US military tries two approaches in Iraq's volatile Anbar region

FURAT, Iraq -- With a biker's bandan a tied under his helmet, the special forces team sergeant gunned a Humvee down a desert road in Iraq's volatile Anbar Province. Skirting the restive town of Hit, the team of a dozen soldiers crossed the Euphrates River into an oasis of relative calm: the rural heartland of the powerful Albu Nimr tribe.

Green Berets skilled in working closely with indigenous forces have enlisted one of the largest and most influential tribes in Iraq to launch a regional police force -- a rarity in this Sunni insurgent stronghold. Working deals and favors over endless cups of spiced tea, they built up their wasta -- or pull -- with the ancient tribe, which boasts more than 300,000 members. They then began empowering the tribe to safeguard its territory and help rid desert routes of insurgents and weapons. The goal, they say, is to spread security outward to envelop urban trouble spots such as Hit.

But the initial progress has been tempered by friction between the team of elite troops and the U S Army's battalion that oversees the region. At one point this year, the battalion's commander, uncomfortable with his lack of control over a team he saw as dangerously undisciplined, sought to expel it from his turf, officers on both sides acknowledged.

The conflict in the Anbar camp, while extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U S officers say. It highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many regular U S military units on sweeping combat operations; and the more fine-grained, patient work that special forces teams put into building rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people -- work that experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency.

``This war was fought with a conventional mind-set. The conventional units are bogged down in cities doing the same old thing," said the special forces team's 44-year-old sergeant, who like all the Green Berets interviewed was not allowed to be quoted by name for security reasons. ``It's not about bulldozing Hit, driving through with a tank, with all the kids running away. . . . These insurgencies are defeated by personal relationships."

The real battles, he said, are unfolding ``in a sheik's house, squatting in the desert eating with my right hand and smoking Turkish cigarettes and trying to influence tribes to rise up against an insurgency."

Under the glittering chandeliers of his newly remodeled salon, Sheik Jubair adjusted his fine, white cotton dishdasha, or traditional robe, and lit a cigarette.

As if on cue, the American team sergeant leaned over and handed him an ashtray.

The 63-year-old sheik is the de facto ruler of the Albu Nimr, a wealthy tribe whose influence stretches from Anbar's violent capital of Ramadi up the Euphrates to Haditha. Jubair knows the U S military needs his tribe as much as the tribe needs the military. Shunned in the 1990s for plotting against Saddam Hussein, the tribe backed the U S -led overthrow of Saddam in 2003. But Jubair now faces threats from Anbar's entrenched Sunni Arab insurgency, which he said put a $5 million bounty on his head.

Week after week, the team has spent long hours cultivating Jubair -- funding his projects, buying his son a PlayStation, even holding his hand during treatment at a U S military hospital for an infected toe. In return, Jubair has supplied hundreds of police and army recruits, as well as intelligence targeting insurgents in the region.

During a recent visit at his home in Furat, Jubair pressed the team sergeant for a hospital, a gas station, a school, payment for a damaged car, and a mosque. ``We don't do mosques," the sergeant replied.

For the Americans, such engagement is as vital as it can be maddening. ``Sometimes I feel like I'm dealing with teen agers," the sergeant said. ``They even do the `mom' and `dad' thing with me" and the team captain.

The clash of military cultures was apparent from the start in late January, when the special forces team captain, scruffy after days in the desert, arrived at the Hit camp and introduced his team's mission to Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Graves, commander of the First Battalion, 36th Infantry Regiment. Graves, a close-shaven West Point graduate from Texas, said nothing and walked away, according to team members.

``We grow our hair a little longer," the team sergeant said. ``We wear mustaches, and the conventional Army doesn't want to deal with you because they look at you as undisciplined. We're the most disciplined force in the Army!"

To Graves, the problem boiled down to communication and his battalion's limited tactical control over the special forces. ``It's not that they have long hair," said Graves in the camp's chow hall. ``They have a responsibility to tell us what they were doing, but they refuse to do it."

Graves said the Green Berets and their Iraqi army scout platoon once shot at his tanks; he said he never investigated the event but declined to explain why.

At a desert firing range outside Hit, a squad of Iraqi army scouts attacked a line of silhouetted targets, emptying their AK-47 assault rifles and then switching effortlessly to pistols. Next, they practiced sweeping a room, pivoting through the doorway and shouting bursts of Arabic.

Training foreign military forces is a core special forces mission -- and the top priority of the U S command. The Iraqi scout platoon, coached by the team in Hit, displayed an agility and confidence unusual among Iraqi soldiers.