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Iraqi tribes shift from hurdle to help

BAGHDAD — Several weeks ago, Lt. Col. Kurt Pinkerton came face to face with the leading edge of a movement that senior coalition officials say has significant potential to shift the war against al-Qaida in Iraq in their favor.

Pinkerton, commander of 1st Cavalry Division’s 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, was meeting a tribal sheikh in the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib.

“The battalion commander goes to meet with this sheikh,” said Gen. David Petraeus, head of Multinational Forces-Iraq and the senior U.S. commander in country.

Pinkerton knew that the sheikh and his tribesmen were “sort of on the edge” of those who had been fighting the coalition.

“These guys are more resistance than hard-core insurgency,” Petraeus said. “They’re a tribe, and the tribe has sort of helped the insurgents a bit.”

But the sheikh had a surprise for Pinkerton. He told the lieutenant colonel the tribe was ready to take up arms against al-Qaida.

“What makes you think you could possibly turn out volunteers?” Pinkerton asked him, according to Petraeus.

“Well, come out back,” the sheikh replied.

When Pinkerton stepped outside, Petraeus said, he found roughly 2,000 tribesmen staring back at him. “And they all want to be provisional police,” the general added.

Gathering of the tribes

Pinkerton’s experience is far from unique among U.S. commanders in recent weeks. Beginning last year in the Sunni stronghold of Anbar province but spreading out in all directions, Sunni tribes that previously offered al-Qaida active or tacit support are turning against the terrorist organization and signing up to defend their communities, said Petraeus and other senior coalition figures.

“I have recently met with tribal leaders representing large segments of the population and what we see in Anbar, I sense, is happening in other places around Iraq,” said Lt. Col. (P.) Rick Welch, an adviser on political, tribal, religious and cultural issues to Multinational Division-Baghdad commander Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil.

This tribal “awakening,” as the Anbar Sunnis call it, covers tribes that include “close to two-thirds” of the Iraqi population outside Anbar and the Kurdish provinces in the north, he said.

“I see this as the greatest momentum shifter that I’ve seen since I’ve been here, if the stars continue to line up right,” said Welch, a Special Forces officer on his second tour in Iraq. “The reason I say that is it looks to me like it’s coming from the people up, not from us down.”

Welch predicted that the tribal movement would evolve from one that simply pitted Sunni tribes against al-Qaida to one that included Shiite tribes who might oppose Jaysh al-Mahdi, the militia headed by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. British Army Lt. Gen. Graeme Lamb, Petraeus’ deputy, said Shiite tribes were already part of the awakening.

“This is not an exclusive Sunni initiative,” he said.

Petraeus was less sanguine. “It’s a little more difficult, frankly, on the Shia side,” he said. “That’s really the Sadr side, and there’s a real reluctance by some of them to talk to us.”

Nevertheless, Welch noted, Sunni tribal emissaries were already meeting with the Sadr Bureau in Sadr City. “It might send a signal to Sadr that you’ve got to be a little kinder and gentler if you want to stick around here,” he said.

More senior coalition officials have seen too many false dawns declared to allow themselves to publicly describe the trend as a turning point in this war.

“We’re naturally cautious people,” said Lamb. “We don’t do excitement.”

And they readily acknowledge that even the widespread tribal shift against al-Qaida that seems to be occurring brings its own set of challenges, not least the task of persuading the Shiite-dominated government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to embrace a trend that is putting thousands of Sunnis under arms.

But there is palpable optimism here among coalition leaders who are tracking the tribal issue. Lamb called it “a slow burn across the country, and outside. The potential is significant.”

“It’s huge,” said Brig. Gen. John Campbell, a Special Forces officer who is deputy commanding general for maneuver of Multinational Division-Baghdad. “It’s a huge opportunity, and we’re going to work our way through it and make sure, one, we don’t miss out on it, and two, we take advantage of it to help the Iraqi security forces continue in their fight with [al-Qaida in Iraq]. We would be negligent in our duties if we did not.”

Indeed, a concern expressed by coalition officers is that the tribal dominoes are falling too quickly for the coalition and the Iraqi government to keep pace and exploit all the possibilities.

“My fear is [our reaction will] go too slow and the tribal guys will lose patience, and then they’ll go back to being an armed militia,” Campbell said. “There’s potential ... that it will all get blown up on us here.”

Multinational Corps-Iraq and Multinational Division-Baghdad are establishing “reconciliation cells,” led, respectively, by Brig. Gen. Mark McDonald and Col. Bill Rabena. McDonald is MNC-I’s effects coordinator and Rabena fulfills the same function for MND-B.

“We have this whole apparatus that’s just been stood up to do this stuff,” Petraeus said. “It is based upon a recognition that is codified in our counterinsurgency manual: Counterinsurgency ... is roughly 20 percent military and 80 percent political, so get the tribe to flip and join you, or at least oppose al-Qaida, [and] that’s a pretty big deal.”

“I think you’re going to see things start moving in a couple of weeks,” Welch said.

An ‘awakening’

Engaging with the Sunni tribes was not always a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Iraq. In the early days of the occupation, when Paul Bremer and his Coalition Provisional Authority held sway, the emphasis was more on standing up Western-style democratic institutions. But now, with the pressure on and a sense among coalition leaders that time is not on their side, senior coalition leaders are latching on to the tribes as a route to defeating al-Qaida in Iraq, which leaders here consider their most implacable enemy in Iraq.

“There was not only an ‘awakening’ in Anbar, there was an awakening within the coalition that you cannot ignore the tribal network,” Welch said. “It is the largest social network in this country. The people are nested in the tribes.”

The movement that has officers here scrambling to keep pace began last year in Anbar, the western province that for the first three years of the war was the heartland of the Sunni insurgency.

“In al-Anbar, 18 months ago everyone accredited it as lost,” said Lamb. “Whether it was the armchair generals, whether it was the press, the media, they had the Marines defeated out in al-Anbar. About a year ago, slightly less than that, you had al-Qaida standing up a caliphate in al-Anbar. Well, if I’m not mistaken on both accounts, that has failed to turn out the way they wanted.”

But within the past year, the most major Sunni tribes in Anbar have turned against al-Qaida, meaning that the nationalist insurgent groups who drew their personnel from those tribes and operated in league with al-Qaida have also ended their association with the terrorist group. Not only that, but many of the tribesmen have volunteered to join the Iraqi security forces, or at least sign up as “auxiliary” police to defend their communities.

“The most stunning achievement is what’s happened in Anbar,” Petraeus said. “There have been days recently when there have been fewer than 10 total attacks in Anbar. We’ve got 40,000 Marines and soldiers out there. And what we really look at is effective attacks, and there have been several days with zero effective attacks in all of Anbar.

“I’m not saying Anbar’s completely clean by any stretch of the imagination, because there are still a lot of challenges south and north of Fallujah and to the east of it. We still have a lot of work to be done in those areas. But from about Habbaniyah west, the tribes have just about all flipped and they’re all supporting the coalition, fighting to be in the Iraqi security forces and fighting to fight al-Qaida, and doing that quite effectively.”

As just one example, Petraeus said the tribes have already found more weapons caches in Anbar province in the first five months of this year than they found all of last year.

Coalition leaders list several reasons why the Anbar tribes “flipped.” First, the awakening is a reaction to the violence that al-Qaida visited against their communities, particularly against tribal sheikhs and their families who fell out with al-Qaida.

“Killing a sheikh, beheading him, throwing him out in the street and making it very clear you could not touch the body for three days is hugely abusive,” Lamb said.

Second, al-Qaida’s extremist Islamist ideology alienated many Anbar residents. “They’re not into being a caliphate,” Petraeus said. “Half these guys go to Amman and drink on the weekends.”

Third, al-Qaida’s activities were costing the sheikhs money. “They all have a truck company, they all have a construction company and they all have an import-export business,” Petraeus said. “And this is really bad for business.”

The Sunni tribal awakening is a bottom-up movement, Welch said. “They’re coming through the tribal system to their leaders, saying, ‘The government isn’t able to help us, the coalition obviously can’t help us all the time — we need help.’ ... The people have been so far backed into a corner and have gotten so frustrated that they’re finally coming out swinging.”

For this reason, al-Qaida will not be able to snuff out the movement by assassinating tribal leaders, Welch said. “That’s just like putting gasoline on the fire now,” he said. “They kill a tribal leader, and that just enflames the people even more. The dynamic is shifting.”

Another incentive for the tribes is that once their neighborhoods are secure, Iraqi government and coalition officials are ready to turn on the spigots of aid for their region. This money, which is already being spent in Anbar and comes mostly from Iraqi government funds, Lamb said, pays for essential services and economic development “so that it doesn’t get filled up with bad things again.”

Coalition officials generally skirt the issue of whether the tribal leaders are being paid to come in from the cold, in much the same way that the CIA bought the allegiances of tribal leaders in Afghanistan during the opening phases of the war against the Taliban and al-Qaida there.

“Would I say that is absolutely, emphatically not happening? No,” Lamb said. “Am I paying any cash? No.”

A crucial part of the tribal awakening is the recruitment of tribesmen to defend their communities. The coalition’s preferred option is for the tribesmen to join one of the pre-existing Iraqi security force organizations: the Iraqi army, the Iraqi police (the local cops), or the Iraqi national police (the Interior Ministry’s paramilitary force).

This is happening, Lamb said, adding that “thousands” have “formally” joined Iraqi security forces in Anbar, where previously the number of locals volunteering for service ranged from “very few to none.”

But not all the tribes want to lose their men to the army or the National Police, who can be assigned anywhere in Iraq. “You’ve got the tribes who say, ‘Actually, we want something more localized, we want something that’s close to us,’” Lamb said, adding that this was an understandable response.

Cautious optimism

Coalition officials are cautiously optimistic that they can repeat their success in Anbar in much of the rest of Iraq.

“It certainly has the potential to happen in other places [beyond Anbar],” Petraeus said. “We’ve already done some deals up in western Nineveh, for example. ... Believe it or not, in Diyalah province there is a mixed group of sheikhs who are from Sunni, Shia and Kurd elements or tribes, and want to work together to expel al-Qaida. ... But having said that, there’s also plenty of areas where the tribes are still very much with the resistance.”

Al-Qaida’s car bombs are a large reason why the overall level of killing in Baghdad has not eased since the implementation earlier this year of the Baghdad security plan and the concurrent “surge” of U.S. forces into the Iraqi capital.

But coalition officials say that they may be able to flip enough tribes in the “belts” of towns around the capital to inhibit al-Qaida’s freedom of movement and reduce its ability to inflict mass casualties in the city.

“The belts of Baghdad ... are hugely important,” Petraeus said. “These belts that control the throat of Baghdad, and the belts north of it ... out past Taji up to Baqubah, down to Kut, down to Hillah and down to Karbala, these are key, key areas.”

Pinkerton’s engagement with the tribes in Abu Ghraib is typical of what officials would like to achieve around the entire city. The plan for the tribes in the Abu Ghraib area is to bring them into the Iraqi police, according to Campbell. The “initial scrub” suggested that about 500 tribesmen were eligible and would sign up immediately, “but there’s a whole bunch more that want to get out there, so we’re trying to get this thing moving very quickly,” he said.

Welch outlined how flipping the tribes could protect Baghdad. “If this awakening occurs in other places, it could protect the southern gate, the western gate of Baghdad and perhaps even the northern gate from flowing in and out of bad guys and materiel, and it denies sanctuary and safe haven in those areas,” he said.

“So then the Baghdad security plan, as it works its way through the city, the insurgents [that try to leave Baghdad] really have nowhere to go,” he said. “They’re going to run into one of these closed gates and they’re going to get picked up in there, because the people are no longer giving [them] sanctuary. ... And the ones who try to stay will get eventually rolled up.”

Lamb was less willing to predict total success in sealing off the Iraqi capital. “I’m cautious about ‘sealing’ anything,” Lamb said. “I’ve seen enough ‘cordon sanitaires’ and [demilitarized zones] and you name it in my 35 years of getting thrashed around the world. ... But does it make it more difficult [for al-Qaida]? You bet your sweet life it does.”

But the process of turning tribes against al-Qaida is fraught with difficulty. One obvious issue coalition and Iraqi officials will have to decide is which former insurgents, if any, they are willing to negotiate with.

“We’re talking to the resistance, we’re talking to the insurgents,” Petraeus said. The man doing much of that talking on Petraeus’ behalf is Lamb, a wiry, hard-bitten veteran of the elite Special Air Service who now heads the MNF-I reconciliation cell.

Lamb “is a brilliant guy,” and ideally suited for the task, said Petraeus, adding: “He’s dealt with thugs his whole career.”

“In fact, we had the weekly [reconciliation cell] meeting today, and we actually agreed to release some folks from detention, because we think they can help split a certain element of the insurgency off from al-Qaida,” Petraeus said in a May 18 interview.

“Are we reaching out to people who at some point in time have fought against us to expand the dialogue? Yes,” said Lamb. “Are we talking to al-Qaida? No.”

But Lamb and others said hard decisions must be made. “Beyond this are issues of detainees, amnesty, reconciliation,” he said. “If you [refuse to reconcile with] everybody who took up arms against what they saw as occupation, took up arms against what they saw as an assault upon their community, what they saw as, in effect, something that they disagreed with, then your pool of reconcilables is extraordinarily small.

“If you want to move a nation forward, then you have to put your hand out,” he said. “Now those that are guilty of crimes need to be held to account.”

How to do that, he said, is “a work in progress.”

Campbell said some tribesmen who might join the war against al-Qaida could “potentially” be militants who had fought against the coalition, and there has been discussion in the U.S. chain of command about the prospect of fighting alongside men with American blood on their hands.

“That’s part of this reconciliation,” he said. “That’s why it’s so hard. There’s no cookie-cutter approach. ... There’s going to be some tough, tough negotiating.”

Another potential stumbling block is the reaction of the Maliki government, which is far more wary of the Sunni tribal “awakening” than are its coalition counterparts.

Welch said it is important, particularly in the Sunni heartland of Anbar, that the tribal movement against al-Qaida occurs in such a way that it is not perceived as a threat by the Maliki government.

In particular, the Maliki government gets more nervous the closer the movement gets to Baghdad, said Campbell. The government had to be able to answer the question, “Are they really behind reconciliation or are they just paying lip service to it?” Campbell said.

“You’ve got to watch it when it gets close to mixed neighborhoods,” Petraeus said. “It’s a whole different dimension of complexity.”

Petraeus said the closer to mixed areas — and in Iraq, Baghdad is the ultimate mixed area — the more important it is to have a memorandum of agreement with the tribe, which he said had been done with the tribe in Abu Ghraib.

“You’ve really got to have a few rules of the road,” Petraeus said. “It does become trickier.”

Lamb is keen to give the Maliki government as much credit as possible for the reconciliation effort, which he said had been going on for some time and was “quite widespread.”

He pointed out that in June 2006, shortly after taking office, Maliki announced a reconciliation initiative. “People just keep on forgetting it,” Lamb said. “They somehow think this is novel, new. But he’s been pretty consistent.”

It was crucial that the Iraqi government play a central role in the reconciliation process, and not just for the sake of appearances, Lamb said.

“I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the Middle East, but I might see maybe one, two, three layers down into unintended consequences, cause and effect,” he said. “There’s got to be at least another four layers down below which I have really no insight to at all, but an Iraqi will see.

“Therefore, what makes eminent sense to us needs to be cautioned with their understanding, because what is really important is that we’re not looking for a short-term spectacular success or change in circumstance. We’re looking to quietly, with the Iraqi government, set the conditions which will then take them into the future when, at some point in time, we’ll be gone.”