Sahwa seen as model to unite Sunni militias
Fought against al-Qaida but now pushed aside by Iraq’s Shiite regime
BAGHDAD — They were known as the Sahwa, or the Awakening Councils — Sunni militiamen who took extraordinary risks to side with U.S. troops in the fight against al-Qaida during the Iraq War.
Once heralded as a pivotal step in the defeat of the bloody insurgency, the Sahwa later were pushed aside by Iraq’s Shiite-led government, starved of the political support and money needed to remain a viable security force.
Now, the Obama administration is looking at the Sahwa, which still exist in smaller form, as a model for how to unite Sunni fighters against the rampant Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) that has swept across most of the nation’s north. U.S. officials say they hope Sunnis will be similarly stirred to fight back against the new insurgency.
As many as 3,000 core ISIL fighters, many of them foreign, are believed to be in Iraq. But U.S. officials fear twice that many Iraqi Sunnis are vulnerable to being lured into the violence — pushing the country into an outright civil war.
That has prompted the White House, State Department and CIA to look for incentives to keep as many disgruntled Sunnis as possible from joining the fight.
“Hundreds of Sahwa fighters have given up during the past months. Either they have stayed home or joined insurgent groups,” said Ramadi militiaman Abu Humam, who would only identify himself by his nickname. He said he will not join the insurgency “because they do nothing but kill
people.” But Abu Ahmed, a Sahwa fighter from Muqdadiyha, said he joined an extremist group to protect his family after receiving threatening text messages. He said he reported the threats to government security orces, “but nobody cared.”
“It seems that both the government and the insurgents hate Sahwa,” he said.
The Obama administration knows it cannot recreate the ori-ginal Sahwa security movement, which was supported and bol-stered by American troops in Sunni-dominated areas of western and northern Iraq. Over a three-year period after the Sahwa campaign began in late 2006, the U.S. military paid them at least $370 million. By contrast, there now are no immediate U.S. plans to arm or fund the Sunni security militias, and there are too few American personnel in Iraq now to try to duplicate the original joint force.
It’s thought likely that Iraq’s Sunni neighbours — notably Jordan and Saudi Arabia — will use their cross-border tribal networks to bolster the security militias with financing or weapons, but it’s not clear whether Washington would even support that privately. The U.S. would probably want to vet the tribes before they received any money or arms, even from other nations, to ensure that the aid does not get passed along to ISIL or other extremist groups.
A similar process in Syria has delayed aid to the frustrated moderate Sunni rebels in their threeyear civil war to eject President Bashar Assad.
Secretary of State John Kerry will meet Thursday with diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. He hopes to enlist Sunni-dominated Gulf states in the U.S. effort to push Iraq toward creating a more inclusive government.