A Sheik and His Uninvited ‘Guests’ Mirror Uneasy Iraq-U.S. Ties

Sheik Hamed Moussa Khalaf al-Duleimi outside his former home, now an outpost for American and Iraqi forces.

The NYT reports:
Nearly every day, the sheik stops by the villa that was once his home, but is now an American garrison. Sometimes he comes with tips about the insurgency, or with news of political developments in this rural village near the Euphrates River.

But mostly he comes to ask for his house back.

“To take my home in this way is not right,” the sheik, Hamed Moussa Khalaf al-Duleimi, said one afternoon in April, putting a wrinkled, bronzed hand on the knee of the 31-year-old American commander, Capt. Chris Calihan.

Sheik Duleimi, 74, has not lived here since January, when marines on a counterinsurgency mission burst in late one night, announced that they were turning his house into a military base and evicted him. He sent his family to a rented apartment in Falluja while he moved into a son’s home just across the road.

Most Iraqis, particularly here in the Sunni-dominated Anbar Province, regard the Americans as occupiers who came uninvited to Iraq and who, in their rush to remove Saddam Hussein, may have damaged the country beyond repair.

But the prevailing view is also a deeply conflicted one, because most people here now want the Americans to stay, at least until some semblance of stability is restored.

“It’s not just my house,” Sheik Duleimi continued. “They have taken Iraq. They have taken everything.”

On a recent afternoon, the sheik, as usual, showed up at the garrison gate unannounced and was escorted in by a soldier.

He swept past Bradley fighting vehicles and Humvees, his long dark robe and spotless white headdress billowing around him, and through the battered marble portico, now a bunker of sandbags. Captain Calihan, who commands Company B, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, was waiting for him in the grand foyer.

For security reasons, that is as far as the sheik has been allowed to go. In the shadowy world of tribal politics here in Anbar, it is almost impossible for the Americans to know who is friend and who is foe.

“May God bless you with goodness,” the sheik said, using a traditional Arabic greeting, as he settled into an armchair that had once been his.

Despite the sheik’s antipathy toward the American enterprise in Iraq, his visits with the captain are cordial and have become something of a self-affirming ritual for both men. The regular contact helps the captain maintain at least the tacit cooperation of the community’s leaders in the fight against the hard-core Sunni resistance.

The sheik, meanwhile, can remind the American whose house this really is.

The interaction captures the uneasiness of the alliance forged all over Iraq between the American military and the Iraqi leadership, a mix of cooperation and barely concealed antagonism.

On this particular visit, the sheik brought a cousin to meet the captain. The cousin hoped to recover several weapons the marines had confiscated during their operation in January. But the cousin had no record of the serial numbers.

“The guns were old, from our fathers’ generation,” Sheik Duleimi said, worrying a strand of amber-colored beads between his fingers.

But without the serial numbers, Captain Calihan said, he could do nothing. The sheik’s cousin thanked the captain, and, escorted by a soldier, left the two men to talk.

The sheik asked if he could take a quick walk around the house and videotape it “for myself.” Captain Calihan laughed. He had heard a version of this request many times. “I can’t let you tape the house for security reasons,” he said.

Both men were smiling: They know how the conversation goes.

The sheik said he was not receiving enough compensation for his house — the military was giving him about $2,000 a year in rent. He asked about the claim he had filed for $40,000 worth of lost furniture; the captain said it was still under review.

As they spoke, the sheik’s eyes flicked around the room, tracking the movement of the soldiers and taking in the alterations and damage: the thick electrical cables run through holes in the walls, scuff marks on the plaster, captured weapons — including a rusty surface-to-air missile launcher — hung like trophies. All the windows had been punched out, filled with sandbags and covered with plywood.

Most of the 11 rooms, including the kitchen, had been converted to barracks with bunk beds and cots. A company of Iraqi Army soldiers, most of them Shiites, had moved into one wing. The garden of fruit trees and flowers was now a muddy parking lot for armored vehicles.

“I have patience in life,” the sheik said, his voice worn from years of smoking. “It’s not easy, but I have patience. From Baghdad to Qaim, there is not a house like my house. Nobody spent money like I did.”

“It’s a beautiful house,” the captain replied evenly. “You’re kind for letting us stay here.” This, too, was a familiar refrain — and a fiction they both perpetuated. It allowed the sheik to retain some dignity.

Called away on other business, the captain left the sheik under guard to ensure that he did not wander off.

The sheik said he began building the house in 1991 and was nearly done when the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003. Then the Americans, he said, helped usher in a Shiite-dominated Iraqi government, which he blamed for inflaming sectarian tension throughout Iraq and attracting foreign jihadists to Anbar.

The Americans “destroyed everything in Iraq,” he said.

But he opposes an immediate withdrawal of American forces. First, he said, he wanted to see the advent of a new government with no sectarian prejudices. “Someday, the Americans will leave,” he said. “But they have to fix the situation.”

The sheik glanced at the sleepy young soldier guarding him. He was slumped in a chair, nibbling on a Pop-Tart. “If the American soldiers are done with their mission, I want them to leave the house,” the sheik continued, an edge to his voice. “The American forces destroyed this house. My house is raped.”

It appeared that the captain would be delayed indefinitely, so Sheik Duleimi decided to leave. On his way out, he ducked into a big room where he had once received guests. It had a cantilevered ceiling, recessed lighting, a chandelier. It was now occupied by two dozen Iraqi soldiers. As he entered, several soldiers stood up in respect.

“In the past, there were many guests who came here to visit me,” the sheik said wistfully, looking past the soldiers. “If there were any problems with members of the tribe, we solved it here.”

As he turned to leave, he paused. “Take care of my house,” he murmured to the soldiers, then shuffled out of the room, his sandals scraping against the tiles he had laid.