The sheiks, who have long served as cultural leaders here, felt marginalized by the political system imposed after the 2003 invasion. Some U.S. occupation officials viewed the sheiks and their hold over extended families as undemocratic.
Al Anbar Gov. Mamoun Sami Rasheed said Thursday that the sheiks marginalized themselves by refusing to participate in Iraq's 2005 elections and, in some cases, supporting the Al Qaeda in Iraq organization.
The sheiks in turn have mocked some of the provincial representatives for being absentee politicians with no local track record.
But some sheiks in Ramadi and other parts of Al Anbar have established closer links with U.S. armed forces since last year, when they began speaking out against the insurgency and Al Qaeda in Iraq.
With the sheiks' encouragement, Al Anbar tribes have contributed thousands of recruits to Iraq's security forces in recent months, enabling U.S.-led troops to hold and pacify parts of the restive province.
The number of insurgent attacks in Ramadi and its outlying areas has fallen to a fraction of what it was a year ago, said U.S. Army Col. John Charlton, commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, who is overall military commander in the Ramadi area.
Sattar said the sheiks council would offer "full accountability for anyone in his tribe. Also they will know of any strangers -- man, woman or child -- who try to mix in their neighborhoods."
Analysts who lauded the sheiks' announcement as well as U.S. efforts to work with them cautioned that the political situation remained fluid.
"It's only now that the United States appears convinced of the need to build up local support against Al Qaeda," said Joost Hiltermann, a consultant with the International Crisis Group in Amman, the capital of Jordan. "What these people want is a restoration of Sunni power, or a preservation of certain privileges, or more simply, protection of their community from the Shiite majority and Iran."
Vali Nasr, a Middle East expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said the "most important result may not be in the battlefield but in producing new Sunni voices that Shiites and Kurds can negotiate with."
Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution in Washington said that improving U.S. relations with Sunni sheiks made "eminent sense" but that officials needed to be thinking about the "next step."
"We need better contacts among Sunnis for the purposes of negotiating an end to the civil war," he said, "and this could create an opportunity to create partners in the larger project while also serving an immediate need."
chris.kraul@latimes.com
Times staff writer Ned Parker in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
