Assessing living conditions in Iraq's Anbar Province in 2009 / Audra K. Grant, Martin C. Libicki.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 115-116)

"The research was sponsored by the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity and conducted within the Intelligence Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute."

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.

Also available in electronic form via the RAND Corporation Web site.

The research described in this report was prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). The research was conducted in the RAND National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by OSD, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community under Contract W74V8H- 06-C-0002.