Baghdad, Iraq – A campaign against insurgents by Iraqi forces has sparked a backlash from some of the country’s Sunni Muslim leaders and could complicate efforts to enlist more Sunnis in running Iraq’s new government, drafting a democratic constitution and battling the insurgency.
Iraqi officials last month described Operation Lightning as a one-week offensive by 40,000 Iraqi security forces along with U.S. troops that would cordon Baghdad and sweep out insurgents. On Friday, with the operation still underway, Sunni leaders said their neighborhoods have been unfairly targeted.
Members of the three largest Sunni parties – the Iraqi Islamic Party, the Association of Muslim Scholars and the Sunni Endowment – condemned Operation Lightning, saying the largely Shiite Muslim and Kurdish Iraqi forces were concentrating on Sunni Arab parts of Baghdad.
“Our towns are surrounded, our people are detained and our worshipers cannot reach the mosques because of this bad operation,” said Sheik Ayad al Ezi of the Iraqi Islamic Party, who spoke at a joint prayer service.
Bruska Noori Shaways, secretary-general of the Iraqi Defense Ministry, said security personnel were forced to take the war to local neighborhoods – even to some mosques – because the insurgency was largely Sunni and hid among residents in Sunni neighborhoods.
“Of course, we are going to first of all concentrate on those areas,” Shaways said.
Government officials acknowledge that the police and security forces don’t have the intelligence data they need to conduct precise sweeps in Sunni neighborhoods. When they do dragnets, innocent residents get caught, discouraging Sunnis from embracing the new government and driving some of them toward the insurgency.
The sweep of Baghdad, which U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called “an important signpost” on the way to assessing what the newly trained Iraqi forces can do, hasn’t gone according to the plan the Iraqi government announced more than a week ago.
Knight Ridder correspondents found all 23 routes leading out of the city were never closed and new checkpoints were manned sporadically and could be avoided. It’s unclear whether all 40,000 police and military forces the government planned to use took part. And the only neighborhoods that encountered a heavy police presence were Sunni-dominated.
