Hunting terrorists is just good police work, FBI agent Tim Clemente believes, but Omar Mohammed, who became his Iraqi partner, didn’t start out with the same training as his American colleague:
Omar would drive, as he knew the neighborhoods, the culture, and could immediately distinguish Shiite from Sunni. Clemente grew a beard to blend in a little and took to wearing a kaffiyeh. Together they built an informant network from nothing, and before long they had people in bakeries, driving taxis, sweeping floors inside mosques. Omar’s men started bringing in low-level terrorists, locals who were being paid by the insurgency to set bombs and provide intelligence on the Americans to Al Qaeda.
By American standards, Omar didn’t have much formal police training, but he was eager and seemed fearless. Under Saddam, police loyalty to the regime was valued much more than detective work. At the police academy, Omar’s class was ordered to skin and eat a live dog. After that, his instructors believed, no order would be too repulsive to carry out.
Hunting terrorists, Clemente told Omar, is just good police work. But doing police work in a war zone complicates things somewhat. Leads disappear or get shot, so it pays to act fast. Some days, Omar and Clemente would interview a source in the morning, identify a suspect, tap the phone a few minutes later, have a unit doing surveillance in the afternoon, make an arrest, and be interrogating by evening.