Paul McGeough turns in a tour de force of an article, tying together some previously confusing information about events in Al Anbar province, like the sudden escalation of violence in Ramadi last week and the kidnapping of the governor of Al Anbar province’s sons. McGeough clearly has extensive contacts to have assembled the wealth of sourced information included in this article as well as the scoop he wrote last week on Allawi personally shooting prisoners.
Juan Cole’s comment (I’m hoping Professor Cole reads this post and comments on the McGeough article, though his expertise centers in the Shi`a and this is a Sunni affair) on the kidnapping incident “The provincial governors have largely been chosen in a complicated process over which the Americans and British had a great deal of influence, and many guerrillas consider them puppets,” implies that the governor’s sons were kidnapped as punishment for collaboration. McGeough, however, indicates that it is also a tribal clash:
At the centre of it all are the Al-Kharbits, deemed by experts in tribal affairs from Amman to Washington to be one of the most important tribal clans in all of Iraq.
The old man is one of their sheiks. And two days ago there was payback for his expulsion – the three sons of the provincial governor, Abdul Karim Burghis al-Rawi, were kidnapped in a brazen daylight attack on his Ramadi home. The house was torched and nothing has been heard on the fate of the sons – aged 15 to 30.
Before the US invasion the Al-Kharbit sheiks regularly made secret trips to Amman to brief US intelligence agents on events in Iraq, they plotted their own coup against Saddam and they ferried CIA agents into Iraq. But what seemed to be a genuine love affair was reduced to hatred two days after the fall of Baghdad, when the US bombed the home of the clan’s then sheik of sheiks, Malik Al-Kharbit, killing him and 21 of his immediate relatives.
In the doomsday language of the tribes “Blood was spilled.”
The new paramount sheik is 47-year-old Mudher Al-Kharbit, a nephew of the bespectacled old man the tribe says has been exiled. Al-Kharbit’s bitterness is multiplied by what he says has been an American refusal to apologise for the 22 deaths.
Here’s one more nugget from McGeough’s article:
An observer said: “He [Al-Kharbit] feels that he is losing his grip on the tribe. He has to go back to them with one of two things. Either the US is listening to him – or it’s not, in which case the response in Al-Anbar will be: ‘Let’s give them hell.’
“And that’ll make Falluja look like a tickle. The absurdity of all this is that the Americans were talking about the Sunni Triangle before the war.
“Al Kharbit and his tribe were the only people who didn’t fire a shot at the Americans and they allowed US Special Forces into the country three months before the war started.”
There is an old Arab saying – “he killed him and then walked at his funeral”. In the absence of a halfway house, it remains to be seen who’ll be behind the cortege at the end of the Ramadi stand-off – Washington or the tribes.