Shi’ites ally with Sunnis in Iraq

BAGHDAD — Some young Shi’ites are lining up to fight Americans in Fallujah — not for extremist cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, but for Sunnis, their traditional religious rivals.

Hussein Subhi, a polite, soft-spoken 22-year-old from Baghdad’s mainly Shi’ite slum of Hurriya, recently drove to Fallujah with a convoy of cars and trucks delivering humanitarian aid. But his real reason, he said, was to join the Fallujans in fighting U.S. forces.

“They were counting on a Sunni-Shi’ite split in Iraq, but we are one hand,” he said. “We will be victorious, God willing.”

Mr. Subhi has no reason to fight for Fallujah. The hard-core Sunni Triangle city is a hotbed of Wahhabi insurgents and former Mukhabarat agents who killed hundreds of thousands of Shi’ites like him when Saddam Hussein was in power.

But anger over the U.S. retaliation in Fallujah, where four Americans were savagely killed last month, has won sympathy for the Sunni insurgency among at least some Shi’ites and raised fears of more active cooperation.

Such worries contributed to a decision by U.S. commanders to call a unilateral cease-fire in Fallujah while members of the Iraqi Governing Council try to negotiate the peaceful hand over of the killers of the four Americans.

“The contacts between Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fallujah resistance are not as significant as the sympathy between the Shi’ites and the people of Fallujah,” said Adnan al-Janabi, sheik of the powerful Janabi tribe, which, like many Iraqi tribes, contains both Shi’ite and Sunni members.

“If it moves beyond sympathy — if the Americans continue to make more mistakes, for example if they attack Najaf — probably they will create a real organization between the Shi’ites of Najaf and the Sunnis,” he said.

U.S. military commanders steadfastly maintain that the great majority of Iraqis killed in Fallujah, now estimated at about 700, are insurgents who have been battling American forces.

But the claims are being questioned in Baghdad, where Arab satellite channels like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya have been beaming footage of dead and injured women and children since the conflict began.

Now that refugees from Fallujah are pouring into Baghdad telling tales of carnage, Iraqis are even more likely to see the city’s residents as victims.

“I saw it with my own eyes. They shelled all of Fallujah,” said Mr. Subhi, collapsing into an armchair, exhausted and sweating after his return journey, on which he brought about 400 refugees back with him.

Hurriya, where Mr. Subhi lives, is a Shi’ite slum with a Sunni minority. Mountains of rotting garbage choke the alleys where children play and sewage still floods many streets as it has since the Saddam era.

The neighborhood sent a convoy of 22 young men to Fallujah last Friday, driving six trucks and four cars full of food, water and medicine.

After passing out relief packages, Mr. Subhi said, he and the other young men visited the local mujahideen and asked if they could join the fight. But the Fallujans turned them down.

“They said we were their guests, and we had already done so much for them by bringing them these food and supplies,” Mr. Subhi said. “They told us they had enough fighters to achieve victory.”