AFP Article: Sunni fighters take on Qaeda in Baghdad

Sunni fighters take on Qaeda in Baghdad
by Ammar Karim

Sunni tribal fighters, American troops and nationalist insurgents were all in action Friday against Al-Qaeda's Islamist militants in vicious street battles in west Baghdad.

Sunni militants, who would once have sympathised with Al-Qaeda's war against American and Iraqi government troops, have instead this week been shooting it out with the Islamist extremists in the lawless Amiriyah neighbourhood.

US and Iraqi government security forces have also piled into the fight.

"Planned security operations in cooperation with Iraqi Security Forces were conducted today based on intelligence gained from local leaders and citizens of the area," said US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl.

These official units also have a shadowy new ally in the battle, according to the commander of a Sunni tribal militia.

"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, said in a telephone 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," he said, adding that his forces were fighting in plain clothes.

The Salvation Council is the armed wing of an alliance of Sunni sheikhs from the western Iraqi province of Anbar, where they have funnelled tribal gunmen into the Iraqi security forces in order to fight Al-Qaeda extremists.

Many of these Sunni militants are former insurgents once hostile to the US military and Baghdad's Shiite-led government but, angered by Al-Qaeda's attacks on civilians and tribal leaders, they have now changed sides.

US commanders see this as one of the most positive recent developments in Iraq, which is in the grip of vicious series of overlapping civil conflicts, and hope now to persuade former insurgent groups to join a peace process.

Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the number two US officer in Iraq, told reporters on Thursday that about four-fifths of the militants currently fighting American forces were thought to be ready to end their campaigns.
"So we want to reach back to them," he said. "And we're talking about ceasefires and maybe signing some things that say they won't conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces."

Amiriyah, however, was still far from peaceful as the political shifts played themselves out in the form of bloody street battles. Iraqi security officials said fighting had decreased since Thursday, but was continuing.

"A curfew has been in effect in Amiriyah for about 10 days from 8:00 pm to 6:00 am. The curfew was set by the Iraqi security forces to disrupt the enemy's ability to reinforce the area," said US Lieutenant Colonel John Reynolds.

Residents said the curfew had not prevented fighting from erupting.

"Yesterday morning heavy fighting started in the main streets of Amiriyah using lots of different kinds of weapons between Islamic Army and 1920 Brigades on one hand and the Islamic State on the other," said resident Raed Mohammed.

The Islamic Army and the Brigades of the 1920 Revolution are nationalist insurgent groups run by former supporters of Saddam Hussein's ousted regime, while the Islamic State of Iraq is an Al-Qaeda-led Islamist alliance.

"We want the Iraqi government to save us and to kill those criminals. We can't leave our homes get the injured and dead to the hospitals. I saw bodies in the streets," Mohammed, a civil servant, told AFP by telephone.

Amiriyah was once one of Sunni west Baghdad's most upscale districts, where streets of generous detached homes are lined by palm trees and bougainvillea blooms, but in the past year has been one of the city's fiercest battlefields.

Businessman Abdel Aziz al-Issawi said the area was currently in a state of siege.

"We can't even watch from our windows. The fighting was so heavy in the streets lasting all day yesterday and through the night," he said.

"There's no electricity, no water, just fear and the cries of children. We kept ourselves in the last room at the back of the house. We couldn't even sleep last night and our suffering is huge."

Iraqi security officials said 1,951 civilians were killed in violence in May, 30 percent more than in April and close to March's toll, according to figures from the defence, interior and health ministries.