Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites sign up in Qaeda battleground

By Paul Tait

TUWAITHA, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of Sunni Arab men, and a smattering of Shi'ites, have begun signing up for local tribal police units in areas southeast of Baghdad where pitched battles were fought with al Qaeda only weeks ago.

In one rural area not far from the Tuwaitha nuclear plant, idle after Saddam Hussein's atomic energy program was shut down following the 1991 Gulf War, about 30 young Iraqi men queued patiently in the ruins of a bombed-out watchtower.

The tower stands at an odd angle in a field next to a narrow road along the Tigris River. U.S. soldiers in humvees bounced along the road, over one repaired section where they said a bomb detonated by al Qaeda in Iraq militants left a 15-foot crater.

Further on, date palms stand next to a gutted power station, their trunks blackened by the explosion and fire.

"I'm not afraid. I'm wanted by al Qaeda anyway," Mahmoud Jablawi, a Sunni Arab sheikh in the town of Tuwaitha, said when asked about the dangers of working with the U.S. military, which organized a visit to the area on Thursday for Reuters.

Apologizing for his limp handshake -- he said he was shot in the arm in a gunbattle with al Qaeda three weeks ago -- Jablawi said two of his brothers had been killed in the past two weeks.

"We don't want to live in an Islamic country the way the Taliban live," he said of al Qaeda's strict version of Islam.

In Tuwaitha, 256 young men have joined a "concerned citizens" group, one of the latest examples of tribal police units based on the "Awakening" model established in western Anbar, once the most dangerous province in Iraq.

"Almost every one of these guys fought side by side with me against al Qaeda a week ago," said U.S. army captain Brian Gilbert as he signed up the latest group in Tuwaitha.

T-SHIRTS, CAPS

Lieutenant-Colonel John Kolasheski said about 700 people had signed up for such groups across his religiously mixed area of command southeast of Baghdad, which includes pockets of Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army militia as well as al Qaeda.

Kolasheski's men have been busy distributing T-shirts, with "CC" in large letters on the back, and baseball caps in the colors of the Iraqi flag to identify them.

The U.S. military rejects criticism that such groups -- who carry their own weapons -- are no more than sectarian militias being used to solve local problems and who could just as easily turn their arms against U.S. and Iraqi forces in the future.

"We could shut it down tomorrow," Kolasheski said when asked what the U.S. response would be if that happened.

U.S. President George W. Bush has praised the use of tribal police in Anbar for reducing violence there, and it is now being mirrored elsewhere, especially around Baghdad.