With the four-month-old "surge" in US troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, US commanders are turning to another strategy they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight al-Qaeda-linked militants who have been their allies in the past.
US commanders say they have successfully tested the strategy in Anbar Province and have held talks with Sunni groups suspected of prior assaults on US units, or of links to groups that have attacked US units in at least four other areas where the insurgency has been strong.
In some cases, the US commanders say, these groups have been provided, usually through Iraqi military units allied with the US, with arms, ammunition, cash, fuel and other supplies.
PHOTO: AP
US officials who have engaged in what they call "outreach" to the Sunni groups say the groups are mostly linked to al-Qaeda but disillusioned with al-Qaeda's extremist tactics, particularly suicide bombings that have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians.
In exchange for US backing, these official say, the Sunni groups have agreed to fight al-Qaeda and halt attacks on US units.
Commanders who have undertaken these negotiations say that in some cases Sunni groups have agreed to alert US troops to the location of roadside bombs and other lethal boobytraps.
But critics of the strategy, including some US officers, say it could amount to the US arming both sides in a future civil war.
The US has spent more than US$15 billion in building up Iraq's new army and police, whose 350,000 members are heavily Shiite.
With a US troop drawdown increasingly likely in the next year and little sign of a political accommodation between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Baghdad, the critics say, there is a strong prospect that any weapons given to Sunni groups will eventually be used against Shiites.
US commanders met this month in Baghdad with General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, to discus the conditions Sunni groups would have to meet to win US assistance.
Senior officers who attended the meeting said that Petraeus and the operational commander who is the second-ranking US officer here, Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, gave cautious approval to field commanders to negotiate with Sunni groups in their areas.
Meanwhile, Iraq's leading political blocs agreed on Sunday to replace the speaker of parliament, Mahmoud Mashadani, a Sunni, after accusations that his bodyguards assaulted a Shiite lawmaker as the speaker cursed him and then dragged him to the speaker's office.
Four lawmakers and an aide confirmed the details of the skirmish and the effort to remove Mashadani, including Saleem Abdullah, a parliament member and spokesman for Mashadani's bloc, the Iraqi Consensus Front
Abdullah said the new speaker of the 275-member Iraqi Council of Representatives would be likely be another Sunni Arab.
"We are now in negotiations to find another candidate," he said. If carried out, the move would come at an already difficult time for Iraq's largest elected body. Mashadani's tenure, which began after the December 2005 election, has been characterized by personal volatility, sectarian division among members and legislative inertia.
The scuffle on Sunday was the third time this year that Mashadani or members of his staff have been accused of physically assaulting members of parliament. The most recent incident was last month, when Mashadani slapped a Sunni lawmaker who questioned the speaker's decision to rush out of a legislative session in disgust after a Shiite colleague questioned the government's sensitivity to the plight of displaced Shiite families.
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