Sons of Iraq

The perils of basing your budget on oil revenue: the Iraqi government is practically hemorrhaging money thanks to falling oil prices, and that’s causing a drastic reduction in defense-related jobs and purchases, according to The Washington Post’s Ernesto Londono. The U.S. general in charge of mentoring Iraqi security forces observes that the shortfall will compel [...]

That press release from the U.S. military in Iraq announcing that U.S. planes fired on Sons of Iraq militiamen who were planting roadside bombs? Note its anodyne headline, designed to die in reporters’ inboxes and RSS feeds:
MND-B [Multinational Division-Baghdad] aircraft engage suspected IED emplacement team
Nothing about the Sons of Iraq there. You would think that [...]

As press releases go, this one, from Multinational Forces-Iraq, starts off routine –
Four armed men were engaged by an air weapons team from Multi-National Division-Baghdad, after they were spotted emplacing an improvised explosive device north of Taji, Iraq the night of April 2—leaving one dead and two wounded.
– and then gets stomach-churning:
The men, alleged Sons [...]

While you were sleeping, the Iraqi security forces and the ex-insurgent militiamen known as the Awakening Councils or the Sons of Iraq skirmished in the Baghdad neighborhood of Fadhil. The Iraqi government appears to have won the battles decisively. In Iraq, though,”decisively” means “for now, while the aggrieved party studies what went wrong, adjusts and [...]

Two weeks ago I noted that the U.S. military signed its last checks to the former insurgents known as the Sons of Iraq or the Awakening Councils. The program — whereby insurgents got money and the ability to call themselves security auxiliaries in exchange for bandwagoning against al-Qaeda — is widely credited with reducing violence [...]

The U.S.military announced today that it has just signed its final paychecks for one of the riskier programs it’s ever undertaken: inducing the coalescence of ex-Sunni insurgents into the quasi-governmental militias called the Sons of Iraq. The program was hated and opposed by the Shiite-led government, and now that government is in control of it, [...]

Over at the Weekly Standard, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Joshua D. Goodman have a piece purporting to give advice about how to export the Anbar Awakening — that is, the 2006-7 Sunni tribal break from Al Qaeda in Iraq — to Afghanistan. I guess the point of the piece is to push back against the contention [...]

Being at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s ginormous foreign-policy expo yesterday meant I had to bail on a morning conference call with Army Lt. Col. Jeffrey Kulmayer about the integration of the Sons of Iraq (SOI) — a 100,000-strong mostly-Sunni militia force — into the regular Iraqi security forces, civilian government or a nice [...]

Mohammed Hafez of the Naval Postgraduate School takes a look at how Al Qaeda in Iraq could mount a comeback.
The short answer: If the U.S. doesn’t broker a formidable deal between the Sons of Iraq — the 100,000 mostly Sunni ex-insurgents currently paid by the U.S. to be a pro-U.S. militia — and the Shiite-controlled [...]

DENVER, Colo. — No, this isn’t convention-related, but still. Colin Kahl and Shawn Brimley, two counterinsurgency experts with the Center for a New American Security just back from a trip to Iraq, have a powerful op-ed in the Los Angeles Times calling attention to the looming crisis with the Sons of Iraq militia: