US:The US military has embarked on a new and risky strategy in Iraq by arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will tackle the extremist al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The US high command this month gave permission to its officers on the ground to negotiate arms deals with local leaders. Arms, ammunition, body armour and other equipment, as well as cash, pick-up trucks and fuel, have already been handed over in return for promises to turn on al-Qaeda and not attack US troops.
The US military in Baghdad is trying to portray the move as arming disenchanted Sunnis who are rising up in their neighbourhoods against their former allies, al-Qaeda and its foreign fighters.
But the reality on the ground is more complex, with little sign that the US will be able to control the weapons once they are handed over. The danger is that the insurgents could use these weapons against American troops or in the civil conflict against Shia Muslims. Similar efforts by the US in other wars have backfired, the most spectacular being the arming of guerrillas against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Maj Gen Rick Lynch, a senior US commander in Iraq, insisted no weapons would be given to insurgents who had attacked Americans. "We have not crossed that line," he said.
The US said it would use fingerprinting, retinal scans and other tests to establish whether insurgents had been involved in fighting against American troops.
But a reliable witness to a meeting this month between US forces and insurgents in the Sunni stronghold of Amadiya, in Baghdad, expressed scepticism about the strategy. Far from being a popular uprising against al-Qaeda, only a handful of armed men turned up. The US handed over ammunition to them.
The witness said that US soldiers watching the handover were dismissive, seeing it as a stunt. The strategy was discussed in Baghdad this month between the new US commander in Iraq, Gen David Petraeus, and his field commanders. They decided to leave it to each commander to decide locally.
The Pentagon insisted the latest strategy was not recognition that President Bush's "surge" policy had failed. All of the extra 30,000 US troops ordered by Mr Bush in January to Baghdad and Anbar province, one of the centres of the violence, had only just been fully deployed and it was too early to judge it.
Initial successes of the surge in pacifying parts of Baghdad have now been reversed, with the death toll among US troops and Iraqi civilians last month among the highest since the 2003 invasion. The US military first tested the strategy of arming its former enemies in Anbar province. Anbar is now relatively quiet, but that could be because the US has flooded the province with US troops.
The Anbar model is being extended to Amariya, as well as Diyala and Salahuddin provinces.
The US insists that the Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaeda is because of the group's suicide bombings that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
The arming of the Sunni insurgents reflects US unhappiness with the slow progress of the Iraqi army, which it suspects of being too close to the Shia militias, and with the police, which is even more riddled with sectarianism.
Part of the problem is that the US needs its security efforts to be accompanied by political progress but the Iraqi coalition government has so far been unable to reach agreement on the biggest divisive issues.
In a further upset, Iraq's Shia-dominated parliament voted yesterday to remove the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, over alleged scandals. His bloc, the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front, was asked to submit an alternative.