A Dark Side to Iraq 'Awakening' Groups

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A Dark Side to Iraq 'Awakening' Groups
International Herlad Tribune | January 04, 2008

The thin teenage boy rushed up to the patrol of U.S. Soldiers walking through Dora, a shrapnel-scarred neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, and lifted his shirt to show them a mass of red welts across his back.

He said he was a member of a local Sunni "Awakening" group, paid by the U.S. military to patrol the district, but he said it was another Awakening group that beat him. "They took me while I was working," he said, "and broke my badge and said, 'You are from Al Qaeda.' "

The Soldiers were unsure what to do. The Awakening groups in their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: They fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite "dogs."

The Awakening movement, a predominantly Sunni Arab force recruited to fight Sunni Islamic extremists like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, has become a great success story after its spread from Sunni tribes in Anbar Province to become an ad-hoc armed force of 65,000 to 80,000 across the country in less than a year.

A linchpin of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq, the movement has been widely credited with turning around the violence-scarred areas where the Sunni insurgency has been based.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,159357,00.html