Word: tribalization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...against them, the people of Ramadi Tuesday invited U.S. forces to watch a massive parade - albeit one so tightly secured that no pedestrian traffic got close to it. The almost surreal, two-hour martial procession was led by the city's children to commemorate the martyred leader of a tribal revolt that has virtually silenced al-Qaeda in Anbar Province. It gave the Baghdad government a photo-op to make points about national unity, and so the Shi'a dominated government sent a representative to Sunni Ramadi. "With unity, victory is possible," said Iraqi Defense Adviser Mowaffak al Rubaei, clearly...
...Thursday, 32 tribal sheiks from the region - mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites - signed a groundbreaking accord pledging to work together to curb extremism and to shake the sectarian violence that has rent the region since the U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. The rare gathering at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel, in the heart of the Green Zone, was the culmination of months of delicate negotiations and a welcome breakthrough for U.S. troops who've been fighting and dying there for the past 14 months. "You know the saying: that all politics is local. Well you really...
...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...
...Tribal leaders approached the soldiers, who in turn notified civilian leaders, including the local Embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team, a State Department-sponsored unit of development and security experts working in the region since early this year. The EPRT turned to the U.S. Institute for Peace, a body created by Congress in the 1990s, to assemble the tribes, local Iraqi Army and local political leaders into working groups to come up with a plan. A delegation even traveled to Amman, Jordan, to convince exiled former members of the ousted Ba'ath regime...
Gradually Shi'ite tribes, themselves tired of the most extreme elements of their own sectarian militias, joined the process. The result was the document signed Thursday, which identified local governance, rule of law, the local economy, "social well being," and security as its main priorities. Wearing tribal robes and head scarves, the 32 sheiks signed the document and shook hands with Iraqi political and military leaders in a grip-and-grin ceremony easily reminiscent of an American college graduation...