Joseph Galloway: Drop In Iraq Violence Threatened By String Of Assassinations

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_8080331

Galloway: Drop in Iraq violence threatened by string of assassinations

Joseph Galloway
Article Last Updated: 01/25/2008 07:37:03 PM MST

Some weeks ago, this writer issued a small warning against prematurely celebrating victory in the U.S. surge in Iraq because the level of violence has dropped, a phenomenon that had far more to do with the Iraqis than it did with the Americans.

In recent weeks, however, a wave of assassinations by al-Qaida in Iraq and by Shiite Muslim militiamen is threatening the American-paid tribal leaders and fighters of the Sunni Awakening Councils, which are at the heart of the reduced violence in some of the most dangerous places in Iraq.

The Awakening Councils and their Sunni sheiks have stopped the insurgent attacks on American troops in Anbar province and turned on the Sunni jihadists they'd sheltered for years.

This seismic shift virtually ended the violence in bloody Anbar and helped dampen the killings in Diyala province north of Baghdad and in some of the worst neighborhoods in the Iraqi capital. This and a six-month cease-fire by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia are far more responsible for the improved security in Iraq than is the temporary increase in American troops.

Assassinations of council leaders and sheiks, however, have spiked since Osama bin Laden called the 80,000 tribal volunteers ''traitors and infidels'' in a recent videotaped lecture. Suicide bombers and ambushes have killed more than 100 Awakening Council leaders and several tribal sheiks, and that has American commanders worried. U.S. officials say they believe that Sunni militants have mounted most of the attacks, but that some have been carried out by Sadr's militia or by the Iranian-backed Badr Corps, which has close ties to Iraq's Shiite-led government.

The Sunni council members see it differently. They say the Shiite militias and their friends in the U.S.-backed Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are the biggest threat to them, with al-Qaida in second place.

Either way, it's bad news for the American commanders, who've cooperated with their former Sunni enemies against the wishes of the Baghdad government and worked hard to spread the model to other areas where the Sunni extremists are strong. The assassinations pose a serious threat of renewed violence if the Sunni groups do an about-face and resume their insurgency against Iraq's central government or, worse yet, begin fighting the Shiite militias and government forces as the United States tries to draw down its forces in Iraq to pre-surge levels.

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authored by Bush and Petraeus pacified Iraq and cause geysers of steaming sugared milk to gush forth from the Syrian Desert. Really...

To be somewhat serious the Awakening councils have always been nothing more than a pause. The history of 4th Gen Warfare clearly indicates when the military has a large concentration of troops the Guerrillas reduce their presence and activity to wait out the occupying force as soon as the occupiers grow weary of hemorrhaging money and pull back the guerrillas increase attacks.