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Provincial Reconstruction Team Leader Jim Soriano "gets wired" in the U.S. Embassy Baghdad Television Studio for a live television interview on Fox & Friends Sunday, July 22.
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Date: 22 JUL, 2007
Slot: 0716-0720 (a.m.)
Program: Fox & Friends (Live via satellite from Embassy studio)
Guest: James Soriano, TL Anbar PRT
Q: …and he’s part of the force sent to transition the Iraqis to self-reliance. Sir, thank you for joining us this morning.
JS: Pleasure to be with you.
Q: Tell us about the provincial, I believe, reconstruction team… you are heading one… what is its function?
JS: That’s right, I head up a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Anbar Province. Actually there are four such teams. Three of them are at the Brigade level, smaller military units, and I head up one at the Division for… at… the province as a whole.
We are… at my level we have about 30 people on the team from various fields… such as infrastructure development, agriculture… and we’re there to help the Iraqis with budgetary issues and to help them get the infrastructure up and running again.
Q Mr. Soriano… and what the White House has been telling us that there has been something of a breakthrough… and I want to see if you agree with this… that the security conditions in your section of the country are such now that the PRTs… more of them… can finally function… is that true?
JS: Well, I can speak for Anbar Province and I think you, you are correct. There has been a windfall of good news on the security front in Anbar. Al-Qaida is on the defensive. The enemy has been pushed out of cities and towns. Public opinion has turned against them. The tribes are mobilized to oppose them. So we are presented… we civilians that is… we are presented with an opportunity now… to exploit the situation… ah, that is to say help the Iraqi people in Anbar Province put together local government which did not exist six to nine months ago… and to help with economic recovery.
Q: Okay, well Jim Soriano we hope the situation maintains because we’ve heard those kinds of things before that the corner has been turned in Al Anbar and things slipped back… by the way you have twenty-two years in the foreign service and you speak Arabic… it’s great to see a professional… civilian on the ground in Iraq so thank you very much.
JS: Thank you.
James Soriano, Team Leader Anbar Province
James Soriano leads the 30-person PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) in Anbar Province. He is a 22-year veteran of the Foreign Service. He has served in various capacities at the US Embassies in Yemen, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and India. He is currently on his second tour in Iraq, having served as the senior Coalition civilian official in Al-Muthanna province in 2003-04. In his Washington assignments, Jim has served in the State Department's Near East Bureau and in the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. In 1996-97, Jim served on as a professional staff member on the US House of Representatives Committee on International Relations. He holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from Seton Hall University (1969) and a Master's degree from Georgetown University (1976). He is married and has twin nine-year-old daughters.
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