Word: alefan
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...houses and take any money they can find," says Abufawaz Khazal, a former government scientist. "It's clear that [U.S. soldiers] are working with the local black marketeers," says a businessman in Baghdad. "They take guns from people on the streets and pass them to their fences." Sheik Khalid Alefan, cousin of Sheik Barakat Alefan, says that a young American soldier recently took his satellite phone and spent half an hour making calls...
...some of the continuing fire fights in Iraq are the work of those still loyal to Saddam, others seem to result from a slow-burning resentment of the American occupation. That, at least, is the view of Sheik Barakat Alefan, chief of the 100,000-strong al-Boesa tribe, one of whose strongholds is the town of Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad. Alefan insists he saw the Americans as "liberators, not occupiers." But he's starting to revise that view. Fallujah has seen more than its share of bloodshed. In late April, U.S. forces based in a local school...
...Alefan doesn't believe the Iraqi fighters were holdouts from the old regime. "The Baathists who live here are cowards," he says. He figures, rather, that these are unemployed young men who are angry about the occupation. The Americans, he says, have a "total misunderstanding of this place and our culture. Some people here have been insulted and feel a need to retaliate." Alefan says the Americans are using too much force, shouting commands in English at locals who don't understand and then pointing guns at them when they don't respond. In particular, he complains, the Americans trample...
...communications between occupier and occupied remain terrible. In the office of the regional governor in Kirkuk, there are just four or five interpreters mediating between U.S. troops stationed there and the governor's approximately 200 local staff. "We don't speak English, and they don't speak Arabic," says Alefan, the Fallujah tribal chief. Because few TVs work, it's hard to disseminate official decrees. When the U.S. Army first entered Iraq, says an ORHA official, it had state-of-the-art links to everything that moved in the air or on the ground. Now Iraqi ministries rely on part...
...York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, now overseeing Iraq's police force, similarly doesn't think that more soldiers would make his job any easier. In Kerik's view, it's the quality of decision making, not the quantity of officers, that determines how well a job is done. Alefan, the sheik in Fallujah, wouldn't disagree. He doesn't want more U.S. troops, just better behavior. If Americans want to maintain security, they just need to understand a few simple things, he says: "Don't search our women, don't insult us, hire an interpreter, show us respect...
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