'Re-Liberators': a progress report from Iraq.(Iraqi War)(Cover story)

Hamada, Iraq

THIS small, rural village in Diyala Province north of Baghdad experienced a revolution a month ago. Hamada had been controlled by al-Qaeda and its band of teenage killers, who terrorized the place. Qaeda imams took over the mosques and people stopped going. The mayor of the nearby city of Muqdadiya lived here--until al-Qaeda blew up his house and he fled. The village became a ghost town.

Then, for the first time in five years of war, U.S. troops showed up. They captured key Qaeda leaders, and the rest ran away. Local citizens formed a makeshift security force, and people returned to the streets. Suddenly it was a new day.

Hassen Nssaif Jasim, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi army who leads the local security volunteers, hosts us, his American visitors, in his dirt front yard. He looks rugged in a brown knit cap, with a mustache and a day's worth of stubble on his face. His handful of security volunteers stand by along the road, holding rifles, with a strap of reflective material thrown over their shoulders to denote their quasi-official status. "I told everyone this is a golden opportunity," he says of his message to fellow villagers. "Don't lose it."

Isolated towns like this one, with a population of 750 and a dirt road off a small canal as the main thoroughfare, are highly vulnerable to al-Qaeda. "It's easy to intimidate them," explains an American officer. "They get up in the morning and there are a bunch of heads in the soccer field." At the village level, the War on Terror is less a grand ideological struggle than an elemental fight to replace men with guns who want to prey on the local population (al-Qaeda) with men with guns who want to help it (us). No romanticism about human nature is required to see that most people will prefer the latter.

Gen. Mark Hertling, who commands American forces in the north of Iraq, recalls being introduced in the nearby village of Himbus to a twelve-year-old girl who had pointed out where the Qaeda thugs were hiding. "I asked her why she had done that," General Hertling explains, "and she said, 'They were riding up and down the roads on mopeds shooting in the air. They killed my two brothers, my father couldn't farm, and I couldn't go to school.'"

It would still be that way without U.S. forces. Iraq is a mind-bogglingly complex country that defies generalizations, except this one: Where U.S. troops have a substantial presence, there is more security, more grassroots political activity, and more economic progress. Hence the success of the surge, and the imperative not to draw down from it too quickly. Before he lets his American visitors leave, Hassen Nssaif Jasim insists--fixing us with a glare and twice asking if he can rely on us--that we take home a message: "We are very serious, and we are going to go all the way to the end of the path. We don't want you to leave."