More Good News Coming Out Of Iraq (Updated) :: Iraq

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November 19, 2007

More Good News Coming Out Of Iraq (Updated)

Topics: Iraq

The good news on Iraq just keeps on coming. And there's no better sign of progress than when Sunnis and Shiites start working together to secure their neighborhoods.

According to U.S. military officials, Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides at the local level to protect their neighborhoods from insurgents, militias, and al-Qaeda.

In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland.
Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims.

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government's progress on mending the sectarian rift.

"What you find is these people have lived together for decades with no problem until the terrorists arrived and tried to instigate the problem," said Lt. Col. Valery Keaveny, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 509th Airborne unit in the Iskandariya area south of Baghdad. "So they are perfectly willing to work together to keep the terrorists out."

As late as this summer, there were no Shiites in the community policing groups. Today, there are about 15,000 in 24 all-Shiite groups and 18 mixed groups, senior U.S. military officials say. More are joining daily.

Continue reading: Sects unite to battle Al Qaeda in Iraq

Update: You don't want to miss reading Christopher Hitchens' "Something To Give Thanks For" with much more on the 'Good news from Iraq'.

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