By Neil Munro, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Monday, May 14, 2007

Most observers agree that the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, particularly in the western province of Anbar, is splintering. The ruptures have allowed Iraq's Shiite-dominated central government and U.S. military forces to make some new friends and allies who can aid in the continuing fight against Al Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq and against old Baathist stalwarts.

	In Iraq's huge western province, new coalitions are forming against Al Qaeda.

Experts disagree, though, over whether this is a short-term phenomenon or a longer-term trend that could help turn the tide against the insurgency.

Some argue that these splits are merely factional jostling among Sunni groups that remain implacably opposed to the U.S. presence and to the Iraq government. Others say the divisions indicate that Al Qaeda in Iraq is trying to commandeer the entire Sunni insurgency. Still others contend that the fissures demonstrate a fundamental turnaround -- a decision by increasingly desperate Sunnis to abandon their post-U.S. invasion goal of overthrowing the elected government in Baghdad and regaining power.

The splits "matter immensely," said Samir Shakir Mahmoud Sumaidy, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, who offered one of the more optimistic assessments of the developments. The government is working hard to split the insurgent groups, he said. "I'm sure there will be more splits to come.... This is a process that is gradual."

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, recently back from Iraq, said, "There are unmistakable signs that [the splintering] is happening." Optimism over the Sunni splits "is not frippery or [just] positive thinking," he said. But he pointed out that it could be all for naught if Al Qaeda's spectacular bomb attacks against Shiites provoke Shiite militias into launching an all-out civil war against Sunni communities.

Evidence of a deep break between Qaeda-affiliated forces in Iraq and the various other Sunni insurgent groups is mounting. Al Qaeda's high-profile suicide bomb and chlorine gas bomb attacks against its former allies in Anbar's Sunni communities who are now siding with the government certainly tell of a fundamental split. In addition, the 1920 Revolution Brigades, an insurgent group generally described as more nationalist than Islamist, has divided into pro- and anti-Qaeda factions.

Jihadist Web sites describe battles between Qaeda gunmen and other Sunni insurgent groups. Leaders of the Islamic Army of Iraq, for example, recently asked Osama bin Laden to order Qaeda gunmen in Iraq to stop killing fellow jihadists. In May, three Islamist insurgent groups -- the Islamic Army, the Mujahedeen Army, and Ansar al-Sunna -- announced that they were merging to form an anti-Qaeda group called the Reformation and Jihad Front.

These splits are also reflected in shifting policy statements from influential Sunni tribal leaders and clerics, including Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a prominent advocate of jihad against U.S. and Israel, who recently criticized Al Qaeda's signature tactic, the suicide bombing of Shiite civilians. "There is no justification for the suicide operation in Iraq where civilians are being killed," he said in a mid-April speech in Qatar.

The divisions are changing the battlefield. In Anbar, which has been the heartland of the Sunni insurgency since 2004, many Sunni tribes recently united into the Anbar Salvation Front, which claims to have deployed 20,000 militiamen against Al Qaeda. U.S. military officials, trying to deepen the splits through economic aid and deals with Sunni tribes, say they have recruited more than 4,500 locals -- including former insurgents -- in recent months to serve in the Anbar police force. Together, the U.S. military and the Iraqi security forces, according to numerous recent media reports, have largely pacified Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, which one Army intelligence report last year wrote off as lost.

The change in Anbar "does matter," said Col. Steven Boylan, the U.S. military's spokesman in Baghdad, especially because locals are now providing information on Al Qaeda to U.S. and Iraqi troops and to the police. "The bigger issue," he said, "is that the sheiks in Anbar and their tribes realize ... they're going toward a potential future" of cooperation with the Baghdad government.

The Salvation Front's effectiveness has been underscored by the ruthlessness of Al Qaeda's counterattacks, which have included detonating several truck bombs and crude chemical bombs in Sunni communities, and launching large-scale attacks against tribal leaders. Two suicide car bombers hit near Ramadi on May 7 in explosions believed to be aimed at towns where Sunni tribal chiefs have turned against Al Qaeda. Ironically, these attacks have reassured Shiite leaders that the Salvation Front is in fact cooperating with the central government against Al Qaeda. Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other top Iraqi government officials recently met with Sunni leaders in Ramadi.

The Salvation Front says it will field candidates in the yet-to-be scheduled provincial elections. Supporters of the central government hope that the group's candidates will replace many of the insurgent-affiliated Sunni legislators now in the Baghdad parliament. The Sunni tribes are demanding, meanwhile, that the government direct more attention and money to their province. Sumaidy promised that the government would respond. When the central government decides how to spend its oil revenues, "Al Anbar will not be left out; they will be helped," he said.

Why the Sunni splits? The answers are many.

Nibras Kazimi, an Iraqi visiting scholar at the right-of-center Hudson Institute in Washington, offers one explanation. He says that Al Qaeda set off the divisions last year when it announced the formation of the "Islamic State in Iraq" and declared the state's leader to be a mysterious man named Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, titled the "Prince of the Faithful." The combination of the title and the man's name -- which asserts that he is a Sunni from Baghdad and a descendant of Muhammad -- is one step short of declaring him to be the Islamic caliph, who serves as both monarch of all Muslims and as Allah's representative on earth, Kazimi says. By asserting divine authority over all Sunnis and insurgent groups, Al Qaeda in Iraq overreached and provoked a hostile reaction from the other jihadists, says Kazimi, who follows these disputes on his Web site, Talisman Gate.

Another explanation for the infighting, some experts say, is Al Qaeda's continued opposition to any compromise with the Shiite government. In the early days of the insurgency, that was a plus from the Sunni point of view. Backed by many deposed Baathists, the Sunnis thought they could regain control and end what they regarded as a shameful subordination to a government elected by Shiites, who represent about 60 percent of the population. Sunnis make up only about 20 percent of Iraq's population but they long dominated its government. Many Sunnis regard the current government as a puppet of the Shiite theocracy in Iran. Early on in the war, some Sunni leaders thought that neighboring Sunni-dominated countries -- Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria -- would come to their aid and help them regain dominance in Iraq.

Sunni leaders thus invited Al Qaeda's jihadists to provide the insurgency's cutting edge, sending suicide bombers against coalition forces and Shiite civilians. But the insurgency, although not defeated, is now blunted because the United States has prevented any overt intervention by neighboring Sunni states, has won support from some Sunni communities, and has been able to capture or kill many insurgents. Moreover, a nighttime "dirty war" by Shiite groups, including the Mahdi Army allied with Shiite firebrand Moktada al-Sadr, has killed many more Sunni fighters and civilians than U.S. troops have. Shiite militias have wrecked many Sunni neighborhoods and terrorized a million or more Sunnis into leaving Baghdad -- or fleeing Iraq altogether.

Al Qaeda in Iraq's suicide bombing attacks against Shiite targets have also left the Sunnis feeling vulnerable to revenge attacks by Shiites. Last month, Shiite bombers killed 50 Sunnis in Tal Afar, just after a Qaeda suicide bomber murdered more than 100 Shiite shoppers in the same town.

Over the past year, many Sunnis have grudgingly accepted their post-Saddam vulnerability and now seek aid from U.S. forces. Khalaf al-Elayan, an influential Sunni legislator in parliament who formerly supported the insurgency, has changed his tune. "In Baghdad, for instance, we are trying not to let the resistance or the ordinary citizen attack U.S. forces," he said in a March television interview on a satellite TV channel. "We feel that the U.S. forces extend some form of security to us," said Elayan, who is the leader of the National Dialogue Council, one of three parties in the Sunni parliamentary bloc known as the Iraqi Accord Front. Elayan's interview was translated by the U.S. government's Open Source Center.

Sunnis, Elayan further explained, are also rejecting Al Qaeda in Iraq because of its attacks aimed at fellow Sunnis who are fighting the government and the Americans. Al Qaeda and its allied groups began killing Sunni leaders in 2005 and have been doing so ever since. Because of these murders, Elayan said in the TV interview, "we started to view this group with suspicion after we had been proud of it as a mujahid Muslim Arab force."

The central government's outreach to the Sunnis and its partial crackdown on the Shiite Mahdi Army have won some grudging recognition from Sunni holdouts. Exiled Iraq Sunnis in Jordan, for example, spoke favorably about Maliki's recent visit to Ramadi, said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who recently met in Jordan with Sunni leaders. "It was a very good step, a significant step in symbolically saying, 'Iraq isn't just for the Shia,' " he said.

Sunnis in Saudi Arabia are also nudging Iraqi Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, said Alexis Debat, a former official in the French defense ministry who is now at the Nixon Center, a Washington-based think tank. Saudi Arabia's primary goal is the eradication of Al Qaeda, and it is using its plentiful money and Arab tribal connections to firm up an anti-Qaeda front, Debat said. This may lead to an eventual Saudi-Sunni-Baghdad deal, he said, principally because most "Sunnis have abandoned hopes of victory ... [and now] the Sunni community is fighting to squeeze out some concessions, especially on the oil sharing, and some guarantees they will survive" in a state dominated by Shiite and Kurdish politicians. To make the deal, Debat emphasized, "you have to generate a [Sunni] coalition powerful enough to impose its will and order on at least part of Anbar."

But it's not clear that a permanent compromise is possible between influential Sunnis who still seek disproportionate political power and oil revenue, and an elected Shiite-dominated government that remains highly suspicious of the Sunnis.

American soldiers complain that the Shiite-dominated central government often hinders even such simple cooperation with the Sunnis as the delivery of reconstruction funds, police payrolls, uniforms, and ammunition. Shiite politicians in Baghdad have repeatedly said that Sunni legislators in parliament -- including two of the top leaders in the largest Sunni faction -- sponsor anti-Shiite murder campaigns in their home districts. The hostility has stalled political compromise and the delivery of financial aid to Sunni-dominated areas.

Some analysts are skeptical, meanwhile, whether the Sunni splits indicate a permanent change of heart among influential Sunnis or just a temporary shift aimed at getting the Americans to withdraw from Iraq. "One thing that unites them all is trying to get the Americans out of there," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, now senior director at the left-of-center Veterans for America. "I'm sure the [Sunnis] would like to be back in control," he said, but they're a minority and unlikely to win a war against the Shiite government. Gard has urged a rapid pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq. But he said that Iraqi culture is such a mystery to Americans that any predictions about the future are "speculation."

Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has just returned from Abu Dhabi, said that the Sunni minority in Iraq shows little sign of reconciling to their historic loss of power, and that the infighting may simply reflect the jostling of Sunni groups seeking pre-eminence ahead of the hoped-for departure of American forces. The results of the U.S. elections raised hopes among some Sunnis that a withdrawal will come sooner rather than later, he said. The Anbar Salvation Front may yet become important, Simon acknowledges, but its leaders "have to stay alive long enough [before] we'll perhaps see 'moderate death squads' which will go after Al Qaeda."

Amid the competing explanations and predictions, McCaffrey acknowledged much room for uncertainty. Coming months could bring about more Qaeda massacres and Shiite pogroms. The Persian Gulf War veteran said that success and failure will be demonstrated on the battlefield and in the negotiating rooms. "Between now and January," he predicted, "this thing will get decided."