AT a desolate lot filled with car wrecks in the Dora neighborhood of south Baghdad, members of one of the Sunni militias recruited to fight Al-Qaeda proudly show how they got rid of the militants.
Their commander, who gave his name only as Mohammed, points into the scrub where he said the militants stored their weapons and buried dozens of victims. All gone – for the time being – thanks to his men.
Mohammed’s fighters are part of a grassroots movement of mostly Sunni tribesmen and former insurgents backed and funded by the United States since 2006 that has been widely credited with reining in Al-Qaeda and its allies. But with the program now in the hands of the Iraqi government, there are concerns that late wages and delays in finding jobs for nearly 100,000 armed Sunnis – as well as lingering sectarian mistrust – could send some militiamen back to the insurgency and help fuel fresh instability.
For the fighters in Dora, known as Sahwa, or Awakening, Council members, there is a sense that good deeds are going unrewarded by the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki.
“We started the Sahwa because of the cruelty and oppression of the insurgents against the people here,” said Mohammed, a thickset middle-aged man with a vintage chrome pistol at his hip.
“We saw how these gangs were slaughtering and beheading 12- and 15-year-olds in the streets, stealing and looting,” said the commander of some 60 fighters, who is a former member of the Baath party of executed dictator Saddam Hussein.
But since the Iraqi government took control of paying him and his men in April, he said wages have been cut and paid late. Twenty of his men have quit already.
His fighters have also seen few of the 16,000 jobs that have been created in the security forces and civil service specifically for the Sahwa, while he and his top assistants are the subject of arrest warrants that, although currently suspended, hang as a looming threat. “If I lose my fighters, I won’t stay alone on the street,” he said.
“If we’re gone, I’m 100 percent sure Al-Qaeda will return... There are sleeper cells. If we leave our positions, the area will be clear for them and they’ll come back in a minute.”
He said none of his own men had ever fought for Al-Qaeda, but said the assurance of a paycheck might lure some into returning to the insurgency. While claims Al-Qaeda will jump into any vacuum left by the winding down of Sahwa groups are probably self-serving, any failure to reintegrate the militiamen is a potential trigger for future instability, said Loulouwa Al-Rachid, an analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group.
“It’s a political problem, not just a security issue. It’s about what kind of equilibrium will prevail among Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq,” Rachid said.
The sectarian issue clouds everything. The legacies of the vicious wave of Sunni-Shiite killings in 2006 and 2007 linger in Dora, where concrete walls divide the rival communities and Sahwa members talk of past abductions and killings of Sunnis by men in police uniforms.
The government has promised to incorporate 20 percent of the Sahwa into the police and military, and find civil service jobs for many of the rest, but the process is fraught with risks.
“(Maliki) can’t incorporate too many Sunnis, these tribal forces, into the government for risk of annoying the Shiites. But he can’t antagonize these people for risk of triggering another round of sectarian killings in the country,” Rachid said.
The Iraqi prime minister made clear his misgivings about the Sahwa movement in a recent interview with French daily Le Monde. He acknowledged they had played a role against Al-Qaeda but insisted they should not be “above the law”.
“The Sons of Iraq, which contains some Baathists, was a real sectarian Sunni army in the making if we hadn’t taken care of it. We will never accept the constitution of a Sunni, Shiite, or whatever army,” he said. Maliki has made overtures to Sahwa leaders to join a multiconfessional alliance to contest parliamentary elections in January, and he has had some success.
But the US military has expressed concern over the integration process.
A Pentagon report in July argued: “The slow pace of integration has the potential to undermine Sunni confidence in the GoI (Government of Iraq), and, if not corrected, could undermine security progress.”
The US commander responsible for overseeing the program, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Barkley, denied that the US military had created a Sunni militia that threatened future tensions. “We see these groups more as tribal. Most of the leaders are tribal affiliated and they have some of that allegiance tribally and these tribes are connected in many other ways to communities and to the government,” Barkley said.
In Dora, where brown-uniformed Sahwa fighters continue to man the checkpoints, one militiaman said he feels little trust in the government.
“We should get medals,” he said, requesting anonymity. “Instead, we are wanted men.” – AFP