The Awakening Councils between Saudi Arabia, U.S. and Maliki

There is one way to find why this Saudi pro­pa­gan­dist “Betray­ing The Awak­en­ing Coun­cil” is upset with the Maliki’s gov­ern­ment arrests cam­paign of the “Awak­en­ing” members.

The answer is to find the Saudi con­nec­tion to the “Awak­en­ing Coun­cils”. In this inter­view with F. Gre­gory Gause “Saudis ‘Very Anx­ious’ to Hear Bush Views on Iran” said the following:

But the most inter­est­ing devel­op­ment in 2007 from the Saudi point of view is the rise of the Awak­en­ing Coun­cils, the tribal and other Sunni groups unit­ing against al-Qaeda and coop­er­at­ing with the United States. We don’t have much evi­dence on this because the Saudis are secre­tive about such things, but I’m pretty con­fi­dent that the Saudis have encour­aged this with their influ­ence and with their money. And those Awak­en­ing Coun­cils are kind of the nat­ural exten­sion of Saudi influ­ence into Iraq.

But do you really think that it is the Saudis own, “stand­alone” ini­tia­tive? Then notice the last line reported on Al-Hayat report today “Awak­en­ing Coun­cils: Between polit­i­cal and sec­tar­ian dif­fer­ences”, it says:

Sources told the news­pa­per that a list of “most wanted” mem­bers of the “Awak­en­ing Coun­cils” in the pos­ses­sion of the [Iraqi] mil­i­tary com­mand but they can­not arrest the per­sons because of the Amer­i­can forces opposition.

Each time the Iraqi army forces arrest “Awak­en­ing” mem­bers charged with mur­der, abduc­tion and dis­place­ment and brings them to the mil­i­tary base, an Amer­i­can mil­i­tary force releases them, order­ing the offi­cers not to carry out any arrests oper­a­tion against the “Awak­en­ing” mem­bers in the future.