Iraqi Civil War No More

Nir Rosen is a Fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security. He is finishing a book about the civil war in Iraq…

December 2007 I met a 30-year-old man named Osama who had a contract with the US Army to provide 300 Iraqi Security Volunteers, as the Americans called the Awakening men. (They were also known, less formally, as the “Sons of Iraq”.)… People loved al Qa’eda at first,” Osama said, “they protected the neighbourhood from the Mahdi Army and the Iraqi police, but they got more powerful and they kidnapped Sunnis and Christians.”…

The remaining Awakening men have burnt their bridges with their more radical former allies and are now hunted by them; the Iraqi Security Forces have improved their intelligence and strike capability and have little problem tracking those men they want to arrest. Sunni civilians have no interest in backing a new insurgency after their own bitter experience – and they no longer feel targeted by Shiite militias.
The occasional al Qa’eda suicide attack can still kill masses of innocent civilians, but it has no strategic impact; in fact it is difficult to understand what motivates such attacks today, since their effect is almost nil. It would be naive to say that Iraq’s future is certain, or even likely, to be a peaceful one, but the war between Sunnis and Shiites is now over.

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