A piece in today’s Los Angeles Times comes pretty close to saying just that under the headline “Sects unite to battle Al Qaeda in Iraq:”
QARGHULIA, Iraq – Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say. In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland. Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims. Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.
There’s also a line about the “unexpected flowering of sectarian cooperation,” and it closes with some tough talk from one of the ‘Concerned Citizens’ that Coalition forces have enlisted in the fight against AQI and other sectarian, insurgent groups:
And one day recently, this graffiti appeared on several metal roll-up doors in a dingy strip mall here: “For the leaders of the Awakening and everybody who is involved with it, Warning: Death.” Ali Hussein didn’t flinch. “Most of their challenge is only with slogans,” he said. “They are not courageous enough to face us. Even if they want to come, we are here ready to face them.”
