December, the U.S. delivered 75 Hellfire missiles to Iraq, the first such shipment since it left the country. Then in January, the administration notified Congress of a new weapons package for Iraq that includes up to 500 Hellfire missiles.
In Fallujah, many Sunni politicians blame the bloody uprising on Mr. Maliki and his policies, which his critics say amount to Shiite chauvinism. Contrary to recent reports, locals interviewed in the city say the strongest occupying force in the Sunni-majority city isn't al Qaeda but tribal fighters whose impatience with Mr. Maliki has finally boiled over into violence.
In response, the premier has said the policies aren't chauvinistic and that militants are trying to use them to stir an uprising. Mr. Maliki's spokesman also denied criticisms that the prime minister had been playing up al Qaeda's presence in Anbar province, saying that there would be "no political benefit" to overstating the region's terrorist threat.
But observers warn that unless Mr. Maliki takes a more conciliatory tone with Iraq's powerful Sunni minority, the sectarian division could lead to a more permanent political rupture. Mr. Maliki risks pushing Sunnis out of politics altogether only months before this spring's parliamentary vote, Sunni politicians warn.
"If the government fails to convince people to stand against al Qaeda…it could be the beginning of a civil war in Iraq," said Rafi Al Essawi, a Sunni who served as Finance Minister under Mr. Maliki, but quit under protest last year after his bodyguards were arrested and accused of terrorism. He said he is working to encourage Fallujah's tribal leaders to reject al Qaeda.
In all, since the outbreak of violence began in Fallujah, Ramadi and other areas of Anbar province in December, some 400,000 civilian residents have been displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The fighting in Fallujah has pushed February's death toll above 1,000 across the country, according to the U.N. and the Health Committee of the Provincial Council of Anbar.
Known as the city of mosques, Fallujah has long been a focal point of Sunni extremist sympathies. U.S. forces fought two blistering battles against al Qaeda-linked insurgents in the city in 2004. Though some U.S. officials have quietly voiced concern over Mr. Maliki's policies, a spokeswoman for the White House said this month that the U.S. was actively consulting with Iraqi leaders because of concerns about terrorism.
For the moment, the size of the threat directly from al Qaeda is hard to determine. While al Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, can claim a sizable deployment in Fallujah, interviews with local officials, tribal sheiks and antigovernment fighters suggest that much of the fighting is also led by ordinary Sunni Iraqi tribesmen, jilted loyalists of Saddam Hussein's regime like Gen. Mashhadani and Islamist fighters whose jihad, unlike that of al Qaeda, doesn't exceed Iraq's borders.
For the bulk of the fighters, locals say, the goal of the uprising is far more provincial than al Qaeda's global agenda. Their aims align more closely with the Sunni protesters who erected and maintained largely peaceful protest encampments against Mr. Maliki's government throughout Anbar and other Sunni provinces over the past year.
Among the Sunni protest movement's chief grievances is a counterterrorism law that Sunni leaders say Mr. Maliki has wielded disproportionately against Sunnis, arresting them by the tens of thousands.
The Sunnis' other main complaint is an exclusion law against loyalists of the former regime. Demonstrators say the law against former Baath Party members, the dominant party under the old regime of Saddam Hussein, functions as little more than a sectarian filter to keep Sunnis from getting government jobs or rising in the ranks of Iraq's bureaucracy and military.
"What Maliki has done, the way the security services operate, this has created support for al Qaeda," said Kirk Sowell, a Jordan-based political risk analyst who is the publisher of Inside Iraqi Politics. Al Qaeda-linked fighters, he estimated, make up only about a fifth to a third of the fighters in Fallujah.
Mr. Maliki and his supporters say that both laws are essential tools in the fight against global Islamist extremism and the return of the former regime of Hussein—very real threats that the prime minister insists are incubating inside at least a dozen Sunni protest camps.
"The de-Baathification law included people from both sides, and even may include more Shiites than Sunnis," said Ali al-Moussawi, Mr. Maliki's spokesman, who added that Mr. Maliki is bound by the law and remains "unhappy" that he isn't able to recommission certain former officers who had "proven their loyalty" to the nation. "These are attempts by the politicians in the Sunni areas to gather people around them by telling them that the government is treating them unfairly as an excuse to create trouble in Iraq."
Mr. Moussawi acknowledged that some former senior army officers under Hussein were now colluding with al Qaeda to fight against the Iraqi army. While he didn't know of Gen. Mashhadani, the general would definitely be considered a traitor if he were caught, Mr. Moussawi said.
Loyalists of Hussein, who was executed in 2006, have organized themselves into a group known as the Army of the Men of the Naqshabandi Order, a violent resistance movement with loose ties to the global Naqshabandi Order of Sufi Islamic mystics. Their ranks have populated some of the protest encampments in the north of the country.
ISIS, meanwhile, has strengthened as the bloody conflict in neighboring Syria drags on. Syria's war has given militants access to a plethora of heavy weapons and fighters transported over the two countries' porous shared border, allowing them to ramp up the scale, frequency and sophistication of their attacks. ISIS operates in multiple countries with the aim of carving out an Islamic caliphate.
Though pro-Maliki politicians acknowledge the Sunni protesters' legitimate grievances, they say al Qaeda-linked groups like ISIS have exploited sectarian divisions to advance a regional agenda.
"If the government didn't raid the protest camps, then Anbar would have already been named an Islamist state for al Qaeda," said Khaled Al Assady, a member of the Dawa Party that Mr. Maliki leads.
Despite their ideological differences, most antigovernment militants in Fallujah see their main goal as preventing Mr. Maliki's Shiite-majority Iraqi military from re-entering the city—which to them is tantamount to a hostile takeover by foreign occupiers.
Weeks of negotiations between local tribal leaders loyal to the militants and Anbar politicians with ties to Baghdad have revolved around which security force would eventually take charge of the city in lieu of the armed forces.
For Mr. Maliki's part, the Fallujah calculations include the added complication of the April 30 parliamentary elections, in which the two-term prime minister will be seeking a third chance at the helm. In Fallujah, analysts say the prime minister has what may be his last, best chance to show Shiite Iraqis that he can deal firmly with a rising jihadist threat without further alienating the Sunni minority.
"Maliki needs to demonstrate that he's cleared Fallujah of al Qaeda one way or another," said Michael Knights, an Iraq expert at the conservative-leaning Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "There has to be some kind of dependable end to this, otherwise it's just going to risk humiliation again and again."
Yet as the fighting wears on, more and more secularists like Gen. Mashhadani are finding themselves seduced by al Qaeda.
When he enrolled in the military academy in 1979 at age 20, he says being in the army was a different experience. Being an officer was "marvelous, and you could propose to any girl."
Greeting guests in his house in a neighborhood populated by former officers loyal to Hussein, the sharply dressed, mustachioed Gen. Mashhadani still boasts of the war wounds he earned while fighting against Iran—what he calls "the Persian state of evil." His disfigured leg recalls where an Iranian shell gouged out a chunk of muscle during a firefight in 1987.
He says he climbed the ranks by fighting in what he termed "the disastrous invasion of Kuwait" in 1991 and then against American air incursions in 1993 and 1997. After the army was dissolved following the U.S. invasion in 2003, Gen. Mashhadani returned to his home in Fallujah, and tried civilian jobs. He says he asked about recommissioning in the army four years later, but says he and other Sunni retirees were turned down under the de-Baathification law.
Ultimately, the former general cites increased crackdowns on his fellow Sunnis as a driving force behind his shift in allegiance. In December last year, after the prime minister declared that a protest camp outside Ramadi was dominated by al Qaeda-linked militants, Iraqi security forces killed at least a dozen protesters while dispersing the camp. Shortly afterward, Gen. Mashhadani says he followed his son to a Fallujah mosque where militants were organizing themselves and distributing weapons.
He says he was quickly assigned as a brigade commander over 60 mostly untrained men, and on the same day found himself face-to-face with the first division of the same Iraqi army he served. He says he ordered his unit to retreat. "Some of my old colleagues serve in that division," he said.
Gen. Mashhadani believes the presence of at least one hundred former Iraqi army officers among the Islamists' ranks has made them a more professional, merciful fighting force. He claims to have convinced al Qaeda leaders to halt the practice of launching rockets from civilian neighborhoods.
The former general recalls one incident in which he and his ex-officer colleagues argued with al Qaeda leaders to prevent them from executing 14 captured Iraqi soldiers. Gen. Mashhadani says he saw to it that the men were given over to the protection of a local Fallujah sheik. Such experiences have hardened Gen. Mashhadani's belief in the dignity of his fight.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm a living schizophrenia case," he said. "On the one side I refuse al Qaeda ideology, but on the other I miss military life and hate the government that commands this army."
According to Khalid Al Dulaimi, a leading figure in the Fallujah tribal military council that functions as an informal umbrella group for antigovernment militants, Gen. Mashhadani has become a favorite among younger fighters. He now controls a unit of 103 militants, all from different tribal backgrounds, in a southern suburb of Fallujah.
Gen. Mashhadani admits that it was "bad luck" that compelled him to join with al Qaeda. But for the first time since 2003, he says, he is earning a respectable salary of about $1,000 a month—comparable to that of a new army lieutenant, he says. And he has a refrigerator stocked with food, some spare cash to spend and a loyal following of young soldiers who value his hard-won expertise.
"Today I will prove to Maliki and to anyone who refused my return to the army that I deserve to be an army commander," he said. "Today, I am absolutely with al Qaeda."
—Uthman Al Mukhtar, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes contributed to this article.
Write to Matt Bradley at matt.bradley@wsj.com
