Iraq's wild Anbar a killing ground for Sunni struggles

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The killers started early.

Just after sunrise, they tracked the imam to his modest brick mosque, where he was praying on a green carpet. Three masked gunmen muscled past a handful of worshippers and pumped four bullets into the chest of Sheik Adbul Rahman Jawhar al-Karbouli.

His murder Feb. 16 in a village near the Syrian border was barely noticed in Iraq's daily body count. But -- like a vivid footnote in a dry collection of statistics -- it helps bring the violence among Iraqi into sharper focus.

To much of the world, the meltdown in Iraq is a two-act spectacle: insurgents versus U.S.-led forces and Iraqi allies, and the sectarian bloodletting between Sunni Muslims and the majority Shiites. Yet out in the desert of the western Anbar province there is another story -- told one attack at a time -- of an internal struggle among Sunnis, between militant factions and those who have stood up against them.

It's a fratricide that may be escalating. A suicide truck bomb killed more than 50 people Saturday leaving a mosque in the Anbar village of Habbaniyah, 50 miles west of Baghdad. The mosque's imam -- like the slain al-Karbouli -- had spoken out against the insurgents, which include extremists inspired by al-Qaida.

The showdowns in Anbar demonstrate how the battle for Iraq can reach into every home and mosque. Political and religious leaders are being pushed to choose between the insurgency or the U.S.-backed government.

Heads of the province's powerful desert clans also must decide if they will assist or resist the militants -- setting off mafia-style turf wars along tribal lines.

"The first step, before we talk about reconciliation, is to bring the outlaw places under control," said Brig. Gen. Qassim Moussawi, a spokesman for the Iraqi military.

No place, it seems, shelters more outlaws than wild Anbar, a huge wedge of badlands and dunes with the Euphrates River as its lifeline.

Anbar's capital -- Ramadi -- is often referred to as Iraq's "wild west." It's the scene of near daily battles that produce a steady flow of U.S. body bags.

As insurgents clash with government forces, Anbar's clan leaders are caught between them.

Clan chiefs often act as judges, policy makers and intelligence chiefs for entire neighborhoods and villages. They also have the firepower at their disposal to enforce their decisions. Both the government and the insurgents need their support.

Some clans have thrown in with the insurgents -- providing them with safe houses and protection along the suspected smuggling lines. Others have spurned the al-Qaida inspired "mujahadeen" -- such as Jordanian-born leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed by a U.S. airstrike last June -- as foreign interlopers.

The result for Anbar's Sunnis has been division and bloodshed.

"Anbar represents the breakdown of Iraq at its most basic levels. It has forced tribes and families to pick sides," said Mustafa Alani, an expert in Iraqi affairs at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.

The imam al-Karbouli was a victim of this splintering of Anbar along clan lines, one of perhaps hundreds of similar killings since 2003.

Members of his tribe had publicly denounced the insurgents. Al-Karbouli often used his Friday sermons at the Ameen mosque in Karabilah to warn worshippers against joining the "terrorists," said residents of the town, located about 240 miles west of Baghdad.

The 45-year-old al-Karbouli spoke out in other prominent forums. As a member of the municipal council, he tried to rally young men to join the police or military. As a lawyer, he mocked the declarations by al-Qaida in Iraq to establish an Islamic state.

Resident of Karabilah say his opposition to the insurgents cost him his life. "The only reason for this brutal act was his stance against al-Qaida," said one resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals.

Family members refused to release a photograph of the imam. They are worried that insurgents may attack the four children he left behind.

The impact of Anbar's clan-against-clan violence on the people living in this desert landscape is difficult to measure. Reports, however, give a sense of how ruthless and thorough the killers can be.

On Feb. 19, gunmen ambushed a minivan on the main highway from Baghdad to Anbar. The attackers accused the 13 aboard of opposing al-Qaida in Iraq. All 13 were executed, including an elderly woman and two boys, police said. The bodies lay on the roadside for hours.

The same day, a suicide bomber tried to kill Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, leader of the Anbar Salvation Council, an alliance of clans backing the government.

"We give al-Qaida and their supporters these choices: either surrender, kill themselves or we kill them," said Col. Tarik Youssif Mohammed al-Assal, the deputy interior minister in Anbar and the Salvation Council's top security adviser.

The council, he said, uses a network of informants to hunt for insurgent backers and weapons stashes. He declined to give a clear breakdown on how many clans back the militants, but he suggested that the tide was turning.

"Al-Qaida is dying in Anbar," he claimed.

What progres has been made has come -- in part -- because the Pentagon has learned some painful lessons about dealing with the insurgency here.

During the 2003 invasion, the province was largely bypassed as U.S.-led columns pushed toward Baghdad. Small detachments were sent into the Anbar desert to try to block Scud missile batteries from moving within range of Israel.

But Anbar's expanses were too vast and its population too small to draw much attention after Saddam Hussein's fall.

That all changed in March 2004 when mobs in Fallujah ambushed U.S. security contractors and displayed the mutilated remains of two victims on a bridge over the Euphrates. The intense street-by-street battles that followed foreshadowed the bloody struggles ahead for U.S.-led forces across Anbar.

The Pentagon struck back with offensives to try to block the cross-border networks of suspected foreign fighters. These were the first major campaigns joined by the new Iraqi Army and another allied force: Several hundred Anbar tribesmen pledged to fight against the insurgents, who called themselves the Desert Protectors.

Since then, Washington has tried to expand the ranks of pro-government clans in Anbar by wooing clan leaders. The Pentagon's No. 2 commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, traveled Thursday to Anbar towns near the Syrian border, where he met political leaders and tribal elders.

But it can be difficult to recruit nervous Sunnis to the government's side.

The Shiites can count on the protection of the police, who are led by Shiites, and on their miliitas, including the powerful Mahdi Army of radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The Kurds of northern Iraq are protected by their traditional mountain guerrillas, called the peshmerga.

Many Sunnis -- who were favored under Saddam -- now feel vulnerable without a homegrown armed faction on their side.

"Groups like al-Qaida in Iraq exploit these fears among Sunnis and tell them things like, `We are here to protect you,"' said Alani, the security analyst.

Andrew Exum, a specialist in Iraqi issues at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, believes the White House is still struggling to grasp the "tribal geography and social geography" of Anbar.

"For the most part, the complications of tribal politics remain a mystery for the Americans," he said.

"No doubt they may be getting better at getting some clan leaders over to the government side," he added, "but they still have to make sure that empowering one faction does not appear be at the expense of another group. It's a very difficult place."