Home > Mason and Kings Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > February > 19
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Neighborhood Watch … in a very bad neighborhood.
The Sunni Arab men who first came forward nearly two years ago to reject the insurgency and join the American-led fight to secure Iraq neighborhood by neighborhood call themselves the Awakening.
The Shiite-led government has rejected that name, and so, in an effort to strike a balance, U.S. officials have struggled ever since to find an appropriate moniker for the group that has become a principle ally and reason for the turning tide in Iraq.
First, U.S. officials called them the Neighborhood Watch. Then, Fixed Site Security. Then, Concerned Local Citizens. Two weeks ago, top commanders changed their name yet again. They are now known as Sons of Iraq — Abna Al-Iraq — or, in military shorthand: SOI.
The reason for the latest switch?
Their previous name translated poorly. The Arabic word used for “those who are concerned” — ma’aneen — can take on a meaning of worried, disquieted or discomforted.
Today, I visited members of this group, which now number roughly 80,000 across Iraq, at a checkpoint on a highway known for banditry in a remote region of western Iraq considered a safe haven for insurgents.
Their leader, Mohammed Al-Diab, said they were manning the checkpoint, set up by U.S. forces just yesterday, as a vanguard against terrorists raiding their farms and families to the south.
“This is considered the gate of terrorism,” he told me.
Carrying their own wood-stock rifles and AK-47s, and wearing traditional head dresses and dishdashas, they were hard to distinguish from the archetypal image of the insurgents U.S. forces are hunting.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment |
Bodies in the desert: A gruesome finding by U.S. troops.
U.S. forces searching for al-Qaida in Iraq fighters today discovered 16 bodies, most killed execution-style within the past three to six months, U.S. Army officials said.
The bodies were found in an abandoned industrial chemical storage site in the western Iraqi desert. A three-day-old operation in pursuit of al-Qaida in Iraq has yielded signs of insurgent activity, but no fighters.
Most of the bodies had been shot in the head, their arms tied behind their backs. Some were thrown into a well.
The sparsely populated badlands north of the Euphrates is still a safe haven for anti-American fighters, pushed out of urban areas by U.S. troops and their Iraqi allies over the past year.
U.S. forces, operating alongside an Iraqi army company, were searching the Muthana chemical complex, a Saddam-era storage facility.
U.S. commanders concede that insurgents, leaving calling cards declaring, “Islamic State of Iraq,” operate freely on the eastern shore of Lake Tharthar and along a critical supply highway that links northern Iraq to the western cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.
Recent discoveries of bomb-making materials and large caches of rocket-propelled grenades, rockets and mortars suggest insurgents are using the tribal area as a staging ground for attacks in cities as far away as Baghdad, U.S. officials said.
“It’s the perfect area that Al-Qaida likes because it’s remote,” said Col. John Charlton, commander of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, who was visiting this remote Army post on Tuesday. He likened the region of shepherds and solitary farming families to the Wild West.
“And we’re the law West of the Pecos right now, so we’re going after them,” he said.
Al-Qaida fighters continue to set up illegal checkpoints on the adjacent highway — as recently as Tuesday, nearby villagers told U.S. soldiers - in order to extract money or cargo from passing vehicles. Those who resist are often shot, U.S. officials said.
