Pointing and Shooting (II)

(Part one here.)

Here's a snaphot of Iraq today, from Reuters:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military will transfer control of security in Iraq's Anbar province to Iraqi forces this week, a remarkable turnaround given the vast western region was considered lost to insurgents less than two years ago.

Anbar will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces returned to Iraqi security control since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but it will be the first Sunni Arab region handed back.

Mamun Sami Rasheed, Anbar's governor, said the handover ceremony would take place on Saturday.

"We have been dreaming of this event since 2003," he said.

I've been running an ongoing series here detailing how this happened.

For more recent details, here's the DoD's June, 2008 report to congress, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq:

Assessment of the Security Environment—Western Iraq

Security in Anbar Province continued to improve this reporting period... In Anbar, the average number of security incidents remained at five incidents per day over a 90-day period, accounting for less than 4% of the attacks in all of Iraq. This represents a ten-fold reduction compared to the summer of 2006 and is half of the rate of the last few months of 2007. The combined efforts of SoIs [greyhawk: Sons of Iraq] and Iraqi and Coalition forces continue to hinder AQI’s [gh: al Qaeda in Iraq] ability to obtain resources or operate effectively in population centers, forcing AQI to operate and conduct attacks from remote locations in the province. Despite these setbacks, AQI continues efforts to regain footholds in the Euphrates River Valley.

The Iraqi Army has handed over security responsibilities in most of Anbar’s population centers to the Iraqi Police, allowing the Army to concentrate its efforts on driving AQI from hideouts in remote locations. The Sahawa al-Iraq (SAI) tribal movement has survived AQI attacks against its key leaders, and instead is successfully using the attacks to embolden local tribes and strengthen its own influence. SAI recently registered as a political party and intends to compete in the upcoming fall provincial elections and the subsequent nation elections, although the GoI [gh: government of Iraq] has yet to act on SAIs request to become a national political party. The movement continues to position itself as an alternative to existing provincial political leaders, deriving much of its credibility from its fight against AQI and the resulting security gains. For several months, SAI leaders have reached out to prominent Shi’a figures in other provinces to promote reconciliation and unity under the theme of “One Iraq.”

Transferring Security Responsibility

Currently, half of Iraq’s 18 provinces are under Provincial Iraqi Control (PIC). In support of the U.S. Government strategic objective to strengthen the Iraqi forces and transition primary security responsibility to the GoI, Anbar and Qadisiyah Provinces are scheduled to transition to PIC in June and July 2008, respectively. This will bring the total number of provinces for which the GoI has lead security responsibility to 11 of 18 provinces.

In PIC provinces, Iraqi forces demonstrate varying abilities to maintain domestic order and prevent a resurgence of terrorism. Examples of this are the recent ISF-led operations in Basrah. On short notice and with little Coalition planning support, the ISF were able to rapidly deploy forces to the city to engage rogue militias. Once operations were underway, the ISF required Coalition Military and Police Transition Teams and Coalition staff assistance to obtain and move logistics assets to support its forces in the field. The Transition Teams proved particularly helpful in their ability to increase Iraqi and Coalition forces’ situational awareness and facilitate employment of additional Coalition enablers. As operations progressed, many Iraqi forces grew increasingly competent and were able to restore security in much of the Basrah area within one week.

Other graphs from the report include this one - the first I've seen that acknowledges the Ramadan spikes I wrote about some time ago. (See also my Ramadan, 2007 report from Baghdad here, or my Ramadan, 2004 report from Baghdad here).

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