At the height of the Iraqi insurgency, Dr. Thamer al-Assafi, a former Iraqi commando combat veteran of the Iran-Iraq war who later served as a cleric and a faculty member at Al-Anbar University,turned against “foreign Arabs” who attempted to control the local mosques. The power grab by outsiders prompted al-Assafi and likeminded clerics to use their sermons to incite fellow Anbaris against al Qaeda in Iraq. For this, he explains, “We lost many innocent people. Some of them were loaded down with blocks and put in the river. Some of them were taken out to the desert and beheaded.”
Al-Assafi’s story—and others like it—are told for the first time in Al-Anbar Awakening, an illuminating compilation of lengthy oral interviews of more than three dozen individuals intimately involved in the transformation of al-Anbar province from one of Iraq’s bloodiest battlefields to one of its great success stories. Col. Gary W. Montgomery, Lt. Col. Kurtis Wheeler, and CWO-4 Timothy S. McWilliams, the three field historians at the U.S. Marine Corps History Division who edited Al-Anbar Awakening, thus shed light on perhaps the most complex phenomenon of the Iraq war by chronicling rather than interpreting the experiences of Awakening participants.
