[Dean's World] Dave Price: Reuters: Major Anbar Highway Far Safer

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Posted by Dave Price:
Reuters: Major Anbar Highway Far Safer
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1190661945.shtml


   Do they know [1]what they're talking about?

     BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Only six months ago, many Iraqi travelers
     considered it a suicidal risk to take the insurgent-controlled
     desert highway that stretches from Baghdad to neighboring Syria and
     Jordan.
     But now Iraqi driver Jamal says the Sunni Islamist al Qaeda
     insurgents who used to abduct and execute his Shi'ite passengers
     before robbing him and fellow Sunnis are virtually a thing of the
     past.
     ...
     Security along the Anbar highway has been transformed by the
     emergence of a tribal alliance of Sunni sheikhs and their fighters
     who have managed to suppress Anbar's volatile insurgency -- after
     repeated failures by Washington and Baghdad.

   A lot of news reports and analysis pieces seem [2]distrustful of the
   Sunni tribes, viewing them as "militias." But by millennia-old
   tradition, these are the power brokers and businessmen of the region,
   long familiar with rapprochement and compromise, while the
   troublemaking militias (whether AQI or Mahdi Army) tend to be groups
   of sectarian youg men with guns trying to seize power violently from
   those of other ethnosectarian identity: street gangs with RPGs and
   IEDs, essentially.
   If this trend of tribal triumph continues, when historians and
   military planners dissect the occupation the most salient mistake they
   note will be a decision everyone agreed was obviously correct in 2003:
   the dismissal of the tribes as relics of Iraq's dark, pre-democratic
   past, irrelevant to governance in a free country.

     Despite the slowdown, Mohammed is happy just to be back in
     business.
     "I closed my office last year for several months because too many
     travelers had been robbed, kidnapped and killed on the road," he
     said.
     "But after the tribes took control of Anbar we saw a lot of people
     coming back to travel on the road, including Shi'ites who thought
     they'd never see Anbar again."

References

   1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070924/lf_nm/iraq_anbar_dc_1;_ylt=AkNCIhooaGn5w2Ty8zX0qv5X6GMA
   2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2100698,00.html