Sunni tribal leaders offer to battle Islamic State if Baghdad makes concessions

[flamingdem]

Source: McClatchy Foreign Bureau

IRBIL, IRAQ — Leaders of Iraq’s Sunni Muslim tribes threatened Friday to rebel against the Islamic State, the first indication that a change of government in Baghdad might allow a new prime minister to rally the country’s divided ethnic and religious groups against the Islamist extremists.

But the Sunni offer to battle the militants came with strings _ possible autonomy and the withdrawal of Iraqi military forces from Sunni areas _ that would be difficult for a Shiite-led government to grant, and Shiite politicians in Baghdad showed little enthusiasm. One, Dhiaa al Asadi, a member of Parliament loyal to cleric Moqtada al Sadr, called the Sunni proposal “very exaggerated and unrealistic.”

U.S. officials have predicted since the Islamic State began its sweep through much of central, western and northern Iraq, often with the collaboration of Sunni tribes, that a more conciliatory government in Baghdad, coupled with harsh rule imposed by the Islamists, would move disaffected Sunnis to rebel. That’s one reason the U.S. pushed so hard for Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to resign in favor of a replacement who would be more disposed to offer concessions to Sunnis and Kurds.

That happened Thursday, with Maliki endorsing a fellow member of the Dawa party, Haider al Abadi, to succeed him.

Then Friday came the first suggestion that the U.S. theory might prove accurate: an impromptu televised speech by one of the leading Sunni tribal leaders, Ali Hatem, the head of the Dulaim tribe who has sought refuge in Irbil, the capital of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish zone, from an arrest warrant issued by the Baghdad government charging him with treason.

Hatem, whose Dulaim clan is the largest in Anbar province, said tens of thousands of Sunni tribesmen and other anti-government groups now supporting the Islamic State would change their loyalties if the new government in Baghdad offered something in return. He said that the Islamic State includes thousands of non-Iraqis who could easily be defeated by Iraq’s much larger complex of Sunni tribes.



Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/15/236669/sunni-tribal-leaders-offer-to.html

[Uncle Joe]

1. This is good.

Thanks for the thread, flamingdem.

[Cha]

2. A Ray of Hope.. mahalo

flamingdem.

[CJCRANE]

3. "Islamic State includes thousands of non-Iraqis".

So it's a marriage of convenience between the local tribes and the invaders.

IMO Facebook and Twitter should be sued for facilitating the recruitment and propaganda of these vandals.

[paleotn]

5. It was the same some years ago with the Sunnis and Al-Queda in Iraq....

...the enemy of my enemy is my friend....sort of.... that is until I get tired of his bullshit and he's transformed into a bargaining chip. The Surge didn't break Al-Queda in Iraq. Far from it. It was the deal that Patraeus stuck with the Sunni tribes in response to the possibility that The Surge was failing that broke Al-Queda in Iraq. That's just the way the world works over there. Most folks are reasonable, you can always do a deal.

[Z_California]

6. Really?

Twitter is the tool by which the Corporate Media is defeated. It is our friend.

[freshwest]

7. Facebook and Twitter are mass surviellance tools, that's why it's allowed, then nab 'em later.

Last edited Sat Aug 16, 2014, 01:57 PM - Edit history (1)

Twitter can be turned off by authorities to control protests. Facebook and Twitter record every website visited after viewing their material by cookies installed on computers and devices.

And all their contacts, and their GPS locations are recorded along with every bit of personal information required to set them up, is available to security apparatus. This consumer gives information to set up these accounts. It creates a data base for the corporations they share with government.

Most people think in terms of communications of a century ago, public pay phones, less GPS, less integrated cellphone transmission systems and forget every keystroke and mouse click is recorded in order to make the system work. It's similar to how the phone company billed long distance and no one objected as it was for profit and it fits the 'what's good for business is good for the country' mantra. All wireless is open to surviellance.

People gamble on slipping through the net. Because things can move faster than intelligence can stop terroristic acts, but the data base builds. It is a standard technique to take them down later. Whether one is for or against these things, their communications and personal data are the property of corporations, it's their playing field we're using, not ours.

Just sayin'

[CJCRANE]

8. I agree but it works both ways.

It's a rolodex of a billion people who can be influenced individually or in specific groups.

[freshwest]

10. That's true, but such groups are later shut down and the info used against them.

Examples would be Occupy and crimes like Stuebenville that can't be stopped before they occur. To say they can't talk and organize, that's First Amendment territory to Americans, even if it's fascists doing it and not under our laws. It's just natural stuff. We don't have incitement to riot prohibitions nor do we restrict the most awful of hate speech and threats.

But they can be punished later. AFAIK, there is no desire or practical way to shut down the billions of social network accounts that are so popular they surpass less empheral communication. And at that level of wealth the owners have surpassed any interest in what most of us think important, not even governments.

They have eliminated the comfortable anonymity people once felt online to serve connectivity. I'm sure some bad actors can be stopped from doing harm by surviellance or by adding filters. But even the US government can only act later and not in real time like the heart racing fantasies in movies.

Really, we haven't had open sky between us and solar system for well over half of a century. I think that's how people feel about this stuff, that they are talking as if they are in the same room in physical and not a cyber reality they do not own and can't control who hears, sees or reads them. They don't know how things work technically and so they get paranoid. Not that a little bit of that isn't a good thing...

They aren't in control of what they are overheard or seen to do or brag about as in the case of ISIS who is threatening nations, not just their neighbors. Whatever one does, depends on those networks. Which again, I will stress, exist at the pleasure of the owners. I'm not talking CT here, just garden variety stuff. City water, for example, does not fall out of the sky to our cup to drink. It comes from an unseen connectivity that's taken for granted.

Our natural love of being connected is a survival tool, and easily infected by dark forces, like ISIS. But they think they are saving the world, have all the zeal of the newly converted and won't surrender their dream of a world wide caliphate, no more than the judeo christians will give up their dream of heaven on Earth.

It just sucks to be human at times, but it shouldn't. I saw a sig line today that was something many of us should consider:

We're all going to die. All of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

~ Charles Bukowski

Looking up his writings, I was less than impressed, but he certainly got the goods on that one.

JMHO...

[ColesCountyDem]

4. Good read!

Thanks for posting this.

[Burf-_-]

9. Is no one here thinking....

this could be one hell of a double cross. That's what the Mujahedin pulled on us after the soviets in Afgahnistan... The majority of the militants only owe their allegiance only to God and the Prophet. They follow the violent versus in the koran as gospel and always will. They would do or say anything to that end.

[DhhD]

11. If the Iraqi troups withdraw, the Sunni government of norther Iraq could continue to use oil

contract made by Kurdish, with American oil companies, to do energy business instead of going through the elected Iraqi government.
Just such a tanker of oil waits off the Texas coast.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/us-judge-says-unable-seize-kurdish-oil-201472922619290764.html

Are the Kurdish using IS and other militants against the Shiite government of Baghdad?
Iraqi government refused American Oil Companies contracts since Bush left office. Looks like President Obama will not allow our soldiers to protect illegal oil markets for Oil Companies. In 2009, Obama told oil companies to start drilling on leases they owned here in America. And this year leases off the east coast have been made avilable.

Republicans are again trying to lie Americans back into a war in Iraq. This time it is very evident why.

[flamingdem]

12. I don't think so but

it's possible the 3 state solution would offer some oil benefits.