by Damozel | Meanwhile in Iraq, there are changes that may threaten the "fragile success" which Petraeus said some time back was what we have won there. In Anbar, the US military has handed over control of about half the members of the "Anbar Awakening," the mostly Sunni movement which many members of the military believe had more to do with our success, such as it is, than the surge. (WaPo) The movement was fostered in Sunni areas by the military paying "$300 monthly
salaries to fighters, many of them former insurgents, to patrol areas
and stop attacking American troops." (WaPo; BN-Pol) Subsequently tribal leaders were awarded lucrative reconstruction contracts. (WaPo)
Having paid the members of the Awakening for their cooperation, military commanders are (still) worried about what will happen now that the Iraqi government is balking at absorbing all of the mainly Sunni fighters into their security forces---and is also arresting some of them. (BN-Pol)
This month, the U.S. military handed over to the government control over about half the Awakening groups, now totaling roughly 100,000 mostly Sunni fighters. But the government, increasingly confident that it can provide security on its own, has refused to enroll most Awakening members into the police or army. In recent weeks, Iraqi security forces have arrested some Awakening leaders who were former insurgents, out of fear they will take up arms against the government.
"There are good Awakening members. But there are others who have simply changed their T-shirt, who don't want progress, who do not believe in a new Iraq," said Haider al-Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party. "We don't want these elements to infiltrate our security forces." (WaPo)
As the US military commander in Baghdad worries, if the Iraqi government won't give them a good deal, al-Qaeda might offer them a better one. (WaPo) The article's main source, Sheik Jassim Muhammed al-Sweidawi doesn't rule it out for some members of the Awakening, though he does for himself.
He is consumed by one overriding question: What will happen if his American backers leave? He gloomily predicts chaos in the provincial elections. "There are al-Qaeda sleeper cells in the province. Our borders are still being infiltrated," Sweidawi recently told Marine Maj. Gen. John Kelly, who commands U.S. forces in Anbar.
Sweidawi would like to see Americans stay on bases here for years, even decades, as they have in Japan and Germany. Like many Sunnis, he fears that his country could fall under the influence of Iran's Shiite theocracy, which has forged close ties with many Iraqi Shiite leaders.
"If the Americans were not here, Iran will stretch to the Jordanian border," Sweidawi said.(WaPo)
This is from an October 1 BBC Report:
An Ameriya engineer who did not want to give his name is also uneasy. He says the continuing security of the neighbourhood relies on all the Awakening men, not just a few of them.
He fears many will be bored, will lose their status, and may be tempted back to al-Qaeda.
"Killing is a career," he said.
And al-Qaeda are busy threatening members of the Awakening movement. While I was sitting with him, Abu Ibrahim al Azawi got a mobile phone text message from an al-Qaeda member.
"We will put you in the sewer," it read, "like all unbelievers who sell their souls for dollars."
The message continued: "You are the shoes of the worshippers of the cross." Showing the sole of a shoe is a profound Arab insult. (BBC News)
So there it is: there are some in Iraq who want us to stay, as well as plenty who want us gone.
The Sunni tribal leaders of Anbar---with the backing of the US military--wrested territory from al-Qaeda in Iraq. As the piece makes clear, some of them had reasons independent of their relationship with the US military.
Sweidawi said he despised the U.S. occupation at first. The U.S. military, he said, alienated the tribes by its heavy-handed tactics and mass arrests of Sunni men suspected of ties to the insurgency.... Sweidawi concedes that he was "covering for the militants and not informing the Americans or local authorities." But by 2006, he said, he began to view U.S. forces as the lesser enemy. Al-Qaeda in Iraq had overreached, carrying out beheadings and banning smoking, shaving and other behavior it considered un-Islamic.
In late 2006, during the holy month of Ramadan...al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgents abducted seven of Sweidawi's brothers and cousins from his family home. They were killed that day, their bodies dumped into the Euphrates River....
"After that, I started chasing them in the streets and capturing them," Sweidawi said...(WaPo)
Another said:
"We became sheiks because we use force.... Iraq needs men who use force." (WaPo)
Certainly Sweidawi isn't the type to let bygones be bygones.
[U]ltimately his authority rests on his ability to punish. He said he used to interrogate al-Qaeda in Iraq suspects in his large greeting room. Now he uses one of his police stations. How does he extricate information? "We have our ways," he said, smiling coyly. Then he took off the thick, black cord made of camel's skin that held his tribal headdress in place and said: "I was using this, beating them twice, three times."
As he finished his sentence, he pulled out his black cellphone and played a video, set to haunting Arabic music, of insurgents executing a group of Iraqi policemen and soldiers. "One day, if I feel like showing mercy on them, this video will stop me. It will always remind me of their crimes," Sweidawi said.(WaPo)
The rise of these sheiks, says The Washington Post, is creating problems for the future of democracy in Iraq.
is already touching off new conflicts that could deepen without U.S. military backing for the movement. They have stripped traditional tribal leaders of influence. They have carved up Sunni areas into fiefdoms, imposing their views on law and society and weakening the authority of the Shiite-led central government. Divisions are emerging among the new breed of tribal leaders, even as they are challenging established Sunni religious parties for political dominance.
Their ascent reflects how the struggle for local and regional centers of power is increasingly shaping Iraq's future. And their growing clout ensures that large segments of Iraq will remain influenced by tribal codes, rather than modern laws, posing an obstacle to the democratic foundations that many would like to see built here. (WaPo)
Against this background, violence has continued pretty much as you might expect. On October 21, 15 people were killed in what the BBC describes as a "tribal clash" between Sunni tribesmen and militants in Babil province.
The violence comes ahead of a transfer of security in the province from US to Iraqi troops, which the governor says is to take place on Thursday....
The militants fought members of two Sunni tribes who had formed an anti-al-Qaeda militia last year.
A number of people were also injured in the clashes...
Babil has seen much sectarian violence, including a suicide attack in Hilla in March last year that left more than 100 Shia pilgrims dead. (BBC News)
Colin Powell got it right back in the day, it seems: "“All of Powell's warnings think of the consequences, Pottery Barn rules: If you break it, you own it. And that's exactly what has happened in Iraq. We own it,"" said Bob Woodward back in 2004. (WaPo)
Let's hope that we can now pass on the ownership to the Maliki government without everything that we achieved there falling apart. Iraq is an expense we can't afford.
But there are other storm clouds threatening Iraq in addition to a potential purge by the Maliki government of the Awakening leaders. Discussing Petraeus's statement that the Iraq success, such as it is, is "fragile," Cernig discussed other threats to its permanence a few weeks ago:
-In the North, Kurdish peshmerga are facing off against the Iraqi Army and the Kurds are stealthily landgrabbing around the disputed city of Kirkuk. Amid accusations of kurdish oppression and ethnic clearing of Arabs in the region, it is "now on the verge of exploding." Any such explosion would lead to American forces choosing between three allies - the Kurds, Iraqi central government and NATO member Turkey, who would not sit idly by while a Kurdish independent state was formed....
- In the Shiite South, the Sadrist movement still isn't dead or defeated. But it has been pushed into the arms of Iran, from whom it had previously mainteained a distance despite rightwing claims otherwise. Sadr is streamlining his movement into a massive political arm and a smaller military one, and his people are still observing his self-imposed ceasefire. But that could yet change - there's a move among the Green Zone elite to run provincial elections under the old laws since they can't get a new law passed. This would disenfranchise Sadrists along with all the other "powers that aren't" (like the Awakening movement) and, with no prospect for getting their voices heard peacefully, the pressure to return to violence to get some say will be overwhelming.
He noted at or around that time:
Maliki...isn't as strong as he thinks he is and I'm just no longer sure there are enough Iraqis so see themselves as Iraqis first and foremost to do the job of keeping it all together. If there were, surely a multi-sectarian nationalist coalition (like the one that has kept promising it will form under various secular leaders from Chalabi to Allawi) would have already taken power by a parliamentary defeat of the separatist Powers That Be. I can quite understand why Ambasador Davutoglu thinks that ethnic and religious differences among Iraq's leadership are bound to flare again - and I don't believe there's a whole lot America or anyone else can do about that. (C&L)
Cernig also wrote: "I know its the Iraqis' country to mess up or not, at the end of the day, but...the PR is..well...PR. Not victory."
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