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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NickSE who wrote (98931)	5/23/2003 12:19:46 PM
From: NickSE	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Troops Test Cooperation With Clerics 'Locals' Get Lead Role In Baghdad Cleanup washingtonpost.com BAGHDAD, May 22 -- It was payday in Baghdad's largest slum and, as is their custom, the Americans arrived in force. Four Humvees parked outside a building housing an Islamic charity chosen by the U.S. Agency for International Development to administer its first grass-roots project in the Iraqi capital. Near a portrait of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, a soldier doled out bundles of 15,000 Iraqi dinars to workers chosen by mosques to clean the streets of sewage and trash. In the hall stood a Special Forces major, who spoke with the impatience of a soldier used to precision but struggling with imprecise translations. Overseeing it all, in his cleric's white turban and pressed robes, was the charity director, Sheik Kadhim Fartousi, America's man among the neighborhood's 1.8 million Shiite Muslims. Perhaps. Fartousi is the face of ambiguous postwar Iraq, a turbulent landscape of uncertain allegiances and agendas. And in the week since the start of the project -- a 16-day, $280,000 effort to clean the slum once known as Saddam City -- he has emerged at the center of an experiment, largely unintended, of engagement between U.S. soldiers who occupy Iraq and Shiite clergy who deem its future theirs. For the Special Forces officer, Maj. Arthur P. Vidal III, the project represents the first U.S. steps to engage "the locals" and leave the neighborhood better than when he arrived. "I believe in the philosophy of crawl, walk, run," he said, sitting in a room with slogans on the wall that read, "God preserve Iraq." In Saddam City, now renamed Sadr City after a renowned ayatollah slain with his two sons in 1999, U.S. forces have to reach out to the clergy, Vidal said, because they "have the people's ear." [cont'd...]