Not content with losing the logistics war, now al Qaeda is just plain losing the war. And this is a new wrinkle:

BAGHDAD (AP) — Former Sunni insurgents asked the U.S. to stay away, then ambushed members of al-Qaida in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said Saturday.

The Islamic Army in Iraq sent advance word to Iraqi police requesting that U.S. helicopters keep out of the area since its fighters had no uniforms and were indistinguishable from al-Qaida, according to the police and a top Islamic Army leader known as Abu Ibrahim.

Abu Ibrahim told The Associated Press that his fighters killed 18 al-Qaida militants and captured 16 in the fight southeast of Samarra, a mostly Sunni city about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

“We found out that al-Qaida intended to attack us, so we ambushed them at 3 p.m. on Friday,” Abu Ibrahim said. He would not say whether any Islamic Army members were killed.

Much of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, has joined the U.S.-led fight against al-Qaida in Iraq along with Sunni tribesmen and other former insurgents repelled by the terror group’s brutality and extremism.

Those who’ve cared to know learned months ago that the vast majority of Sunnis in Iraq have turned against al Qaeda, though Sunni Baathist “dead enders” and anti-Shia insurgents had mostly allied themselves with al Qaeda to fight US forces not long after the Coalition’s invasion in the spring of 2003. Before the middle of 2005, the first cracks in the Sunni’s affiliation, and sometime alliance, with al Qaeda had started to appear. Not many months after that, there was occasional combat between some AQI formations and Sunni militias.

Understand that the Islamic Army in Iraq is not pro-American. It was the largest Sunni anti-coalition insurgent group in Iraq after Saddam’s fall, and was devoted mainly to regaining power for the Baathists. Despite its name, the IAI is not especially hardline Muslim in character and would be mischaracterized as Islamist, though it did openly ally itself with al Qaeda in Iraq for a long time. But AQI’s harsh brutality in taking over Sunni towns, executing townspeople (and even beheading children) who wouldn’t toe the hardcore Islamist line, finally turned IAI against AQI early this year, and it began fighting AQI. However, AQI and IAI soon came to a ceasefire agreement under the proposition that they each alike were bound first to fight the Americans. Even so, IAI never signed on to AQI’s version of Islam and never agreed to help al Qaeda in its goal of instituting the Islamic State of Iraq.

Evidently, the ceasefire has broken down. At this stage of the war, for al Qaeda to lose 18 fighters to death with almost as many captured is a serious loss for them.

The Islamic Army in Iraq cannot be counted as friendly to the US or to Iraq’s central government. However, it now appears that they are no longer enemies, either.

There’s bad news for AQI elsewhere, too.

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation Saturday against al-Qaida in Iraq there, the Iraqi Army said.

About 60 militants were captured and handed over to Iraqi soldiers, an Army officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to media.

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through the streets of Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting “Down with al-Qaida!” and “Diyala is for all Iraqis!”

Well, when it rains, it pours.