Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [377]
But Iraq’s Sunnis were contemplating a major change in their strategy just as our military commanders were pursuing new tactics. In late 2005, our commanders had brought to bear new counterinsurgency tactics and forged alliances with Sunni tribal leaders in the western cities of Tal Afar and Qaim.23 Enterprising colonels such as H. R. McMaster and Sean MacFarland were forging new operational techniques and tactics and applying the art of counterinsurgency.24 U.S. troops were clearing neighborhoods infiltrated with insurgents and al-Qaida. They held the ground until Iraqi security forces were sufficiently capable of maintaining security. The yields were impressive in a part of Iraq that many had written off to the enemy.
Though the terrorists often invoked the lessons of Vietnam and Lebanon, they did not heed all of them. Unlike other successful insurgency movements, al-Qaida in Iraq and its many affiliated organizations did not offer the Iraqis the promise of a better life. Instead, they offered the Iraqi people brutality and terror. Their approach was to bully and intimidate the local people into submission. Al-Qaida’s vision was a kind of nihilism cloaked in the trappings of a twisted version of their religion.
The local population had an opportunity to see the kind of a future that al-Qaida would offer them and the rest of Iraq. Iraq’s Sunnis recognized the need to break with the Islamist insurgency and to seek the protection U.S. forces could provide from their violence-obsessed former allies in al-Qaida and from the retribution of Iraq’s Shia. The barbaric behavior of al-Qaida and its affiliated organizations had frayed their relations with Sunni tribes. Al-Qaida members were skilled in the arts of intimidation: They would “marry”—an al-Qaida euphemism for sexual assault—local women, push tribes off their land, and seize profitable activities traditionally under tribal purview. Rather than integrating with the Sunni tribes, al-Qaida sought to colonize Iraq’s western provinces and turn them into the “Islamic State of Iraq.” Raising revenues through smuggling and extortion, al-Qaida achieved tribal acquiescence by kidnapping, torturing, and murdering the tribal leaders and their families who stood in their way.
So in August 2006, even as some in the media were mistakenly proclaiming Anbar “lost” to the enemy, our military was actively negotiating with tribal sheikhs for them to turn against al-Qaida and join the side of the Iraqi government and our forces. In Anbar’s capital of Ramadi, Army officers were establishing small outposts in the heart of enemy territory, enduring fierce enemy fire in the process. They pressed ahead on reconstruction projects and began craing deals with the local sheikhs. If the sheikhs encouraged tribal members to join the police, Army commanders agreed to let them protect their own localities. Police recruits tripled in both June and in July. In August alone, there were close to one thousand new recruits.25
Part of the reason Sunni sheikhs were willing to change sides was their growing understanding that our forces would stay in Iraq only as long as necessary. In September 2006, a fledgling movement among Iraqi tribal sheikhs around Ramadi was starting to take shape, which became known as “the Awakening.”26 By October 2006, we were briefing the President on the Anbar tribal leaders leading the resistance.27 And by the end of 2006, this alliance, also called “the Sons of Iraq,