WASHINGTON - Are the Sunni leaders in
Iraq's al-Anbar province finally coming around to
joining the US counterinsurgency war?
That's how the New York Times portrayed
the situation last week. Times reporters quoted a
Sunni tribal leader in Anbar as saying that 25 of
31 tribes in the province had banded together to
fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Iraqi
insurgents allied with them.
The newspaper
said US officials, who had "tried to persuade the
Sunni Arab majority in Anbar
to reject the insurgency and embrace Iraqi
nationalism", saw the announcement as an
"encouraging sign".
But careful readers of
the Times report would have noticed that something
was missing from the picture of the
political-military situation in Anbar that is
crucial to making sense of the tribal leader's
announcement, as well as the spin put on it by the
unnamed US officials.
The missing piece is
the home-grown Sunni armed resistance to the US
occupation, which enjoys the strong support of the
Sunni population and tribal leaders in the
province and has been at war with the foreign
terrorists of al-Qaeda for many months. According
to a report by prominent security analysts Anthony
Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid, foreign fighters
represent only 4-10% of some 30,000 armed
insurgents in Iraq.
The omission of any
mention of the indigenous Sunni resistance forces
from the Times story followed a Washington Post
report on a secret US Marine Corps intelligence
analysis of the situation in Anbar, in which
Pentagon officials were quoted as saying the
document portrays a "vacuum that has been filled
by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq".
The disappearance of Sunni resistance
forces from these papers' coverage of the
situation in Anbar mirrors the view presented by
the US military briefers for the past six months,
which has systematically ignored what has become,
in effect, a third force in the war in Iraq - a
Sunni resistance to both the occupation and
al-Qaeda.
That third force emerged last
year out of the struggle in the Sunni heartland of
Iraq over the constitutional referendum and
December parliamentary election. Al-Qaeda in Iraq
threatened anyone in Anbar province who
participated in the referendum with death, but the
major Sunni armed groups broke openly with
al-Qaeda and supported full participation by
Sunnis to defeat the referendum.
Sunni
resistance groups then began attacking al-Qaeda
forces in Ramadi, Husayba and other towns in
Anbar. By early 2006, these armed groups had
captured 270 foreign infiltrators, according to
the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. US military
command spokesman Major-General Rick Lynch
publicly confirmed in January that the insurgents
had killed six "major leaders" of al-Qaeda in
Ramadi.
From late November to February,
Lynch made the fundamental conflict between the
Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda a major theme of his
briefings. He told reporters, "The local
insurgents have become part of the solution."
But the Sunnis' solution included the
demand that the United States set a date for
withdrawal in return for their ending the
insurgency and cooperating with an Iraqi
government against al-Qaeda. And in the interim
period before a final withdrawal, the Sunnis
wanted the withdrawal of US forces from Anbar,
along with the largely Shi'ite army units they had
sent in to control the province.
At a
meeting at a US base in Ramadi in December,
reported by the London Sunday Times in February, a
former Iraqi general, Saab al-Rawi, representing
the Iraqi Sunni insurgents in the province, asked
General George Casey, the senior US commander in
Iraq, for the withdrawal of US forces from Ramadi
and their replacement by a brigade of former
soldiers from the area.
But Casey angrily
refused, accusing Rawi of wanting a US pullout so
the insurgents could take over the city. The Iraqi
general recalled that his forces had protected the
city for six months after the fall of Saddam
Hussein's regime. "You have not protected this
city and can never do so," said Rawi, "for you are
foreigners here - unwanted and unwelcome."
The Shi'ite-dominated Iraqi government was
more responsive to the Sunni plea. The Los Angeles
Times reported on January 29 that national
security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie acknowledged that
the major Sunni resistance organizations were in
an irreconcilable conflict with al-Qaeda. "We are
talking about two ideologies," he declared.
Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari
promised the Sunni tribal leaders in January that
he would support the request for the replacement
of US troops in Ramadi with local Sunni forces,
according to Al-Hayat.
But that never
happened, and the US military command soon
reversed its line on the Sunni armed
organizations. Instead of touting them as
important to the solution to the al-Qaeda problem,
the US military command began to act as though the
United States didn't need Sunni armed
organizations at all.
In his March 9
briefing, Lynch dropped the distinction between
the Sunni armed organizations and al-Qaeda. "The
people of Iraq are uniting against the
insurgency," he declared. And he added, "Remember,
democracy equals failure for the insurgency."
A review of the transcripts of US command
briefings since then reveals that the spokesman
has systematically avoided any comment suggesting
that there is a third alternative to al-Qaeda
control over Anbar and occupation by US and
Shi'ite troops.
In contrast to the
official military line, however, in April the
London Daily Telegraph quoted the senior US
officer in Ramadi, Colonel John Gronski, as saying
that almost all the fighting against coalition
forces in his sector had been by Iraqis, and that
in the previous five months not a single foreigner
had been detained in and around Ramadi. Gronski
also admitted that the Sunni insurgents had the
support of the local population and that local
tribal leaders regarded the resistance as
"legitimate".
After the new government was
formed under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in May,
representatives of the Sunni resistance pressed
their case in talks with the Iraqi government. USA
Today reported on July 4 that the government was
"studying a request from some local insurgent
leaders to supply them with weapons so they can
turn on the heavily armed foreign fighters who
were once their allies ..."
But Washington
has continued to oppose such schemes, according to
Ayad al-Samarrai, the second-highest official of
the Sunni-based Islamic Party. In a report
published on September 13, The Times of London
quoted Samarrai saying leaders in Anbar had made
several proposals to the US on building "an
indigenous army and police force" in the province,
but to no avail.
The US resistance to
arming the Sunnis in al-Anbar, he said, had led
many Sunni leaders to believe the US was
deliberately helping al-Qaeda because it preferred
chaos there.
The Sunni resistance to both
al-Qaeda and the occupation represents an acute
embarrassment to the US military and the
administration in Washington. The US needs the
help of the Sunni resistance against al-Qaeda, but
to get it, it must admit that it can't do the job
itself. Since that option is still unacceptable,
the administration has had to pretend that there
are only two sides in the struggle in Anbar - not
three.
Gareth Porter is a
historian and national-security policy analyst.
His latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in June 2005.
