The Last Battle

By MICHAEL R. GORDON
New York Times Magazine

I. The Shiite Moment

One morning this spring I climbed into a Polish helicopter with a major-general in the Iraqi Army named Othman Ali Farhood. He had just surveyed the situation in Kut, a small city 100 miles southeast of Baghdad where Iraqi forces were contending with a Shiite militia, and was returning to his division headquarters near the city of Diwaniya. Othman, who is a lanky man with a welcoming manner, commands the Eighth Division, rated by the U.S. military as one of Iraq’s best units. In many ways, he also embodies the complexities of Iraq today — including its best hopes for a stable future. A career military man, he served under Saddam Hussein; a tribal sheik, he was at home in the ancestral culture of Iraq’s south; a member of Iraq’s Shiite majority, he and his family had been discriminated against under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated regime. Othman prides himself on his ability to rise above sectarianism, but he also conveys a belief in the historical inevitability of the Shiite ascension in Iraq. “Right now we are the leaders of Iraq,” he told me, “and we will not let it go to anybody else.”

By the time I met up with him, Othman had proved himself one of the Americans’ most effective partners. Over the past year he worked with Team Phoenix, which was composed of three marines dispatched by Gen. David H. Petraeus to troubleshoot problems in the Shiite south. Together they devised a plan to rid Diwaniya of the Shiite militias that roamed freely through the streets, and to strengthen the hand of Shiite tribal leaders: a variation on the tribal-empowerment plan that had already done so much to blunt the power of Sunni insurgents in Iraq’s once-violent Anbar Province. But their strategy wound up attracting far more attention than they liked from the Shiite-led government of Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, for the simple reason that sharing power within the Shiite fold was just as difficult for many Shiites as sharing power with Sunnis.

Over the previous few years, my own trips through Iraq had focused mostly on the U.S. and Iraqi governments’ struggle with Sunni insurgents in battlegrounds like Mosul, Baquba, Hit and Arab Jabour. But the nature of the war has fundamentally changed. The American “surge,” together with a strategy that emphasized protecting civilians and engaging with Sunni tribesmen, weakened Sunni insurgents and jihadists. The bitter fighting between Shiites and Sunnis that turned Baghdad into a killing ground of car bombs, suicide attacks and mutilated corpses has quieted down. And now this sectarian struggle has been eclipsed by a growing tussle for power among the Shiites themselves. The competition involves Prime Minister Maliki and the Shiite religious parties (the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and Maliki’s Dawa Party) that constitute the ruling hierarchy in Baghdad; Moktada al-Sadr’s weakened but still-popular political movement and its military wing, the Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army; and, increasingly, Shiite tribes.

(Continued here.)