The good civil war in Iraq

Bill Roggio:

... Most importantly, AFP reported that the Anbar Salvation Council sent in a unit to fight al Qaeda.

“We dispatched around 50 of our secret police from Anbar to Amiriyah, and started to hit Al Qaeda there. We killed a lot of them,” Sheikh Hamid al-Hais, the head of the Anbar Salvation Council, told AFP in a phone interview. “A similar operation will be launched in Al-Ghazaliyah against Al Qaeda today. We have sufficient information on places they are in, and we will punish them.”

The Anbar Salvation Council has formed a “clandestine SWAT unit” which is capable of operating outside of the western province, an American military intelligence official close to the operations of the group told us. These are the “secret police" described by of Sheikh al-Hais.

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The fighting between al Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades is not a new development. In March of this year, the two sides fought pitched battles in the town of Amiriya in Anbar province, as well as in Diyala. Just today, al Qaeda attacked the 1920 Revolution Brigades in Baqubah. “Northeast of Baghdad, an al-Qaida-linked suicide bomber blew himself up Friday in a house sheltering members of the rival 1920 Revolution Brigades, killing two of the other militants and wounding four,” the Associated Press reported. “The suicide bombing of Sunni insurgent groups is no small matter,” the American intelligence official told us in a phone interview. “Al Qaeda is alienating these groups while diverting needed resources from attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets.”

In March, we noted that “elements of the Islamic Army in Iraq, Jaish Al-Mujahideen, the 1920 Revolution Brigades and other elements of the Sunni insurgency are battling al-Qaeda in Anbar, and are fighting alongside government forces. Al-Qaeda is countering by assassinating as many of the leaders of the Sunni opposition as possible.” This fighting has spread outside of Anbar, into Diyala, Salahadin and Baghdad as the Awakening movement spreads to the provinces. Today, the 1920 Revolution Brigades has been “by and large co-opted,” according to the American intelligence official, while the Islamic Army in Iraq is fragmented between pro and anti-al Qaeda factions.

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This is additional information on the fight reported below in a post with excerpts from the Washington Post story on the fighting between al Qaeda and Sunni insurgents in Amariyah. It gives a little more perspective on how wide spread the red on red action is now for al Qaeda. This comes at a time when it has lost its rat lines through Anbar which are needed for replacements and supplies.