25 of 31 Anbar tribes join forces against al Qaeda

NY Times:

More than two-dozen tribes from Iraq’s volatile Sunni Arab-dominated province west of Baghdad have agreed to join forces and fight Al Qaeda insurgents and other foreign-backed “terrorists,” an influential tribal leader said today.

Twenty-five of about 31 tribes in Anbar Province, a vast, mostly desert region that stretches westward from Baghdad to the borders of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have agreed to fight together against insurgents and gangs that are “killing people for no reason,” said the tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Buzaigh Al-Rishawi.

“We held a meeting earlier and agreed to fight those who call themselves mujahedeen,” Mr. Rishawi said in an interview today. “We believe that there is a conspiracy against our Iraqi people. Those terrorists claimed that they are fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.”

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Mr. Rishawi said the 25 tribes counted 30,000 young men armed with assault rifles who were willing to confront and kill the insurgents and criminal gangs that have torn at the fabric of tribal life in Anbar, dividing members by religious sect and driving a wave of violent crime.

“We are in battle with the terrorists who kill Sunnis and Shiites, and we do not respect anyone between us who talks in a sectarian sense,” said Mr. Rishawi, the leader of the Rishawi tribe, a subset of the Dulaimi tribe, the largest in Anbar Province. Half of the Rishawi are Shiite and half are Sunni Arabs, he said.

Mr. Rishawi said the insurgents counted about 1,300 fighters, many of them foreigners and backed by other nations’ foreign intelligence services, though he declined to say which ones.

Today, he said, the coalition of 25 tribes sent letters to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other top Iraqi government officials asking for their support. In addition to the government’s blessing, Mr. Rishawi said, the tribes also wanted weapons and equipment to confront the Qaeda-backed insurgents.

“We are determined to go ahead with this plan and eliminate the gangs that claim jihad,” he said.

An American military official said tribes had fought Sunni Arab insurgents in Anbar in the past, but previously had not agreed to come together and fight them together. “Tribes just get fed up have fought them in the past,” an American military official said today. “This would be the first we’ve seen of tribes banding together.”

An Iraqi government spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said Mr. Maliki supported “any operations that try to resist terrorism and aims to maintain security in this dear and important part from the country.”

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This is a significant political victory for the Iraqi government and a significant defeat for al Qaeda. I have been saying for months that al Qaeda had lost the hearts and minds battle in Iraq and this certainly confirms that point. It also suggest that the gloom in a Marine intelligence report probably did not factor in this information. If they really have 30,ooo fighters to join against al Qaeda, that pretty much solves teh bulk of the force to space problems in the province.