Word: sheiking
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...Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was gloomy when I met him at his compound in Ramadi last December. A few days earlier a friend of his had died, U.S. Army Capt. Travis Patriquin, the military's tribal liaison for the area. Patriquin and Sattar had worked closely together late last year, when Sattar first emerged as the leader of a band of tribes around Ramadi coming together to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq. Sattar, like other tribal leaders of Anbar Province, had fallen out with al-Qaeda in Iraq after years of complacency and cooperation with insurgents targeting U.S. forces...
Patriquin's loss was deeply felt on both sides. Sattar himself seemed to be taking it very hard when I was with him. A notorious showboat and media hound, Sattar waved away TIME's photographer at one point, saying he was too depressed to pose for pictures. The sheik vowed to fight on nonetheless. Indeed, he swore revenge. For a time Sattar seemed to be making good on his pledge as tribal fighters loyal to him killed off and drove out insurgents from Ramadi, where al-Qaeda in Iraq had established a headquarters of sorts in the rubble...
...would spread across other parts of Iraq and turn more and more tribes against radical insurgents. Some U.S. officials even suggested that Sattar might lead a political faction in Baghdad as part of a sitting government. Those hopes ended today with news that Sattar was dead. Insurgents killed the sheik the same way they did his American friend, with a roadside bomb near his compound that left two of Sattar's bodyguards dead as well...
...unwilling to include such Sunni local leaders in the political process. Grassroots success would reshape the political landscape and allow things to work out,or so the Americans hoped. And so U.S. military leaders sought more tribal chieftains in other provinces, and continue to do so even now. The sheik may have been an unsavory character but to paraphrase what Franklin Roosevelt once said of a Central American dictator, "He may be an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B...
...Sunni figure Maliki could court is Sheik Abdul Sittar, the leader of the tribal alliance in Anbar province. Maliki has offered a tentative embrace of Sittar's "Awakening" movement, in which Sittar banded together tribal leaders in Anbar to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq alongside the Americans. Few other Sunni leaders on the political stage in Iraq now hold as much sway as Sittar, who has made no secret of his desire to take on a larger leadership role in the country. A formal political alliance between Sittar and Maliki would leave little room in the political sphere for Sunnis...