Taking on the Bombers
The U.S. presses Sunni tribal leaders to drive out al Qaeda
They are calling it the Anbar awakening—and one of the most encouraging signs of progress in Iraq. It's the teaming up of Sunni tribal leaders with U.S. military forces to drive al Qaeda-linked extremists from the cities and villages in the once highly volatile western Anbar province.
President Bush is citing the efforts there as a success. U.S. deaths in Anbar were down from some 40 in December to four last month. This in a mainly Sunni area where the Sunni terrorist group al Qaeda in Iraq was, a senior Marine intelligence officer reported a year ago, an "integral part of the social fabric."
The question now: Can the approach be replicated in areas where the situation is complicated by Sunni-Shiite violence? U.S. commanders are certainly trying to implement some of the lessons. In Diyala province, now one of the deadliest areas for American soldiers, U.S. forces are encouraging (and by some reports arming) Sunni sheiks and their followers to turn on al Qaeda-linked insurgents.
Militias. It is a risky approach in a country where alliances of convenience can be fleeting—and could also carry the unintended consequence of legitimizing what amount to selected sectarian militias. "By looking to the Sunni militias to provide security in Sunni regions...the U.S. will confirm that the vital task of security, which is the domain of the Iraqi state...will be performed by forces of each community in its own community," says Vali Nasr, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "This is the beginning of devolution of authority and power along regional lines."
Commanders are working to link up Sunni tribal recruits with the mostly Shiite soldiers and police. "We get them swearing allegiance to Iraq, tied in to Iraqi structures," says Gen. David Petraeus, who leads U.S.forces in Iraq. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has set up a committee to monitor these developments. "We are calling all the tribes who are ready to fight al Qaeda to tell them they need to approach this committee to ensure that this goes in the right direction, that our standards and criteria are followed," says a government spokesman. "We seek to legitimize them and at the same time to keep them subjected to certain" standards.
Read another way, this can also be viewed as a measure by the majority-Shiite government to keep the Sunni movement under its thumb. Indeed, sectarian dynamics are a major hurdle in areas like Diyala that contain a volatile mix of Sunnis and Shiites. "You can't truly export the things that are happening there [in Anbar] out to the rest of Iraq," says one senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. "But maybe you can use the same kind of approach in more homogenous areas."
And hope for some breaks. The Anbar sheiks turned on al Qaeda for their own reasons, after a tribal leader was killed. The death was less a point of contention than the fact that the body was not promptly returned for a Muslim burial, dishonoring the tribe. "That," says Petraeus, "was the final straw."
With Stephanie Gaskell
This story appears in the July 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.