WASHINGTON - For months, US President
George W Bush and General David Petraeus have been
touting the program of recruiting tens of
thousands of Sunnis into US-financed "Awakening
Councils" as a master stroke of Iraq strategy
which has weakened al-Qaeda in Iraq and helped
reduce sectarian conflict through "bottom-up
reconciliation".
But the mainstream Sunni
insurgents who have been fighting al-Qaeda appear
to have outmaneuvered US strategists by using the
councils to pursue their interests in weakening
their most immediate enemy, reducing pressures
from the US military and establishing new
political bases, while continuing to mount attacks
on US and Iraqi government forces.
The
biggest question surrounding the strategy from the beginning
was
whether the Awakening Councils - called
Sahwa in Arabic - would be a haven for
Sunni insurgents.
High-ranking US officers
issued public assurances last year that former
insurgents would not be allowed to enter the
program, but last month, Iraqi government
officials, including Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki, began raising the specter of
"infiltration" of the Awakening groups by al-Qaeda
or "Ba'athists". Those are terms which have often
been used by Shi'ite leaders to refer to the
mainstream Sunni insurgents.
The US
command responded by denying they have been
infiltrated systematically by either al-Qaeda or
other "extremists". At a February 17 press
briefing, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith admitted that
individual extremists may have infiltrated some
units, but rejected the idea that any "complete
unit" of the Awakening had gone "bad".
Nevertheless, by the end of 2007 it had
become clear the Sahwa were dominated in
many places by the Sunni insurgent groups, and US
specialists were openly acknowledging it. The 1920
Revolution Brigades, a major Sunni armed
resistance organization, is the primary element in
the Sahwa in Diyala province as well as in
parts of al-Anbar province. One commander of the
Brigades, Abu Marouf, brought 13,000 of his
fighters into the Sahwa in Anbar. His
background as an insurgent commander is well known
locally but has never been acknowledged by US
officials.
Meanwhile, the 1920 Revolution
Brigades also continues to wage war against US
forces. In March 2007, it announced the creation
of two separate military "corps", one of which,
the "Iraqi Hamas", was clearly intended to
continue military operations against the US in
Diyala and other Sunni provinces.
The 1920
Revolution Brigades did not join a new "political
council of the Iraqi resistance" formed in October
to unify the Sunni armed organizations fighting
the US occupation - at least in its own name. But
the Iraqi Hamas "wing" of the organization, which
continues to be affiliated with the parent
organization, did join the new council.
The de facto security force in Amiriya
district of Baghdad is under the command of Abu
Abed, a former Iraqi army captain who led a unit
of another major resistance organization, the
Islamic Army of Iraq (IAI). He claims that the
local Sahwa is drawn from both IAI and the
1920 Revolution Brigades. The IAI has distanced
itself from Abu Abed, at least publicly, but that
move should be understood in light of the great
reluctance of Sunni armed organizations to admit
they are cooperating overtly with institutions
associated with the United States.
A
recent incident in which US troops killed or
detained members of the Sahwa during
operations against insurgents suggested that the
line separating the Sunni insurgents targeted by
the US military and the Sunnis working with the US
military was nonexistent.
On February 13,
US forces carried out an attack on an insurgent
target west of Kirkuk, killing six insurgents and
detaining 15. But members of the local Awakening
Council complained that the six people killed and
some of those detained were members of the
Sahwa.
One of those detained was
the head of the local 700-member Sahwa and
leader of the Baghzawi tribe.
Colonel
Martin Stanton, who is in charge of reconciliation
and engagement for the Multinational Corps-Iraq,
acknowledged to the New York Times last December
that the Awakening Council members came from the
Sunni insurgency.
He described the Sunnis
who joined the US paramilitary groups as having
been "hammered" by both al-Qaeda and the United
States. Stanton suggested that joining the
Awakening groups was "probably a distasteful
choice" for them, "because, after all, they viewed
us as invaders, and they probably still do, but it
was a survival choice and they made it".
Stanton had told investigative journalist
Spencer Ackerman in November that the participants
in the Awakening groups hadn't made "a fundamental
break" with the insurgency.
Participation
in the Sahwa appears to serve the interests
of mainstream Sunni insurgent organizations at
multiple levels. It has isolated al-Qaeda's
"Islamic State of Iraq" (ISI) and associated
jihadi groups, which in turn causes some
guerrillas factions to come back to the mainstream
insurgency.
It also may have reduced US
military pressure on the Sunni nationalist
insurgents. As the lines between pro-ISI and
anti-ISI Sunni insurgents have hardened during
2007, US military operations have apparently
focused more on ISI and the insurgents aligned
with it and less on the mainstream insurgents
fighting against al-Qaeda.
The US command
in Iraq provides no data indicating how many of
its operations are directed at each of its
adversaries. But Dan Gouré, vice president of the
Lexington Institute, a conservative Virginia
think-tank, told Inter Press Service he estimates
that the US military command in Iraq has been
targeting ISI in 60% of its operations and other
Sunni insurgents in 30% of them. The other 10%, he
says, are focused on the Shi'ite Mahdi Army of
Muqtada al-Sadr.
Insurgents are still
mounting about 700 improvised explosive device
(IED) attacks every month, according to the latest
statistics issued by the US command. Although they
are not broken down by source, the vast majority
are certainly carried out by the same Sunni
insurgent organizations that fight al-Qaeda and
have contributed tens of thousands of men to the
Sahwa.
Participating in the
Sahwa also gives insurgent groups a new
semi-legal political base. When the rape and
murder of two Sunni women, allegedly by Shi'ite
militiamen, provoked Sunni protests in Baquba
against the government this month, hundreds of
1920 Revolution Brigades fighters belonging to the
Sahwa demonstrated to demand the dismissal
of the provincial police chief. The organization's
spokesman in Baquba said they would "take up arms"
against the police and US troops if their demands
were not met.
One US colonel with long
experience in Iraq told Lieutenant Colonel Douglas
McGregor (Army retired), a senior fellow at the
Straus Military Reform Project, that the Sunni
insurgents' participation in the Sahwa may
be a transitory stage in a "fight, bargain,
subvert, fight approach" to achieving their
long-term aims, as McGregor testified before a
sub-committee of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee on February 8.
Those aims
include the complete withdrawal of US occupation
forces and reducing the power of a
Shi'ite-dominated government they believe
represents Iranian interests in Iraq.
The
Sunni insurgent strategy of flooding the
US-sponsored paramilitary forces with their own
fighters appears to make the Sunni insurgency
stronger than ever. Far from being a device for
"bottom-up reconciliation", the Awakening Councils
have added powder to the powder keg of
Sunni-Shi'ite tensions.
Gareth
Porter is a historian and national
security policy analyst. The paperback edition of
his latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam,
was published in 2006.
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