Anti-Al Qaida Awakening

First Anbar province, an Al Qaida stronghold, rallies behind tribal chieftains who have turned against Al Qaida and their brutal tactics, now replicated in a Sunni Area of West Baghdad. Yahoo via RCP:

Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said Thursday that U.S. military officers were talking with Iraqi militants — excluding al-Qaida — about cease-fires and other arrangements to try to stop the violence. He said he thinks 80 percent of Iraqis, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militants, can reach reconciliation with each other, although most al-Qaida operatives will not.[snip]

Although al-Qaida is a Sunni organization opposed to the Shiite Muslim-dominated government, its ruthlessness and reliance on foreign fighters have alienated many Sunnis in Iraq.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi government congratulated Amariyah residents for standing up to al-Qaida.

"Government security forces are now in control of the Amariyah district," Iraqi military spokesman Qassim al-Moussawi was quoted as saying by Iraqi state TV. He also lauded "the cooperation of local residents with the government."

More on this trend from Bill Roggio:

The Awakening movement, which was started in Anbar province by local tribes and Sunni insurgents that opposed al Qaeda's attempts to Talibanize Iraqi society, has now spread to all of the provinces bordering Baghdad. Over the past month, Awakening movements formed in Diyala and Salahadin, and, this week, the Babil Awakening was formed. Al Qaeda in Iraq immediately targeted the leader of the Babil Awakening, Sheikh Obeid Al-Masoud, seriously wounding him and his wife in the city of Iskandaria. Al Qaeda is working to destroy the nascent Awakening movements in the provinces, where they provide a political and ideological alternative to al Qaeda's Islamic State.

General Petraeus' counterinsurgency tactics are having an effect, even though our troop surge is not yet at full strength and the Democrats have already declared defeat.

UPDATE to the story:

"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.