R J Del Vecchio: The people we need to support Contributed by Bill Faith
(Please don't miss my closely related post .)
Del emails:
Interesting... in the NY Times, no less.
This guy reminds me only too well of the dedicated ARVN commanders and their people. Please God, let's not let them go the same way. ...
BAGHDAD, March 2 — The sheik stared at the cake that the hotel workers had brought up to his room as a gift. Across the red gelatinlike surface was written, “God protect you from the enemies and keep you for the Iraqi people.”
God is indeed his guardian, said the sheik, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi. So were the three burly Iraqi men standing outside the door of his suite here in the Mansour Hotel, and the five others by the elevators at the end of the hall. They had walkie-talkies, Kalashnikov rifles and camouflage vests stuffed with ammunition clips.
The sheik needs as much protection as loyalty and prayers can bring, not to mention money. He is the public face of the Sunni Arab tribes in lawless Anbar Province who have turned against the Sunni jihadists of in Mesopotamia, many of whom belong to other, sometimes more militant Iraqi tribes.
“I swear to God, if we have good weapons, if we have good vehicles, if we have good support, I can fight Al Qaeda all the way to Afghanistan,” he said recently as he sat smoking in a dark jacket and brown robes while meeting with a sheik from another Sunni tribe in his hotel room.
Sheik Abdul Sattar, a wiry 35-year-old with a thin goatee who comes from the provincial capital, Ramadi, is the most outspoken Sunni tribal figure in the country who is fighting, at least for now, on the side of the Shiite-led Iraqi government and the American military.
He has met three times with Prime Minister since announcing his campaign in September, and there is talk that the sheik has received large amounts of money from the Iraqi government or the Americans. His face has been shown in anti-insurgent commercials on the government-run Iraqiya television network. ...
As part of a broad review of options in Iraq, President Bush is looking at whether to give greater support to Sunni Arab tribal leaders who have grown disillusioned with the radical arm of the insurgency. It is a strategy long urged by officials in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and now vigorously backed by Secretary of State .
The effort would have echoes of the American military’s promotion of South Vietnamese “village militias” during the Vietnam War, which some American counterinsurgency experts say was a relative success.
Sheik Abdul Sattar and the Anbar Salvation Council, the group of 25 tribes that the sheik said he had helped pull together to fight Al Qaeda, would be central to any such move by the Americans.
The sheik said he and his allies, who also call themselves the Anbar Awakening, had recruited 6,000 fighters from the tribes into the Anbar police, helped appoint a new provincial police chief and formed a 2,500-member “emergency brigade” answering to him.
A United States Army civil affairs officer in Ramadi, Capt. Travis L. Patriquin, said in an e-mail message shortly before he was killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi in December that the tribal fighters in the Iraqi police constituted “the first successful, large force of men we’ve had since the start of the war.”
The captain wrote of Sheik Abdul Sattar, “He is the most effective local leader in Ramadi I believe the coalition has worked with since they arrived in Anbar in 2003.” ...
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Contributed by Bill Faith on March 4, 2007 at 10:31 PM in , |
