Iraq Insurgency Sunni Muslims United States Military Terrorism Counterinsurgency

Checkpoint 20 was the last piece of American-controlled terrain on the road to Hawr Rajab and our linkup point with Sheik Ali Majid al-Dulaimi. Before heading out, Lt. Col. Mark Odom surveyed the terrain from the rooftop of the nearby American combat outpost, a heavily sandbagged structure surrounded by concrete walls to guard against car bombs. A dusty town on the southern outskirts of Baghdad, Hawr Rajab had a strategic importance that belied its humble appearance. It straddled the infiltration routes used by Sunni militants to circumvent Lion's Gate, the grandiloquently named system of checkpoints, canals and other obstacles designed to stop the suicide attacks that had brought havoc to the Iraqi capital.

Aid and Comfort Specialist Jose Collazo being treated after his Husky mine-detecting vehicle hit a buried bomb on the way to Hawr Rajab. He is now recuperating from his injuries in Texas.

Hawr Rajab had been under the dominion of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi group that took its inspiration from Osama bin Laden and whose senior echelons are filled by foreign jihadis. The group's fighters in Hawr Rajab were armed with AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and a seemingly endless supply of homemade improvised explosive devices (I.E.D.'s), many of which were concocted from urea fertilizer and nitric acid. They were hard to detect and yet powerful enough to destroy an armored vehicle. Odom's soldiers had never driven into the town without encountering some form of "contact," as his soldiers matter-of-factly referred to the clashes.

This day in early August, however, was to mark a turning point. Just a month earlier, the Americans acquired a new ally: Sheik Ali, a leader of the Dulaimi tribe. In an extraordinary development, a growing number of Sunnis who had sympathized with the insurgency or even fought American forces were now more concerned with removing Al Qaeda from their midst - so much so that they had chosen to ally with their supposed occupiers. Such expedient confederations were emerging across Iraq. They began last year when Sunni tribes and former insurgents in western Anbar Province began cooperating with American forces, cropped up later in the violent Diyala Province and even emerged in the sharply contested Ameriya neighborhood in Baghdad.

The sheik was relatively new to the game. Like many Sunnis, he insisted that Iraq had been more secure under Saddam Hussein. He told me he had no formal military credentials: his father paid a bribe so that he could avoid military service. With his penchant for track suits, the chain-smoking sheik seemed a most unlikely partner for Odom, the cerebral commander of the First Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment. But Ali had a powerful motivation to work with the American troops. Al Qaeda militants had killed his father, kidnapped his cousin, burned his home to the ground and alienated many of his fellow tribesmen by imposing a draconian version of Islamic law that proscribed smoking and required women to shroud themselves in veils.

Ali had already provided valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives and had been recruiting members of his tribe for what was to be a new, American-backed security force. Al Qaeda's hold on the town had been weakened, and the sheik was one reason why. The trip to Hawr Rajab was to be a further demonstration that the group's days there were numbered.

Still, a series of broader concerns lingered in the background. Could the Americans' success with the Sunni tribes in the provinces of Anbar and Diyala be transferred to other areas of the country? Even if the sheik delivered, did he and the Americans share the same long-range vision for Iraq? If they did, would the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad accept the emergence of new Sunni forces just outside the capital? Were the new local Sunni forces the key to stabilizing Iraq - or the prelude to a fiercer civil war?

The American strategy to stabilize Iraq is outlined in a several-inches-thick document called the Joint Campaign Plan. The stated goal is to achieve "localized security" (that is, in Baghdad and other critical parts of Iraq) by the summer of 2008 and to establish "sustainable security" nationwide by the summer of 2009. War critics at home have bemoaned the two-year time line, but meeting the objectives in such a short period would be an extraordinary accomplishment. The mission has been made all the more complex by the fact that the United States' adversaries in Iraq are well aware that the "surge" of American reinforcements has placed a considerable strain on the Army and Marines and will probably run its course by early 2008. Yet the surge has also provided a chance to forge alliances between American forces and Sunnis who were fed up with Al Qaeda militants and uneasy about the Shiite-dominated government. The additional troops have enabled the United States to push into Sunni areas where American forces had not operated for many months and to stay there rather than sweeping through and leaving.

Before leaving Baghdad to embed with the troops, I stopped by the fortified Green Zone to talk with Maj. Gen. Paul Newton. A British officer with eight tours of duty in Northern Ireland, Newton recently joined the staff of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and headed the Force Strategic Engagement Cell with Donald Blome, a senior aide to the U.S. ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker. It was part of the determined effort to exploit the willingness of local Sunnis to work with the American-led coalition. To my ear, it sometimes sounded as if the command had an assistant secretary of war for peace. Yet this effort was being carried out with hardheaded practicality and was potentially of enormous significance. The basic strategy was to persuade sheiks and former insurgents to submit lists of potential recruits for local security forces. These new recruits would be fingerprinted, photographed and given retina scans; all this would be entered into a database to help monitor the new forces.