Dr. Muhammed Ismail Ahmed is a village shaikh and tribal liaison for more than 50 other rural villages surrounding Contingency Operating Base Q-West, a political and religious leader on whom the Coalition Forces have grown to depend. He lives in the small hamlet of Jedallah Sofia, a general practitioner with a medical degree from the University of Mosul who no longer practices medicine.
I met him about a month after my battalion arrived, when he paid an introductory visit to Lt. Col. William B. Smith, Jr., the mayor of Q-West, essentially a municipal position. Every sizable base has a Mayor Cell to oversee basic life-support—billeting, public works, business operations, recreation—as opposed to the forces that attend to base defense and off-base operations, such as presence patrols, convoy security, and so on. I serve as Smith’s Director of Operations, something of a deputy mayor.
So, as I am the “deputy mayor,” Dr. Muhammed introduced himself. Everybody, it seems, knows him, and the Americans call him “Doc Mo.” I asked him once how he felt about the nickname, and he replied in his characteristically philosophical manner.
They call me “Doc Mo.” It’s okay. In Iraq, we do this, too. Families will honor a favored son with a nickname, a shorter name of affection. “Doc Mo” is like that—a name that comes from family. My good friends call me this.
Be that as it may, few seem to know his full name. When I first met him, I transcribed it from his identification card, which all civilians must wear in plain view when on post. I have seen him mentioned, for instance, in official dispatches simply as Doc Mo. He doesn’t seem to mind, but then Dr. Muhammed plays his game close to the chest. He doesn’t show his cards.
Clean-shaven but for a trimmed mustache that nonetheless manages to droop, Dr. Muhammed embodies the fine balance of tradition and change that characterizes Iraqi professionals—ancient tribal memory contending with contemporary ideas. He is spokesman for an impoverished, rural, and under-educated population. However, he possesses a subdued cosmopolitan air, sporting, for instance, an expensive gold wristwatch, an quartz crystal Omax, the face of which bares not numbers, only thin dashes on the hour.
(I made the mistake of admiring his watch the last time we sat down to chat on the foyer couch at the Mayor Cell. Now he intends to give me one just like it the next time we meet. I should have known better than to admire a possession of a respected shaikh. I learned during pre-deployment cultural training that, as a point of honor, a host will give to a guest an object overly admired. If I do not accept it, I will dishonor him, but if I do accept it, I will be in his debt. I will deny his gift, of course, to avoid more obvious conflicts of interest. However, what if I accepted it and, in the fashion of Maude in Harold and Maude, promptly threw it in the Tigris—so as never to forget where I put it?)
Dr. Muhammed exudes contradictions. On the day I first met him, he had donned an ankle-length, loose-fitting dishdasha, the traditional, shirt-like garment of Iraqi men, but his was gray-green rather than the typically summer white, and it bore the faintest pinstripes, suggesting the shrewd business man that he is.
(He stopped practicing medicine in 2005, he told me, having become more and more active as a tribal leader in the province. He receives a small stipend for his work with Coalition Forces, but hardly enough to support his wife and three young sons. He also owns a modest earth-moving operation, trucks, track-hoes, and dozers that cost more to operate and maintain than he expected. )
On his head, he wore a kaffiyeh, a long, white scarf folded into a triangle and held with the plated-cord of a tribal leader. Occasionally, when listening intently, he swept the right hand folds of the scarf up and draped them behind, revealing his short, black hair flecked with gray.
With his large-lens glasses and left-breast pocket stuffed with pens, notepad, identification card, and wallet, Dr. Muhammed brought to mind the owl-eyed, bookish medical student he must have been in the 1980s when he attended the University of Mosul’s Medical College, where English is the language of instruction.
Dr. Muhammed is the key figure in any discussion with the local communities, especially those animated conversations about water. I have mentioned the importance of water variously in previous postings because it is the central issue in this desert country—not oil, which bubbles from flatlands and oozes from ridgelines, not even the ongoing insurgency or the continued presence of Coalition Forces.
“Iraq, which is in its fourth consecutive year of drought, is facing its lowest harvest in a decade this year,” says Jane Arraf, correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, in an August 11 story, “Turkey offers water for Iraqi crackdown on Kurdish rebels”. The title suggests the geo-political importance of water in Iraq, a country that relies on the two great rivers of ancient Mesopotamia—the Euphrates, which meanders from Turkey through Syria, and the Tigris, which flows straight down from Turkey.
Turkish hydroelectric dams have reduced the flow of water in recent years, requiring treaties governing minimum volumes of water released south. Turkey leverages this need to gain Iraqi cooperation with its own insurgency. “If water is Iraq's biggest bilateral issue, the separatist Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) is Turkey’s,” says Arraf.
Iraqi military and civil authorities—the Army and the Police, mainly—struggle for control of water as a source of power and revenue. Where does Dr. Muhammed stand? Many say he stands with General Abaas and the Army. Others think he sides with the mayor and police chief of Qayyarah, the name from which COB Q-West gets its “Q,” being west of the city. Those who can say one way or another know more than I, and it’s beyond my purpose to draw such conclusions.
Some accuse him of corruption, benefiting from American largess by pocketing money and supplies meant for the impoverished communities he represents. If that is true, it is neither excusable nore surprising. A culture of corruption exists in Iraq that sometimes makes it difficult to distinguish between good guys and bad guys.
The dream of the United States was that Iraq would become a democracy. We scattered the seeds of democracy in a desert and hoped they would germinate, and perhaps they have or will. For a democracy to bloom, the government and all its institutions must submit to the people’s just consent, yet the people still have little conception of the power of democracy, of the people’s voice.
This is a country where the Army and Police are notoriously corrupt, where people take for granted extortion at highway checkpoints, where those who control the water pipelines to communities—whoever they are—often sell that water, though public taxes had already paid for it.
Many communities in Ninewa Province along the Tigris River have their own lift station pumps—bought and installed mostly by Coalition Forces—but these pumps often lie idle. Dr. Muhammed believes that they may be left unused to keep them in good shape (after all, why wear out a good pump when a convenient and free water source flows under the eaves of the police station?) or left silent because someone has sold on the black market the diesel fuel meant to run it. The problem lies with the people, too, for they often refuse to follow their own laws. For instance, they tap illegally into the 16-inch water pipeline that feeds Q-West rather than using the 12-inch pipeline that supplies water to the city of Qayyarah.
Most frustrating for Coalition Forces stationed at Q-West is that the people will not obey the share-the-water policy. This policy allows Iraqis to tap the 16-inch water pipeline feeding Q-West for 12 hours (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) and during the other 12 hours they close their taps, allowing the base to replenish its reservoirs. The Iraqi authorities, however, seem unprepared or unwilling to enforce this law.
Under Saddam, people obeyed laws because disobedience resulted in severe punishment, which is characteristic of totalitarian regimes. Not surprisingly, when the dictatorship crumbled, lawlessness spread like a dust in the desert. We all recall news reports of widespread Iraqi looting in the weeks and months following the defeat of the Iraqi Army, pillaging of municipal, retail, and industrial centers and, more devastating to the nation, the looting of cultural centers such as museums, libraries, archeological sites. Some other entity had to impose stability, and with the collapse of civil and military authorities that onerous task fell to Coalition Forces. Since the June 30 Agreement, Iraqi authorities have been pondering that responsibility.
"The challenge of our government is to gain legitimacy," Dr. Muhammed told me. "Iraqis must solve Iraqi problems without Coalition support."
As far as Dr. Muhammed being corrupt, as I said, I do not know. Most of what I know about him—such as his full name—I learned from him. Beyond that, I know what I have observed, that he is an important figure in Ninewa Province, one to whom all sides seem to listen, even if they don’t always like or trust what he says. This is a pattern in his life, at least since the invasion.
He told me once that, in the days following the 2003 collapse of the Ba’athist government, Iraqi civilians and Coalition Forces didn’t know how to deal with one another.
“For ten days we just looked at each other,” he said. “Finally, I stepped forward to make a connection. I will never forget the first American soldier I met, Maj. Frederick Wellman. He is like a brother to me, even to this day.”
In the spring of 2003, Wellman was an operations officer with 6th Battalion, 101st Aviation of the 101st Airborne Division, says Sgt. Rachel Brune in a December 31, 2005, article still available online at the Digital Video & Imagery Distribution System. (Brune wrote a nicely textured story, a fine balance of narrative, dialogue, and description that shows a writer who loves the craft. Check it out: “Doctor Mohammed's Perseverance Pays Off.”)
In her lead and bridge paragraphs—the first and second of news stories, generally one sentence each—Brune describes Dr. Muhammed’s initial effort to make a connection.
In late April 2003, an elder from the small farming village of Jedallah Sofia appeared at the gates of Q-West Base Complex with a handwritten request.
Sent by Dr. Mohammed, the local physician, the note asked for help in stopping random shots landing in the village and solving a water shortage.
Next to protection of life and limb, Dr. Muhammed was concerned with the chronically short water supply, even scarcer because of war.
From this small gesture, Dr. Muhammed built a lasting relationship. Conditions improved. Water reached the villages and presence patrols improved security. Coalition Forces stationed at Q-West built roads and employed most of the working population on the base. They built a clinic in his village, supplying him with medication, which he said he dispensed free to the people.
He told Sgt. Brune that the Coalition Forces were “doing great things here.” He told her that people in his village “still talk about improvements to the roads the British forces made when they occupied the country in World War I as part of the offensive against the Ottoman Empire.”
“For many generations, the people will talk about these projects as the actions of the coalition forces, said Mohammed.”
This is classic Dr. Muhammed talking, educated and culturally aware, a man with a vision of the past and the future.
Dr. Muhammed walks a thin line between cultures and classes, between languages and religions, between nations and tribes. His challenge is to speak in behalf of numerous sides of a many-sided conversation, and he has suffered for this. Indeed, Dr. Muhammed walks unsteadily with aluminum, forearm crutches, the crippling result of an improvised explosive devise targeted to kill him.
He seems to have been born into this difficult role, inheriting his political-religious leadership in the ancient patriarchal tradition, and he is among those on whom this fledgling democracy depends.
“It is a tradition in my family to build bonds with different tribes. My grandfather was a shaikh who owned 1,000 sheep, 1,000 goats—and built strong relationships with the tribes 80 or 90 years
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