In a neighborhood without lights, its pockmarked dirt streets and open sewers faintly visible under the full moon, the Dutch soldiers began a foot patrol on a recent evening. After getting out of their soft-top vehicles, the soldiers entered a street, wearing no helmets and pointing their guns down, chatting with Iraqis clustered in front of their homes.
"Hello, Mister!" some boys cried out, and they followed the soldiers to the bend in the road. Driving through the town later, the Dutch called out "Salaam Aleikum" to pedestrians. Many Iraqis, adults and children, waved at them.
Part neighborhood police officers, part social workers, the soldiers managed to practice in Iraq what the Netherlands has come to call the Dutch approach to patrolling. Scarred by national shame over the Dutch peacekeepers who proved powerless to stop the Bosnian Serbs from rolling into the UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995 and killing thousands of Muslims, the Dutch have nonetheless managed to keep a soft touch, honed in Afghanistan and now on display in this small town on the Euphrates.
Instead of armored vehicles, the Dutch drive vehicles that leave them exposed to the people around them. To encourage interaction with residents, they go bare-headed and are forbidden to wear mirror sunglasses. Making soldiers accessible and vulnerable to their surroundings increases their security, they contend. Making them inaccessible decreases it.
Samawa, one of the quietest spots in Iraq, is a world away from the lawlessness that has spread across Baghdad and other cities. What the Dutch face here cannot be compared with what US soldiers must deal with in the capital or in the Sunni triangle, where they are confronted daily with a deadly resistance.
Yet, perhaps unfairly, the US are compared with the Dutch here, in a way that underscores how difficult it will be for the US to win back the popular support it enjoyed after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Lieutenant Colonel Kees Matthijssen, the commander of the Dutch force in Iraq, said he could not say whether the Dutch approach would be feasible in a place like Baghdad.
"On the other hand, it might have helped," he said. "Everybody is aware of how the Iraqi population is looking at the Americans now. They are happy that the Americans liberated them from Saddam Hussein, but I wonder if the population is still happy with what the Americans are doing now."
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