Greetings SWJ Members,

My name is Sam Stolzoff, and I am an Iraq analyst that supports the United States Army. I am a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and with four years of experience in Iraq, I have come face to face with both our successes and failures in counterinsurgency.

The most acute issue is our lack of understanding of the tribal system - which I am sure has hampered us in other areas of operation as well. In 2007, after finally breaking just one entire tribe into its many sub tribes and organizing it hierarchically, I began my search for a culturally correct source for tribal data in the English language. I was shocked that I couldn't find it. The Brits have some of this data, but the spelling isn't standardized and it was filtered through a western prism of tribal studies. In other words, I couldn't make any sense out of it, and given the lack of real tribal analysis throughout the western world (no joke), I sought resources in Arabic.

I found a treasure trove. After translating 'Abbas Al-'Azzawi's 4 volume set of tribal hierarchies into English in a culturally correct manner that could be easily used by anybody with a little bit of training, I compared it to what I learned operationally since 2003.

The data was good - and way more complete than I ever expected. So I began to collect other Iraqi tribal studies in Arabic, and have translated them, as well, so that they could be put in databases and analyzed sensibly.

For example, why is Nuri ((Al-Maliki)) the prime minister? How was he elected? What is his power base? What I found is that as we imposed a democratic model of government on the tribal system, that the ((Al-Maliki)) phenomenon, and many other phenomena were grounded in the tribal system, which exists in much the same way that it has for thousands of years.

Further, I wonder why we didn't have this information 6 years ago, when we needed it the most. It is for that reason that I encourage you all to please begin to study the Iraqi tribal system in depth. The tribal system leads to many fruitful paths with respect to targeting in a counterinsurgency, and explains why our western paradigmatic targeting method has a tendency to fall short of out right victory over insurgent forces, as it can't get down to the root of the problems - which are found in small entities called sub tribes.

I encourage open discussion on this subject. I am not the master of all things tribal, but what I have for you is a substantial amount of data and the analysis thereof, which seems to be in harmony with events on the ground as we are able to perceive them through the news media.

Thanks for reading this - and thanks in advance for your kind participation.

Very Respectfully,


Sam Stolzoff
www.theiraqitribalsystem.com