U.S. Hands Off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraq Insurgency

By DEXTER FILKINS RAMADI, Iraq — Two years ago, Anbar Province was the most lethal place for the Americans in Iraq, with a marine or a soldier dying here nearly every day. The provincial capital, Ramadi, was a moonscape of rubble and ruins. Islamic extremists controlled large pieces of territory, with some so ferocious in their personal views that they did not even allow the sale of bread. On Monday, following a parade on a freshly paved street, American commanders formally returned responsibility for keeping order in Anbar Province, once the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police force. The ceremony capped one of the starkest turnabouts in the country since the war began five and a half years ago. In the past two years, the number of insurgent attacks against Iraqis and Americans in Anbar Province has dropped by more than 90 percent. Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is led by foreigners, has been severely degraded, if not crushed altogether. Since February, as the situation improved, American commanders have cut the number of marines and soldiers here by more than a third, they said. The transfer of authority codified a transformation that Iraqi and American officers say has been in effect since April: the Iraqi Army and the police operate independently and retain primary responsibility for battling the insurgency and crime in Anbar. The Americans, who had long done the bulk of the fighting, have stepped into a backup role. With the transfer on Monday, Iraq now bears the primary responsibility for maintaining security in 11 of its 18 provinces. Even so, the dynamic that has brought such calm to Anbar, welcome as it is, appears fragile in some respects. Former insurgents who spent years ambushing Americans now staff local police stations, or remain on the American payroll as loosely supervised gunmen working for the so-called Sunni Awakening Councils. Beyond that, many local Sunni leaders claim that the prevailing political arrangements leave them under-represented, and they are demanding a greater share of the spoils. Some have warned that fresh provincial elections must go forward if more violence is to be averted. Still, as the parade marched along Main Street, the signs seemed mostly good. The ceremony was a mostly Iraqi affair, with American marines and soldiers wearing neither helmets nor body armor, nor carrying guns. The festive scene became an occasion for celebration by Iraqis and Americans, who at several moments wondered aloud in the sweltering heat how things had gone from so grim to so much better, so fast. “Not in our wildest dreams could we have imagined this,” said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser. “Two or three years ago, had we suggested that the Iraqis could take responsibility, we would have been ridiculed, we would have been laughed at. This was the cradle of the Sunni insurgency.” Indeed it was. Anbar Province, a flat, Wyoming-size desert split by the Euphrates River, became the most intractable region following the toppling of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. More than 1,000 American marines and soldiers have died in Anbar Province — a quarter of the American death toll in the country. Anbar’s second city, Falluja, was the site of the biggest battle of the war, an invasion by 6,000 marines and soldiers, most of them on foot, to wrest the city from insurgent control. In that battle, nearly 100 Americans died and more than 500 were wounded; the American military estimated that it had killed more than 1,000 insurgents. Bordering on three countries — Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria — Anbar was also the primary transit point for foreigners coming to Iraq to join the insurgency. The fighting devastated much of Anbar. Falluja was razed; whole neighborhoods in Ramadi were likewise flattened. The city and provincial governments, and the local police forces, ceased to function — and in many cases ceased to exist. By the summer of 2006, Anbar’s governor, Mamoon Sami Rashid, had survived 29 attempts on his life. Others were not so lucky: Mr. Rashid’s immediate predecessor, Raja Nawaf, was kidnapped and killed; his deputy, Talib al-Dulaimi, was shot to death; the chairman of the Anbar Provincial Council was also killed; and Mr. Rashid’s personal secretary was beheaded. By then, most of his ministers were in hiding. What finally broke the stalemate, according to former insurgents and local Anbar leaders, was a revolt against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. As the group began to expand its ambitions to include sectarian killings and imposed a fundamentalist brand of Islam on the population, local tribal leaders pushed back and began reaching out to the Americans for help. Hence the “Sunni Awakening” was born in Anbar Province, and it soon spread across the Sunni areas of Iraq. Saadi al-Faraji, once a teacher, was a gunmen for a local insurgent group, the Islamic Movement of Holy Warriors, which, despite its religious name, focused mainly on attacking the American forces, which it regarded as invaders, Mr. Faraji said. Then, in 2006, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which Mr. Faraji said was led by foreign Arabs, tried to take over his group and force its members to kill Iraqis who had signed on with the new government. “Al Qaeda declared that we were apostates, and they demanded our heads, because we would not kill Iraqi soldiers or Iraqi police,” he said in an interview. So, by late 2006, the Islamic Movement of Holy Warriors began laying ambushes against Qaeda fighters, Mr. Faraji said. At roughly the same time, a Sunni sheik named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha approached the Americans for help and formed the first Awakening Council. By early 2007, the Islamic Movement of Holy Warriors had formed its own Awakening Council, and today Mr. Faraji is a colonel in the Iraqi police. As for the Americans, Mr. Faraji said that his views had evolved. “They made mistakes, and so did we,” he said. “The past is past.” Today, nearly 100,000 Iraqis, many of them former insurgents, are on the American payroll. Many, like Mr. Faraji, have been taken into the security services. In some parts of Iraq, including Baghdad, the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has issued orders to arrest hundreds of Awakening Council members it considers dangerous and expressed intentions of decommissioning the groups, nervous that so many Sunni gunmen are being allowed to roam freely. Mr. Maliki’s desires are aggravating sectarian tensions in these places. But so far, the arrangements in Anbar seem immune to those strains. Perhaps because the province is almost entirely Sunni, there are no sectarian tensions to speak of. Only 4,000 people are still on the Awakening Councils’ rolls here, American officials here say, suggesting that many of the former insurgents have already been absorbed into the local police forces. The striking turnaround in Anbar Province, accomplished by making deals with Sunni tribal leaders, has inevitably raised a question here: Could the Americans have avoided years of bloodshed by reaching out to the tribal leaders five and a half years ago? “Yes, yes,” Mr. Rubaie said, shaking his head. “But they didn’t know.” Marine commanders say that they had spent years cultivating the tribes here, but that they had come in after several large mistakes had already been made, including the killing of anti-American demonstrators in 2003 and the failure to properly compensate their families. Some of the tribal sheiks who had gathered at the ceremony in Ramadi agreed. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/02/world/middleeast/02anbar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print