BAGHDAD – Conflicts between provincial governments and local Sunni Arab forces allied with the United States intensified yesterday in two provinces.
The conflicts raise the prospect that the creation of the forces, known as Awakening Councils or Concerned Local Citizens, formed to fight extremists and bring calm to the country, might instead add to the unrest in two provinces, Diyala and Anbar.
Yesterday in Diyala province, 300 members of the local concerned citizens groups, many of whom are former insurgents, left their outposts, from which they start patrols and guard the surrounding areas.
The groups said they took the step as a protest against the Shiite police commander for the province, whom they accuse of being sectarian and a member of the Mahdi Army, a militia affiliated with the anti-American rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to an official in the governor's office who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The police commander, Gen. Ghanim al-Quraishi, has accused many in these citizens groups of continuing their past activities of killing and displacing Shiite families and has removed some of them from their posts and detained others.
The American military recruits and pays the groups to fight Islamic extremists. Although the groups have mostly seemed to be cooperating, more recently their behavior has been problematic.
In Anbar Province, tensions escalated yesterday between leaders of the local Awakening movement and the Iraqi Islamic Party, which as the sole major Sunni party to contest the most recent local elections won control of the provincial council. Party members said yesterday that they might bring a lawsuit against the Awakening leaders for saying they would oust the party from control; the leaders had previously called for a new election in the next couple of months in order to win seats on the council.
In southern Iraq, more than 30 people from different Shiite groups were detained by the police, who are also Shiite in those areas. In Karbala, at least 15 people were taken into custody and at least 15 were picked up by the police in the Nasiriyah area, according to local police officers. The detentions appeared aimed at curtailing the activities of a messianic Shiite cult, the Soldiers of Heaven, but appeared to include some people who had no affiliation with the group.
A police spokesman in Karbala denied that those arrested were connected with al-Sadr's militia. More arrests were under way in Nasiriyah yesterday, according to Ahmed Taha, the province governor's deputy.
In Najaf, President Jalal Talabani visited with the five members of the Marjaia, the most senior clerics in Iraq, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Afterward, Talabani told reporters that contrary to some Iraqi news reports, there was no plan among them to dump Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“Maliki will not be replaced; there is a deal on keeping the prime minister, changing the ministers and reducing the number of ministries by half,” Talabani said, apparently referring to long-standing discussions among the leaders of different political parties about restructuring the government.
