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2-23 INF, 4/2 SBCT Commander quoted in the following article.
By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times
MUQDADIYA, IRAQ -- The room seethed with anger as Sunni Arab members of a neighborhood guard force brought in a freed captive, who stood mute amid the raised voices and swirling cigarette smoke.
Eyeing a visiting U.S. Army officer, the burly gunmen in camouflage coaxed the man to raise his arms and display the brown shoelaces that bound his wrists. The man, a fuel vendor, said he had been stopped by Shiite guards who demanded to know his sect. When he told them he was Sunni, he said, "they tied my hands, they slapped and kicked me. They stole fuel from me too."
He was released, he said, when he told his captors that his relatives were Shiite.
Both the Sunni and Shiite guards are helping the U.S. military defend Muqdadiya's Matar district from Sunni extremists who forced the city into a self-styled Islamic caliphate for more than a year. But though the two groups run checkpoints around the corner from each other, each takes every opportunity to convince the Americans that the other is not to be trusted.
The rivalry illustrates the difficulties the U.S. military faces as it tries to duplicate in religiously mixed regions of Iraq a strategy that produced a dramatic turnaround in Anbar, an overwhelmingly Sunni province.
U.S. commanders and residents agree that the fighters, once dubbed concerned local citizens by the Americans, and now known as Sons of Iraq, have played a key role in forcing the group Al Qaeda in Iraq and affiliated Sunni insurgents out of Muqdadiya, about 60 miles northeast of Baghdad. But as the militant organizations have retreated, rival bands of Sunni and Shiite guards have raced to stake claims to the vacated areas, raising the specter of sectarian bloodshed.
Lt. Col. Mark Landes, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, in Muqdadiya, called the rivalry "a huge concern." Landes' hope is that by working on the same side, they will find a way to overcome their differences. But there is little sign of that yet. The U.S.-allied Sunni fighters who gathered in a tiny office at a hospital-turned-security base in Matar were blunt about relations with their Shiite counterparts.
[...]