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When U.S. strategy in Iraq called for pulling American forces back to large, heavily protected bases last year, Army Col. Sean MacFarland was moving in the opposite direction. He built small, more vulnerable combat outposts in Ramadi's most dangerous neighborhoods — places where al-Qaeda had taken root.
"I was going the wrong way down a one-way street," MacFarland says.
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Mains acknowledges that in the current Army, "not every brigade or battalion commander has gotten that." He says MacFarland, whose brigade returned to its home base here in Germany in February, "really understood this is an argument between us and the insurgents."
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In Ramadi, MacFarland embraced the freedom and accepted risk.
"I had a lot of flexibility, so I ran with it," he says.
He lacked the number of troops required for a large offensive. The combat outposts allowed him to secure Ramadi "a chunk at a time," he says, adding that he pursued the sheiks because of their "leverage" over the population.
The brigade, which commanded about 5,500 soldiers and Marines, immediately began building combat outposts in Ramadi.
"We did it where al-Qaeda was strongest," MacFarland says. The outposts housed U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and civil affairs teams.
It was a risky strategy that put U.S. soldiers in daily battles with insurgents.
The brigade lost 95 soldiers; another 600 suffered wounds over the course of its tour in Iraq.
Taking troops out of heavily fortified bases as MacFarland did often produces results but increases risk, says Hy Rothstein, a retired Special Forces officer who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
MacFarland put a battalion under Lt. Col. V.J. Tedesco in the southern part of the city, where al-Qaeda fighters were concentrated.
Before the battalion arrived, that part of the city "was largely off-limits to coalition forces," Tedesco said at a briefing for the Army Lessons Learned team last week.
His battalion lost 25 tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and trucks to roadside bombs as they began patrolling and setting up bases.
"We just absorbed IEDs," Tedesco said, referring to roadside bombs.
MacFarland's brigade didn't wait until a neighborhood was entirely secure before launching construction projects, recruiting police and trying to establish a government. Lt. Col. John Tien, commander of 2nd Battalion, 37th Armor, says the brigade was "aggressive" about pushing ahead on projects as soldiers were establishing security.
By the time the unit returned to Germany, the brigade had built 18 combat outposts in and around Ramadi.
The combat outposts helped reduce violence last summer, but the brigade wasn't close to winning over the population, an essential part of defeating an insurgency.
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MacFarland says he soon realized the key was to win over the tribal leaders, or sheiks.
"The prize in the counterinsurgency fight is not terrain," he says. "It's the people. When you've secured the people, you have won the war. The sheiks lead the people."
But the sheiks were sitting on the fence.
They were not sympathetic to al-Qaeda, but they tolerated its members, MacFarland says.
The sheiks' outlook had been shaped by watching an earlier clash between Iraqi nationalists — primarily former members of Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party — and hard-core al-Qaeda operatives who were a mix of foreign fighters and Iraqis. Al-Qaeda beat the nationalists. That rattled the sheiks.
"Al-Qaeda just mopped up the floor with those guys," he says.
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The brigade made an offer: If the tribal leaders encouraged their members to join the police, the Army would build police stations in the tribal areas and let the recruits protect their own tribes and families. They wouldn't have to leave their neighborhoods.
"We said, 'How about if we recruit them to join the police and they go right back into their tribal areas?' " MacFarland recalls.
Some tribes agreed.
The number of police recruits in Ramadi jumped from about 30 a month to 100 in June 2006 and about 300 in July. More than 3,000 new recruits had joined the police by the time MacFarland's brigade left in February.
Trying to blunt police recruitment, al-Qaeda fighters simultaneously attacked one of the new Ramadi police stations with a car bomb in August 2006, killing several Iraqi police, and assassinated the leader of the Abu Ali Jassim tribe.
They hid the sheik's body, denying him a proper Muslim burial, and his remains were not found until four days later. Members of the tribe were outraged.
A couple of weeks later, one of the brigade's officers went to visit Sheik Abdul Sattar al-Rishawi, a local tribal leader. The officer was shocked to see a gathering of 20-30 sheiks jammed into al-Rishawi's home. Al-Rishawi was asked what was going on.
"We are forming an alliance against al-Qaeda," the sheik replied, according to MacFarland. "Are you with us?"
MacFarland was. Now he needed to convince his bosses.
Officials at MacFarland's higher headquarters, the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force based near Fallujah, were worried. The U.S. military was supposed to be supporting Iraq's government. A tribal alliance could pose a threat to Anbar Gov. Maamoun Sami Rashid al-Awani.
Al-Awani's government wasn't popular and had been thinned by threats and assassinations. Still, U.S. policy was to back Iraqi government institutions.
The tribal leaders didn't like al-Awani and wanted him replaced. MacFarland said the sheiks agreed to back off their demand that al-Awani step down.
There were other concerns. Al-Rishawi and his colleagues were second-tier sheiks. Most of Anbar's senior tribal leaders, some of whom amassed considerable wealth in a variety of businesses, had decamped to Jordan because of the growing violence after the U.S.-led invasion.
The Marine headquarters in Anbar was in contact with the tribal leaders in Jordan and was concerned that an alliance involving the U.S. military and junior leaders — the ones who remained in Ramadi — would jeopardize that relationship.
MacFarland says he saw it differently. The contacts in Jordan had yielded little. "Maybe there is a power struggle between the sheiks in Jordan and the sheiks in Anbar," MacFarland says. "But let's back the sheiks in Anbar. Let's pick a horse and back it."
He says the results were immediate when a sheik pledged to support the alliance with the U.S. Army, an agreement some of the sheiks involved would grandly name The Awakening. "Once a tribal leader flips, attacks on American forces in that area stop almost overnight," MacFarland says.
Marine headquarters officers also raised concerns about the backgrounds of some of the tribal leaders involved in The Awakening. Anbar's desolate roads and stretches of empty desert have long been home to smugglers.
"I've read the reports" on al-Rishawi, MacFarland says. "You don't get to be a sheik by being a nice guy. These guys are ruthless characters. … That doesn't mean they can't be reliable partners."
Despite its concerns, the Marine headquarters allowed MacFarland to pursue his work with the tribes and ultimately supported it.
The alliance grew to more than 50 sheiks by the time the brigade left Iraq, spreading throughout the province. Police recruiting continued to increase. The tribes began attacking al-Qaeda leaders who were on U.S. target lists, according to brigade documents.
More than 200 sheiks are now part of the alliance. They plan to form a political party ...
