Two crucial US allies display divergent loyalties

Phil Sands, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: October 30. 2008 10:50PM UAE / October 30. 2008 6:50PM GMT

Mahmudiyah // Both are leaders of powerful tribes, both have been heavily involved in the past five and a half years of violence that has engulfed Iraq. And they live a few minutes drive from one another, just south of Baghdad.

Similarities between Sheikh Amash and Sheikh Malik do not run much deeper than that. True, they are both allies with the US military. But while the former is a long-time, willing friend of the Americans, Sheikh Malik has only recently, and reluctantly, agreed to co-operate with them.

Sheikh Amash heads the Al Raba’e tribe in Al Rashid. He is a huge bear of a man, with enormous hands and feet. He has little education, talks endlessly and speaks his mind bluntly, regardless of the consequences.

In the early years after the 2003 invasion, tribal leaders from Anbar – the area that became the beating heart of the insurgency – met Sheikh Amash and asked him to side with them against US forces.

“They tried to offer me a lot of money to sign up with them to fight the occupiers,” he said. “I told them the Americans are not occupiers, they are friendly forces and that’s something I don’t regret saying. They told me ‘we have to fight them’. I said, no, I cannot work with you. Since then I’ve had a lot of threats against me. That’s when I started fighting al Qa’eda.”

In post-invasion Iraq, before the US military set up bases across the country, Sheikh Amash and his tribe essentially stood alone against the extremists who eventually took over much of south central Iraq. They never took over Al Rashid, where Sheikh Amash holds sway.

“We had no government,” he said. “There was no army in the area. By myself I was fighting al Qa’eda in this district. I lost 18 men in one day but I kept fighting.”

A Shia, Sheikh Amash refuses to recognise differences between Iraq’s sects. And while he battled against Sunni extremists, he also fought Shia militia groups who, at the height of the sectarian civil war in 2007 grew enormously powerful in Mahmudiyah, a kilometre or two south of Sheikh Amash’s tribal centre.

Sheikh Malik, head of the Al Gariri tribe, is physically smaller and much more refined than Sheikh Amash. He weighs the value of words before saying anything, and phrases answers to questions politically, adjusting them to his audience and the circumstances.

While Sheikh Amash was fighting with the Americans, Sheikh Malik was supporting the groups which were trying to kill US soldiers. On the wall of his home still hangs a framed text in Arabic that extols the virtues of shedding invaders’ blood in defence of one’s country.

A Sunni, Sheikh Malik insists his tribe – he has about 3,000 fighters – began to battle against the Shiites only after coming under attack from their militias.

A couple of years ago, US and Iraqi forces in the area issued an arrest warrant for Sheikh Malik, after he allegedly murdered a rival sheikh. According to the Americans, he refused to turn himself over to the governmental authorities but agreed to pay blood money for the killing. Sheikh Malik is currently, ostensibly, allied with the US military. He is part of the Sahwa council programme, under which tribes involved in the insurgency stopped fighting against the Americans and turned against the extremists they had been helping. In exchange for that volte-face, the Americans agreed to pay the sheikhs tens of thousands of dollars a month. Although the United States has been paying Sheikh Malik and his men, it does not regard them as trustworthy.

“He’s a staunch Baathist. Always was and always will be,” said one US military official in the area. “He hates us and has basically told us as much to our faces.”

Sheikh Amash is happy that the Americans came to overthrow Saddam Hussein. While there are problems in Iraq, he said he wanted to keep fighting for a democratic future. Sheikh Malik is blunt on the subject: “Democracy here has been a failure.”

Sheikh Amash said he was certain there would be renewed fighting with the tribes that were currently enrolled in the Sahwa system.

Sheikh Malik threatens the same outcome, saying that he expects payments to his tribe to stop, now that the Iraqi government is responsible for making them. In response to that, his people will pick up their weapons again.

“There are thousands of men who need to feed their families in this area,” Sheikh Malik said. “If for the Sons of Iraq [Sahwa council] money stops, they’ll have nothing to do but go back to fighting.”

On this final and critical point – the future of the Sahwa system – the two sheikhs apparently do see eye to eye. Both think the current uneasy peace will not last, that violence will surge once more.



psands@thenational.ae

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