In late February 2006,
al-Qaeda destroyed the Askariya Shiite shrine in
Samarra. During the previous two months that my cavalry squadron had been operating in
Iraq, my main focus was the technical training of the Iraqi national police and combined operations with them against Sunni insurgents in west Baghdad. Before Samarra, it did not seem important which areas of
Baghdad were Shiite or Sunni or that the police battalions I operated alongside were almost completely Shiite. Before Samarra, I assumed that Iraqi citizens saw the national police as the security arm of the elected, and thus legitimate, government and that the officers had the people's support against insurgents.
It took about three weeks after the attack, in which time my combat patrols sprang from one Sunni mosque to another to protect them from Shiite militias that were at times supported by members of the national police, for me to realize what was really going on. For me, Samarra came to define the nature of the violence in Iraq: civil war.
...
In the summer of 2006, my squadron was assigned to
Amiriyah, a Sunni district of Baghdad. I was the American commander in charge, and over five months I came to know well Sunni perspectives of Iraq. Many if not most Iraqi Sunnis think that the Iraqi government is not legitimate but sectarian and out to crush them. The Sunnis in Amiriyah believed that the government was using its institutional powers to deprive them of essential services such as electricity, trash pickup, banking facilities, health care and, most important, security. People I spoke with said that Iraqi security forces, especially the local and national police, were determined to kill them because they were Sunni. Their response to these ideas was not passive: Residents of Amiriyah, working with Sunni insurgents, would regularly target the Shiites in the area as payback for what they saw the government doing to them. The bodies that my squadron helped retrieve from the streets each day were almost always Shiite.
I decided that the best way to secure the neighborhood would be to hire local men, vetted by me and trusted imams in the district, and turn them into a police force. Not only did this prove to be exceedingly difficult, but government officials often told me that doing this was arming their enemy.
I ordered a concrete barrier to be built around Amiriyah and limited entry to one checkpoint controlled by the Iraqi army. The goal was to keep Sunni insurgents from bringing in weapons and to prevent attacks by Shiite militias. But while the barrier helped isolate the neighborhood from outside insurgents and militias, it could not stop, and actually facilitated, killings within Amiriyah. The security we helped provide for Sunnis gave them increased freedom to go out and kill Shiites or, more recently, to conduct fights against local al-Qaeda members. Amiriyah became one of the safest areas in Baghdad for Sunnis but lethal for the few remaining Shiites ...