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Neighborhood Watch … in a very bad neighborhood.
The Sunni Arab men who first came forward nearly two years ago to reject the insurgency and join the American-led fight to secure Iraq neighborhood by neighborhood call themselves the Awakening.
The Shiite-led government has rejected that name, and so, in an effort to strike a balance, U.S. officials have struggled ever since to find an appropriate moniker for the group that has become a principle ally and reason for the turning tide in Iraq.
First, U.S. officials called them the Neighborhood Watch. Then, Fixed Site Security. Then, Concerned Local Citizens. Two weeks ago, top commanders changed their name yet again. They are now known as Sons of Iraq — Abna Al-Iraq — or, in military shorthand: SOI.
The reason for the latest switch?
Their previous name translated poorly. The Arabic word used for “those who are concerned” — ma’aneen — can take on a meaning of worried, disquieted or discomforted.
Today, I visited members of this group, which now number roughly 80,000 across Iraq, at a checkpoint on a highway known for banditry in a remote region of western Iraq considered a safe haven for insurgents.
Their leader, Mohammed Al-Diab, said they were manning the checkpoint, set up by U.S. forces just yesterday, as a vanguard against terrorists raiding their farms and families to the south.
“This is considered the gate of terrorism,” he told me.
Carrying their own wood-stock rifles and AK-47s, and wearing traditional head dresses and dishdashas, they were hard to distinguish from the archetypal image of the insurgents U.S. forces are hunting.
Comments
By andy oplas
February 20, 2008 4:06 AM | Link to this
I am reading you now. Be careful out there in Anbar Province, mate!
andy
By andy oplas
February 20, 2008 4:11 AM | Link to this
I am reading you, Bobby Bob.
Be careful out there in Anbar Province.
Andy
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