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A Delicate Changing of the Guard
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Amer Saleem Meki said he was worried about losing the $300-a-month salary the Americans had provided for patrolling the neighborhood and passing on information.
"I don't think this is going to succeed. There will be no support for us. I'm already 35," Meki said, referring to age limitations that prevent him from joining the Iraqi military or police.
Iraqi authorities have agreed to employ 20 percent of the Sons of Iraq in the country's security forces and to find other jobs for the rest. But only about 3,400 members of the Sons of Iraq in the Baghdad area have been accepted into the army and police so far.
Alarm spread through the Sons of Iraq in recent weeks after the government issued arrest warrants for hundreds of their men around the country.
Under U.S. pressure, the Iraqi government has agreed not to arrest any of the Sons of Iraq without a warrant issued in the past six months and not to fire any without cause. The government is supposed to put the Sons of Iraq on its payroll this month.
But asked whether the Iraqi government would be covering the next payday, McDonough looked uncomfortable.
"I wish I could say, 'Yeah, it will be,' but I can't," the U.S. soldier said. The Iraqi police official he had invited to hand out payments on Wednesday did not show up.
The Sons of Iraq program started in western Anbar province in 2006, when Sunni tribal leaders abandoned their fight against U.S. military forces and became their allies in combating the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The U.S.-backed forces are one of the main reasons cited for the dramatic drop in violence in Iraq in the past year, along with a cease-fire by radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and the increase in U.S. troops who began working closely with Iraqi security forces in neighborhood bases.
According to Interior Ministry statistics provided Wednesday by an official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, 860 people died in Iraq in war-related violence in September, including 130 members of the security forces. That compares with 2,431 killed in the same month a year ago.
Special correspondent Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.
