40,000 anti-Qaeda fighters in Iraq integrated: US

More than one third of 118,000 anti-al-Qaeda militiamen have been integrated into Iraqi institutions as part of national reconciliation efforts, a senior US general said on Sunday.
The men are members of the Sahwa (Awakening) movement, known as the "Sons of Iraq" by the US army, which joined American and Iraqi forces in 2006 and 2007 to fight al-Qaeda and its supporters, leading to a dramatic fall in violence across the country.
"Seventy-eight thousand right now are on the rolls, over 40,000 have been integrated, 30,000 of those have been integrated directly into the ministries over the last couple of months," Major General Joseph Reynes told reporters.
Around 10,000 have been integrated into the Iraqi security forces.
Control of the Sahwa passed to Iraq last October, and for the past year their wages -- said to have been cut from 300 dollars under US leadership to 100 dollars -- have been paid, often late, by the Shia-led government.
But Reynes said that these delays were now a thing of the past.
"They (Iraq's authorities) have taken over and while there were some bumps and some miscalculations in the way they executed the payments, and how they executed some things in the beginning, the last two payments have been on time."
The US military began recruiting the Sahwa militias among Sunni Arab tribesmen and former insurgents in 2006, turning the tide in the war against al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Baghdad has promised to incorporate 20 percent of the Sahwa into the police and military and find civil service jobs for many of the rest, but the process is fraught with risks.
The US military had expressed concern over the integration process.
A Pentagon report in July argued: "The slow pace of integration has the potential to undermine Sunni confidence in the GoI (Government of Iraq), and, if not corrected, could undermine security progress."