~Figures and Tables

Figure 1.1

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank first our interviewees for providing us with extraordinary information and insight into the Awakening. We also thank the funding agency that made the interviews possible, and Max and Abdullah, our translator and driver, respectively. Friends and colleagues who provided us with ideas and critical...

~By 2004, al Anbar Province in Iraq was one of the most dangerous places for American forces in Iraq. The province, which comporises one-third of Iraqi territory, was wracked with violence committed by Iraqi national insurgent groups, and increasingly by the al Qaeda branch, al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The province seemed all but lost to...

~Details on the nature of tribal interaction and the interests of the sheikhs were provided in Chapter 1. Here we begin an analysis of the Sunni tribes in al Anbar Province as they anticipated the invasion by the United States and its allies. The Sunni tribes in al Anbar had survived the...

~By late 2004 al Anbar was wracked with violence. The insurgency that the United States did not anticipate, and was unprepared for, accelerated and al Anbar became the most dangerous place in Iraq. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld denied that there was an insurgency in Iraq and forbade the use of the word (Ferguson, 2008: 316). In...

~With the presentation of the formal eleven points, the formal Awakening began. General Allen made the point that the Awakening had two forms: one a formal organization, the other a principle. The principle of the Awakening occurred when the image of AQI changed for good from an ally to a barbarian, and the tribes decided that they had to...

~In the time since the interviews of Sunni tribal leaders presented here, the situation in al Anbar has changed considerably. In this chapter we will examine some of the developments since 2010 in light of the factors we used to explain the Awakening. Many of the security gains and political cooperation achieved through the Awakening and US...