This article in the Chicago Tribune has a fascinating account of how a Sunni insurgent became an ally of American troops:
Earlier this year, Abul Abed, a disgruntled Sunni insurgent leader, began secret talks with the Americans about ending Al Qaeda's reign of terror in this run-down, formerly middle-class Baghdad neighborhood, renowned as one of the city's most dangerous. He had been gathering intelligence on the group for months.
One day in late May, he said, he decided it was time to act.
He hailed the car carrying the feared leader of Al Qaeda in the neighborhood, a man known as the White Lion, on one of Amariyah's main streets. "We want you to stop destroying our neighborhood," he told the man.
"Do you know who you are talking to?" said the White Lion, getting out of his car. "I am Al Qaeda. I will destroy even your own houses!"
He pulled out his pistol and shot at Abul Abed. The gun jammed. He reloaded and fired again. Again, the gun jammed.
By this time, Abul Abed said, he had pulled his own gun. He fired once, killing the White Lion.
"I walked over to him, stepped on his hand and took his gun," Abul Abed, which is a nom de guerre, said at his new, pink-painted headquarters in a renovated school in Amariyah, as an American Army captain seated in the corner nodded his head in affirmation of the account. "And then the fight started."
It was the beginning of the end for Al Qaeda in Amariyah. The next day, a firefight erupted. Al Qaeda fighters closed in on Abul Abed. Most of the 150 men who had joined him fled. Holed up in a mosque with fewer than a dozen supporters, Abul Abed thought the end was near.
"The blue carpet was soaked red with blood," he recalled. Then the imam of the mosque called in American help.
A friendship was born.
It is common to hear critics of the war argue that the reason things are better in Iraq today has nothing to do with the surge and everything to do with the fact that many Sunnis have turned against al Qaeda, but this is a puerile argument. It seems much more likely that both the American surge and Sunni desperation at al Qaeda tyranny have combined to turn the course of this conflict.
As the above account makes clear people like Abul Abed would not have survived were they not able to call upon beefed up American forces to defend them against al Qaeda. Nor would the Sunnis have been eager to challenge al Qaeda despite the terrorists' atrocities were it not for the knowledge that the U.S. would be there to support them and wasn't going to abandon them.
The surge may not be the only reason things are looking up in Iraq, but it is certainly a necessary reason. Without it there no progress would have been made at all.
RLC
