Free ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror by Michael Weiss, Hassan Hassan

also reached out to Qa’im’s tribes, some of which had already grown so horrified by AQI’s practices that they took up arms against theZarqawists. In the Albu Mahal’s Hamza Battalion, the marines discovered a volunteer army that proved as committed to hammering the insurgents as they were.
    Discounting corruption, the main reason why the ISF often proved inept or simply unwilling to duke it out with AQI was that many recruits were Shia, who understandably had little interest in fighting in Sunni-majority territory where they were viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Sunni tribesmen had no such compunction, however, and were fired by self-interest to rid their areas of what may have started out as an applauded anti-American “resistance” but had devolved into a gang of obscurantist head-loppers. The graduates of the Qa’im program were turned into a battalion called the Desert Protectors, a name more than a little redolent of Lawrentian romanticism but accurate insofar as the battalion safeguarded the December 2005 parliamentary election from terrorist sabotage.
    By 2006 security incidents in Qa’im had plummeted. Even in success, though, US forces still failed to discover that the tribes weren’t motivated by anything so grandiose as patriotism; they only wanted to ensure peace and quiet in their own communities, not in the entire country. A third of the Desert Protectors’ members quit after being told that it constituted a national defense force and not just a local Qa’im gendarmerie and so was duly slated for redeployment elsewhere in Iraq.
    That said, Iraq’s national parliamentary election yielded unforeseen and welcome developments. One of these was the transformation of Dr. Muhammad Mahmoud Latif, a long-sought-after insurgent leader, into a partner of the United States. Appalled by how the Sunni boycott of the January election for a constituent assembly had deprived Sunnis of their say in Iraq’s self-determination, Latif realized that al-Zarqawi’s plan for delegitimizing the new government was backfiring. He also had political ambitions of hisown. In the lead-up to the parliamentary vote, he gathered a collection of Ramadi tribal sheikhs who were eager to declare war on AQI and, more daringly, work with the Americans to do so, on one condition. Like the Desert Protectors, the Ramadi tribesmen wanted a guarantee that the security portfolio for Anbar’s provincial capital would devolve to themselves after AQI was no more.
    Assured of the Americans’ good faith in that respect, the Anbar People’s Council was born. Its first initiative was to encourage Sunnis to join the Iraqi police, which was about to hold a large recruitment drive at a local glass factory. The council’s certification of the effort yielded hundreds of fresh applicants, who in turn became an unavoidable target for al-Zarqawi’s jihadists. On the fourth day of the glass factory drive, a suicide bomber exploded a device that killed as many as sixty Iraqis and two Americans. AQI then announced all-out war on the Anbari sheikhs who had joined the council, hunting them down individually for weeks after the bombing. Latif fled Iraq to avoid being caught in the terrorists’ dragnet. Still too vulnerable to al-Zarqawi’s strong-arm tactics, the council folded weeks later.
    It took another two years for the US military to make strategic sense of what had transpired in Hit, Qa’im, and Ramadi. Pockets of wholly spontaneous and unforeseen tribal backlashes against the same foreign-led terrorist organization made sense in light of tribal history. For centuries, these clans had survived by cutting pragmatic deals with perceived dominant powers in their midst. They had done it with Saddam, and they had done it with al-Zarqawi, and they were ready to do it with the Americans. And while they still regarded the United States warily, they saw in its army a possible ally against a greater common enemy.
    “I had a Marine Corps