Jane Arraf has an article in today’s IraqSlogger that is interesting to read. It tells the story of the death of an Iraqi who worked as a cameraman who worked for the news agency APTN and was killed in the neighborhood where he lived because he took up a gun to fight against guerrillas described as “al Qaeda.”

A doctor from the U.S. Army’s Stryker brigade, sweating with heat and exertion, worked frantically to insert a chest tube in his side to try to keep his lung from collapsing. I turned away for a moment as an American medic worked on an Iraqi man who had been shot in the face. When I turned back – he had died.

The Army’s Arabic interpreter who had held Saif’s hand knelt by him to pray. Saif, 26, was the younger brother of Omar Fakhry, 33, a photojournalist for Arabic television stations and Yasser Fakhry, 31, who was also an Iraqi journalist. They shouted in grief.

A tragic scene, repeated dozens of times daily in Iraq, yet different in the fact that a cameraman – a journalist- put down his camera and took up a gun to defend the neighborhood where he lived.

U.S. military officials said some of the group are what Iraqis call the ‘honorable resistance’ – including former Baathists and members of the Sunni insurgent group the Islamic Army who appear to have agreed to stop attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces to fight a common enemy. Local residents said al-Qaeda forces had taken root in Amiriyah, one of the last remaining Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, and were launching unprovoked attacks.

“We don’t like the Americans because they allowed – excuse the expression – these dogs of Osama bin Laden to come to Iraq,” said a school teacher at the mosque. He hasn’t worked in more than three years. “Because they said I was a Baathi,” he said.[emph added]

It’s remarkable that Sunni groups are putting aside their own disputes in order to create temporary alliances against a-Q. One can wonder at the decision to unite against a common enemy and hope this unity might continue. But it’s astounding that a school teacher, an educated man, believes the US Army “allowed” a-Q to take root.