Creating a functioning national unity government was the key to quieting both the Sunni insurgency and the danger posed by Shia militias, the second most senior US general in Iraq said on Wednesday
“I honestly believe, with all my heart, that the key to this thing is the government,” Lt Gen Peter Chiarelli, commander of the US-led multinational corps in Iraq, told the Financial Times. A functioning government could create job opportunities to ween youth away from the militias, solve the administrative problems plaguing the army, and win over public confidence in former rebel areas by reducing corruption and improving basic services, he said.
He spoke as Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, and Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state, made a surprise visit to Iraq to show support for an emerging government under Jawad al-Maliki, prime minister-designate. Mr Rumsfeld said that talks with the Iraqi government on turning over provinces to Iraqi control – a precondition for US and British troop withdrawals – would begin when the new administration, which Mr Maliki hopes will be formed within two weeks, was in place.
Gen Chiarelli said, meanwhile, the surge of killing that followed the February 22 destruction of a Shia shrine at Samarra, much of which has been attributed to Shia militias, appeared to be ebbing. ‘’What we are seeing today is a return to pre-22 February levels of violence,’’ he said.
Notably, there do not appear to be significant desertions from the Iraqi army as happened during a previous Shia militia uprising in 2004, which might be expected if soldiers were preparing for a long-term civil conflict.
Sectarian violence “flared for sure, I think there were a couple of spikes . . . [but] I believe the majority of those spikes were accelerated by AMZ [the faction of the insurgency associated with the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the re-puted head of al-Qaeda in Iraq] and then militias played them out from the other side”.
Although thousands of families may have been displaced in the killing, Gen Chiarelli said he had not seen any “neighbour on neighbour” violence during the recent surge.
Nonetheless, “there’s no doubt in my mind that much of the sectarian violence that we had here post 22 February was directly [attributable] to militia actions”, and that one of the first tasks facing the new government was to form a policy to stand the militias down.
“There’s a certain proportion of the militia that I believe are no more than angry young men who are really out of work,” he said. ‘’I believe some of those can be brought over to our side, or to the government’s side, through the focused and proper application of re-sources and training, such as vocational tech schools that would give them a skill they could use, [or] such as hiring them to assist in [water and electrical] projects.’’
Gen Chiarelli, who commanded US forces in Baghdad in the aftermath of the 2004 uprising led by the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had attempted a similar job creation programme in the militias’ Sadr City stronghold in 2005. “It would have worked fine . . . but there wasn’t the political stomach at that time . . . to do something with the militias. And the militias, for over a year, have grown.”
As for the Sunni insurgency, Gen Chiarelli said there were numerous locations where progress had been made such as Samarra, Talafar and the west of al-Anbar province. At the same time in Baghdad “we’ve got the same problems that we’ve had before”, while in Anbar’s provincial capital of Ramadi, radical insurgents had probably chosen “to make a stand”.