After a grisly series of civilian deaths from bombings in downtown Samarra, Hekmat Mumtaz, leader of the Al Bu Baz tribe, met local al-Qaeda commander Abu Abdullah and asked him to halt operations inside population centres.
Mumtaz had himself been released only a month earlier after spending a year in United States detention facilities for supporting the rebels but, like many Iraqis, by the summer 2005 he was tiring of the violence and civilian casualties.
”You have miles of open road filled with US convoys to attack. Why are you setting off bombs inside town?” associates quote Mumtaz as telling Abu Abdullah at the time.
The legitimacy of targeting locally recruited police and other civilians has deeply divided Iraq’s insurgent groups, with more nationalist-minded rebels increasingly joining tribal leaders in opposing the more aggressive tactics of the foreign-led Islamic militants of al-Qaeda.
In the western province of al-Anbar, where al-Qaeda established an early stronghold before US troops stormed the city of Fallujah in late 2004, the split is most pronounced.
”The people of Fallujah should oppose all these groups of takfireen [Islamic extremists], they should support police to help security in the city,” said Sheikh Jamal Shakur Nazal, whose brother Kamal headed the city council before being gunned down on February 7.
The US military has reported clashes between nationalist insurgents and al-Qaeda and the killing of six al-Qaeda leaders.
”Over the last several months, we started seeing this trend where they are talking about how we have got to get the terrorists out of Iraq, and they’ve accepted that this is their responsibility,” one Western diplomat said of the tribes in al-Anbar province.
”It’s a very big diplomatic breakthrough,” the envoy added, noting that it was the fruit of long-running efforts by the US-led coalition to win hearts and minds among Iraq’s ousted Sunni Arab elite.
US commanders are hopeful that they can now isolate the Islamists in other provinces as well.
”We did it in al-Anbar and we are going to work with the Iraqi government to do it in any other provinces as well,” coalition spokesperson Major General Rick Lynch said.
But al-Qaeda retains a much stronger support base in the central province of Salaheddin around Mumtaz’s hometown of Samarra.
In early October, Mumtaz and other tribal leaders met Defence Minister Sadun al-Dulaimi to discuss ways of dealing with al-Qaeda in the province. Seventeen days later, Mumtaz was assassinated. Within 24 hours, fellow tribesmen had hunted down his killers and executed them, prompting Abu Abdullah to send a suicide bomber to Mumtaz’s funeral.
The war between the tribe and al-Qaeda in Salaheddin lasted for months before a truce was hammered out in the remote desert town of al-Rutbah, participants said. The local al-Qaeda commander was replaced, attacks would no longer take place inside population centres and members of the Al Bu Baz tribe could only be killed with prior permission.
In return, the tribes would provide al-Qaeda logistical support in their war against US forces.
However, the two sides failed to reach agreement on the vexed issue of targeting police officers — part of the security apparatus installed by the US-led occupation to al-Qaeda but local boys trying to help their own communities to its critics.
”We are for expelling the occupier, for an honest resistance, not one that kills innocent Iraqis who are sons of the country,” said Jassem Mumtaz, who became sheikh of the Al Bu Baz tribe in Samarra, after his brother Hekmat’s murder.
In Salaheddin province, insurgent loyalties are divided between Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Sunna on the one hand, and the nationalist umbrella organisation Jaish Mujahedeen on the other.
Adel al-Barra, a 50-year-old nationalist insurgent, scoffs at what he says is a US effort to divide and rule.
”The American occupier is searching for a way to create divisions between the mujahedin and the tribes,” he said, while admitting insurgent commanders do not always see eye to eye over tactics. ”It’s true that there have been errors, which are under discussion,” he said. ”There are differences over the interpretation of jihad — our brigades do not kill Iraqis, no matter what they do.”
Few in Samarra yet feel able to act on their misgivings about the tactics of their Islamist allies.
But the coalition spokesperson said there had been a similar reluctance in al-Anbar before US troops carried out a string of major assaults there last year.
”If we didn’t do the operations we’ve done since August and September out in al-Anbar, we wouldn’t have set the conditions for a dialogue,” he said. — Sapa-AFP