Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 115

ANBAR AWAKENING

The United States helped locals regain or consolidate their social, religious, and economic roles that had
been lost to foreign AQI leaders and AQI’s co-opted
Iraqi tribal elements. In Iraq, AQI gave too much
power to non-local leaders and waged a distracting
war between its local affiliates and their fellow Iraqis.
The contest between al-Qaida and the locals was also
one between al-Qaida’s religious authority and tribal authority. Whereas al-Qaida propagated the view
that authority served the ummah, or community of
Islamic believers, the tribal system was inherently
local, inward-looking, and exclusive. The leaders of
the Awakening, even though some of them were quite
religious in their personal lives, had a lot to lose from
al-Qaida’s brand of religious authority.
Additionally, most of “al-Qaida in Iraq” was not really al-Qaida. Actual al-Qaida leaders directly affiliated
with Osama bin Laden were rare in Anbar. For example, in late 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s network
declared allegiance to al-Qaida and be came what the
West called AQI. However, it was basically a loosely
affiliated franchise enterprise of al-Qaida that frequently defied direction provided by actual al-Qaida
leaders. Al-Qaida leaders, mostly foreigners who did
little fighting themselves, attempted to co-opt the
population by integrating through alliances with local clans and tribes. The rank-and-file AQI therefore
had little engagement with greater al-Qaida outside
of Iraq. As a result, the paradigm of “tribes vs. AQI”
was more accurately understood as “tribe vs. AQaligned rival tribe.”17
This mattered in the Awakening because it
caused al-Qaida to become a major sponsor of Iraqon-Iraq violence. Consequently, AQI brutality, loss
of Muslim lives, and a senior leadership composed of
foreigners provided an opportunity for the U.S.-led
coalition to frame AQI as a hostile imposition on the
Anbar people.
When the AQI-led Mujahidin Shura Council
declared the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI)
in October 2006, it was an act of desperation—an
attempt to put an Iraqi face on AQI in the wake of the
emergence of a popular movement, the Awakening,
that was by then outmaneuvering AQI.18 To deflect
assertions that AQI was a foreign-backed movement,
AQI assigned an Iraqi, Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, as the
leader of ISI. However, he maintained a low profile and
MILITARY REVIEW  March-April 2015

withheld his identity from most of AQI, a spurious
basis for leadership.
Because there was not one “insurgency” in
Anbar, prevailing counterinsurgency thought was
a poor fit. Many assumptions of counterinsurgency
thought—even if they appreciate flexibility and avoid
strict doctrine—were a poor fit for Anbar. One was
the assumption implicit in most counterinsurgency
thought that the various actors—whether those inside
the country or those giving support from the outside—
ultimately fell into one of two sides: the insurgency or
the counterinsurgency. Trying to analyze the insurgency in Anbar this way was like analyzing a boxing match
while paying no heed to a third boxer in the ring. In
Anbar, there were three sides. The first was the U.S.led counterinsurgency. The second was the indigenous
Iraqi resistance that resented the war and attempted
occupation by both the U.S.-led coalition and so-called
AQI. The third was AQI and its local affiliates, whose
designs on power made them ultimately appear to
be a greater threat to the Anbar population than the
United States was. This opened up the opportunity to
assert publicly that a solution was only possible with
the understanding—among both the resistance and the
United States—that the resistance had more to lose
from AQI than from the United States.
A second assumption was that the counterinsurgent
must separate the insurgents from the population. This
proved illusory in Anbar when most of the population
also supported the anti-coalition insurgency at some
level and in some form. When Anbaris used words
like patriotism and nationalism, it was not in reference
to their identification with, or support for, the central
government of Iraq but in reference to loyalties behind
opposition to it.
A third assumption was the need to market state instruments as superior to what the insurgency can offer.
In Anbar, instead of marketing state services to appeal to the people, and instead of trying to court local
leaders to participate in the Iraqi government through
various state-provided incentives, success came in spite
of Iraqi state institutions and the services they provided. Thus, the United States had to come to terms with
the fundamental illegitimacy of the government of Iraq
in the eyes of most Anbaris. By running extra-government militias and transitioning them into the Iraqi
Security Forces, and by staging the recruitment of
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