Steve Russell, once known as Tikrit’s “Poison Dwarf,” returns to his old battleground and finds a much improved Iraq
STEVE RUSSELL is pointing out the exact spot where he shot and killed a relative of Saddam Hussein. We’re in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, five years after Russell’s unit helped capture the dictator on December 13, 2003.
Russell is amazed at the difference in five years. Tikrit doesn’t feel like a battleground. Shops are open. Traffic clogs the streets. There are no US forces in the town. Friendly Iraqi police have escorted us to the site of the most intimate combat Russell has ever seen.
“There’s a piece of me on this street,” says Russell, on the corner where he killed the brother-in-law of Saddam’s son. His armed adversaries weren’t more than 3m away, he says. “I can still see their faces.”
Iraq has moved on. Saddam has been tried and executed. The country has been brought back from the brink of anarchy. The Iraqi government controls 13 of 18 provinces and has set in motion the eventual withdrawal of US troops. Russell has moved on too. He retired from his rank as lieutenant colonel in the Army and launched a career in politics. He was recently elected to the Oklahoma state senate. He spent the last two years traveling the US with an organization he founded called Vets for Victory, trying to convince citizens and lawmakers not to give up on Iraq.
I met Russell in the summer 2003 when I embedded on and off for six months with his battalion during the hunt for Saddam. Russell is not the burly combat grunt from Hollywood central casting. He’s average height, wiry, with cheekbones that cast a shadow and light blue eyes. He was an unusual commander. Even though he was in charge of about 1,000 troops, Russell went out almost every night on patrol in the city. Baathist insurgents whom I interviewed knew him for aggressive tactics. They had a nickname for him: alqazam alssam, or the “poison dwarf.” Russell took that as a compliment.
Russell returned to Tikrit as a civilian to research a memoir about the hunt for Saddam, and to see some of the improvements he had heard about. “I wanted to get a sense of it first hand,” Russell told me at the Baghdad airport while waiting for his flight home, “I left a part of my life here. I had always wanted to come back.”
What do you mean you left a part of your life here?
We invested a lot of ourselves here. Emotionally, physically. In some cases, our soldiers shed blood and died here. With that kind of investment, you have a part of your life here.
I was with your unit when it was raiding houses and farms looking for Saddam Hussein. Why was it important to capture him?
As long as the myth and the legend of Saddam remained at large and alive, I believed that the insurgency would continue to grow legs. At least on the Baathist side. Although I don’t believe and did not believe that Saddam was directing close operations. He was certainly inspiring them. We saw that with the tapes that he released; with the money that he was moving; with the networks and contacts that he maintained. So I don’t think that Iraq could truly get to a new future without some settling of the old past.
Looking back, was the insurgency planned?
Yes, but we did not know to what extent. For instance, now we know that many of the people that we fought were organized fedayeen. They were using their emblems, their uniforms.
What was the fedayeen?
The Fedayeen Saddam was a group of extremely loyal, committed guerrilla fighters that were designed to be used unconventionally. If Saddam’s army was standing, they were to be used in key roles for key attacks because of their fanaticism. There were plans that the fedayeen would be used after an area would be conquered or overrun or Iraq was to be overrun. It was planned from the beginning that they would conduct guerilla operations.
So why didn’t the capture of Saddam end the insurgency? What effect did it have?
It didn’t end the insurgency, but it did end the idea of restoring the Baathists to power. With Saddam’s capture, coupled with the deaths of his sons Uday and Qusay and, with all intents and purposes, his grandson Mustafa, in the space of five months you had every Hussein adult male removed from the scene.
Walk us through the last five years. We’ve had some bad years. What do you think went wrong with the US presence in Iraq?
I felt that in the beginning we needed more troops to secure the area. When you remove a government, and you remove the infrastructure, and you remove the security forces that are there, it’s not readily replaced without some effort. Now, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be replaced or you don’t have loyal people who can do that, and we’ve seen that to be the case. But if you go and make a wreck of a place, you have to be able to stabilize it long enough to clean it up.
Looking back five years later, what would more troops have done for the US in Iraq?
I think in the early days we desperately needed more troops to take care of security. There was a big debate going on during that time. You had half that were enamored with this idea I called Lollypop Ops: that if you go around and make nice, everybody is going to be endeared to you and suddenly the lion is going to lay down with the lamb, and everything is going to be fine. I did not subscribe to that because we were being ambushed and bombed and shot at in a 100 percent, well nearly 100 percent, Sunni-Baathist area that was being inspired and led by fedayeen operational leaders inspired by Saddam himself. For us it was geography. It was different in other places. I recognize that. I likened it to being a commander who, in one hand has a hammer and in the other a lollypop. I have them both behind my back and its like, “Which would you like?” If you need the hammer, here it is. If you need the lollypop, here it is. But this notion that somehow you can get to the quality of life essentials of the civilian population without adequately securing the area first was a false one.
On this trip you traveled with private security in a civilian car up from Baghdad up into your old area of operations, Tikrit. What surprised you about that trip?
Well, it was fascinating to see how the other side lives. For me it was very educational to travel in a civilian car just as a normal Iraqi citizen would, traveling with nothing more than a pen, quite unlike my previous experiences. What I saw was a very adequate security presence on the roads. I’m not talking American military; I’m talking Iraqi military. Checkpoints every three to five miles [five to eight kilometers]. An alert Iraqi security force whether it be police or military that does random checks. Sometimes we were pulled over, sometimes we weren’t. It was usually done with efficiency. Traffic wasn’t backed up for miles. There was a system and an order to it. There was relaxation in the air. People were moving. Commerce was moving. I found it quite promising.
What did you think about going back to Tikrit the city? What was your impression five years after being the commander there?
I was struck before we came at the complete lack of incidents coming out of Tikrit. So, I knew it had improved. I had been in touch with Lieutenant Governor Abdullah. But I had no idea that it would have been as well- controlled and as normal a city as we saw when we got there. Although things had improved by the time we left and we saw a return to commerce. It was probably by a factor of five the amount of commerce that I saw. The buildings that had sat idle had been repainted, refurbished and were in operation. The amusement park had been reopened. It was a striking thing to see how normal the city was, under its own control. There were no US or coalition forces in the city and it had been that way for some time.
When you were visiting soldiers in Baghdad, you met a former militia member named Firas who was now working with coalition forces. Tell me about that.
It was fascinating. I’m talking to a guy that no more than a year ago was trying to kill our soldiers and now he’s working for a new Iraq. But the questions that we asked him, the things that we talked to him about, it struck me in that interview that he was a nationalist. And he recognized that the way to the future was not a path of destruction, it was a path to get on to something better.
The sense I got was that he had truly converted and looked toward the new future and that was certainly true by his actions like his willingness to be publicly identified. All of those things showed one more indicator that the Iraqi people are moving toward their own governance.
US casualties are down. Incidents are down below levels they were at in 2004. Why shouldn’t the US just pull out now?
Because we’re at the crest of the roller coaster, kind of the tipping point. The ride might look like it is almost over. You might have a few cars that are over the top. But if you were to cut out now, there is the danger that the whole train is not completely over the tipping point and it might come sliding down in the other direction.
What would be some of those dangers?
My own assessment – this is just my opinion – is that there are concerns with the Iranian influence that is out there with the Iraqi government. There have to be continued efforts in place for the Sunni and Shia involvement in government where they can reach a compromise. And the same is true with the Arabs and the Kurds. Security is there now, so that is fostering and creating this political process, but if the security was to get away from us then we’re no longer focusing on that political process. And while I think we’re very nearly there, we’re not there yet.
