Assessing Living Conditions in Iraq's Anbar Province in 2009

The local population is the center of gravity in counterinsurgency, and the first step toward winning over the population is to understand it. To this end, the RAND Corporation, in spring 2008 and spring 2009, conducted a survey of Iraq's Anbar Province by putting a detailed set of questions to 1,200 randomly selected households. The survey was designed to collect a wide variety of data, ranging from demographics and housing to employment and living standards, about Anbari households and the province's citizens. This report summarizes the key results of the 2009 survey and includes comparisons, as appropriate, to the 2008 phase of the project. Al-Anbar has been surveyed before, notably in 2004, when the Iraqi government, with cooperation from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Fafo-AIS, carried out a countrywide survey, reporting results in 2005 on a province-by-province basis. RAND's survey project built on this previous effort and, although this report focuses on more-current conditions, it does offer comparisons to the situation described in 2004. --From publisher description.