BAGHDAD // Shiite gangs are joining the Sunni extremists of al Qa’eda to form new and dangerous alliances that threaten stability in southern Iraq, government officials and community leaders have warned.
A series of deadly attacks last month in once secure areas, including the southern cities of Kut and Basra, caught the Iraqi authorities by surprise and, they say, indicate that al Qa’eda has made contacts with Shiite groups willing to carry out strikes in the region.
The cooperation, driven by a mixture of money, fear and a mutual hatred of Iran, represents a stark reversal. Since the formation of al Qa’eda in the late 1990s, the radical Sunni Muslim group and its affiliates have regularly targeted Shiites, whom they consider heretics. That hostility continued following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the factional fighting that broke out soon thereafter.
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“Al Qa’eda has been quietly recruiting down here for the past two years,” Mr al Jabberi said. “They found many poor people with nothing to eat except dust while government officials have been playing with billions of dollars. Under those circumstances, of course al Qa’eda has been successful.”
Al Qa’eda was expanding its area of operation and had found accomplices enabling it to make attacks in previously safe zones in the Shiite dominated south, said Maj Gen Mohammed al Askari, a spokesman for Iraq’s ministry of defence.
“The environment in southern Iraq is not as good for al Qa’eda as it is in other cities, but there are those who cooperate with them, togive them information and assistance just to get money,” he said.
However, authorities believed those carrying out the bombings in places such as Kut, Basra and Kerbala were not local al Qa’eda militants but had traveled from traditional Sunni militant strongholds, Maj Gen al Askari said.
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AQI and Iraqi Shi'ites
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