BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraqi Sunni sheikh Sattar Abu Reesha, who has been leading the fight against Al-Qaeda in Iraq’s western Anbar province and who last week met US President George W. Bush, was killed on Thursday in a bomb attack, police said.
One of his bodyguards was also killed in the attack on his convoy in the Anbar province capital of Ramadi, marking a bloody start to the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
“Sheikh Reesa was returning home when his convoy was hit by a roadside bomb planted by insurgents,” said Anbar security chief Colonel Tareq al-Dulaimi. “His car was hit directly.”
AFP adds, with no agenda, I’m sure:
The attack comes hours before Bush is due to make a televised address detailing Washington’s future strategy in war-torn Iraq.
Sheikh Reesha was a prominent figure in the so-called Anbar Awakening Conference of Sunni tribes which formed an alliance with American troops in western Anbar province to claw back their neighbourhoods from Al-Qaeda.
A week ago, he attended a meeting of Iraqi government and US officials in Ramadi at which he urged other provinces to follow Anbar’s lead in cooperating with the central government.
The meeting, known as the Anbar Forum, was aimed at giving an economic boost to the western province, where Sunni Arab former insurgents have joined with US forces to fight Al-Qaeda.
“I wish we could do in all the provinces of Iraq what we did in Anbar, which is that the people and the government come together,” he said just three days after Bush made a surprise stopover at an airbase just 48 kilometres (30 miles) west of Ramadi.
Bush had said during his lightning visit that a reduction in US combat troops in Iraq was possible because of progress on the security front in Anbar.
He had shaken hands with the sheikh and praised the Anbar Awakening movement, a coalition of some 25 tribes which came together in September last year and pledged to fight Al-Qaeda militants by forming their own paramilitary units and sending recruits to the local police force.
Bush, in a 15-minute televised address to the nation at 9:00 pm on Thursday (Friday at 0100 GMT) is expected to announce that he may pull some 30,000 US troops out of Iraq by mid-2008.
A senior aide said that the president would closely follow the strategy laid out by the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, which would end the military “surge” ordered in January.
That would leave roughly 130,000 US troops in Iraq about six months before Bush — who has cited the half-century US presence in South Korea as a possible model for Iraq — hands the White House keys to his successor.