ICYMI: al-Qaida jail break may mean death for U.S. allies in Iraq

The Daily Beast has a big story about last week's jail break in Iraq by 500 al-Qaida jihadists and the implications of that debacle for some of the top U.S. allies during Gen. David Petraeus successful surge during the final phase of the Iraq War.
The breakout at Abu Ghraib is now being called a counterterrorism and intelligence nightmare for the U.S., with a possible impact on the Syrian civil war.
The origins of this story go back to the Anbar Awakening, which began in 2005, nearly two years before George W. Bush sent more troops and empowered Petraeus to execute an aggressive war strategy that decimated al-Qaida in Iraq and drove the group from its safe harbor in western Iraq, The Daily Beast reports.

But the story by Eli Lake notes that “Petraeus’ campaign would not have been possible if not for tribal leaders like (Sheik Jassim Muhammad) Suwaydawi. Sheik Jassim, as he is known to his fellow tribesmen, was one of the first tribal leaders to rise up against al-Qaida in 2006, when he and his fighters in Anbar province warded off an assault known as the Battle of Sofia, despite being outmanned and outgunned.”

Here’s a bit more:
“On Sunday, Jassim said he was trying to get messages to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, but since the last American soldier left Iraq at the end of 2011, Suwaydawi says the United States has abandoned its former ally. ‘We haven’t had any contact with the U.S. government since they withdrew their forces from Iraq and left us dangling in the wind,’ he said. ‘We are threatened at any moment because of our fight with al-Qaida while the Americans were here.’
“U.S. intelligence officials who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity say the jailbreaks last Sunday in Abu Ghraib and Taji present a counterterrorism and intelligence nightmare. “We just lost track of everyone we didn’t kill who was in al-Qaida during the surge,’ one U.S. intelligence analyst said.”