Stryker Brigade News

“This is a monumental meeting,” Kamper said. “This is the first time in more than three years that these tribes have sat down to talk - leaders from the west side who are Sunni and those from the east who are Shia.”

“This has been a very positive step on their parts, and it’s important to have them involved in the government process that will lead to volunteers providing security for their own villages,” Kamper added. “It has been the result of about six weeks of work to bring them to the table and for this first meeting we’re offering them a neutral ground here on Camp Taji.”

Following on similar efforts in the Al-Anbar province and other places such as Falahat, Iraq, where neighborhood watch programs are showing success in reducing violence with volunteers manning traffic control points and reporting insurgent activities to both coalition and Iraqi security forces, the sheiks opened the discussion on how best to implement their own volunteer program.

During the meeting, sheiks determined that each village would be responsible for providing its own volunteers for security within their own respective village. There will also be areas, or fault lines, where combined Sunni and Shia volunteers will work in places where village borders overlap and other areas such as bridges and traffic control points.

According to Kamper, some of the volunteers will actually become policemen and will make up the nucleus of a police station after receiving official government training, inducting them into the Iraqi security forces in the future.

The reconciliation of the sheiks will open the doors for villages working with the Iraqi government and coalition forces to pursue future projects to improve the quality of life for villagers.

“There has to be a stable security environment or we won’t be able to make any great progress with service projects,” said Kamper. “(Reconciliation) will build a foundation for working service projects and issues. When the Sunnis and Shia can come together and agree on security and it improves, eventually we will be able to fix water and work other projects and begin making dents in the services gap.”

Kamper said the meeting was very positive and believed the sheiks will make progress in their process of reconciliation.

“Overall, I feel really good about seeing that the two sides are clearly engaged in a dialogue and are committed to working together,” said Kamper. “The key thing is that each of the leaders pledged themselves to support the Iraqi government and to resist al-Qaeda and militias.”