The Biopolitics of Baghdad:Counterinsurgency and the counter-city

8/12/2019 The Biopolitics of Baghdad:Counterinsurgency and the counter-city

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The Biopolitics of Baghdad:

Counterinsurgency and the counter-city

Derek GregoryDepartment of Geography

University of British Columbia at Vancouver

The cultural turn and late modernwar

Many of the problems that the United States

has faced since its invasion of Iraq in 2003 canbe traced back to a reluctance by the Bushadministration to use two words, and a failure toplan and prepare for either of them: occupationand insurgency. The two are of course connected;people don’t like living under military occupation.While American troops did not nd the streets ofBaghdad strewn with the promised rose petals,they did nd them full of people. Yet prevailingmodels of urban warfare had visualized enemycities as targets and as object-spaces – three-dimensional geometries of buildings, streets andutility networks – emptied of their populations.The reality of military occupation evidentlyrequired different ways of comprehending thecity.1 So too did the rapid spread of resistanceto the occupation, but the Pentagon had becomeso entranced by its Revolution in Military Affairsand force transformation, so invested in hightechnology and network-centric warfare againstthe conventional forces of nation-states, that itwas radically unprepared for the reinvention ofasymmetric warfare in so-called ‘new wars’ wagedby transnational, non-state and non-hierarchicaadversaries in the margins and breaches of

former empires.2

The US military had not revisedits doctrine on counterinsurgency for twentyyears, and in an attempt to shore up a rapidlydeteriorating situation an interim Field Manual onCounterinsurgency was hastily released in October2004; but it remained rigidly tactical-technical.3

That same month retired Major-General RobertScales repeated arguments he had made before theHouse Armed Services Committee in an inuentia

AbstractSoon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, theUS military began to explore culture-centricwarfare as a means of nding the terms forboth occupation and counterinsurgency. Thepower of the new doctrine is supposed to havebeen proved by the success of the surge inUS combat troops that started in February2007, which incorporated the new emphaseson protecting the civilian population and on ‘non-kinetic’ (non-violent operations), andwhich has been credited with bringing abouta dramatic reduction in ethno-sectariandeaths in Baghdad. This argument ignoresthe intensication of kinetic operations in andaround the capital and the consequent spike

in deaths caused by military violence, andit minimizes the role of ‘ethnic cleansing’ ineventually reducing ethno-sectarian deaths asBaghdad rapidly turned from a predominantlySunni to an overwhelmingly Shia city. Theseerasures are not accidental: they are directlyconnected to carefully calculated politicaleffects that result from presenting culture-centric warfare in general and the Surgein particular as intrinsically therapeuticinterventions. Such a strategy obscurescrucial ways in which the Baghdad SecurityPlan was complicit in and capitalized on the

ethno-sectarian restructuring of the capital.Conversely, disclosure of these connectionsreveals that political-military and paramilitaryoperations in Baghdad have frozen rather thanresolved the conict, and that they exemplify alate modern security apparatus that is not onlygeopolitical but also profoundly biopolitical.



essay on ‘culture-centric warfare’, in which he calledfor cultural awareness to be given a higher prioritythan the technical x of ‘smart bombs, unmannedaircraft and expansive bandwidth.’ Commandersin Iraq had found themselves ‘immersed in analien culture’, he said, ‘an army of strangers in the

midst of strangers’, and forced to improvise.4

The divide between the military occupation andthe civilian population continued to sharpen, andattacks on American and allied forces soared. In2005 the Commander of Multi-National Force Iraq(MNF-I), General George Casey, decided that themost effective way to reduce coalition casualtieswas to reduce the military footprint. Americantroops withdrew to large Forward Operating Bases(FOBs) on the outskirts of cities. These heavilyfortied spaces were advertised as bases fortactical operations and ‘refuges from danger, places

of renewal for physical needs.’ 5

The heightenedseparation produced what George Packer called ‘one of the most isolated occupations in history.’Travelling back and forth between these mini-Green Zones and the Red Zone that was the restof Iraq, Packer said he became ‘almost dizzy atthe transition, two separate realities existing onopposite sides of concrete and wire.’ In a tortured,twilight landscape that was ‘neither at war nor atpeace’ he argued that repower was ‘less importantthan learning to read the signs’, and yet whenAmerican troops conducted counterinsurgencyoperations they ‘were moving half-blind in an alien

landscape, missing their quarry and leaving behindfrightened women and boys with memories.’ 6 Many of the troops – disparagingly referred to as ‘fobbits’ – rarely left the base at all, and thosethat did so usually conducted their patrols andraids from helicopter gunships and Humvees:what Thomas Ricks, borrowing a phrase fromDavid Kilcullen, referred to as ‘war tourism’. Thesweeps were as often as not counterproductive,their violence serving to alienate the populationstill further, but they were insensitive in anotherway too: ‘You have to know what normal is to beable to detect what’s abnormal,’ Ricks explained,and ‘you can’t get that if you’re driving through.’ 7

The implementation of culture-centric warfarewas a response to these failings, and as it describeda widening arc through the military so, according toRicks, the Army effectively turned the war ‘over to itsdissidents.’ Although the new doctrine emphasizesits intellectual credentials – ‘the graduate levelof war’ or, as The Economist put it, ‘After smart

bombs, smart soldiers’ – it is not primarily theproduct of academics, military theorists or think-tanks: it emerged through improvised tacticsdeveloped and shared by responsive commandersin the eld. The cultural turn cannot be reducedto the projection of these individual wills, however,

even though a number of gures have becomeclosely identied with it. These iconic gures arenot only the public faces of the new strategy; theyare also part of the public-ness through which itproduces carefully calculated political effects for itsAmerican audience. But this counter-revolutionin military affairs is a heterogeneous assemblageof discourses and objects, practices and powersdistributed across different but networked sites: amilitary dispositif. Its capstone in military circlesand in the public sphere was the publication of anew Army Field Manual 3-24 on Counterinsurgencyin December 2006, and the triumph of Ricks’s

dissidents was conrmed when one of its leadingarchitects, General David Petraeus, the mostpublic of its public faces, was appointed to replaceCasey as Commander of MNF-I in February 2007(followed in April 2008 by his nomination as thenext Commander of CENTCOM).

The new doctrine dened the population asthe centre of gravity of military operations andinsisted that protection of the civilian populationtake priority over force protection; it required ‘adversary cultural knowledge’ precisely because ‘American ideas of what is “normal” or “rational”

are not universal’; it demanded sympathetic ‘immersion in the people and their lives’ so thatcounterinsurgency involved not only ‘kinetic’but also ‘non-kinetic’ (non-violent) military-political operations (‘armed social work’); and itreafrmed the obligations imposed by internationahumanitarian law on the treatment of civiliansand combatants.8 These formulations fed intorevised Mission Rehearsal Exercises and militarysimulations that paid close attention to culturatransactions and negotiations between troops andcivilians.

The new doctrine has attracted considerablepublic acclaim. In part an attempt to re-positionthe US military, it has identied crucial ways tolimit the horrors of war: refusing the reduction ofenemy space to an empty space; rejecting the de-humanization of adversaries; and rehabilitating theconcept of the civilian. But to count these as majoradvances is also a measure of how far we havefallen. And to focus on doctrine and training is to



limit discussion to the normative and the virtual,and to accept the tacit invitation to step through theback of the wardrobe into a martial Narnia wherethe US military consistently follows the rules andintervenes for the greater good. Even then, therehave been criticisms of the precepts themselves.

Commentators inside the military have objectedto the relegation of conventional warfare (and,in particular, the supposed marginalization of airpower), and commentators outside the militaryhave provided stinging critiques of its co-optionand enlistment of the cultural sciences.9

But any evaluation of the cultural turn must also

depend on its practical effects. Many writers haveattributed the apparent success of the US military ‘surge’ in reducing ethno-sectarian violence inBaghdad to its exemplary implementation of whatthe New York Times called ‘Counterinsurgency 101

as espoused by General David Petraeus’.

The Surge and securing Baghdad

Like the cultural turn, the Surge has been thework of many people. In March 2006 the bipartisanIraq Study Group, appointed by Congress and co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton, calledfor a phased withdrawal of American troops fromIraq by 2008. The Group concluded that anysubstantial increase in troop levels would onlyconrm Iraqi fears of a long-term occupation,but it was none the less willing to support whatit called ‘a short-term redeployment or surge ofAmerican combat forces to stabilize Baghdad.’ 11 Neoconservatives vilied the report as a surrenderdocument, and in January 2007 military historianFrederick Kagan released a counter-proposal fromthe Iraq Planning Group of the American EnterpriseInstitute, ‘Choosing Victory’, that made securingBaghdad through a surge in combat troops thecentral platform of its ‘plan for success in Iraq’.12 Notsurprisingly, Kagan’s rival report found a receptiveaudience at the National Security Council, whichwas conducting its own Iraq Strategy Review,

and when President Bush announced a ‘new wayforward’ on 10 January 2007 it closely followed thedirections provided by the Iraq Study Group. Since80 per cent of Iraq’s sectarian violence occurredwithin 30 miles of the capital, the President andhis advisers determined that the most urgentpriority was to secure Baghdad. The Pentagon hadagreed to deploy 30,000 additional troops, most ofthem – ve brigades – to Baghdad, one arrivingeach month from February through to June in a

rolling ‘surge’, and the US military would workwith the Iraqi Army to clear and secure the city’sneighbourhoods.

There were two main differences between thenew Baghdad Security Plan, Operation Imposing

the Law (Fardh al-Qanoon), and its predecessor,Operation Together Forward, which had beeninitiated in June and abandoned in October 2006.Both plans depended on increased troop levelsand on joint US-Iraqi patrols to secure the cityneighbourhood by neighbourhood. But OperationTogether Forward had mobilised only 12,000 extratroops, whereas the Baghdad Security Plan couldcall upon an additional 21,000 troops. During thetwo iterations of the old plan violence increaseddramatically: aggressive operations to secureneighbourhoods achieved only temporary success,and had to be reinforced by further sweeps.

Insurgents had ‘punch[ed] back hard,’ a militaryspokesman conceded, ‘trying to get back intothose areas’, and so the Army was ‘constantlygoing back in and doing clearing operations.’ ‘Thistime,’ Bush promised, ‘we’ll have the force levelswe need to hold the areas we have cleared.’ 13 Thesecond major difference was the incorporation ofthe new counterinsurgency doctrine. The centreof gravity of military operations was now thecivilian population, and troops dispersed fromtheir Forward Operating Bases into dozens of JointSecurity Stations and then into subsidiary CombatOutposts in neighbourhoods.

The rst Surge troops arrived in Baghdad inFebruary, and during their rst week the numberof patrols doubled from 10,000 to 20,000. Withindays Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Malikipronounced the plan a ‘dazzling success’, but theUS military was more measured (and had metricsto prove it). In April 2007 MNF-I claimed to controless than 20 per cent of Baghdad’s neighbourhoods;by late May this had risen to 32 per cent, and bymid June to 40 per cent. Progress was uneven(Table 1), and deliberately so since militaryincursions into some neighbourhoods, notablythose in Sadr City, were delayed for fear that theywould be provocative and counter-productive.14



Table 1: Security rating of Baghdad neighbourhoods,2007

By July more than half the capital was declared ‘under control’, which did not mean that violencehad been eradicated, only that people ‘feelprotected and feel comfortable going about theirbusiness.’ In September Petraeus told Congressthat the number of sectarian deaths in Baghdadhad fallen by 80 per cent since the previousDecember, and attributed this in large measure to ‘counterinsurgency practices that underscore theimportance of units living among the people theyare securing’ and the use of ‘non-kinetic means to

exploit the opportunities provided by our kineticoperations.’ By January 2008 MNF-I classied 356of Baghdad’s 474 neighbourhoods in the ‘control’or ‘retain’ category of its four-tier security ratingsystem, around 75 per cent of the city, ‘meaningenemy activity in those areas has been mostlyeliminated and normal economic activity isresuming.’ In contrast, in February 2007, justbefore the Surge, only 37 neighbourhoods were inthose two categories.15

Statistics are a battlespace of their own,particularly when it comes to counting casualties

in Iraq, and a military that once deantly claimed ‘We don’t do body counts’ has become preoccupiedwith their production. MNF-I has developed ‘sophisticated reporting techniques and computersoftware systems to measure everything fromSunni deaths at the hands of Shiites, and viceversa, to the numbers of suicide and roadsidebombs,’ the Washington Post reported, and ‘detailsof an enemy attack in the eld are reported andcompiled in an enormous database – containinginformation on hundreds of thousands of incidents– less than two hours after they occur.’ 16 It isimportant to remember, however, that these

statistics, even as they purport merely to measureand to ‘represent’, also produce a reality. Thatprocess is necessarily a selective one, since spacesof constructed visibility are also always spaces ofconstructed invisibility. In particular, there wasconsiderable scepticism about the algorithmsused by the military to attribute deaths to ethno-sectarian violence.17 But there are two other greyzones that are also highly signicant.

First, the emphasis on ethno-sectarian violence(however it is dened) distracts attention from

the continuation of military violence: from deathsattributable to kinetic operations in Baghdadand the belts that surround it. You may not beable ‘to kill your way out of an insurgency,’ asPetraeus told Time, but the cultural turn does notdispense with killing. On the contrary, in certaincircumstances it is a prerequisite for its renement.The Baghdad Security Plan depended on a parallecounterinsurgency operation in the zones aroundthe capital. Sunni insurgents and Shia militias hadcontrolled these belts since 2004, but in December2006 American forces captured a sketch map of

Baghdad, supposedly drawn by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, outlining a plan for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)to control the belt cities and use them as logisticahubs, sites for bomb-making factories and stagingposts for attacks on American troops inside thecity.18 Because AQI and other insurgent groupsdepended on their ability to move freely aroundBaghdad as well as within it, the military decided todeploy three of the additional Surge brigades notin Baghdad but in the towns that ringed the capital.Soldiers and Marines established an inner ringaround the perimeter of Baghdad and an outer ring15-30 miles out, a strategy of deep encirclement

that blockaded all main roads leading to and fromthe city. From June through to mid-August 2007multiple, simultaneous strikes were launched todisrupt these supply networks and to preventinsurgents escaping military operations in thecapital as part of an umbrella Operation PhantomThunder.19 The objective, as the commander ofMulti-National Corps – Iraq, Lieutenant-General RayOdierno, put it, was to ‘eliminate the accelerantsto Baghdad violence from enemy support zonesin the belts that ring the city.’ 20 By the end ofthe year Odierno claimed that AQI’s capabilitieshad been dramatically diminished. Hundreds of

weapons caches had been cleared, three factoriesmaking car bombs and IEDs had been uncovered,121 AQI ghters had been killed or captured andmore than 1,000 suspects detained.21

According to Iraq Body Count, however, deathsof non-combatants killed in reghts and otherattacks involving coalition forces rose from arange of 544–623 in 2006 to a range of 868–1,326

% neighbourhoods disrupt clear control retain

April 41% 35% 19%

June 16% 36% 41% 7%



in 2007; the majority of these incidents involvedair strikes, which also increased signicantly from2006 through 2007. There were 229 close airsupport/precision strikes in which major munitionswere dropped in 2006, but this increased almostve-fold in 2007 to 1,119 (640 of them in June, July

and August, when Operation Phantom Thunder wasunder way). Civilian deaths directly attributable toUS forces alone increased during the same period,from a range of 394–434 reported in 2006 to arange of 669–756 in 2007. These statistics mustalso be treated with caution: IBC’s tabulations areminimum estimates, and these raw numbers donot distinguish deaths attributable to OperationImposing the Law and Operation Phantom Thunderfrom other military operations in Iraq. But itseems clear that, for all the attention culture-centric warfare paid to ethno-sectarian deaths,in other registers the killing continued and even

accelerated.22

Second, Petraeus’s presentation to Congress

was illustrated by a series of maps in which plotsof ethno-sectarian violence from December 2006through to August 2007 were superimposed overa base-map of ethnic segregation in Baghdad.Signicantly, Petraeus’s base-map remainedunchanged throughout the sequence and yet, justdays earlier, the equivalent base-maps used inthe Report of the Independent Commission on theSecurity Forces of Iraq showed Baghdad turninginto an overwhelmingly Shia city.23 The omission

is doubly important. Other military ofcersacknowledged that a process of ethnic cleansingthat had started before the Surge continued throughit and played a vital role in the eventual diminutionof ethno-sectarian violence.24 This new sectarianlandscape was not an autonomous production, andit involved many actors, but its erasure also artfullyerases the involvement of the Bush administrationand the US military in crystallizing these divisions.These two considerations bear directly on boththe politics of the cultural turn and the biopoliticsof Baghdad, and I will elaborate each of them inturn.

Sectarianism and the production ofspace in Baghdad

There are many cultural groups in Iraq, but Ifocus on the Sunni and Shia whose interactionshave been instrumental in the restructuring of post-invasion Baghdad. In doing so, however, I do notmean to impose any essentialist identity on what

is a complex cultural-historical eld; identity is ofcourse constructed and conjunctural, negotiatedand contested, and subject-positions are formedat the intersection of multiple afliations. Indeed,many Iraqis insist that marriage between Sunnand Shia was common until very recently. Neither

do I mean to treat violence as a pure expressionof sectarian afliation; on the contrary, it has beena signicant means of manufacturing identity inBaghdad as elsewhere. This has not been connedto divisions between the confessions. The Sunnand Shia are not homogeneous constituencies,and ssures within both communities have playedan important part in the narrative of sectarianpower.

This is not the place to trace the historicageographies of sectarianism in the provincesof the Ottoman Empire, during the British

occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s, andin the independent state of Iraq. But in generaterms an accommodation of sorts had beenreached between the Sunni and the Shia by the1950s. While Sunni Arabs dominated the stateapparatus, the cultural and religious traditionsof the Shia were respected and the privileges ofthe Shia commercial and mercantile class wereretained. During the 1960s and 70s, however,the Shia were increasingly marginalized, and theirpolitical institutions crushed by the security forcesUnder Saddam Hussein political power was neverwholly determined by sectarian allegiance – unti

the nal years of his rule, the Ba’athist regime wasboth nominally and substantively secular – butrepression assumed sectarian forms in momentsof crisis. The dominance of the Sunni increased,both politically and economically, at the expense ofthe Shia. During the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88 theShia were on the front-lines of the Iraqi Army butreceived little recognition of their sacrices, andSaddam’s bloody response to the Shia uprising inthe wake of the ill-fated invasion of Kuwait and therst Gulf War in 1991 deepened their disaffection.This spare narrative is only a caricature, but it servesto show that the shifting antagonism between theSunni and Shia was not primarily cultural: it was,rather, a political conict over the right to ruleIraq, to share in its resources and to dene themeaning of the nationalist project.25 In fact, this isconsistent with the original schism between Sunnand Shia, which was not so much a theologicaas a political dispute over the nomination of theProphet’s successor as caliph and ruler of theIslamic state.26



In post-invasion Iraq ethno-sectarian violencebecame a means of communication, and there wasno shortage of iconic episodes. In understandingwhat came to be called ‘the Battle of Baghdad’ twoevents were of special signicance: the rst was

Fallujah in 2004 and the second was Samarra in2006. It is around these punctuation points that Ihave organised my account.

The rst US-led siege of the Sunni strongholdof Fallujah in April 2004 coincided with a series ofmoves by the Coalition Provisional Authority andthe US military against the Shia cleric Moqtadaal-Sadr and his Mahdi Army ( Jaish al-Mahdi orJAM). Many Iraqis saw close parallels betweenthe looming ght in Fallujah and the erce ghtingthat had erupted in Moqtada’s home ground,Sadr City in Baghdad (which was named after his

murdered father). ‘They’re no different,’ AnthonyShadid was told: ‘We’re one Iraq.’ Shia marchedwith Sunni in joint demonstrations in the streetsof the capital; refugees from Fallujah were givenshelter in Baghdad; and convoys raced back tothe besieged city with sacks of grain, our, sugar,and rice and supplies of blood donated by Shiaand Sunni families alike. Karl Vick reported that ‘the Sunni-Shiite divide, already narrower in Iraqthan in some parts of the Muslim world, is by allaccounts shrinking each day that Iraqis agreetheir most immediate problem is the occupation’.27 The rst assault on Fallujah failed but in the fall,

as American airstrikes increased and preparationsfor a second ground attack gathered momentum,the city turned into a symbol of division. On oneside, the failure of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,the leading Shia cleric, to condemn the attackwas widely seen as a tacit endorsement of it anda disavowal of the increasingly violent tacticsof Sunni insurgent groups, especially AQI, andestrangement was increased still further by theparticipation of units of the reformed Iraqi Armythat were predominantly Shia. On the other side,Sunni Arabs increasingly dominated the insurgency,which redoubled its attacks on the Iraqi Armyand police whose ranks were disproportionatelylled by Shia, and AQI escalated its attacks onthe coalition (‘the far enemy’) and on the Shiapopulation at large (‘the near enemy’). Thesewere two sides of the same coin, each serving toincrease the political currency of the other, andthey virtually destroyed any possibility of a unied,cross-sectarian resistance to the occupation.28

By the end of the year Edward Wong was

already writing in the New York Times about ‘theearly stages of ethnic and sectarian warfare’.Thousands of Sunni refugees together with numbersof insurgents ed Fallujah and elsewhere in theSunni Triangle and streamed in to neighbourhoodsin western Baghdad. Shia families were driven

from Amriya and Dora by threats and intimidation,attacks on their homes, and abductions andmurders. As many as 40 per cent of homes inAmriya were abandoned and the vacant housestaken over by refugees in what would eventuallybecome a systematic campaign of expulsionby Sunni militias.29 Many of the displaced Shiamoved to Sadr City or left Baghdad for townsand cities in the south, but apart from one or twoneighbourhoods the community response to theseexpulsions and displacements was remarkablymuted. Both al-Sistani and Sadr called for restraint,but they could afford to do so. The United States

had already made sectarianism the basis for theconstitution of its ‘new Iraq’ when it appointed theInterim Governing Council in 2003, which markedthe inauguration of ‘institution-building by ethno-sectarian logic’.30 The elections in January 2005gave this principle popular legitimacy, at leastamongst the Shia and the Kurds, and when theUnited Iraqi Alliance won a majority of the vote thepolitical ascendancy of the Shia was formalized.The Alliance was a coalition dominated by theSupreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq(SCIRI) and the smaller Dawa Party; other partiesincluded a bloc that broadly supported Moqtada

al-Sadr. Several of the Shia parties had armedmilitias, and soon after the elections they startedto seize sectors of the state apparatus including,crucially, the institutions of violence.31 Sunnmilitias pushed back, and AQI increased its assaultson the Shia to provoke them into taking aggressivecountermeasures that would in turn radicalise moreof the Sunni into joining the insurgency.32 Duringthe summer revenge killings by the Shia began,orchestrated by death squads that were part ofwhat Charles Tripp called a ‘baroque proliferationof security forces’, including police commandounits operating from the SCIRI-controlled Ministryof the Interior, and local militias that claimed tobe defending their neighbourhoods. The shadowstate that paralleled Saddam’s formal apparatusof rule had been revived, Tripp argued, but ina devolved form, ‘fragmented, uid, no longercontrolled by the centre.’ 33 Killing was on sectarianlines, and in July al-Sistani raised the spectre of ‘genocidal war’. By the end of the summer, as the15 October vote on a new constitution drew near,



the cleansing of neighbourhoods accelerated in adetermined attempt to inuence and intimidatevoters. Sunni insurgents forced Shia residents toee Amiriyah, Dora, Ghaziliyah and Sadiya; Shiamosques were closed, houses left empty, and thewest bank seemed to be becoming the preserve of

the Sunni, while in a mirror reection across theTigris, Shia death squads and militias ensured thatthe east bank was becoming the preserve of theShia.34

A second major punctuation point changed thisstark division: the bombing of the Shia al-Askarimosque in the predominantly Sunni city of Samarraon 22 February 2006. It was now the turn of Shiarefugees to pour into Baghdad, and in the daysafter the bombing dozens of Sunni mosques inthe capital were burned or taken over by armedghters, and 1,300 bodies (mostly Sunni) weredumped in and around the city: often burned and

mutilated, they were intended to send a viscerallysectarian message.35 Violence escalated duringthe spring and summer, and from here on theadvance of the Shia through Baghdad acceleratedand Sunni militias and AQI fought ercely to retaincontrol of Sunni-dominated neighbourhoods. Thelaunch of Operation Together Forward in June waspowerless to prevent the continued ‘cleansing’of the capital. Sabrina Tavernise reported that ‘militants on both sides have moved block by blockthrough Baghdad’s neighbourhoods, threatening,kidnapping and killing.’ In August the US militaryestimated that 60 per cent of killings had been thework of Shia death squads. By the fall insurgentattacks in Baghdad had increased by 26 per centand violent deaths reported at the mortuary hadquadrupled. The main battle lines had been drawn:the core ght was over control of the corridors intothe city from the north (by the Shia) and the south(by the Sunni), and each side sought to secureits territory by advancing through a correspondingarc of neighbourhoods.36 Homi Bhabha remindsus that the root of ‘territory’ is the same as ‘terror’,so that it literally means a place from which peoplehave been frightened away.37 While many people

ed the violence voluntarily, particularly the middleclass, often leaving not only the capital but also thecountry to seek refuge in Syria or Jordan, manyothers were subject to systematic campaigns ofintimidation: threatening letters, posters andiers, even videos, and ultimately the abductionand murder of family members.38

By November it was clear that the Shiahad gained the upper hand, and were making

signicant inroads into both the north-west andsouth-west of the city. Online message boardswere full of frantic postings from Sunni residentsasking for help in defending their neighbourhoodsand providing frequent updates on their localsituation. A staccato sample translated by Zeyad

Kasim captures the frightening cadence of ethniccleansing:

• ‘Please inform us about the areas thatare expected to be targeted so we can beprepared’;

• ‘Please intervene to save the Jihad districtfrom another massacre – Interior Ministrycommandos have been transporting ghtersand mercenaries from the militias with theirbuses to their headquarters in the district’;

• ‘Deploy snipers on the rooftops of buildingsthat lie close to the main entry points for

each area… RPG carriers should maintain theirpositions on side streets’;

• ‘Dora has been breached’;

• ‘Elements of the Interior Ministry are attackingDora… But do not fear, for we are engagingthem’;

• ‘Urgent. The residents of Ghazaliya are inurgent need for medical supplies’;

• ‘Please inform us how the Shia pray becausethis will save many from being killed duringinterrogation after they are abducted.’ 39

By the end of the month MNF-I had mapped whatit called ‘ethno-sectarian fault lines’ throughout thecity (Figure 1), and from its persistent plotting ofethno-sectarian deaths its commanders concludedthat most ‘high-visibility, high-casualty eventslike car and truck bombings were being carriedout by Sunni insurgents, principally AQI, in theeast bank, while most ‘murders, executions andassassinations’ were being carried out in responseby Shia militias on the west bank.40 Althoughthe US military did not say as much, the Shiacontrolled both the police and the police commando

units, and there was covert co-operation betweenthese security forces and many of the militias.This made it easy for them to set up checkpointsand kill any Sunnis who fell into their hands. AsCockburn remarked, and as the message-boardsconrm, ‘an ofcial police checkpoint may simplybe a death squad in uniform.’ 41



Figure 1: Ethno-sectarian fault-lines in Baghdad(MNF-I), November 2006

Contemplating this stark geometry, Brain Finokiwrote that

‘Baghdad is almost completely dissected bya feral matrix of informal checkpoints, sniperalleyways, car bombed corridors, networks ofmicro insurgent-urbanisms; it is the city re-engineered by endless dueling barricades ofpostcolonial control; it is, above all, a scrappyimperial abyss. Baghdad’s guillotined realestate is a stage for indiscriminate slaughter,for militant dominance – blood trails in thestreets mark a kind of demographic authority

as much as they do the absence of an authorityaltogether.’ 42

Between February and December 2006 at least146,000 people had been displaced in Baghdad,and still the Shi advanced at a ferocious pace.In Ghazaliya, for example, the Mahdi Army wasgiving Sunni families just twenty-four hours toleave their homes, which were then handed over

to Shia families. The deadlines were exactly that:anyone who deed the order risked death. ‘Fewdo,’ Mark Kukis reported, ‘allowing the Mahdi Army

to ip up to ve houses a day.’ 43

Intimidationreached far beyond the inconstant, swirling circlesof paramilitary violence; it affected health care,employment and the very textures of daily lifewere being systematically shredded. In March2007 Damian Cave described Baghdad as

‘a capital of corrosive and violent borderlines.Streets never crossed. Conversations neverstarted. Doors never entered. Sunnis andShiites in many professions now interact almostexclusively with colleagues of the same sect.Sunnis say they are afraid to visit hospitals

because Shiites loyal to the cleric Moktadaal-Sadr run the Health Ministry, while Shiitelaborers who used to climb into the back ofpickup trucks for work across the Tigris Riverin Sunni western Baghdad now take jobs onlynear home.’ 44

The intention of the Surge, so Cave claimed,was ‘to x all this – to fashion a peace that stitches



the city’s cleaved neighbourhoods back together.’But by May MNF-I concluded that ‘the sectariancleansing is pretty much done on the east side’ ofthe city, and during the next four months of theSurge, Shia militias continued to drive Sunnis outof at least seven neighbourhoods.45

At the end of June Kazim posted one of manye-mails circulating on message boards and list-servers classifying neighbourhoods according to thedanger of JAM or AQI activity. The lists have theirown morbid humour – a ‘safe area’ was denedas one where the probability of staying alive was50 per cent – but they also have a hard edge,and the geography of risk that they describe was,as Kazim noted, ‘quite different’ from those foundin ofcial statements from the Iraqi governmentor the US military.46 Embedded in these mentalmaps was a new geography of the killing elds.

As a neighbourhood was cleansed so it becamea target for renewed mortar attacks, since eachside could be more condent it would not be killingmembers of its own community; bodies continuedto be dumped on the streets, especially on thewest bank, in most cases bound, blindfold andexecuted, but as the Battle for Baghdad reachedits tense climax so killings were less about sendingmessages to others and the death squads startedto conceal the bodies of their victims in shallowgraves.47

The area under the control of the Mahdi Army

continued to expand until August 2007, which wouldhave been impossible without its penetration ofthe Ministry of the Interior and the collaboration ofIraq’s security forces.48 As with the other militias,the advance of the Mahdi Army through Baghdadwas about the pursuit of political and economicpower. ‘Control equals money and power,’ onemilitary ofcer told two reporters, and the moreneighbourhoods a militia controls then the moreinuence it will have ‘through legal and non-legalmeans.’ 49 Politically these territorial gains were ofimmense symbolic signicance. This was, after all,the capital city. In the 1940s and 1950s, beforethousands of poor Shia moved to the newly builtsuburb of al Thawa (renamed Saddam City andeventually Sadr City), Baghdad was perhaps 90per cent Sunni. Now, in just two or three years, ithad become 75 per cent Shia (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Sectarian composition of Baghdad,2003-2007*

* The original maps were drawn for MNF-I by Mike Azady and were based on censuses carried outby the US military. Such exercises are of course fraught with difculty and, in the circumstances,danger for the respondents. They form part of ‘mapping the human terrain’, a central element inthe new counterinsurgency doctrine, but some commanders have claimed that the initial countswere inaccurate so that ethnic cleansing in some neighbourhoods was signicantly over- or under-estimated. There have also been repeated calls to automate census operations, incorporating

biometric identiers and thereby enabling the production of a consistent and integrated date-base.See Alex Kingsbury, ‘The US Army ramps up biometrics to ID Baghdad residents’, US News & WorldReport, 1 May 2008.1The intricate wiring of the military-industry-media-entertainment complex(MIME) ensured that this had its media counterpart. For months before the invasion media graphichad relentlessly reduced Baghdad to a series of likely targets, but in the very week that Saddam’s



Nothing symbolised the reversal of politicalpower so visibly and viscerally as redrawing the mapof Baghdad. According to Tripp, neighbourhoodswere being ‘cleansed’ not simply for reasons ofethnic or sectarian hatred ‘but in order to mapout territorially strategic positions’ that translated

directly into political advantage. ‘Each side is stillseeking to impress on the other that it cannot takeeverything, that its enemies are so formidable thatsome kind of deal – to share or devolve power, todivide the spoils – is required.’ 50 This jockeyingfor position was not conned to the strugglebetween Sunni and Shia, since there were divisionswithin each constituency. In particular, Moqtada’srelationship with the Shia-dominated governmentwas a turbulent one, and the advance of the MahdiArmy through the capital was a reminder that hismovement could not be marginalized. This wasa source of exasperation to other Shia parties

that, in early 2008, would move against theMahdi Army in both Baghdad and Basra. But thecontrol of so many Baghdad neighbourhoods gaveMoqtada a popular legitimacy. His organizationoperated a shadow state, providing both securityand social services that the government eithercould not or would not provide. ‘In a city virtuallyabandoned by the state, Sadrist ofces in severalneighbourhoods became the last and only resortfor Shiite residents in need of help. Shiites living inremote areas requested military support; displacedfamilies asked for resettlement assistance; evenfeuding couples turned to the maktab [the Sadrist

neighbourhood ofce] for arbitration. The MahdiArmy offered security by protecting the perimeterof neighbourhoods and emptying some of allSunni presence; as a result its popularity grewwell beyond its natural social constituency (chieycomposed of young and more disadvantagedShiites.’ 51

Economically, territorial control was an importantsource of revenue for the militias, which took a cutof 10-25 per cent on all construction contracts andproperty transactions, and demanded fees fromelectricity suppliers and public works contractors. ‘The Mahdi Army acts as a tax ofce in all Shiiteneighbourhoods,’ the leader of one neighbourhoodcouncil claimed, and, with other militias, haddeeply penetrated the urban economy.52 Theseparalegal norms and forms provided the shadowstate with income for its political, military andsocial operations. In the postcolony, Jean and JohnComaroff observe, the forms of the law and themarket are appropriated and re-commissioned. ‘Its

perpetrators create parallel modes of productionand proteering, sometimes even of governanceand taxation, thereby establishing simulacra ofsocial order.’ 53 As is common in ‘new wars’ moregenerally, these activities shaded into outrightcriminality.54 This was, in part, geographical,

the product of territorial advance: as the MahdArmy expelled Sunnis from neighbourhood afterneighbourhood so its provision of security for theShia became moot and other sources of revenuehad to be found. But it was also generational: assenior militia commanders were arrested or killed,many of the younger ghters that took their placeextended their activities into protection rackets,kidnappings and car-jackings, and began to preyon Shia communities too. At the end of August2007, as factions of the Mahdi Army degeneratedinto criminal gangs, Moqtada called a ‘freeze’ inoperations and suspended attacks on US troops

in order to re-establish his authority with aprotracted purge in which hundreds were expelledor executed.55

Although the Shia advance juddered to ahalt, its effects on ethno-sectarian violence weredramatic. ‘Now that the Sunnis are all gone,’ oneAmerican intelligence ofcer explained, ‘murdershave dropped off. One way to put it is they ranout of people to kill.’ The view may not have beenorthodox, but it was familiar to American militaryofcers and planners. In a classic essay publishedin the journal of the US Army War College, former

Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters had argued thatthe ‘most promising environment’ for stabilityoperations is ‘a formerly multicultural city that hasbeen ethnically cleansed.’ With a truly Orwellianourish, he explained: ‘The deprivation of theobject of hatred is a powerful force for peace.’ 56

Other observers drew the same conclusion. InSeptember two Newsweek reporters claimed thatpart of the reason for the decline in insurgentattacks ‘is how far the Shiite militias’ cleansing ofBaghdad has progressed: they’ve essentially won.Next month one of their colleagues said much thesame. The security situation had improved but ‘the capital’s neighborhoods have calmed in largemeasure because each is now dominated by onesect or another.’ 57 As Patrick Cockburn was toldby many Iraqis, ‘the killing stopped because therewas nobody left to kill.’ 58

The diminution of ethno-sectarian violence wasthus, in large measure, the climax and consequenceof a campaign of ethno-sectarian violence. It was



not until Petraeus’s second report to Congress inApril 2008 that he acknowledged that the reductionof ethno-sectarian violence in Baghdad was partlythe result of the ‘sectarian hardening of certainBaghdad neighbourhoods’, however, and only thendid he display the changing composition of the

city on his base-maps.59

In September DamienCave and Stephen Farrell had concluded from theirsurvey of Baghdad neighbourhoods that the Surgehad not reversed ‘the city’s underlying sectariandynamics’, but this was only half the story. Forthat same week Tina Susman noted that Baghdad ‘appears to have become more balkanized, notless, in the last six months.’ 60 In fact, far fromreversing sectarian dynamics, as I now want toshow, the security plan actively exploited them.

Divide and rule

That the Baghdad Security Plan should havehad a sectarian inection is hardly surprising. Itwas implemented under the auspices of a highlypartisan Iraqi government and its security forces,and in conjunction with a US military that saw itselfas holding the line between the Shia and the Sunni.The public versions of the cultural turn and the newcounterinsurgency doctrine had positioned the USmilitary as an innocent bystander in an ethno-sectarian conict. Thus Sarah Sewall from the CarrCenter for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, whohad been instrumental in the review of the draft ofthe new Army Field Manual, indicted both the Iraqi

government – amongst whose failings she listedsectarianism, fecklessness, and corruption – andthe Bush administration (about which one mightsay the same) and absolved the new, culturallysensitive and ethically driven military. ‘Whilethe administration gambles away civil liberties athome and abandons human rights abroad,’ shedeclared, ‘the US military has recommitted itselfto protecting the rights of foreign citizens of allnationalities and faiths’.61 Given the new reservesof cultural tact and cultural intelligence within themilitary, it was not difcult to conclude that ifviolence continued then the fault must lie with theIraqis alone. Hence the move from Newsweek ’scover of 15 October 2001 – ‘Why they hate us’ –to Time’s of 5 March 2007: ‘Why they hate eachother’. Newsweek effectively removed ‘us’ (US)from the equation.

This is ideologically convenient but thoroughlyfraudulent. In his review of the Surge, Odiernoadmitted that ‘there was some movement of

Shia and Sunnis around Baghdad in 2006 andthe beginning of 2007’ – an understatement ofextraordinary proportions – and continued: ‘sowhat we’ve tried to do is hold that in place.’ 62

When Tripp argued that violence in Iraq was ‘notmerely the main threat to “security” but also an

outgrowth of the ways in which security responseshave been organized,’ he was talking about themultiplication of Iraqi police commando units,death squads and sectarian militias.63 But thesame could be said of the US military, whose verypresence and continuing kinetic operations haveprovoked violence, and which has been complicitin and even capitalized on the ethno-sectarianrestructuring of Baghdad. As the rst Surgebrigades began to return stateside, Crisis Groupconcluded that previous US military operations had ‘exacerbated and consolidated’ ethno-sectariandivisions, and that ‘today its divide-and-rule tactics

are contributing to new fault lines and rivalries.’ 64

This is a highly charged political and militaryeld. At one end of the spectrum are actionstaken in concert with the Government of Iraqthat have worked to favour the ascendancy ofthe Shia and of particular factions within it, whileat the other are actions that have worked tocounterbalance the marginalization of the Sunni.Three strategies have been of special signicanceduring the implementation of the Baghdad SecurityPlan: the differential treatment of prisoners; theincorporation of new militias; and the selective

walling of Baghdad neighbourhoods.

First, the detention and treatment of prisonerswas by no means blind to sectarian afliation. Theoperational title for the Plan, ‘Operation Imposingthe Law’, is revealing. There has always been anintimacy between law and violence, and the useof legal formularies as the language for militaryoperations was calculated to have a powerfurhetorical effect. Securing Baghdad cannotbe reduced to a series of expedient politicamanoeuvres, to be sure, but it neverthelesstrembled on the edges of the ‘lawfare’ that ischaracteristic of the postcolony: ‘the resort tolegal instruments, to the violence inherent withinthe law, to commit acts of political coercion, evenerasure.’ 65 There had long been serious concernsabout the treatment of detainees held in US facilitiesin Iraq, and secret jails and torture chambers runby the Ministry of the Interior and its militias wereraided by American troops in 2005. But OperationImposing the Law did not mark a major break from



the carceral regimes that preceded it. During theSurge the number of detainees soared to levelsunprecedented since the American invasion: thoseheld by the Maliki government increased morethan 50 per cent, and those held by MNF-I morethan 60 per cent (Table 2).

Table 2: Detainees held in custody, January–September 2007 (UNAMI)

Their treatment was decisively determined bysectarian afliation. Around 85 per cent of those

held were Sunni, and Anthony Cordesman reportedthat while Shia detainees were often freed, ‘Sunnis are warehoused.’ In December 2007 theUnited Nations Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI)complained that its ‘longstanding concerns withrespect to due process rights’ of prisoners in USmilitary custody remained unaddressed, and thata high proportion continued to be held in militarydetention even after the courts had dismissed theircases. In relation to those held by the Governmentof Iraq, UNAMI reafrmed its concerns over ‘prolonged delays in delays in reviewing detaineecases; the lack of timely and adequate defence

counsel for suspects; the failure to promptlyinvestigate credible allegations of torture and toinstitute criminal proceedings against ofcialsresponsible for abusing detainees; and theprocedures followed by the Central Criminal Court,which fail to meet basic fair trial standards.’ 66

The second strategy involved a series ofcompromises and deals between the US Army andvarious militias and paramilitary proxies in andaround the city. On one side, the US Army welcomedMoqtada’s freeze, and in its public statements wasscrupulously careful to refer to him by his honorictitles (Hojatoleslam Sayyid), to acknowledge theservices provided to Shia neighbourhoods throughhis ofces, and to distinguish the Mahdi Armyfrom the dissident factions (‘special groups’)and criminal gangs against which it continued itsoffensive operations.67 On the other side, theUS military was instrumental in the formalizationof new and predominantly Sunni militias. Thesetook their lead from the Sahwa or ‘Awakening’

movement in Anbar province, a coalition ofSunni tribes that suspended their support for theinsurgency in the summer of 2006 and startedto co-operate with the US military against AQI.Similarly, from early in 2007 thousands of Sunnisin and around Baghdad were recruited as Critical

Infrastructure Security Volunteers, AwakeningCouncils, Guardians, Concerned Local Citizensor Sons of Iraq. The names vary over time andspace; the military prefers generic identicationsthat imply an integrated movement, but the

groups are rooted in neighbourhoods rather thanstructured by tribal allegiance and many preferlocal identications. The rst group in the capital,the Knights of the Two Rivers, formed in Ameriyain June 2007 and by the end of the year claimedmore than 300 members. By then around 43,000Iraqis had been enrolled in similar groups in 16other Baghdad neighbourhoods. Most of themwere on the west bank, but they had also spreadto the largest remaining Sunni neighbourhoodon the east bank (Adhamiya). Once recruits hadbeen screened, recorded on a biometric databaseand signed a security contract they were paid

$300 a month by the US military to provide armedsecurity for their neighbourhoods (from which theIraqi Army was now excluded).68

As in Anbar, the formation of these groupswas in part provoked by the explosive violenceof AQI that targeted not only American and Iraqsecurity forces and the Shia population but alsoconfronted and coerced the Sunni with its rigidversion of Salast Islam. Like the Mahdi Army,AQI was the victim of generational change. Asits seasoned leaders were captured or killed in USmilitary operations they were replaced by whatCrisis Group identied as ‘less experienced, moreundisciplined and increasingly brutal youngermilitants who typically resorted to random, savageviolence.’ In Baghdad the rupture between AQI andother Sunni insurgent groups was delayed by AQI’srole in resisting the march of the Shia militias. Inthe spring of 2007 it declared Ameriya the capitalof its Islamic State of Iraq, antagonising otherinsurgent groups in the process, and repulsed Shia

January April June August September

MNF-I 14 534 19 139 21 107 23 508 23 508

Governmentof Iraq 13 989 19 001 21 112 20 075 21 327



incursions into Ameriya, Dora and Ghazaliya. ButAQI’s determination to dominate the insurgencycombined with the advance of the Shia elsewherein the city to push the Sunni, including manyformer insurgents, closer to the US military.69 Iuse those words advisedly, because the Sunni

militias make no secret of their contempt for theIraqi government, which they see as a proxy forIran. In return, the Iraqi government has resistedtheir incorporation into its security forces, andthere are fears that many of them will return tothe insurgency if they are denied a continuingrole in post-invasion Iraq.70 The rise of the Sunnimilitias has provided a precarious counterbalanceto the Shia supremacy, therefore, but as MichaelSchwartz notes, this is ‘little more than an armedtruce between enemies’. The United States iseffectively arming both sides in the civil war, themilitary and paramilitary forces under the control

of the Iraqi government and the new Sunni militias,and it is difcult to see how these accommodationscan produce political reconciliation.71

The third strategy involved building highconcrete walls around selected, primarily Sunnineighbourhoods. Baghdad was already crisscrossedwith countless blast walls and checkpoints, butbeginning in April 2007 the military decided toreinforce the major ethno-sectarian fault lines.The objective was to prevent insurgents from usingneighbourhoods as bases to conduct operationsagainst other communities and, if this failed, to

prevent death squads from entering in order toretaliate. Initially ve neighbourhoods wereselected, including Adhamiya, Amiriya and Khadra,but this was later increased to ten. The plan wasmodelled on projects in Tel Afar and Fallujah, butit also reactivated the strategic hamlets modelfrom Vietnam (though one of the authors of thenew counterinsurgency manual promised thatit could now be done ‘with much more culturalsensitivity’).72 The rst neighbourhood to bewalled was Adhamiya, which Petraeus’s SeniorCounterinsurgency Adviser described as both astaging post for AQI bomb attacks on surroundingShia communities and a recurrent target for revengeattacks by Shia death squads. Many residentswere unconvinced by the strategy, however, andthe parallels they drew were with the Israeli fencearound Gaza and the wall Israel had built deepinside the occupied West Bank. They complainedthat like the Palestinians they were being turnedinto ‘caged animals’.74 The sentiment and thestructure of feeling that it represented were widely

shared, and there was considerable opposition tothe construction of the wall, from the press, onthe streets and even, for a brief moment, fromthe Iraqi Prime Minister. One young Iraqi womanmust have spoken for many when she wrote: ‘The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraq

society apart. Promoting and supporting civil warisn’t enough, apparently… It’s time for Americato physically divide and conquer.’ 75 The militarybrushed aside the protests, however, insisting thatthey had been orchestrated by AQI, and claimedthat it was not ‘sealing off neighbourhoods’ butmerely ‘controlling access to them.’ Althoughthe military referred to these walled enclaves as ‘gated communities’, Baghdad was hardly Bel Air.Access was restricted to military checkpoints – ‘One road in and one road out,’ said one sad manin Ghazaliya: ‘Now I live in my own little prison’ 76

– and all residents were subjected to biometric

scanning (ngerprints and retinal scans).77

Aswith the militias, so the miles of concrete wallsrepresent a suspension rather than a resolutionof the conict between the Sunni and the Shia.As James Denselow argued in commentary onthe walling of Baghdad, behind so much of thesupposed progress in Iraq ‘is a systematic attemptto transfer the conict into a deep freeze ratherthan address the root causes of the violence.’ 78

Hell freezes over79

It is not only ethno-sectarian conict that

has been suspended; everyday life has beensuspended too. That post-occupation Baghdad haswitnessed a profound contraction of the horizonsof life has become a dismal commonplace, andthe wretched conditions under which most Iraqislive in Baghdad (and elsewhere) have beendetailed in endless, eviscerating accounts of thehopelessly inadequate provision of public utilitieslike electricity, water and sewage disposal. In thecapital these now bear most heavily on the Sunni,whom Alissa Rubin describes as inhabiting ‘a worldof ruined buildings, damaged mosques, streetspitted by mortar shells, uncollected trash and solittle electricity that many people have abandonedusing refrigerators altogether.’ She argues thatthe contrast with Shia neighbourhoods, includingeven Sadr City, is stark: ‘Markets are in full swing,community projects are under way, and whileelectricity is scarce throughout the city there is lesstrouble nding fuel for generators in those areas.When the government cannot provide services,civil arms of the Shiite militias step in to ll the



gap.’ 80

But for both Sunni and Shia the freedom ofmovement, the essence of the right to the city, hasbeen deeply compromised by the new sectarianlandscape. Thousands of families have been

forced to ee their homes, many of them movingtwo or three times, and by the end of 2007 therewere more than one million displaced people inBaghdad.81 Even those who remained in theirhomes found the walls closing in on them. ‘Peoplemay feel safer inside their neighbourhoods’ KimSengupta reported, ‘but are more wary of venturingoutside them. A short journey across the city cantake hours with roads blocked off and numerouscheckpoints, discouraging people from visitingrelations and friends and reinforcing the senseof isolation.’ 82 Extended families are common inBaghdad, but face-to-face interactions have become

less frequent: one man said his favourite auntsand cousins lived in Dora, less than two miles awayfrom his home in Saydia, but he had been unableto visit them for over a year. Ordinary activitieslike visiting friends or going to school have beenturned into major expeditions fraught with difcultyand danger. Different militias control differentstreets and bridges, and ‘Shiites and Sunnis stilltake long, circuitous routes to work to avoid eachother’s neighbourhoods.’ 83 Increasingly, the Shiamust navigate intra-sectarian barriers too, whichintensied during the crisis of March 2008 whendifferent Shia constituencies battled for control

in the streets. Allegiances in Kadhimiya changedfrom block to block, for example, where the MahdiArmy controlled most of the central district andthe rival Badr Organization the southern district.Conversely, Karrada was secured by the BadrOrganization but threatened by the Mahdi Army,to such a degree that one resident said that it wasnow safer for him to go to (Sunni) Dora than toother Shia neighbourhoods ‘where being perceivedas [a supporter] of the wrong political party canlead to death.’ 84

These turf wars mean that when the envelopeof personal security expands, it has denite butindeterminate limits. One shopkeeper in Karradasaid that it was safe enough for him to go to thelocal wholesale market but not safe enough forhis daughter to go back to school, safe enoughto drive in his immediate neighbourhood but notsafe enough to cross the Tigris. There are work-arounds, like the informal exchanges that havebeen set up where taxi-drivers swap passengers

and truckers swap cargoes for destinations that lieacross the fault lines.85 But the very existence ofthese arrangements only conrms the suspendedanimation of normal transactions; this is ‘thenew normal’, where ‘the simple interactions thatmake up normal life in cities around the world –

buying gas, going to a grocery store, xing yourcar – are now conducted along strictly sectarianlines.’ In the spring of 2007 Leila Fadel reportedthat neighbourhoods were becoming self-sufcientenclaves ‘in which Sunni and Shiite residents canshop among their own without fear of retribution.As Baghdadis became reluctant to visit the mainmarkets and shopping areas, so former residentiadistricts sprouted with street stands, privategarages opened for car repairs, and gardens wereconverted into mini-marts, clothes shops andinternet cafés. ‘The result has been a new patternof life for many as they search for ways to stay in

their Sunni or Shiite neighbourhoods.’ 86

GhaithAbdul-Ahad, who grew up in a very differentBaghdad, returned in March 2008 to nd that mostpeople ‘now live in walled, ethnically cleansedcommunities’ to such a degree that ‘there is no suchthing as a Baghdadi any more. Everyone now isidentied with a particular walled neighbourhood,guarded by one of a dozen or so militias.’

Biopolitics, security and the counter-city

In his original discussions, Foucault describedsovereign power and bio-power as ‘absolutely

incompatible’, because one was exercised overterritory, the other over bodies or populations.Biopolitics, Foucault insisted, was ‘the exact, point-for-point opposite’ of sovereign power, ‘foreign tothe form of sovereignty’. But he was also acutelyaware of their contradictory combination, andargued that the play between ‘the sovereign rightto kill’ and the calculated administration of the rightto life is inscribed ‘in the workings of all states.’ 88

And in Baghdad – as in so many other places –biopolitics is not pursued outside the domain ofsovereign power but is instead part of a protractedstruggle over the right to claim, dene and exercisesovereign power. In Iraq, it bears emphasizing,sovereign power is at once contested – otherwisethere would be no counterinsurgency –and alsodistributed. The sovereignty of the Governmentof Iraq is conditional, as both the insurgency andthe continuing involvement of the United Statestestify, and sovereign power is dispersed throughits own security apparatus and through a multitudeof militias that have varying and in some crucia



cases hostile relations with the central state.This unstable grid of power both structures andis structured by ethno-sectarian division, so thatbiopolitics in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq isprosecuted in the name of sovereign power and,at the limit, turns into a necropolitics.89

There are, I think, close afnities between thesuspended animation of Baghdad in the name ofsecuring the city and Foucault’s description of thetransformation of the plague-stricken town into acounter-city:

‘In the [plague-stricken town] there is anexceptional situation: against an extraordinaryevil, power is mobilized; it makes itselfeverywhere present and visible; it invents newmechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, itpartitions; it constructs for a time … a counter-

city that is reduced, in the nal analysis, likethe evil that it combats, to a simple dualism oflife and death: that which moves brings death,and kills that which moves.’ 90

It is not, I think, fanciful to see the dialecticbetween insurgency and counterinsurgencyturning Baghdad into a counter-city. But this canbe pressed still further, because much of what Ihave described can also be connected to MichaelDillon’s discussions of contemporary biopoliticsthat extend the arguments Foucault sketched outin a series of lectures on security two years after

his thematization of the plague-stricken town.The instrumentalisation of counterinsurgency;the compulsive need to produce and reproducemetrics (‘You cannot secure anything unless youknow what it is,’ Dillon observes, so that ‘integralto the problematizations of security are the ways inwhich people, territory and things are transformedinto epistemic objects’), and the concerted attemptto freeze the contingency and spontaneity of life,what Dillon calls ‘the endless calibration of theways in which the very circulation of life threatenslife’: all of these speak directly to a late modernsecurity dispositif that is not only geopolitical butalso profoundly biopolitical.91

The biopolitical disposition is revealed mostacutely in the doctrinal description of three stagesof counterinsurgency:

• ‘Stop the bleeding’: ‘similar to emergencyrst aid for the patient. The goal is to protect thepopulation, break the insurgents’ initiative and

set the conditions for further engagement.’

• ‘Inpatient care – recovery’: ‘Efforts aimedat assisting the patient through long-termrecovery or restoration of health – which inthis case means achieving stability … throughproviding security, expanding effective

governance, providing essential services andachieving incremental success in meetingpublic expectations’

• ‘Outpatient care – movement to self-sufciency’: ‘expansion of stability operationsacross contexts regions, ideally using HN [‘HostNation’] forces.’ 92

Counterinsurgency is made to appearintrinsically therapeutic so that, when it moves to theconcrete, the walling of Baghdad neighbourhoodsbecomes the military equivalent of ‘tourniquets

in surgery’, temporary measures to stop a ‘life-threatening haemorrhage’. These medicalizedmetaphors become even more powerful once theycirculate through the public sphere, and whateverthe effects of the Baghdad Security Plan on thepeople that live (and die) there, these vocabularieshave made the cultural turn therapeutic for the USmilitary and the American public.93

But the attempt to secure Baghdad has becomemore than emergency triage. The military plots ofdeaths in the capital resemble medical scans ofthe body politic in which ethno-sectarian violence

is visualized as a series of tumours (Figure 3),and in his April testimony to Congress, Petraeussuperimposed similar displays over his base-mapsand described ethno-sectarian violence as ‘a cancerthat continues to spread if left unchecked’ 94

This has the most powerful rhetorical effect ofall, because it so easily justies the most radical(and always supposedly ‘surgical’) intervention:more killing to stop the killing. As I have tried toshow, that killing is never indiscriminate because,in the name of securing the population, it alwaystargets particular groups in and thus excisesthem from the population. As Dillon argues moregenerally,

‘Biopolitics simply lives for its obsession withthe audit of existence. For the continuousassay of life, it is necessary to specify the veryeligibility to life as well as the eligibilities thatlife biopolitically accords to life. How wouldbiopolitics know how to promote and enhance





FOOTNOTES

1The intricate wiring of the military-industry-media-entertainment complex (MIME) ensured that thishad its media counterpart. For months before theinvasion media graphics had relentlessly reduced

Baghdad to a series of likely targets, but in thevery week that Saddam’s statue was toppled inthe capital a new series of maps appeared showingBaghdad as a series of neighbourhoods full ofpeople. Derek Gregory, The colonial present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell,2004) pp. 213-4.2Herfried Münkler, The new wars (Cambridge:Polity, 2005); Mary Kaldor, New and old wars:organized violence in a global era (Cambridge:Polity, second edition, 2006).3James Corum, ‘Rethinking US Armycounterinsurgency doctrine’, Contemporary

security policy 28 (2007) 127-42: 128-9; BeatriceHeuser, ‘The cultural revolution in counter-insurgency’, Journal of strategic studies 30 (2007)153-71: 156.4Statement of Major General Robert Scales beforethe House Armed Services Committee, 15 July2004; MG Robert Scales, ‘Culture-centric warfare’,Proceedings of the Naval Institute, October 2004.5Leonard Wong, Stephen Gerras, CU @ the FOB:How the Forward Operating Base is changing thelife of combat soldiers, Strategic Studies Institute,March 2006, p.1.6George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America inIraq (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005);see also Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial life in theEmerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York:Alfred Knopf, 2006).7The analogy is even more telling than Ricksacknowledges, since the ability to enter and withdrawfrom ‘the Orient’ at will – the choreographedalternation between ‘modern’ hotel and ‘traditional’street and bazaar – is one of the characteristicgestures of cultures of tourism conducted under thesign of Orientalism. Thus Wong and Gerras, CU @the FOB, p. 1: ‘For thousands of soldiers deployed

to Iraq, life can be divided into two distinct realms.There is the life spent conducting missions in Iraqineighborhoods – constantly scanning the area forsuspicious activity, weapons locked and loaded foraction, and adrenaline-pumping situations. Andthen there is life on the Forward Operating Base(FOB) – catching up on sleep, pumping iron in thegym, and surng the Internet.’ 8US Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency(December, 2006); for a fuller discussion, see

Derek Gregory, ‘“The rush to the intimate”:counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in latemodern war,’ Radical Philosophy 150 (2008) (inpress).9Gregory, ‘“The rush to the intimate”’.10Edward Wong, ‘Do over: Iraq plan’s elusive

target, fear itself,’ New York Times 8 April 2007.11Iraq Study Group Report, March 2006, p. 50.12Choosing Victory: a plan for success in Iraq, IraqPlanning Group, American Enterprise Institute,2006.13M-G William Caldwell, MNF-I Press Brieng,19 October 2006, at http://www.mnf-iraq.com;President’s Address to the Nation, 10 January2007 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html14The rst phase of the Iraq Planning Group’sstrategy had ruled out military operations inSadr City because they would ‘provoke a massive

political and military conagration’, and insteadadvocated rst securing Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods. This ‘accords with soundcounterinsurgency practice,’ the Report continued, ‘which favors defensive strategies aimed atprotecting the population over offensive strategiesaimed at killing insurgents’: Choosing Victory, p.15.15Marc Santora, ‘Baghdad Plan is a “success”, IraqPrime Minister tells Bush’, New York Times 17February 2007; Ann Scott Tyson, ‘Military reportsslow progress in securing Baghdad’, WashingtonPost 5 June 2007; David Cloud, Damien Cave,

‘Commanders say push in Baghdad is short ofgoal,’ New York Times 4 June 2007; Kim Gamel, ‘US: 40 per cent of Baghdad not controlled,Washington Post 16 June 2007; MG Joseph Fil,US Department of Defense News brieng, 29 June2007; Lisa Burgess, ‘Odierno: Half of Baghdadunder control’, Stars and Stripes 20 July 2007;General David Petraeus, Report to Congress onthe situation in Iraq, 10-11 September 2007; JimMichaels, ‘Military: 75 per cent of Baghdad areasnow secure,’ USA Today 18 January 2008.16Amit Paley, Karen De Young, ‘Iraqis’ Qualityof Life Marked By Slow Gains, Many Setbacks,Washington Post November 30, 2007; see also TomEnglehardt, ‘We count, they don’t’, Tom Dispatch,2 October 2007 at http://www.tomdispatch.com.17Clark Hoyt, ‘The reality in Iraq? Depends on who’scounting’, New York Times 7 October 200718AQI is the common English-language acronymfor Tandhim al-Qaida f Bilad al-Rafdayn (‘al-Qaeda’s Organisation in the Country of the TwoRivers [Mesopotamia]’); it was directed by Abu



Musab al-Zarqawi until he was killed in 2006, andwas an outgrowth of his previous terrorist group, Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (‘Monotheism andJihad’). It declared its allegiance to al Qaeda inOctober 2004, but its connections with both al-Qaeda and the wider Iraqi insurgency have varied

considerably.19Kimberly Kagan, ‘The real Surge: preparing forOperation Phantom Thunder’, Iraq Report 5 (June2007), Institute for the Study of War; ‘BaghdadBelts’, Institute for the Study of War, 31 October2007; Michael Duffy, ‘Why the Surge worked,’ Time31 January 2008. In case it isn’t obvious, I shouldnote that Kagan is not a disinterested observer:she is the wife of Frederick Kagan and in March2007 was appointed by the Weekly Standard tocompile progress reports on the Surge devisedby her husband. That same year she becamePresident of the Institute for the Study of War,

which describes itself as ‘a private, nonpartisan,not-for-prot institution’ providing military analysisand education for civilian leaders: http://www.understandingwar.org.20MNC–I is part of MNF–I; where the focus of MNF–Iis primarily strategic, dealing with military-politicalrelations and the training of Iraqi security forces,the focus of MNC–I is primarily tactical, dealingwith day-to-day military operations throughoutIraq. Odierno commanded MNC–I from December2006 to February 2008, and he and Petraeus areusually seen as the site architects of the Surge.21LG Ray Odierno, Department of Defense News

brieng, 17 January 2008; Bill Roggio, ‘Al Qaedain Iraq’s shrinking area of operations’, TheLong War Journal , 17 January 2008 at http://ww.longwarjournal.org.22 ‘Civilian deaths from violence in 2007’, IraqBody Count, 1 January 2008 at http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2007;Anthony Cordesman, US Airpower in Iraq andAfghanistan, Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies, Washington DC, 13 December 2007.Cordesman’s gures are also minima: ‘majormunitions’ excludes 20 and 30 mm cannon androckets.23Petraeus, Report to Congress, 10-11 September2007; Report of the Independent Commission onthe Security Forces of Iraq, 6 September 2007,p. 3; see Ilan Goldenberg, ‘Putting your best footforward’, at http://www.democracyarsenal.org, 13September 200724The term is as rebarbative as the process. Itmay be a literal translation of the Serbo-Croatetnicko ciscenje and was widely used to describe

the systematic campaigns of terror unleashedon particular ethno-cultural groups during thedisintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslaviain the 1990s: these included the destruction ofhomes and property, forcible expulsions and massmurders. Many ed in advance of the violence

but these population displacements hardly qualifyas voluntary. The practice has a longer history,and the term has since been used to describe theexpulsion of any ethno-cultural group by force orintimidation in order to homogenize the populationof a territory. It differs from genocide inasmuchas its objective is to force a group to ee ratherthan seek its physical elimination, and it has beenrecognised under international law25Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’is of Iraq (Princeton:Princeton University Press, second edition,2003); Faleh Jabar, The Shi’ite movement inIraq (London: Saqi Books, 2003); Ali Allawi, The

occupation of Iraq: winning the war, losing the peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007);Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada: Muqtada al-Sadr, theShia revival and the struggle for Iraq (New York:Scribner, 2008).26After Muhammed’s death, those who believed thathis successor should be selected by consultationfavoured the Prophet’s close friend and adviser,Abu Bakr, and were identied as Sunni (loosely, ‘one who follows the traditions of the Prophet’),while those who insisted that the successor shouldbe chosen from the Prophet’s own family preferredMuhammed’s son-in-law, Ali, and came to be

identied as the Shia-t-Ali (hence Shia) or ‘theparty of Ali’.27Anthony Shadid, Night draws near: Iraq’s peoplein the shadow of America’s war (New York: HenryHolt, 2005) pp. 377-8; Karl Vick, ‘Shiites rally toSunni “brothers’’, Washington Post 9 April 2004.28Crisis Group, In their own words: readingthe Iraqi insurgency Middle East Report 50, 15February 2006; Loretta Napoleoni, Insurgent Iraq:al Zarqawi and the new generation (New York:Seven Stories Press, 2005) 157-160.29Edward Wong, New York Times 5 December 2004;Nir Rosen, ‘Anatomy of a civil war: Iraq’s descentinto chaos’, Boston Review November/December2006; Michael Schwartz, ‘The battle of Baghdad’,TomDispatch at http://www.tomdispatch.com, 23March 2008.30Crisis Group, The next Iraq war? Sectarianismand civil conict , Middle East Report 52, 27February 2006, p. 12.31SCIRI was formed in exile in Iran in 1982. Fiercelyopposed to Saddam’s regime, it raised an armed



militia, the Badr Brigades, which fought on theside of Iran during the Iran-Iraq war. In contrastto Sadr’s roots among the poorest sections ofthe Shia, its social base lies in the Shia merchantand middle class. Since the invasion it ‘used itsinstitutional alliance with the United States to

capture strategic positions in the state and securityestablishments’ – men from the Badr Brigades llsenior positions in the Iraqi security forces – but ithas also retained the Brigades as its paramilitaryarm: Kamal Nazer Yasin, ‘The tangled web of Shiapolitics’, ISN Security Watch, 9 April 2008. SCIRIwas viewed with considerable suspicion by theSadrists, who left the Alliance in September 2007,and there was constant and often violent conictbetween the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army.32Allawi, Occupation of Iraq, pp. 233-433Eric Herring and Glen Rangwala, Iraq in fragments:the occupation and its legacy (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 2006) pp. 155-9; Charles Tripp, ‘Militias, vigilantes, death squads: the grammarof violence in Iraq’, London Review of Books 25January 2007.34Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Many Iraqis see sectarianroots in new killings’, New York Times 27 May2005; Patrick Cockburn, ‘Iraq’s top Shia clericwarns of “genocidal war”’, Independent 19 July2005; Nancy Youssef and Mohammed al Dulaimy, ‘Shiites eeing Sunni-dominated neighbourhoods’,Knight Ridder Newspapers 21 September 2005.Zeyad Kasim reproduced guidelines circulatingamong (presumably Sunni) communities in

Baghdad. Arrest by Iraqi security forces or theirmilitias ‘would mean possible death or injury’,they began, and it would be ‘naïve’ to trust them;residents were advised to seek out ‘trustworthyfriends’, to become familiar with the geographyof their neighbourhoods, and to establish ‘neighbourhood watch groups’ so that when apatrol entered (usually a 4WD without numberplates) people could be warned by telephone tohide or escape. Healing Iraq, 17 February 2006 athttp://healingiraq.blogspot.com.35Maps of the violence and the attacks on mosquescan be found in Healing Iraq, 22 and 25 February2006.36Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Sects’ strife takes a toll onBaghdad’s bread’, New York Times 21 July 2006;Jim Michaels, ‘Shiites redene battle in Baghdad’,USA Today 10 August 2006; ‘Sunni, Shiite factionscarve up Baghdad’, Associated Press at msnbc.com, 1 September 2006.37Homi Bhabha, The location of culture (London:Routledge, 1994) pp. 99-100.

38Mark Kukis, ‘Ethnic cleansing in a Baghdadneighborhood’, Time 25 October 2006; for graphicexamples of threatening letters, iers and posterssee Healing Iraq, 9 October 2006.39Healing Iraq, 26 November 2006.40MG William Caldwell, MNF-I Press brieng, 29

November 2006. The map was rst published inNed Parker, Ali Hamdani, How violence is forginga brutal divide in Baghdad’, Times 14 December2006; versions of the map reappeared in the IraqPlanning Group Report: Choosing Victory, Figures2 and 3.41Patrick Cockburn, ‘Baghdad under surge’,Counterpunch 15 March 2007.42Brian Finoki, ‘The sectarian faultlines of Baghdad’,Subtopia at http://subtopia.blogspot.com, 18December 2006.43Parker, Hamdami, ‘Violence’; Sabrina Tavernise, ‘District by district, Shiites make Baghdad their

own’, New York Times 23 December 2006; MarkKukis, ‘In Baghdad, a last stand against ethniccleansing’, Time 28 December 2006.44Damian Cave, ‘In Baghdad, sectarian lines toodeadly to cross’, New York Times 4 March 2007.45Ann Scott Tyson, ‘Commanders in Iraq see “Surge” into ’08’, Washington Post 9 May 2007;Damien Cave, Stephen Farrell, ‘At street level,unmet goals of troop build-up’, New York Times 9September 2007.46Zeyad Kazim, ‘The Baghdad death map: Iraqisoffer their own security assessment of Baghdadneighborhoods’, IraqSlogger, 30 June 2007 at

http://www.iraqslogger.com.47Cockburn, ‘Baghdad under surge’; Healing Iraq,25 July 2007; Babek Dehghanpisheh, ‘The bodycontractors’, Newsweek 15 December 200748Crisis Group, Iraq’s civil war, the Sadrists and thesurge, Middle East Report 72, February 2008, p. 4.Soon after the elections in January 2005 the BadrBrigades moved to dominate the Ministry of theInterior, while the Mahdi Army remained outsidethe state security apparatus since it was unwillingto co-operate with the American occupation; afterthe Samarra bombing, however, elements of theMahdi Army penetrated the Ministry and many ofthem were actively involved in its death squads:Cockburn, Moqtada, pp. 184-6.49Parker and Hamdami, ‘Violence’.50Tripp, ‘Militias, vigilantes, death squads’.51Crisis Group, Iraq’s Civil War, p. 7.52Edward Wong, Damien Cave, ‘Baghdad district isa model, but only for Shiites,’ New York Times 22May 2007.53John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, ‘Law and



disorder in the postcolony: an introduction’, inJean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds) Law anddisorder in the postcolony (Chicago: ChicagoUniversity Press, 2006) pp. 1-56: 5.54See Carolyn Nordstrom, Shadows of war(Berkeley CA; University of California Press, 2004).

Criminality was not all on one side, however, andexternal actors had also penetrated – and hollowedout – the urban economy: see Michael Schwartz, ‘Neo-liberalism on crack: cities under siege in Iraq’,City 11 (2007) 21-69.55Crisis Group, Iraq’s Civil War, p. 7; ‘In Baghdad,services and violence are linked’, IraqSlogger athttp://www.iraqslogger.com, 21 August 2007;Sabrina Tavernise, ‘Relations sour between Shiitesand Iraq militia’, New York Times 12 October 2007;Ned Parker, ‘Sadr militia moves to clean house’,Los Angeles Times 7 December 2007; SudarsanRaghavan, ‘Iraq’s youthful militiamen build power

through fear,’ Washington Post 13 December 2007;Amit Paley, ‘Sadr’s militia enforces cease-re witha deadly purge’, Washington Post 21 February2008.56Joshua Partlow, ‘Mahdi Army, not al-Qaeda, isEnemy No 1 in western Baghdad’, Washington Post 16 July 2007; Ralph Peters, ‘The human terrain ofurban operations’, Parameters 30 (2000) 4-12.57Babek Dehghanpisheh, Larry Kaplow, ‘As Sunnisee, Shiites now dominate Baghdad,’ Newsweek 10 September 2007; Rod Nordland, ‘Baghdadcomes alive’, Newsweek 17 November 2007.58Patrick Cockburn, ‘Who is whose enemy?’ London

Review of Books, 6 March 2008.59But that is ‘only a partial explanation,’ he added, ‘as countless sectarian faultlines and numerousmixed neighborhoods still exist in Baghdad’:General David Petraeus, Report to Congress onthe situation in Iraq, 8-9 April 2008.60Cave and Farrell, ‘At street level’; Tina Susman, ‘Troop build-up fails to reconcile Iraq’, Los AngelesTimes 4 September 2007; my emphasis.61Sarah Sewall, ‘He wrote the book, can he followit?’ Washington Post , 25 February 2007; ‘Craftinga new counterinsurgency doctrine’, Foreign Service Journal , September 2007: pp. 33-40.62Odierno, News brieng, 17 January 2008; myemphasis.63Tripp, ‘Militias, vigilantes, death squads’.64Crisis Group, Iraq after the Surge: the new Sunnilandscape, Middle East Report 74, 30 April 2008,p. 27.65Comoroff and Comoroff, ‘Law and disorder’, p.3066Anthony Cordesman, ‘The tenuous case for

strategic patience in Iraq’, Center for Strategic andInternational Studies, Washington DC, 6 August2007, p. 18; Human Rights Report, United NationsAssistance Mission for Iraq, 31 December 2007,pp. 2-3 (for a detailed discussion, see pp. 22-28);Chris Tomlinson, ‘Iraqi court rulings stop at US

detention sites’, Associated Press, 17 May 2008.67Alex Kingsbury, ‘Baghdad’s new normal,’ USNews & World Report 2 March 2008.68Three different biometric systems are used by theUS in Iraq: Automated Fingerprint IdenticationSystem (AFIS); the Biometrics Automated Tool Set(BATS); and the Biometric Identication Systemfor Access; all three are linked to the Departmentof Defense Biometrics Fusion Center in WestVirginia.69James Glanz, Stephen Farrell, ‘US-backed planfor Sunni neighborhood guards is tested’, New YorkTimes 19 August 2007; Will Waddell, ‘Reconciliation

movements in and around Baghdad,’ Institute forthe Study of War, Backgrounder 11, September2007; Michael Howard, ‘A surge of their own:Iraqis take back streets’, Guardian 20 December2007; Alissa Rubin, Damien Cave, ‘In a force forIraqi calm, seeds of conict’, New York Times 23December 2007; Alissa Rubin, Stephen Farrell, ‘Awakening Councils by region’, New York Times23 December 2007; Peter Spiegel, ‘US shifts Sunnstrategy in Iraq’, Los Angeles Times 14 January2008; Crisis Group, Iraq after the Surge, pp. 2-3,17.70MNF–I insists that the recruitment of the militias

was intended to be a short-term measure, but theIraqi government had been accused of draggingits feet over vetting and approving candidates totransfer to its security services. It has also madeit plain that less than one-third of applicants arelikely to be accepted: in Dora, none of the 2,000applicants was accepted. Magggie O’Kane and IanBlack, ‘Sunni militia strike could derail US strategyagainst AQI’, Guardian 21 March 2008; AlexandraZavbis, ‘In Iraq US seeks jobs for surplus hiredguns’, Los Angeles Times 28 March 2008.71Patrick Cockburn, ‘Is the US really bringingstability to Baghdad?’ Independent 15 February2008; Schwartz, ‘Battle’; Nir Rosen, ‘The myth ofthe Surge’, Rolling Stone 6 March 2008.72Julian Barnes, ‘“Gated communities” planned forBaghdad’, Los Angeles Times 11 January 2007.73David Kilcullen, ‘The urban tourniquet: “Gatedcommunities” in Baghdad,’ Small Wars Journal , 27April 2007 at http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog.74A proposal to turn Baghdad’s Sunni districts into ‘closed cantons’ was outlined by Nibras Kazimi of



the Hudson Institute in November based on whathe called ‘the Israeli method’ used to constructthe ‘separation barrier’ (or Apartheid Wall) in theoccupied West Bank: Talisman Gate at http://talismangate.blogspot.com, 30 November 2006.75Baghdad Burning, 26 April 2007, at http://

riverbend.blogspot.com76Sam Dagher, ‘Baghdad is safer, but it’s a lifebehind walls’, Christian Science Monitor 19December 2007.77Karin Brulliard, ‘“Gated communities”’ for thewar-ravaged’, Washington Post 23 April 2007;Thomas Frank, ‘US is building database on Iraqis’,USA Today 12 June 2007; Alex Kingsbury, ‘TheUS Army ramps up biometrics to ID Baghdadresidents’, US News & World Report 1 May 2008.78James Denselow, ‘Freezing the conict’, Guardian 28 April 2008.79Cf. Aparasim (Bobby) Ghosh, ‘Life in Hell: a

Baghdad diary’, Time 14 August 2006.80Alissa Rubin, ‘Sunni Baghdad becomes land ofsilent ruins’, New York Times 26 March 2008. Thelast sentence speaks directly to the situation inSadr City.81The internally displaced are predominantlywomen and children. See successive reportsfrom the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, Theinternally displaced in Iraq, especially Updates 29(27 December 2007) and 32 (March 2008). Manymore people ed to Lebanon, Jordan and Syria;these were disproportionately the Iraq middleclass, who had the means to escape but who also

encountered considerable hardships in their newlives as refugees.82Kim Sengupta, ‘Under siege: what the surge reallymeans in Baghdad’, Independent 10 September2007.83Nordland, ‘Baghdad comes alive’.84Wong and Cave, ‘Baghdad district is a model’;Sudarsan Raghavan, ‘On a Baghdad street,palpable despair’, Washington Post 31 March 2008;Raghavan, ‘Between Iraqi Shiites, a deepeninganimosity’, Washington Post 7 April 2008.85Cave, ‘In Baghdad’, 4 March 2007; Yasir Faisal, ‘Baghdad garage where drivers swap Shiites andSunnis’, Reuters 2 July 2007; Joshua Partlow,Naseer Nouri, ‘In Iraq, a lull or a hopeful trend?’Washington Post 2 November 2007; Nancy Youssef, ‘Ride home shows Baghdad’s safe, dangeroussides’, McClatchy Newspapers 5 November 2007;Nordland, ‘Baghdad comes alive’; Diaa Hadid, ‘Shopowners ee mixed Baghdad areas’, AssociatedPress 28 December 2007.86Leila Fardel, ‘Life blooms on the side streets of

Baghdad,’ McClatchy Newspapers, 7 May 2007;Hadid, ‘Shop owners ee’.87Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, ‘Death, destruction and fearon the streets of cafés, poets and booksellers,’Guardian 17 March 2008.88See Michel Foucault, The history of sexuality:

an introduction (London: Penguin, 1978; rstpublished in French, 1976) pp. 135-145; Foucault,“Society must be defended”: lectures at the Collègede France 1975-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003)pp. 23-41, 239-263.89Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public culture 15(2003) 11-40.90Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birthof the prison (trans. Alan Sheridan) (London:Penguin, 1979) p. 205; originally published inFrench in 1975.91Michael Dillon, ‘Governing terror: the state ofemergency of biopolitical emergence’, Internationa

political sociology 1 (2007) 7-28: 12, 18; see alsohis ‘Underwriting security,’ Security dialogue 39(2008) 309-332. Cf. Michel Foucault, Security,territory, population: lectures at the Collègede France 1977-1978 (trans. Graham Burchell)(Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); thelectures were rst published in French in 2004.Following Foucault, Dillon identies geopoliticswith territory and biopolitics with population,but both involve spatializations. Foucault madeit clear that ‘problems of space’ were common toall three apparatuses of power with which he wasconcerned. ‘It goes without saying for sovereignty,

since sovereignty is rst of all exercised within aterritory. But discipline involves a spatial division,and I think security does too, and the differenttreatment of space by sovereignty, discipline andsecurity is precisely what I want to talk about’:Security, territory, population, p. 12.92US Army Field Manual 3-24, § 5.3-5.6.93Kilcullen, ‘Gated communities’; Gregory, ‘Rush tothe intimate’.94Petraeus, Report to Congress, 8-9 April 2008.95MG William Caldwell, MNF-I Press brieng, 6September 2006.96Dillon, ‘Governing terror’, p. 25.

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The Biopolitics of Baghdad:Counterinsurgency and the counter-city

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