The Osterley Times: U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies

Monday, June 11, 2007

U.S. Arming Sunnis in Iraq to Battle Old Qaeda Allies

Sometimes I read something that is so outrageous that I feel that I must have misread it. So I go back over it again slowly, picking at the words, looking for where along the line I must have misread what I was reading. And then there's the moment of dull shock, like being punched on a bruise, when I realise that I haven't misread the article at all. It actually is saying what I thought it was saying.

What the article in question says is this:

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.

So the United States have now started arming the Sunnis, the same group who have been fighting them throughout the insurgency. And, when one considers that the US is also arming the mostly Shi'ia government forces, then in any future civil war the United States will be arming both sides in the dispute.

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.

Of course there is every chance that this weaponry could also find itself being used against the Iraqi Shi'ite government forces or even against the coalition army itself.

Apparently this tactic was first tried in Anbar Province and proved successful there so it is now to be implemented throughout Sunni areas in Iraq.

As strategies go, it's certainly high risk as there is a very strong possibility that the US may one day find itself fighting men armed with it's own weaponry. After all, despite all their attempts to put the blame for what is taking place in Iraq at the door of Iran, the undeniable fact is that the main opposition to the occupation forces have come from Sunni insurgents, not from their Shi'ia adversaries.

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.

Okay, so the idea is to have them fight al-Qaeda, who by most accounts are a fraction of the forces operating inside Iraq. But, more worryingly, the people that these guys say they hate - even more than they hate al-Qaeda - are the Persians. In other words, Iraq's Shi'ia population.

And the guys who made the statement above are being armed by the US forces.

Sometimes I am simply at a loss for words. This is one of those times.

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?”