BAGHDAD, 2 June 2007 — Sunni tribal fighters, American troops and nationalist insurgents were all in action against Al-Qaeda’s militants in vicious street battles in west Baghdad yesterday. Sunni militants, who would once have sympathized with Al-Qaeda’s war against US and Iraqi government troops, have instead this week been shooting it out with the extremists in the lawless Amiriyah neighborhood.
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 Lt. Col. 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 Anbar province, where they have funneled 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.
“A curfew has been in effect in Amiriyah for about 10 days from 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. The curfew was set by the Iraqi security forces to disrupt the enemy’s ability to reinforce the area,” said US Lt. Col. 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.
In the southwest corner of the capital, Sunni and Shiite tensions played out with a mortar attack on a popular market place at nightfall that killed 12 people and wounded 40, a doctor at Baghdad’s Yarmuk hospital said. Mortar duels between rival neighborhoods are common in the restive capital and one person was killed and three wounded in a similar bombardment of the north Baghdad suburb of Saba Al-Bur yesterday. In nearby Khadra, a roadside bomb killed on person and wounded two others, security officials said.
Meanwhile, powerful Shiite politician Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim returned to Iraq’s city of Najaf yesterday after receiving treatment for cancer in Tehran. Hakim, the head of one of the most powerful parties in the Parliament, spent nearly two weeks abroad in a trip that included medical tests in the United States and treatment in Iran.
