The increasingly chaotic situation, the fall of dozens of security posts and the announcement by Anbar clan leaders who had led the protests, including Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, that they would fight against al-Qaeda, reshuffled the cards and allowed the Iraqi army to return to Anbar’s cities to liberate them from al-Qaeda. On a security level, analysis of the military decisions made during the crisis and their effectiveness can wait until after al-Qaeda is ousted from the cities.
On a political level, however, one cannot postpone discussing the manner in which the government dealt with the Sunni protests, considering they were one of the main reasons for matters degenerating to their current state.
An initial assessment indicates that the government failed throughout 2013 to differentiate between moderates and extremists taking part in the protests. It did not initiate a dialogue with the moderates among them until the crisis worsened, leading to Maliki eventually meeting with Sheikh Abu Risha in Baghdad.
The failure to differentiate between clans that felt marginalized and those with religious motivations or specious goals point to an important question that is not being seriously examined in political circles: Were the thousands of gunmen who unprecedentedly appeared on Anbar city streets all members of al-Qaeda?
The information available from inside Anbar indicates that ISIS only had a few hundred fighters spread among sleeper cells in Sunni cities and the border encampments. The momentum acquired by the organization appears to have resulted from impressionable young clansmen, receptive to religious fatwas, joining its ranks to repel the government’s “invasion” of Anbar and fight alongside al-Qaeda, despite not previously being associated with it.
Resolution of the Anbar crisis cannot be arrived at through security measures alone or through solely political approaches. Rather, a solution must entail the adoption of coordinated security and political efforts to guarantee the support of moderate politicians and clan leaders. It must also involve a framework for getting the gunmen who recently joined ISIS to return to the fold of their clans, establishing cooperation between Anbar inhabitants and security forces to expel the organization from Sunni cities and speeding the deployment of Iraqi army troops so they can complete their mission along the Iraqi-Syrian border.
Furthermore, an honest dialogue must be initiated with political, religious and clan representatives of Anbar province to settle the differences that led to the protests and prevent their recurrence.
(Picture: Fallujah)
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