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The End of
By Robert Dreyfuss
The Nation
September 30, 2008
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/dreyfuss
In an exclusive interview with The Nation, the
commander of the Sunni-led Awakening movement in
government-allied militiamen against Awakening leaders
and rank-and-file members are likely to spark a new
Sunni resistance movement. That resistance force will
conduct attacks against American troops and Iraqi army
and police forces, he says. "Look around," he says. "It
has already come back. It is getting stronger. Look at
what is happening in
Azzam, spoke to The Nation by telephone from Amman,
Jordan, last week, before returning to
He laid out a scenario for a new explosion in
that would shatter the complacent American notion that
the 2007-08 "surge" of American troops in
stabilized that war-torn country. Although the greater
violent sectarian clashes, it was the emergence of the
Awakening movement in 2006 that crushed Al Qaeda in
On October 1 the Iraqi government was slated to take
over responsibility for the Awakening movement, which
includes about 100,000 mostly Sunni fighters in the
provinces of Anbar, Salahuddin and Diyala and in the
mostly Sunni western suburbs of
many former Baathists, ex-military officers from the
Saddam Hussein era and other assorted secular
nationalists, the Awakening -- in Arabic, sahwa, also
referred to by the
involves thousands of former guerrillas from the
2003-07 Iraqi resistance.
The sectarian Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki views the Awakening movement with extreme
suspicion, and the feeling is mutual. According to
several Iraqi sources interviewed for this article,
there is a grave possibility that the relative calm
that has prevailed in
shattered if the Shiite-led government and its allied
militia, the Badr Brigade of the pro-Iranian Islamic
Supreme Council of
power struggle with the Awakening forces for control of western
So far, the
into supporting the Awakening, offering $300 to $500
per month for each member of the Sunni militia. At the
same time,
to guarantee the payments to the Sunni forces and to
shield the Awakening from attacks or reprisals by the
regime. But among Sunnis, including those interviewed
for this story, there is widespread concern that they
are on their own and that the
abandon the government in
sectarian, pro-Iran leanings.
In that case, said a former top Iraqi official, many
Sunnis may turn to an unlikely source for support:
are talking with many Iraqis, including resistance
leaders and Awakening members, in
are in discussions with big Baathists." According to
this official, former Baathists, army officers and
Awakening members in
are looking to
East. "The Russians intend to come out strongly to play
with the Sunnis," he said. "I heard this from sahwa
members in
abandon us, we will go to the Russians.'"
Abu Azzam, who helped found the Awakening in the
Baghdad area, is based in the Abu Ghraib suburb of the
capital, and he is the commander for the region. Over
the past several months, he said, "hundreds" of his
fighters have been assassinated by the Badr militia or
killed in battles with Iraqi police forces controlled
by ISCI's Badr Brigade. Last month, the police issued a
warrant for Abu Azzam's arrest, but Maliki quashed it
after a brief period of confusion. "The Ministry of
Justice and the police in
religious parties," Abu Azzam said. "It wasn't a real
arrest warrant." Still, it was unsettling to the
movement, and it was widely taken as a sign of things to come.
According to the New York Times, Maliki's government
has ordered the arrest of 650 Awakening leaders in the
Baghdad area and hundreds more north of the capital, in
Diyala province. The Times quoted Jalaladeen al-Saghir,
a top official of ISCI's Badr Brigade, saying, "The
state cannot accept the Awakening. Their days are numbered."
The Iraqi government has pledged to enroll 20 percent
of the Awakening force in the army and police. But that
pledge is seen by most Sunnis as an action by Maliki to
keep the Americans happy -- even though Maliki has no
intention of keeping his promise.
"Maliki tells the Americans what he thinks they want to
hear," an Awakening leader tells The Nation. "I tell
the Americans all the time that it is a trick, but they
don't understand. The Americans are so naïve. They
assume good will on the part of Maliki. We don't
understand. The Americans know that Maliki is working
closely with the Iranians, so why do they believe him?
Why do they listen to him?"
According to Abu Azzam, the fact that 80 percent of the
Awakening forces will be kept out of the security
services means that they won't have work, and they will
be angry. "The government's plan is to take the 20
percent, bring them into the security forces, but move
them out of the neighborhoods where they are based," he
says. That's foolish, he adds, because those militia
forces know the neighborhoods, and they know a lot
about pro-Al Qaeda and pro-Sunni Islamist radicals,
house by house. "If you move them, you lose all that
knowledge," he says. "And then they replace them with
Iraqi army units that are mostly made up of sectarian
Shiite forces." It is a formula for disaster, and a new civil war.
Last week, the Iraqi Parliament passed a flawed but
workable law to govern provincial elections, which are
expected to be held early in 2009. Abu Azzam is forming
his own political party, the Iraqi Dignity Front, to
compete mostly in the
provinces, there are other parties emerging out of the
Awakening, including the Anbar-based National Front for
the Salvation of
parties are expected to sweep the Sunni vote in Anbar,
Salahuddin, Diyala and the western suburbs of Baghdad,
delivering a knockout blow to the Iraqi Islamic Party,
the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Sunni religious bloc that
at times has been part of Maliki's coalition. The Iraqi
Islamic Party was elected with only 2 percent of the
Sunni vote, when nearly all Sunnis boycotted the rigged
2005 elections. Sheikh Ali Hatim, leader of the
National Front for the Salvation of
We are waging a battle of destiny against the
Islamic Party. Al Qaeda does not pose any danger to
Iraq anymore, and it is finished. The real danger
are those that fight us in the name of legitimacy
and religion -- I mean the Islamic Party. Had it
not been for the intervention of the government and
the
two days in Al-Anbar.
But the pro-Awakening parties are far more concerned
about the threat from Maliki and the ISCI-Badr forces
than they are with the Iraqi Islamic Party, which does
not have a militia of any consequence. And there is no
guarantee that they will be satisfied with
participation in a political process that restricts
them to elections in Anbar and a few other Sunni
strongholds yet keeps them out of power in
in the central government -- especially if the campaign
of violence and assassination continues against their fighters.
According to Iraqi sources, the assassinations of key
Sunni leaders are being carried out by death squads
associated with the Badr Brigade, often supported
directly by units from
which works closely with Badr forces. Since 2003 the
Badr Brigade and
assassinated thousands of former Baathists, army and
air force officers; Sunni intellectuals and
professionals; and others opposed to
Many
possibility that the Russians would lend their support
to a new resistance force in
entirely rule it out.
Earlier this month, a former top Baathist official
openly called on
was an aide to Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi foreign
minister under Saddam, and who was
India and Vietnam, said that
in
of view in its timing, aims and tactics," and he called
on
The
over our planet can be buried in
Only through backing the patriotic Iraqi resistance
and strengthening its military capabilities can we
accelerate the end of
world. . The key to defeat the
world and to corner it into isolation is
providing support to the Iraqi resistance directly or indirectly.
The key to freeing the world by muzzling the United
States requires Russian involvement in the
Despite the bravado in that statement, it's not
impossible that
engaging the
directly. In all likelihood, it would depend on a
significant further deterioration of U.S.-Russian
relations over
contention. In the meantime, though, it is likely that
Russian intelligence agents are quietly connecting with Iraqis.
The bottom line is that despite the deceptive calm in
it is possible that the Sunni-Shiite war could reignite
but another flashpoint is developing in the north and
northeast of
aggrandize their territory. Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs
in
especially the Kurds' desire to take control of oil-
rich
the possibility that the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada
al-Sadr might reassert themselves, with Iranian
backing, if Maliki were to cave in to
a status-of-forces agreement and a U.S.-Iraq treaty
that cedes too much of
American occupation forces.
___________
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the
(Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).
(c) 2008 The Nation All rights reserved.
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