The Widow’s Network Page 2

  It was two days later that Nazhan, ears ringing, ran outside to discover Sara sprawled in front of his garage. Talat’s big house across the street had been turned to rubble. Nazhan knelt to examine his daughter. She didn’t seem to be bleeding, but she was unconscious, barely breathing, and he couldn’t wake her. He picked her up and loaded her into his car, telling the rest of the family to get in, too. He gathered all their ID cards and drove for Kirkuk. He was determined to save Sara.13

  A few days later, Sabrine stood in front of Talat’s house and snapped a picture of the destruction. She felt a certain satisfaction. As far as she was concerned, she was personally responsible for the air strike that had destroyed this ISIS headquarters. No one, she believed, suspected her of anything. It was a mission accomplished, and she was safe.

  Tikrit in general, however, was increasingly dangerous. Kadisiya Two regularly received artillery fire in addition to the occasional air strike, and Sabrine feared for her son’s life. She recalled ISIS fighters telling children, at the time, that on hearing airplanes, it was better to stay out in the street and die a true death than run like a coward. And so, not long after the destruction of Talat’s house, she and several siblings decided to take their children to Hawija, a town sixty-two miles north into ISIS territory, where the fighting was said to be less intense.

  ISIS didn’t stop them going in that direction, and Sabrine moved in with her eldest sister in a neighborhood called Hay al-Askari. Within days, news spread of a recently arrived unmarried woman, and several fighters came to the house. Sabrine couldn’t refuse the marriage proposal one of them made—it wasn’t really a proposal at all. The fighters took her away to live with them.

  “They used me as a slave,”14 Sabrine now says of that time.

  Mobile coverage in Hawija was excellent, though, and at night, when she thought no one would catch her, Sabrine snuck onto the roof, or crouched behind a water tank in the garden, and called Wahida. She described plans overheard while serving rice, or cleaning house, or washing clothes, or after she’d had sex with her “husband.” Then she hid her phone in her underwear again and returned downstairs to obey further commands. Sometimes she wished she were dead.

  Hawija became a dark place for the rest of her family, too. In December of 2015, an air strike would destroy Sabrine’s eldest sister’s house, killing her husband and nine children—five girls and four boys, ranging in age from four to fourteen.15 (This was the incident that originally brought me to Tikrit.) Sabrine claimed she sent Wahida seven or eight locations that were subsequently destroyed in air strikes around Hawija—but not that one. By the time that location was destroyed, she was gone.

  In the spring of 2015, after she had spent seven months undercover, an opportunity for escape presented itself. Sabrine had been talking to an old man in the neighborhood, a shepherd. He claimed he knew a way out of Hawija off the roads where ISIS had checkpoints, and described the path in detail. They made a plan for him to slaughter a sheep for dinner for Sabrine’s “husband” and the local fighters. While the men were at the shepherd’s house, Sabrine broke her SIM card in two and set off with her son, Mohammed, and a handful of relatives, south through the desert, in the dark, toward Tikrit.

  The city, she’d heard, had been liberated—but at great cost. She didn’t know what she’d be returning to. During the offensive, Iraqi security forces received significant air support from the United States but downplayed it to the press. Iraqi commanders claimed they hadn’t needed the help16—though pockets of resistance remained until the end of the month, and the offensive had been stalled for several weeks prior. The United States had set militia withdrawal as a precondition for support, but in the immediate aftermath, several were accused of looting and murder. There was some doubt whether the displaced Sunni population would return. Many did, however—including, finally, Sabrine. Walking from Hawija for a night and a day, she reached an Iraqi Army checkpoint on the edge of the government-controlled territory, and continued home without incident.

  She’d not been home long when, one afternoon, she received a phone call from Wahida, asking her to step outside for a gift. Wahida was waiting just beyond the gate with a crowd of armed men, some in the uniform of the local SWAT team. They stood around a black pickup truck emblazoned with the eagle insignia of the Iraqi special forces. A naked male corpse, badly lacerated, was lashed facedown to the hood. Wahida raised a fist in triumph, grinning.

  Someone snapped a picture of that moment, and when I eventually met Wahida, in Baghdad, she showed it to me proudly. Separately, Sabrine told me that she appreciated the “gift” (allegedly an Islamic State fighter) and was proud of Wahida, especially of the work they did together with the United States. Asked for comment, a spokesman for the United States Central Command wrote, “For operational security we will not release any information in regards to our allies on the ground.”17 But, according to the women, Fat Mike, Talat, and several other officers in the Iraqi security forces,18 the US military frequently used their intelligence to conduct air strikes against the Islamic State in the ongoing campaign. General John Hesterman described that summer as “the most precise and disciplined in the history of aerial warfare.”19 These strikes relied not just on images collected using satellites and drones, but on information Sabrine and Wahida gathered.

  Still, in the days after I first met Sabrine and Wahida, I was skeptical. Even if Sabrine was finished working undercover, why would a spy in a conflict zone confess her profession? In subsequent months, as I interviewed the web of people connected to her story, I came to understand that Sabrine was volatile, even dangerous—perhaps out of Wahida’s control. Though always polite with me, in private she propositioned my interpreter and became abusive when he told her he was married. She called him repeatedly, often late at night, for months. Igrah, the lawyer who’d befriended and recruited her, told me that she stabbed her husband in the run-up to their divorce.20 A source at the Tikrit courthouse told me she regularly got into fights and had recently been incarcerated. Sabrine herself admitted to having spent seven days in the courthouse jail after a dispute, but claimed that it was because pro-ISIS elements in the government learned that she was working with Wahida—not, as the source said, that she had assaulted a courthouse guard. Either way, a senior intelligence officer had gone to the jail to secure her release21—and after the escape, Wahida put Sabrine back to work, interviewing and monitoring women fleeing ISIS territory. She told me Sabrine’s aggression was an asset, insisting that though “many people try to recruit [Sabrine] . . . I have complete control over her.”22

  It didn’t, finally, seem that way to me and my colleagues, though we agreed that her intelligence was indeed used in strikes. The problems, of course, were bigger than any single woman’s ability to fix them. One afternoon, while Sabrine and my interpreter were driving to meet me in Baghdad, she let him listen in on a phone call with Wahida. As my interpreter remembered it, Wahida was furious about something Sabrine had told me.

  “Look,” she was shouting, “why are you talking about Talat? This is not your job to talk about Talat! Don’t mention anything good about Talat! He is our enemy! He is working with ISIS!”23

  A few days later, I asked Wahida about that. “If there’s anyone in Iraq who would be with ISIS, it’s Talat,” Wahida insisted. “Of course, he’s in my agency.”

  When I pressed for an explanation as to how he remained in the agency—and why he would destroy his own house—she speculated that perhaps he’d been working with ISIS but had a falling-out with them. Given the lack of evidence, this accusation is more likely a function of Wahida and Talat’s known competition within the security services than any significant alliance with ISIS. Talat, for his part, showed me a threat he’d recently received by text message. Talat, intelligence officer of Saladin, it read, your liquidation has been ordered. He was obviously uneasy, even frightened, as we drove around Tikrit.

  Death threat against Colonel Talat

  Still, it
is conceivable that Talat did have ties to ISIS. Talat’s tribe, the Albu Ajeel, was reported to have accepted ISIS’s takeover of its eponymous village gladly. Wahida’s Jumaili tribe, in contrast, was famous for resisting. But these groups are not monolithic, and as Sabrine told me at one point, “Half of Tikrit is ISIS.” Uneasy alliances have characterized the conflict at large. ISIS has made occasional bedfellows of the United States, Iran, communist Kurds, and radical Islamists like the group Jabhat al-Nusra. For Wahida, that someone with ties to ISIS might be in her agency wasn’t a shocking accusation—it was just business as usual.

  Especially in public, though, many of the players try to distance themselves from one another, for any number of reasons. In the United States, one of these is legal in nature. According to an amendment to the annual Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, usually known as the Leahy Law for the Vermont senator who introduced it, “no assistance shall be furnished . . . to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”24

  Throughout our interviews, however, Wahida boasted both about her information being significantly helpful to the Americans and about the crimes she had committed against captured ISIS fighters and sympathizers. The first time, she showed me the picture of the naked corpse tied to the special forces pickup truck. Another time, she told me, proudly, “People say I am like Hitler! A lot of people, on the leadership level and among fighters.” At another point, she told me that she “cut off [ISIS fighters’] heads and walked over their bodies as if they were nothing. And,” she concluded, “I publish all of this on Facebook.”

  “She put it on Facebook?” I asked our interpreter.

  “When they go to my Facebook,” said Wahida, “they can see all these things.”25

  On her Samsung smartphone, she pulled up a Facebook page. In the profile picture, she stood in front of a dirt-and-concrete berm topped by barbed wire. In the black uniform of the Iraqi special forces, she wore a small smile and held at arm’s length, by its short hair, a bloody severed head.

  In Wahida’s view, she’d done nothing wrong. “ISIS killed my entire family,” she told me, “even my pure Arabian horses . . . If I find the ISIS member who killed my family, [and] who would kill me, if I want to take my revenge on him, why,” she wanted to know, “would I be charged and imprisoned or punished?”

  The severed head wasn’t the last thing she showed me on her phone that day. She was no longer in direct contact with the Americans, she said, but many in her agency were—and they all relied on the same US-built software for information sharing, ATAK. As Wahida scrolled through locations and grid coordinates she had received from her “girls,” as she called them, and sent up the chain, she narrated air strikes. Some had been successful, some had resulted in civilian casualties, and some of the targets had never been attacked.

  Whether particular attacks she described were conducted by Iraqi or coalition aircraft, she couldn’t say for sure, but she thought most were American. She was right. At the time of the Tikrit offensive, the New York Times reported that the Iraqi Air Force had “a dozen attack jets, but less than half are known to be in service, and none are equipped for precision bombing.”26 According to the UK-based analysis group Airwars.org, which aggregates official data, at least 68 percent of strikes in Iraq have been conducted by the United States27—under the aegis of an official partnership with the Iraqi military and its intelligence networks, like Talat and Wahida’s.28 For unofficial strikes, no numbers are available.

  One day in July, I invited Wahida to the Babylon, a heavily fortified four-star hotel overlooking the Tigris River in central Baghdad. It was a hazy afternoon, and the temperature outside was over 120 degrees. I’d asked Wahida whether she might bring any of her agents but didn’t expect she would. To my surprise, she brought three, all in their midtwenties—plus five children, three armed guards, and a one-legged relative who had been mutilated by ISIS but was smuggled out of the organization’s territory.

  We’d all been sitting together for two hours, speaking through an interpreter, when the conversation, which had been cordial and lively, stopped. Just beyond the windows of the hotel, a woman in an elaborate wedding dress had stepped into the garden with a photographer and a small, formally dressed entourage. The Babylon is the fanciest hotel in Baghdad and a common venue for wedding receptions among the elite.

  “Beautiful,” said one of the agents. “I wore a dress like it at my first wedding.”

  “We dream that everything becomes white everywhere in Iraq,” said another.

  Up to that point, Wahida had coolly directed the conversation, sometimes telling her “girls” how to respond to my questions, but usually letting them speak for themselves. When the bride appeared, however, she became forceful, addressing the interpreter directly, rather than speaking through him. The rest of the table quieted.

  “Interpret,” said Wahida, “and tell him that those people who are living comfortably”—she jabbed a finger at the window—“are living off our money and blood. I’ve connections with the highest levels and leaders in the country. This is the first time for me to come here . . . Interpret what I say!”29

  Wahida is fairly well known in Iraq. She has been the subject of several newspaper articles,30 appeared on television, and been photographed in meetings with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis,31 commander of the collected Iranian-backed Shiite militias, or Popular Mobilization Forces. The daughter of a nomadic shepherd turned truck driver, she was born in Tikrit in 1976 and married her first husband, Jassim, on May 2, 1991. At the time, Jassim was a deputy for Mosul in the Ministry of Defense under Saddam Hussein, and Wahida, at fifteen, didn’t go to school or have a job. But in 2004, when Jassim joined the reconstituted Iraqi security forces and began working with the Americans, Wahida began working with him, too. She recalled being impressed with the foreigners, especially the women.

  “I see female soldiers who come and fight, and they become martyrs for Iraq . . . ,” Wahida told me, “. . . and I asked myself, ‘[H]ow come these people would fight for our land and defend us, while we don’t do that for ourselves?’”32

  When Jassim died in an IED explosion in 2007, Wahida kept in touch with his various police, military, and intelligence contacts. She also started to build her own networks—including women like Igrah, the lawyer, on whom she relied to find good “girls.” Wahida and Igrah claimed that, over the years, the Office of Assistance for Divorced Women and Widows had been a fruitful recruiting location.33 The office, they agreed, was getting more crowded. Wahida herself had recently been widowed again. In late 2013, she’d married an army officer, but in May 2016, ISIS fighters killed him in a gun battle in Haditha.

  In the wake of these tragedies, Wahida told me she was ready to die, and expected to, soon. Along with her explicit request for increased American support, this was perhaps one of the reasons she wanted to tell me about her work. She was proud, and seemed to want recognition, some record of what she’d accomplished. She also seemed to enjoy chatting, even joking. When the bride disappeared from the garden, I asked whether Wahida and her agents would pose for a group picture. The younger women hesitated, fussing with their headscarves.

  “Come and get close to me,” Wahida told them, wryly. “It’s not like we’re going to the salon.”34

  After Nazhan sped off with his family on the day Talat’s house was destroyed, he made it without incident to the outskirts of Kirkuk. There, he was turned away by soldiers of the Kurdish Peshmerga, who, he claimed, denied him entry because he was Arab.35 He doubled back. Sara remained unconscious. At a checkpoint on a different road, the guards took pity on his daughter and allowed him to pass. Nazhan drove directly to Azadi Hospital, where doctors examined Sara and told him she’d had a heart attack. She regained consciousness but developed partial paralysis and, after lingering for three months, died on December 24, 2014. The medical record’s cause of death translates a
s “full stop of the heart,” but Nazhan had no doubt it was the air strike that killed her.

  Sara Mohammed in Delhi

  Officially, though, there was no air strike on Talat’s house. Iraqi officials told me there were no records, and a public affairs officer for CENTCOM wrote me that “there were no strikes conducted in Tikrit during September 2014.” The rubble was there, though, and Sabrine, Talat, and Mike all described the air strike as American. When I visited Talat’s new house in Tikrit, he produced a notebook in which he had recorded the date of the incident. He was certain: September 15, 2014.36 Nazhan and his wife, Sara’s hospital documents, Sabrine, her sisters in the neighborhood, and Wahida all confirmed the approximate timing, if not the precise day.

  The last time I saw Talat, however, he changed the story and didn’t explain why. He, Mike, and I were sitting in the Baghdad Hotel, a slightly down-market version of the Babylon. It had been a strange meeting. Mike had told me that his American contact, “Marius,” who “works with The Company,” knew that we were talking. “He said don’t give names,” Mike told me, “don’t give [you] nothing.”37

  Talat, however, did give me something: a revised date for the air strike. This time he said it didn’t happen until March of 2015—the month the United States publicly joined the Tikrit offensive.

  Two days after that, Nazhan and I had a long conversation in the Babylon about his daughter’s death. The topic was sensitive, and as with Wahida, the hotel’s luxury seemed to make Nazhan uneasy. Several times over the course of our talk, he asked me pointed questions.

  “Didn’t they know,” he asked, “that families were living in that area, and in that house? How could they bomb that house, knowing many families live in houses surrounding [it]?”38