Military Review English Edition July-August 2015 | Page 107

ROLE OF TRIBES

anyone who joined the ISF or had ties to the new Iraqi government. Though Zarqawi had a strong hand at the time,
he overplayed it. Vigilante groups that received no U.S.
support began waging shadow wars against AQI, largely to
extract revenge for the jihadist group’s widespread assassinations but also to regain control of the insurgency. These
anti-AQI Anbari vigilantes, prior to the creation of the
Sahwa, were known as Tribal Revolutionaries.
Tribal rivalries were intertwined with these vigilante efforts. These rivalries were multidimensional, existing at the
family, subtribal, and larger tribal levels. Different groups
were connected to various tribal patrons, who held clashing
positions on the insurgency, the Americans, and Zarqawi.
Vigilantes fighting Zarqawi and AQI received assistance
from Sunni Islamist politicians who denounced the U.S.
occupation but were nonetheless targeted by AQI. Senior
tribal leaders who began to fight AQI through these early
vigilante efforts included the Abu Mahal in al-Qaim; Albu
Nimr in Hit (whom IS would later viciously target); Abu
Jugayfa in Haditha; Abu Risha, Abu Thyab, Abu Assaf,
Abu Alwan, and Abu Fahad in Ramadi; and the Abu Essa
and al-Janabis in Fallujah. Many of these tribal leaders
constituted the backbone of the Sahwa al-Anbar that was
announced in September 2006.

The Surge-Era Sahwa and Its
Aftermath
The tribal revolt in Anbar against AQI that began in
2004, was named Sahwa in 2006, and then was adopted
and adapted by U.S. troops in 2007–2008 during the troop
surge, has been misunderstood by many Western observers. When the Sahwa was announced in September 2006,
the U.S. brigade in charge of operations in Ramadi decided
to recognize the legitimacy of the uprising. U.S. companies
and battalions in Anbar had supported similar tribal uprisings but were limited in the kind of support they could
provide.
Sunnis in the area lacked a functioning city council and
local police officers, and they faced Iraqi army soldiers who
were mainly Shias in a majority Sunni city. Thus, the Sahwa
had relatively limited demands, only asking the U.S. brigade
to recruit tribesmen into the security forces locally, to allow
them to secure their own neighborhoods, and to help the
tribal uprising have more political representation in the
municipal and provincial councils. The U.S. brigade did
not use U.S. funds to pay Anbari tribal fighters’ salaries,
but it did work within the rules of Iraq’s ministry of the
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2015

interior to recruit tribal fighters into the police force. The
new recruits’ weapons, training, and salaries were all paid
for by Iraq’s Ministry of Interior. In return, the U.S. brigade used its authorized reconstruction funds to finance
reconstruction projects in areas from which the local
police dislodged AQI.
The Ramadi experiment, in which the United States
supported a grassroots uprising against AQI, was an immediate success. Tribal and local government leaders from
Sunni areas made their way to Ramadi, asking the Sahwa
leadership to help them convince U.S. troops in their
own areas to allow them to build police stations and be
in charge of their own operations against AQI. It was not
until the summer of 2007 that the United States began
paying the salaries of tribal fighters claiming to be Sahwa
in areas where the interior ministry did not want to hire
Sunni tribal fighters (including in areas where Shias made
up the majority of security officers, such as in Baghdad
and Salahideen).
It is important to distinguish between the Sahwa
centered in Ramadi and the Sahwat (also known as the
Sons of Iraq program) largely outside of Anbar.16 The
Sahwa based in Ramadi, Hit, al-Qaim, Haditha, and the
Ramadi-Fallujah corridor were integrated into Iraq’s security institutions from the beginning. There was not much
pushback from Baghdad about allowing these local Sunnis
to constitute the majority of the ISF in their areas because
homogeneous Anbar did not have the same kind of sectarian problems as the mixed areas of Baghdad, Salahideen,
Diyala, and Babel.
The Sahwa’s turning of tribes to cooperation with coalition forces made a significant difference on the ground. At
its height, more than one hundred thousand predominantly Sunni Iraqis took part in this program. Then Army Gen.
David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker presented
information about the changes on the ground to Congress
in two separate sets of testimony, in September 2007 and
April 2008. By the initial testimony in September 2007, the
Awakening movement had already helped to significantly
improve Anbar, transforming it from the days in which
al-Qaida was the dominant actor. Gen. Petraeus said that
Anbar had become “a model of what happens when local
leaders and citizens decide to oppose al-Qaida and reject its
Taliban-like ideology.”17
Despite this success, as the United States drew down
its forces in Iraq at the end of 2011 and U.S. leverage over
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government diminished,
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