Gov. Mamun Sami Rasheed of Anbar province, Iraq's largest Sunni province, said the U.S. military will transfer control of the province's security to Iraqi forces June 28, Reuters reported June 23. U.S.-led coalition forces have so far transferred security control for three Kurdish provinces in the north and six Shiite provinces in the south. Though Anbar will be the 10th of Iraq's 18 provinces returned to Iraqi security control since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, it will thus be the first predominantly Sunni region handed back to Iraqi government control. While the performance of Iraqi government security forces has been mixed, they have begun to demonstrate a limited capability to stand on their own. In Anbar, these forces will meet Sunni forces known as the Awakening Council that have imposed a tribal-controlled peace on the province. The meeting of these Sunni elements and government forces will serve as a key litmus test for Iraq's emerging post-Baathist security establishment. As late as 2006, chronic tensions between local Sunni police forces and Shiite-dominated national police and army units in Anbar province were palpable, occasionally even breaking out into isolated gunbattles. These tensions arose because Iraq's police and army are dominated by Shia while Anbar — the country's largest province in terms of land area — until late 2006 was a major insurgent theater for both Sunni nationalist and jihadist groups. Intra-Sunni rivalries in the western province will play a key role in assisting the Shia to take control. This could lead to a resumption of violence in Anbar as various groups seek to take advantage of the new security environment. Anbar's size makes it key to the future Sunni entry into a Shiite-dominated political system, explaining why the United States has given the province a disproportionate amount of attention. Much of this attention was spent on assisting in the formation of an 80,000-strong tribal force known as the Awakening Councils. Not only were these groups instrumental in controlling the Sunni nationalist insurgency, they turned their guns against al Qaeda-led jihadists. It is these fighters, currently on the Pentagon's payroll and backed by Saudi Arabia, that have both the Iraqi Shia as well as their Iranian patrons extremely concerned. Under the Awakening Councils' tenure, Anbar has gone from one of the deadliest provinces in Iraq to one of the safest. Tehran already has warned of a major uprising if the ongoing talks between the al-Maliki and Bush administrations on a future U.S. military presence in Iraq lead to a long-term U.S. presence in Iraq, especially one conferring significant security powers on the United States. Meanwhile, the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government has been blocking any progress on the re-Baathification process, which is supposed to oversee the return of Sunnis in the country's civil and military bureaucracy, even when the Shia agree to it in principal. Therefore, the Iranians and their Iraqi Shiite allies view the transfer of Anbar's security as an opportunity to check the Sunni resurgence in the new Iraqi republic. Coalition and Iraqi commanders want to transition about 20 percent of the Awakening Councils fighters — or about 15,000 out of the total of 80,000 Sunni tribal militiamen — to the Iraqi Security Forces, which comprises the army, national police and Iraqi police. Most of these fighters would be inducted into the national police, which is recruited and deployed locally, giving the Awakening Councils some degree of official influence at the local level. Shiite-dominated Baghdad sees the 15 percent figure as sufficient, but it falls far below the expectations of the Anbar's Sunnis. Awakening Councils also are in the process of transitioning from a militia into a political movement, and hope to take advantage of provincial elections slated in the fall to consolidate their de facto gains into formal political power. The Iraqi Sunnis know that a demographic-based constitution severely limits their share of power in the central government, so the Sunni's best bet is to entrench themselves in their region (comprising Anbar, Salah ad Din, At Tamim, and Ninawa provinces, and to lesser degree, Baghdad, Diyala and Babil provinces) as much as possible. But at the local level, intra-Sunni rivalries between those Sunnis who are already part of the state (such as Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi's Tawafoq Iraqi Front, the largest Sunni bloc in parliament) and those who initially shunned the post-2003 political system (e.g., Awakening Councils, the Sunni religious establishment, various tribal elements, Islamist insurgents, and Baathists) will prevent the Sunnis from consolidating their power. The internal problems of the Sunnis could thus give the Shiite-dominated security forces a tactical advantage in establishing their control in Anbar. Sectarian and intra-Sunni dynamics have the potential to recreate security problems in Anbar as Iraqi forces assume responsibility for security. Ultimately, an Iraqi state imposing its writ on its territory will require a U.S.-Iranian understanding establishing an ethno-sectarian balance of power in Iraq. But before that can happen, a balance of power has to be achieved within both Shiite and Sunni communities. The outcome of the coming provincial polls will to a great degree settle the internal balance within Iraq's Shia and Sunnis, thereby preparing the two sides for and ultimate face off.