IRAQ: Maliki says Sadrist foes "worse than al Qaeda" - Reuters

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Maliki says Sadrist foes "worse than al Qaeda"
Peter Graff, Reuters

Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008


BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki raised the
stakes in his five-day-old crackdown on Shi'ite militants on Saturday,
describing his foes as "worse than al Qaeda."

Fighting raged in Basra and Baghdad, threatening to draw U.S. forces
deeper into Maliki's confrontation with cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi
Army militia and endangering a ceasefire that has been in place for
seven months.

U.S. forces said they had killed 48 militants in air strikes and gun
battles across the capital the previous day.

At least 133 bodies and 647 wounded were taken into hospitals in
eastern Baghdad over five days of clashes, the head of the area's
health directorate, Ali Bustan, said.

In Basra, government troops said they had killed 120 fighters. Scores
of people were reported killed in other towns across the south where
fighting has spread.

"We used to talk about al Qaeda. Unfortunately it seems there are some
among us who are worse than al Qaeda," Maliki said in a televised
meeting with tribal leaders in Basra, where he has personally overseen
the crackdown since Tuesday.

After years in which Iraq was torn apart by violence between Shi'ites
and Sunni Arab militants like al Qaeda, the past week's violence has
exposed another bloody rift -- among Shi'ites themselves. Parties in
Maliki's government are battling followers of Sadr, who in many
Shi'ite areas rule the streets.

The crackdown poses a dilemma for the United States.

On the one hand, it wants Iraqi forces to take the lead on security,
but on the other hand this action endangers a Sadr truce which has
been key to a fall in violence.

Washington has so far backed Maliki to the hilt and President George
W. Bush has called the crackdown a "defining moment in the history of
a free Iraq."

But the spread of violence risks undoing a year of security
improvements and jeopardizing plans for U.S. troops to withdraw.

U.S. arch-foe Iran has called for an end to the inter-Shi'ite fighting
which it says could provide a "pretext" for U.S. troops to stay on.

"The key question now is what the United States is going to do," said
Joost Hiltermann, of the International Crisis Group think tank.

"If it allows (the crackdown) to go forward the ceasefire will unravel
and the U.S. will face the Sadr movement in its full power."

SISTANI MEETING

A Sadr aide said his representatives had met the Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, Iraq's highest Shi'ite authority, in a bid to end the
violence. But a government spokesman rejected any talks with gunmen
who "threaten the security of citizens in Basra."

Iraq's security forces have struggled to take control of neighborhoods
in Basra from the Mehdi Army and have had to call in U.S. air strikes
on militant positions.

Mehdi Army fighters in black masks still control the streets of much
of Iraq's second-biggest city, manning checkpoints and openly
brandishing rifles, machineguns and rocket launchers, a Reuters
reporter in the city said.

"We will fight on and never give up our weapons," Mehdi Army deputy
military commander in Basra Abu Hassan al-Daraji told Reuters by
telephone. "We will not turn over a single bullet."

In Baghdad's Sadr City, Sadr's main stronghold, a group of Iraqi
police and soldiers surrendered themselves and their weapons to the
local Sadr office, a Reuters photographer said.

The spokesman for Iraqi security forces in Baghdad, Major- General
Qassim Moussawi, sought to play down the desertions, saying he had
received reports of only 15 men surrendering. He said those who did so
would be court-martialled.

Mehdi Army fighters clashed with government forces on the western
outskirts of Kerbala, one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest cities. Iraqi
commander Major-General Raad Jawdat said his forces had killed 21
"outlaws" and arrested 57 others.

Fighting was also reported in eastern Kut, the southern city where
there have been some of the worst clashes between the Mehdi Army and
Iraqi forces. Police said three people also died in gun battles in the
town of Suwaira, 60 km south of Baghdad.

Sadr, who led two anti-U.S. revolts in 2004, helped install Maliki in
power after an election in 2005 but broke with him last year. He
declared a ceasefire last August that U.S. commanders praised but has
remained implacably anti-American.

In a rare interview taped just before this week's outbreak of
violence, he told al-Jazeera television: "I call on the Arab League,
the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the United Nations to
recognize the legitimacy of the resistance."

(Additional reporting by Wathiq Ibrahim and Waleed Ibrahim in Baghdad,
Aref Mohammed in Basra and Khaled Farhan in Najaf; Editing by Richard
Balmforth)