Rebuilding starts in Iraq's once-wild West

AL QAIM, Iraq, Sep 7 (Reuters) On a street surrounded by ruins of bombed-out homes, stonemasons were working into the hottest part of the day to finish the second-floor gallery of the grand house they are rebuilding for Sheikh Mausuf Murdi.

''I will have new ceramic tiles on the floor and on the facade,'' boasts the sheikh. ''It will be better than before.'' The reconstruction is part of a rebuilding boom in al Qaim, a district along Iraq's border with Syria that was turned into a depopulated ruin by street combat less than two years ago.

Al Qaim is part of Anbar province, a vast western desert region that is now Exhibit A when US President George W Bush is looking for good news to describe in Iraq.

Bush made a surprise visit to Anbar on Monday, saying its improved security was an example of what could happen elsewhere in Iraq.

Like many in the Albu Mahal tribe, Sheikh Mausuf fled al Qaim with his family in 2005, when militants from Sunni Islamist al Qaeda in Iraq took over the area.

From 2003 until last year, Anbar was the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency and the most dangerous part of Iraq.

Al Qaim, where the Euphrates River pours in from across the Syrian border, was a battleground for most of 2005, with Marines battling insurgents street to street.

Nearly half of its 15,000 homes, many holding families of 30 people or more, were damaged. More than 400 were reduced completely to rubble. Whole blocks of stone and concrete houses still look like they were hit by an earthquake.

As recently as a year ago, a senior intelligence officer with the Marines wrote in a report leaked to media that Anbar province was all but lost, with the central government and its U.S. allies exercising virtually no influence and al Qaeda in control of towns all along the Euphrates.

What a difference a year makes.

Now Anbar will likely feature as convincing evidence of progress when the U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, reports to Congress on September 10.

RARE GOOD NEWS Four years into the war in Iraq, much is still going wrong for US forces. Some parts of the country are more dangerous than ever for US troops and their allies.

Iraqi civilians are still being killed in large-scale attacks like the coordinated truck bombings that killed more than 400 members of the minority Yazidi sect last month.

Fighting between Shi'ite groups for influence has intensified.

With good news so rare, little wonder Bush has seized on the change in Anbar.

For a Reuters reporter who was embedded in al Qaim during the height of combat in 2005, the quiet now is uncanny.

The current battalion of Marines has been based in the district for four months. They patrol the streets on foot from small bases inside the towns but have yet to engage in a single major firefight, fire one live artillery round or summon their first air strike.

They have lost just one Marine killed by a roadside bomb.

Many of them joke uneasily that they are bored.

Their commander, Lieutenant-Colonel Jason Bohm, rattles off the successes of the past few months: eighteen new schools that will open this year; a new system for registering cars; a vocational training centre; a volleyball league.

The main street in the border town of Husayba, once nicknamed ''ambush alley'' by the Marines, is now a thriving vegetable market.

The district had no formal Iraqi security forces two years ago. Now it has 1,400 Iraqi soldiers and 1,200 police. Both are commanded by two brothers from the Albu Mahal, a powerful tribe that initially fought the Americans but was one of the first to turn against al Qaeda.

When the Marines go on patrol, it is now often under the direction of an Iraqi sergeant, something unheard of just a few months ago.

Foreign fighters who once streamed in from the Syrian border seem to have vanished: Bohm's Marines have encountered just one.

The dependence on the tribes has its drawbacks. This week the mayor of Al Qaim revealed that he had turned over two prisoners to a tribe for a summary execution after they were accused of murdering a policeman.

''We are working hard to get the rule of law stood up here,'' said Bohm. ''We still have a way to go.'' Some sceptics worry that the fighting could return if the tribes fall out with one another or become impatient with a lack of support from the central government in Baghdad.

But Sheikh Mausuf is spending 0,000 to rebuild his house because he thinks it will stay quiet.

''All Iraqis now know who the insurgents are, and we will never allow them back,'' he said.

REUTERS ARB HS0904