The Iraq war isn't just a war of guns, bombs and homebrew weapons. It's also a war of words, a contest that elevates politics and propaganda to the same plane as kinetics. With the release of Wikileaks' tranche of Iraq reports, we get a psy-operator's eye-view of how Iraqis and Americans tried to fight that war with sermons, graffiti, music and talking points.
The documents paint a picture of a coalition that paid close attention to insurgent messaging at the tactical level, from places of worship to city walls and overpasses.
U.S. patrols, wary of mosques' potential involvement in the insurgency, often conducted weekly "mosque monitoring" operations to record preachers sermons for signs of incitement, Wikileaks documents show. Sermons deemed to constitute incitement could provoke some official questioning, a stint in jail or in the case of a Fallujah mosque that broadcast the location of coalition forces, a shut-down.
Reports detail instances of mosques used for broadcasting incitement against the coalition, telling residents to take up arms against the occupation forces and asking them to "come down and help us kill" troops.
At other times, insurgent propagandists used similar methods as their U.S. counterparts. American psyops teams would broadcast Arabic pop music and pro-coalition messages on an FM radio station in Iraqi neighborhoods. While the coalition had anodyne pop from a radio station on its side, one Wikileaks document recounts insurgents using a mosque to blare more martial music, urging that "holy warriors come out to fight" to join a small arms attack in progress.
Insurgents also used graffiti to get their point across. This wasn't about kids trying to get a measure of local fame by spraying their names around the block, or some Iraqi equivalent of Banksy staging his latest art project. With the occupation dependent on the cooperation of Iraqis, the public threatening of "spies," "everybody who works for [U.S. forces]" and those who "go to theelection" detailed in reports about graffiti took on military significance -- regardless of the fact that it was written with a can of spray-paint. When encountering graffiti, troops took care to document it with photos and paint over it.
In order to keep readers on message when interacting with Iraqis, the U.S. military added information operations (IO) talking points into reports about recent events.
One document shows a military intelligence officer believed an IED attack near Baghdad was designed to "discredit security efforts by [Coalition Forces] and [Sons of Iraq]." The assessment was added to a report with an IO talking points lauding local security forces, with instructions that coalition troops convey it to local citizens in conversation.
"Your local police found an IED that was meant to endanger your life and the lives of your loved ones," it read. "Thanks to your local police officers, your families are safe."
IO messages have exploited the things that Iraqis hold dear, including their national soccer team. Psychological Operators also played on the subject particularly close to Iraqis: their families.
IO talking points often stressed the risk to wives, children and families when discussing the dangers of insurgent activity. Messages warned that "these evil doers do not care if there [sic] stray bullets find there [sic] way into the places where your children are at play." When these fears were realized after a truck bombed in Khalidiyah damaged a house nearby and injured children, coalition forces broadcast "a message highlighting the terrorists' lack of compassion for women and children."
For all these documents reveal about what Iraqis and Americans said, wrote, sprayed and sung to wrest control of Iraq's political narrative, there's one very important question they don't answer: Whether any of these tools were actually effective.
Photo: Special Operations Command
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