Word: iraqi
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...Counterinsurgency is all about the people," says Crider. And residents of the predominantly Sunni neighborhood called Dora don't trust the Iraqi government, believing that the Shi'ites who run it are controlled by Iran. They trust the Americans instead. "When you realize they think we are the government then we need to take the initiative. They think if we can launch a missile from the Persian Gulf and destroy Saddam's palaces we can do anything." Like throw a switch and provide 24-hour electricity across the Iraqi capital. They look at us, says Crider, and think...
...Even the Iraqi police call on Crider's men for help. The Americans have good rapport with neighborhood residents - while the police, staffed with outsiders, are generally mistrusted. And so one day the cops called in a panic. There had a been a kidnapping: someone was missing. What were they to do? Crider's men found out that the kidnapping was a case of older brothers defending a younger sibling from a bully by tying up the bully with string and tossing him into a school bathroom, where no one bothered to look for four hours...
Parliament usually receives pretty low marks from average Iraqis - it's not uncommon to hear them all referred to as a "bunch of thieves." But this piece of legislation has largely been welcomed. "It's the best law they've passed so far," says Ahmed Hashim Mohammad, an Iraqi army captain-turned-insurgent who now works on the U.S. payroll as a checkpoint leader in a neighborhood watch, part of the Sunni "awakening movement" that has been key to restoring order in al-Qaeda-infested areas...
...military currently holds about 25,000 detainees at its facilities in Iraq. More than 80% of the detainees are Sunni, according to the military. Roughly 24,000 other people, mostly Sunnis, are being held in Iraqi jails, where their fate remains uncertain. In December, Maliki's cabinet approved a draft law that could free thousands of these prisoners, many of whom were taken in during counter-terrorism sweeps flowing from surge operations. But the Parliament has yet to decide on the measure...
...part, the U.S. has been full of praise for the Iraqi parliament vote on Saturday. An official with the embassy in Baghdad says: "We don't see this so much as a vote on old policies than as a vote on Iraq's future," even though the vote was a clear reversal of policy introduced by Bush's hand-picked Iraq czar in 2003, L. Paul Bremer III. It was one of a handful of laws the U.S. was eager to see Iraq's Parliament tackle. Others are the oil law, the election law and a provincial powers...