From: Ad 

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=20925

" Sunni tribal fighters have joined nationalist insurgents battling
Al-Qaeda in vicious Baghdad street battles, their commander said on Friday,
as residents reported two days of intense clashes.

For the past two days, Sunni fighters, who would once have sympathised with
Al-Qaeda's war against American and Iraqi government troops, have instead
been locked in battle against them in the lawless Amiriyah neighbourhood.

"We dispatched around 50 of our secret police from Anbar to Amiriyah,
and started to hit Al-Qaeda there. We killed a lot of them," Sheikh
Hamid al-Hais, the head of the Anbar Salvation Council, said in a telephone
interview.

"A similar operation will be launched in Al-Ghazaliyah against
Al-Qaeda today. We have sufficient information on places they are in, and
we will punish them," he said, adding that his tribal forces were
fighting in plain clothes.

The Salvation Council is the armed wing of an alliance of Sunni sheikhs
from the western province of Anbar, where they have funnelled tribal gunmen
into the Iraqi police in order to fight Al-Qaeda.

Many of these Sunni militants are former insurgents once hostile to the US
military and Baghdad's Shiite-led government but, angered by Al-Qaeda's
attacks on civilians and tribal leaders, they have changed sides.

US commanders see this as one of the most positive recent developments in
Iraq, which is in the grip of vicious series of overlapping civil
conflicts, and hope to recruit more former insurgent groups into the peace
process."


I reckon there is clearing of the decks going on prior to an expected
Coalition withdrawal & thus the need for various local power structures
to have secured their base.

Which is ironic given AQ's name.

Entirely predictable though.


The first stage of healing is to remove the source of infection, in this
case foreign fighters of all sorts inc coalition troops.



Adam

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