KEY POINTS:
Under a tree by a battlefield road in Iraq's "Triangle of Death", Lieutenant- Colonel Robert Balcavage meets his new recruits.
The men are Iraqi Sunni Arabs who are about to join the United States military's payroll as a local militia. They want guns.
"I am not giving out
guns and ammo," the US commander says. The men listen carefully as the interpreter translates.
"I've been shot at up here enough times to know that there's plenty of guns and ammo. Me personally. Some of you guys have probably taken some pretty good shots at me."
Slowly but deliberately, US forces are enlisting groups of armed men - many probably former insurgents - and paying cash, a strategy they say has dramatically reduced violence in some of Iraq's most dangerous areas.
It is a rare piece of good news in four years of war, and successes like this are likely to play a prominent part when US commander General David Petraeus makes an eagerly anticipated report to Congress in mid-September.
"People say: 'But you're paying the enemy'. I say: 'You got a better idea?"' says Balcavage. "It's easier to recruit them than to detain or kill them."
But US forces also say the militia - dubbed the Concerned Citizens Programme, or CCP - is only a temporary measure. If the comparative peace is to hold, the mainly Shiite Government must offer the fighters real jobs in its Army and police force.
US forces have launched an offensive against Sunni Arab militants and Shiite militias following a build-up of US troops to 160,000, aimed at quelling sectarian violence.
They have partially succeeded, although hundreds of people are still being killed every month.
Balcavage's territory in the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad covers the sectarian fault line dividing Sunni Arab western Iraq from the Shiite south.
The lush date-palm groves in the irrigated river valley were a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, and the steaming towns of Iskandariya and Musayyib became a cauldron of sectarian violence and power base of Shiite militia.
Since last October, 23 members of Balcavage's battalion of 800 paratroopers have been killed in the area US troops call the "Triangle of Death".
But the unit's charts show sudden, unexpected improvements in security in the past few weeks. At one point the battalion was hitting 16 road bombs a day but that fell to four last week. Mortar barrages have almost ceased.
The CCP effort is focused on the road leading from the town centre north. A potentially strategic artery linking the region to Baghdad and to the Euphrates valley of Anbar province to the west, it has been sealed off for nearly a year.
The last time Balcavage's troops went up this road in January, they hit six roadside bombs, had three armoured Humvees destroyed and had to fight their way out.
But as they started moving up the road this week, they were met by a local chieftain, Sheikh Sabah al-Janabi, in white robes with a shiny, chrome-plated pistol at his waist.
"We are glad to see you," the Sheikh told the US colonel, greeting him warmly with a broad smile. "Our men will guard the road. If we receive any shots, please let us answer, not you. We give you our word as we promised."
The valley's inhabitants are from the Janabi tribe, a Sunni Arab group once favoured by Saddam Hussein, who recruited and stationed his feared Medina Division of shock troops here to protect the capital from restive Shiites to the south.
When US occupation authorities dissolved the Iraqi Army in 2003, many Janabi returned home - armed, jobless, angry and fearful, and joined the insurgency.
But in recent weeks, Janabi leaders have approached the Americans, offering to make peace. Balcavage's troops took fingerprint and retina data of nearly 1000 men in the area.
Each militia member will earn $370 a month, about 70 per cent of the salary of an Iraqi policeman or soldier. Contracts are signed with sheikhs in villages, and each is given authority to hire 150 to 200 men.
A chart Balcavage first drew on a napkin and then added to his regular briefing shows the scheme ending by 2008 with militiamen being incorporated into the Iraqi Army and police.
He stopped to talk to some of the militia as his column of US infantry and mainly Shiite Iraqi soldiers made their way into what had been enemy territory. He took the names of two Janabi men who had been officers before the US invasion and promised to try to secure them jobs in the Army or police.
"You should have done this a long time ago," said Abdul Razzaq Homayid, in a frayed robe and sandals, with a beat-up AK-47 on a knotted cord over his shoulder.
"Your invasion of Iraq brought hardship. Everything was destroyed and we had no salaries. All of these men are unemployed."
He asks about opening the town centre, rebuilding the health clinic, fixing schools.
The colonel nods: "We'll get it done. We've got to keep talking and not fighting."
- Reuters
