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Still No Clear Path for Integrating 'Sons of Iraq' into Iraqi Government
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Michael Wahid Hanna,
World Politics Review,
7/10/2008
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In a recent investigative hearing at the Central Criminal Court of Iraq (CCCI) in Baghdad, a detainee held by the U.S.-led Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) gave his version of the events leading up to his detention in a village in al-Anbar province, and his subsequent transfer to the Iraqi court for possible prosecution. The detainee, clad in a standard-issue bright yellow jumpsuit, explained that the weapons caches found on and next to his property were part of an elaborate set-up arising out of a feud with a neighboring family.
According to the detainee, he was not involved in insurgent activity and had no knowledge of the existence of the weapons caches. He further claimed that members of the local Awakening Council, known to Iraqis as a sahwa, were cooperating with U.S. forces, had taken part in the raid of his house, and had planted the weapons to implicate his family. He went on to state that the bad blood between the two families had arisen when his uncle, a former member of the sahwa, had attempted to break off and found his own such group.
As an observer of the investigative hearing, I had no way of judging the veracity of this particular detainee's exculpatory account of events or the weight of the evidence against him. However, the accusations he levied against the sahwa cast light on the fact that American soldiers navigating the complex terrain of Iraqi tribes, families, and feuds will inevitably alienate portions of the civilian population and be obliged to cooperate with groups engaged in activities that will undermine confidence in the U.S. military or instigate violence against it. While these local alliances have had a significant impact on the security situation in areas once ravaged by the Sunni insurgency, the United States must now take advantage of the present opportunity to ensure that the government of Iraq implements concrete measures to formalize the relationship of the sahwat to the central government. Absent such concerted action, the recent spike of violent insurgent operations directed at the sahwat could herald the collapse of the fragile security gains of the past two years.
As a tactical matter, the decisions of commanders on the ground and the results they have achieved in pacifying Anbar province and other mixed areas through tactical alliance and cooperation with tribal forces and former insurgents have been unimpeachable. However, the current U.S.-brokered order remains untenable in the long term. With the Iraqi government reluctant to take on the responsibility for financing the sahwat or for providing their members with employment, the United States remains the primary patron of these localized forces.
The competition among these forces and their leaders for U.S. largesse and support has grown since such cooperation offers erstwhile insurgents a truce with financial gain. The dependence on U.S. support is also heightened by the dire economic realities in those areas where the U.S. has brokered local deals with tribal groups and former insurgents. The lack of central government support for economic development has meant that the burden and expectations for producing tangible economic gains rests almost entirely with the United States.
In this context, the detainee's testimony pointed to looming dangers in U.S. efforts to recruit proxies, as a result of often-opaque local struggles for influence and authority. 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. In a separate day of hearings at the CCCI, I attended six investigative hearings for sahwa members from two different groups from Diyala province accused of illegal weapons possession. These arrests of putative U.S. allies indicate that either these particular sahwa members were untrustworthy partners or that the detentions were the result of ill-conceived and mistaken security sweeps that had unwittingly ensnared locals working in cooperation with the U.S. military.
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.
While the United States has displayed increasing subtlety and nuance in co-opting tribal leaders and former insurgents, it is unrealistic and unwise to expect a foreign power to undertake the role of tribal administrator without serious missteps, when, as Steven Simon has pointed out, the "ruling powers in the Middle East have slowly and haltingly labored to bring tribal populations into the fold, with mixed success." The cultural divide between U.S. military forces and the local population is bound to result in serious misunderstandings and mistakes. Kilcullen, in describing the cultural gap that exacerbated tensions feeding into the tribal revolt, noted that al-Qaida in Iraq "is heavily urbanized, and town-dwellers—even urban Iraqis—may as well be foreigners as far as some tribal leaders are concerned."
This is not to suggest that the United States should now abandon its newfound allies; the United States must use its leverage with the government of Iraq to ensure that the government adopts formal and verifiable structures to integrate or train members of the sahwat and establishes clear guidelines governing the scope and nature of their activities. This focus on the rank and file must also be complemented by free and fair provincial elections on a timely basis. Although election processes cannot substitute for actual progress on fundamental political issues, they would provide an avenue for enhanced political participation to a segment of the population that has been underrepresented and often neglected at the provincial and national level.
Many of the leaders of sahwat have indicated their intentions to transition to politics and have registered to compete in the upcoming provincial elections. Signaling to the sahwat that U.S. support is finite and limited will further encourage such political participation since the sahwat will no longer be able to rely on U.S. backing as the basis for their legitimacy and funding. This new political reality might also impress upon them the need to overcome endemic fragmentation and organize in a politically sustainable fashion.
Ending U.S. support for the sahwat in an orderly fashion obviously requires the cooperation of the al-Maliki government. In a recent press conference in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Qasim Atta, an Iraqi military spokesman, announced that qualified members would be integrated into the security forces while others would be offered employment in other government ministries. There are legitimate concerns regarding the capacity of the Iraqi government to absorb members of these groups and vet candidates adequately to screen out infiltrators allied with insurgents. However, there remain over 90,000 such members outside the formal structure of the state, and the barriers to integration are not simply a result of insufficient capacity. Despite the repeated assurances of the al-Maliki government, there is no evidence to date that the governing coalition has resolved its sectarian concerns regarding the sahwat or begun to formulate a comprehensive plan for integration of their members.
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.
In the absence of the broad political accommodation that normalizing such forces requires, the United States will remain the broker of a "peace" it neither initiated nor can sustain. While U.S. military forces are now tolerated in many areas of the country where they were previously the main targets of insurgent activity, it is difficult to imagine that the large-scale presence of foreign forces will not engender popular frustration and ill will if they remain indefinitely. At the same time, if the United States attempts to unilaterally cut its support to its newfound Sunni allies without sufficient coordination with the government of Iraq, the neighboring Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia, could feel obligated to fill this vacuum, thereby raising the possibility of wider regional conflict.
Despite the centrality of the sahwat in tamping down violence, there is currently no clear path to normalizing these ad hoc security arrangements by incorporating members of the sahwat into the Iraqi state or providing them with viable training or employment opportunities. More broadly, the case of the sahwat offers a picture of how the open-ended U.S. military presence in Iraq has enmeshed U.S. national security interests with the vagaries and intricacies of localized disputes that have little or no bearing on whether the fundamental political questions that divide Iraqis will be resolved consensually or violently through a future civil war.
Michael Wahid Hanna is a Program Officer covering international affairs at The Century Foundation. |
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Taking Note
