Inside Iraq: The militia that won't go away

'Sons of Iraq' were crucial to US military in helping to drive out al Qa'eda. Today, as they guard checkpoints and brandish weapons, they have become a problem. But whose?

Oday Abdul Qader, left, a Sunni, and his friend Abdul Qader Salah, a Shiite, guard their checkpoint in Samarra.

SAMARRA, IRAQ // Baber Mohammed Ahmed, wearing fashionable jeans and a printed shirt, stands as straight as he can at a checkpoint in Samarra; his leg though juts out at an unnatural angle. Mr Ahmed, the epitome of a cool Iraqi 19-year-old, has not been able to straighten it since he was shot by insurgents last year. "I need an operation to remove the bullets," he said, but he does not have the money to pay for one. Mr Ahmed and his buddies work for about US$230 (Dh844) a month guarding one of several dozen checkpoints in his hometown. Fluorescent yellow sashes identify them as SOIs - 'Sons of Iraq' - the name given by the US military to the largely Sunni militia they created to help drive out al Qa'eda. There are more than 90,000 SOIs - a force of untrained, armed, minimally employed young men which the United States cannot disband and the Iraqi government is reluctant to embrace. Before he began guarding the checkpoint, Mr Ahmed was pushing a cart in the market. He and his friends would like to become policemen, but it is not clear if many would qualify to join. But, having risked their lives to help restore security in Samarra, they have high expectations. "All of us will go into the police," said Luai Ibrahim, 30, wearing a baseball cap and covering his face with a black balaclava despite the 45C heat. "If there are no police we will stay at the checkpoint and defend the city." Some military strategists believe US forces could not have stabilised Iraq without the help of tens of thousands of Sunnis unexpectedly turning against al Qa'eda. The movement started as the Sahwa - the Awakening - in al Anbar, in western Iraq, when tribal leaders facing increased challenges from al Qa'eda two years ago turned against the people they had been harbouring. As US and Iraqi troops surged in and around Baghdad last year, other Sunni leaders threatened by extremists realised that aligning themselves with coalition forces could give them back some of the power they had lost. That movement helped pull Iraq back from the brink of all-out civil war. With al Qa'eda in retreat, Shiite militias began to step down. But it created a de facto militia funded by the US military and mistrusted by the Iraqi government, which has baulked at absorbing large numbers of SOIs into what is still a disproportionately Shiite police force. Played out on the streets every day, it is a dilemma that illustrates a central truth in Iraq five years after Saddam was toppled - despite the Shiite grip on power and the Sunni's tacit acknowledgement of a Shiite majority, many Sunni and Shiite leaders believe the war is not over yet. The Sunni movement swept into Baghdad last year. As tribal and religious leaders directed their people to co-operate with the US military, army commanders suddenly had thousands of men added to their forces, some of whom had previously been fighting the Americans. The Baghdad neighbourhood of Amariyah - an al Qa'eda enclave surrounded by Shiite neighbourhoods - was one of the first to turn. In the spring of last year, the US battalion commander in Amariyah took a call from a local imam telling him neighbourhood fighters planned to attack al Qa'eda members and asking the US military for help evacuating their wounded. Neighbourhood men took to the streets with AK-47s while US forces let the battle unfold, treating the Iraqi wounded in a local mosque. Over the next few days, US officials arranged with the Iraqi army to supply ammunition to the fighters, agreed on markings so US soldiers would not shoot the masked men in civilian clothes and soon began using intelligence from the former insurgents to target al Qa'eda in Iraq. As the ad-hoc co-operation became more entrenched, the US army began drafting security contracts to pay the fighters through the imams and sheikhs. "Wise Sunnis realised it was a lost war," Sheikh Khaled Mohammed Ahmed Mizwad al Ubaydi said in March. "We need a new kind of relationship in dealing with the Americans." Part of that relationship was the realisation that, aligned with the Americans, Sunnis could leverage more political power with the Shiite-led government than they could by themselves. Having fought al Qa'eda and helped stabilise Iraq, the SOI believe they are entitled to more than a precarious pay cheque. With a significant number of them former insurgents, they fear what would happen to them if the United States withdrew its funding and the Iraqi government did not absorb them into the official security forces. "All of us are fighters. We used to fight the Mahdi Army and al Qa'eda. They know who we are," Shuja'a Naji Shaker, head of the 'Ghazaliya Guardians' in Baghdad, said in March. "If we do not become part of the police, they will come and kill us." "It's a problem - we promised them jobs," said Col Robert White, in charge of the Mad'ain area southeast of Baghdad. "It goes back to the fairness issue again - especially out here since 60 per cent are Sunni and 40 per cent are Shiite - how they are being treated, what their perceptions of what the government is doing for them - so there could be trouble." The Sunni areas outside Baghdad, where there were few coalition forces and almost no Iraqi security forces, are where the SOIs have been most valuable. As part of the surge strategy, US troops moved in and around Baghdad to cut off lines of communication and supply between al Qa'eda and the capital. As they cleared areas that had become entrenched al Qa'eda strongholds, former insurgents provided intelligence to help them capture extremists and found and dismantled homemade bombs. "Out here, where you have six coalition companies and you're missing four battalions of Iraqi security forces between the Iraqi army and the national police, you start to have areas you can't physically cover and you need SOIs to do that," Col White said. Said Iraqi army Gen Abdullah Habeeb in Salman Pak, a former insurgent stronghold on the outskirts of Baghdad: "We don't want to fight them and we don't want them to fight us again." Col White and other commanders said they believed if the Iraqi government disbanded the SOIs, the men would refuse to give up their weapons and would continue to take orders from the sheikhs who employed them. "Everybody is trying to help find them meaningful employment," Gen David Petraeus said. "They clearly can't absorb more than a fraction of them in the Iraqi security forces at this time but we're also not going to cut them loose." About 20 per cent of an estimated 103,000 SOIs have been accepted into the Iraqi police. The Iraqi government has said it does not need any more. "There's a hiring freeze for lack of a better term right now to get them into the Iraqi police," said Col White. "I probably need 1,600 more [Iraqi police] out here and of those 1,600 I need 40 per cent of them, or the equivalent, to be Sunni from Sunni towns." The central government instead has sent him Emergency Response Unit police - a relatively new security force whose members receive just 10 days training before being put on the streets. While the US military for now continues to pay almost all the SOI salaries out of emergency funds, the US and Iraqi governments have implemented a range of programmes for technical training or public works. "The problem is it's not a long-term solution there's no job guarantee at the other end," said one US commander. Said another, "When they've fought al Qa'eda they're not going to be happy sweeping the streets." In Arab Jabour, part of the southern belt around Baghdad used by al Qa'eda in Iraq to move fighters and explosives into the capital, Lt Col Ken Adjie said the information the SOIs provided, the insurgents they identified and the bombs they found and turned in were invaluable in causing a dramatic drop in violence. "The first two weeks we were here we had 95 attacks - the last five months we had zero," said Lt Col Adjie, who commanded one of the last surge units to be deployed to Iraq. Fifteen of his soldiers were killed and 95 wounded. The SOIs lost a similar number in the fighting, he said. One former insurgent used to dismantle improvised explosive devices with his hands. The arms-length embrace of the SOIs by the United States has been central to its recent strategy of trying to separate fighters willing to renounce violence from those deemed to be irreconcilable. Among ordinary US soldiers it has often been a tough sell. "I know some of these guys are probably former insurgents - I know some of them probably have American blood on their hands," Lt Col Dale Kuehl told a group of young officers in Amariyah last May, but added they could prevent more bloodshed by working with their former enemies. The US army registers each SOI in a biometric database with fingerprint and iris scans, but unless they are already on a target list does not ask questions about their past. Some brigades have offered an amnesty in which they agree not to target even former insurgents who have killed US or Iraqi soldiers if they renounce violence and provide information. Military commanders are also aware of the potential for some SOIs, known by most Iraqis simply as 'volunteers', to revert to being insurgents or infiltrate. "Most of them are good but about 35 per cent of the SOIs joined just for money and one or two per cent were pushed by [al Qa'eda] to join," said Col Rasheed Fleeah, the head of Samarra's security operations centre. In Samarra, as in other places, the SOIs are a mixture of the disciplined and undisciplined. At one checkpoint, manned jointly by the largely Shiite national police and the mostly Sunni SOIs, Abdul Qader Salah and Oday Abdul Qader illustrate how differences that are crucially important in Iraqi politics melt away with day-to-day contact. Mr Salah, 25, and Shiite, was the national policeman in charge of the checkpoint. Mr Qader, 23 and Sunni, was the SOI working with him. "We're like brothers," said Mr Qader. "We share the same duty," Mr Salah added. @email:[e-mail]