Less than twenty-four hours after the last convoy of American fighters left, Maliki’s government ordered the arrest of Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, the highest-ranking Sunni Arab. Prosecutors accused Hashemi of having run a death squad that assassinated police officers and government officials. The practice was not uncommon at the time. “During the civil war, many political leaders in Iraq had death squads,” a former Western diplomat said. “Maliki started using the security forces to go after his rivals.” In moving against Hashemi, Maliki was signalling that he intended to depose his sectarian rivals. Hashemi flew to the Kurdish region, in northern Iraq, where officials offered to protect him. Seven of his bodyguards were arrested, the first of sixty. Only a few days earlier, in a press conference at the White House to mark the end of the American war, President Obama had praised Maliki as “the elected leader of a sovereign, self-reliant, and democratic Iraq.” When Hashemi fled, American officials did not publicly protest. Three months later, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to death; he remains in exile.
With the expulsion of Hashemi, Maliki began an aggressive campaign to crack down on dissent—especially Sunni dissent—and to centralize authority in his office. In the following months, he forced out a number of senior officials, notably Sinan al-Shabibi, the governor of the Central Bank, who had tried to stop him from diverting Iraq’s foreign reserves into the government’s operating budget. After the inconclusive 2010 election, the chairman of the Independent Election Commission was arrested. When the Integrity Commission uncovered a network in Maliki’s cabinet that was issuing government contracts to fake companies, he blocked the prosecutions; soon afterward, the commission’s director was replaced with a Maliki ally. In addition, Maliki created the Office of the Commander-in-Chief, which gave him personal control over the country’s million-man Army and police force, often requiring local commanders to report directly to him.
As Maliki gathered power, he set out to banish every trace of Sunni influence from the bureaucracy. One of the places he began was the Iraqi National Intelligence Service. The director was an imposing former general named Mohammed Shawani, a Sunni whose three sons had been tortured to death by Saddam’s men. In August, 2009, Shawani told me, he went to Maliki with an intelligence report that detailed insurgents’ plans for attacks on several government offices. The Prime Minister brushed off his warnings, he said. (Maliki denied this, saying, “It is impossible to believe Shawani.”) Two days later, a wave of car bombs struck the Finance Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, and other government targets, killing a hundred Iraqis and wounding more than five hundred. Shawani fled to the United States. “I knew I had to leave,” he told me. “I thought I was next.” In the following several months, according to Shawani and former American officials, Maliki purged the service of nearly all its Sunni agents and analysts, some five hundred in total. “It’s essentially a Shiite organization now,” Shawani said.
To prevent parliament from passing laws against his interests, Maliki secured a decision from the Iraqi High Court that gave him the exclusive right to draft legislation. Indeed, Maliki has refused to appear before the parliament, or to submit his appointees for approval. “Maliki could have been a historic figure,” Adil Abd al-Mahdi, the former Vice-President, said. “The Shiites supported him; he had the support of the Sunnis and the Kurds. But he needed a real partnership. He needed to give some of his power to others.” Mahdi added, “We have a saying in Arabic: When you want everything, you lose everything.”
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Many of the allegations of corruption center on Ahmed Maliki, the Prime Minister’s son. According to several Iraqis and Americans, Ahmed often demands a percentage of government contracts awarded to private companies. Maliki calls these accusations “fabrications by enemies and opponents.” But he has acknowledged giving Ahmed unusual legal authority. In 2011, Ahmed led raids on U.S. government contractors in the Green Zone, forcing them out of their offices and confiscating property. And, in a television interview last fall, Maliki said that he had dispatched his son, along with a police squad, to arrest an Iraqi construction mogul named Namir al-Akabi, on tax-evasion and embezzlement charges. “When an arrest warrant was issued, everyone was afraid to go near him,” Maliki said, citing Akabi’s connections in the media. “But Ahmed said, ‘Give me the arrest warrant and I will bring him in.’ ” He added, “Ahmed is tough.” Many Iraqis were outraged that the Prime Minister’s son had been given such power, and saw it as a troubling sign that he is being groomed as a dynastic successor. The Iraqi official worried that, if Maliki wins the upcoming elections, “he will pass power to his son.”
<snip> (Sound familiar?)
Maliki has grown steadily more imperious, reacting violently to the slightest criticism. He often claims to have files on his rivals, filled with evidence of corruption and killings. “I swear to God, if the parliament wants to summon me, I will go, but I will turn the world upside down,” he said on Iraqi television last year. “I will take a list of names with me and call them out one by one, and tell everyone what they have been doing.” Maliki has even resurrected a Saddam-era law that makes it a criminal offense to criticize the head of the government. He has filed defamation suits against scores of journalists, judges, and members of parliament, demanding that they spend time in prison and pay damages. “For any political difference, any rivalry, he makes a case,” a senior Iraqi politician told me.
Maliki is relatively restrained in his display of wealth—his sole apparent indulgence is a Patek Philippe watch—but he lives in an area in the Green Zone known as Little Venice, for its many fountains and canals. The area once housed Saddam’s family and senior members of his regime; today, black Mercedes sedans purr down its manicured streets. Maliki does not live in Saddam’s Presidential Palace—that’s set aside for state occasions—but in a villa that was once one of his guesthouses.
Across a square live two notorious Maliki associates. The first is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Dawa activist convicted of bombing the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait in 1983. Muhandis founded the Party of God Brigade, an Iranian-backed militia that attacked American soldiers during the occupation and has been declared a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department. When American forces were still in Iraq, Ryan Crocker said, “We told Maliki that if Muhandis wanted to stay healthy he needed to stay in Iran.” After they withdrew, according to Iraqi and American officials, Muhandis was given a guesthouse on the property of Falah al-Fayyad, Maliki’s national-security adviser.
Just down the road lives Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asa’ib Ah al-Haq, an Iranian-directed militia that launched hundreds of attacks on American forces. U.S. officials say that Khazali was one of the principal plotters in the kidnapping and execution of four American soldiers in Karbala, in 2007, an operation performed at Iran’s behest. The U.S. captured Khazali but turned him over to Iraqi authorities; after the troops left, he was promptly released.
What We Left Behind | The New Yorker
I realize the Iraq army isn’t the most highly disciplined or trained anymore. But simply by sheer numbers they can easily defeat these guys. 10,000 can easily defeat 1,000. The US left millions of dollars in equipment over there.