Tony Gerber
Khalid al-Khafaji, an Iraqi role player in the U.S. Army's Iraq Simulation, plays a Shiite imam in Medina Wasl, one of 13 mock villages in the simulation.
On the day United States troops arrive in Medina Wasl, an undistinguished village with a mixed Sunni-Shiite population at the center of a desert province, anti-American insurgents kidnap and murder the son of the town's deputy mayor. The American battalion's commanding officer, a thoughtful, bespectacled colonel who encourages his subordinates to be respectful and culturally sensitive, arrives with high hopes of winning hearts and minds in this remote area, but spends most of his time managing an explosive situation that is spiraling toward civil war. Even the battalion's public information officer refers to the colonel's outreach efforts as "all that 'salaam alaikum' shit."
On their first night in their new barracks, the arriving troops are attacked by insurgents who fire a mortar into the camp and briefly penetrate the perimeter wire, shooting several soldiers before escaping. A few days later, jittery U.S. troops fire on a vehicle at a checkpoint, killing several unarmed civilians. As the local population turns ever more anti-American, a local Shiite imam orders the expulsion of all Sunnis and the deputy mayor's henchmen conduct a freelance assassination campaign. The colonel orders payments to the bereaved families and promises the mayor aid in rebuilding the local water and sewer service, but the ceremony to award the contracts is ambushed by insurgents and turns into a chaotic firefight, with U.S. forces taking heavy casualties.