The midday sun turns the dusty streets of the Iraqi frontier town of al-Qaim into a furnace with a heat that keeps many people indoors but fails to deter the man on whom a fragile peace seems to depend.
Wearing a saffron-colored shirt, a 16-shot Beretta strapped to his hip and his head shaved in the style of Yul Brynner, Abu Ahmed patrols al-Qaim in a new Japanese all-terrain vehicle, surrounded by bodyguards toting assault rifles.
“The law here is the law of the tribes,” he said. “The rule of the tribes is stronger than that of Baghdad.”
Abu Ahmed belongs to the Bou Mahal, the most powerful clan in this isolated region of Iraq, some 400km northwest of the capital.
Exclusively Sunni, the tribe controls the nearby frontier with Syria — a kingdom for those who smuggle cigarettes, fuel and weapons.
“We are ready to respect the law of Baghdad, but the government has to represent the people,” he said in a scarcely veiled criticism of the central power, dominated by Shiites.
This reticence to acknowledge the state as the legitimate center of authority and power illustrates the fragility of a nation in which people prefer to put their trust in the hands of men like Abu Ahmed.
The 40-year-old is a hero to the 50,000 residents of al-Qaim for having chased al-Qaeda from the agricultural center where houses line the green and blue waters of the Euphrates.
In the main street, with its fruit and vegetable stalls, its workshops and restaurants, men with pistols in their belts approach Abu Ahmed to kiss his cheek and right shoulder in a mark of respect.
It was not always this way.
He tells how one evening in May 2005 he decided that the disciples of Osama bin Laden went too far — they killed his cousin Jamaa Mahal.
“I started shooting in the air and throughout the town bursts of gunfire echoed across the sky. My family understood that the time had come. And we started the war against al-Qaeda,” he said.
It took three battles in the streets of al-Qaim — in June, in July and then in November of that year — to finish off the extremists who had come from Arab countries to fight the Americans.
Abu Ahmed, initially defeated by better-equipped forces, had to flee to the desert region of Akashat, around 100km southwest of Al-Qaim. There he sought help from the US Marines.
“With their help we were able to liberate al-Qaim,” he said, sitting in his house with its maroon tiled facade.
This alliance between a Sunni tribe and US troops was to be the first, and it give birth to a strategy of other US-paid Sunni fighters ready to mobilize against al-Qaeda. It resulted in the Sunni province of al-Anbar being pacified in two years.
The US military, which since it led the spring 2003 invasion of Iraq had sought to control the frontier with Syria, found in the men of Abu Ahmed an auxiliary force completely au fait with all the routes used by the smugglers.
And while Abu Ahmed has been able to receive the homage and rewards, which are seen as his right as a warlord, he is very aware that the current calm is a fragile one.
“I’ve drawn up my will several times,” he said. “I expect to die.”
His town had an unhealthy reputation for years, and no Westerners other than US troops risked going there.
In the era of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, al-Qaim’s huge chemical factory treated uranium to feed Iraq’s nuclear program. But US air strikes in 1991 and then UN inspections transformed the factory into a metallic skeleton. Its destruction buried the town’s only source of income.
And al-Qaeda killers are still never far away. Recently men disguised as US soldiers approached a post near the frontier with Syria. Police manning it trustingly handed over their weapons.
The disarmed men were then forced to their knees and 16 of them had their throats cut.
Just one survived to tell the tale of what had happened to his comrades in west Iraq where law and order does not always rule — despite the presence of men like Abu Ahmed.
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