Marines were wasting their time.3 The visit to the sheikh might produce a breakthrough.
It would be Whisnant’s first chance to negotiate in secret with one of the sheikhs of the Albu Issa, an old and quarrelsome tribe that effectively administered the Fallujah peninsula and represented a large share of the citizenry within the city.4 Then again, the late night conference might wind up in the familiar fashion of more public meetings with tribal leaders: sweet tea and cigarettes, flowery Arabic rhetoric, inexhaustible complaints, and ethereal promises of cooperation that would evaporate with the morning sun. Whisnant cautiously hoped for the best.
Intelligence documents were murky, but hinted that the man they would meet, Sheikh Aifan Sadoun Aifan al-Issawi, might have ties to the insurgency. One of the Iraqi’s older brothers had certainly funded it, and Aifan himself might have even fought the Marines. The sheikh had even claimed to have been shot by Americans, under unclear circumstances, before being jailed for a time in the Abu Ghraib prison.5 A dodgy past wasn’t, however, a disqualifying concern for negotiations with the Marines. Many proud military-age men in Fallujah had supported “the resistance against the occupiers” in one way or another during the early years of the war. The “City of Mosques” had been a town filled with and surrounded by barely governable hard cases long before Iraq’s Ottoman era, and the citizenry’s characteristic independence along with a series of unfortunate events had bred rebellion that arguably rivaled soccer and prayer as local pastimes after the U.S.-led invasion.6 The only things that might make Sheikh Aifan stand out in this regard were his noble tribal lineage and wealth.
Whisnant’s well-armed security team and the proximity of the sheikh’s house to his base meant the major wasn’t particularly concerned for his safety, even while meeting a possible insurgent in the middle of the night on the Iraqi’s terms. No, what occupied the 42-year-old company commander was sorting out his new contact’s status and motives. He wondered, “Who is this guy? What kind of influence does he wield?”7
Aifan was a notable sheikh, but in the bigger picture, he was merely a nephew of the paramount sheikh, the acknowledged leader of his tribe. In addition, the leaders of the Albu Issa are not, in any case, omnipotent. Tribes in Iraqi society are not monolithic, cohesive entities. Rather, they are loose confederations of subtribes, or hamulas, that roughly correspond with individual villages. The subtribes alternately compete with one another for resources or work together against outsiders in shifting patterns of segmentation and collectivism bred from their nomadic ancestors’ struggles to survive a harsh social, political, and desert environment. The paramount sheikh of the Albu Issa tribe nominally presides over twelve subtribes. This leader typically descends from one of the most prestigious khams, an extended family unit consisting of male children who share the same great-great-grandfather. Even under ideal circumstances, the authority of the paramount sheikh is limited, however. His tribe views him as the “father of his people,” influential and responsible for their well-being, but he is still required to consult with a council of sheikhs representing the various subtribes. The complete societal upheaval and loss of basic security after the 2003 invasion had weakened this delicate hierarchy and essentially threw the Albu Issa into chaos.8
The moneyed, foreign Islamist fighters who arrived to confront the Americans and their allies were initially welcomed, or at the least tolerated, by many of Anbar province’s Sunni tribes as allies. The newcomers’ thirst for power, however, soon threatened the traditional structure. They siphoned tribal manpower, co-opted or intimidated entire subtribes, casually plundered resources, and murdered competitors.9 As the insurgency against U.S. forces persisted, the Albu Issa descended into a parallel civil war for control of the Fallujah peninsula. Some local tribesmen sided with the Islamist radicals in grasping for a new order, while others clung to the status quo. By late 2006, no one sheikh appeared to speak for the tribe. The paramount sheikh and his family nevertheless remained influential figures among an intimidated population caught in the middle of a complex war between insurgents, criminals, Americans, and fellow tribesmen.10
Gen. David G. Reist and other Marine leaders had recently courted Khamis Hasnawi Aifan al-Issawi, the Albu Issa’s paramount sheikh and titular leader, in Jordan, where some of the tribe’s leadership had taken refuge when al Qaeda began assassinating those who did not bow to the authority of the Islamic State of Iraq, their shadow government. The Marines had attempted to convince Khamis and his family that the United States would support and protect them if they returned from exile and formed an alliance against the radical insurgents.11 Khamis, Sheikh Aifan, and other sheikhs of the Albu Aifan, a subtribe of the Albu Issa, had come home only days prior to the meeting with Major Whisnant. Their return was motivated by the American promises, a sense of duty, and fear that their influence would disappear permanently as other tribes in Anbar province grew in stature and bargained with the Americans, while al Qaeda–backed elements expanded control of the peninsula in their absence. Consummate survivalists, most of the sheikhs remained aloof from U.S. overtures as they assessed prevailing winds.12 The man Whisnant set out to meet on the night of December 26, however, claimed to be different.
Sheikh Aifan had been actively petitioning to fight the radical insurgents. Unfortunately for American interests, he was only the paramount sheikh’s nephew and the fifteenth of sixteen sons within his kham at that.13 The Marines didn’t really know him, wondered about his motives, and were skeptical about his influence within the tribe. Whisnant and his military intelligence sergeant were intrigued, however, by Aifan’s unusual request to meet secretly and considered him a possible inroad toward gaining his powerful uncle’s confidence. They were willing to “keep an open mind” and engage the upstart as a first step toward generating local support.14
More than three years into the war, the sheikhs of the Albu Issa remained an enigma to the Americans. While a number of them had courted the U.S. military after the invasion, some of these same individuals concurrently supported the then-nascent insurgency.15 Such double-dealing is a common characteristic of Middle Eastern politics and tribal relations. Nonetheless, the authors of a study on tribes published a few months prior to Whisnant’s deployment had singled out the Albu Issa for their alleged duplicity. The researchers, a group of academics and former military officers, used an old Middle Eastern proverb to describe the tribe: “Put a black turban on a scorpion and you still have a scorpion.”16
The Albu Issa included some conservative religious firebrands, but the everyday tribesmen weren’t particularly radical in their practice of Islam, and they had no great love for the memory of Saddam Hussein or the Baath Party. They were, however, fierce Iraqi nationalists and members of the newly disenfranchised Sunni minority. Thus, the tribal study determined that the Albu Issa would maintain some support for the insurgency and cynically play both ends to achieve its overriding interests: the economic and political welfare of the tribe and the hasty ejection of foreign forces from Iraq. The authors regarded the possibility of successful cooperation between the Americans and sheikhs of the Albu Issa as unlikely.17
Past meetings with tribal leaders almost always took place in public and tended to run in rhetorical circles. The superficial dialogue frustrated American—and especially military—sensibilities. Sheikhs would make vague promises while issuing a litany of requests and platitudes, rarely offering actionable intelligence or assistance against the insurgency. Experienced U.S. negotiators had learned to limit promises and obtain concrete support before making significant concessions.
Whisnant knew the game, and on this first visit to the sheikh, he couldn’t promise much anyway. The major had no instructions on how to play things. In fact, the chain of command had not even briefed him about the U.S. mission to woo the tribe’s sheikhs in Jordan. Thus, Whisnant was neither sure of Sheikh Aifan’s position within the tribe’s leadership nor what he was authorized to offer him. Their meeting would be limited to tentative overtures and appraisal. Whisnant later recalled that he was simply there to “assess the man. Get something of value before promising anything of value. And keep an open mind.”18
