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Thursday 4 December 2008

The Sunni side of Tikrit

The Sunni side of Tikrit: progress in Iraq

Where people are turning to the Coalition for protection

The US officer relating this story gave a wry smile. ‘And guess what? The next day the old man arrives at the JSC â” with his son two steps behind.’ Having met Captain Ahmed, I wasn’t surprised. Young, tough, with a chiselled physique from hours of pumping iron at the American gym, he’d spent the last three years happily ‘killing bad guys’, he told me. He’d had many close calls, as his battered, bomb-damaged Humvee showed. A threat from Captain Ahmed was entirely believable.

The American officer, part of the effort to mentor and train the Iraqi army, admitted there were ‘some problems’ with Captain Ahmed’s methods but ‘at least he’s someone we can work with’. In fact, US troops in this area have been fired on by both the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police, the outgoing commander for ad Dawr told me, although it was the police, by a long way, who worried him the most.

I went along to the Americans’ weekly meeting with the local police chief, a harassed-looking figure in a brown suit, with a bad comb-over, yellow, nicotine-stained fingers and a tremor in his right hand. Over the usual small glasses of hot, sweet tea, I asked him how many of his men he couldn’t trust; how many were loyal to the insurgents?Â

After a lot of hedging about the odd fox hiding in every sturdy orchard, he gave a figure. ‘Three out of every ten may be helping the terrorists,’ he said, before hastily explaining that most of those were doing so out of fear rather than conviction. A US official at the meeting passed me a note: ‘You will never get an honest answer on this issue,’ the note said. ‘It’s a lot more than that.’

And yet, for the Americans, things are going rather well in this part of Iraq.

Ad Dawr is the Sunni heartland: it’s where Saddam was pulled out of his spider hole. Although most violence in Iraq is sectarian, Shia murdering Sunni and vice versa, most violence against the Americans has come from Sunni insurgents. It is here, in the Sunni heartland, that the Americans must win if they are to leave Iraq with honour.

After four years of relentless optimism from the Coalition, ‘good news’ from Iraq tends to invite scepticism. But US commanders are convinced that things are finally turning around in the Sunni areas which were once their biggest problem. In a bad month, US forces used to suffer around 180 attacks a day across Iraq. It is now just over 100 attacks a day, a US officer told me, adding that roadside bombs in his area of operations, around Tikrit, had fallen by around a third since the summer. This is progress.

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