Anbar General - "I'm only as confident as I look to Baghdad"

By Cernig

Yesterday, US forces handed over Anbar region, which had been the heart of the Sunni insurgency but calmed down remarkably after the Awakening movement took off, back to the Iraqi central government.

Although this is being claimed as unalloyed good news by US pro-occupation voices, the general in command of US forces in Western Iraq is rather more circumspect.

Iraq must invest heavily in Anbar province's crumbling economy if it wants to ensure a bloody insurgency that once raged there does not return, the commander of U.S. forces in western Iraq said on Monday.

Speaking to Reuters as the U.S. military handed control of the former insurgent heartland to Iraqi security forces, Major-General John Kelly said Iraq's government should inject urgently needed cash to build on recent security gains.

"How confident am I that this (insurgency) is over? I'm only as confident as I look to Baghdad," he said. "It's not really up to the police or Marines any more, it's up to the government. They know what the reconstruction needs of the province are."

... Kelly said al Qaeda would struggle to regain a foothold, but keeping that depended on continued reconciliation with Baghdad.

"In Anbar, they are no longer an insurgency. They're a loosely organised bunch of murderers," he said. "Could they come back? Sure, if the the Iraqi central government did something to enrage ... to alienate these people," he said.

Oh, you mean something like this?

A key pillar of the U.S. strategy to pacify Iraq is in danger of collapsing because the Iraqi government is failing to absorb tens of thousands of former Sunni Muslim insurgents who'd joined U.S.-allied militia groups into the country's security forces.

... We cannot stand them, and we detained many of them recently," said one senior Iraqi commander in Baghdad, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Many of them were part of al Qaida despite the fact that many of them are helping us to fight al Qaida."

He said the army was considering setting a Nov. 1 deadline for those militia members who hadn't been absorbed into the security forces or given civilian jobs to give up their weapons. After that, they'd be arrested, he said.

Oops.