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June 11th,
2007 - U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies |
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U.S. Arming
Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies By John F. Burns and Alissa J. Rubin New York Times June 11, 2007 Baghdad, June 10 - With the
four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in
curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another
strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups
that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been
their allies in the past. American commanders say they
have successfully tested the strategy in Anbar Province west of Baghdad and
have held talks with Sunni groups in at least four areas of central and
north-central Iraq where the insurgency has been strong. In some cases, the American
commanders say, the Sunni groups are suspected of involvement in past attacks
on American troops or of having links to such groups. Some of these groups,
they say, have been provided, usually through Iraqi military units allied
with the Americans, with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and supplies. American officers who have
engaged in what they call outreach to the Sunni groups say many of them have
had past links to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia but grew disillusioned with the
Islamic militants’ extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have
killed thousands of Iraqi civilians. In exchange for American backing, these
officials say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight Al Qaeda and halt
attacks on American units. Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations
say that in some cases, Sunni groups have agreed to alert American troops to
the location of roadside bombs and other lethal booby traps. But critics of the strategy,
including some American officers, say it could amount to the Americans’
arming both sides in a future civil war. The United States has spent more
than $15 billion in building up Iraq’s army and police force, whose manpower
of 350,000 is heavily Shiite. With an American troop drawdown increasingly
likely in the next year, and little sign of a political accommodation between
Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a risk
that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against
Shiites. There is also the possibility the weapons could be used against the
Americans themselves. American field commanders
met this month in Baghdad with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top American
commander in Iraq, to discuss the conditions Sunni groups would have to meet
to win American assistance. Senior officers who attended the meeting said
that General Petraeus and the operational commander who is the second-ranking
American officer here, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, gave cautious approval to
field commanders to negotiate with Sunni groups in their areas. One commander who attended
the meeting said that despite the risks in arming groups that have until now
fought against the Americans, the potential gains against Al Qaeda were too
great to be missed. He said the strategy held out the prospect of finally
driving a wedge between two wings of the Sunni insurgency that had previously
worked in a devastating alliance - die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s
formerly dominant Baath Party, and Islamic militants belonging to a
constellation of groups linked to Al Qaeda. Even if only partly
successful, the officer said, the strategy could do as much or more to
stabilize Iraq, and to speed American troops on their way home, as the
increase in troops ordered by President Bush late last year, which has thrown
nearly 30,000 additional American troops into the war but failed so far to
fulfill the aim of bringing enhanced stability to Baghdad. An initial decline
in sectarian killings in Baghdad in the first two months of the troop buildup
has reversed, with growing numbers of bodies showing up each day in the
capital. Suicide bombings have dipped in Baghdad but increased elsewhere, as
Qaeda groups, confronted with great American troop numbers, have shifted
their operations elsewhere. The strategy of arming Sunni
groups was first tested earlier this year in Anbar Province, the desert
hinterland west of Baghdad, and attacks on American troops plunged after
tribal sheiks, angered by Qaeda strikes that killed large numbers of Sunni
civilians, recruited thousands of men to join government security forces and
the tribal police. With Qaeda groups quitting the province for Sunni havens
elsewhere, Anbar has lost its long-held reputation as the most dangerous
place in Iraq for American troops. Now, the Americans are
testing the “Anbar model” across wide areas of Sunni-dominated Iraq. The
areas include parts of Baghdad, notably the Sunni stronghold of Amiriya, a
district that flanks the highway leading to Baghdad’s international airport;
the area south of the capital in Babil province known as the Triangle of
Death, site of an ambush in which four American soldiers were killed last
month and three others abducted, one of whose bodies was found in the
Euphrates; Diyala Province north and east of Baghdad, an area of lush palm
groves and orchards which has replaced Anbar as Al Qaeda’s main sanctuary in
Iraq; and Salahuddin Province, also north of Baghdad, the home area of Saddam
Hussein. Although the American
engagement with the Sunni groups has brought some early successes against Al
Qaeda, particularly in Anbar, many of the problems that hampered earlier
American efforts to reach out to insurgents remain unchanged. American
commanders say the Sunni groups they are negotiating with show few signs of
wanting to work with the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal
al-Maliki. For their part, Shiite leaders are deeply suspicious of any
American move to co-opt Sunni groups that are wedded to a return to Sunni
political dominance. With the agreement to arm
some Sunni groups, the Americans also appear to have made a tacit recognition
that earlier demands for the disarming of Shiite militia groups are
politically unachievable for now given the refusal of powerful Shiite
political parties to shed their armed wings. In effect, the Americans seem to
have concluded that as long as the Shiites maintain their militias, Shiite
leaders are in a poor position to protest the arming of Sunni groups whose
activities will be under close American scrutiny. But officials of Mr.
Maliki’s government have placed strict limits on the Sunni groups they are
willing to countenance as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda. One leading
Shiite politician, Sheik Khalik al-Atiyah, the deputy Parliament speaker,
said in a recent interview that he would rule out any discussion of an
amnesty for Sunni Arab insurgents, even those who commit to fighting Al
Qaeda. Similarly, many American commanders oppose rewarding Sunni Arab groups
who have been responsible, even tangentially, for any of the more than 29,000
American casualties in the war, including more than 3,500 deaths. Equally
daunting for American commanders is the risk that Sunni groups receiving
American backing could effectively double-cross the Americans, taking weapons
and turning them against American and Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government
forces. Americans officers
acknowledge that providing weapons to breakaway rebel groups is not new in
counterinsurgency warfare, and that in places where it has been tried before,
including the French colonial war in Algeria, the British-led fight against
insurgents in Malaya in the early 1950s, and in Vietnam, the effort often
backfired, with weapons given to the rebels being turned against the forces
providing them. Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, commander of the Third Infantry
Division and leader of an American task force fighting in a wide area between
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers immediately south of Baghdad, said at a briefing
for reporters on Sunday that no American support would be given to any Sunni
group that had attacked Americans. If the Americans negotiating with Sunni
groups in his area had “specific information” that the group or any of its
members had killed Americans, he said, “The negotiation is going to go like
this: ‘You’re under arrest, and you’re going with me.’ I’m not going to go
out and negotiate with folks who have American blood on their hands.” One of the conditions set by
the American commanders who met in Baghdad was that any group receiving
weapons must submit its fighters for biometric tests that would include
taking fingerprints and retinal scans. The American conditions, senior
officers said, also include registering the serial numbers of all weapons,
steps the Americans believe will help in tracing fighters who use the weapons
in attacks against American or Iraqi troops. The fighters who have received
American backing in the Amiriya district of Baghdad were required to undergo
the tests, the officers said. The requirement that no
support be given to insurgent groups that have attacked Americans appeared to
have been set aside or loosely enforced in negotiations with the Sunni groups
elsewhere, including Amiriya, where American units that have supported Sunni
groups fighting to oust Al Qaeda have told reporters they believe that the
Sunni groups include insurgents who had fought the Americans. The Americans
have bolstered Sunni groups in Amiriya by empowering them to detain suspected
Qaeda fighters and approving ammunition supplies to Sunni fighters from Iraqi
Army units. In Anbar, there have been
negotiations with factions from the 1920 Revolution Brigades, a Sunni
insurgent group with strong Baathist links that has a history of attacking
Americans. In Diyala, insurgents who have joined the Iraqi Army have told
reporters that they switched sides after working for the 1920 group. And in
an agreement announced by the American command on Sunday, 130 tribal sheiks
in Salahuddin met in the provincial capital, Tikrit, to form police units
that would “defend” against Al Qaeda. General Lynch said American
commanders would face hard decisions in choosing which groups to support.
“This isn’t a black and white place,” he said. “There are good guys and bad
guys and there are groups in between,” and separating them was a major
challenge. He said some groups that had approached the Americans had made no
secret of their enmity. “They say, ‘We hate you
because you are occupiers’” he said, “‘but we hate Al Qaeda worse, and we
hate the Persians even more.’” Sunni militants refer to Iraq’s Shiites as
Persians, a reference to the strong links between Iraqi Shiites and the
Shiites who predominate in Iran. An Iraqi government official
who was reached by telephone on Sunday said the government was uncomfortable
with the American negotiations with the Sunni groups because they offered no
guarantee that the militias would be loyal to anyone other than the American
commander in their immediate area. “The government’s aim is to disarm and
demobilize the militias in Iraq,” said Sadiq al-Rikabi, a political adviser
to Mr. Maliki. “And we have enough militias in Iraq that we are struggling
now to solve the problem. Why are we creating new ones?” Despite such views, General
Lynch said, the Americans believed that Sunni groups offering to fight Al
Qaeda and halt attacks on American and Iraqi forces met a basic condition for
re-establishing stability in insurgent-hit areas: they had roots in the areas
where they operated, and thus held out the prospect of building security from
the ground up. He cited areas in Babil Province where there were “no security
forces, zero, zilch,” and added: “When you’ve got people who say, ‘I want to
protect my neighbors,’ we ought to jump like a duck on a june bug.” Damien Cave and Richard A.
Oppel Jr. contributed reporting. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/11/world/middleeast/11iraq.html |