Shiite Fighters Arrested In Crackdown, Iraq Says

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
January 18, 2007
Pg. 1
By Sabrina Tavernise
BAGHDAD, Jan. 17 — Facing intense pressure from the Bush administration to show progress in securing Iraq, senior Iraqi officials announced Wednesday that they had moved against the country’s most powerful Shiite militia, arresting several dozen senior members in the past few weeks.
It was the first time the Shiite government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had claimed significant action against the militia, the Mahdi Army, one of the most intractable problems facing his administration. The militia’s leader, the cleric Moktada al-Sadr, helped put Mr. Maliki in power, but pressure to crack down on the group has mounted as its killings in the capital have driven a wedge into efforts to keep the country together.
Although the announcement seemed timed to deflect growing scrutiny by an American administration that has grown increasingly frustrated with Mr. Maliki, American officers here offered some support for the government’s claims, saying that at least half a dozen senior militia leaders had been taken into custody in recent weeks.
In perhaps the most surprising development, the Americans said, none of the members had been prematurely released, a chronic problem as this government has frequently shielded Shiite fighters.
“There was definitely a change in attitudes,” in the past three to four weeks, a senior American military officer said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Mr. Maliki, in a meeting with foreign journalists on Wednesday, said 400 Mahdi militiamen had been arrested “within the last few days.” A senior government official said later by telephone that the total number arrested was 420 and that they had been detained in 56 operations beginning in October. Several dozen senior leaders have been detained in the past several weeks, the senior official said on condition of anonymity. He said the total number of senior commanders did not exceed 100.
Still, some American military officials remained skeptical that the effort was more than just a short-term attempt to appease them at a time when American government support for Mr. Maliki appeared to have sunk to an all-time low.
“The question is whether it will be sustained,” another American military official said. “This shouldn’t be done to weather some short-term political storm. This has to stick in the long run.”
Whatever the case, changes have been felt on the street. In Shiite neighborhoods across the capital, militia members seem to have dropped from view in recent weeks, residents and militia members say. Shiite foot soldiers have tucked away their machine guns and have melted back into bustling city blocks, preparing for what they say they believe will be an American military onslaught against them.
“They have not run checkpoints for a week,” said Ali, a merchant who lives in northern Baghdad and does business with the militia. “They hid their weapons. They are bored.”
An influential Shiite sheik, Adel Ibrahim Subihawi, said of senior Mahdi members, “They are making new passports right now to leave.”
It was not immediately clear whether the vanishing act was related to fear over the arrests or was a calculated move to wait out the coming American troop increase and prepare to re-emerge later.
But Iraqi and American officials acknowledge that the militia is the central challenge in the new effort to stop the cycle of violence in the capital, especially given the fighters’ ability to move and hide freely in tightly knit Shiite neighborhoods.
It is a vast task ahead: American military intelligence officials have estimated that there are around 7,000 Mahdi militiamen in Baghdad. Many have split off into their own fiefs.
“They are like amoebas,” one Shiite politician said. “Always dividing and multiplying.”
American military commanders are now debating whether a large-scale offensive in Sadr City, a vast grid of cinder-block houses in northeastern Baghdad that is the stronghold of the Mahdi Army, should be the way to confront the fighters. American soldiers battled the militia twice in 2004, but it emerged stronger after Mr. Sadr entered the political system and helped install Mr. Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister last spring.
One senior military official said a large-scale operation “cannot be taken off the table,” but others speak of plans to isolate the militia by cutting off northeastern neighborhoods where the militia dominates, and then continuing to chip away at its networks elsewhere.
In an interesting twist, the militia’s leadership has not visibly fought back against the crackdown. American commanders say that the arrests do not draw the howling objections they used to in 2004, because Mr. Sadr’s militia has splintered so deeply since then that the members they are arresting are more criminal than political and considered by Mr. Sadr to be disloyal renegades.
In that assessment, Mr. Sadr could even be using the government and the American military to purge his own ranks of undesirables.
Mr. Maliki, in the meeting on Wednesday, denied he was influenced by Mr. Sadr, and he offered as proof the fact that his government was finally taking painful action against his own Shiite constituency.
“In the entire four years I only talked to him twice,” he insisted.
Iraqis who live in the neighborhoods where the Mahdi Army is strong say the primary motivation for avoiding full-scale confrontation with the Americans is money. Members have grown rich on political channels of financing from Iran as well as from Iraqi government ministries, the residents say, and the militiamen do not want to fight the Americans directly for fear of losing their newfound status.
Ali, the merchant, said the reluctance to fight could be summed up in two words: “Italian shoes.”
“They know they will lose everything if they fight,” he said.
The Iraqi official, for his part, attributed the ease of the arrests to the government’s intensive political efforts with Mr. Sadr through the fall.
“As soon as he distanced himself from these death squads, we started hitting them really hard,” the official said.
The effort seems to be having some effect. In Ur, a Mahdi Army neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad whose empty eastern edge is a dumping ground for bodies, the local police station reported that the number of bodies found so far in January was 25, far fewer than the 68 bodies found in the same time period a month earlier.
Shiite neighborhoods present a particular challenge for the American military as it prepares to place thousands of soldiers into Baghdad in the coming months. In Topchi, a Shiite neighborhood in western Baghdad that is now largely empty of Sunnis, Shiites have formed intricate networks of tribes, militiamen and local policemen to maintain order. Residents say that American soldiers coming into the neighborhood would be disruptive.
“There’s no security if the Americans come in,” said Ali Hussein Abdallah, a 43-year-old falafel shop owner who had to close for three days during a recent American raid, in which soldiers tore down a poster of Mr. Sadr that was hanging on his wall. “They create confusion. When they come they make a lot of trouble and maybe fighting.”
The attitude is a measure of just how much alliances have shifted in nearly four years of war. Early on, Sunni Arabs spurned the Americans, and Shiites embraced them. Now Sunni areas ask for American protection, and Shiites want them to stay out of their areas.
“There is a wariness,” said Abu Fatma al-Musawi, a Mahdi Army member in Sadr City. “We feel that this new strategy is against the Mahdi Army. We are worried the American troops might attack our area.”
Military action will be all the more difficult because the militias are deeply embedded in the fabric of society. In Topchi, residents pay 3,000 Iraqi dinars a month, or about $2.40, to support local Mahdi Army members. Fighters are members of the local council, and they arrange trash collections and housing for Shiite refugees, often settling them into empty Sunni houses.
“If they don’t make relations with local councils I am sure they will fail,” said one prominent tribal member in Topchi who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If they use only force, like before, they will make many more problems.”
It is unclear whether militias would choose to fight Americans. For now, militia members in Topchi, like Jafar Sadik, a 22-year-old student at Baghdad University, simply left their checkpoints during the recent American raid.
For now, it is Sunni violence that shatters neighborhood calm and draws the Shiites out, perpetuating the war. A bombing at a largely Shiite university on Tuesday that killed about 70 has already prompted Mahdi militia members to reinstate some checkpoints in eastern Baghdad, residents said. A drive-by shooting on the same day in the upscale Shiite neighborhood of Binouk that killed 12 has set revenge reactions into motion.
To isolate Mr. Sadr, Americans and several prominent Iraqis, including Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a powerful Shiite, and Tariq al-Hashimi, Iraq’s Sunni vice president, tried to assemble a new political coalition that excluded him. Those efforts seem to have foundered in recent weeks, marred by events that divided the Iraqi groups — the arrests of Iranians in Mr. Hakim’s compound and the indignation surrounding the execution of Saddam Hussein.
Baha al-Aaraji, a senior representative for Mr. Sadr in Parliament, said Mr. Sadr’s supporters knew that recent American efforts were aimed at weakening them, and eventually Mr. Maliki, whom they support.
“The main goals are to exclude the Sadrists from decision-making and, after the formation of a new bloc, to replace the prime minister,” he said.
But in the current political situation, in which Islamists are overwhelmingly popular among voters, the efforts are likely to fail, he said.
“In the election, Islamists from both sides won,” he said. “It is a reality.”
 
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