BAGHDAD -- The American military marked another milestone the other day in the initiative perhaps most responsible for taming the violence in Iraq: All but 10,000 of the 94,000 Sunni militiamen -- many of them former insurgents who agreed, for cash, to stop killing American soldiers -- had been turned over to the control of the Iraqi military.
The same day, one group of the fighters north of Baghdad announced they were resigning from their Awakening Council, the Iraqi name for what the Americans call the Sons of Iraq. And in the town of Salman Pak, councils in southern Baghdad and its suburbs, an area once called "the ring of death," met to denounce Iraqi efforts to integrate them.
These are among the signs that the fighters' patience is fraying badly at a difficult moment. After months of promises, only 5,000 Awakening members -- just over 5 percent -- have been given permanent jobs in the Iraqi security forces. Those promises were made last year when Iraq was flush with oil money.
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Now with Iraq's budget battered by falling oil prices, the government is having trouble paying existing employees, much less bringing in Sunni gunmen already regarded with suspicion by the Shiite-led government.
In interviews with leaders from a dozen local Awakening Councils, nearly all complained that full-time jobs were lacking, that pay was in arrears and that members were being arrested despite promises of amnesty.
Perhaps most ominously, many expressed concern this might drive some followers back to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a largely Iraqi group with some foreign leadership, at a time when both Iraqi and American military commanders say that the group seems to be making gains, small but worrisome, around Baghdad.
The complaints are not completely new, as Awakening members bargained for power and cash, but the threat to rejoin the insurgency has grown more fervent as more time has passed without government jobs.
"Until now, promises are all we've gotten," said Adil al-Mashhadani, a leader of the Awakening Council in the Fadhil neighborhood in Baghdad, where 12 of the 180 members have been able to join the police. "When the government does not even pay them enough to stay alive, Qaeda and armed groups are ready to pay them generously."
Maj. Gen. Mike Ferriter, deputy operations commander of the American-led forces, gave a press briefing at Camp Victory Saturday at which he declared the Awakening "the leading edge of reconciliation." He added, "I predict success."
At the same time, he conceded that in the past year, only 5,000 fighters had been integrated into the Iraqi security forces, mostly in the police. That is well short of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's pledge to bring 20 percent of them into the police. Mr. Maliki also pledged that the other 80 percent would get jobs in other government ministries.
Coinciding with the American military's "surge" over the last two years, the Awakening movement is given broad credit for helping quell most of the violence in Sunni communities.
The program was never meant to be permanent, however; the idea always was to find them jobs and bring Sunnis into the security services and government.
General Ferriter said he was not concerned about the low number integrated so far, predicting that all 94,000 members would have government jobs by the end of this year. He said that so far, 3,000 jobs had been promised by the Health Ministry, 10,000 by the Education Ministry and 500 by the Oil Ministry.
But other American officials are not so sure, given the far weaker financial condition of the Iraqi government because of falling oil prices. "Do we really think the Iraqi government is going to bring 100,000 new employees in at a time when their revenue stream is taking a nosedive?" asked an American military official knowledgeable about the program, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.
"You have to realize the Iraqi government may have an S.O.I. transition program, but Al Qaeda and all those groups have their own S.O.I. transition program," the officer said, using the abbreviation for the Sons of Iraq.
No one has ever doubted that many of the recipients of the American money were once insurgents, some aligned with Al Qaeda at one time. Essentially, they were paid to change sides. They have paid a price: More than 500 were killed in the fighting that ousted Al Qaeda from their neighborhoods and villages in 2007 and 2008.
Now they continue to be the victims of assassinations by extremists, most recently on Monday, when an Awakening leader in Abu Ghraib was killed.
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