Apologies for the radio silence. It's been four years since I'd been in Baghdad, so I had a lot of catching up to do. And though the security situations is much improved since the bad not-so-old days (violence in Iraq is down 80 percent since 2006 according to the US military) it's still difficult for a foreigner to move around the city. We all live either in the American fortified Green Zone, or highly secure, walled compounds. When we do go out, we either have to coordinate our moves in advance with whomever we visit, or else have some kind of police escort, as I did the other day on a trip to Dora.

Dora, a religiously mixed neighborhood in South Baghdad, was home to some of the worst urban fighting. When Lt. Colonel Ali Abbas Hamad, the deputy commander of an Iraqi police brigade, first deployed in Dora in the summer of 2007, most of the neighborhood's Christians had been driven from their homes by jihadis and militias, and those residents that remained didn't dare leave their homes. “There wasn't a car in sight,” he told TIME on a recent tour. “The only person I saw fired a RPG [rocket propelled grenade] at me.” But with the help of American soldiers, the police began taking back the streets, first with the Americans in the lead, then fighting side by side, and today patrolling the streets on their own. Now the stores are open, the street merchants are back selling fruits and vegetables, and at least one church is once again holding public mass.
 
But Lt. Col Hamad said he could never have done the job without the help of a local Awakening group that the Iraqi government is now disbanding. The Awakening provided crucial intelligence about insurgents, far better than what government agencies supplied, because the locals knew their own neighborhood. “We picked up Al Qaeda personnel one by one,” said Hamad. “Some of them we took from their beds without even a fight.” But the Iraqi government is concerned that Awakening groups are composed of former insurgents or criminals whose loyalties are uncertain, and has said it will absorb just 20 percent of Awakening into the national army and police. Hamad thinks this is a big mistake. “Some of these people helped al Qaeda because they needed the funds,” he said. But now “all they have known for four years is war. If the government doesn't treat them with respect, and help give them jobs, they will go back to war.” 
 
--Andrew Lee Butters/Baghdad