Sunni tribal fighters have joined nationalist insurgents fighting al Qaeda in vicious Baghdad street battles, their commander told AFP on Friday, as residents reported two days of intense clashes.
Sunni militants, who would once have sympathised with al Qaeda's war against American and Iraqi government troops, have instead this week been locked in battle against the Islamists in the lawless Amiriyah neighbourhood.
"We dispatched around 50 of our secret police from Anbar to Amiriyah, and started to hit al Qaeda there. We killed a lot of them," Sheikh Hamid al-Hais, the head of the Anbar Salvation Council, said in a telephone interview.
"A similar operation will be launched in al-Ghazaliyah against al Qaeda today. We have sufficient information on places they are in, and we will punish them," he said, adding that his forces were fighting in plain clothes. The Salvation Council is the armed wing of an alliance of Sunni sheikhs from the western Iraqi province of Anbar, where they have funnelled tribal gunmen into the Iraqi security forces in order to fight al Qaeda extremists.
Many of these Sunni militants are former insurgents once hostile to the US military and Baghdad's Shia-led government but, angered by al Qaeda's attacks on civilians and tribal leaders, they have now changed sides. US commanders see this as one of the most positive recent developments in Iraq, which is in the grip of vicious series of overlapping civil conflicts, and hope now to persude former insurgent groups to join a peace process.