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Iraqi Sunnis Turn on Al-Qaeda over Marriages

[Washington Times] David R. Sands - Iraq's Sunni tribes began turning against al-Qaeda when the largely foreign-run terrorist organization tried to arrange forced marriages with local women to secure their foothold in the country, according to Australian Col. David Kilcullen, who just completed a tour as senior counterinsurgency aide to U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus in Baghdad. "The uprising represents very significant political progress toward reconciliation at the grass-roots level," Col. Kilcullen wrote Wednesday in the military blog Small Wars Journal. An estimated 30,000 Sunni fighters in Iraq are now battling their former al-Qaeda allies. The tactic of forced political marriages was standard for al-Qaeda, according to Col. Kilcullen, used successfully in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere to "embed" the international terrorist network in the local kinship and tribal network. But in Iraq, he wrote, "the tactic seemed to have backfired." Forced marriages outside the tribe have never been culturally accepted in traditional Iraqi society, and tribal leaders resisted demands for such marriages.
2007-08-31 01:00:00
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