Anbar Province Insurgency Loses Footing

This comes from Threatswatch regarding a NYTimes article. It appears that there are some fractures in the tribal support for the insurgents.

A big development in Iraq today as 25 of the 31 al-Anbar tribes have openly declared against al-Qaeda and the insurgency and have commited to fight them and rid their region of their violence.

“We held a meeting earlier and agreed to fight those who call themselves mujahedeen,” Mr. Rishawi said in an interview today. “We believe that there is a conspiracy against our Iraqi people. Those terrorists claimed that they are fighters working on liberating Iraq, but they turned out to be killers. Now all the people are fed up and have turned against them.”

The agreement came on a day when a series of coordinated suicide bombings rocked two of Iraq’s most volatile cities outside the capital.

It is important to note that the sizes and relative power of the tribes in Iraq varies greatly. It is not reported precisely which tribes are among the 25 and which 6 tribes remain in support of al-Qaeda and the insurgency, which is not an insignificant detail. However, that being said, one of the tribes among the 25 is a ‘subset’ of the largest tribe in Anbar and some numbers were mentioned in the article.

Makes you wonder if the coalition did something right or was it just that the insurgents are doing things wrong. This does look like a good place for the Iraqi government to step in and form militias that are under government control. They could then organize and aid the counterinsurgency to their own benefit as well as that of the local populations. This would be different from the mess in Baghdad where the security voids were filled by militias under control of the religious sect leaders. The security needs are present and when the population is willing, giving them aid will move the central government's prospects forward.

In fact, moving to emplace militias could be hugely helpful to US forces in Anbar. With a bit of organization, they could clear out or disrupt insurgent forces in a sector, then hand it over to the Iraqi militias to maintain. This has worked in several historica insurgencies, such as Malasia and even Vietnam.