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U.S. aims to arm Sunni tribemen as Iraqi army attacks IS in Ramadi

Iraqi forces assaulting Ramadi discovered the bodies of Sunni tribesmen who resisted the Islamic State. The U.S. indicated in a Pentagon document a plan to arm such tribesmen with AK-47s, mortars and other weapons of war.

By Fred Lambert

RAMADI, Iraq, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- Iraqi army forces launched an operation to re-take the city of Ramadi from Islamic State fighters Saturday, the same day a Pentagon-prepared document revealed details about a plan to arm Sunni tribesmen from the area.

Fighting in Ramadi, the capital of Iraq's mostly-Sunni Anbar province, was focused in the eastern suburbs of the city. Islamic State fighters have controlled swaths of Ramadi since the summer when the group blitzed into Iraq, causing tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers to flee without a fight.

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As Iraqi army soldiers moved into the city Saturday, they discovered two dozen bodies of men from the Al-Bu Fahd tribe.

The Islamic State, which is composed mainly of Sunni Muslims, reportedly killed at least 50 members of the same Sunni tribe in the town of Hit earlier this month, and in later reports that number swelled into the hundreds.

The Shia-dominated government in Baghdad has reached out to Sunni tribes in Anbar province, seeing them as vital in a successful campaign against the Islamic State, but most of the tribes have been slow to take sides.

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Meanwhile, a document prepared by the U.S. Department of Defense for Congress revealed a plan to arm Iraq's Sunni tribesmen with Russian-designed weaponry, including Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and 82-mm mortars.

From a $1.6 billion budget to arm and train anti-IS forces, Iraq's Sunni tribes were allotted over $24 million. The Iraqi military took the lion's share of funds at $1.2 billion, while Kurdish peshmerga forces were assigned over $353 million. Both the Iraqi army and the Kurds will be armed with American weaponry, including TOW missiles and M4 carbines, which is the standard issue service rifle for the U.S. military.

The document suggests that any Anbari tribal force will eventually be folded into the Iraqi national guard.

"Engagement from Sunni tribes is critical to the long-term defeat of ISIL," the document says, referring to the Islamic State by one of its known acronyms. "If these fighters do not receive the support they need to counter ISIL, in conjunction with the [Government of Iraq] tribal outreach, they will not be effective in combating ISIL in their areas."

The document also noted that Iraqi army forces are not popular in Sunni areas for a multitude of reasons, including "past excesses and sectarian activities, and poor combat performance," and that giving the tribesmen weapons to fight IS offered better unit cohesion and motivation:

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Armed tribal forces fighting on their own territory and among their own people offer both a more effective, motivated force and encouragement to like-minded tribal forces to initiate their own insurrection against ISIL–so long as these tribal forces operate under the [Iraqi Security Forces] security umbrella. Not arming tribal fighters will continue to leave anti-ISIL tribes reluctant to actively counter ISIL.

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