Word: mahmudiyah
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...Iraqi army needs more equipment to function on its own. It needs time and support from both the Iraqi government and coalition forces." One Iraqi official even has his own timetable for American troops. "I need [American forces] here until 2015," said Sheikh Amash Saray, the head of the Mahmudiyah local council...
That's apparently the case with the region around the Iraqi town of Mahmudiyah, a district on Baghdad's rural southern fringe, which until recently was best known for its place in the Triangle of Death. Mahmudiyah was where five U.S. soldiers were killed and three kidnapped in May. But local Iraqis there are now trying to soften its violent reputation and even make Mahmudiyah and its surrounding political district a model for peace and reconciliation among Iraqis and with Coalition troops...
...political district of Mahmudiyah lies just south of metropolitan Baghdad and includes the violent urban centers of Yusifiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. It shares a rough-and-tumble neighborhood with Anbar to the west and Babil to the south. A mixed region of Shi'a and Sunni, city and country, the mostly agricultural region suffers all the sectarian, economic and political woes of the capital. While the region's Sunni and Shi'ite tribes battled each other for land and primacy, they found a common enemy in the U.S. troops stationed there. But that situation changed about four months...
...look at the graph [of attacks] after about April and it just falls. It's a free fall," said Maj. Austin Miller, head of the U.S. Army's civil affairs mission in the Mahmudiyah district. Military leaders credit the recent lull in violence to Sunni tribal leaders who earlier this year turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in response to its excesses. It dovetails with a movement that began a year ago in neighboring Anbar Province to the west and has since spread out from there along tribal lines...
...Kiowa scout helicopter. The two crewmen had died in the crash, but the militants who brought the helicopter down, apparently anticipating that a rescue would be attempted, had set up an IED ambush. A more sophisticated operation was mounted on May 12 by Islamic State fighters in rural Mahmudiyah, south of Baghdad. They attacked a U.S. patrol, killing five soldiers and capturing three others. They then planted IEDs in the adjoining palm groves, correctly believing that the military would launch a massive manhunt. One soldier was killed and three others were injured when an IED went off in a field...