Baghdad starts paying anti-Qaeda militias

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Sunni militias which have played a key role in driving Al-Qaeda fighters from Baghdad began receiving pay cheques on Monday from a Shia-led government that has long eyed them with suspicion.
Up to 60 stations were open throughout the Iraqi capital to pay some 54,000 members of the US-allied so-called Awakening Councils or Sahwas which used to receive their monthly salaries from the US military.
“This is really a tremendously important day and a manifestation of the reconciliation process that is happening in Iraq,” US Army Brigadier General Robin Swan told AFP. “The real proof of the pudding is in the payday.” The Iraqi government has always been wary of the groups which formed in 2007 largely made up of fighters that once battled US and Iraqi forces, and its bid to bring them into the security forces could test Baghdad’s fragile calm.
“We brought security to the area and now they call us a militia,” said Barakat al-Obeidi, 35, a Sahwa member in Adhamiyah, a centuries-old Sunni district that saw fierce fighting at the height of sectarian fighting in 2006.
“But even if they cut off our salaries we will continue to defend our city. We will do it for free. Our families live here so we have to protect them.”
However, the fragility of security in the capital was brutally underlined on Monday when a double bombing in a market in Adhamiyah killed 28 people, including women and schoolgirls, and wounded dozens more.
On Sunday, the spokesman for the Iraqi army command in Baghdad said the government would begin distributing around 15 million dollars worth of salaries to the Sahwas.
At Iraqi army’s main military base in Baghdad’s Ameriya district, 290 Sahwa had received their salaries. Officials said they expect it will take several days to finish the payroll. Obeidi, like many Sahwa members, has paid a heavy price for the calm that has gradually returned to Baghdad over the past year.
In August his brother Faruq, a Sahwa commander, was killed when a suicide bomber veiled in an ankle-length black abaya, the traditional Arab dress usually worn by women, blew himself up at a checkpoint.