Word: anbar
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Sheik Hamid al-Hayess is not optimistic. A burly man with a thick black mustache and closely knitted brows, he is one of the founding members of the Anbar Awakening. The grouping of Sunni tribal sheiks in the once al-Qaeda-infested western province turned against the insurgents and sided with the U.S. military, providing the model for what became a nationwide campaign known as the Sahwa. But that model is in trouble. "The Sahwa has been infiltrated by al-Qaeda," he says somberly. "A civil war is coming...
...like Sheik Hamid, who are now allied with the Shi'ite-led government, and Sunnis who are against it. Some co-religionists remain so antigovernment that they either have returned to the insurgency or sympathize with those who have. (See pictures of the sheiks who helped bring stability to Anbar province...
...there's a lot of corruption here in Iraq," says Colonel Moslet Ahmad Attiyeh, commander of the national police's Salah battalion. "The terrorists pay their way out and are released," he says, whereupon they join other insurgents displaced from al-Qaeda's former stronghold of Anbar and the still volatile Diyala who have found refuge in Mosul...
...destroy it, the population must actively turn against subversive elements within it, and either fight or flush them out in the same way that Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar switched sides and allied with the Americans against al-Qaeda in their province, a movement known as the Sahwa. That hasn't happened yet, General Brown says, because Mosul's diverse makeup has proved difficult to foster such a movement. The Anbar Sahwa fell into line behind tribal sheiks, whose word is law, but Nineveh is not exclusively a tribal society...
...much less considered, given the balance of power on the ground, what the U.S. and its Afghan allies would have to concede in order to get a deal that would make a difference. The model for Obama's suggestion, of course, is Iraq, where the U.S. managed to pacify Anbar province by recruiting most of the local Sunni sheiks, who had previously been part of the insurgency, to wage a common fight against al-Qaeda. But Obama admitted that the Iraq strategy is hardly an easy fit. "The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex [than Iraq]," he said...