© 2008 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

Rover’s rehab: ‘Walter Reed’ for combat dogs opens at Texas base Michelle Roberts, The Associated Press Photo by Eric Gay/AP Guests tour the new Department of Defense Military Working Dog Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio on Tuesday. SAN ANTONIO — A new $15 million veterinary hospital for four-legged military personnel opened Tuesday at Lackland Air Force Base, offering a long overdue facility that gives advanced medical treatment for combat-wounded dogs. Dogs working for all branches of the military and the Transportation Safety Administration are trained at the base to find explosive devices, drugs and land mines. Some 2,500 dogs are working with military units. Like servicemembers in combat, military dogs suffer from war wounds and routine health issues that need to be treated to ensure they can continue working. Dogs injured in Iraq or Afghanistan get emergency medical treatment on the battlefield and are flown to Germany for care. If necessary, they’ll fly on to San Antonio for more advanced treatment — much like wounded human personnel. “We act as the Walter Reed of the veterinary world,” said Army Col. Bob Vogelsang, hospital director, referring to the Washington military medical center that treats severely wounded troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The dogs can usually return to combat areas if they recover at the Military Working Dog Center, he said. Before the center opened, veterinarians treated and rehabilitated dogs in a cramped building that opened in 1968, when the military trained dogs for work in Vietnam. The hospital was already overloaded by Sept. 11, 2001, but since then, demand for military working dogs has jumped dramatically. They’re so short on dog breeds such as German shepherds, Labrador retrievers and Belgian Malinoises that Lackland officials have begun breeding puppies at the base. Lackland is training 750 dogs, which is nearly double the number of dogs there before the Sept. 11 attacks, Vogelsang said. To treat the trainees and injured working dogs, the new hospital has operating rooms, digital radiography, CT scanning equipment, an intensive care unit and rehab rooms with an underwater treadmill and exercise balls, among other features. A behavioral specialist has an office near the lobby. “This investment made sense … and somehow, we were able to convince others,” said retired Col. Larry Carpenter, who first heard complaints about the poor facilities in 1994 and later helped to launch the project. Training a military working dog takes about four months. With demand outstripping the number of dogs available, hospital and veterinary workers were trying to keep them healthy and working as long as possible, Vogelsang said. Working dogs usually enter training at 1 and a half- to 3-years-old, and most can work until they’re about 10, he said. Then, the military tries to adopt them out and “station them at Fort Living Room,” Vogelsang said.

© 2008 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

Navy trains Iraqi water patrol Unit keeping eye on crucial Haditha Dam By Jimmy Norris, Stars and Stripes Mideast edition, Friday, October 24, 2008 Photos by Jimmy Norris/S&S Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Gailenes, of Riverine Squadron 3, mans a .50-caliber machine gun while patrolling the waters adjacent to Haditha Dam. A local fisherman on Lake Qadisiyah shows his identification to Iraqi police officer Abdula Tif Rakan Ali during a patrol of the waters surrounding the Haditha Dam. A Small Unit Riverine Craft patrols the waters around Haditha Dam in Iraq. The Navy’s Riverine Squadron 3 has been training Iraqis to take over security of the waters in the area, specifically at the strategically important dam. HADITHA, Iraq — The Small Unit Riverine Craft pulls alongside a tiny fishing boat. Well-maintained and bristling with weapons, it makes the raggedy canoe look like a cheap toy. Fishermen lift up their shirts and pat themselves down to show they have no weapons before reaching for their identification and handing it to the Iraqi police who patrol Lake Qadisiyah alongside the Navy’s Riverine Squadron 3. They chat with the police for a few minutes before the SURC pushes off to continue on its patrol. It’s those little chats, say members of the U.S. unit RIVRON 3, which have led to caches of explosives, weapons and insurgents. And as Iraqis prepare to take over from U.S. forces in the area, they’re doing most of the talking. “It’s good to have the Iraqi police out here,” said Chief Petty Officer Robert Noe, one of two Riverine sailors who developed a training program for Iraqi river police. “A lot of them are from here so they know the locals. They know who belongs here and who doesn’t.” Training for the Iraqis began in early June. Since then, Noe said, 63 Iraqi police have graduated from a four-week course that taught them basic naval skills such as boat handling, navigation and knot tying. Maj. Hamad Kazal Husayn, chief of the Iraqi River Police, said there are currently 45 dedicated river police, though he expects to have 200 within the next year. So far the river police have conducted two solo patrols, using borrowed Zodiac inflatable boats, on Lake Qadisiyah, a man-made lake adjacent to Haditha Dam. The Iraqis still don’t have their own craft, but Husayn expects 25-foot, up-armored “Jon Boats” as soon as his government finishes negotiations with manufacturers. Husayn said his people are eager to do the job, and ready to start right now. “We’re very anxious to take over,” he said. The job they’re slated to take over is a crucial one — the dam supplies power to about one-third of the country, including western Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi. The river is home to numerous farming and fishing communities, and their camps dot the shores and sand bars of the lake. Damage to the dam would have “catastrophic” results for the country. Because of this, Riverines enforce a 2,000-meter buffer zone in the water around the dam. In recent months the zone has been harder to enforce as receding water levels caused by a five-year drought and dams in Syria and Turkey cause fishermen to chance going into the deeper waters closer to the dam, said RIVRON 3 Detachment 2 officer in charge Lt. j.g. Daniel Harkins. Harkins said for repeat offenders, his sailors have had to cut nets and confiscate boats. “We try to be as liberal as we can, but we still have to enforce the rules,” said Harkins. Also a security concern is the use of waterways as smuggling and escape routes for insurgents. RIVRON 3 sailors have turned up two caches of small arms and one cache of bomb-making materials during their six months on the dam. They’ve also detained three suspected insurgents, one of whom allegedly placed bombs along the routes leading to the dam for months. At the height of fighting in the area, when Marines still had responsibility for the rivers, insurgents frequently tried to use the waterways to escape after executing attacks. Things around the dam have quieted quite a bit since then, thanks largely to the “tribal awakening” that had sheiks calling for an end to local support of the insurgency, said Senior Chief Brian Korrigan. With violence cooling down in western Anbar, the Iraqis believe they are ready to take the lead in security operations at the dam, and to maintain relations with local fishermen. “We’re going to follow up with what coalition forces have been doing,” said Husayn. “We’re going to take care of security first and if we serve the community, they’ll cooperate with us.”

© 2008 Stars and Stripes. All Rights Reserved.

A new breed grabs reins in Anbar

U.S.-backed sheiks reshaping own areas and, potentially, Iraq’s future

By Sudarsan Raghavan

The Washington Post

updated 2:12 a.m. CT, Tues., Oct. 21, 2008

Sheik Jassim Muhammed al-Sweidawi prepares to go bird hunting at his Ramadi home. He is among a new generation of tribal leaders asserting influence across Sunni areas.

RAMADI, Iraq - As the day crossed into dusk, Jassim Muhammed al-Sweidawi sat on brown floor cushions, chain-smoking, calmly watching the tribesmen argue over blood money.

A man from the Dulaimi tribe had killed a man from the Jenabi tribe. The elders of both tribes could have sought justice in a provincial court. They could have conferred with traditional sheiks versed in centuries-old ways of resolving disputes. But they didn’t. They came to Sweidawi, a sunburned, American-backed chieftain who in less than two years had become the most powerful man in this patch of eastern Ramadi.

He asked the men if they trusted his authority. They nodded. Within minutes, he worked out a settlement. The men were not happy, but they also feared Sweidawi and needed his protection. “Your appreciation for me will not be forgotten,” the chieftain, 52, said after both men had kissed his cheeks.

“Sheik Jassim,” as his tribesmen call Sweidawi, is among a new generation of tribal leaders asserting influence across Sunni areas. They have won their respect by fighting Sunni insurgents of the al-Qaeda in Iraq group. With American money and support, they have brought a fragile order to Anbar province, once Iraq’s most violent theater, accomplishing in months what the U.S. military could not do in years.

But the rise of these sheiks, collectively called the Awakening, is already touching off new conflicts that could deepen without U.S. military backing for the movement. They have stripped traditional tribal leaders of influence. They have carved up Sunni areas into fiefdoms, imposing their views on law and society and weakening the authority of the Shiite-led central government. Divisions are emerging among the new breed of tribal leaders, even as they are challenging established Sunni religious parties for political dominance.

Their ascent reflects how the struggle for local and regional centers of power is increasingly shaping Iraq’s future. And their growing clout ensures that large segments of Iraq will remain influenced by tribal codes, rather than modern laws, posing an obstacle to the democratic foundations that many would like to see built here.

“No one can remove us,” Sweidawi said. Today, he claims to control much of his Albusoda tribe, numbering about 30,000.

Backing from the U.S.
Since its launch in Anbar in late 2006, the Awakening has spread to mostly Sunni-majority enclaves in Baghdad and other provinces as a means of Sunni self-defense. The U.S. military gave $300 monthly salaries to fighters, many of them former insurgents, to patrol areas and stop attacking American troops.

U.S. military officials have handed Awakening tribal leaders reconstruction contracts for their areas, building up their influence. They have assisted tribal operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq with airstrikes and other military and logistical support. On one day, Sweidawi recalled how U.S. officers promised to pave the road that led to his house.

American commanders credit the movement as key to the decline in violence; some believe it played a more significant role than the U.S. “surge” offensive of 30,000 troops last year.

This month, the U.S. military handed over to the government control over about half the Awakening groups, now totaling roughly 100,000 mostly Sunni fighters. But the government, increasingly confident that it can provide security on its own, has refused to enroll most Awakening members into the police or army. In recent weeks, Iraqi security forces have arrested some Awakening leaders who were former insurgents, out of fear they will take up arms against the government.

“There are good Awakening members. But there are others who have simply changed their T-shirt, who don’t want progress, who do not believe in a new Iraq,” said Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa party. “We don’t want these elements to infiltrate our security forces.”

U.S. commanders worry that their tactical successes could evaporate if Iraq’s leaders stop paying the Awakening fighters their salaries. “It could cause a fracture in this important program which would cause these guys to resort to violence,” said Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, the U.S. military commander in charge of Baghdad. “Because there’s always someone outside such as al-Qaeda and certain resistance groups who are willing to offer them a better deal. “

In Anbar, Sweidawi and other founding Awakening leaders insist they will never return to violence; 20,000 fighters have joined the police here. Most remain more loyal to their tribes than the government, deepening the movement’s control.

“I have no confidence in the Iraqi government,” Sweidawi said. “There’s a program to remove us from the security process in any way possible.”

Turning against insurgents
Slim, with a thick mustache and a polite manner, a father of 11, Sweidawi spent three decades in the Iraqi air force, maintaining jets. After the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, he ran a profitable business protecting commercial convoys in Anbar, where the Sunni insurgency began. His favorite pastime was hunting for birds on his family’s farm.

His critics say he was the ringleader of a group of highway bandits who stole cars. Sweidawi denies the accusation. The critics say that’s how he met Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the Awakening movement’s founder, who also had a reputation as a highway robber.

“Sheik Jassim is not educated. He’s not an original sheik of the Albusoda,” said Hamdi Mohammed al-Sweidawi, 45, who belongs to the same clan as the chieftain and teaches law at Anbar University. “Before al-Qaeda came, he was nothing.”

Sweidawi said he despised the U.S. occupation at first. The U.S. military, he said, alienated the tribes by its heavy-handed tactics and mass arrests of Sunni men suspected of ties to the insurgency.

Many of his tribesmen joined the insurgency. Nasir al-Jenabi, a senior al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, said in a telephone interview that Sweidawi allowed insurgents to use his territory as bases. “Jassim is the kind of person who always stands with the strongest,” Jenabi said. “When we were controlling Ramadi, he was pretending to be a nice guy who wanted to serve and satisfy us.”

Sweidawi concedes that he was “covering for the militants and not informing the Americans or local authorities.” But by 2006, he said, he began to view U.S. forces as the lesser enemy. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had overreached, carrying out beheadings and banning smoking, shaving and other behavior it considered un-Islamic.

In late 2006, during the holy month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents abducted seven of Sweidawi’s brothers and cousins from his family home. They were killed that day, their bodies dumped into the Euphrates River, which snakes through Ramadi.

“After that, I started chasing them in the streets and capturing them,” Sweidawi said.

Broken lines of succession
Backed by their American benefactors, the new tribal leaders, who included many former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, wrested territory from al-Qaeda in Iraq. They also ruptured ancient rites of succession. Taking over from a distant uncle, Abu Risha led his tribe until he was assassinated last year in a bombing. Raad Sabah Alwani, a burly, whiskey-drinking businessman, became his tribe’s leader. “We became sheiks because we use force,” said Alwani, at his heavily guarded mansion in Ramadi, where he openly displays pictures of himself with American commanders. “Iraq needs men who use force.”

More tribesmen joined Sweidawi’s fold, shifting their allegiance from their traditional leader, Sheik Mahmoud al-Jarbou, whose family had ruled Sweidawi’s tribe for three centuries. “Sheik Mahmoud played no role at all in the battlefield,” explained Maj. Gen. Hamid Hamadh al-Shoki, Ramadi’s former police chief. “Sheik Jassim restored security, and security is the base of everything here.”

Within weeks of launching his assault on al-Qaeda in Iraq, Sweidawi controlled the tribe, the second largest in Ramadi, and Jarbou quietly faded away. “Sheik Mahmoud is a weak man,” Sweidawi said.

Reached in Syria, Jarbou asserted that most of his tribe was still loyal to him, but acknowledged that his rival was trying to push him out. “He wants to take over someone else’s position. It’s not up to Jassim to evaluate me, it’s up to my people,” Jarbou said. “He’s one who likes dictatorship.”

Marine Maj. Adam Strickland, who works closely with the Awakening leaders, described Sweidawi as “a very influential individual” who is viewed as a key local ally. The U.S. military, he said, was “supporting his leadership.” Some American commanders have called Sweidawi “The Lion of Eastern Ramadi.”

Dispensing tribal justice
One day recently, Sweidawi’s handpicked, heavily armed men, including three sons, piled into a blue and white Iraqi police truck. Some wore hats emblazoned with the old Baath-era Iraqi flag, rejecting Iraq’s new flag. Sweidawi recalled he has survived 12 assassination attempts, including a bomb disguised as a gift that was delivered to his house.

They passed an empty field where they had fought a battle against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Seventy of his men died that day, said Sweidawi, with reverence. At the local electricity plant, employees welcomed the sheik as if he owned the facility. His tribesmen guard it and operate it. Sweidawi also controls nine police stations in his territory.

He later visited Juma Hussein, a 25-year-old unemployed man with no arms and legs — a victim of a roadside bomb. As he prepared to leave, he tucked a $100 bill into Hussein’s pocket. “If you need anything, let me know,” he said.

Sweidawi has brokered land grabs, murders, inheritance disputes, police complaints, even fights among teenagers. He emulates traditional sheiks, using centuries-old Bedouin customs based on honor and reciprocity to dispense justice. “No one can abandon or get rid of tribal law,” Sweidawi said. “The laws and the constitution are not permanent. They change with governments.”

But ultimately his authority rests on his ability to punish. He said he used to interrogate al-Qaeda in Iraq suspects in his large greeting room. Now he uses one of his police stations. How does he extricate information? “We have our ways,” he said, smiling coyly. Then he took off the thick, black cord made of camel’s skin that held his tribal headdress in place and said: “I was using this, beating them twice, three times.”

As he finished his sentence, he pulled out his black cellphone and played a video, set to haunting Arabic music, of insurgents executing a group of Iraqi policemen and soldiers. “One day, if I feel like showing mercy on them, this video will stop me. It will always remind me of their crimes,” Sweidawi said.

A move for political power
Sweidawi and other Awakening leaders seek to transform their anti-insurgent credentials into political clout. They plan to challenge the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political group and part of Maliki’s ruling coalition, in provincial elections scheduled for next year. At stake is the leadership of a rudderless Sunni minority that is still wrangling for a political toehold in the new Iraq.

“We know our people are better than them,” Sweidawi said. If the Awakening leaders triumph, they would infuse clan-based, secular values into a sectarian political system ruled by Shiite religious parties. In recent weeks, Islamic Party officials and offices have been attacked, as have Awakening leaders, raising fears of a wider intra-Sunni conflict.

The Awakening movement is itself rife with tension. In interviews, several Awakening founders said Ahmed Abu Risha, who took over the movement’s founding council after the death of his brother, was not qualified to lead because he had not fought against al-Qaeda in Iraq. Two influential founders left to form their own political parties. Sweidawi also recently had a falling-out with Abu Risha. “Unfortunately, the strongest and bravest do all the work and the fruits of our work is given to the cowards,” Sweidawi said.

He is consumed by one overriding question: What will happen if his American backers leave? He gloomily predicts chaos in the provincial elections. “There are al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the province. Our borders are still being infiltrated,” Sweidawi recently told Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, who commands U.S. forces in Anbar.

Sweidawi would like to see Americans stay on bases here for years, even decades, as they have in Japan and Germany. Like many Sunnis, he fears that his country could fall under the influence of Iran’s Shiite theocracy, which has forged close ties with many Iraqi Shiite leaders.

“If the Americans were not here, Iran will stretch to the Jordanian border,” Sweidawi said.

In a motorized canoe, sliding slowly along the Euphrates, Sweidawi was recently keeping watch over his tribe and his land. “Evil exists everywhere,” he said, squinting at clusters of tall reeds in the blazing sun.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27288456/page/2/

Multi-National Corps – Iraq
Public Affairs Office, Camp Victory
APO AE 09342

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
RELEASE No. 20081020-06
Oct. 20, 2008

Conference reviews progress, looks to future success

Multi-National Division – Center

FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU, Iraq – Military and provincial leaders responsible for reconstruction efforts in North Babil participated in a brigade-level Civil Military Operations Conference here Oct. 16 and 17.

The meeting comes 12 months into the deployment of 4th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, giving its civil affairs representatives a chance to reflect on accomplishments made over the past year. Using lessons learned, they will be able to pass on knowledge for their replacements to build upon in the future.

“Everything we do here is a continuum,” said Maj. Kimberly Peeples, deputy team leader for the North Babil embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team.

The North Babil ePRT is a group embedded with military civil affairs to assist with rebuilding projects in the area. It brings stability to the local population by helping with construction projects, education, local economy and governance. The meeting offered the ePRT to meet with 4th BCT assets, members of the U.S. Agencies for International Development and the Corps of Engineers.

“We talked about today bringing that coordination closer,” said Peeples. “The key is communication and coordination as we move forward in this vertical and horizontal kind of integration that all these agencies are doing.”

The conference was split into two days to cover topics in both governance and economics. During this span, the parties involved discussed the Iraqi Government budget, project management, capacity building, the province’s finances and funding, ongoing projects and contracting.

In order for that success and those projects to continue, the meeting allowed the current ePRT to communicate with the incoming Civil Affairs unit that will assume many of the ePRT’s current responsibilities.

“The benefit (of this meeting) for me was to get situational awareness as to what the current operating picture for civil military operations looks like cross the entire brigade area,” said Maj. Rich Brown, civil affairs company commander of Company B, currently under the 403rd CA Battalion.

Brown’s company will arrive in Babil in the coming months, and he said his future goal is to leave this area in even better condition than he receives it..

There are several major goals in place to help improve Babil’s capacity-building efforts, but one stood out in particular.

“At our level (the key) is just empowering the Iraqis and doing some basic things we know best, which are leadership, community development, decision making, you know, just some basic skills that the Army is really well poised to do,” Peeples said.

Last One Turn Out the Lights: Marines Quietly Begin Leaving Bases in Iraqi Cities

Friday , October 17, 2008

By Jennifer Griffin

WASHINGTON — 

When Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly deployed to Iraq in February, the violence had fallen so low in Anbar province that he began figuring out how to start closing bases and prepare to go home.In the last 10 months the Marines in Fallujah have done what was unthinkable before the surge began — they have quietly transferred out of one of Anbar province’s largest cities. FOX News has learned in an exclusive interview with Kelly from Fallujah that 80 percent of the move is complete. In February there were 8,000 Marines living at Fallujah base. Now there are about 3,000 left. By Nov. 14 there will be none.

“We will shut down the command function here and I will move; my staff has already started to move,” Kelly, the commander of Multinational Force-West, told FOX News in an exclusive interview via satellite. “We will turn the lights off here.”

They will hand the Fallujah base over to their Iraqi counterparts on Nov. 14, having relocated themselves and thousands of combat vehicles to the desert base of Al Asad to the west. Marines will no longer be seen in city centers such as Fallujah — a major step toward leaving Iraq, and one step closer to Iraq’s goal of having U.S. troops out of its population centers by mid-2009 — one of the key points enshrined in the Status of Forces Agreement being reviewed on Capitol Hill today.

On Wednesday, to little fanfare, the Marines quietly closed down Al Qaim base near the Syrian border. Now it is run by Iraqis.

In Fallujah, where the U.S. Marines once had three large mess halls to feed troops, they are now down to one. The Marines have quietly disassembled the entire infrastructure of the base.

“We probably had several thousand of those large metal containers — tractor-trailer containers,” Kelly said. “I bet we don’t have 200 of them here now.”

Of the thousands of vehicles once parked at the base, now there are only 300 left. Their transfer occurred at night, between 9 p.m. and 5 a.m., over the past 10 months so as not to disturb Iraqi drivers and clog the roads.

They dubbed it “Operation Rudy Giuliani” because they were cleaning the streets up and returning Fallujah to normalcy — taking down barbed wire and tearing down checkpoints and Jersey walls that made Anbar look like a war zone.

“There is almost no barbed wire left anywhere in Fallujah,” Kelly said. An Iraqi no longer sees barbed wire when traveling in and around the city.

Between 300 and 400 concrete barriers that divided the city were removed by Navy Seabees.

One of the big changes Kelly made when he took command in Anbar was to remove fixed checkpoints, and Iraqi vehicles no longer had to pull off to the side when a military convoy was on the road. His troops risked car bombs, but the gamble paid off in what had once been Iraq’s most dangerous province. The new road rules instantly lowered the tension between military and locals. Soon he transitioned to moving military convoys only at night, so they would not encounter locals. This also stymied many of the insurgents laying IEDs or roadside bombs, which they often had done at night.

Another change for the better since Kelly arrived in February: He pushed the central government to provide more fuel to the people of Anbar, so the mostly Sunni population is now happier. In February, Anbaris were receiving only 8 percent of their allocation of fuel from the central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Now it’s 90 percent — eliminating one of their main gripes.

But perhaps the biggest sign that the situation has changed for the better for Sunnis living in Anbar: With the help of the Marines and the Iraqi police, nearly 100 percent of the eligible voting population were registered a month ago to vote in upcoming provincial elections.

“They seem to add another political party every day,” Kelly said. “We didn’t have a single security violation of any kind. They’re at least going to give the electoral process a shot … at least going to give democracy a chance.”

The Sunnis, who fueled a large part of Iraq’s insurgency, boycotted the last election for Parliament with only 3 percent of Sunnis participating. Now they feel they have a stake in the government.

“This is an amazing indicator as to where this province is,” Kelly said.

He and the Marines no longer use violence as an indicator of how much progress they have made. Two years ago they had 400 attacks — roadside bombs or shootings — at U.S. forces every week. In February it was down to 30 attacks per week. Now it is down to under 12 attacks per week. There hasn’t been a Marine death in a few months.

Troop numbers have dropped, as well — down by 40 percent since February. About 26,000 Marines still serve in Anbar.

“In Anbar there is no longer an insurgency,” Kelly said. “Unless someone does something stupid (for instance, if the Coalition were to accidentally kill a large number of civilians), this place will not go back to the way it was.”

In football terms, Kelly says, the Marines are “in the last 10 yards of this fight.”

“Could it go back? I don’t think so,” he said firmly. “We are winning this thing.”