The German magazine Der Spiegel reports today on the developing factional rift between the different insurgent groups in Iraq. Increasingly, the native insurgents have concentrated their efforts not against the Americans but against the foreign-based terrorists of al-Qaeda, having belatedly come to the conclusion that the true danger of long-term foreign domination comes from Zarqawi's lunatics:

[T]he split within the insurgency is coinciding with Sunni Arabs' new desire to participate in Iraq's political process, and a growing resentment of the militants. Iraqis are increasingly saying that they regard Al Qaeda as a foreign-led force, whose extreme religious goals and desires for sectarian war against Iraq's Shiite majority override Iraqi tribal and nationalist traditions. ...

According to an American and an Iraqi intelligence official, as well as Iraqi insurgents, clashes between Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and Iraqi insurgent groups like the Islamic Army and Muhammad's Army have broken out in Ramadi, Husayba, Yusifiya, Dhuluiya and Karmah.

In town after town, Iraqis and Americans say, local Iraqi insurgents and tribal groups have begun trying to expel Al Qaeda's fighters, and, in some cases, kill them.

The cause for much of the local/AQ split comes from the same problems that plagued the Coalition during the war: tactical errors that killed the wrong people at the wrong place, followed by an indifference to local custom for repentance, ie, penalty payments. The AQ faction has added a complete disrespect for the Iraqi tribal system, deliberately targeting tribal chiefs in order to intimidate the other clansmen into at least tacit cooperation. Those tactics backfired on AQ, and now the native insurgents have increasingly focused on ridding themselves of the terrorists before the Americans, or at least have no longer targeted Americans in the effort to do the same.

While the insurgents still have no love for the Americans, the awakening to the dangers of AQ domination have provided some of the impetus for the Sunni to start participating in the democratic processes instead of continuing their insurgency. That development, no matter what the motivation, bodes well for the new Iraqi nation. The realization of what an AQ-approved government would entail will remind even the more incalcitrant Sunnis that democracy provides a much better guarantee of protecting them, and not just from the lunatics of the Islamofascist stripe. They have to live with the peoples they dominated for decades, and the structure of laws and government that the Kurds, Shi'ites, and a handful of Sunnis have built will be their only hope against their certain annihilation in a civil war.

The new Iraq is on its way, and al-Qaeda is facing a humiliating defeat from an ad-hoc alliance of Arabs and Westerners together.

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» Al Qaeda vs. Islamic Army in Iraq? from The Jawa Report
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Tracked on January 12, 2006 11:28 AM