IN A different prison it might have been a sign of trouble. In Camp Cropper, with its 7,000 Iraqi detainees, Major General Douglas Stone knew that when the prisoners turned over four forcibly shaven Islamic extremists to the guards it meant that the moderates had at last regained control of the camp.

“They said, ‘Get them out of here’,” Stone recalled last week. For the first time a compound of Iraqi prisoners had turned against the hard-liners in their midst.

Stone is bringing new thinking to a camp that for the past four years has served as a breeding ground for Iraqi extremists, turning some prisoners into Al-Qaeda terrorists under the eyes of their American guards.

The general sits in his marine camouflage uniform watching a video filmed before he took command in May. It shows the prison compound in flames. Arabic graffiti plastered on a wall read “Die now American Army”.

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

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The charismatic Stone is unworried by the bloodied jaws of the formerly bearded extremists who have now been locked up in a separate part of the camp reserved for “irreconcilable” enemies. They had pretended to be moderate so as to prolong a reign of terror in the prison.

“It’s a breakthrough,” Stone said. “The Takfiris [extremists] terrorised the prison. This is the first time the moderates have felt empowered enough to identify them and take back control.”

The step is crucial not only to controlling Camp Cropper, near Baghdad’s international airport, but also to breaking the back of a system that allowed Al-Qaeda and its Iraqi allies to recruit and train in military prisons.

“We were feeding and warehousing a 25,000-strong army dedicated to the battle against us,” Stone said. “We were breeding an insurgency in our internment facilities.”

Stone believes the majority of Iraqis are moderate and care mostly about jobs and family. He has carved out different compounds in the prison, separating moderates who receive vocational training, education and “religious enlightenment” from militants who cannot be reformed.

Al-Qaeda members, most of them Iraqi nationals, held sway over the prison before Stone came to command and were determined to win “a battlefield of the mind”. They easily recruited sympathisers.

A hand-written document confiscated in the camp shows the extent of their bureaucratic reach. It is entitled: Certification of Training; Islamic State of Iraq – Ministry of War and Military Affairs – Department of Training.

The document details the vetting of a new prisoner under topics such as “knowledge of jihad” (this potential recruit got a score of 10) and “execution of battle drill” (he got 10 again).

The prisoners’ leader signed his approval, with recommendations: the recruit passed with flying colours but was advised to disguise his “outgoing personality” as that might give him away to his American captors.

Even more sinister was Al-Qaeda’s system of conscripting detainees. Al-Qaeda clerics taught them the language of jihad in makeshift prison mosques off limits to the guards. Prisoners were schooled in clandestine laboratories about how to construct IEDs – improvised explosive devices to blow up coalition vehicles. Sharia courts enforced Islamic law inside the prison. Those who disobeyed were beaten and, in at least one case, killed.

It was a terrifying regime. “They had specialist greeters, specialist vetters, they even had specialist leg-breakers,” Stone said. Even when the prison was locked down, Al-Qaeda would communicate by “rock mail” – a missive wrapped around a stone.

Stone imposed a different regime. A tall, muscular figure, he saw the prison as a microcosm of Iraq and a way to understand the insurgency and defeat it.

The general immediately won the respect of the beleaguered camp personnel. At last, a senior American officer was no longer making the mistake of his predecessors who had failed to try to understand Iraq. “I had to look at it and ask: how do I think we can win the war?”

Stone, an Arabic speaker who carries a copy of the Koran with him and can outquote many a Muslim cleric, started by examining the prisoners to work out “who the hell are they and why the hell are they here”.

One of his first moves was to look at what the prisoners were charged with. He found most of them had no idea; nor did the American military court system.

Stone changed that. For the first time, prisoners who had been incarcerated for years were standing in front of panels, being questioned about their alleged crimes.

Many, stuck in the furnace-like heat of the camp’s windowless concrete block buildings, had given up all hope. One wept and said: “This is the first time anyone has spoken to me.”

Word of the new review system has gone through the prison and given detainees a hope for the future beyond Al-Qaeda. Stone has released 2,000 men since he took over; but no one is going out on his watch to kill again, he believes. “I’m not doing mass releases,” he said.

Stone hired Ed O’Connell, a Vietnam war veteran and an adviser at the Rand Corporation think tank, to study the prisoners’ motives. O’Connell found that money was the prime moti-vator for attacks on coalition forces; the second most important turned out to be fear, usually threats against the prisoner or his family. It seems simple but it had been ignored.

The key tactic that Stone has used to turn around Camp Cropper is one that he believes can be projected across Iraq: to empower the moderates. They are the silent majority of the Muslim world and he is convinced that by separating and educating the moderates and ruthlessly containing the radicals, he can send out a force that can work against the extremists.

Criminal gangs ‘control Iraq ministries’

A damning report by the American embassy in Iraq has exposed widespread corruption in prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government, writes Sara Hashash.

In many ministries where criminal gangs and militias are in control, corruption has become “the norm”, the report said. Maliki’s office is accused of hindering investigations into corruption cases by demonstrating an “open hostility” to efforts to establish an independent anticorruption agency.

The report highlights a growing discontent in Washington at the failure of Maliki’s Shi’ite government to introduce reforms during the breathing space created by the US troop “surge”.

The report reviewed the performance of the Commission on Public Integrity, the main body charged with eliminating corruption. It found the commission to be “a passive rather than a true investigative agency” and said its investigators could not be trusted to expose criminal activity involving “anyone protected by the violent or powerful”.

Baghdad was accused of withholding “basic support and resources” from the agency.

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