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David Kilcullen writes a fascinating piece about the tribal awakenings in Iraq. For those unaware of Kilcullen's resume, see here.

A teaser:

The uprising began last year, far out in western Anbar province, but is now affecting about 40% of the country. It has spread to Ninewa, Diyala, Babil, Salah-ad-Din, Baghdad and - intriguingly - is filtering into Shi'a communities in the South. The Iraqi government was in on it from the start; our Iraqi intelligence colleagues predicted, well before we realized it, that Anbar was going to "flip", with tribal leaders turning toward the government and away from extremists.

Some tribal leaders told me that the split started over women. This is not as odd as it sounds. One of AQ's standard techniques, which I have seen them apply in places as diverse as Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia, is to marry leaders and key operatives to women from prominent tribal families. The strategy works by creating a bond with the community, exploiting kinship-based alliances, and so "embedding" the AQ network into the society. Over time, this makes AQ part of the social landscape, allows them to manipulate local people and makes it harder for outsiders to pry the network apart from the population. (Last year, while working in the tribal agencies along Pakistan's North-West Frontier, a Khyber Rifles officer told me "we Punjabis are the foreigners here: al Qa'ida have been here 25 years and have married into the Pashtun hill-tribes to the point where it's hard to tell the terrorists from everyone else.") Well, indeed.

But this time, the tactic seems to have backfired.

Read the rest.

(Via DW)

Posted by Bill at August 29, 2007 09:55 PM | TrackBack (0)

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