US military tries two approaches in Iraq's volatile Anbar region

Colonel Falah Salah Shimra heads the new police force in Furat, in Iraq’s restive Anbar Province.

FURAT, Iraq -- With a biker's bandan a tied under his helmet, the special forces team sergeant gunned a Humvee down a desert road in Iraq's volatile Anbar Province. Skirting the restive town of Hit, the team of a dozen soldiers crossed the Euphrates River into an oasis of relative calm: the rural heartland of the powerful Albu Nimr tribe.

Green Berets skilled in working closely with indigenous forces have enlisted one of the largest and most influential tribes in Iraq to launch a regional police force -- a rarity in this Sunni insurgent stronghold. Working deals and favors over endless cups of spiced tea, they built up their wasta -- or pull -- with the ancient tribe, which boasts more than 300,000 members. They then began empowering the tribe to safeguard its territory and help rid desert routes of insurgents and weapons. The goal, they say, is to spread security outward to envelop urban trouble spots such as Hit.

But the initial progress has been tempered by friction between the team of elite troops and the U S Army's battalion that oversees the region. At one point this year, the battalion's commander, uncomfortable with his lack of control over a team he saw as dangerously undisciplined, sought to expel it from his turf, officers on both sides acknowledged.

The conflict in the Anbar camp, while extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U S officers say. It highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many regular U S military units on sweeping combat operations; and the more fine-grained, patient work that special forces teams put into building rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people -- work that experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency.

Read the rest at the Boston Globe

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