THEIR WAR NOW:

As Fears Ease, Baghdad Sees Walls Tumbls (STEPHEN FARRELL, ALISSA J. RUBIN, SAM DAGHER and ERICA GOODE, 10/10/08, NY Times)

Market by market, square by square, the walls are beginning to come down. The miles of hulking blast walls, ugly but effective, were installed as a central feature of the surge of American troops to stop neighbors from killing one another.

“They protected against car bombs and drive-by attacks,” said Adnan, 39, a vegetable seller in the once violent neighborhood of Dora, who argues that the walls now block the markets and the commerce that Baghdad needs to thrive. “Now it is safe.”

The slow dismantling of the concrete walls is the most visible sign of a fundamental change here in the Iraqi capital. The American surge strategy, which increased the number of United States troops and contributed to stability here, is drawing to a close. And a transition is under way to the almost inevitable American drawdown in 2009. [...]

There is one overriding issue when it comes to the Awakening Councils, the groups of mainly Sunni former gunmen who were hired by the Americans to stop attacking them: Will they return to violence?

Many were supporters of the Sunni insurgency, either for money or ideology, and many still feel aggrieved at the new order, in which Sunnis are no longer in charge.

The Americans won over the Sunnis by overlooking their crimes, paying them and rewarding their leaders with extra money. They held out the prospect that Awakening members would eventually get jobs in the Iraqi Army or the police. Those who did not would get civilian jobs, and the government would not conduct wholesale detentions.

But as the early-October transfer approached, it became clear that the Iraqi government would refuse to accept most Awakening members into the security forces, and that most of the civilian jobs simply did not exist. Furthermore, the Awakening leaders, some of whom had been paid thousands of dollars by the Americans, would get no more than the rank and file under the Iraqis. The Americans now say they will try to make up the difference for some of them.

The Awakening members’ fears have still not been allayed.

“Allah. Homeland. Salary,” reads one piece of protest graffiti painted near an Awakening checkpoint in Dora market, adapting the motto of a feared paramilitary unit during Saddam Hussein’s era.

Pointing to the words, Sgt. Alaa al-Janabi, 30, who works with the Dora Awakening, said, “This is our slogan.”