U.S. reliance on Sunni leaders calms rebel haven — for now

QABR ABED, Iraq — These days, this town in northern Iraq is relatively safe, at least compared to other Sunni Arab-dominated areas of Iraq. For a village that held folk status among Iraqis as one of the most sinister places in the country, that is quite a change.

As the insurgency gathered strength last year, Qabr Abed served as a weapons depot and safe haven for a large number of home-grown insurgent commanders, including Mohammed Shakara, the al-Qaida leader for northern Iraq and its biggest city, Mosul.

"It was for the insurgency what the Dominican Republic is to baseball," said Capt. Kevin Burke, who commands Company C of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Infantry Regiment, which oversees Qabr Abed.

Now, however, the village has a home-grown police force that maintains checkpoints and conducts patrols — a rarity in rural Sunni Arab areas, where the police often hunker down in their barracks or, worse, conspire with insurgents.

No U.S. soldiers have been killed or wounded here in five months. And members of Shakara's family fed information to U.S. forces that aided in his capture one month ago, according to U.S. commanders in Mosul.

If Qabr Abed can maintain its relative calm, which U.S. officers here say will require constant hand-holding, it would stand as a striking contrast to other Sunni Arab regions in Iraq where the insurgency remains undiminished. Just 15 miles north, in Mosul, insurgents routinely kill policemen and attack soldiers and civilians with mortars and car bombs. And in Tal Afar, 40 miles to the west, residents say insurgents effectively control many neighborhoods.

Strategy criticized

Early in the occupation of Iraq the Bush administration pursued a strategy — a misguided one, in the view of many military commanders in Sunni Arab areas — of marginalizing Sunni leaders suspected of ties to insurgents or Saddam Hussein's Baath party.

Now, however, the administration, tacitly acknowledging that military power may never defeat the Sunni-dominated insurgency, has swung to the other extreme: courting Sunni Arabs with insurgent ties.

That is what some U.S. soldiers who were rushed here in November to quell an insurgent uprising ultimately figured out for themselves. Looking for effective leaders, they turned to a few Sunni Arabs, each with ties to the former regime or the insurgency, to take control of the police and what remained of a municipal administration. They say they had no choice.

"Everyone here alive today, and who is still effective, was at least compliant with the insurgents," said Burke, 36, of DuPont, Pierce County. "Otherwise, they would have been killed."

Commanders' caution

If the village today seems to stand as one small example of how the insurgency can be contained, commanders caution that signs of progress might prove deceptive, that apparent friends and allies can switch sides overnight.

"You always make sure you keep your back plates in," Burke said, referring to body armor. "Everybody here has a past."

In mid-November, almost all the police in Mosul and surrounding towns quit, and over a two-month period insurgents led by Shakara beheaded or shot more than 200 Iraqis they deemed "collaborators," according to the U.S. military.

Meanwhile Shakara was operating with impunity in Qabr Abed. U.S. commanders received reports that foreign fighters killed in Mosul were sometimes buried here and that he attended the funerals.

Soldiers quickly learned that Qabr Abed was also home to many senior officers in the old Iraqi army, making for an explosive combination of Saddam loyalists and jihadists. The extent of their intimidation was plain in January, when only 800 people in a region of 56,000 voted in national elections.

But as the cold winter wore on, Company C began to score some wins. And as those successes accumulated, the townspeople, the commanders here said, slowly shifted their allegiance to the Americans.

One major turning point, the commanders said, came when a person embittered after Shakara killed some of his family members revealed the identities of several dozen insurgents, who were quickly rounded up. After that, and the breakup of a cell of Syrian fighters, the villagers became convinced the Americans were gaining the upper hand, said Tariq Ahmed Sleman, a police captain. Villagers, fed up with constant raids, began providing information.

"They began to divorce themselves from Shakara," said Sleman, who ultimately won the trust of the U.S. troops.

At least 50 insurgents captured in Qabr Abed since November remain in custody, said 1st Lt. Nik Trotta, 24, of Boise, Idaho, an intelligence officer here.

Another crucial event came March 7, when a man showed up saying he was the town police chief and could organize dozens of officers.

The Americans were skeptical, but that afternoon they went to the police station — abandoned after the November bombing — and were shocked to find themselves heavily outnumbered by policemen, some of them in uniform. "I thought I had walked into an ambush," Burke recalled.

The chief, Lt. Col. Khaled Hussein Ali, is a former army-intelligence officer and one-time smuggler who funneled guns and other weapons to Shakara and other insurgents in November, said Sleman, who is now Ali's right-hand-man.

Sleman himself was once a close friend of Shakara. They drank beer and chased women together, Sleman said, before what he described as his friend's bizarre midlife embrace of Wahhabism, the ultrafundamentalist strain of Islam.

Risking their lives

Both men are risking their lives. Ali, who has dodged periodic assassination attempts by assailants armed with rocket-propelled grenades, now lives with a $25,000 bounty on his head, U.S. officers say. The bounty on Sleman is $10,000.

In the past three months they have apprehended more than a dozen insurgents and seized a half-dozen hidden stockpiles containing more than 1,000 grenades and mines, materiel that U.S. officers say was used to replenish fighters in Mosul.

To Khalif Khudr Mohammed al-Jabouri, mayor of the district that includes Qabr Abed and neighboring Hammam al Alil, it was no surprise that the police discovered the weapons. "They were the ones who buried them," he told Lt. Col. Todd McCaffrey, the battalion commander here, as the two shared a lunch of flat bread and lamb sitting on floor mats at the mayor's house.

Officers concede that Qabr Abed could easily backslide. "If you let up at all, you open up the opportunity for what happened in November," Trotta says. "It was horrible, dark, tiring and exhausting."