An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The new offensives in Northern Iraq are directed much as we might expect them to be. I've mentioned before why Diyala province especially is a key territory, so this should come as no surprise:

"US military commanders have launched a joint US-Iraqi assault against al-Qaeda in Iraq focused on Diyala and three other provinces north of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital."

Other news reports detail how this offensive will be structured, with US and ISF forces spearheading and doing most of the actual combat, while police and CLCs will be responsible for security as US and ISF operations begin winding down. Kind of a "duh" moment there, but there's a fair amount of speculation as to whether or not the CLCs will work in Diyala province, given it's sectarian mix. From the original Al-Jazeera article:

"Compounding the military's woes is the checkerboard pattern of Shia and Sunni communities adjacent to one another amid orange groves."

So far, CLCs have been very successful in predominately Sunni areas, but there is potential in Diyala for a Sunni-Shia clash if this isn't handled carefully - some Sunni tribal leaders have been quite blunt about who they're taking the fight to after AQI is beaten, and the Shia aren't halting their consolidation of power for anyone, so local CLCs may be percieved by the Shia as a threat. That's very clearly what's been happening at a national level, and that's also at the heart of worries about a possible genocide in Iraq. So what we really have in Diyala is a microcosm of the frustrations that have been playing out across the country.

That, by the way, makes it much less daunting than it makes it useful. Diyala province will offer an opportunity to experiment with the Sunni-Shia tensions at a molecular level, as it were, and it may well offer some useful insight as to how to allay those tensions at a national level.

That is, if it's done correctly, and there's no guarantee of that right now. How Diyala's CLCs play out over the next few months will depend very much on their local leadership - just a few veiled tigers thrown into leadership positions could very well poison the whole mess. But thus far in Diyala, according to MNF-I, no such problems have cropped up with currently existing CLCs:

"Northern al Hashmiyat was recently controlled by al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) . Troop C kept a heavy presence in the area, but since 4th Stryker Brigade’s move into Diyala, the AQI presence in al Hashmiyat has been diminishing. Concerned Local Citizens (CLC) groups began taking over responsibility of the security in the area. CLC checkpoints arose around the villages.

"'We used to provide a heavy presence there,' Shekishiro said. 'But the CLCs have been successful at providing their own security for the past month.'”

It seems that those expecting the CLC idea to fall through based on ethnic tensions are going to have to wait a bit longer, at the very least. If the Sunni-Shia rift really hits the fan, things will get very ugly and we haven't yet averted that possibility, because we can't; only the Iraqis can do that for themselves. But expecting that to happen based on mixed ethnic populations hasn't been a winning horse yet.