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“Iraqi militants regrouping”

Damascus: Iraq’s main Sunni-led resistance groups have scaled back their attacks on U..S forces in Baghdad and parts of Anbar province in a deliberate strategy aimed at regrouping, retraining, and waiting out President George Bush’s “surge”, a key militant leader has said.

U.S. officials recently reported a 55 per cent drop in attacks across Iraq. One explanation they give is the presence of 30,000 extra U.S. troops deployed this summer. The other is the decision by dozens of Sunni tribal leaders to accept money and weapons from the Americans in return for confronting Al-Qaeda militants who attack civilians. They call their movement Al-Sahwa (the Awakening).

The resistance groups are another factor in the complex equation in Iraq’s Sunni areas. “We oppose Al-Qaeda as well as Al-Sahwa,” the director of the political department of the 1920 Revolution Brigades said in Damascus in a rare interview with a Western reporter.

Using the nom de guerre Dr Abdallah Suleiman Omary, he went on: “Al-Sahwa has made a deal with the U.S. to take charge of their local areas and not hit U.S. troops, while the resistance’s purpose is to drive the occupiers out of Iraq. We are waiting in Al-Sahwa areas. We disagree with them but do not fight them. We have shifted our operations to other areas”.

Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, has seen some of the heaviest fighting since the 2003 invasion but has become conspicuously calmer in recent months. “There is no resistance at the moment in Ramadi,” Omary said. He described the tribal Awakening movement as “good for pushing Al-Qaeda out but negative for the resistance”. “There are no armed clashes between us and them but they prevent us working in their areas,” he said.

Omary’s group is named after a Sunni uprising against British occupation forces in 1920. The group recently joined seven other Sunni-led armed resistance organisations to form the Front for Struggle and Transformation, a political committee aimed at drawing up a programme for national unity and hastening a U.S. withdrawal.

Besides Ramadi, the Awakening movement was also operating in Sunni-majority districts of Baghdad, such as Ameriya, Adhamiya, and parts of Ghazaliya and Jihad, Omary said. He predicted it was unlikely to last for more than a few months. It was a “temporary deal” with the U.S. and would split apart as people realised the Americans’ true intentions.

He cited last week’s announcement that the Bush administration plans to work with the Shia-led government of Nuri al-Maliki on arrangements for long-term U.S. bases and an open-ended occupation in Iraq.

Operating in small cells, Sunni resistance groups have been responsible for most of the roadside bomb attacks on U.S. vehicles in western Iraq. While they are starting to unite at the political level, their suspicion of Iraq’s Shia militias shows no sign of abating. “We helped [Shia cleric] Moqtada al-Sadr in 2004 when the Americans attacked Najaf, but see no point in dialogue with him now,” Omary said. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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