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thedrifter
03-04-07, 07:24 AM
March 3, 2007
An Iraqi Tribal Chief Opposes the Jihadists, and Prays
By EDWARD WONG

BAGHDAD, March 2 — The sheik stared at the cake that the hotel workers had brought up to his room as a gift. Across the red gelatinlike surface was written, “God protect you from the enemies and keep you for the Iraqi people.”

God is indeed his guardian, said the sheik, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi. So were the three burly Iraqi men standing outside the door of his suite here in the Mansour Hotel, and the five others by the elevators at the end of the hall. They had walkie-talkies, Kalashnikov rifles and camouflage vests stuffed with ammunition clips.

The sheik needs as much protection as loyalty and prayers can bring, not to mention money. He is the public face of the Sunni Arab tribes in lawless Anbar Province who have turned against the Sunni jihadists of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, many of whom belong to other, sometimes more militant Iraqi tribes.

“I swear to God, if we have good weapons, if we have good vehicles, if we have good support, I can fight Al Qaeda all the way to Afghanistan,” he said recently as he sat smoking in a dark jacket and brown robes while meeting with a sheik from another Sunni tribe in his hotel room.

Sheik Abdul Sattar, a wiry 35-year-old with a thin goatee who comes from the provincial capital, Ramadi, is the most outspoken Sunni tribal figure in the country who is fighting, at least for now, on the side of the Shiite-led Iraqi government and the American military.

He has met three times with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki since announcing his campaign in September, and there is talk that the sheik has received large amounts of money from the Iraqi government or the Americans. His face has been shown in anti-insurgent commercials on the government-run Iraqiya television network.

But Sheik Abdul Sattar, as he is known to Iraqis and American commanders, complains that he does not get nearly enough financial or military support. “We don’t have enough weapons, cars, uniforms,” he said.

Part of the sheik’s mission is rooted in the tribal law of revenge. His father was killed by Al Qaeda in 2004 for opposing its kind of fundamentalism. Two brothers were abducted and never heard from again, and a third brother was shot dead, he said. He has survived three car bombs outside the home he shares with his wife and five children.

Residents in parts of Anbar say the split in the Sunni insurgency is widening, with moderate tribal leaders and nationalist guerrillas pitted against fundamentalist warriors and rival tribes. That has led to a sharp increase in Sunni-on-Sunni violence across Anbar, especially in the past week, deepening the chaos of Iraq’s civil war.

Al Qaeda remains a major force, and the relentless violence from all sides has turned the province into a failed region, according to a classified Marine intelligence assessment that was leaked to reporters last year.

As part of a broad review of options in Iraq, President Bush is looking at whether to give greater support to Sunni Arab tribal leaders who have grown disillusioned with the radical arm of the insurgency. It is a strategy long urged by officials in Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and now vigorously backed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The effort would have echoes of the American military’s promotion of South Vietnamese “village militias” during the Vietnam War, which some American counterinsurgency experts say was a relative success.

Sheik Abdul Sattar and the Anbar Salvation Council, the group of 25 tribes that the sheik said he had helped pull together to fight Al Qaeda, would be central to any such move by the Americans.

The sheik said he and his allies, who also call themselves the Anbar Awakening, had recruited 6,000 fighters from the tribes into the Anbar police, helped appoint a new provincial police chief and formed a 2,500-member “emergency brigade” answering to him.

A United States Army civil affairs officer in Ramadi, Capt. Travis L. Patriquin, said in an e-mail message shortly before he was killed by a roadside bomb in Ramadi in December that the tribal fighters in the Iraqi police constituted “the first successful, large force of men we’ve had since the start of the war.”

The captain wrote of Sheik Abdul Sattar, “He is the most effective local leader in Ramadi I believe the coalition has worked with since they arrived in Anbar in 2003.”

Once the Anbar Salvation Council began its recruitment efforts, more than 300 people a month signed up to join the Iraqi police, up from just 30 in May, Captain Patriquin said. American commanders have armed the recruits with weapons, munitions and vehicles provided by the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The Americans have also taken the recruits to academies in Jordan or Baghdad for schooling and given them a week of specialized combat training at an American base in Ramadi.

The plan has risks. The Americans and governing Shiite parties could be building up a Sunni militia that will eventually turn against them, as one such group, the Falluja Brigade, did in 2004 after the Marines handed it control of Falluja.

Some moderate Sunni sheiks in Anbar have said that for purposes of survival, they might be forced to ally themselves with Al Qaeda if the American military and, in particular, the Shiite-led Iraqi government did not provide them with more money and weapons, given the powerful presence of Al Qaeda in the province.

Sheik Abdul Sattar speaks of the Iraqi government with ambivalence, praising its stated goals while criticizing its ties to Shiite militias and its ignorance of the power of the tribes.

“They’re not cooperative, and they don’t want security,” he said. “This is true of all the political blocs.”

He has been to Baghdad twice to ask senior Iraqi officials for financial backing and equipment. He has met with the prime minister and with Jawad al-Bolani, the interior minister. But he said Iraqi leaders here were reluctant to give him what he needed to fight Al Qaeda.

An adviser to the Iraqi cabinet on tribal affairs, Sheik Minahi Minshid Hussein al-Shammari, said the government had responded to Sheik Abdul Sattar’s requests “within a limited capacity,” because “this is what the government can give.”

“The government extends a hand to anyone who wants to cooperate,” he added.

The formation of the group in September shocked many Sunni Arabs. It was the most public stand anyone in Anbar had taken against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which was founded by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In November, Sheik Harith al-Dhari, the leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line Sunni religious group that calls itself the “legitimate resistance,” denounced the Anbar Salvation Council in a television interview, saying, “They don’t represent the Anbar tribes, and they are a group of criminals and thugs.”

Sheik Abdul Sattar said his tribe, the Rishawi, which accounts for a tenth of the 400,000 residents of Ramadi, had always tried to make peace with the Americans in Anbar. That was one reason his father was killed while attending a funeral more than two years ago, he said. Al Qaeda had begun killing sheiks and clerics, even selling videos of the crimes.

“They became people who didn’t distinguish between right and wrong, and that’s when we believed these people were terrorists,” he said.

Recent violence in Anbar has underscored the brutality of the fighting among the Sunnis there.

Two soccer players in Ramadi had been shot dead in front of teammates by masked gunmen who had accused them of having ties to the Anbar Salvation Council. On Thursday, a car bomb in Falluja killed at least seven people in a policeman’s wedding party, while intense fighting broke out in Amariyat, a community to the south where residents say tribes aligned with Al Qaeda have been battling nationalist insurgent groups.

A car bomb next to a Ramadi mosque killed 15 people on Monday, and a truck bomb exploded in Habbaniya on Feb. 24, killing at least 31 people and wounding dozens, outside a Sunni mosque where the imam had been preaching resistance to Al Qaeda.

In their clashes with Al Qaeda, the sheik’s tribal fighters have captured about 80 militants and put them into a “prison” in Ramadi, the sheik said.

Saudis and Syrians were among them, he said. The Saudis, under interrogation, said they had been recruited in their home country by being shown anti-American propaganda, including images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, the sheik said. Then they were shipped off to Syria to enter Iraq.

The sheik has little love for the Syrian government. One morning as he ate breakfast in his hotel room, a television program about the assassination of the Lebanese cabinet member Pierre Gemayel on Nov. 21 came on. “This is all Syria’s doing,” he said. “Syria is doing bad things.”

Just as nefarious is Iran, with its ties to the Shiite militias, Sheik Abdul Sattar said.

“In my personal opinion, and in the opinion of most of the wise men of Anbar, if the American forces leave right now, there will be civil war and the area will fall into total chaos,” he said. “If we complete the police and the army, if we make them strong enough, it’ll be possible for the American forces to leave and go home, and they’ll be friends of the Iraqis.”

The evening call to prayer echoed through the streets of Baghdad as he ended the talk. Darkness had fallen. The sheik got up to show two foreign visitors from his room, warning them that no one could ensure their safety at that hour.

Four of his men were shot dead while driving through the capital the previous day, he said, and they surely would not be the last.

Khalid al-Ansary contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Helene Cooper from Washington.

Ellie