Iraq's Sunni insurgency waged by convenient bedfellows
The protests that sprouted last year in the Sunni Arab village of Karmah were a peaceful sort, tribal leader Laurence Hardan recalled, with residents “wearing dishdashas and carrying the Koran” in opposition to the Shiite Muslim-led Iraqi government.
It is a very different scene in Karmah now, Hardan said. Under siege by Iraqi security forces, the village is guarded all around by a latticework of Sunni militias — tribal fighters, neo-Baathists, ex-army officers and militants with the powerful Al Qaeda offshoot, the Islamic State.
“You name the group and they’re here,” Hardan said with pride, speaking by phone from the village in central Iraq, 50 miles west of Baghdad. “We are using any means to defend ourselves.”
As anger at Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s government has deepened, the armed Sunni opposition has grown more diverse and unified than Iraqi and U.S. officials often acknowledge.
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http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iraq-sunni-opposition-maliki-20140703-story.html#page=1
Maliki was the Bush-gift that just keeps on giving.....sort of like a poison pill for the region.
