At one time, Anbar looked like a permanently lost province. Terrorists from al-Qaeda and native insurgencies had made Anbar a no-man’s-land of IEDs, suicide bombings, and drug-fueled, brutal applications of shari’a law. The US appeared unsure and the central Iraqi government impotent. Two years later, Anbar has transformed itself into the next province to officially come under control of the Iraqi security forces that once epitomized futility:
The US military is to hand over security control of the former Sunni insurgent bastion of Anbar province to Iraqi forces in the next 10 days, a US military spokesman announced on Monday.
“The handover of Anbar is expected to take place in the next 10 days,” Lieutenant David Russell told AFP, declining to provide an exact date.
Anbar would be the tenth of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be handed back to Iraqi forces by the US-led coalition amid a push to transfer security control of the entire country back to Baghdad.
Two turning points led to Anbar’s transformation. The American surge and new counterinsurgency strategies of General David Petraeus finally fought the AQI and native insurgents effectively, putting them on the defensive and re-establishing the initiative for the Coalition forces. Prior to that, the native Sunni tribes switched allegiances after discovering the bloodthirsty and tyrannical nature of their co-religionists in AQI. Even the native insurgents, mostly Ba’athist dead-enders who hated Americans, switched after enduring their alliance with AQI long enough to see the real threat to their homeland.
Meanwhile, the secret surge of the Iraqi Army continued to develop. The Bush administration had put a lot of effort in training a new, “clean” Iraqi Army from the ground up as a professional fighting force instead of a parking lot of political sinecures. It takes a long time to build that kind of force, and to season it for the kind of fighting that it would face in places like Anbar and later Mosul, Basra, and Sadr City. Setbacks came as expected, but the IA has grown into a large and effective fighting force, capable of holding territory and now seizing it from militias as well.
The result? A province that many relegated to “lost state” status has become one of the showcase areas for the new Iraq. At one time, Anbar was the most violent area of Iraq outside of Baghdad itself, but it has stabilized to the point where the US has moved it ahead of seven other provinces in turning control to the Iraqis. Most had predicted that Anbar would be the last province to go, and at that in an American retreat rather than a victory.
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