Al Qaeda's jail break bad news for US allies in region

Eli Lake:

A week after a dramatic jailbreak freed dozens of al Qaeda leaders captured during the Iraq surge at the end of President George W. Bush’s second term, America’s closest allies in that counterinsurgency are preparing for the worst.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, tribal leader Sheik Jassim Muhammad Suwaydawi said: “Of course I’m afraid of retribution. These people who escaped were put into jail because of those fighting al Qaeda in the awakening. Their first targets will be leaders in the awakening like me.”

The Anbar Awakening began in 2005, nearly two years before Bush sent more troops and empowered Gen. David Petraeus to execute an aggressive war strategy that decimated al Qaeda in Iraq and drove the group from its safe harbor in western Iraq.

Petraeus’s campaign would not have been possible if not for tribal leaders like Suwaydawi. Sheik Jassim, as he is known to his fellow tribesmen, was one of the first tribal leaders to rise up against al Qaeda in 2006, when he and his fighters in Anbar province warded off an assault known as the Battle of Sofia, despite being outmanned and outgunned. On Sunday, Jassim said he was trying to get messages to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but since the last American soldier left Iraq at the end of 2011, Suwaydawi says the United States has abandoned its former ally. “We haven’t had any contact with the U.S. government since they withdrew their forces from Iraq and left us dangling in the wind,” he said. “We are threatened at any moment because of our fight with al Qaeda while the Americans were here.”

U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity say the jailbreaks last Sunday in Abu Ghraib and Taji present a counterterrorism and intelligence nightmare. “We just lost track of everyone we didn’t kill who was in al Qaeda during the surge,” one U.S. intelligence analyst said.

While the United States still launches non-lethal drones and other kinds of aircraft from Turkey to gather intelligence on Iraq, the sheer number of people who escaped in the dramatic jailbreak have overwhelmed U.S. analysts. “We don’t have the analysts or the human source networks to track these guys,” the U.S. intelligence analyst said. The source added that most of the Iraq analysts have been reassigned to other areas since the United States withdrew from Iraq at the end of 2011.
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This is a major screw up that is a result of Obama's failure to negotiate an agreement for continued US presence in Iraq.  It is also a major failure for the Iraqi Shia regime.   If there is any good news in the jail break it involves these guys making a break for the Syria border to take part in that county's civil war.  It is a war that now looks like a loser for al Qaeda.