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News :: Government Secrecy : International Relations : Iraq |
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Offensive Resumes in Najaf, Prompting Desertions of Iraqi Troops |
Current rating: 0 |
by Hannah Allam, Tom Lasseter and Dogen Hannah
(No verified email address) |
17 Aug 2004
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When Ali was asked about the number of guardsmen who have quit since al-Sadr's latest uprising, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Vernon Sparkmon cut him off.
"Certain things, you can't discuss," Sparkmon told Ali. "If somebody asks that question, that's, like, classified stuff." |
BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. and Iraqi forces launched a renewed assault Sunday on Shiite Muslim militiamen in the southern holy city of Najaf in a risky campaign that was marred from the onset by an outcry from Iraqi politicians and the desertion of dozens of Iraqi troops who refused to fight their countrymen.
The latest siege began Sunday afternoon, a day after Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's administration announced that fighting would resume after negotiations between government officials and aides to Muqtada al-Sadr failed to end the militant cleric's 10-day rebellion. The failed cease-fire talks, desertions and renewed fighting further undermined Allawi's leadership just as Iraq was poised to take its first step toward free elections by picking a national assembly.
More than 100 delegates walked out of a national conference that was hailed as Iraq's first experiment with democracy after decades of dictatorship. Enraged over the fresh violence in Najaf, the delegates left the meeting hall declaring that, "as long as there are airstrikes and shelling, we can't have a conference."
The day's events illustrated the dilemma that plagues Allawi and his American supporters.
It will be difficult, if not impossible, for Allawi to establish his leadership, hold Iraq together and prod the country toward democracy without crushing his militant opponents, not only in the Shiite south but also in the old Saddam Hussein strongholds north and west of the capital. But to do that, Allawi must rely on unpopular U.S. troops, whose offensives only lend support to the charge that Allawi is an American puppet.
Sunday's showdown in Najaf was troubled even before the fighting resumed. Several officials from the Iraqi defense ministry told Knight Ridder that more than 100 Iraqi national guardsmen and a battalion of Iraqi soldiers chose to quit rather than attack fellow Iraqis in a city that includes some of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam. Neither U.S. military officials nor Iraqi government officials would confirm the resignations.
"We received a report that a whole battalion (in Najaf) threw down their rifles," said one high-ranking defense ministry official, who didn't want his name published because he's not an official spokesman. "We expected this, and we expect it again and again."
"In Najaf, there are no Iraqi Army or police involved in the fighting. There were in the beginning, but later the American forces led the fighting," said Raad Kadhemi, a spokesman for al-Sadr. "Only the mercenaries and the bastards are supporting the Americans and helping them ... We salute our brothers who abandoned participating in the fight against the Mahdi Army."
Arabic-language satellite channels broadcast live all day from inside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, where dozens of members of al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia chanted vows to defend the holy site. Plumes of smoke rose from just outside the shrine, and reporters heard the crackle of machine-gun fire and the deeper booms of tank and mortar rounds. Many journalists had fled the area after Iraqi police evicted them and threatened them with arrest if they stayed.
Sober-faced Iraqi colonels gathered inside the defense ministry command center, their cell phones ringing with continuous updates from the battlefield. American military advisers wandered in and out of the room, located at the end of a marble hallway in the massive, heavily guarded palace that serves as headquarters for U.S.-led forces and American civilian administrators.
"Aziz is trapped in the ancient fortress with two wounded men and two of his vehicles surrounded!" shouted one Iraqi officer.
The officers, most of them decorated veterans from the former regime, shook their heads at the thought of Iraqis battling Iraqis on sacred soil. Several said they would resign immediately if senior officers ordered them to serve in Najaf. They asked to withhold their names for fear of reprimand.
"I'm ready to fight for my country's independence and for my country's stability," one lieutenant colonel said. "But I won't fight my own people."
"No way," added another officer, who said his brother - a colonel - quit the same day he received orders to serve in the field. "These are my people. Why should I fight someone just because he has a difference in opinion about the future of the country?"
However, an Iraqi military analyst inside the ministry defended the assault, saying that crushing al-Sadr's militia would finally bring stability to the volatile southern Shiite region and smooth the way to national elections. The analyst, who spoke on background because he wasn't authorized to give interviews, said force was the last resort because "dialogue and rational policy" had failed with al-Sadr's men.
The analyst said Iraqi forces are taking precautions against damaging the Imam Ali shrine, a place of pilgrimage for millions of Shiites, but added that battles in the area were inevitable because militiamen holed up there were attacking from the shrine.
"Iraqi forces will shoot them even if they are inside," the official said. "The militia itself has violated this place, storing weapons there and using it as a fort."
Halfway through the interview, two mortars landed outside his office with deafening thuds that rattled windows throughout the building.
"That? That's just music," the analyst said with a grim smile.
Another mortar strike Sunday killed two Iraqis and wounded 17 at a bus station near the Baghdad convention center, where the national conference was under way. Pools of blood dried in the blazing sun and pieces of flesh were still stuck to the seats of a bus at the scene. In total, nine Iraqis died and 56 were injured in Sunday's violence in Baghdad, according to the Iraqi health ministry.
At an Iraqi national guard base near the border of Sadr City, the vast Baghdad slum that serves as al-Sadr's support base and recruiting ground, 1st Sgt. Khalid Ali described the death threats he and other Iraqi troops have received from the Mahdi Army. He drew distinctions between fighting fellow Iraqis and fighting militiamen, whom he holds responsible for the deaths of two of his relatives.
"There are concerns about what's happening in Najaf because most of the people working here are Shiite and they are concerned about what happens to their sacred sites," Ali said. "We do not fight our brothers, we fight against those people who are sabotaging our country. The Mahdi Army is not Shiite, they are saboteurs."
But when Ali was asked about the number of guardsmen who have quit since al-Sadr's latest uprising, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Vernon Sparkmon cut him off.
"Certain things, you can't discuss," Sparkmon told Ali. "If somebody asks that question, that's, like, classified stuff."
Lasseter reports for The Miami Herald; Hannah reports for the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times.
© Copyright 2004 Knight-Ridder
http://www.realcities.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Showdown in Najaf: US Logic Hard to Follow |
by Gwynne Dyer
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Aug 2004
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The claims and counter-claims make it hard to discern the strategies behind the showdown in Najaf, and the language that is used blurs the situation even more. U.S. military spokesmen, for example, always call the young men who are defending rebel Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr "anti-Iraqi forces," although not one in a hundred of them has ever been outside Iraq.
But you can guess why U.S. authorities in Iraq chose this moment to try to eliminate Sadr and his al-Mahdi militia.
From the start, the biggest obstacle to the creation of a compliant, pro-American regime in Iraq has been the fact that the Shias, who make up about 60 per cent of Iraq's population, could elect a majority government that could, and probably would, defy U.S. wishes if they voted as a bloc. Moreover, senior Shia clerics command great respect in the community, making it much likelier that the Shia would indeed vote en bloc. So, elections were too risky.
Retired general Jay Garner, the original choice as U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, was dismissed after a month because he called for early elections in Iraq: "The night after I got to Baghdad, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld called me and told me he was appointing Paul Bremer as the presidential envoy. The announcement ... was somewhat abrupt."
Rumsfeld was worried that an elected Iraqi government would resist mass privatization of the economy, but he was equally worried that such a government would be Shia-dominated, and insist on an Islamic state.
The problem was compounded by the fact that Washington's favorite ayatollah, Abdul Majid al-Khoei, was killed the day after Baghdad fell. Khoei had become a personal friend of British Prime Minister Tony Blair during his long exile in London, and had strong U.S. backing. But a mob hacked him to death in the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf on April 10, 2003, the day after he arrived, leaving the field open to less pro-American rivals.
One was Iraq's current senior ayatollah, Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian-born scholar who issued a fatwa early in last year's U.S. invasion calling on all Muslims to fight the invading infidel forces. His principal rival for the loyalty of Iraqi Shias was Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, an Iraqi-born cleric who had spent more than 20 years in exile in Iran after backing that country's Islamic regime against Iraq in the 1980-'88 war.
Hakim was willing to co-operate with the U.S. occupiers in the hope that an election would ultimately give the Shias power, but he was killed by a huge car bomb outside the Imam Ali shrine on Aug. 29, 2003. That left only the recalcitrant Sistani — and the young firebrand Moqtada al-Sadr.
At 30, Sadr is less than half the age of his rival and he lacks a rigorous education in Islamic law, but he is the son of a revered former grand ayatollah who was murdered by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1999 and he has a strong following among the urban poor.
Last March, Bremer made a deal with Sistani. The ayatollah guaranteed that the Shiites would remain quiet this year (until George W. Bush's re-election bid in the U.S. is safely past, in other words), in return for free elections in Iraq early next year.
And then, seeking to insure against the risk that Sadr would try to spoil the deal, Bremer did something very foolish: He attacked Sadr directly.
In early April, the U.S. occupation authorities closed down Sadr's newspaper, a 10,000-circulation weekly that stridently condemned the occupation but had little influence, and issued an arrest warrant charging Sadr with Khoei's murder.
Sadr took his militia to the sacred city of Najaf and defied the Americans to come and get him. Impoverished young Shiites rose in revolt in east Baghdad and the cities of the south, and hundreds died before the U.S. command negotiated a truce. By then, al-Sadr was famous across Iraq and the whole Muslim world.
U.S. troops could have fought their way into Najaf, violated the Imam Ali mosque and killed Sadr if they were willing to pay the price, and the price in American lives would not even be great: American firepower, equipment and training mean that a hundred young Shia men die in the fighting for every American who is killed.
But the political price would have been huge, so the U.S. forces were called off in May. Why are they attacking again now? Whatever the truth about the incident that restarted the fighting, it's clearly an American choice to go for broke against Sadr.
U.S. forces were under no compulsion to escalate as they have done, and the newly appointed Iraqi "transitional government" could not have forced them to.
The likely answer is that the sudden removal of Sistani from the scene — he flew to London for heart treatment two weeks ago — has made Sadr too powerful, and too dangerous, to the "transitional government," to be left alive.
There are to be no witnesses this time: The few journalists in Najaf have been ordered to leave on pain of arrest.
But if this ends in a last stand and a massacre of the al-Mahdi militia in the most sacred site in the Shia world, possibly doing serious damage to the Imam Ali mosque itself, the long-term cost to the United States will far outweigh any possible gains.
The logic of the strategy is still very hard to follow.
Gwynne Dyer is a veteran Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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