Word: anbar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Hostile fire, Anbar province...
There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me-confirming reports from several other sources-that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack...
...good news comes with caveats, of course. The removal of AQI's havens in Anbar may ultimately hurt the terrorists' ability to blow up markets in Baghdad, but it hasn't yet. As I reported in September 2005, there is also the scandalous reality that an alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never...
...today Mansour is boxed in by bloodshed. To the north and south, the Shi'ite death squads of the Jaish al-Mahdi have pushed in block by block over the past year, warning Sunni families to move or be killed. In response, Sunni insurgents have poured in from Anbar province, bringing with them weapons, explosives and suicide bombers. The warring forces have made my old neighborhood one of the most dangerous areas in Baghdad...
...virtually no proven reserves, nor do they sit on a main export route as do the Shi'a and the Kurds. Since the invasion they have resorted to stealing and smuggling from government facilities small amounts of finished oil products, such as fuel oil and condensates. Sunni tribes in Anbar province do most of the smuggling. According to the tribes themselves, the American military looks the other way in order to keep the tribes on their side in the war against al-Qaeda...