Is al-Qaeda on the Run in Iraq?

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There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.

The good news comes with caveats, of course. The removal of AQI's havens in Anbar may ultimately hurt the terrorists' ability to blow up markets in Baghdad, but it hasn't yet. As I reported in September 2005, there is also the scandalous reality that an alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war. "Just because the Sunni tribesmen have joined with us in Anbar doesn't mean they like the Baghdad government," a senior Administration official told me. "They just hate al-Qaeda more."

Which is why there is some very bad news from Iraq as well. There is a growing sense among senior U.S. military and intelligence officials that the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki—and the Shi'ite factions in general—has little interest in making concessions to the Sunnis. "The Shi'ites suffer from a battered-child syndrome. They simply don't trust the Sunnis," said a senior U.S. official. There was a long history, even before Saddam Hussein's massacres, of Sunni prejudice and pogroms against the Shi'ites. In recent months, the al-Maliki government has sent several clear signals of anti-Sunni intransigence. It has supported the "voluntary" relocation of Sunni Arabs from the disputed, Kurdish-dominated city of Kirkuk. And in an instance that is particularly vexing to U.S. intelligence officials, al-Maliki has supported the creation of a parallel Shi'ite-dominated intelligence service to supplant the authority of the Iraq Intelligence Service, which has been run by a Sunni general named Mahmoud Shahwani, who is considered "very effective" by U.S. officials. It is beginning to seem quite implausible that the various Iraqi political factions will meet "benchmarks" like rescinding the punitive de-Baathification programs and passing a law guaranteeing fair distribution of oil profits anytime soon. And as General David Petraeus keeps reminding us, a political solution is necessary: a military victory is not possible. So let's try to put the good and bad news together. It's not impossible that the Iraqis will eventually remove the al-Qaeda cancer from the Sunni insurgency—which would put a serious crimp in President George W. Bush's current rationale for the war, that we're there to fight al-Qaeda. But it's also probable that without a political deal, the sectarian conflict between the Sunnis and Shi'ites will intensify—and eventually explode when the U.S. military pulls back from Iraq. The stakes in Iraq then become questions of moral responsibility and regional stability. "How many Srebrenicas do you have the stomach for?" a senior U.S. official asked me, referring to the Bosnian massacre by the Serbs in 1995. Given the antipathy of the American people for the war, I'd guess the public reaction would be, "Those Arabs are just a bunch of barbarians, and we could never tell the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis anyway." A more pointed question is, How many massacres of Sunnis will the Saudis and Jordanians have the stomach for? How hard will Iran press its obvious advantage with a Shi'ite-dominated government in Iraq? The answers to those questions are completely out of American hands. They rest with the Iraqi Shi'ites. Eventually even battered children have to grow up.