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2 Soured Sunni deal ends one US
option By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay
Khalilzad negotiated with Sunni armed groups for
several weeks earlier this year on an agreement
that would have supported Sunni forces in
attacking pro-Iranian Shi'ite militias, according
to accounts given by commanders of armed Sunni
resistance organizations.
The revelations
of the intensive US-Sunni negotiations, reported
by Hala Jaber in the Sunday Times of London, are
consistent with an account of those negotiations
provided by a Sunni participant
last
May in an interview with the London-based Asharq
al-Awsat newspaper.
But the new accounts
make it clear for the first time that the main
objective of the talks was to explore possible US
support for building a Sunni military force
directed primarily against Shi'ites in Iraq.
The George W Bush administration never
responded to the Sunni offer and resumed its
support in April for fielding an almost
exclusively Shi'ite and Kurdish army and
paramilitary forces to suppress the Sunni
resistance. The decision against any accommodation
with the Sunni organizations made it virtually
impossible for the United States to curb the
rising tide of sectarian Shi'ite killings of Sunni
civilians and the open sectarian civil war that
has followed.
In the talks, the Sunnis
assured the ambassador that the Sunni insurgents
had sufficient manpower and knowledge to deal
successfully with the problem of Shi'ite militias
in Baghdad, which Khalilzad had begun to recognize
as a serious policy problem for the Bush
administration. "If he would just provide us with
the weapons, we would clean up the city and regain
control of Baghdad in 30 days," one insurgent
leader was quoted as saying. The Sunni
participants did not refer to potential
cooperation against al-Qaeda in Iraq and other
jihadi terrorist networks in Iraq, but the
organizations involved had parted ways with
al-Qaeda on central issues and some insurgent
leaders had reportedly offered in late 2005 to
turn al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi over to
the Iraqi government as part of a broader peace
agreement.
The negotiations between
Khalilzad and Sunni insurgents were said by the
Sunni leaders to have been brokered by former
interim prime minister Iyad Allawi at Khalilzad's
request. Allawi apparently convinced Sunni
resistance leaders that they could find common
ground with the US over Iranian influence in the
country, which was exercised through Shi'ite
political parties and militias. Allawi established
his bona fides with the Sunni resistance on the
Iranian threat to Iraq by having his defense
minister refer to the main Shi'ite list in the
first parliamentary elections as the "Iranian
list".
Throughout most of 2005, US
policymakers were ignoring warnings from Allawi
and other non-sectarian Iraqis about the rise of
Shi'ite militias, which were taking revenge
against Sunnis for the Saddam Hussein regime's
harsh treatment of Shi'ites over more than three
decades.
But in November 2005, Khalilzad
began hinting strongly at a shift toward a "Sunni
strategy". The US Embassy abruptly confronted
prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari publicly over
torture houses being run by Shi'ite officials of
the Ministry of Interior and adopted a tough line
against militant Shi'ite control over Iraqi
security forces or ministries.
Khalilzad
then announced in late November that he was ready
to meet with insurgent leaders and wanted to "deal
with their legitimate concerns". At the same time,
the US command began for the first time referring
to the Sunni insurgents as "nationalists" rather
than "anti-Iraqi forces". Khalilzad accused the
Iranians of wanting regional hegemony, and the top
US military commander, General George Casey, said
Iran was funding Shi'ite lists in the election.
Khalilzad openly criticized the sectarian
nature of Iraq's main parties and made no secret
of the US hope that the party of the secular
Shi'ite Allawi, a long-time Central Intelligence
Agency asset in Iraq who had been chosen by
Washington as interim prime minister in June 2004,
would get enough votes to play power broker in
forming a new government.
After Allawi's
list did badly in the December elections,
Khalilzad repeated his insistence that sectarian
Shi'ites would not be allowed to control the
Interior Ministry.
These were all signals
aimed primarily at convincing Sunni resistance
leaders that they could strike a deal with the US.
Three major Sunni armed organizations were
interested in a possible agreement with the US:
the Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, the 1920
Revolutionary Brigade (an umbrella group for seven
smaller organizations) and The Islamic Army of
Iraq. The three groups claimed to represent
three-fourths of the resistance forces.
The resistance groups interested in
participating in the talks were all independent of
former high officials of Saddam's regime who
directed anti-coalition guerrilla units. The
forces loyal to Saddam remained outside the talks,
demanding the reinstatement of
