Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

AS THE Marines began preparing to invade Fallujah, back in Washington, D.C., Erik Prince’s stock was rising dramatically. In a matter of days, Prince and other Blackwater executives would be welcomed on Capitol Hill as special guests of some of the most powerful and influential Republican lawmakers—the men who literally ran Congress—where Blackwater would be hailed as a “silent partner” in the war on terror.¹ As his schedule began to fill, Prince found himself monitoring yet another crisis with his mercenaries at the center. But unlike Fallujah, where the deaths of four Blackwater men had provided the spark for a U.S. onslaught, this time Blackwater forces would be active combatants in the fighting, engaging in a day-long battle against hundreds of followers of the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Blackwater had been contracted to guard the U.S. occupation authority’s headquarters.

In the weeks preceding the March 31 Fallujah ambush, the Bush administration had been building toward an intense crackdown on Sadr, whom Bremer and the White House viewed as an obstacle to the central U.S. goal at the time—the so-called “handover of sovereignty” scheduled for June 2004. The son of a revered religious leader assassinated by Saddam’s forces, Sadr had emerged in occupied Iraq as commander of the Mahdi Army—named for a Shiite messiah—and perhaps the most vocal and popular opponent of the U.S. occupation.² The administration and Bremer believed that like the rebellious Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr and his insurgent Shiite movement had to be stopped. In April 2004, as the U.S. launched simultaneous counterinsurgency wars in Iraq against the country’s main Sunni and Shiite resistance movements, Blackwater would play a decisive role in perhaps the most pivotal moments of the Iraq occupation, a period that would irreversibly alter the course of the war and go down as the moment the anti-U.S. insurrection exploded.

While the killing of the Blackwater men in Fallujah grabbed international headlines for days and is remembered as an iconic moment of the war, the significant role of Blackwater’s forces in Najaf during the Shiite uprising five days later was barely noticed at all. And yet this episode, which found Blackwater mercenaries commanding active-duty U.S. soldiers in battle, starkly dramatized the unprecedented extent to which the Bush administration had outsourced the war. Like the ambush in Fallujah, the fate of Blackwater in Najaf was guided by history.

During his year in Iraq, Paul Bremer presided over various U.S. policies that greatly accelerated the emergence of multiple antioccupation resistance movements. In April 2004, it all came to a head. “The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920,” wrote veteran British war correspondent Robert Fisk from Fallujah. “The Americans are achieving this in just under a year.”³ The disbanding of the Iraqi military combined with the firing of thousands of state employees under Washington’s “de-Baathification” program had put tens of thousands of Iraqi men of fighting age out of work and into the resistance. Iraqis watched as foreign corporations—most of them based in the United States—fanned out across their country to reap enormous profits while ordinary Iraqis lived in squalor and insecurity. What’s more, victims of U.S. crimes had almost no recourse as contractors were basically immunized from domestic prosecution, giving the overwhelming appearance of total impunity.⁴

At the same time, the dire humanitarian situation in the country and killings and disappearances of Iraqi civilians had opened the door for religious leaders to offer security and social services in return for loyalty. This phenomenon was perhaps seen most clearly in the ascent of Muqtada al-Sadr to the status of a national resistance hero. In the chaos and horror that followed “Shock and Awe,” Sadr was one of the few figures within the country actually addressing the extreme poverty and suffering, establishing a sizable network of social institutions in his areas of influence, among them the vast Baghdad slum of Sadr City, whose 2 million residents had long been neglected by Saddam’s regime. At a time when Bremer’s de-Baathification was dismantling social institutions and protections, Sadr’s network was building alternatives and winning thousands of new followers. “Immediately after the invasion, Mr. Sadr deployed black-clad disciples to patrol the streets of Baghdad’s Shiite slums,” reported the New York Times. “His men handed out bread, water and oranges. They also provided much-needed security. Mr. Sadr had seen a void and filled it.”⁵ While other religious and political figures vied for power within the new U.S.-created institutions, Sadr rejected all components and supporters of the U.S. regime. In August 2003, his militia numbered roughly five hundred members. By April 2004, it had swelled to an estimated ten thousand.⁶

Sadr’s rising credibility and popularity, combined with his fierce rhetoric against the occupation—and Bremer in particular—would soon earn him the U.S.-imposed label of “outlaw.”⁷ With the June 2004 “deadline” fast approaching, the United States believed that, like the militant Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr had to be stopped.

Washington had long viewed Sadr as a primary enemy in the “new” Iraq, and top U.S. officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the senior commander in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, had for months discussed plans to neutralize him. “There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained,” a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post. “But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it.”⁸ That changed in March 2004, when Bremer launched his all-out war on Sadr, his institutions, and his followers. As Bremer and the Bush administration engaged in a major propaganda campaign leading up to the “handover,” Sadr was railing against the occupation and its collaborators within the country. He was calling for the United States to pull out and had declared his Mahdi Army the “enemy of the occupation.”⁹ Sadr was not just a Shiite religious figure; he was also an Iraqi nationalist who spoke the language of the streets, often peppering his sermons with slang and cultural references.

According to the Washington Post, there had long been concerns that if the United States went after Sadr, it would boost his already rising popularity and possibly make him into a martyr. By March, the Post said, “Bremer’s calculus had changed.”¹⁰ On March 28, U.S. troops raided the Baghdad office of Sadr’s small antioccupation weekly newspaper, Al Hawza (The Seminary), ejecting the staff and placing a large padlock on the door.¹¹ In a letter written in “sparse, understated” Arabic, bearing the official stamp of the CPA,¹² Bremer accused the paper of violating his Order 14, charging that Al Hawza had the “intent to disrupt general security and incite violence.” ¹³ While U.S. officials could not cite any examples of the paper encouraging attacks against occupation forces, Bremer provided two examples of what he characterized as false reporting. One of them was an article headlined “Bremer Follows in the Footsteps of Saddam.”¹⁴ The move against Sadr was carried out with senior Bush administration officials fully behind it. “We believe in freedom of press,” said Bremer spokesman Dan Senor. “But if we let this go unchecked, people will die. Certain rhetoric is designed to provoke violence, and we won’t tolerate it.”¹⁵ The crackdown would prove to be a disastrous miscalculation on Bremer’s part. Al Hawza was named for a thousand-year-old Shiite seminary that historically encouraged revolt against foreign occupiers, most notably in the 1920s against the British.¹⁶ “In recent months, al-Sadr had been losing popularity,” wrote Newsday’s veteran Iraq correspondent Mohamad Bazzi. “But after U.S. soldiers closed al-Sadr’s weekly newspaper in Baghdad on March 28, accusing it of inciting violence, the young cleric won new support and established himself as the fiercest Shiite critic of the U.S. occupation.”¹⁷ The shutdown of Al Hawza immediately sparked massive protests and fueled speculation that Bremer intended to arrest Sadr.¹⁸ Eventually the protests spread to the gates of the Green Zone, where demonstrators chanted, “Just say the word, Muqtada, and we’ll resume the 1920 revolution!”¹⁹

Even before the United States began its attacks against Sadr, there were serious rumblings across Iraq of a national uprising of Shiites and Sunnis. Two days before Bremer shut down Al Hawza, U.S. forces had raided a neighborhood in Fallujah, killing at least fifteen Iraqis in an incident that enraged many Sunnis.²⁰ By the time the four Blackwater contractors were ambushed in Fallujah on March 31, the south of the country was already on the brink, with tens of thousands of Shiites pouring into the streets. On April 2, during Friday prayers, Sadr declared, “I am the beating arm for Hezbollah and Hamas here in Iraq.”²¹ As U.S. forces prepared to lay siege to Fallujah, Bremer poured gas on the volatile situation by ordering the arrest of Sadr’s top deputy, Sheikh Mustafa Yaqubi, who was taken into custody on Saturday, April 3, 2004.²² For Sadr, it was the final straw. He urged his followers to openly and fiercely rise up against the occupation.

After Yaqubi’s arrest, thousands of outraged Sadr followers boarded buses from Baghdad heading for their leader’s spiritual headquarters in Kufa, next to the holy city of Najaf,²³ where many believed Yaqubi was being held by occupation forces. Along the way, they encountered jam-packed roads filled with thousands of men preparing to do battle. “We didn’t choose the time for the uprising,” said Fuad Tarfi, Sadr’s Najaf spokesman. “The occupation forces did.”²⁴ Shortly after dawn on Sunday, April 4, the Mahdi Army began to take over the administrative buildings in the area. Local police commanders immediately relinquished their authority, as did administrators in another government building. But then the massive crowd began moving toward its actual target—the occupation headquarters in Najaf, which was guarded by Blackwater.

04/04/04

On the morning of April 4, 2004, as the sun was rising over the Shiite holy city of Najaf, a handful of Blackwater men stood on the rooftop of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters they were tasked with protecting. At the time, the actual U.S. military presence in Najaf was very limited because of negotiations with Shiite religious leaders who had demanded that U.S. troops leave. As part of its contract in Iraq, Blackwater not only guarded Paul Bremer but also provided security for at least five regional U.S. occupation headquarters, including the one in Najaf.²⁵ Like most of the world, the Blackwater guards in Najaf were well aware of the fate of their colleagues a few days earlier in Fallujah. Now, with a national uprising under way, they watched as an angry demonstration of Muqtada al-Sadr’s followers reached Camp Golf, formerly the campus of Kufa University, which had been converted to an occupation headquarters. Blackwater had just eight men guarding the facility that day, along with a handful of troops from El Salvador. By chance, there were also a few U.S. Marines at the complex.

U.S. Marine Cpl. Lonnie Young had been in Iraq since January 2004. The twenty-five-year-old native of Dry Ridge, Kentucky—population two thousand—was deployed in Iraq as a Defense Messaging System administrator. On the morning of April 4, he was in Najaf to install communication equipment at Camp Golf. “While entering the front gate, I noticed a small group of protesters out in the streets,” Young recalled in an official Marine Corps account of the day.²⁶ “As we proceeded onto the base there were numerous coalition soldiers in ‘riot gear’ near the front gate.” Young and his colleagues met with the local occupation commander, a Spanish official, and then proceeded to the roof of the building to install the communications equipment. About twenty-five minutes later, Young had finished his task. Despite the beginnings of a protest at the camp, Young tried to catch a quick ten-minute nap in the back of his truck, “since we were about twenty-minutes from chow time.” But a few moments later, a colleague of Young’s woke him up and told him the equipment was not working properly. “I told him that I would be right in to help,” Young said. “I got dressed, grabbed my weapon, and was about to get out of the truck when I heard the unmistakable sound of an AK-47 rifle fire a few rounds out in the street in front of the base.” Young said he quickly grabbed his gear and headed into the CPA building, eventually making it to the roof, where he joined eight Blackwater mercenaries and the Salvadoran troops. Young assumed a position on the roof and readied his heavy M249 Squad Automatic Weapon. He peered through the scope of his gun, watching the action unfold below and awaiting orders. “After what seemed like an eternity, which was maybe just a few seconds, I could see people getting out of [a] truck and start running,” Young recalled. “One of the Iraqis quickly dropped down into a prone position and fired several round[s] at us. I started yelling that I had one in my sights and asking if I could engage.” But there was no commanding officer on hand from the U.S. military. Instead, Cpl. Lonnie Young, active-duty United States Marine Corps, would be taking his orders that day from the private mercenaries of Blackwater USA.

“With your permission Sir, I have acquired a target,” Young recalled yelling out. “Finally, the Blackwater Security guys gave the call [to] commence firing.” Young said he then “leveled the sights on my target and squeezed the trigger. I could see that the man had on an all white robe and was carrying an AK-47 rifle in his right hand. He seemed to be running as hard as he could when I fired off a short burst of 5.56 mm rounds. Through my sights I could see the man fall onto the pavement. I stopped for a second, raised my head from my gun, to watch the man lay in the street motionless.”

“I had a weird feeling come over me,” Young recalled. “I had many emotions kick in at once. I felt a sense of purpose, happiness, and sorrow, which all hit me at once.”

While Young and Blackwater contend that the Iraqis initiated the shooting that day, other witnesses interviewed by journalists on the scene said it went down differently; they claimed the battle began when the forces guarding the occupation headquarters fired percussion rounds from atop the roof as the protesters assembled. “Alarmed to see the throng still moving toward them, [the forces on the roof] fired percussive rounds designed to break up the crowd, which instead enraged it,” wrote Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid. “They may then have switched to live fire. Armed men in the crowd returned fire with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars.”²⁷ Estimates of the crowd size outside the occupation headquarters that day ranged from seven hundred to more than two thousand.

Regardless of how it started, once the shooting began, Blackwater’s men, the Salvadorans, and Corporal Young were unloading clip after clip, firing thousands of rounds and hundreds of 40 mm grenades into the crowd.²⁸ They fired so many rounds that some of them had to stop shooting every fifteen minutes to let their gun barrels cool.²⁹ Sadr’s men responded with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s.³⁰ Shadid reported, “At one point, witnesses saw a vehicle carrying four Salvadoran soldiers caught outside the gate. Demonstrators overwhelmed the terrified occupants, seizing and executing one prisoner on the spot by putting a grenade in his mouth and pulling the pin. Two of the other soldiers, their faces bruised from recent beatings, were [later] seen being led by armed men into the mosque.”³¹

In the midst of the fighting, several active-duty military police officers joined the force on the roof being managed by Blackwater’s men. During the battle, which would rage on for nearly four hours, a Blackwater contractor began videotaping the action. That video would make it onto the Internet and provide remarkable historical documentation of the events of April 4, 2004.³² The home video opens with a deafening barrage of outgoing gunfire, as Blackwater’s men, Corporal Young, and at least two other soldiers dressed in camouflage fire round after round. “You’re aiming too high buddy,” one contractor yells at the soldiers.

“You see a guy on the ground?” the voice yells. “RPG!”

“Where?”

“Right in front of the truck, right on the wall!”

Boom boom, rat-a-tat-tat. Explosive gunfire rips for thirty seconds. “Got more ammo?” someone yells. Then: “The truck’s empty, the truck’s empty.”

The shooting stops as the men assess the situation below them. “Hold what you got, hold what you got right there,” a voice commands. “Just scan your sectors. Scan your sectors. Who needs ammo?”

“We got mags, we got mags right here.”

“Fuckin’ niggers,” says another voice as the men begin to reload their weapons. The camera then pans to what appears to be the cameraman—a goateed Blackwater contractor wearing sunglasses—who looks into the camera and smiles. As the camera pans back to the action, he quips laughingly, “What the fuck?” The camera then turns to a man who appears to be a U.S. soldier, and the cameraman asks him about his weapon, “That shit fuckin’ hot, dude?”

“I spent all this time [unintelligible] in the fucking Marine Corps—never fired a weapon,” the soldier replies. Another voice yells, “Mark your target!”

Men who appear to be Salvadoran troops can also be seen on the roof; a Blackwater contractor wearing a blue T-shirt and a baseball cap apparently instructs one Salvadoran on how to position the heavy weapon. “Hang tight, hang tight, hang tight,” says another goateed man wielding a machine gun and wearing a T-shirt, bulletproof vest, and a blue baseball cap.

“Hey, all these fuckers right here,” says another voice.

“Yeah, Mahdi ass!”

With that, the heavy firing once again begins as the men unload from the rooftop. Along with machine-gun fire, there is the methodical boom, boom, boom from heavier weapons. “Hey, get some!” someone yells as the deafening rip of gunfire explodes over Najaf. One of the Blackwater men appears to be directing three camouflaged soldiers firing from the roof.

As the battle raged on, Iraqi snipers hit a total of three of the men protecting the occupation headquarters. According to Young, a Blackwater contractor got hit and blood spurted five feet out from his face. “I could see a quarter-sized hole in his jaw,” Corporal Young remembered. “By this time, the guy had lost about a pint of blood. I tried to press on the wound and stop the bleeding that way, but the blood was squirting out between my fingers.” Young said he reached into the wound and pinched the man’s carotid artery closed. He then picked him up and got him to Blackwater’s medic before returning to his rooftop post. A picture taken that day shows Young on the rooftop aiming his SAW at the crowd with heavily armed Blackwater men in sunglasses positioned directly behind him and alongside him. “I gazed over the streets with straining eyes, only to see hundreds of dead Iraqis lying all over the ground,” Young said. “It was an unbelievable sight; even though there were so many lying dead, the Iraqis were still running towards the front gate. I opened fire once again. Emptying magazine after magazine, I watched the people dressed in white and black robes drop to the ground as my sights passed by them. All I could think about at that time was that I had to either kill or be killed. It felt as if we were losing ground. In many senses we were, but that feeling just made me fight harder.”

Blackwater later said that throughout the battle, its men tried to make contact with U.S. military commanders but were unsuccessful. A senior Blackwater executive, Patrick Toohey, told the New York Times that at one point the crowd was moving in fast on the compound, and Blackwater’s men “were down to single digits of ammo, less than 10 rounds a man.”³³ The besieged men eventually contacted Blackwater’s headquarters in Baghdad. Within moments, Paul Bremer’s staff gave the go-ahead for Blackwater to send in three company helicopters—known as “Ass Monkeys,” the very ones used for Bremer’s security—to deliver more ammunition.³⁴ The helicopter crews also rescued Corporal Young after he was wounded.³⁵ “We ran outside and I saw three Blackwater helicopters sitting there,” Young recalled. “I ran to the farthest helicopter and got inside the front passenger seat. I felt very nervous as we took off from the ground. I didn’t have any body armor at all, nor did I have a weapon. I looked all around the base and saw that everybody was firing their weapons…. I felt almost helpless sitting there.” In the end, the Blackwater helicopter transported the Marine to safety. “It was OK with [Bremer] if they went out and saved some American lives,” said Toohey.³⁶

In another video filmed on the CPA roof in Najaf, Blackwater helicopters can be seen dropping off supplies.³⁷ The video then cuts to a closeup of what appears to be a Blackwater contractor aiming a large sniper-style weapon. “He slipped into a building,” a man says off camera. “Guy on the wall runnin’?” asks the sniper. Before the man off camera says, “Yep,” the sniper calmly pulls the trigger. Three shots ring out. He reloads his clip.

“We got a group of three. They’re all runnin’ now,” says the man off camera. “Wow, we’ve got lots of—see the guy in white? He’s goin’ too fast—now they’re haulin’ ass.” The sniper adjusts his scope. “We got a big group comin’. On the wall, squeezin’ off,” he calmly announces. Three more shots are fired off. “Wow, you got a whole group of ’em,” says the man off camera, who appears to be acting as a spotter.

Another shot.

“We got a bunch of bad guys at twelve o’clock, 800 meters,” says the man off camera into his walkie-talkie. “We’ve got about fifteen of ’em on the run up here.” The spotter is asked for the location of the “bad guys” from a voice on the other end as the sniper continues firing. It was unnecessary, though. “Negative,” he replies. “He cleaned ’em all out.”

A short while later, the sniper indicates that U.S. forces have joined the battle, dropping a Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)—a GPS-controlled air-to-surface missile, sometimes referred to as a “smart bomb”—in the vicinity. The sniper asks his colleague, “Who dropped the JDAM?”

“Marines.”

“Yeah,” the sniper says. “We were flyin’ in right as that JDAM was hittin’.” The sniper’s reference to “flyin’ in” as the JDAM missile was hitting indicates that in addition to ammunition, Blackwater also deployed more of its men to Najaf during the fighting.

“Another car haulin’ ass out—blue Mercedes,” the sniper says, firing a shot. “OK, I hit the car right in front of him.” Another shot. The video then cuts to bursts of shooting and then back to the sniper again. “That guy with a green flag?” he asks. “Yeah. There you go,” says his partner. A shot rings out. “That’s Mahdi Army. Green flag is Mahdi Army—they’re to be engaged at any opportunity.” Three more shots. “OK, you see the road that goes straight out like that? That road right there?” asks the spotter.

“Yeah.”

“Follow it out—straight out—about 800 meters,” he instructs the sniper. As the sniper reloads, his partner exclaims, “Holy shit—look at all them fuckers.” Then to the sniper: “All right, you’re on ’em.” The sniper begins picking people off. “You guys are dead on,” says the spotter. Three more shots. As he shoots, the sniper declares, “Jesus Christ, it’s like a fucking turkey shoot.” Two more shots. “They’re taking cover,” says the spotter. Another shot. The Blackwater men then say they are receiving return fire and begin accelerating their firing pace. The video then cuts to a scene of heavy outgoing fire. “Smoke that motherfucker when he comes around the corner! Hit him now!” someone yells. Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat.

Blackwater contractor Ben Thomas—the man who admitted to killing an Iraqi with the unapproved “blended metal” bullets in September 2003³⁸—said he was on the roof in Najaf that day. Two years after the Najaf shootout, when the home videos had circulated widely around the Internet, Thomas lashed out at critics of the conduct of the Blackwater forces that day. “You wanna know what its like to be shoulder to shoulder with 8 teamates while 1,200 Mahdi troops hit the wire at 300 meters on three flanks? And then criticize the actions of my teamates based on a grainy video?” [sic] Thomas wrote in a posting on a private military contractor Web forum to which he is a frequent contributor.³⁹ “My seven teamates and our El Salvadorian [SFODA] who fought with us are the only people who saw what happend. War is chronicaled and studied. Najaf is just another small battle in history but for us it was a place of alot of killing and dying. Its not a light dinner topic” [sic].⁴⁰ As for the man on the tape heard using the word “nigger,” Thomas wrote: “My Teamate who had never been in direct combat and rarely swore can be heard making a racial slur. This is not his character. Its a man who has just killed 17 enemy troops who had slipped to within 70 meters of our Alamo. When my friend stopped the advance cold, alone and under direct fire, the worst word his mind could muster to yell at the dead bastards was ‘nigger’. When he saw the video he cried. He isn’t a racist. What you hear is a man terrified and victorious. But you don’t see that in the video”⁴¹ [sic].

Eventually, U.S. Special Forces moved into Najaf and the crowd was dispersed. ⁴² At the end of the battle, an unknown number of Iraqis were dead in the streets. According to Corporal Young, it was “hundreds.” Other estimates put it at twenty to thirty dead with two hundred wounded.⁴³ Because Blackwater was guarding the building and coordinating its defense, there are no official military reports on how the incident started.⁴⁴ Blackwater admitted that its men fired thousands of rounds into the crowd, but vice president Patrick Toohey told the New York Times his men “fought and engaged every combatant with precise fire.” Then, according to the Times, Toohey “insisted that his men had not been engaged in combat at all. ‘We were conducting a security operation,’ he said. ‘The line,’ he finally said, ‘is getting blurred.’” At the end of one of the home videos of the Najaf battle, Iraqis are shown loaded on the back of a truck with hoods over their heads and plastic cuffs binding their hands. One of the men appears to be crying under his hood as he clutches his forehead.

What was clear from the video and from Corporal Young’s recollections of that day was that Blackwater was running the operation, even giving orders to an active-duty U.S. Marine on when to open fire. “When there are rounds firing, coming at you from down range, everybody pulls together to do what needs to be done,” said Blackwater’s Chris Taylor. He praised Corporal Young after hearing how the Marine resupplied the ammunition of the Blackwater contractors on the roof. “He should be proud of the way he acted,” Taylor said.⁴⁵ By afternoon, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, had arrived on the scene. When Kimmitt later spoke about the battle, he did not mention Blackwater by name but praised the operation its men led. “I know on a rooftop yesterday in An Najaf, with a small group of American soldiers and coalition soldiers… who had just been through about three and a half hours of combat, I looked in their eyes, there was no crisis. They knew what they were here for,” Kimmitt said. “They’d lost three wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells—the bullet casings—and, frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident. They were confident for three reasons: one, because they’re enormously well trained; two, because they’re extremely good at what they’re doing; and three, because they knew why they were there.”⁴⁶ Blackwater’s Toohey, acknowledging the growing use of private military contractors, concluded, “This is a whole new issue in military affairs. Think about it. You’re actually contracting civilians to do military-like duties.”⁴⁷

To the Iraqis, particularly Sadr’s followers, April 4 is remembered as a massacre in one of the holiest cities of Shiite Islam—indeed, clerics were among the casualties that day.⁴⁸ To the Blackwater men and Corporal Young, it was a day when—against all odds—they fended off hordes of angry, armed militia members intent on killing them and overtaking a building they were tasked by their government with protecting. “I thought, ‘This is my last day. I’m going out with a bang,’” Corporal Young later told the Virginian-Pilot. “If I had to die it would be defending my country.”⁴⁹ While scores of Iraqis were killed and Blackwater retained control of the CPA building, the battle emboldened Sadr’s forces and supporters. By that afternoon “the loudspeakers of the Kufa mosque announced that the Mahdi Army held Kufa, Najaf, Nasiriyah and Sadr City, Baghdad’s teeming Shiite slum,” according to the Washington Post. “The checkpoint controlling access to the bridge into Kufa and Najaf was staffed by young militiamen. Many Iraqi police officers, paid and trained by the U.S.-led coalition, had joined the assault on its quarters.”⁵⁰ That afternoon, Paul Bremer announced that he had appointed new Iraqi defense and intelligence ministers. In making the announcement, Bremer addressed the fight in Najaf. “This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line, and they have moved to violence,” Bremer declared. “This will not be tolerated.”⁵¹

Just before the sun set over Najaf, Muqtada al-Sadr issued a public call for an end to all protests, instead exhorting his followers to rise up. “Terrorize your enemy,” he said. “God will reward you well for what pleases him…. It is not possible to remain silent in front of their abuse.”⁵² That night U.S. forces began moving into the Sadr City section of Baghdad. A U.S. military spokesman said U.S. fighter jets and helicopter gunships were striking back in response to the Najaf clash, and Reuters television footage showed images of tanks crushing civilian cars in the neighborhood.⁵³ As word spread of Sadr’s orders, his followers carried out ambushes against U.S. forces, including in Sadr City, where Cindy Sheehan’s son, Casey—a Specialist in the U.S. Army—was killed that day.⁵⁴ In all, eight U.S. soldiers died in Sadr City April 4 and fifty were wounded, along with an unknown number of Iraqis.⁵⁵ Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division, would later call the fighting in Sadr City that day “the biggest gunfight since the fall of Baghdad a year ago.”⁵⁶ Ultimately, Sadr’s followers staged uprisings in at least eight cities across Iraq.

On Monday, April 5, Paul Bremer officially labeled Muqtada al-Sadr an outlaw. “He is attempting to establish his authority in the place of the legitimate authority,” Bremer declared. “We will not tolerate this. We will reassert the law and order which the Iraqi people expect.”⁵⁷ Hours later, occupation authorities announced that there was a warrant for Sadr’s arrest.⁵⁸ It would prove to be a disastrous decision that would boost Sadr’s status tremendously. Along with the situation in Fallujah, the crackdown on Sadr would also briefly unite Shiites and Sunnis in a guerrilla war against the occupation.

Back in the United States, a debate was beginning to rage about the increasing use of private contractors—a development due in no small part to Blackwater’s involvement in Fallujah and Najaf. In an unsigned editorial, the New York Times referred to the Fallujah ambush as evidence of “America’s troubling reliance on hired guns” and the Najaf firefight as an indication that the “Pentagon seems to be outsourcing at least part of its core responsibilities for securing Iraq instead of facing up to the need for more soldiers.”⁵⁹ The Times editorial said, “Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged that the Pentagon will keep looking for ways to ‘outsource and privatize.’ When it comes to core security and combat roles, this is ill advised. The Pentagon should be recruiting and training more soldiers, rather than running the risk of creating a new breed of mercenaries.”⁶⁰ Amid mounting criticism of the use of private soldiers, Blackwater was lionized in some circles, particularly the Republican Congressional leadership. If there had been any question before, it was now clear that Blackwater was a major player in the war. The night of the Najaf firefight, hundreds of miles to the northwest, more than a thousand U.S. Marines had Fallujah surrounded and were preparing to exact revenge for the killing of the four Blackwater contractors five days earlier.