RAMADI, IRAQ — Call it Neighborhood Watch, Iraqi-style.
As recently as two months ago, U.S. forces didn't dare stake out the Al Tash neighborhood of this insurgent stronghold in Al Anbar province. Enter 22-year-old Saif Sahed, a go-getter recruit for the Provincial Security Force, a new auxiliary police unit that offers hope for at least a bit of stability in the mean streets of Ramadi.
Sahed lives in Al Tash, the kind of neighborhood where everyone knows everyone and newcomers are immediately noticed -- and in recent years often have been insurgents.
"If I find strangers or strange cars, I go to tell my officer. Last week we found some who were insurgents and they were detained," Sahed said matter-of-factly. "The important thing is to make my neighborhood safe."
Because Sahed is young and illiterate, he ordinarily would not qualify for the Iraqi army or police. But for the last several weeks, he and his ragtag cohorts, wearing castoff army fatigues and numbering about 2,200, have filled crucial intelligence-gathering, patrol and checkpoint functions in the new provincial force.
And some of them, including Sahed, are even going without pay, in hopes of someday getting the chance to join the police force and make $400 a month.
The provincial force is an example of how the United States is adapting its military strategy to changing conditions. It is difficult to imagine U.S. forces earlier in the war arming and training a force made up mainly of unschooled rural Sunni Arab youths and Iraqi army veterans, groups once considered unsuitable for the post-Saddam Hussein security forces.
Today, Sahed and other members of the force are helping staff "joint security stations." The new inner-city military outposts, made up of U.S. and Iraqi forces, give the coalition a presence in areas such as Al Tash that just weeks ago were conceded to the insurgents.
'Tipping point' seen
Together with the 4,500 police officers recruited in Ramadi since last May, the members of the Provincial Security Force, or PSF, have helped effect an improvement in security that has seen attacks on U.S. forces plummet and a surge in discoveries of insurgents' weapons and munitions caches. U.S. military officers now talk of a "tipping point" in the three-year battle in Ramadi that has left much of this city in ruins.
