Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Hala Jaber, American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq - Times Online, November 25, 2007

Even the militia commanders confirm that they have the Shi’ites in their long-range sights after a turbulent few months.

First they tired of Al-Qaeda’s beheadings, bombings and strange demands, such as a ban on salads containing (male) cucumbers and (female) tomatoes, and on ice cubes because the Prophet Muhammad never had them.

Then the militias threw in their lot with the Americans to get rid of Al-Qaeda, but without losing their animosity for the occupying forces that many of them had been fighting.

Now they are starting to think about what happens when the Americans leave and how they can counter Iranian-backed Shi’ite forces. Abu Omar, an intelligence officer with the Baghdad Brigade in Abu Ghraib, was candid.

“Of course the coming war is with the [Shi’ite] militias,” he said. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did Al-Qaeda.”

Abu Maroof, one of the brigade’s commanders, said that he regarded the Shi’ite militias, which include the Mahdi Army of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, as more dangerous than the United States. But he is also increasingly hostile to the government of Nouri al-Maliki, which is reluctant to absorb militia members into the official Iraqi security forces.

The Surge: Illusion and Reality - by Conn Hallinan, AW, December 25, 2007

The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq since early January 2007. In early December, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) said, “I think the surge is working.”

Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters and that, while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent.

Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence, and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the “surge”?

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.”

Take the attacks on Americans, which are down. The Sunni-based resistance carried out the majority of those. Sunnis, who constitute 5 million of Iraq’s 27 million people (there are 16 million Shi’ites and five million Kurds), dominated the country under Saddam Hussein.

Initially the Sunnis formed an alliance with al-Qaeda that turned out to be a disaster. Al-Qaeda, an extremist Sunni organization, targeted Shi’ites, whom it considers heretics. The relentless bombings and shootings culminating in the 2006 bombing of the Golden mosque in Samarra, spurred Shi’ite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, to counterattack.

The Sunnis suddenly found themselves fighting a two-front war against the Americans and the Shi’ites, a war they cannot win. They soon were driven out of large sections of Baghdad by the Shi’ites while absorbing massive casualties from the U.S. military campaign.

These defeats forced the Sunnis to turn on al-Qaeda and to reach a détente with the U.S. In return, the new Sunni militias – like the Baghdad Brigade, the Knights of Ameriya, and the Guardians of Ghazaliya – were given vehicles, uniforms, flak jackets and $300 a month for each member by the Americans. Starting months before the “surge,” the so-called “Sunni awakening” soon fielded 77,000 militia members, larger than the 60,000-member Mahdi Army and half the size of the Iraqi army.

But according to the Sunday Times, many of these Sunnis were formerly al-Qaeda members, and the current “truce” with the Americans is little more than a tactical maneuver to buy time. “Of course the coming war is with the [Shi’ite] militias,” Baghdad Brigade intelligence officer Abu Omar told the Times. “God willing, we will defeat them and get rid of them just as we did with al-Qaeda.”

Ned Parker / Los Angeles Times
CHANGING ALLEGIANCE: Abu Abed, far right, with members of his paramilitary group. A former insurgent and officer in Hussein’s army, he helped drive Al Qaeda in Iraq out of Amiriya.

Ned Parker, Ruthless, shadowy — and a U.S. ally - Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2007

BAGHDAD — “Abu Abed, you’re a hero,” the retired Shiite teacher shouted from the home she had fled last winter, when the bodies of Shiites were being dumped daily in the streets of her Amiriya neighborhood.

The fighter, wearing green camouflage and dark wraparound sunglasses, kept walking, his hand swinging a black MP-5 submachine gun.

No more than 5 feet 6, with a roll of baby fat, this Sunni Muslim gunman is an unlikely savior of Amiriya: a former intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, a suspected onetime insurgent, a man who has photos of his brothers’ mutilated corpses loaded in his cellphone.

To many Iraqis, Abu Abed is a Sunni warlord whose followers have spilled the blood of Shiite Muslim civilians and U.S. troops. But to the people in Amiriya, he is the man who has, with ruthless efficiency, restored order to a neighborhood where the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq held sway.

The American military, enlisting local Iraqi help in ending sectarian violence, has formed “Awakening” groups in neighborhoods. A member in the Adhamiya neighborhood of Baghdad guards a checkpoint.

Photo: Joao Silva for The New York Times

ALISSA J. RUBIN and STEPHEN FARRELL, In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict - New York Times, December 23, 2007

BAGHDAD — The thin teenage boy rushed up to the patrol of American soldiers walking through Dora, a shrapnel-scarred neighborhood of the capital, and lifted his shirt to show them a mass of red welts across his back.

He said he was a member of a local Sunni “Awakening” group, paid by the American military to patrol the district, but he said it was another Awakening group that beat him. “They took me while I was working,” he said, “and broke my badge and said, ‘You are from Al Qaeda.’”

The soldiers were unsure of what to do. The Awakening groups in just their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: they fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite “dogs.”

The Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni Arab force recruited to fight Sunni Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has become a great success story after its spread from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province to become an ad-hoc armed force of 65,000 to 80,000 across the country in less than a year. A linchpin of the American strategy to pacify Iraq, the movement has been widely credited with turning around the violence-scarred areas where the Sunni insurgency has been based.

But the beating that day was a stark example of how rivalries and sectarianism are still undermining the Americans’ plans. And in particular, the Awakening’s rapid expansion — the Americans say the force could reach 100,000 — is creating new concerns.

Son of Sunni Leader Arrested in Iraq, AP, November 30, 2007

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraqi troops arrested the son of a leading Sunni politician and dozens of his associates after a car bomb was discovered near his compound and keys to the vehicle were found on one of his bodyguards, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Friday.

Five U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi civilian were injured when they detonated the car bomb near the compound of Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament, the U.S. military said.

The arrests threaten to inflame sectarian tensions at a time when U.S. officials are pushing Iraqi politicians to take advantage of a decline in violence to forge power-sharing agreements among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.

Al-Dulaimi’s bloc, the Iraqi Accordance Front, accused Shiite-dominated security forces of “creating and marketing this crisis” to undermine U.S. efforts to organize Sunni tribes against al-Qaida.

Ackerman, The Problem with Militias | The American Prospect, November 13, 2007

Perceiving the United States’ receptivity to Sunnis who declare themselves against AQI, whose number has always been miniscule compared to the indigenous Sunni insurgency, the Sunnis have built a massive constellation of militias in the past few months with U.S. support. Known as “Concerned Local Citizens” — “militia” being a taboo term — the U.S. military totals the number of militiamen at a staggering 67,000. About 37,300 of them are under a contract with the U.S. and receive a stipend of $300 per month.

In theory, the CLCs are a series of neighborhood watch organizations that “augment local force protection, law enforcement and/or infrastructure security,” says Col. Steve Boylan, Petraeus’ spokesman. They help fight AQI and assorted miscreants, supplement U.S. and Iraqi forces, and are meant to be incorporated (eventually) into the regular Iraqi security apparatus. Their creation follows counterinsurgency best-practices, as Kilcullen wrote: “Provided they are under Iraqi government control (a non-trivial proviso), ‘neighborhood watch’ groups motivated by community loyalty and enlightened self-interest are not necessarily a bad thing.”

The trouble is that Kilcullen’s proviso is kicking in with a vengeance. U.S. commanders I’ve interviewed in the past few weeks suggest they have little actual oversight over what the CLCs in their areas of operations do. Maj. Gen. Kevin Bergner, a spokesman in Baghdad, says commanders “believe there is good accountability.” But Col. David Sutherland, a brigade commander in Baquba, says he recently detained a CLC leader for using his organization as a gang: They stockpiled illegal weapons, charged extortion money, and “raped a young girl.” Typically, commanders must take on faith that those the CLCs harass are truly AQI. Very often what the CLCs are interested in is consolidating control over a particular area in a warlord-like way. The recently-assassinated Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, a key figure in the establishment of what would become the CLCs , was something of a highway bandit, known for telling the U.S. that rival tribes were AQI sympathizers.

Nor are the CLCs getting absorbed within a distrustful, Shiite-run Iraqi security infrastructure. Col. Martin Stanton, who holds the reconciliation portfolio for Multinational Force-Iraq, warned recently that the CLCs are growing so frustrated with the lack of support from Baghdad that they might easily turn their guns on the government. Anbar province officials visiting Washington earlier this month sounded the same alarm, complaining of a sectarian double standard in police recruitment.

Ricks, Iraqis Wasting An Opportunity, U.S. Officers Say - washingtonpost.com, November 15, 2007

CAMP LIBERTY, Iraq — Senior military commanders here now portray the intransigence of Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government as the key threat facing the U.S. effort in Iraq, rather than al-Qaeda terrorists, Sunni insurgents or Iranian-backed militias.

In more than a dozen interviews, U.S. military officials expressed growing concern over the Iraqi government’s failure to capitalize on sharp declines in attacks against U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians. A window of opportunity has opened for the government to reach out to its former foes, said Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the commander of day-to-day U.S. military operations in Iraq, but “it’s unclear how long that window is going to be open.”
The lack of political progress calls into question the core rationale behind the troop buildup President Bush announced in January, which was premised on the notion that improved security would create space for Iraqis to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements. And what if there is no such breakthrough by next summer? “If that doesn’t happen,” Odierno said, “we’re going to have to review our strategy.”

Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, deputy commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, complained last week that Iraqi politicians appear out of touch with everyday citizens. “The ministers, they don’t get out,” he said. “They don’t know what the hell is going on on the ground.” Campbell noted approvingly that Lt. Gen. Aboud Qanbar, the top Iraqi commander in the Baghdad security offensive, lately has begun escorting cabinet officials involved in health, housing, oil and other issues out of the Green Zone to show them, as Campbell put it, “Hey, I got the security, bring in the [expletive] essential services.”

Indeed, some U.S. Army officers now talk more sympathetically about former insurgents than they do about their ostensible allies in the Shiite-led central government.

Meet Abu Abed: the US’s new ally against al-Qaida, Guardian Unlimited, November 10, 2007

Abu Abed, a member of the insurgent Islamic Army, has recently become the commander of the US-sponsored “Ameriya Knights”. He is one of the new breed of Sunni warlords who are being paid by the US to fight al-Qaida in Iraq. The Americans call their new allies Concerned Citizens.

It is a strategy that has worked well for the Americans, on paper at least. This week, the US military claimed it had forced the extremist group al-Qaida in Mesopotamia out of Baghdad altogether, and cut the number of murders in the city by 80%. Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad, said: “The Iraqi people have decided that they’ve had it up to here with violence.”

Critics of the plan say they are simply creating powerful new strongmen who run their own prisons and armies, and who eventually will turn on each other.

A senior Sunni sheikh, whose tribe is joining the new alliance with the Americans against al-Qaida, told me in Beirut that it was a simple equation for him. “It’s just a way to get arms, and to be a legalised security force to be able to stand against Shia militias and to prevent the Iraqi army and police from entering their areas,” he said.

“The Americans lost hope with an Iraqi government that is both sectarian and dominated by militias, so they are paying for locals to fight al-Qaida. It will create a series of warlords.

“It’s like someone who brought cats to fight rats, found himself with too many cats and brought dogs to fight the cats. Now they need elephants.”

Gordon, Iraq Balks as U.S. Seeks to Enlarge Sunnis’ Policing - New York Times, October 28, 2007

HABBANIYA, Iraq — The American military’s push to organize Sunni Arabs into local neighborhood watch groups has been one of the United States’ most important initiatives in Iraq — so much so that President Bush flew to Anbar Province in September to highlight growing alliances with Sunni tribal leaders.

But now that the Americans are trying to institutionalize the arrangement by training the Sunnis to become police officers, the effort has been hampered by halfhearted support and occasionally outright resistance from a Shiite-dominated national government that is still inclined to see the Sunnis as a once and future threat.

Marc Lynch, Sunni World | The American Prospect, September 13, 2007

The Sunni turn against al-Qaeda had very little to do with American diplomacy or military efforts, and far more to do with local power struggles and preparations for the widely-expected coming war with the Shia. The origins of this shift in Sunni politics date back to last year’s attempt by al-Qaeda in Iraq to impose its hegemony over the Sunni insurgency and to establish physical and political control in a variety of locales.

Al-Qaeda’s attacks on Iraqi Shia had always been controversial among the insurgency’s factions, many of which preferred to keep a tight focus on attacking American forces and Iraqi government personnel. Al-Qaeda made many enemies with its grandiose rhetoric, attacks on local political figures, attempts to enforce Islamic morality, and decisions to muscle in on tribal smuggling routes. When it declared the “Islamic State of Iraq” as an umbrella for the insurgent groups, the major “nationalist” factions which make up the overwhelming majority of the insurgency decided they had seen enough. The Islamic Army of Iraq released the first public denunciation, other factions followed suit, and nasty fighting (both verbal and military) ensued. The root of the conflict was a struggle for power within the Sunni community — not attitudes towards the United States or even the central Iraqi government. The turn against al-Qaeda did not mean abandoning the insurgency, even if some of the groups are willing to use American support for their current tactical needs.

Bush’s new friends: The Sunnis | Salon, September 5, 2007

Steven Simon, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, says the sheiks are telling U.S. leaders what they think they want to hear. “They are not going to go to the U.S. commanders and say, Lets strike a deal because I want you to strengthen me so that when the time comes, I can go after the Shiites,” Simon said dryly. “For tactical reasons, you tell your benefactor whatever you need to tell your benefactor.”

By strengthening Sunni groups the United States could be helping to set the stage for a full-blown, if more balanced sectarian conflict, rather than a slaughter of the Sunnis by the Shiites if conflict spreads.

The Myth of AQI - Andrew Tilghma, Washington Monthl, October 2007

Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. “It was kind of a running joke in our office,” he recalls. “We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda.”

To describe AQI’s presence, intelligence experts cite a spectrum of estimates, ranging from 8 percent to 15 percent. The fact that such “a big window” exists, says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, indicates that “[those experts] really don’t have a very good perception of what is going on.”

It’s notable that military intelligence reports have opted to cite a figure at the very top of that range. But even the low estimate of 8 percent may be an overstatement, if you consider some of the government’s own statistics.