President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq, and he used it to send a big message. He didn't go to the US airbase outside Baghdad; he went to Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province and a city that used to be the center of the Sunni insurgency—an area that, as recently as a year ago, was written off by the Marines as lost to al-Qaeda.
And Bush didn't go alone. He brought along the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and they all met with the Iraqi prime minister, president, and vice president. As a Pentagon press secretary put it, "He has assembled essentially his war cabinet here, and they are all convening with the Iraqi leadership to discuss the way forward."
When you convene all of your top leadership to meet in the former stronghold of the insurgency, that sends a message. Bush is making sure the world knows that the US is winning its counter-insurgency war against al-Qaeda and its Sunni backers in Western Iraq.
What has happened in Anbar province, and how? For a long overview of the big picture, see a very important essay at Small Wars Journal (a blog devoted to the theory and practice of counter-insurgency) by David Kilcullen, an Australian counter-insurgency expert who is a top advisor to General Petraeus in Iraq.
Military historian Frederick Kagan also has a long article covering much of the same ground.
But I have linked below to a less comprehensive but more readable report in the Times of London, which focuses on the story of an American officer who helped "flip" Iraq's Sunni tribes and turn them against al-Qaeda. This is not the "big picture," but it is a very useful vignette.
"How Life Returned to the Streets in a Showpiece City that Drove Out al-Qaeda," Martin Fletcher, Times of London, August 31 The police station in Tameen, a district of Ramadi, occupies a wreck of a building—its roof shattered by shells, its windows blown out, its walls pockmarked by shrapnel. That is not unusual in Iraq. What makes this station extraordinary is that a city in the heart of the infamous Sunni Triangle, a city that once led the anti-American insurgency, has named it after a US soldier—Captain Travis Patriquin.
The honour is well-deserved. Captain Patriquin played a little-known but crucial role in one of the few American success stories of the Iraq war….
I had met Captain Patriquin while embedded with US troops in Ramadi last November. He was a big man, moustachioed, ex-Special Forces, fluent in Arabic and engaged in what was then a revolutionary experiment for a US military renowned for busting doors down. He and a small group from the First Brigade Combat Team, part of the 1st Armoured Division, were assiduously courting the local sheikhs—tribal leaders—over endless cups of tea and cigarettes.
They were encouraging them to rise up against the hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters – Saudi, Jordanian, Syrian, Sudanese, Yemeni—who had arrived in Ramadi two years earlier, promising to lead the battle against the infidel Americans. What al-Qaeda actually did was recruit local thugs, seize control of the city, and impose a Taleban-style rule of terror….
The sheikhs did rise up. They formed a movement called the Anbar Awakening, led by Sheikh Sittar. They persuaded thousands of their tribesmen to join the Iraqi police, which was practically defunct thanks to al-Qaeda death threats, and to work with the reviled US troops. The US military built a string of combat outposts (COPs) throughout a city that had previously been a no-go area, and through a combination of Iraqi local knowledge and American firepower they gradually regained control of Ramadi, district by district, until the last al-Qaeda fighters were expelled in three pitched battles in March. What happened in Ramadi was later replicated throughout much of Anbar province.
Ramadi’s transformation is breathtaking….
“Al-Qaeda is gone. Everybody is happy,” said Mohammed Ramadan, 38, a stallholder in the souk who witnessed four executions. “It was fear, pure fear. Nobody wanted to help them but you had to do what they told you.”…
The 6,000 US soldiers are now dubbed “friendly forces”, and most are bemused by their new civil role. “I want to fight al-Qaeda, but f*** it—this is victory,” said Corporal Patrick Marzillo from Chicago….
[F]or now Ramadi’s citizens are enjoying their improbable peace, and remembering the American they call “Martyr Husham”—the brave and generous martyr.
Captain Patriquin, 32, a father of three young children, was killed by a roadside bomb days after I left Ramadi last winter. Sheikh Sittar wept when told the news. He and several tribal leaders attended his memorial service. Captain Patriquin “was an extraordinary man who played a very, very important role,” he told The Times.
He “showed Iraqis that Americans are real people and not an evil occupying force bent on destroying their land.... He was a true hero who paid the ultimate sacrifice,” said Colonel Charlton.
0 comments:
Post a Comment