The Fleeting Success of the Surge

By Bobby Ghosh

Reports of Iraqi refugees returning to Baghdad fill Adnan and Noora Awadi with envy and nostalgia. The young couple--whose names have been changed, since they fear reprisals if quoted in the media--fled to the Jordanian capital, Amman, in the summer of 2006 and are yearning to go back to their leafy street in al-Yarmouk, a middle-class neighborhood in Baghdad. Noora, 28, misses their modest one-story home so much, she is sentimental even about its defects. "The sink in the kitchen is cracked, there are termites everywhere, and sometimes in the summer we can smell our neighbor's toilet from our living room--but I swear I would go back there this minute," she says wistfully. "If we had hope of some kind of life in Baghdad, I would walk all the way." Adnan, a physician, feels the tug of home too, but he keeps a check on his emotions. "If we had hope ..." he repeats after his wife. "But do we have hope?"

It's a question the Awadis and hundreds of thousands of other exiled Baghdadis ask every day. The bloody sectarian war that drove them from their city having abated, the temptation to return has grown. In recent weeks, several thousand refugees have journeyed home--mostly from Syria, which has introduced tough new visa regulations designed to send back Iraqis and turn away new waves at the border. Many had simply run through their life's savings and could no longer afford exile. (The Iraqi government has offered cash, free transport from the border and other inducements for those who agree to go back.) Perhaps tellingly, so far there have been few returnees from Jordan, the preferred destination of educated, middle-class Iraqis like the Awadis.

Humanitarian agencies reckon that there are 750,000 Iraqis in Jordan and 1.5 million in Syria. Fewer than 30,000 have returned, and many of them will simply join the ranks of the 2.4 million who are classified as "internally displaced persons"--living in Iraq but unable to return to their old neighborhoods because they are now run by sectarian militias. That hasn't stopped the Iraqi government from declaring that peace is at hand. Welcoming one recent batch of returnees, Ali Dabbagh, spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said, "We are eager to have Iraqis return and live a normal, safe life."

In truth, Baghdad is nothing like normal and still some distance from safe. The number of sectarian killings is down, but few Sunnis dare to venture into Shi'ite neighborhoods, and vice versa. U.S. military commanders, whose efforts have led to the sharp reduction in violence, have been cautioning against reading too much into the statistics. "Nobody says anything about turning a corner, seeing lights at the end of tunnels, any of those phrases," General David Petraeus told journalists on Dec. 6. "There's nobody in uniform who is doing victory dances in the end zone."

Petraeus' words may have been directed at Washington, where some Administration officials have been crowing about the success of the military surge strategy. Iraqis living in exile don't need to be told it's too soon to celebrate. Most carry terrible memories of the violence that forced them to flee in the first place. Many refugees lost loved ones, either to the Shi'ite mobs that rampaged unchecked through the streets of Baghdad several times last year or to reprisal killings by Sunni insurgents. The Awadis were lucky: they had fair warning. Adnan still remembers the strong body odor of the six armed men from the Shi'ite Mahdi Army militia who walked into his office at the Health Ministry and demanded that he quit his job and get out of the country. Said the leader of the group: "We are cleaning the government, throwing out Sunni garbage like you." He told Adnan what would happen if he didn't obey. "They would kidnap all of us, put drills into the eyes of me and my son, but only after we had witnessed my wife and daughter being raped," he says. "Then they would kill all of us." The leader reached into his pocket and pulled out a small glass bottle. In it was a pair of round, bloodstained objects Adnan recognized at once: "Human eyeballs."

Baghdad may be safer than it was, but people like the Awadis worry that the gains of the surge are temporary and predicated on a massive American presence. They point out that Iraq's political leadership has failed to use the relative calm to engineer any real reconciliation between the majority Shi'ites and the Sunnis. While U.S. troops have battled al-Qaeda in Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala, the Iraqi Parliament has made little progress on critical legislation in more than a year. And partly because of massive government corruption, improvements in basic services like electricity, water and fuel have lagged behind security gains. Baghdad gets an average of eight hours of electricity a day, about half the prewar level. So while there's a trickle of refugees going home, many Iraqis continue to leave Baghdad. Here are four reasons families like the Awadis are not yet packing their bags for home.

The Killers Are Still at Large

The U.S. military has recruited thousands of Sunni insurgents to join the fight against jihadist groups like al-Qaeda, but the Shi'ite militias mainly responsible for last year's sectarian carnage remain largely untouched. In August, Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, ordered it not to attack American troops. But U.S. commanders on the ground know there was no goodwill behind the decision. "It wasn't because Sadr saw Jesus--let's put it that way," says Major Christopher Coglianese, a staff officer in Baghdad. More likely, the Mahdi Army is waiting for the Americans to begin their drawdown from Baghdad next year. Sunnis worry that when the U.S. troops leave, the Shi'ite militias will resume their pogroms.

The al-Maliki government has promised to integrate more militiamen into government forces, but that's hardly reassuring. Adnan Awadi's former colleagues have told him that the Mahdi Army men who threatened him all now have jobs in the Health Ministry. "If I show my face there again ... my son's eyeballs will end up in a bottle," Adnan says.

The Sunnis Remain Out in the Cold

The U.S. military may have embraced Sunni insurgents, but the al-Maliki government has been less enthusiastic. American officials say Sunni "concerned citizens" groups (a euphemism for armed groups that protect Sunni areas) are examples of "bottom-up reconciliation." The officials say the best way to keep the Sunni fighters from returning to the insurgency is to integrate them into official Iraqi forces, just as the Shi'ite militias have been. But many Shi'ite leaders see Sunni groups as a long-term threat--a fifth column within the armed forces. The distrust is so deep that many Sunni fighters injured in battles against al-Qaeda have to be taken to U.S. military hospitals because they would not be safe in the Shi'ite-controlled Iraqi medical system.

Not that all the Sunni fighters want to join the Iraqi army or police. Many regard al-Maliki's government as a puppet of Iran--as loathsome as al-Qaeda or more so. In some Sunni neighborhoods, former insurgents who patrol the streets alongside U.S. troops regard the Iraqi forces as the enemy. When the Americans leave, they expect to be fighting against government forces. Abu Abid, a former insurgent who now helps guard the Amiriya neighborhood, has no illusions about how things will pan out. "After [we] defeat al-Qaeda, the government will come after me," he says. "The government, they hate us. They don't want to reconcile with us."

Al-Maliki is also openly contemptuous of the Sunni political class, which he views as weakened because it can no longer use the threat of violence as leverage in negotiations. "The terror arm is not working for them, and their political influence is becoming insignificant," an adviser to the Prime Minister told TIME. So al-Maliki has been able to run roughshod over the Sunnis in his notionally all-party government. Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the government's highest-ranking Sunni, frequently complains that he doesn't get a fair hearing. "[Al-Hashimi] is losing a lot of ground," the adviser said. Al-Maliki's Shi'ite inner circle tends to see the marginalization of Sunni politicians as a victory, but it only confirms to many Sunnis that the government is unlikely to give them any share in power.

Crooked State, Crippled Services

While politicians in the protected bubble of the Green Zone argue in circles, rampant graft has left Iraq devoid of any meaningful governance. Transparency International, which monitors corruption worldwide, recently ranked Iraq as the third most corrupt country in the world, ahead of only Burma and Somalia. This fall the government's top anticorruption official sought asylum in the U.S. for fear of assassination; 31 of his employees have been killed in the past three years. Before leaving Iraq, Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi estimated that $18 billion in government money had disappeared since 2004. In October he told a congressional hearing in Washington that corruption has affected "virtually every agency and ministry, including some of the most powerful officials in Iraq." Much of the missing money was meant for infrastructure projects and the improvement of basic services. Without that vital investment, Baghdad remains chronically short of electricity, water and gasoline. There are no reliable economic data, but the unemployment rate is thought to be nearly 50%.

Al-Maliki routinely promises to clean up his government, but his tendency to blame the corruption on Saddam Hussein suggests a reluctance to confront unpleasant realities. Al-Maliki has decreed that his office must be consulted before investigators can pursue top officials, and he uses a Saddam-era law to exempt some officials from investigation, prompting suspicions that he is shielding crooked political allies. At the congressional hearing, al-Radhi named the Prime Minister's cousin, former Transport Minister Salam al-Maliki, as a top official who had been protected from investigation.

There's No Political Leadership

In a year and a half in office, Al-Maliki has proved incapable of rising above narrow Shi'ite politics. He has tended to hector and provoke rivals rather than attempt any genuine reconciliation. Last month he told a widely read Arabic paper that al-Hashimi's bloc in Parliament, the larger of two Sunni groupings, didn't represent Iraq's Sunnis. "This is not how you treat your allies in a government of national unity," says Maysoon al-Damaluji, one of the Parliament's handful of secular members. Nor is the Prime Minister the only partisan in the Green Zone. Sunni leaders have frequently been linked to terrorists. Last month a car bomb was found near the office of Adnan al-Dulaimi, who heads al-Hashimi's bloc; several of his bodyguards were arrested. Al-Dulaimi was not accused of wrongdoing but admitted he couldn't vouch for his bodyguards. Kurdish leaders tend to look after the interests of Kurdistan first rather than of the nation as a whole.

U.S. officials spend a lot of time coaxing and cajoling the Iraqi leadership to show some statesmanship. So far, it hasn't worked. "There isn't a common vision of what Iraq should be--in the near future or the far future," says al-Damaluji. Nowhere is that clearer than in Parliament, where sectarian and ethnic bickering passes for political dialogue. This time last year, American officials were pressing Iraqi politicians to set aside their differences and pass several crucial pieces of legislation--among them a deal on sharing oil revenues, a referendum on the status of the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk and a law allowing members of Saddam's Baath Party to return to government jobs. The Bush Administration has since abandoned many of those benchmarks, focusing on less ambitious goals, like getting Parliament to pass the annual budget and generally work toward national reconciliation.

But the Iraqi Parliament continues to put off key issues. The status of Kirkuk--claimed by Kurds, Arabs and a third ethnic group known as Turkomans--was meant to be decided by the end of this year. Iraqi and U.S. officials now say that vote will have to be postponed. Ditto the vote on the budget. Bills on oil revenues and the drawing of provincial borders are no closer to being passed than they were months ago. The worry now is that if key political battles take place after the Americans have drawn down forces, they could spill into the streets in a confrontation between warring militias.

For Iraqi refugees like the Awadis, all this paints a dismal picture. Adnan and Noora say they and other refugee friends in Amman start almost every conversation with the question, Should we go home now? But the conversations all end the same way. "We want to be optimistic, but in the end we have to face reality," says Noora. "It is not time to pack our bags."

With reporting by Charles Crain / Baghdad, Brian Bennett / Washington