Fierce gun battles erupted between Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias in Basra, Baghdad and other cities Tuesday as the government, backed by U.S. and British reconnaissance planes, launched an offensive aimed at breaking the power of politically backed gunmen.The fiercest fighting took place in Basra neighborhoods where Iraqi forces targeted members of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, further risking the collapse of a cease-fire that Sadr declared last summer. His fighters' stand-down has been widely credited with helping curb violence throughout the country during the U.S. troop buildup known as the surge.
When the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker deliver a report card on the country before Congress next month, a key gauge of progress will be whether the Iraqi government and its security forces are prepared to take over as U.S. troops withdraw.
The offensive in Basra, an important test of that preparedness, was several weeks in the making. While it targets the Mahdi Army in particular, its goal is also to break the grip that other Shiite militias, criminal gangs and death squads hold upon the southern port city, the conduit for Iraq's oil exports. In recent weeks, the militias have often battled each other in the streets.
It was unclear why U.S. forces would take part in a broad armed challenge to Sadr and his thousands-strong militia on the eve of Petraeus's assessment, which the Bush administration has said would greatly influence its decision on whether to draw down troop levels.
But many Sadr followers view the offensive as the latest attempt by the United States and Sadr's Shiite rivals, who run Iraq's government, to take advantage of Sadr's cease-fire to weaken his movement politically ahead of provincial elections that could take place this year...
By Tuesday evening, Iraqi security forces and Shiite militias had also clashed in the cities of Kut and Hilla, as well as outside Sadr's Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City. Dusk-to-dawn curfews were imposed on at least six cities in southern Iraq, police said.
In Baghdad, mortars and rockets pounded the heavily protected Green Zone, which houses the U.S. Embassy and key Iraqi government offices, for the second time in three days. The attacks were apparently launched from Shiite enclaves. A U.S. Embassy spokesman said no deaths or injuries had been reported in Tuesday's attacks; an American civilian wounded in a similar barrage Monday was reported to have died.
In addition to resisting with arms, Sadr's movement led a labor strike for a second day in many parts of eastern and central Baghdad on Tuesday, demanding the release of Sadr's jailed followers and an end to Iraqi government raids. Sadrist leaders ordered stores to close and taxi and bus drivers to stop operations. Many neighborhoods turned into virtual ghost towns, their usually busy streets all but empty. Parents kept their children home from school.
Sadr, who imposed the cease-fire to improve his nationalist credentials and rein in his often unruly militia, is under immense pressure from senior loyalists to lift the cease-fire order. Two weeks ago, he issued a statement permitting the Mahdi Army to fire on U.S. and Iraqi forces in self-defense. Hazim al-Araji, a senior Sadr official in the southern holy city of Najaf, told reporters there that the cease-fire remains in place despite Tuesday's clashes.
Later, hundreds of Sadr followers took to the streets of Najaf, carrying Korans, Iraqi flags and olive branches. Calling Maliki "the agent of Americans," they chanted: "No, no occupation! No, no terrorism!"
"The Iraqi army went to Basra under the pretext of imposing a security plan, but the fact is they are targeting Sadrists," said Haidar al-Jaberi, a Sadr official who joined the protest.
The Mahdi Army's seven-month-long cease-fire appears to have come undone.
Rockets fired from the capital's Shiite district of Sadr City slammed into the Green Zone Tuesday, the second time in three days, and firefights erupted around Baghdad pitting government and US forces against the militia allied to the influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.At the same time, the oil-export city of Basra became a battleground Tuesday as Iraqi forces, backed by US air power, launched a major crackdown on the Mahdi Army elements. British and US forces were guarding the border with Iran to intercept incoming weapons or fighters, according to a senior security official in Basra.
The US blames the latest attacks on rogue Mahdi Army elements tied to Iran, but analysts say the spike in fighting with Shiite militants potentially opens a second front in the war when the American military is still doing battle with the Sunni extremists of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
"The cease-fire is over; we have been told to fight the Americans," said one Mahdi Army militiaman, who was reached by telephone in Sadr City. This same man, when interviewed in January, had stated that he was abiding by the cease-fire and that he was keeping busy running his cellular phone store.
Even before the crackdown on militias began on Tuesday, Pentagon statistics on the frequency of militia and insurgent attacks suggested that after major security gains last fall, the conflict had drifted into something of a stalemate. Over all, violence has remained fairly steady over the past several months, but the streets have become tense and much more dangerous again after a period of calm.It is not clear how responsible the restive Mahdi militia commanders are for stalling progress in the effort to reduce violence. In recent weeks, commanders have protested continuing American and Iraqi raids and detentions of militia members.
If the cease-fire were to unravel, there is little doubt about the mayhem that could be stirred up by Mr. Sadr, who forced the United States military to mount two bloody offensives against his fighters in 2004 as much of the country exploded in violence.
Sadiq al-Rikabi, the prime minister's political adviser, and other Iraqi officials said that just how the unrest in Baghdad was related to the crackdown in Basra was unknown.
Sadr City, the Baghdad neighborhood that is the center of the Mahdi Army's power, was sealed off by a cordon of Iraqi troops and what appeared to be several American units. A New York Times photographer who was able to get through the cordon found more layers of checkpoints, each one run by about two dozen heavily armed Mahdi Army fighters clad in tracksuits and T-shirts. Tires burned in the city center, gunfire echoed against shuttered stores, and teams of fighters in pickup trucks moved about brandishing machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
"We are doing this in reaction to the unprovoked military operations against the Mahdi Army," said a Mahdi commander who identified himself as Abu Mortada. "The U.S., the Iraqi government and Sciri are against us," he said, referring to a rival Shiite group whose name has changed several times, and is now known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which has an armed wing called the Badr Organization.
"They are trying to finish us," the commander said. "They want power for the Iraqi government and Sciri."
How will the U.S. media portray this? As the Iraqi Army cleaning up a renegade militia in Basra? Probably. But the Iraqi Army in Basra is mostly composed of another renegade militia--the Badr Corps, an organization founded by Iran and answerable to ISCI--the Shi'ite faction led by the Hakim family, Sadr's great rival. There are no heroes here. The Sadr movement is populist, nationalist, anti-Iranian, in favor of a strong central government...but it's also anti-American and oriented toward a stricter Islamic state than the current Maliki government is. The Hakim family's movement is both pro-American and pro-Iranian. It is federalist, rather than nationalist, in favor of a weak central government with a strong Shi'istan in the south (which would be heavily influenced by Iran).My intelligence sources have told me in the past that we don't know nearly enough about the southern Shi'ite factions--we've been fighting and wooing Sunnis in the north for the past five years--and that U.S. involvement in the Basra fight would be a disastrous idea. Let's hope that General Petraeus makes the right decision, stays out of it in Basra and keeps a low U.S. profile in the Shi'ite neighborhoods--almost exclusively Sadr-controlled--in Baghdad.
We'll see how this turns out...but wasn't it just yesterday that Fred Kagan was saying, at the American Enterprise Institute, that the Iraqi civil war was over? And didn't John McCain just say that he didn't care what anybody thought, we were "succeeding" in Iraq? Unfortunately, Iraq is a majority Shi'ite country--and the two major Shi'ite factions seem poised to tear each other apart.
It is their country. No matter how long we stay - 10 months, 10 years, 100 years - they will stay longer. If they want a civil war, there is nothing we can do to stop it. I wish that it were otherwise, but it is not. Reality is what it is, and we must learn to accept that.
There is no such thing as "Iraq." It is a figment of the western imagination created by the British and held together by strongmen for the better part of a century. We removed the last strongman and replaced him with chaos. Unless we are willing to recreate his regime, we will not be able to hold Iraq together. Sunni are fighting Shia. Shia are fighting Shia. Sunni are fighting Sunni. And just for good measure, the Kurds are fighting the Turks.
We had the power to destroy Iraq, but we do not have the power to rebuild it. No one does. There is no good way out of this disaster. That is reality, and we must face it. How many more must die before we admit the truth?
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