The Awakening members are currently paid by the American military to operate checkpoints, guard buildings and, in some cases, to refrain from bombing military convoys and shooting at American and Iraqi soldiers.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Jabbar, 31, who is known in the neighborhood as Abu Sajad, said angrily that the government was trying to undermine the councils and to make them fail.

“We think we are fighting not against just Al Qaeda; now we are also fighting against the Iraqi Army,” said Mr. Jabbar, who is in charge of a section of Adhamiya, a Sunni stronghold in the capital.

As other Awakening members have in recent days, he expressed fears that the Iraqi government would disband the local patrols once it took control.

“I think they will dissolve them,” he said, adding that the government opposed the councils because it saw them as usurping the role of the Iraqi Army in fighting insurgents.

“Al Qaeda controlled Adhamiya before we were here,” Mr. Jabbar said, referring to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a mostly homegrown insurgent group that American intelligence says is led by foreigners. “If Al Qaeda cells feel weakness in some places, they will return. They will not ask our permission. They will take revenge on us.”

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Mr. Jabbar said he had heard that the Iraqi Army issued an arrest warrant for him in connection with a kidnapping and killing. The warrant, he said, was based on false accusations made by the family of a militia leader in a Shiite group, the Mahdi Army, whom he had helped to capture and turn over to Iraqi security forces.

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Mr. Jabbar said that he had asked the American forces for help, but that he had been told that this was “an internal affair.”

The strike, which left many checkpoints in the neighborhood unguarded in the morning, was “just a small message for the Iraqi Army and the government of Iraq to make them know that people in Adhamiya support the Awakening Councils,” he said. The Adhamiya council halted the strike shortly after noon.

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Mr. Jabbar seemed to alternate between pride in his accomplishments and indignation at the injustice of his plight. At one point during the interview, he sent his men off to retrieve a photograph of him standing with Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq.

About 1 p.m., Mr. Jabbar’s cellphone rang, and he answered it and spoke in staccato Arabic, his voice at times rising in protest. The caller, he said afterward, was an interpreter for the American military, who questioned him about whether he had planted a bomb on a street in the neighborhood. He explained to the interpreter that someone else had placed the explosive, he said.

A little later, another call came; this one, Mr. Jabbar said, was from an Iraqi Army officer, who told him that the army would not arrest him, but that the officer would come to talk to him. Then they would tour Adhamiya together, to show that there were no hard feelings on either side, Mr. Jabbar said.

“We should cooperate as the Awakening Council with the Iraqi Army and the American forces,” he said after the phone call. “If our leadership can reach for solutions to the problem, then there will no longer be any tension between us and the Iraqi Army.”

Shortly afterward, a line of Iraqi Army Humvees appeared, and a meeting was held at the Abu Hanifa mosque. Later, Mr. Jabbar said, the officers asked him if some Awakening members were planning to attack the Iraqi Army. He reassured him that they were not, he said.

After the meeting, Mr. Jabbar and an army captain shook hands outside. “This man is my friend,” the captain said.

In other developments around Iraq on Wednesday, at least five Iraqis — two police officers, two soldiers and one Awakening Council member — were mistakenly killed and at least four others wounded by American forces in the Abayachi neighborhood near Tarmiya, north of Baghdad, according to Col. Muhammad Kadhum, of the Abayachi police.

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An American military statement said that American forces conducting combat operations had exchanged fire with Iraqi forces, resulting in casualties.

Colonel Kadhum said the Americans were in a boat patrolling the Tigris when they approached an Iraqi checkpoint. The Iraqi security forces thought that the approaching troops were terrorists, Colonel Kadhum said, and began firing at them. An American aircraft then arrived and opened fire on Iraqi forces.

“The American commander came to my office today, and he apologized for what happened,” Colonel Kadhum said. “He promised to start an investigation.”