Isis brutality in Iraq reawakens Sunni resistance

Massacres of Sunni Iraqis by killers from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the extremist Sunni group known as Isis, are proliferating. In the latest atrocity, dozens of Sunni suspected of collaborating with the central government were reportedly burnt alive in the heavily contested town of Baghdady in Anbar province.

In Iraq, many of Isis's victims are Sunni. Some within the community want to take up the fight against the jihadist group, which promotes its self-declared Caliphate as the repository of pious Sunni aspirations.

"Isis is not Sunni," insists Sheikh Wissam Hardan, a co-founder of the Awakening movement, which successfully smothered al-Qaeda in Iraq from 2006 to 2012. "They're covered in Sunni clothes but they are not Sunni. They came to destroy the Sunni, and they have already destroyed all the Sunni cities."

Sheikh Hardan has been struggling for more than ten years to draw young men out of the orbit of extremist groups and into the political process. He says he has been hampered along the way by US policy makers hesitant about giving support to armed Sunni factions that may include former insurgents and by Shia leaders of the Baghdad government reluctant to finance and arm their rivals.

But Isis itself may be helping the cause of men such as the sheikh, who are attempting to resurrect the Awakening to take on the new threat. Isis has swallowed up most of Iraq's older insurgent groups into an entity that makes al-Qaeda look relatively moderate. It has presented a genocidal vision that includes the slaughter or enslavement of the at least two-thirds of Iraq's people who are not pious Sunni and has pitted itself against the armed forces of nearly every country in region and many western powers.

To Sheikh Hardan, Isis has pursued the logic of extremism so far that it has sown the seeds of its own destruction. This creates fertile ground to recruit young men to fight against Isis, an opportunity the west and the Baghdad government have yet to fully exploit.

"Americans along with the Iraqi government know very well that no one can break the back of Daesh except the Sunni," says the sheikh, who has written two books on the Awakening movement, using the derogatory Arabic acronym for Isis. "We know Daesh's secrets, where Daesh moves and how they operate. We know the weaknesses of Daesh."

While former Iraqi insurgent groups appealed to young Sunni men's nationalist or religious sentiments, Isis and its predecessors have already alienated the mainstream Sunni community with multiple killings. Isis recruitment efforts among Iraqis may have already peaked. Instead of seeking to join Isis, Sheikh Hardan says many young men "have revenge in their hearts" against the group.

Already, he says, small Awakening units have been arrayed around Anbar province towns including Baghdady, Amariyat Falloujah, Saqlawiya and others. They continue to hold off Isis in central Ramadi, the provincial capital. <

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But Awakening proponents complain that in addition to a lack of resources, there has been little political opening to allow for the re-emergence of organisations that represent the interests of those Sunni susceptible to Isis's influence. The political class in Iraq has remained largely ossified - among Sunni, Shia and Kurds - for a decade.

In addition, the central government has yet to deliver on key promised reforms that would signal to young Sunni men that they were welcome in Iraq. Attempts by prime minister Haidar Abadi to roll back rules that exclude members of former ruler Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party and to stem the rising power of Shia militias have gone nowhere.

"Some people try to destroy the political process when they can't be a part of it," Sheikh Hardan says. "We are afraid of the Shia militias as well as Daesh."

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