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At least one insurgent group in Iraq is taking a greater interest in customer service these days. An anti-al Qaeda, Islamist-leaning Iraqi insurgent coalition known as the Jihad and Change Front (JCF) recently held an online question-and-answer session with forum members, who were asked to provide feedback on the group’s performance and shortcomings. This exercise yielded some interesting responses, which shed further light on the divisions engulfing Iraq’s Sunni insurgent community.
In its response, the JCF made sure to criticize the U.S.-allied Sunni Awakening Councils that have been put on the U.S. payroll to root out al Qaeda. At the same time, the group cautiously criticized the main al Qaeda node in Iraq — the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) — for focusing its targeting of U.S.-backed Sunni militias. Though the JCF referred to the ISI as the JCF’s brothers, the group’s criticism showed that it is conscious of the need to maintain a strong and viable Sunni support network in Iraq, and that targeting the Awakening Councils would only further alienate the locals and erode their longevity as an insurgent movement. This is an age-old debate in the Sunni insurgent movement and was prominently brought to light by al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri back in 2005 when he admonished late al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for targeting Shia, thereby putting the local Sunni population at greater risk.
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