Obviously fully committed to recruiting Sunnis to the U.S. side, General Petraeus casts the entire point of the surge as a battle against Al Qaeda, in an interview with the London Times:

"They are attempting to establish a real al-Qaeda sanctuary in Iraq, a caliphate. Zarqawi (the former al-Qaeda leader in Iraq) stated that he intended for Baquba (the capital of Diyala) to become the new capital of his caliphate in 2006 shortly before he was killed."

The goal, he says, is to buy time in Washington to allow the mission (whatever it is) to continue: "I hope that we can put time back on the Washington clock. Al-Qaeda is keenly aware of the Washington clock. They are obviously going to have a surge of their own."

Of Al Qaeda, he says:

"An awful lot of their foreign fighters come through Syria. Eighty or so foreign fighters come through a month. That does not sound like much but every one of those is a potential suicide bomber. We think that 80 to 90 per cent of suicide bombers are foreign fighters. ... It is still led by foreigners called al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL). Our assessment is that this is the central front for al-Qaeda. They have a global war of terror, and Iraq is the central front. Whether you like it or not."

Besides Al Qaeda, Petraeus says the other bad guys, the Shia ones, are Iranian-backed:

"They are trained in Iran, equipped with Iranian (weapons), and advised by Iran. The Iranian involvement here we have found to be much, much more significant that we thought before. They have since about the summer of 2004 played a very, very important role in training in Iran, funding, arming."

Petraeus says that the Shia fighters are offshoots of Sadr's Mahdi Army. But he doesn't say anything about the Badr Brigades of the reorganized SCIRI (SIIC).