Center for a New American Security

When the Sunni Awakening began among Anbar’s tribes, and then those tribal militia asked to be integrated into the Iraqi security forces, Maliki didn’t really care. Anbar was far away, strategically and economically peripheral, and Sunni-dominated. Anything that undermined AQI in that backwater was fine by the prime minister so long as it didn’t pose a threat to Baghdad.

As the Awakening spread into greater Baghdad in the summer of 2007—starting in places like Ameriya, where former insurgents like Abu Abed (now on the run) and farsighted commanders like LTC Dale Kuehl from 1-5 CAV (who comments on this blog!) forged pacts against AQI—suddenly the sahwat did not seem like such a great idea to Maliki. After all, unlike the tribes of Anbar (which might as well have been hillbillies from Kentucky), the newly formed “Sons of Iraq” (SoIs, formerly known as “Concerned Local Citizens”/CLCs) contained numerous members of the Islamic Army of Iraq, the 1920 Revolutionary Brigade, and other Sunni insurgent groups. Maliki was petrified of forming and then integrating these groups because he feared creating a “fifth column” inside the ISF (that is, another fifth column to compete with all those Badr guys!).

In the summer and fall of 2007, Petraeus tried to get Maliki to reach out to the growing number of SoI groups and begin integrating them into the ISF. For commanders at MNF-I and MNC-I, this was a key element of engaging the nearly 80 percent of Iraqi combatants they had deemed “reconcilable.” Maliki said no. Petraeus asked again. Maliki said no. Then, in the lead up to his September 2007 Congressional testimony, Petraeus really put the screws to Maliki and the prime minister relented, but Petraeus could only get Maliki to okay integrating about 1,500 SoIs from rural Abu Ghraib. (Abu Ghraib borders Anbar on the western outskirts of Baghdad and thus was seen by Maliki as less of a threat.) But, even then, the Maliki government slow-rolled the process. First they blamed Abu Ghraib’s SoIs for attacks on Iraqi army checkpoints they did not commit. Then the Ministry of Interior required that SoI recruits from Abu Ghraib be trained at a police training station in east Baghdad, requiring them to drive through Shia-militia-infested neighborhoods where they could easily be attacked. (The U.S. military created a work-around for this particular move by training some of the SoIs on a nearby FOB and using helicopters to ferry the rest.)

Since then, little has changed. Yes, more SoIs have been integrated, but not nearly enough. And every step appears to require twisting Maliki’s arm to the breaking point. With Maliki's newfound (over)confidence in the capabilities of the ISF, moreover, he is growing less amenable to this kind of tactical pressure every day. There is a genuine possibility that the prime minister will basically tell the “thugs,” “criminals,” and “terrorists” in the SoIs to go screw themselves. And, as provincial elections approach and Maliki strikes deals with the IIP/Tawafuq (Green Zone Sunnis who are natural competitors to the SoIs), the incentive to marginalize and crack down on the political activities of the Awakening groups grows.

Shunning the sahwat is incredibly dangerous. As Michael Wahid Hanna explains in an excellent new article:

The dangers posed by resentments among members of the sahwat could easily be exploited by insurgent groups who continue to wage a violent campaign against U.S. and Iraqi forces, resulting in wider violence. A reversion to outright violence could also lead to full-scale renewal of sectarian warfare aimed at the Iraqi security forces, which are seen by many Sunni Arabs as an extension of a sectarian government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has viewed the sahwat warily as barely rehabilitated terrorists with designs on central authority.

At the moment, U.S. forces pay most of the SoIs and sit on them so they don’t cause trouble. But as the number of these groups have proliferated across the country, this has deeply enmeshed U.S. forces in policing overlapping webs of local tribal, clan, criminal, and insurgent competitors. As Hanna notes, this relationship is inherently unsustainable over the long-run:

The sahwa campaign has continued and expanded far beyond Anbar province and has reached mixed areas of the country such as Nineveh, Kirkuk, Salahuddin, and Diyala provinces. Due to the multiplicity of these groups and the terminology used to describe them, the U.S. military has begun to refer to all such volunteers as "Sons of Iraq," although Iraqis still refer to these groups as sahwat without distinguishing by geography or origin. Following the initial realignment in Anbar province, which established the precedent and mechanisms for U.S. sponsorship, newer branches were established in a more explicitly calculated process; a greater risk now is that personal, tribal, or group agendas may overtake the central mission of community policing and enforcing security.

Continuation of this mission by the U.S. military inevitably runs the risk of dragging the U.S. military into local disputes and creating enemies out of those members of the community who have not benefited from U.S. assistance. David Kilcullen, a former senior counterinsurgency advisor to the MNF-I, has described how local disputes between al-Qaida in Iraq and various Iraqi tribes spun out of control, resulting in violence and "revenge obligation[s]." With U.S. forces identified as the sponsor of certain tribes and groups, if the competition and jockeying for limited resources among tribal groups and clans breaks down into outright violence, U.S. military forces will become targets within such feuds.

This type of violence could also result if U.S. proxies overstep their bounds in their attempts to extend their influence or engage in predatory or criminal behavior. If U.S. proxies are engaged in such behavior, resentment among the local populace could escalate and result in destabilizing violence aimed at both the sahwat and their U.S. military sponsors, who will be seen as complicit in such lawlessness.

Legitimate U.S. attempts to police their sahwa allies are likely to create serious frictions that could undermine the precarious relationship between U.S. military forces and their local allies.

So what is the answer? The answer is to start using strategic leverage by putting direct pressure on Maliki from the highest levels of the U.S. government to integrate the SoIs or risk losing U.S. support to the ISF (that is, move to effectively end our open-ended commitment to Maliki), combining it with the tactical leverage produced by the existence of the Awakening groups themselves (which our commanders and diplomats already use). As Hanna concludes:

By offering unqualified support for the government regardless of its intentions with respect to the sahwat, the United States is undercutting the growth of local Sunni Arab political representatives and their formal transition to the political arena. This support for the government is also diluting the not insignificant leverage that the sahwat have accumulated by dint of their ability to control levels of violence and the past participation of many of these groups in insurgent activity. A future outbreak of communal conflict would be devastating for Iraq and U.S. national interests, but the unfortunate current reality is that the support of organized armed forces remains a prerequisite for political legitimacy and power in Iraq. While the strategic calculus for many former insurgents has shifted to encourage cooperation with U.S. military forces at this juncture, the specter of future violence and the strength of the sahwat as an armed counterweight to the government are important points of leverage for these groups in their negotiations over legislation affecting the Sunni Arab community and central government support for economic development.