Part of the new administration approach to Iraq is teaming up with Sunni militiamen, many of whom were killing Americans up until recently. Given the rivalries, this has made for a remarkably complicated battlefield.
Abu Azzam says the 2,300 men in his movement include members of fierce Sunni groups like the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade and the Mujahedeen Army that have fought the American occupation. Now his men patrol alongside the Americans, who want to turn them into a security force that can bring peace to this stretch between Baghdad and Falluja.
A few miles away, in the town of Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Nassir al-Hiti and his brigade of Iraqi Army soldiers also have the support of the American military. But they have a different ambition, some American commanders here say: doing everything they can to undermine Abu Azzam’s men, even using a stolen membership list to single them out for wrongful detention.
Got that? American forces have teamed up with Sunni insurgents, who hate us, and continue to train Iraqi soldiers, who hate the Sunni insurgents (and don’t exactly love us, either).
Does anyone — other than Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, and William Kristol — think this makes any sense at all? We’re in the middle of a civil war, supporting both sides, at the same time, making enemies of our allies and allies of our enemies.
The NYT added, “The gulf between Abu Azzam’s men and the Iraqi soldiers remains vast, with American troops sometimes having to physically intercede. And it is an unmistakable caution that the full depths of the problems facing Iraq cannot be measured in the statistics about insurgent attacks and sectarian killings that carry so much weight in Washington.”
That’s quite an understatement. Metrics matter, but there’s no chart to measure how many times U.S. troops had to physically prevent an allied Sunni militia from fighting an allied Shiite ISF battalion.
I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I found this stunning:
About a month ago, the Iraqi brigade, which is predominantly Shiite, was assigned a new area and instructed to stay away from Nasr Wa Salam, Colonel Pinkerton said. But he said he believed that the Iraqi soldiers remain intent on preventing Sunni Arabs, a majority here, from controlling the area. He cites a pattern of aggression by Iraqi troops toward Abu Azzam’s men and other Sunnis, who he believes are often detained for no reason.
Recently, and without warning, Colonel Pinkerton said, 80 Iraqi soldiers in armored vehicles charged out of their sector toward Nasr Wa Salam but were blocked by an American platoon. The Iraqis refused to say where they were going and threatened to drive right through the American soldiers, whom they greatly outnumbered.
Eventually, with Apache helicopter gunships circling overhead and American gunners aiming their weapons at them, the Iraqi soldiers retreated. “It hasn’t come to firing bullets yet,” Colonel Pinkerton said.
A few weeks ago, he said, a Sunni detainee was beaten to death while in custody of the Muthanna Brigade. And in the past year, he said, Muthanna soldiers detained two of Abu Azzam’s brothers, both of whom said they were abused, and raided Abu Azzam’s house.
Colonel Pinkerton’s experiences here, he said, have inverted the usual American instincts born of years of hard fighting against Sunni insurgents.
“I could stand among 1,800 Sunnis in Abu Ghraib,” he said, “and feel more comfortable than standing in a formation of Iraqi soldiers.”
It’s the awkward tangent of Bush’s argument about al Qaeda — the president describes them as the main enemy because there’s no one else to point to. As Kevin recently explained, “Who else are we going to fight? The Badr Organization? The Mahdi Army? The Sunni insurgents? The Iraqi Security Forces themselves? Hell, we’re allied with the Sunni tribes these days. We’re training the Iraqi Security Forces, making them into an ever more efficient sectarian killing machine. We’re supporting a government that supports the Badr Organization and we’ve apparently got back channel negotiations taking place with Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army too. This leaves us with distinctly limited options.”
We. need. to. leave. now.