Men in Black
Why Iraq's Shiite militias are so brutally effective. What can be done to stop them?
One reason curbing the militia violence will be so difficult, as General Hayden explained in recent Senate testimony, is that "internal divisions and power struggles among the Shia make it difficult for Shia leaders to take actions that might ease Sunni fears of domination. Radical Shia militias and splinter groups stoke the violence," Hayden continued, "while brutal Sunni attacks make even moderate Shia question whether it is possible to reconcile the Sunnis to the new Shia-dominated power structures."
"Pick your battles." And that could determine whether the present government survives. Last month, Duke was asked by an Iraqi Army battalion commander why U.S. forces had buckled under Sadr's pressure and dismantled its checkpoints in Sadr City. Duke posed the question to Gen. George Casey, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, the next time he saw him. "His answer," says Duke, "was that if we're leaving this place anytime soon, the Iraqi government has to make the decisions. He said, in general, to pick your battles."
American military officials here are increasingly worried that those battles are getting more complex-and they're frustrated at the pace of change within Iraqi government ministries. In Diyala province, according to U.S. News sources, the Shiite police chief in the hotly contested town of Baqubah, Ghassan al-Bawi, hired some 250 Mahdi Army members in late October to come north to Baqubah to work as a local highway patrol-enabling Shiites to control roads and checkpoints. "Now you've got whole [Sunni] villages thinking that they're defending themselves against this Shia force coming in and doing a raid," says a senior U.S. military official in the region. American and Iraqi provincial officials in Diyala want the police chief fired, but they are waiting on the decision from the Ministry of Interior. In the meantime, says the official, "we have to keep meeting with him and supporting him."
That reality, says another senior military official in Baghdad, puts America in a precarious position. "What other places are they operating out of that we cannot go into or influence?" he asks. "How do we deal with that? And how long do we wait?"
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