TUWAITHA, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of Sunni Arab men, and a smattering of Shi'ites, have begun signing up for local tribal police units in areas southeast of Baghdad where pitched battles were fought with al Qaeda only weeks ago.In one rural area not far from the Tuwaitha nuclear plant, idle after Saddam Hussein's atomic energy programme was shut down following the 1991 Gulf War, about 30 young Iraqi men queued patiently in the ruins of a bombed-out watchtower.
The tower stands at an odd angle in a field next to a narrow road along the Tigris River. U.S. soldiers in humvees bounced along the road, over one repaired section where they said a bomb detonated by al Qaeda in Iraq militants left a 15-foot crater.
Further on, date palms stand next to a gutted power station, their trunks blackened by the explosion and fire.
"I'm not afraid. I'm wanted by al Qaeda anyway," Mahmoud Jablawi, a Sunni Arab sheikh in the town of Tuwaitha, said when asked about the dangers of working with the U.S. military, which organised a visit to the area on Thursday for Reuters.
Apologising for his limp handshake -- he said he was shot in the arm in a gunbattle with al Qaeda three weeks ago -- Jablawi said two of his brothers had been killed in the past two weeks.
"We don't want to live in an Islamic country the way the Taliban live," he said of al Qaeda's strict version of Islam.
In Tuwaitha, 256 young men have joined a "concerned citizens" group, one of the latest examples of tribal police units based on the "Awakening" model established in western Anbar, once the most dangerous province in Iraq Continued...