NOT MY TRIBE:

A Local Peace Accord: Cause for Hope? (DARRIN MORTENSON, 10/19/07, TIME)

On Thursday, 32 tribal sheiks from the region — mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites — signed a ground-breaking accord pledging to work together to curb extremism and to shake the sectarian violence that has rent the region since the U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. The rare gathering at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel, in the heart of the Green Zone, was the culmination of months of delicate negotiations and a welcome breakthrough for U.S. troops who've been fighting and dying there for the past 14 months. "You know the saying: that all politics is local. Well you really see that playing out here. This is the capstone of the first phase of tribal reconciliation in the region," said Col. Mike Kershaw, the commander of the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, the Fort Drum, New York-based unit which has worked among some 400,000 mostly Sunni Iraqis in the southern portion of Baghdad Province since last year. "Am I saying the war's over? No way. But I am saying that this is an opportunity that we didn't have before."

The political district of Mahmudiyah lies just south of metropolitan Baghdad and includes the violent urban centers of Yusifiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. It shares a rough and tumble neighborhood with Anbar to the west and Babil to the south. A mixed region of Shi'a and Sunni, city and country, the mostly agricultural region suffers all the sectarian, economic and political woes of the capital. While the region's Sunni and Shi'ite tribes battled each other for land and primacy, they found a common enemy in the U.S. troops stationed there. But that situation changed about four months ago.

"You look at the graph [of attacks] after about April and it just falls. It's a free fall," said Maj. Austin Miller, head of the U.S. Army's civil affairs mission in the Mahmudiyah district. Military leaders credit the recent lull in violence to Sunni tribal leaders who earlier this year turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in response to its excesses. It dovetails with a movement that began a year ago in neighboring Anbar Province to the west and has since spread out from there along tribal lines.

The strength of tribal ties is a long term problem, though a short term help.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 19, 2007 7:02 AM