I love reading stories like this. It gives me hope that we can be out of there sooner than later:

Muhammad is one of the thousands of young Baghdadi men to have joined neighbourhood security groups, which have mushroomed over the last year and are a crucial factor in the dramatic decline in civilian deaths. US soldiers call them “concerned local citizens”; Iraqis just call them sahwa (awakening) after the so-called Anbar awakening in western Iraq, which has seen Sunni tribal sheikhs take on foreign-led Islamists.

There are now an estimated 72,000 members in some 300 groups set up in 12 of Iraq’s 18 provinces, and the numbers are growing. They are funded, but supposedly not armed, by the US military. “It is Iraq’s own surge,” said a western diplomat, “and it is certainly making a difference.”

After years of saying the Iraqis need to do their part, it seems they are. All it took was another 30,000 troops and a little faith in the American military. Yet, with all this going on, the Democrats still want to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Have you noticed how the talk has shifted from the Iraq war to climate change or the economy. It’s to shift the peoples attention from the fact that they were wrong about pulling out of Iraq. They have been on the wrong side of almost every American military conflict. This one was no different.