Ramadi War Zone Now Rare Bright Spot

RAMADI, Iraq (AP) â?? For veterans of Ramadi, it seems like a different place and a different war.

Just last year, soldiers were breaking down doors, hunting insurgents and struggling to secure the city block by block. U.S. troops now are invited into the homes of sheiks for lunch.

Life is not all good in this former Sunni extremist fiefdom about 70 miles west of Baghdad, but it's better. Today's worries aren't car bombs or shelling in the streets. There's peace enough to complain about the crippled electricity grid, dirty water, broken sewers.

Marines and soldiers also have adopted different roles: urban planners, community relations managers and political operatives.

"We're knee-deep in counterinsurgency here," said Marine Capt. Brian Cillessen, who's in charge of a group of about 150 Marines living and working in a house they rent in southern Ramadi.

"We came here with a very conventional mind-set. We weren't expecting this. ... I joined the Marine Corps to be a point man on a patrol," chuckled the San Juan, N.M., native.

Instead, Cillessen and his troops are conducting a census and registering weapons, repairing sewer systems, ensuring fuel for cooking and heat is sold for fair prices, approving contracts to build new schools, parks and playgrounds, and perhaps most important, cultivating relationships with Iraqi police and citizens.

The decline of violence rests on a widening basis of trust. It's cultivated in handshakes, platters heaped with rice, chicken and lamb, cup after cup of sweet tea and clouds of cigarette smoke.

Anbar is a sprawling western province that includes Ramadi and stretches through mainly desert from near Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Last year, U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officials declared Anbar lost. "The social and political situation has deteriorated to a point" where U.S. and Iraqi troops "are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency," according to a five-page report written in August 2006 by Col. Peter Devlin, a military intelligence officer with the Marine Expeditionary Force.
The Associated Press: Ramadi War Zone Now Rare Bright Spot

Nice to see stories like this.........something that the "gloom and doom" tv news won't cover. It'll also be something to watch the dems position on the war turn as time goes on. LOL

Have a good one!:s4: