By Anna Mulrine
U.S. News and World Report, 25 July 2007
As President Bush continues to stress al Qaeda as the chief threat to Iraq's stability--a reprised effort to establish a link between al Qaeda in Iraq and the 9/11 attackers--U.S. military forces on the ground in Iraq are fighting a complex war in regions with vast networks of overlapping loyalties--and few foreign fighters. Most members of al Qaeda in Iraq, say commanders on the ground, are local Iraqi outcasts.
"I can count them [foreign fighters] as a total I have engaged, dead or alive, in the 10 months I've been here on one hand," says Col. David Sutherland, the U.S. commander of coalition forces in the hotly contested area of Diyala province, an insurgent stronghold region some 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. There, Sutherland says, those involved in al Qaeda are largely dispossessed locals, not jihadists who have come from elsewhere. "The recruiting program is [that] al Qaeda may send five or eight individuals into a village. They recruit from those who have no power base, no place in society," including, he adds, former male prostitutes and the mentally ill.
Sutherland has launched roughly 200 operations--both large and small--and says there has been some progress. This, he says, is due in large part to the local reaction to the brutal methods of al Qaeda-linked forces. Sutherland says he has seen growing resentment of al Qaeda among Diyala's residents. "People here are so disgusted and disillusioned by al Qaeda--no one here wants an Islamic state in Iraq," he says
Earlier this month, for example, in a small village outside the provincial capital of Baquba, between 20 and 30 gunmen went house to house in pickup trucks, shooting young men. They killed 29, wounded four, burned down several houses and cars, and left. They did not shoot women or children, and the hands of victims were not tied behind their backs, a common practice in militia death squad killings. "We checked with the people and they said [the gunmen] were al Qaeda members that had moved into the area recently," he says.
But the incident highlights the complexity of the situation in Iraq today--and the myriad interconnections among the country's citizens and tribes that, while rendering political solutions increasingly pivotal, at the same time can make them tougher to come by.
The presumed al Qaeda-linked forces were wearing Iraqi Army uniforms. Shiite militia members, both in the Iraqi military and outside, have in the past used such uniforms in carrying out sectarian violence in the area that is a mix of Sunni and Shiite tribes--and is getting more complex by the day. Increasingly, says Sutherland, the province is experiencing a growth in the "Kurdish element" making their bid to "expand their voting rights, and their base" in the region. Rich in resources, at the crossroads of two rivers with sizable oil reserves, the region has a new "problem set," Sutherland adds. "How are they going to get along?"
Known as "little Baghdad," Diyala is one of the most diverse areas in the country, with a far different makeup than, for example, western Al Anbar province, a majority-Sunni region where U.S. military officials have lately touted an "Anbar awakening" (the teaming-up of Sunni tribal sheiks in the western part of Iraq with U.S. military forces against al Qaeda-linked extremists).
But those dynamics may prove harder to replicate in more diverse regions of Iraq. "Diyala ain't Al Anbar," says Sutherland, who commands a region that includes "25 major tribes and 100 subtribes. And of the major tribes, six are a Sunni-Shia mix."
The result, says Sutherland, is that "sometimes the violence that somebody may think is al Qaeda or sectarian may be tribe on tribe." The bottom line, he says, is that "not everything is al Qaeda. Not everything is sectarian, not everything is tribal. And some of it just might be criminal."
This also means that in Diyala, U.S. forces must be careful about being seen as favoring Sunni tribes in an effort to root out al Qaeda-linked elements. Sutherland says that U.S. forces do not arm Sunni tribes. "No, I'm not going to arm anybody. We provide weapons and assistance to Iraqi Security forces that have been designated as such," says Sutherland. "In Diyala, we do not arm locals. We don't because as groups they would be considered militias."
And while persuading tribes to help support U.S. forces against al Qaeda-linked extremists can be part of the solution, it can also be part of the problem as well, says Daniel Byman, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The problem in Iraq, Byman says, is not so much that it has an insurgency than that it is a failed state. "It's not just bad guys shooting the government, but in many parts you have no government authority whatsoever." This means that in addition to civil violence in regions, there is also crime. "To fight this, you need to build a strong state--police, courts." But often, he says, the enemy of this approach can be the same local groups that might be needed to fight against al Qaeda.
The bottom line, says Byman, is that "if you just focus on building the state, you don't have the Anbar awakening. But if you do the Anbar awakening again and again" by teaming up with local sheiks and their tribes, "you have too many armed groups."
It's the sort of dynamic U.S. commanders on the ground continue to grapple with in Iraq. In the meantime, the buildup of U.S. forces in Iraq, which was completed June 15, is yielding results in Diyala. In the past, Sutherland had requested more troops for his hotly contested region. Now he has them.
"I've been able to get more forces up here, which is very important. That's what matters to me," Sutherland says. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other top U.S. military leaders "recognize that what happens in Diyala will influence Baghdad, and what happens in Baghdad influences what happens in Diyala. "General Petraeus said recently that this is doable, and I couldn't agree more," Sutherland says. "This is doable."
But that assessment may matter less than the conclusions of Congress, which is set to receive Petraeus's report card on progress in Iraq in two months.
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Citation: Anna Mulrine. "The United States Finds Few Non-Iraqis Among Insurgents," U.S. News and World Report, 25 July 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnews/20070725/ts_usnews/theunitedstatesfindsfewnoniraqisamonginsurgents
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