The Former-Insurgent Counterinsurgency

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

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.

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.

Once accepted, the recruits would be organized into local neighborhood watches. (American commanders call these Concerned Local Citizens, or C.L.C.’s.) Every member could use the one AK-47 that each Iraqi household is allowed to retain but would not be issued any arms by the American military. The longer-range plan was to run the volunteers through a brief training program and institutionalize the arrangement by securing the Iraqi government’s agreement to transform them into the local police. Recruits would be vetted by the American authorities and the Iraqi government. But having taken up arms against the American-led coalition in the past — or even having American blood on your hands — was not necessarily a barrier.

“I draw the line at war crimes,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, meaning that no one who has committed war crimes could join the force. “Local commanders can and will draw a more stringent line if they believe it is necessary. They understand the dynamics of their area better than I do. We reconcile at the end of any war. If we are able to buy time from the bottom up, that is a start. That will help us buy time for the government of Iraq to continue to mature. As those pockets of security get larger and larger, and we stitch them together, that buys time.” It was hoped that under the program Shiites, too, would eventually be recruited, but so far there had been little interest.

The fact that the patience of American politicians was running out had at least concentrated Sunni minds. For many Sunnis, the American troops were the most reliable protectors they had, and the Americans were looking less like long-term occupiers with each passing day. The development of new Sunni security forces was a way to blunt any Al Qaeda and Shiite militia countersurge when the Americans eventually pulled back.

That was the vision, and the relative success of recruiting efforts among the Sunnis had been the most favorable, if unexpected, development since the surge began. Executing the policy, however, has been extremely tricky. In effect, the American command has been moving on two parallel and possibly conflicting tracks. One represented a decentralization of power, as the American military organized Sunnis into local security forces. The second track was to centralize power in the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and to strengthen national institutions like the largely Shiite Iraqi Army.

The key to squaring the circle is to establish a link between the new Sunni forces in the field and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s risk-averse government. At first, the American effort to work with the tribes in Iraq’s Anbar Province was not much of an issue; Iraqi officials were happy to see them take on Al Qaeda militants and did not seem overly concerned about the role of the tribes in a remote western region that had no valuable resources and few Shiites. But the closer the strategy came to Baghdad, the more anxious the Iraqi government seemed to be about new Sunni groups, and the process has sometimes been a matter of two steps forward, one step back. In Baquba, the capital of Diyala Province north of Baghdad, where I spent much of June, more than a thousand Sunni locals, including former insurgents, had joined the “Baquba Guardians.” They have not hesitated to challenge Al Qaeda, which, while just one of many insurgent organizations, has been linked to spectacular car bombs and other suicide attacks that have fanned sectarian tensions in Baghdad.

But the project ran into resistance from local Iraqi officials after some Guardians tried to take the next step and join the police. Capt. Ben Richards, the commander of Bronco Troop, First Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, who was the first American officer to organize Sunnis in Baquba, told me that the Shiite provincial police chief had used ammunition as a means of political control. When the province received a large quantity of ammunition from the Interior Ministry, the police chief distributed 40,000 rounds to the predominantly Shiite police force in the nearby town of Khalis. Much of it is believed to have found its way to the Shiite Mahdi Army of Moktada al-Sadr. Richards said the Sunni police in eastern Baquba had received nothing.

To oversee the engagement process, the Maliki government recently established a nine-member committee for national reconciliation. The panel is headed by Safa al-Sheik, the deputy national security adviser and a former Air Force engineer during Hussein’s rule; it includes Bassima al-Jaidri, a Maliki aide with a reputation for sectarianism, along with security and intelligence officials. When I met with Safa in his office in Hussein’s old Military Industrialization Ministry, he insisted that the reconciliation panel had made progress in the month it had been in existence. American officials say it has approved 1,738 of the 2,400 Sunnis who had been put forward to serve as policemen in the town of Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad. Still, Safa acknowledged that many Iraqis are worried that the Americans might be inadvertently establishing new Sunni militias that would rise up against the authorities in Baghdad.

Newton, the British officer who was a leader of the Force Strategic Engagement Cell, had the job of bringing the Iraqi government along. “We don’t dress it up,” he told me. “Insurgent groups fear that if they cooperate, they will be targeted by the government of Iraq, and the government fears that the insurgent groups will turn on them after Al Qaeda has been dealt with. So that is the risk. We are not minimizing it. The best way to deal with that risk is to hook these groups close to you. By doing that, you bring them under a degree of control. You have the opportunity to learn how they work, which amounts to an insurance policy of future reasonable behavior.

“In Northern Ireland, reconciliation occurred in 1998, but we probably missed at least two earlier opportunities to resolve that conflict,” Newton added. “In Iraq, there is huge risk, and various people argue against taking those risks. What we are trying to explain to the government of Iraq is that this is one of those moments in a military campaign that it is sometimes difficult to realize it when you see it.”

When Colonel Odom’s squadron deployed in October of last year to Sunni territory south of Baghdad, there seemed to be little opportunity to work with the locals. His unit was assigned about 40 square miles, which included the Arab Jabour region, southeast of the capital, and a largely rural area to the west. It was a region of fish farms, narrow roads, palm trees and tall grasses — terrain that provided good hiding places for the enemy and that restricted the mobility of armored vehicles. There were no locals willing to ally themselves with the soldiers, no police officers and only a small number of Iraqi Army troops, who were largely confined to checkpoints. There were no State Department-led Provincial Reconstruction Teams — the bands of advisers who were supposed to help jump-start the Iraqi economy and build government institutions. The region was a mini-failed-state in the midst of a broader sectarian war.

Nor were there many American troops. Odom’s cavalry squadron, including support units, has 550 soldiers. The squadron’s operations south of Baghdad were what the military calls “economy of force,” which is a polite way of saying that it has few troops to carry out a demanding mission.

When I first arrived at the squadron’s headquarters at Forward Operating Base Falcon, there were already eight “Denali heroes,” as the unit described the soldiers who were killed in action. They included three combat engineers who were killed in May when an I.E.D. destroyed a Buffalo — one of the most heavily armored vehicles, used by explosive ordnance units — and two soldiers who died when a suicide bomber slammed an explosive-laden vehicle into the barriers surrounding Patrol Base Dog, an outpost that has since been abandoned, and collapsed the soldiers’ living quarters.

Odom understood the complexity of the situation and appeared to be soldiering on with grim determination. He seemed the very model of the scholar-warrior. He attended Middlebury College and later completed a master’s thesis on the Balkans conflict at King’s College, London. Most of his career had been in Ranger and airborne infantry units. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he served as operations officer for the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which parachuted into the Kurdish-controlled sector of northern Iraq.

Odom’s office at Forward Operating Base Falcon contained an impressive library of national security literature, including an inscribed copy of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “Second Chance,” Raphael Patai’s tome on “The Arab Mind” and a well-thumbed copy of Samuel P. Huntington’s “Political Order in Changing Societies,” which created a furor when it was published during the height of the Vietnam War. (Huntington argued that the establishment of order was a paramount goal for developing nations, perhaps even more important than whether the society was democratic.) Odom, 42, was private about his family history, but he bore an obvious resemblance to his father, retired Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, a director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan, military aide to Brzezinski during the Carter administration and former military attaché in Moscow. Colonel Odom grew up in a household in which Russophiles, political scientists and prominent journalists held forth at the dinner table on world events. One of the most vociferous critics of the war, General Odom wrote an op-ed column for The New York Daily News on Iraq earlier this year, headlined “Know When to Fold ’Em.” Colonel Odom was more circumspect about his views. But citing Huntington, he saw the effort to secure Iraq and encourage political reconciliation as very much an uphill struggle.

The colonel also had a copy of Jean Lartéguy’s out-of-print classic, “The Centurions.” The novel, about French paratroopers who served in Vietnam and later fought in the battle of Algiers, has a memorable passage in which one officer says to another: “We no longer wage the same war as you, colonel. Nowadays it’s a mixture of everything, a regular witches’ brew . . . of politics and sentiment . . . religion and the best way of cultivating rice, yes, everything, including even the breeding of black pigs. I knew an officer in Cochin-China who, by breeding black pigs, completely restored a situation which all of us regarded as lost.”

With insurgents rife in the area, Odom’s fight in Hawr Rajab and the Arab Jabour had elements of conventional war, but it needed a witches’ brew of force and politics to succeed. Odom’s soldiers made headway in neutralizing the local Al Qaeda leadership during the first half of the year, and the emergence of Sunni security organizations in Anbar and other parts of Iraq provided a model for the residents of Hawr Rajab.

But an infusion of troops in June also facilitated a new approach: the surge policy brought a thousand-soldier-strong battalion. Commanded by Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie — an effusive New Jersey native who played fooball for Trenton State — the First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment had fought its way south on the bomb-infested routes to Arab Jabour. By the time I arrived in July, they had lost six soldiers, including a tank driver who died of heat exhaustion as the temperature soared to more than 115 degrees. The unit set up tactical headquarters along the Tigris, which I visited before making my way to Odom’s squadron, and called in a series of artillery and air strikes against local Al Qaeda militants.

Adgie had made contact with some of the local sheiks and a former Iraqi general who had served in Hussein’s army, and they had provided several scouts to help the Americans sort out the militants. But the effort to recruit a more substantial volunteer force had moved slowly, with the local sheiks insisting that the Americans provide arms and Adgie explaining that recruits needed to be assembled, vetted and trained before the Americans could work with them and that under no circumstances could the U.S. military give them weapons.

The battalion’s effort nonetheless had a positive effect for Odom’s squadron. With less ground to cover, the unit was able to concentrate on Hawr Rajab and to develop contacts in the town. The fighting in Arab Jabour also had the effect of displacing some insurgents to the west, including militants who imposed a severe version of Islamic law and who used the region as a transit point for sneaking explosives into Baghdad. The Sunni residents of Hawr Rajab were soon confronted with American forces who were becoming regular visitors — and Al Qaeda insurgents from out of town who were more ruthless than the homegrown militants.

In early July, Capt. Chad Klascius, the commander of Apache Troop and one of Odom’s officers, received a call from Sheik Ali, who requested a meeting. A West Point graduate, Klascius spent several years before his Iraq duty as a member of an Opfor unit, the opposing force in the Army’s war games in Europe. The young officer had played the role of Islamic insurgent, complete with a suicide belt. Now for the first time he was going to meet with a former insurgent who wanted to make common cause with American soldiers.

The sheik, by his own admission, had led somewhat of a carefree life during the Hussein years. But he wanted payback for the murder of his father, and he wanted to restore his tribe’s authority in Hawr Rajab. The insurgents’ leaders there — unlike the foreigners who dominate Al Qaeda nationally — were Iraqis. According to local residents, they had grabbed control of one of the town’s few resources: the local gas station. Fuel from the Oil Ministry was trucked to the station several times a month, though the station was rarely open, and when it was, it sold gas for an inflated price. The station, the townspeople complained, was little more than a fuel distribution point for the militants and a revenue-raising operation for their cause.

Each side was apprehensive about a planned midnight meeting at the sheik’s home. Ali wanted to bring five armed bodyguards. The Americans were worried that they might be led into an ambush and warned that any males with weapons would be shot on sight. It was agreed that the sheik could have only unarmed protectors. To protect the sheik against retaliation, the Americans concocted an elaborate ruse. A platoon of soldiers cordoned off the home as if it were a raid, pulled Ali outside and then went into the home seemingly to conduct a search.

Once the meeting began, the sheik came to the point. According to Klascius, Ali acknowledged that he had been a supporter of Jaish al-Islami, the Sunni insurgent group. But that was in the past. He wanted Americans to set up a permanent base in Hawr Rajab and to drive Al Qaeda out. He was eager to participate in the offensive, but needed several thousand dollars in financing. He wanted a local police station to be set up in the town. He asked the Americans to distribute food and toys to the town’s residents to encourage them to support his effort to work with the Americans. And he wanted Klascius to give him a pistol to symbolize the new relationship.

Klascius insisted that the sheik provide several names to show that he was serious. He gave them the names of two members from his own tribe who lived just a few houses away. (The Americans later took them into custody.) He also gave them a 17-page, blue spiral notebook in which the sheik and his military adviser had recorded information about Al Qaeda’s activities in the town.

With a limited number of troops, the cavalry squadron was not prepared to set up a permanent presence in the town. Nor would the sheik receive his pistol. But the Americans promised there would be regular patrols and were able to distribute reward money for tips on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda militants. It was clear that the sheik’s resources were limited: one of his scouts wore shoes held together with Scotch tape.

Soon a fellow sheik came forward: Sheik Mahir Sarhan Morab al-Muini, a leader of another tribe in Hawr Rajab, who had been in prison for two years for hiding a cache of weapons. In a region of shifting alliances, Mahir was also looking to re-establish his authority in the town. Since Klascius had only 71 soldiers to deal with 8,000 townspeople and several hundred insurgents, the assistance the sheiks were offering was vital. It was not long before the sheiks and the Americans were planning joint military operations. The Americans called in an air strike on an ice factory that the militants used for their meetings, and Ali and his men raided it the next day.

The first large-scale mission was set for late July. Ali and several dozen of his men would try to establish security in Hawr Rajab by going after the Al Qaeda militants. American Apache helicopters would provide air support. Ali ignored one piece of advice from the squadron’s intelligence team: not to give his fighters advance word of the operation. The day before the operation was supposed to take place, Al Qaeda attacked. They had their own moles among Ali’s ragtag band of fighters and mounted a pre-emptive strike.

When the insurgents attacked, high winds had grounded the American choppers, forcing the sheik and his men to fight without the promised air support. After taking the risk to reach out to the Americans, Ali found he was essentially on his own. As gunfire echoed through the streets, the Iraqi commander at Checkpoint 20 funneled ammunition to Ali. But the supply soon ran out, and Ali’s fighters began to pull back.

One of the sheik’s aides threw his sister and her young children in a van and raced past Al Qaeda fighters toward the checkpoint. The militants machine-gunned the vehicle. The woman and two of her children had their wounds treated at the checkpoint and then were driven by Iraqi soldiers to a hospital in the Sunni town of Falluja, 40 miles west of Baghdad. (The hospitals in the Iraqi capital, while much closer to Hawr Rajab, are controlled by the Shiite-dominated Health Ministry, and Sunnis are terrified of being treated there.) Ali finally beat a retreat, heading south with his fighters to Yusifiya, where he linked up with Sheik Abd al-Sattar, a prominent tribal leader who was working with the Americans in Anbar. It was a low point for the new alliance. The American military was very powerful, but there were times, Ali told me somewhat ruefully, when it was slow to act.

The day after the Al Qaeda victory, Captain Klascius carried out a series of raids to beat the militants back. The Americans’ relationship with Ali was also helped by an unexpected turn of events the following week. The sheik was taken into custody at a National Police checkpoint near the squadron’s headquarters at Forward Operating Base Falcon. The Shiite-dominated police force was on the verge of turning Ali over to the Mahdi Army, an all-but-certain death sentence, when he reached the Americans on his cellphone. The soldiers from Klascius’s Apache Troop rushed to the scene. There was a tense standoff as the soldiers kept their weapons at the ready until the police handed the sheik over to his American protectors.

Much in Iraq was not the way it seemed. The former Sunni insurgent had become the Americans’ most trusted partner in Hawr Rajab, while many of the United States’ nominal allies in the Iraqi police were untested and untrustworthy.

By the beginning of last month, the alliance had been rebuilt, and it was time to resume the battle for Hawr Rajab. On Aug. 1, Ali led 29 fighters to Checkpoint 20 around midnight. The fighters were fingerprinted, and retina scans were taken so the biometric information could be entered into an intelligence database. To identify them as “friendly,” the soldiers gave them numbered orange reflector belts, the kind used by traffic crossing guards. Ali, Mahir and Odom huddled inside a nearby building to discuss the tactical situation in the town, while an American soldier and a newly minted concerned citizen exchanged past military experiences in a Tarzan-like amalgam of English and Arabic.

On the morning of Aug. 4, the Americans were to drive downtown. The day before, Klascius sketched out the plan. Two platoons, including combat engineers with heavily armored mine-detection vehicles, would clear the road to the town. Then two more platoons would head to the town square with shipments of food and a psychological operations unit. Fliers would be distributed urging the people to take back their community from the Al Qaeda militants by cooperating with the American-backed sheiks. The captain added in an offhand manner that every mounted operation the troop had conducted had encountered enemy fire. Ali’s men were to let the Americans know if I.E.D.’s had been seeded along the route, and Mahir’s men were to alert them if Al Qaeda fighters were active in the town.

We pulled out from Forward Operating Base Falcon at 5 a.m. and arrived at Checkpoint 20 only to see that Odom was already there. Ali and a couple of his men were there as well, prepared to make a triumphant entry. While the colonel and I waited for the “route clearance” team to sweep the road of I.E.D.’s, a frown crossed his face. The radio traffic reported that the operation had had its first casualty. Specialist Jose Collazo was driving a Husky mine-detecting vehicle — he had already found one I.E.D. that day — when he hit a buried bomb. The driver’s cab was thrown 50 feet. Collazo had an open head wound and had been rushed back to a sand lot in front of Checkpoint 20 to await a medevac helicopter.

The militants had resorted to the same sort of chemistry that Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Odom explained that they had combined fertilizer and nitric acid, boiled the concoction and then extracted a white explosive substance that was laid out to dry. The explosive was very powerful, and the American military had already given the weapon a name: HME, for “homemade explosive.”

The fact that there was only one route into town must have simplified the enemy’s task. But soon word came that the ordnance team had cleared the route. The soldiers lumbered into the armored Humvees, wearing their standard kit: Kevlar helmet, body armor, ballistic glasses and Nomex gloves to protect against fire. Ali, who was wearing a track suit with “England” emblazoned across the front, had no protective gear as he settled into the cab of the lightly armored truck carrying the food. Several Iraqi soldiers also made the trip.

With the wind whipping the sand, the helicopters were grounded again. We would not have Apache gunships above us, and any medical evacuation would need to occur by ground. As we headed to town, I glanced up at our gunner and saw he was wearing a small, black memorial bracelet for one of the soldiers killed in the April suicide bombing at Patrol Base Dog. It was one way soldiers have been honoring their fallen comrades and is increasingly common. Klascius observed that the stores were shuttered. That was a bad sign. The residents tended to clear out when trouble was expected.

After we reached the town center, the Humvees and the food truck formed a protective circle. The soldiers jumped down and began scanning the streets for militants. Ali got on a loudspeaker to urge the residents to come get the food. A few residents nervously approached. A soldier waved a metal detector over them to check for bombs after they entered the perimeter. But the citizens did not seem threatening, and the soldiers were preoccupied with the threat of snipers. The soldiers handed out several bags of rice, some cans of tomato paste and powdered milk.

As I was scribbling some notes, there was a boom in the distance. Klascius ran over to me and instructed me to get back in the Humvee. “The colonel’s been hit,” he said.

We drove back toward Checkpoint 20 and came upon a terrible sight. The twisted wreck of a Humvee was in the middle of the road. Combat medics were hovering over two soldiers lying in the grass. One was the turret gunner. The other was Odom, whose face was swathed in bandages. The wounded soldiers were lifted by stretcher into waiting Humvees and driven back.

Another Humvee, meanwhile, drove down from Checkpoint 20 to guard our flank. Suddenly there was a massive blast. Much of that Humvee disintegrated into fragments that rained down around us. Nobody could survive such a blast. The radio traffic reported three killed in action.

We were trapped on a “Tier 1 I.E.D. site”— a stretch of road chockablock with buried bombs — with no air cover. There was no heading back to town: the soldiers who had stayed there had been attacked by small arms, and two had been wounded. They would need to be evacuated as well. Yet heading back to Checkpoint 20 was still problematic. A Humvee started to make its way, only to set off another bomb. This blast, at least, was not catastrophic. The front end of the vehicle had been blown off, but there were no casualties.

As we sat in the captain’s Humvee and waited to make our return on the road, Ben Lowy, an experienced combat photographer, asked me for a pen and wrote his blood type on each of his Nomex gloves. With no Apaches on call, the soldiers called in a “show of force” mission. A jet flew by and bombed an empty field to show the adversary the Americans could call in an air strike if necessary. It was not clear if the enemy was still around to absorb this message — or if he would care.

We had no choice but to leave. A few vehicles made their way back, and we followed. After driving a short stretch, our vehicle stopped by the side of the road, and Captain Klascius walked back to supervise the scene. There were vehicles to recover and the grim business of collecting human remains. Several soldiers took black bags out of the Humvees and began to walk the fields in search of body parts. The road was a tableau of destruction. There were a soldier’s soft cap, a can of chewing tobacco, part of a notebook and the twisted end of a gun.

“I need another body bag,” a soldier called out.

A trooper asked if he had found another body.

“Don’t know,” the first soldier replied.

The three Iraqi soldiers who came with the mission — cigarettes in their mouths, cradling their weapons — pointed out some of the remains to the American soldiers but refrained from picking up the pieces. Ali sat in the front cab of the food truck, staring straight ahead.

As the soldiers went about their task, Klascius raised his weapon and peered through the scope at two men peering at our position from the roof of a building in the distance. “Best 1,200 bucks I ever spent,” he muttered. Since his troops had been supplied with only 10 high-powered scopes, he had bought his own. Klascius got on the radio and reported that the stricken convoy was being watched. The Americans needed to get back before they were attacked again.

When we got back to Checkpoint 20, the outpost was silent. The soldiers had lost three of their comrades. Another eight had been wounded. The enemy had suffered no casualties. Food had been given out to 40 residents.

At Forward Operating Base Falcon, the commanders imposed “River City” — they shut down the unclassified Internet connection the soldiers used to chat with their families and to blog so that word of the casualties would not spread until the next of kin were notified. That night, I went to the airfield at the base for the “angel flight.” A formation of soldiers lined up and saluted as the caskets of the three dead soldiers were carried to the tarmac so they could be flown away.

It was later determined that the militants had laid a defensive belt of seven I.E.D.’s. Hidden wires enabled them to activate the bombs so that they would not be blown up by civilian traffic. After being activated, the bombs were set to explode when the vehicles rolled over pressure-plate detonators. It was an ingenious and low-cost defense, and that day they had owned the road. It was, Klascius observed, his most violent day in Iraq, but it was but one day in a long war and not the end of the battle for the town.

I stayed in contact with Colonel Odom’s squadron and received an update two weeks later. Ali and Mahir had stayed in the fight and recruited an additional 25 fighters. The squadron had killed two militants and detained 22 more, including some who were believed to have been involved in the Aug. 4 attack. Some $2,800 in reward money had been paid for useful tips. The Concerned Local Citizens had detained more Al Qaeda militants — and had lost one of their own men, who was captured and beheaded. The sheiks were planning continued operations to clear the town.

From Arab Jabour, Colonel Adgie reported that 170 concerned citizens had been recruited by the former Iraqi general who had allied himself with the Americans. Adgie’s battalion had continued to press the fight against the militants but paid a high price on Aug. 11 when one soldier was shot and killed by a sniper; four others died when they went to search a nearby building that turned out to be rigged with bombs. Still, Adgie said he thought the effort to build a local security force was making headway. “We are still in the crawl stage, but I believe we’re on the right track,” he told me in an e-mail message.

I tracked down Specialist Collazo, the Husky driver, who was an outpatient in Texas and sounded as if he was recovering well. As for Odom, he had returned to his home base at Fort Richardson, Alaska. His left arm and his nose were broken, and he had suffered a concussion. Despite the Hawr Rajab setback, he said that the cooperation with the sheiks had the potential to reduce the attacks on his soldiers and stabilize the town.

But he was philosophical about the way ahead. The political gridlock at the national level had made the recruiting and organizing of Sunni groups around Iraq all the more important. But what would happen once bands of concerned citizens were organized, trained and equipped? If the Iraqi government embraced the strategy, the effort to work with tribal leaders and local insurgents could lead to a broader political reconciliation. “At the local and national level, it could provide impetus to force some reconciliation,” Odom observed. “In other words, the Sunnis could come to have some sort of legitimacy through us.”

But if the effort to forge a link between the central government and the new security groups falters, the United States might simply be laying the groundwork for a heightened round of civil strife. The Iraqi government and the security forces it controls might become alarmed if Sunni security organizations were to sprout around the country and begin to network, and Shiite militias might also respond by stepping up their attacks.

“We have not made political progress at the national level,” Odom said. “We have taken on a decentralized effort with the concerned citizens at the local level and somehow hope that we can tie it back into the local and national government at the end of the day.”