Uncle Chô
07-29-2003, 10:50 AM
SALEH, a stocky taxi driver, was shot in the ankle when U.S. soldiers fired on protesters gathered at a school across the street from his house. His brother was killed trying to rescue one of the demonstrators. His wife, mother and another brother also were wounded by the barrage of American bullets.
His honor, he insisted after the April 28 incident, would only be redeemed by getting even with “the criminal Americans” — an attitude that was widely shared here, and acted upon, by relatives of other people shot by U.S. forces.
Alarmed at attacks by angry relatives, U.S. Army officers in Fallujah did something unusual for the American military but common in rural Iraq. In an effort to ease the desire for revenge, they delivered formal apologies to local tribal sheiks and paid blood money for every dead and injured person deemed not to be a combatant.
The compensation payments — $1,500 for a death and $500 for an injury — are regarded by Fallujah’s political, tribal and religious leaders as one of several bold strategies employed by U.S. commanders here over the past few weeks to appease a city brimming with discontent. Officers have ordered soldiers to knock on doors before conducting most residential searches. They have also permitted the mayor to field a 75-member armed militia and doled out nearly $2 million on municipal improvements instead of waiting for private American contractors to arrive.
In the most significant concession, the commanders have pulled soldiers out of every fixed location in the city, including the police station and city hall, leaving a police force run by Iraqis to man checkpoints and guard key installations.
OUTCOME STILL TO BE SEEN
It is uncertain whether the effort to alleviate tensions here by the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division will succeed. Some officers said they feared the pullout of troops was a dangerous retrenchment and the product of a deal with local leaders that they know little about. But in Fallujah’s mosques, markets and main streets, the unbridled anger and hostility that characterized the past three months have given way to a nervous peace, prompting both Iraqis and Americans here to suggest that the once-infamous city could serve as a national example of how to make the U.S. occupation more palatable to Iraqis.
In the turquoise-domed Abdelaziz Samarrai mosque, prayer leader Mekki Hussein Kubeisi used to rail against the presence of U.S. troops in this city. On Friday, he urged hundreds of men in ankle-length tunics to “be patient” and not to tolerate people who resort to violence.
At city hall, the U.S.-endorsed mayor, Taha Bedawi, said residents “have become much happier because they don’t see as many American Army vehicles on the streets.”
“The tension is reducing every day,” he said. “We are seeing a change. People are starting to realize that the soldiers are not here to occupy Fallujah forever — they’re here to help us rebuild.”
ven Saleh, whose right foot was amputated after the school shooting, has mellowed. “I have nothing against them now,” he said as he showed off five crisp $100 bills he received from the U.S. military by way of the mayor.
He said that U.S. soldiers have visited his house four times — to apologize, to provide a medical check-up and twice to assess damages to his property. “They’ve changed my opinions,” said Saleh, 41, who hobbles around on crutches. “I used to hate them, but now I realize they made a mistake and they really want to help us.”
‘SIMPLE FIXES’
On Fallujah’s scorching streets and in its ubiquitous mosques, most people are not as optimistic as the mayor or as forgiving as Saleh. Although some quietly express gratitude to the U.S. military for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, others continue to express deep skepticism about U.S. motives in Iraq. Most scoff at the notion that American soldiers need to remain in their country to ensure that Hussein’s Baath Party does not return to power.
“Nobody wants the Americans to stay,” said Khalid Yassin, an elementary school teacher. But he and several others said they were willing to take up U.S. commanders on a deal they have implicitly offered to the people of Fallujah: tolerance for an occasional military patrol, so long as troops remain quartered outside the city.
If they don’t bother us,” said shopkeeper Jassim Mohammed Halbousi, “we won’t bother them.”
In early June, a few days after arriving in Fallujah, the 2nd Brigade’s commanders decided to visit the city’s tribal and religious leaders. They gathered on sofas in the mayor’s spacious office, with soldiers in camouflage on one side and sheiks in floor-length tunics on the other. The discussion dragged on for three hours.
“Nobody had bothered to meet with the sheiks and the imams before we came into town,” said Lt. Col. Eric Wesley, the brigade’s executive officer. “Nobody had really talked to the people.”
The city had been seething since April 28, when soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a group of protesters at the school across from Saleh’s house. Fifteen people were killed and more than three dozen were wounded in what the military called an act of self-defense. Many residents believed that the demonstrators were unarmed, although local leaders concede that a handful of Hussein loyalists who had infiltrated the demonstration might have shot at the soldiers. The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Two days later, during another protest, U.S. troops said they came under fire again, prompting them to shoot into a crowd and kill two more people. From that point, exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks became almost daily occurrences.
With violence on the rise, U.S. commanders in Baghdad decided in early June to dispatch the 2nd Brigade to Fallujah. The 2nd Brigade had been one of the units that spearheaded the advance on Baghdad during the war.
The sheiks and clerics wanted the brigade commander to pull his troops out of the city. That request was immediately rejected. But instead of storming out, the sheiks made a series of alternative demands. They asked that tanks not be driven through residential neighborhoods at night. They beseeched soldiers not to frisk women or clerics. And they insisted that searches of cars and homes be conducted without a presumption of guilt that led to soldiers knocking down doors and dragging out occupants in handcuffs.
The officers agreed to most of the demands. But Capt. John Ives, a military intelligence officer who became the key interlocutor between the local leadership and the brigade commanders, said they warned the sheiks that the moment a woman or a cleric pulled a gun on soldiers, or the occupants of a house attempted to resist a search, “all bets would be off.”
“We asked ourselves, ‘Do we really need to drive tanks at 2 a.m. Do we really need to search the women? Do we really need to pat down the clerics?’ ” he said. “It was just a lot of simple fixes.”
In their initial meetings with brigade commanders, the sheiks and clerics raised the idea of paying relatives of people who had been shot by U.S. troops. “We are a very traditional society,” said Khamis Hassnawi, the influential leader of the Bu Issa tribe. “If your relative is killed and there is no compensation, many people believe they are bound by honor to take revenge.”
To Wesley and others in the brigade, paying such blood money was without precedent for the U.S. military. “We did not want the compensation to be seen as an acknowledgement of fault or failure,” Wesley said. “And there was this worry that people back home would say, ‘Why are you paying these bad guys?’ ”
But evidence supported what the sheiks and clerics were saying. One attacker killed by soldiers, for example, was apparently motivated by revenge. Officers discovered he was a relative of a man killed in the school shooting. As part of its efforts to stem the attacks on U.S. forces, officers opted to make the payments. Fearful of controversy and possible rejection from relatives, the brigade gave a lump-sum to the mayor and asked him to hand out the cash.
“It was a tough thing to do,” Wesley said. “We had to reach out and put ourselves in their culture.”
Fallujah was deemed too unsafe for the U.S. Agency for International Development and Pentagon-funded reconstruction contractors to operate, so the brigade tapped a discretionary fund for commanders, using $2 million for repairs and improvements around the town. The 3rd Infantry’s Engineer Brigade purchased ceiling fans for schools, air-conditioning units for the hospital and a new generator to increase output at the water-pumping station. U.S. officers and local leaders contend the spending has won over many skeptical residents.
Given the city’s notoriety, Wesley said the 2nd Brigade was given “a lot of autonomy and a lot of tools to get Fallujah up and running.”
“We came in here with both a stick and a very large carrot,” he said.
ADAPTING TO LOCAL CULTURE
When the 2nd Brigade arrived, the prevailing view among U.S. commanders was that the attacks were being conducted almost exclusively by Hussein loyalists who had the support of other residents. Fallujah, a city of 250,000, is largely made up of Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq who received privileged treatment under Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government.
Over time, the brigade’s officers came to realize Fallujah was more traditional than Baathist. Much of the animosity toward U.S. forces was driven by perceived slights of tribal and religious traditions. Several people here said attempts to search women prompted so much humiliation for male relatives that some of them joined the mobs throwing rocks and shooting at U.S. convoys.
The brigade commander, Col. Joseph DiSalvo, said he concluded that the best way to respond would be for the military to do something it had not done often in Iraq: back down. He reasoned that adopting a less aggressive posture, even if it gave the false impression of a retreat, would mollify the city’s residents and make it less hospitable for Baath Party holdouts.
“It was like making the first move in a game of chicken,” Ives said. “We figured that if we pulled back a bit, they would follow.”
By mid-July, the brigade began vacating the 22 sites in the city where soldiers had been stationed around the clock. Although soldiers still patrol inside the city, the job of ensuring general public order now is the responsibility of three different local, U.S.-trained security agencies: A 400-man police force, a 200-member contingent of armed guards and 75 militiamen who work for the mayor.
DiSalvo authorized the creation of the militia, called the Fallujah Protection Force, because of concerns that the police department was not prepared to handle municipal security on its own. Although the officers had been trained, uniformed and equipped by the U.S. military, many were veterans of the old police force who had become accustomed to sitting around the station instead of patrolling. “It will take time to change that culture,” DiSalvo said. Instead of waiting for the police to adjust, the brigade allowed the mayor to assemble a protection force, drawn from the city’s largest tribes. Ives organized training for the group, whose members now walk around with AK-47 assault rifles and green FPF armbands.
“You have to bend with the culture,” Ives said. “In America, this would be illegal. But here, it’s natural.”
The reaction of people in the city has been cautious. Many who so ardently wanted American troops to leave now express deep reservations about the decision to allow the mayor — who was not popularly elected — to have his own militia. “This is the same thing Saddam did,” said Nadir Mukheef, the owner of a juice bar. Bedawi, a former chamber of commerce president who fled to neighboring Syria last year after receiving death threats from Baath enforcers because of his refusal to join Hussein’s party, was appointed mayor in mid-April by a council of tribal leaders. Since then, he has ingratiated himself with the U.S. military, officers said. The mayor is almost alone among people in Fallujah in regretting the departure of U.S. troops. “I don’t support it at all,” he said. “The Americans left too soon.” His relationship with the Americans has prompted the ire of many residents. “Nobody supports him,” said Ibrahim Ali, a security guard. “He’s close to the Americans not for the city’s benefit, but for his benefit.” Bedawi, who dresses in a suit and tie, insisted that his close relationship with the U.S. military was in the best interests of the city. “They have the power. They have the money,” he said. “I have to deal with them.”
Ives said he thought it would be too destabilizing to hold local elections in Fallujah right away, even though many other cities and towns across the country are electing new leaders. “He needs an opportunity to prove himself first,” Ives said of Bedawi. “If we had a vote now, you’d have a bunch of anti-American strongmen win.”
Within the brigade, Ives said, there are still arguments about whether the strategy to withdraw troops and empower the mayor will work. But he insisted that it is a risk worth taking.
“They wanted the chance to run the city,” he said. “We should give it to them.”
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
At least someone starts to realize that respecting the "ennemy" is the key elements to win a battle... It won't solve all the problems within a day but little changes in behaviour like that are -in my opinion- a major step toward a better life for the troops deployed and will cool down the current situation.
His honor, he insisted after the April 28 incident, would only be redeemed by getting even with “the criminal Americans” — an attitude that was widely shared here, and acted upon, by relatives of other people shot by U.S. forces.
Alarmed at attacks by angry relatives, U.S. Army officers in Fallujah did something unusual for the American military but common in rural Iraq. In an effort to ease the desire for revenge, they delivered formal apologies to local tribal sheiks and paid blood money for every dead and injured person deemed not to be a combatant.
The compensation payments — $1,500 for a death and $500 for an injury — are regarded by Fallujah’s political, tribal and religious leaders as one of several bold strategies employed by U.S. commanders here over the past few weeks to appease a city brimming with discontent. Officers have ordered soldiers to knock on doors before conducting most residential searches. They have also permitted the mayor to field a 75-member armed militia and doled out nearly $2 million on municipal improvements instead of waiting for private American contractors to arrive.
In the most significant concession, the commanders have pulled soldiers out of every fixed location in the city, including the police station and city hall, leaving a police force run by Iraqis to man checkpoints and guard key installations.
OUTCOME STILL TO BE SEEN
It is uncertain whether the effort to alleviate tensions here by the 2nd Brigade of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division will succeed. Some officers said they feared the pullout of troops was a dangerous retrenchment and the product of a deal with local leaders that they know little about. But in Fallujah’s mosques, markets and main streets, the unbridled anger and hostility that characterized the past three months have given way to a nervous peace, prompting both Iraqis and Americans here to suggest that the once-infamous city could serve as a national example of how to make the U.S. occupation more palatable to Iraqis.
In the turquoise-domed Abdelaziz Samarrai mosque, prayer leader Mekki Hussein Kubeisi used to rail against the presence of U.S. troops in this city. On Friday, he urged hundreds of men in ankle-length tunics to “be patient” and not to tolerate people who resort to violence.
At city hall, the U.S.-endorsed mayor, Taha Bedawi, said residents “have become much happier because they don’t see as many American Army vehicles on the streets.”
“The tension is reducing every day,” he said. “We are seeing a change. People are starting to realize that the soldiers are not here to occupy Fallujah forever — they’re here to help us rebuild.”
ven Saleh, whose right foot was amputated after the school shooting, has mellowed. “I have nothing against them now,” he said as he showed off five crisp $100 bills he received from the U.S. military by way of the mayor.
He said that U.S. soldiers have visited his house four times — to apologize, to provide a medical check-up and twice to assess damages to his property. “They’ve changed my opinions,” said Saleh, 41, who hobbles around on crutches. “I used to hate them, but now I realize they made a mistake and they really want to help us.”
‘SIMPLE FIXES’
On Fallujah’s scorching streets and in its ubiquitous mosques, most people are not as optimistic as the mayor or as forgiving as Saleh. Although some quietly express gratitude to the U.S. military for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, others continue to express deep skepticism about U.S. motives in Iraq. Most scoff at the notion that American soldiers need to remain in their country to ensure that Hussein’s Baath Party does not return to power.
“Nobody wants the Americans to stay,” said Khalid Yassin, an elementary school teacher. But he and several others said they were willing to take up U.S. commanders on a deal they have implicitly offered to the people of Fallujah: tolerance for an occasional military patrol, so long as troops remain quartered outside the city.
If they don’t bother us,” said shopkeeper Jassim Mohammed Halbousi, “we won’t bother them.”
In early June, a few days after arriving in Fallujah, the 2nd Brigade’s commanders decided to visit the city’s tribal and religious leaders. They gathered on sofas in the mayor’s spacious office, with soldiers in camouflage on one side and sheiks in floor-length tunics on the other. The discussion dragged on for three hours.
“Nobody had bothered to meet with the sheiks and the imams before we came into town,” said Lt. Col. Eric Wesley, the brigade’s executive officer. “Nobody had really talked to the people.”
The city had been seething since April 28, when soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division opened fire on a group of protesters at the school across from Saleh’s house. Fifteen people were killed and more than three dozen were wounded in what the military called an act of self-defense. Many residents believed that the demonstrators were unarmed, although local leaders concede that a handful of Hussein loyalists who had infiltrated the demonstration might have shot at the soldiers. The shooting set off a cycle of violence that wracked the city for weeks. Two days later, during another protest, U.S. troops said they came under fire again, prompting them to shoot into a crowd and kill two more people. From that point, exchanges of gunfire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks became almost daily occurrences.
With violence on the rise, U.S. commanders in Baghdad decided in early June to dispatch the 2nd Brigade to Fallujah. The 2nd Brigade had been one of the units that spearheaded the advance on Baghdad during the war.
The sheiks and clerics wanted the brigade commander to pull his troops out of the city. That request was immediately rejected. But instead of storming out, the sheiks made a series of alternative demands. They asked that tanks not be driven through residential neighborhoods at night. They beseeched soldiers not to frisk women or clerics. And they insisted that searches of cars and homes be conducted without a presumption of guilt that led to soldiers knocking down doors and dragging out occupants in handcuffs.
The officers agreed to most of the demands. But Capt. John Ives, a military intelligence officer who became the key interlocutor between the local leadership and the brigade commanders, said they warned the sheiks that the moment a woman or a cleric pulled a gun on soldiers, or the occupants of a house attempted to resist a search, “all bets would be off.”
“We asked ourselves, ‘Do we really need to drive tanks at 2 a.m. Do we really need to search the women? Do we really need to pat down the clerics?’ ” he said. “It was just a lot of simple fixes.”
In their initial meetings with brigade commanders, the sheiks and clerics raised the idea of paying relatives of people who had been shot by U.S. troops. “We are a very traditional society,” said Khamis Hassnawi, the influential leader of the Bu Issa tribe. “If your relative is killed and there is no compensation, many people believe they are bound by honor to take revenge.”
To Wesley and others in the brigade, paying such blood money was without precedent for the U.S. military. “We did not want the compensation to be seen as an acknowledgement of fault or failure,” Wesley said. “And there was this worry that people back home would say, ‘Why are you paying these bad guys?’ ”
But evidence supported what the sheiks and clerics were saying. One attacker killed by soldiers, for example, was apparently motivated by revenge. Officers discovered he was a relative of a man killed in the school shooting. As part of its efforts to stem the attacks on U.S. forces, officers opted to make the payments. Fearful of controversy and possible rejection from relatives, the brigade gave a lump-sum to the mayor and asked him to hand out the cash.
“It was a tough thing to do,” Wesley said. “We had to reach out and put ourselves in their culture.”
Fallujah was deemed too unsafe for the U.S. Agency for International Development and Pentagon-funded reconstruction contractors to operate, so the brigade tapped a discretionary fund for commanders, using $2 million for repairs and improvements around the town. The 3rd Infantry’s Engineer Brigade purchased ceiling fans for schools, air-conditioning units for the hospital and a new generator to increase output at the water-pumping station. U.S. officers and local leaders contend the spending has won over many skeptical residents.
Given the city’s notoriety, Wesley said the 2nd Brigade was given “a lot of autonomy and a lot of tools to get Fallujah up and running.”
“We came in here with both a stick and a very large carrot,” he said.
ADAPTING TO LOCAL CULTURE
When the 2nd Brigade arrived, the prevailing view among U.S. commanders was that the attacks were being conducted almost exclusively by Hussein loyalists who had the support of other residents. Fallujah, a city of 250,000, is largely made up of Sunni Muslims, a minority in Iraq who received privileged treatment under Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government.
Over time, the brigade’s officers came to realize Fallujah was more traditional than Baathist. Much of the animosity toward U.S. forces was driven by perceived slights of tribal and religious traditions. Several people here said attempts to search women prompted so much humiliation for male relatives that some of them joined the mobs throwing rocks and shooting at U.S. convoys.
The brigade commander, Col. Joseph DiSalvo, said he concluded that the best way to respond would be for the military to do something it had not done often in Iraq: back down. He reasoned that adopting a less aggressive posture, even if it gave the false impression of a retreat, would mollify the city’s residents and make it less hospitable for Baath Party holdouts.
“It was like making the first move in a game of chicken,” Ives said. “We figured that if we pulled back a bit, they would follow.”
By mid-July, the brigade began vacating the 22 sites in the city where soldiers had been stationed around the clock. Although soldiers still patrol inside the city, the job of ensuring general public order now is the responsibility of three different local, U.S.-trained security agencies: A 400-man police force, a 200-member contingent of armed guards and 75 militiamen who work for the mayor.
DiSalvo authorized the creation of the militia, called the Fallujah Protection Force, because of concerns that the police department was not prepared to handle municipal security on its own. Although the officers had been trained, uniformed and equipped by the U.S. military, many were veterans of the old police force who had become accustomed to sitting around the station instead of patrolling. “It will take time to change that culture,” DiSalvo said. Instead of waiting for the police to adjust, the brigade allowed the mayor to assemble a protection force, drawn from the city’s largest tribes. Ives organized training for the group, whose members now walk around with AK-47 assault rifles and green FPF armbands.
“You have to bend with the culture,” Ives said. “In America, this would be illegal. But here, it’s natural.”
The reaction of people in the city has been cautious. Many who so ardently wanted American troops to leave now express deep reservations about the decision to allow the mayor — who was not popularly elected — to have his own militia. “This is the same thing Saddam did,” said Nadir Mukheef, the owner of a juice bar. Bedawi, a former chamber of commerce president who fled to neighboring Syria last year after receiving death threats from Baath enforcers because of his refusal to join Hussein’s party, was appointed mayor in mid-April by a council of tribal leaders. Since then, he has ingratiated himself with the U.S. military, officers said. The mayor is almost alone among people in Fallujah in regretting the departure of U.S. troops. “I don’t support it at all,” he said. “The Americans left too soon.” His relationship with the Americans has prompted the ire of many residents. “Nobody supports him,” said Ibrahim Ali, a security guard. “He’s close to the Americans not for the city’s benefit, but for his benefit.” Bedawi, who dresses in a suit and tie, insisted that his close relationship with the U.S. military was in the best interests of the city. “They have the power. They have the money,” he said. “I have to deal with them.”
Ives said he thought it would be too destabilizing to hold local elections in Fallujah right away, even though many other cities and towns across the country are electing new leaders. “He needs an opportunity to prove himself first,” Ives said of Bedawi. “If we had a vote now, you’d have a bunch of anti-American strongmen win.”
Within the brigade, Ives said, there are still arguments about whether the strategy to withdraw troops and empower the mayor will work. But he insisted that it is a risk worth taking.
“They wanted the chance to run the city,” he said. “We should give it to them.”
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
At least someone starts to realize that respecting the "ennemy" is the key elements to win a battle... It won't solve all the problems within a day but little changes in behaviour like that are -in my opinion- a major step toward a better life for the troops deployed and will cool down the current situation.