Word: iraqi
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...Conversely, enhancing the Iraqi population’s sense of autonomy has led to positive security results. In Ramadi, for example, Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, consulted sheiks and discovered that a major concern of potential police recruits was the safety of their families, whom al-Qaida frequently intimidated and threatened to murder. MacFarland’s brigade proposed that if tribal leaders encouraged locals to join the police force, the army could construct police stations in the locals’ neighborhoods. This active collaboration expanded the autonomy of tribal leaders...
...Fortunately, the ability to build emotional connections also can be used constructively. Equipping military officers with skills of affiliation has become just as important as equipping them with armored vehicles and machine guns. A single checkpoint guard who treats an important local Iraqi leader poorly may turn him from a friend of the U.S. to an enemy, thus instigating a chain of reduced support for an American presence...
...Iraqi population may be particularly sensitive to impinged autonomy given their history of oppression. And their continued sense of impinged autonomy can only increase support for anti-American insurgencies...
...Colonel H.R. McMaster, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in Tal Afar, realized that successful stabilization is based largely on the ability of U.S. troops to build affiliation with the Iraqi people. He implemented a new training program in Colorado, where soldiers conducted house-search scenarios and only obtained desired information after sitting down with occupants, drinking tea together, and asking culturally respectful questions. McMaster credits his strong and productive relations with local leaders in Iraq to this appreciative mentality, which he urged his brigade to adopt...
...speak not only of our American peers, who have made the ultimate sacrifice in their military service, but also of Iraqi peers who had far less choice concerning when and how American bombs and sectarian strife would wrench their lives, families, and futures apart. By some estimates, of the hundreds of thousands Iraqis killed in the conflict, a disproportionate number were youth. This is to say nothing of the millions more who have lost much hope for a stable, educated future as they were forced to flee into hasty exile...