The details are still sketchy, but by most accounts, there has been a bloody multi-week feud going on between groups within the Sunni open source insurgency in the Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriya. The neighborhood, ostensibly a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) controlled by al Qaeda's Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) which has claimed it as part of an "emerging" virtual Caliphate, has been the site of numerous clashes between the ISI and the ex-military/Baathist groups: the 1920 Revolution Brigade and the Islamic Army.
While infighting between opposition insurgent groups is good news, the underlying dynamics paint a more complicated picture that is more of a function of the success of the insurgency to date rather than any inherent weakness. Several of the dynamics driving this are:- The core plausible promise is breaking down. The underlying narrative that holds an open source insurgency is the plausible promise that the US can be ejected from Iraq. As this goal nears, most particularly due to the free-fall in political support for the war within the US, we will start to see groups jockey for power.
- Opposition to a fork in development. Open source insurgencies are prone to forks, in the sense that some groups may start to push the path of development into areas that many of the original participants are unwilling to agree with. So far, al Qaeda has been able to win the battles over forks in the development path by expanding the conflict beyond attacks on American troops to attacks on the emerging Iraqi army, Shiite civilians, and most recently Kurdish civilians/government. Disputes over the path of the development can erupt into open conflict, as we have seen here.
- De-escalation and the effectiveness of the surge. Throughout most of the fighting in Amiriya, the US army was urged not to intervene. The obvious reason is that if they did the groups would quickly forget their dispute and join together again to fight the American troops. This points to value of de-escalation when fighting open source insurgencies (something I pointed to back in 2005). It also implies that the Baghdad surge has not been effective in controlling restive neighborhoods, in that the guerrilla groups felt secure enough to fight each other rather than US troops. Some reasons for this may be that the expansion of the conflict to Shiite groups (particularly the Mahdi army) and the current hostage dramas have succeeded in distracting Baghdad's generals from its core mission.