As the day crossed into dusk, Jasem Mohammad Al Sweidawi sat on brown floor cushions, calmly watching the tribesmen argue over blood money. A man from the Dulaimi tribe had killed a man from the Jenabi tribe.
The elders of both tribes could have sought justice in a provincial court. They could have conferred with traditional shaikhs versed in centuries-old ways of resolving disputes.
But they didn’t. They came to Al Sweidawi, an American-backed chieftain who in less than two years had become the most powerful man in this patch of eastern Ramadi.
He asked the men if they trusted his authority. They nodded. Within minutes, he worked out a settlement. The men were not happy, but they feared Al Sweidawi and needed his protection. “Your appreciation for me will not be forgotten,” the chieftain, 52, said.
“Shaikh Jasem”, as his tribesmen call Al Sweidawi, is among a new generation of tribal leaders asserting influence across Sunni areas.
They have won their respect by fighting Sunni insurgents of the Al Qaida in Iraq group. With American money and support they have brought a fragile order to Anbar province, once Iraq’s most violent theatre, accomplishing in months what the US military could not do in years.
But the rise of these shaikhs, collectively called the Awakening, is already touching off new conflicts that could deepen without US military backing for the movement. They have stripped traditional tribal leaders of influence.
They have carved up Sunni areas into fiefdoms, imposing their views on law and society and weakening the authority of the Shiite-led central government.
Divisions are emerging among the new breed of tribal leaders, even as they are challenging established Sunni religious parties for political dominance.
Their ascent reflects how the struggle for local and regional centres of power is increasingly shaping Iraq’s future.
And their growing clout ensures that large segments of Iraq will remain influenced by tribal codes, rather than modern laws, posing an obstacle to the democratic foundations that many would like to see built here.
“No one can remove us,” Al Sweidawi said. Today he claims to control much of his Al Busoda tribe, numbering about 30,000.
Since its launch in Anbar in late 2006, the Awakening has spread to mostly Sunni-majority enclaves in Baghdad and other provinces as a means of Sunni self-defence.
The US military gave $300 monthly salaries to fighters, many of them former insurgents, to patrol areas and stop attacking American troops.
US military officials have handed Awakening tribal leaders reconstruction contracts for their areas, building up their influence.
They have assisted tribal operations against Al Qaida in Iraq with air strikes and other military and logistical support. On one day, Al Sweidawi recalled how US officers promised to pave the road that led to his house.
American commanders credit the movement as key to the decline in violence; some believe it played a more significant role than the US “surge” offensive of 30,000 troops last year.
In October, the US military handed over to the government control over about half the Awakening groups, now totalling roughly 100,000 mostly Sunni fighters.
But the government, increasingly confident that it can provide security on its own, has refused to enroll most Awakening members into the police or army.
In recent weeks, Iraqi security forces have arrested some Awakening leaders who were former insurgents, out of fear they will take up arms against the government.
“There are good Awakening members. But there are others who have simply changed their T-shirt, who don’t want progress, who do not believe in a new Iraq,” said Haider Al Abadi, a Shiite lawmaker in Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s Dawa party.
“We don’t want these elements to infiltrate our security forces.”
US commanders worry that their tactical successes could evaporate if Iraq’s leaders stop paying the Awakening fighters their salaries.
“It could cause a fracture in this important programme which would cause these guys to resort to violence,” said Major General Jeffery Hammond, the US military commander in charge of Baghdad.
“Because there’s always someone outside such as Al Qaida and certain resistance groups who are willing to offer them a better deal.”
In Anbar, Al Sweidawi and other founding Awakening leaders insist they will never return to violence; 20,000 fighters have joined the police here.
Most remain more loyal to their tribes than the government, deepening the movement’s control.
“I have no confidence in the Iraqi government,” Al Sweidawi said. “There’s a programme to remove us from the security process in any way possible.”
Al Sweidawi said he despised the US occupation at first. The US military, he said, alienated the tribes by its heavy-handed tactics and mass arrests of Sunni men suspected of ties to the insurgency.
Many of his tribesmen joined the insurgency. Nasir Al Jenabi, a senior Al Qaida in Iraq leader, said in a telephone interview that Al Sweidawi allowed insurgents to use his territory as bases.
“Jasem is the kind of person who always stands with the strongest,” Al Jenabi said. “When we were controlling Ramadi, he was pretending to be a nice guy who wanted to serve and satisfy us.”
Al Sweidawi concedes that he was “covering for the militants and not informing the Americans or local authorities.”
But by 2006, he said, he began to view US forces as the lesser enemy. Al Qaida in Iraq had overreached, carrying out beheadings and banning smoking, shaving and other behaviour it considered un-Islamic.
In late 2006, during Ramadan, Al Qaida in Iraq insurgents abducted seven of Al Sweidawi’s brothers and cousins from his family home. They were killed that day, their bodies dumped into the Euphrates River, which snakes through Ramadi.
“After that, I started chasing them in the streets and capturing them,” Al Sweidawi said.
Backed by their American benefactors, the new tribal leaders, who included many former members of Saddam Hussain’s Baath Party, wrested territory from Al Qaida in Iraq. They also ruptured ancient rites of succession.
“We became shaikhs because we use force,” said Raad Sabah Alwani, a burly businessman who openly displays pictures of himself with American commanders. “Iraq needs men who use force.”
More tribesmen joined Al Sweidawi’s fold, shifting their allegiance from their traditional leader, Shaikh Mahmoud Al Jarbou, whose family had ruled Al Sweidawi’s tribe for three centuries.
“Shaikh Mahmoud played no role at all in the battlefield,” explained Major General Hamid Hamadh Al Shoki, Ramadi’s former police chief. “Shaikh Jassim restored security, and security is the base of everything here.”
Within weeks of launching his assault on Al Qaida in Iraq, Al Sweidawi controlled the tribe, the second largest in Ramadi, and Al Jarbou quietly faded away. “Shaikh Mahmoud is a weak man,” Al Sweidawi said.
Reached in Syria, Jarbou asserted that most of his tribe was still loyal to him but acknowledged that his rival was trying to push him out.
“He wants to take over someone else’s position. It’s not up to Jasem to evaluate me, it’s up to my people,” Al Jarbou said. “He’s one who likes dictatorship.”
Marine Major Adam Strickland, who works closely with the Awakening leaders, described Al Sweidawi as “a very influential individual” who is viewed as a key local ally.
The US military, he said, was “supporting his leadership.” Some American commanders have called Al Sweidawi the “Lion of Eastern Ramadi”.
Al Sweidawi has brokered land grabs, murders, inheritance disputes, police complaints, even fights among teenagers.
He emulates traditional shaikhs, using centuries-old Bedouin customs based on honour and reciprocity to dispense justice.
“No one can abandon or get rid of tribal law,” Sweidawi said. “The laws and the constitution are not permanent. They change with governments.”
But ultimately his authority rests on his ability to punish. He said he used to interrogate Al Qaida in Iraq suspects in his large greeting room. Now he uses one of his police stations.
How does he extricate information? “We have our ways,” he said, smiling coyly. Then he took off the ghutrah and said: “I was using this, beating them twice, three times.”
As he finished his sentence, he pulled out his black cellphone and played a video, set to haunting Arabic music, of insurgents executing a group of Iraqi policemen and soldiers.
“One day, if I feel like showing mercy on them, this video will stop me. It will always remind me of their crimes,” Al Sweidawi said.
Al Sweidawi and other Awakening leaders seek to transform their anti-insurgent credentials into political clout.
They plan to challenge the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political group and part of Al Maliki’s ruling coalition, in provincial elections scheduled for next year.
At stake is the leadership of a rudderless Sunni minority that is still wrangling for a political toehold in the new Iraq.
“We know our people are better than them,” Al Sweidawi said. If the Awakening leaders triumph, they would infuse clan-based, secular values into a sectarian political system ruled by Shiite religious parties.
In recent weeks, Islamic Party officials and offices have been attacked, as have Awakening leaders, raising fears of a wider intra-Sunni conflict.
The Awakening movement is itself rife with tension. In interviews, several Awakening founders said Ahmad Abu Risha was not qualified to lead because he had not fought against Al Qaida in Iraq.
Two influential founders left to form their own political parties. Al Sweidawi also recently had a falling-out with Abu Risha.
“Unfortunately, the strongest and bravest do all the work and the fruits of our work are given to the cowards,” Al Sweidawi said.
He is consumed by one overriding question: What will happen if his American backers leave? He gloomily predicts chaos in the provincial elections.
“There are Al Qaida sleeper cells in the province. Our borders are still being infiltrated,” Al Sweidawi recently told Marine Major General John Kelly, who commands US forces in Anbar.
Al Sweidawi would like to see Americans stay on bases here for years, even decades, as they have in Japan and Germany.
Like many Sunnis, he fears that his country could fall under the influence of Iran’s Shiite theocracy, which has forged close ties with many Iraqi Shiite leaders. “If the Americans were not here, Iran will stretch to the Jordanian border,” Sweidawi said.
Turning against insurgents
Slim, with a thick mustache and a polite manner, a father of 11, Jasem Mohammad Al Sweidawi spent three decades in the Iraqi air force, maintaining jets.
After the 2003 US-led invasion, he ran a profitable business protecting commercial convoys in Anbar, where the Sunni insurgency began. His favourite pastime was hunting for birds on his family’s farm.
His critics say he was the ringleader of a group of highway bandits who stole cars. Al Sweidawi denies the accusation.
The critics say that’s how he met Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the Awakening movement’s founder, who also had a reputation as a highway robber.
“Shaikh Jasem is not educated. He’s not an original shaikh of the Al Busoda,” said Hamdi Mohammad Al Sweidawi, 45, who belongs to the same clan as the chieftain and teaches law at Anbar University. “Before Al Qaida came, he was nothing.”
One day recently, Al Sweidawi’s handpicked, heavily armed men, including three sons, piled into a blue and white Iraqi police truck.
Some wore hats emblazoned with the old Baath-era Iraqi flag, rejecting Iraq’s new flag. Al Sweidawi recalled he has survived 12 assassination attempts, including a bomb disguised as a gift that was delivered to his house.
They passed an empty field where they had fought a battle against Al Qaida in Iraq. Seventy of his men died that day, said Al Sweidawi, with reverence.
At the local electricity plant, employees welcomed the shaikh as if he owned the facility. His tribesmen guard it and operate it. Al Sweidawi also controls nine police stations in his territory.
He later visited Juma Hussain, a 25-year-old unemployed man with no arms and legs — a victim of a roadside bomb. As he prepared to leave, he tucked a $100 bill into Hussain’s pocket. “If you need anything, let me know,” he said.
In a motorised canoe, sliding slowly along the Euphrates, Al Sweidawi was recently keeping watch over his tribe and his land. “Evil exists everywhere,” he said, squinting at clusters of tall reeds in the blazing sun.
