What is going on just west of Baghdad?

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Tuesday, March 24, 2009 - 6:13 PM Share

There was another attack Monday on a Sunni "Awakening" leader just west of Baghdad. This heavily Sunni area strikes me as the emerging battleground between the Shiite-dominated central government and the Anbar tribes.

The Tuesday edition of the New York Times is flashing a warning light:

These are among the signs that the fighters' patience is fraying badly at a difficult moment. After months of promises, only 5,000 Awakening members -- just over 5 percent -- have been given permanent jobs in the Iraqi security forces."

But I am not hitting the panic button -- yet. I'll wait until my old Washington Post colleague Anthony Shadid, AKA Mr. Cool-as-a-Kurdish-Cucumber, starts to fret.

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COW COOKIE

9:33 PM ET

March 24, 2009

Perhaps most ominously, many

Perhaps most ominously, many expressed concern this might drive some followers back to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, at a time when both Iraqi and American military commanders say that the group seems to be making gains, small but worrisome, around Baghdad.

People are too fixated on al-Qaeda. It's not like it's the only game in town.

Most of the Sons of Iraq member can't go "back" to al-Qaeda because they weren't with them in the first place. They were allied with al-Qaeda or working for them, which is a different thing altogether.

Working with al-Qaeda would arguably be better because al-Qaeda's jihadist aims don't have the support among the populace that purely sectarian aims do. The people have already seen where that path leads.

A renewed sectarian conflagration or Sunni-based anti-government movement poses a far bigger danger than any al-Qaeda threat because it has concrete, secular aims that appeal to exactly the types of people who are being disenfranchised by the Sons of Iraq transition.

DATROY

6:07 AM ET

March 25, 2009

Well, Shadid had a recent

Well, Shadid had a recent article about how the different parties are starting to make political progress with cross-sectarian alliances: Sunnis teaming up with Shias against other Sunnis and Shias