SFC Marcus checks a young Iraqi girl's throat for strep in Wuerdiya, Iraq.
Photograph by Jeff Emanuel.

Wuerdiya, Iraq
THOUGH EASE IS AN extremely relative attribute in this case, hunting and killing the enemy in the Salman Pak region of Iraq (southeast of Baghdad) is, in fact, the easy part of the U.S. mission there. 'Terrain denial' artillery missions are staged in known al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) areas on a nightly basis, attack aviation assets are constantly scouring the area and firing on militant outposts, and, with the launching of the division-sized Operation Marne Huskey on August 15, major air-and-land offensives are being conducted in virtually every known insurgent stronghold and outpost in the region.

But fighting is what these soldiers have been trained for, and what they have been preparing--both mentally and physically--to do their entire careers. Very few soldiers have been trained to carry out nation-building or ambassadorial missions, and in the case of an area like Salman Pak, which has seen a negligible troop presence since the initial invasion, trust and rapport cannot be improved or built on, but rather must be created and constructed entirely from scratch. This is an infinitely more difficult (and time-consuming) process, but one which is absolutely essential to the coalition effort in Iraq. The key to making it happen is demonstrating, on a daily basis, that the coalition has the best interest of the Iraqi people--from security, to services, to medical care--at heart.

And there are newfound signs of success in the area just north of Salman Pak, along the road known to 3rd Brigade as "Route Wild," between the villages of Wuerdiya and Ja'ara. It all began with a phone call. During the first week of August, an Iraqi man who lived in the area, and whose brother was the sheik of the al Jabouri tribe, called Captain Rich Thompson, head of 3rd Brigade's Baker Company 1-15 Infantry and the local ground commander, and asked for a meeting. Tired of the persistent insurgent infighting in his area, the man wanted information on starting his tribe's own 'Concerned Citizens' brigade, to augment the National Police and to defend their land and their clan against terrorism.

Called "basically a thumb in the eye [of] a Maliki government that won't get its [act] together" by one officer I spoke with, the Concerned Citizens program, another brainchild of MNF-I commander General David Petraeus, puts ground-level security in the hands of the individual tribes and groups who need it most. The program allows for tribes to arm themselves and to conduct their own security operations and patrols, provided that they agree to wear easily identifiable uniforms and work with and respect the authority of the National Police and Coalition forces (in addition, members of the tribal security contingent must submit to the coalition's biometric identification database).

"I hope they're really serious about [this]," Thompson told me. "If we can get them going with their own security, and the other tribes around them can see what a good thing they have and decide that they want it too, then we could see a serious improvement in this area." The bottom line on the insurgency, said Thompson, a former Ranger noncommissioned officer, "is that I don't want them in my AO (area of operations). I don't care where they go, as long as they're not here--and, if everybody takes that attitude, Iraqis and soldiers alike, and works for that goal, then sooner or later there won't be any place for [the insurgents] to go."

At 4:00 PM on August 10th, Baker Company 1-15 pulled off of Route Wild and into the small neighborhood where the al Jabouri sheik and his brother lived. Dismounting the vehicles, Thompson and a squad of soldiers from Baker Co's 3rd Platoon moved slowly up the narrow, windy dirt road. "We're looking for a mosque," Thompson said, periodically checking his GPS to make sure that we were headed in the right direction and toward the agreed-upon meeting place.