PrairiePundit

Eli Lake: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Iraqi Sheik One of the leaders of the Anbar awakening is now residing in Dubai.  The government polices chased him into exile and the ISIL would be after him too if he had stuck around Anbar.

Rowan Scarborough: Iraq may follow Marines’ blueprint to defeat Islamic State in Anbar Path to victory requires alliance with Sunni tribal chiefs One of teh reasons they are in the fix they currently have is they alienated the Sunni tribal chiefs before their army collapsed in Western Iraq.  Persuading these guys that the government can be trusted will be difficult and it would be impossible if that government relied on the Shia militia to retake the area.

CNN: Leaders in Iraq's western Anbar province appealed Saturday for help from U.S. forces on the ground to halt the relentless advance of ISIS fighters. The situation in the province, just to the west of Baghdad, is "very bad," the president of Anbar Provincial Council told CNN by phone on Saturday. Sabah Al-Karhout said the council has intelligence that ISIS has dispatched as many as 10,000 fighters to Anbar from Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq. The council's deputy head, Falleh al-Issawi, told CNN that it had asked the central government to intervene immediately to save the province from imminent collapse -- and to request the deployment of U.S. ground forces there. That would be a significant shift, since the Iraqi government has until now been adamant that it does not want U.S. forces on the ground. President Barack Obama has also previously ruled out the use of U.S. ground troops. The Iraqi government said it has not received any official request from Anbar pr...

Washington Post: Islamic State threatens to take Iraqi province The capture of Anbar would put the militant group just outside Baghdad, in an embarrassing setback for the U.S.-led air campaign targeting the jihadists. There do not appear to be any forces in place to stop the ISIL advance and the air campaign lacks the robust character needed to at least slow the advance.  The US and its allies have not committed enough planes to the fight and have not put the special ops players on the ground to target the enemy.

Dallas Morning News: The story of Joker One is war at its most intimate level. This unblinking, almost claustrophobic account follows one unit of men caught up in something incomprehensibly larger, who realize quickly that they have no one else but their buddies to get them through and, they hope, home again. Author Donovan Campbell, who now lives in Dallas with his wife and young daughter, had spent a no-obligation summer in the Marines' Officer Candidate School. And despite his own reservations, he left college with an Ivy League sheepskin and found himself choosing the military over corporate America because he wanted responsibility for something greater than himself. The green Marine lieutenant finds it fast when he's assigned to lead Joker One, the first platoon of Golf Company in the Second Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment. His ragtag unit of country boys and émigrés and a narcoleptic who falls asleep under stress rolls into Ramadi, Iraq, in March 2004, part of a 120-...

LA Times: As American forces work to revive Iraq's tattered farming economy, they seem to have found an effective new weapon. Cows. At the suggestion of an Iraqi women's group, the Marine Corps recently bought 50 cows for 50 Iraqi widows in the farm belt around Fallouja, once the insurgent capital of war-torn Anbar province. The cow purchase is seen as a small step toward reestablishing Iraq's once-thriving dairy industry, as well as a way to help women and children hurt by the frequent failure of the Iraqi government to provide the pensions that Iraqi law promises to widows. The early sign is that the program is working. Widows, many with no other income, have a marketable item to sell, as well as milk for their children. Although Iraqis, particularly women, are often reluctant to participate in an American effort, the cows were immediately popular. "It was an easy sell," said Maj. Meredith Brown, assigned to the Marines' outreach program for Iraqi wome...

News.com: A MEMBER of al-Qaeda in Iraq who broke out of jail has been killed in a firefight while two other prisoners on the run have been surrounded by police. "We killed 'Imad the killer' and he is lying on the street in front of me," an officer said. "We are exchanging gunfire with the other two who are hiding in a house in Street number 20 in the centre of the city." The man killed by Iraqi forces, Imad Ahmed Farhan, was nicknamed "Imad the killer" because police say he has admitted to murdering at least 100 people. The men escaped from Forsan police station in Ramadi, capital of Anbar province, yesterday in a brazen breakout that sparked a gunbattle which killed 13 militants and policemen. ... The escape attempt has not worked out too well for Imad and most of the others. I suspect the remaining missing will be found and will probably die in a gunfight like Imad. Since Anbar has turned against the terrorist there is no real place for t...

MNFI: U.S. Army Sgt. Anthony Ward, dressed in the Santa suit, and 1st Lt. Philip Vrska, in the Christmas package, bring some holiday cheer to a 5K ?Jingle? race sponsored on Camp Ramadi, Iraq, Dec. 20, 2008. Ward and Vrska are assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 1. While the festive pair didn?t place in the field of 64, they did complete the entire run in costume. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Emily Suhr. This is quite a different scene from Ramadi four years ago. Because of the great work of the troops they can now have some Christmas fun in Ramadi. Merry Christmas to the troops.

MNFI: Lance Cpl. Kendall R. Strop, team leader, Military Police detachment, 1st Marine Logistics Group, storms into a building with fellow Marines here Nov. 9. The Marines of the Military Police detachment completed their first security and reconnaissance patrol in Iraq?s northern Nineweh, clearing out and securing an old, abandoned town located just a kilometer west of Camp Sinjar. Marine photo by Sgt. GP Ingersoll. The Marines continue to secure their area and deny any sanctuary to the enemy.

LA Times /Houston Chronicle: Just like in the classic movie Lawrence of Arabia , the man's eyes are piercing below his tribal headdress. He looks straight at you with a determined, uncompromising stare. His word is law in his region of Anbar province. He allows no dissent in his tribe and is not opposed to using force to punish those he deems to be threats to him or his tribe. There are many Sunni tribal sheiks in Anbar, but there is only one Sheik Lawrence. His authority and name are inherited from his great-grandfather, one of the Bedouin leaders who rode beside the Englishman T.E. Lawrence during the World War I fight against the Ottoman Empire. His tribe, the Anezi, is not particularly large, and the area he controls isn't prominent in Iraqi politics. But as U.S. military and civilian officials have learned, he is a man to be reckoned with. Sheik Lawrence — full name, Sheik Lawrence Mutib Hazan — is said to be connected to the Saudi royal family and has key conta...

M ichael Fumento: How strange! I spent all three of my Iraqi embeds in western Al Anbar because that’s where the war was worst . Birthplace of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and cradle of the Sunni insurgency, graffiti declared it “Graveyard of the Americans.” Indeed, I was in combat with the first two SEALs to die in Iraq, including the first to win the Medal of Honor (posthumously). I talked strategy with Army Cpt. Travis Patriquin, designer of “ The Awakening ” that turned enemy Sunni tribes into allies against AQI -- none of this was possible without tremendous help from chief Anbar Marine Public Affairs Officer Maj. Megan McClung. An IED blast killed them both. So how can it be that last year AQI fled the province and now we’ve handed military control of a pacified al Anbar to Iraqi forces, in what the AP properly called “a stunning reversal of fortune?” Further, how could this have occurred just two years after the Marines themselves, who were in charge of Anbar military operations, a...

David Martin of CBS interviews Bing West. ... His latest book, "The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics, and the Endgame in Iraq" (Random House), is the product of 20 months on the front lines in Iraq. It's a bottom-up view of the war, which West believes is the only view that matters. "This is not a book about great men," he said. "This is not a book about how terrific or how bad President Bush was, or General Petraeus. They didn't win or lose the war. The war was fought at that people level, at the ground level." And it tells a very different story from the memoirs and inside-the-Oval Office exposes that have been written so far. "When I hear people say, 'We just needed more troops,' I'd say, 'What were you gonna do with those troops when you didn't have a plan, you didn't have a strategy, you didn't have a doctrine, and you had poor leaders at the top who didn't "get it," didn't understand the situ...

NY Post Editorial: A remarkable military turnaround came full-circle this week, as Coalition forces officially turned over responsibility for Iraq's once-tortured and now (relatively) tranquil Anbar province to the central government. Needless to say, this was not the outcome al Qaeda had anticipated. Nor was it something that congressional Democrats dreamed was possible (or, seemingly for some, even desirable). Anbar quickly became the center of the Sunni insurgency after the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003 - eventually morphing into a prime base for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The combat that followed was intense and deadly - more than 1,000 US soldiers and Marines have died there since the war began. At one point, the battle for Anbar seemed close to being lost. Had it been, Iraq - and perhaps beyond - would have descended into bloodshed and chaos. ... Gen. David Petraeus, using combat reinforcements proposed and supported by President Bush, applied an innovative new count...

Ralph Peters: A HURRICANE smacks the Big Easy again. Back-to- back political conventions. A surprise VP pick. Russians behaving like Russians . . . All too easy to miss the biggest story out of Iraq this year: Yesterday, security responsibility for once-bloody Anbar Province officially passed from the US military to the Baghdad government. Fallujah. Ramadi. Al Qaeda's worst atrocities. Those opposed to the liberation of Iraq celebrated years of headlines from Anbar. Then it all changed: We won - and the headlines vanished. This year, Iraq received a special gift to kick off Ramadan, Islam's holy month of alternate fasts and feasts: The handover of a huge, economically resurgent, peaceful province. More than 12,000 Marines have been withdrawn from Anbar. The remaining 25,000 US troops are packing up. That means more forces available for Afghanistan - and more time together for our military families. The handover also means that 11 of Iraq's 18 provinces are no...

Telegraph: The Californian jury took six hours to find Jose Luis Nazario Jr. not guilty of fatally shooting or causing others to shoot dead four Iraqi detainees during fierce fighting in Fallujah, Iraq, on November 9, 2004. The case marked the first time a former member of the US military accused of a combat crime had his case tried in a civilian court. Nazario, 28, who could not be prosecuted in a military court because he had left the Marines, sobbed so loudly after his acquittal that the judge called for order. His family and friends also broke down in court. The former Marine Corps sergeant was accused of shooting dead two of the captives himself before ordering two subordinates to kill the others during the 2004 storming of Fallujah, known as Operation Phantom Fury. Prosecutors in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, told the jury that Nazario had ignored rules about how to treat prisoners and ordered the execution-style killing of four ...

Washington Post: The top Marine Corps general said yesterday that the U.S. military will hand over security responsibilities to Iraqi forces next week in Iraq's western province of Anbar, paving the way to reduce the 25,000-strong Marine contingent there and free up more Marines to go to Afghanistan . The Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. James T. Conway , said Anbar no longer requires such a large number of Marines, who would be better employed fighting in Afghanistan, where he said the Taliban insurgency is "growing bolder." "I do know that 25,000 Marines in a province, again, are probably in excess of the need, especially after Iraqi provincial control assumes responsibilities for security," Conway told a media roundtable at the Pentagon . Attacks in Anbar have fallen to the lowest level since the war started in March 2003, even as thousands of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers have withdrawn from the province this year, said Conway, who recently met with U.S. ...

Mark Walker , NCT: In the first trial of its kind, a civilian jury will decide if a former Camp Pendleton Marine is guilty of leading the slayings of four unarmed captives during a battle for the city of Fallujah nearly four years ago. Military law experts say the manslaughter trial of former Sgt. Jose L. Nazario Jr. establishes a precedent by asking jurors who may have no military background to decide the legitimacy of a battlefield action. The trial starts Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Riverside, A conviction, according to his attorneys, would send a message to troops that what they do in an overseas war could later be called into question by a civilian jury back home. That could cause some to hesitate during fighting, thus putting themselves and their fellow troops at risk, the attorneys argue. "To second-guess the mind-set of a young man in the heat of battle four years later, and to put the question in a (civilian court) system that can't even remotely comprehend the ...

NCT: Camp Pendleton's Maj. Gen. John Kelly said Friday that the military is on the verge on victory in Iraq's once rebellious Anbar province. "We have all but won this thing when they once said that was impossible," Kelly said during a telephone interview with the North County Times from his headquarters in the city of Fallujah, once a flash point in the battle against the insurgency. "The rest of the country is now following Anbar's lead." The two-star general was deliberately cautious about declaring outright victory, stressing that work remains to solidify security in the region, which intelligence officials said could never be tamed. Kelly, the commander of the I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward, said increased stability has led him to recommend troop cuts that could see thousands come home and not face future deployments to Iraq. "It's still dangerous," Kelly said of the province where the temperature on Friday neared 120 and a sands...

MNFI: Sounds of joy and laughter resonate through a police station’s narrow hallways. A young boy slowly enters through a doorway at the end to greet the boisterous group of Marines, but the sounds of excitement quickly diminish as they see him gasping for air after walking just a short distance. The boy, five-year-old Ahmed, is the son of Warrant Officer Othman Mallouki, an Iraqi policeman with Fallujah Headquarters District. Since his birth, Ahmed has suffered from a rare but fatal heart condition that if left untreated, will eventually kill him at an unthinkable, young age. ... Ahmed’s condition was diagnosed at Fallujah Surgical when Marines took him in for an examination, said Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Craig W. Pasanen, a corpsmen with the team. Doctors discovered a hole in the septum of his heart that causes oxygen and deoxygenated blood to pass through the heart and not the lungs. Mallouki and his son have been working with coalition forces for the past year in attempts to ...

MNFI: Lance Cpl. Adam J. Root, a combat videographer from I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward (IMEF FWD) Combat Camera, films children at the Al Ertika School in Ramadi, Iraq. The Marines are at the newly remodeled school for its reopening. Photo by Cpl. Jeremy Giacomino. They do not appear to be terrorized by Lance Cpl. Root. Ramadi may have been one of the most hostile cities in Iraq a couple of years ago. The Marines and the Awakening Council deserve credit for turning the situation around and getting rid of al Qaeda. I am pretty sure that the Iraqis there do not think they could have done it without the Marines despite what the Democrats say.