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.

Several of his colleagues were wounded in the blast. One of them lost an eye. Another, the slain leader's son Adnan, lost the lower half of his left leg and his other leg is still pocked with pieces of shrapnel.

Before Monday's attack, the district of Adhamiyah was regarded as more secure than it was in the years following the March 2003 US-led invasion when Al-Qaeda made it one of the most dangerous areas of the capital. Residents may have praised the armed Sunni militiamen for rescuing the neighbourhood from the Qaeda death squads that left corpses to rot in the street but are distrustful of a government they say neglects them. "Look at the streets, the sewage, the garbage everywhere," said Salman Khalil as he sat outside a flyblown restaurant across the street from the soaring minarets of the famed Abu Hanifa Shrine.

The Sahwas say their relations with the Iraqi army under which they serve have improved, but they fear that over the long term the government is determined to sideline them.

Outside Baghdad, similar concerns exist, especially in the western province of Anbar, once the epicentre of the anti-American Sunni rebellion, where more than 46,000 Sahwas operate. Since the government took nominal control of the Sahwas on October 1, Obeidi says his group stopped receiving the 700 dollars a month the US military used to give them for fuel and other supplies.

"I don't know what to expect," Obeidi said. "It was better with the Americans. We asked and they would provide."

The US military had always hoped that as Iraqi security forces brought order to the country it would be able to pull back, and president-elect Barack Obama has said he hopes to withdraw most troops by the middle of 2010.

But the Sahwas are in no hurry to see US troops leave.

"If the US army withdraws there will surely be problems here," said Abu Sajad Ali, a Sahwa commander in Adhamiyah.