They were hugely outnumbered, but they made a deal with the devil and now the bill’s come due.
“Its not a good time to be a Sunni in Baghdad,” Abu Omar told me in a low voice…
He was more despondent than angry. “We Sunni are to blame,” he said. “In my area some ignorant al-Qaida guys have been kidnapping poor Shia farmers, killing them and throwing their bodies in the river. I told them: ‘This is not jihad. You can’t kill all the Shia! This is wrong! The Shia militias are like rabid dogs - why provoke them?’ ”
Then he said: “I am trying to talk to the Americans. I want to give them assurances that no one will attack them in our area if they stop the Shia militias from coming.”
This man who had spent the last three years fighting the Americans was now willing to talk to them, not because he wanted to make peace but because he saw the Americans as the lesser of two evils. He was wrestling with the same dilemma as many Sunni insurgent leaders, beginning to doubt the wisdom of their alliance with al-Qaida extremists.
That conversation happened in October; Abu Omar has long since disappeared, according to the author, but the second-guessing remains. A new local jihadi commander told him that U.S. troops are now allowed to pass through Sunni territory unharmed unless they have Iraqi army (i.e., Shiite) troops with them. “The jihad now is against the Shia, not the Americans,” he says.
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In hindsight, Sunni jihadis not sure killing Shiites was such a good idea; Update: Mahdi Army lowers its profile