Tribal Engagement in Anbar Province: the critical role of special operations forces

Joint Force Quarterly, July, 2008 by Thomas R. Searle

Persistent Presence

In 2005, however, senior U.S. leaders increased SOF presence in Anbar. The teams that had operated there in early 2004 returned to the same locations and renewed their connections with the local tribes. The SOF deployment schedule of 7 months overseas and 7 months at home station allowed for "persistent presence," as teams routinely returned to the same villages during each rotation.

In 2005, as a partial substitute for the lost CERP funding, the Multi-National Corps-Iraq (MNC-I) authorized SOF and conventional units to establish an indigenous force under the name "Desert Protectors." The initial vision was that the Desert Protectors would bridge the gap between the government's forces and tribal militias by creating a government-sanctioned tribal force. The Desert Protectors would provide local intelligence and additional troops to U.S. and Iraqi forces and would help break the cycle of violence between the tribes and the U.S. and Iraqi government forces. Starting around Al Qaim, the Desert Protectors had a rocky beginning, but once it got started, other tribes joined. The program grew to hundreds of troops from several tribes. In November 2005, elements of the Marine 2d Regimental Combat Team (RCT) and Army human intelligence personnel, supported by the Desert Protector forces, conducted a 2-week sweep along the Euphrates River in Anbar. Local cooperation helped apprehend 800 suspected insurgents.

MNC-I and the government later decided to turn the Desert Protectors into scout platoons in the Iraqi army. The tribesmen, however, wanted to serve closer to home and secure their families and villages, and many quit rather than join an army unit that was available for operations anywhere in Iraq. At the very least, the Desert Protectors may have looked like a failure because they seemed to quit rather than transition into the army as planned. In the fall of 2005, an unnamed U.S. officer in Iraq told Inside the Pentagon, "The issue is getting [tribal forces] to fight insurgents outside their tribal area.... So far, the tribal engagement strategy from a military standpoint has not [done] what it was advertised [to do]." (7)

This anonymous critic missed the point of tribal engagement, but did identify a key challenge: how to measure its effectiveness. Some felt that tribal engagement was just a way to generate more kinetic strikes and that the measure of success was the number of offensive tactical raids conducted by tribal forces outside their home areas. But tribal engagement was a type of indirect, irregular warfare, important at all levels, from the tactical to the strategic, and a better measure of effectiveness was the improvement in security within the tribes' areas of influence.

Since 2004, U.S. SOF and conventional forces have trained and worked with tribal forces to build capacity and capabilities. Although the tribal forces' tactical offensive strikes received much attention, the real power of tribal engagement, and the subsequent Concerned Local Citizens program, was creating local security forces that could, with backup from U.S. and Iraqi forces, defend their local areas against AQI. Their security activities had decisive operational and strategic effects by driving the terrorists and insurgents out of safe havens in Anbar Province. The former Desert Protectors, who returned home, did just that when many joined the local police and continued to enhance local security, though not as part of the army. The tribes best influenced events outside their home areas by setting an example of success that other tribes would want to emulate.