Brothers different, but equally deadly
BAGHDAD, Iraq – The younger brother was slender and serious, a former bodyguard for Saddam Hussein who became a Muslim fundamentalist, grew his beard and prayed five times a day. The older brother was a used-car salesman who was fond of telling off-color jokes and making regular trips to a Baghdad hotel for drinks.
The brothers, Ali and Khalid Mashhandani, grew up together in a poor suburb of Mosul, a cluster of small, stone houses with wooden and metal roofs along the Euphrates River. For years, their paths diverged. But that changed the moment Ali died in Yarmouk Circle in downtown Mosul.
The story of the Mashhandani brothers offers a glimpse into the lives of two lethal Sunni Arab insurgents, their different motivations and the toll their actions have taken on their family in Mosul, a northern city that has become a bastion of the insurgency.
With his radical Islamic convictions and his membership in Ansar al Sunna, a militant group based in northern Iraq, Ali Jassim Mohammed Mashhandani was fighting for an ideological goal.
“Ali was much more serious, much more practiced,” said Hania Mashhandani, the men’s sister. “And he was a mujahadeen prince.”
Khalid Mashhandani was more of an opportunist. He created his own group of unaffiliated insurgents, she said, and set about smuggling cars, kidnapping for ransom and hiring others to attack U.S. convoys. He allegedly raped and killed at least two Iraqi women. He awaits trial in a Mosul jail.
The brothers represent two major strands of the insurgency: one organized, deadly and internationally connected; the other less practiced and more individualistic, but just as dangerous.
As an American convoy rumbled through Yarmouk Circle in January, a rifle report echoed like a dry cough and a bullet pinged off a Humvee’s armor cladding.
The response was immediate. U.S. soldiers fired ragged bursts toward the sound. One soldier firing a tank-mounted machine gun raked .50-caliber fire across a sidewalk where Ali Mashhandani stood.
Finger-sized bullets punched through the 39-year-old man’s pelvis and thighs, pulverizing a leg. One round pushed a kidney and part of his liver out his back. When the gunfire subsided, Ali lay in the dust, the life gushing out of him. His sister Hania, who witnessed the shooting and described it to the Los Angeles Times in several interviews, said he was hit accidentally. She insisted she didn’t know who fired on the Americans.
Although the soldiers in the field that day didn’t know it, they had fatally wounded a local cell leader of Ansar al Sunna. Her brother, Hania said, had orchestrated the December suicide attack on a U.S. base near Mosul in which a man wearing an Iraqi military uniform detonated a bomb vest in the mess tent, killing 22 U.S. and Iraqi troops and civilian contractors.
At Ali’s funeral, Hania said, her 46-year-old brother, Khalid, abandoned the mourners to carry out the first of his own insurgent attacks in a quest for revenge.
The portrait of the Mashhandani brothers was gleaned mainly through interviews with Hania, 43, one of their closest confidants, but Iraqi security forces, U.S. and Mosul officials and residents were also interviewed.
A sympathizer if not an agent of the insurgency, Hania said her close contact with her brothers had made her a fugitive from Iraqi justice, “though I am guilty of nothing except being a sister of Khalid and Ali.”
Another sister, Khalida, reportedly disapproved of her brothers’ activities. Suha Butrus, a university professor and a friend of Khalida, said, “Khalida was my close friend, and she was always complaining about Khalid and Ali’s conduct. Khalida always wanted her brothers to be more normal.”
The Mashhandanis are from Hammam al Alil, a Mosul suburb, devoid of any organized police force or government, that has become known as a stronghold of Sunni Muslim insurgents.
Several years ago, Hania said, Ali became a member of Ansar al Islam, the parent group of Ansar al Sunna. The group is known to have coordinated attacks with al Qaeda and has taken responsibility for a number of kidnappings, videotaped beheadings and deadly strikes on U.S. and Iraqi forces, including a May 4 car bombing at an Irbil police recruiting station that killed at least 60 people.
When the Americans invaded, Hania said, her brother Ali was initially glad that Saddam had been deposed. But as time passed, he became increasingly angry about the U.S.-led occupation and the resulting liberties taken by many Iraqis.
“He said the occupation gave Iraqis too much freedom. He said the occupation reopened the liquor stores and allowed women to go out of the house. Ali was opposed to all of that,” Hania said.
Ali formed a cell whose membership fluctuated between 10 and 20. The cell bought weapons – machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mines and other explosives – from people who had looted Saddam’s many munitions storehouses after the invasion, Hania said. They staged most of their attacks in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city.
“He hit two Humvees in his first operation. This happened in the summer of 2003 – they showed this on television,” Hania said. Ali’s group also fired guns and RPGs at U.S. convoys in downtown Mosul on an avenue residents call “Death Street.”
“And he booby-trapped oil tankers that exploded on American forces,” she said.
“Sometimes they would gather with other groups,” she said, adding that foreigners occasionally stayed at Ali’s house. “He wouldn’t say where his orders came from, but once he told Khalid: `It is not up to us. When we get orders to strike, we strike! When we get orders to stop fighting, we stop!’ “
In October 2003, Ali was arrested for filming U.S. military bases in Iraq, Hania said, and was detained at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
Army Lt. Col. Guy Rudisill confirmed that Ali had been “detained as a security risk” on Oct. 23, 2003, but declined to specify the charges. Ali spent about six months in Abu Ghraib before being transferred to the Camp Bucca detention facility in southern Iraq.
In October, he was released by unanimous decision of the Combined Review and Release Board, a committee of six Iraqi government officials and three coalition military officials who decide which detainees are dangerous and which should be freed.
Rudisill said Ali’s file didn’t mention his involvement in Ansar al Sunna or attacks on U.S. troops. He and other U.S. officials declined to discuss the specifics of his release.
After his brother’s release, Khalid tried to persuade Ali to stop his attacks.
“Khalid used to tell him to stop resisting,” Hania said. “He used to ask him, ‘Are you the only man in Iraq who can resist the Americans?’ “
That all changed when Ali was slain by U.S. troops a short distance from Khalid’s home, she said.
“Do you want to know why Khalid joined the resistance?” she asked. “It is because Ali died slowly. He was calling us for help, and the soldier wouldn’t let Khalid go to him. He was lying alone in the street for an hour. By the time we got to him, he was no longer moving.”
Khalid was never really cut out for the insurgency, Hania said. Though he learned about munitions and weapons handling during his service in the Iran-Iraq war, he was not an extremist. Rather, he was a salesman and tribal mediator, skilled at negotiation and compromise. He hadn’t said his daily prayers for years, his sister said.
Khalid was not a leader of an organized cell, Hania said. “He actually made operations by himself and created his own group. They were all new to the resistance, and they all wanted to avenge Ali’s death.”
Khalid’s group was less an insurgent cell than a motley gang of part-time criminals, Iraqi authorities say. One man managed a Mosul hotel. Another ran a bathhouse.
Hania denied that Khalid had taken part in attacks on other Iraqis, but she said he had kidnapped people for ransom and at least twice used cars to pay people to attack U.S. convoys.
“Our mother tried to tell him, ‘How can you do these things after Ali has recently been killed? I don’t want to lose you as well,’ ” Hania recalled. ” ‘Do you want to destroy your family as Ali has destroyed his family?’ “
By early March, U.S. and Iraqi military units had raided the homes of Khalid’s family several times, but he had fled to Syria, Hania said.
“Three members of my family have been arrested,” said Hania, who insisted that none of her other relatives had taken part in the insurgency. Her husband, a brother named Hani and her sister Khalida were all taken into custody. She said Iraqi authorities beat her sister on the legs and back with telephone cables to force her to identify Khalid’s co-conspirators and confess to organizing Khalid’s terrorist operations while he was in Syria.
Khalida was publicly exonerated last month after her allegations of police abuse came to light. Khalid returned to Iraq last month and surrendered.
“Khalid sent a message through us to the chief of police in Mosul that he will surrender himself to prove that his family has done nothing,” Hania said. “Khalid will be imprisoned and maybe even executed, but he will sacrifice himself for his family.”