U.S. rates post-surge face of Sons of Iraq

BAGHDAD, Feb. 22 (UPI) -- Rivalries among Sunni and Shiite members of the Sons of Iraq pose a challenge to U.S. strategists assessing the post-surge face of Iraq.

The Sons of Iraq came out of the Sunni-led Anbar Awakening movement as a homegrown security response against insurgents. It is about 80 percent Sunni and 20 percent Shiite.

The group acts cohesively to man checkpoints and conduct other security operations throughout Iraq, but each group goes to great lengths to tell their American counterparts the other group can't be trusted, The Los Angeles Times said Friday.

U.S. officials and Iraqi citizens credit the Sons of Iraq with contributing to the calm in violence recently, but the face of sectarian rivalry continues to simmer beneath the surface, military officials say.

One official quoted in the Times calls the situation "a huge concern," and members of the group point to each sect as a source of corruption and revenge.

Shiite members of the group accuse their Sunni associates of being infiltrated by al-Qaida, while Sunni members point to Shiite death squads reputed to be in the Iraqi police force and the influence of Moqtada Sadr as a source of acrimony.

The Iraqi government, for its part, offered to incorporate about 20 percent of the 80,000-member Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi police, with others slated for vocational training.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said the U.S. military pays the group and subjects its members to biometric scans to register its members, and their weapons, into a government database as a post-surge contingent.

U.S. officials told the Times, however, they can't continue to pay the group indefinitely and the Iraqi government has so far balked at recruiting its Sunni members.