Iraqi P.M. Wants U.S. Checkpoints Removed
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday ordered that all the American checkpoints surrounding Sadr City in the northeast and other neighborhoods in Baghdad be removed.
Those checkpoints took weeks to put in place, reports CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, and it will take as long as that to dismantle them, but the prime minister said it should happen in just a few hours.
"We know American forces at those checkpoints have stopped searching individual vehicles and are allowing them to pass through. It appears that this order couldn't have gone out without American forces in Baghdad agreeing to it," reports Logan.
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, said officers were meeting to "formulate a response to address the prime minister's concerns."
In other developments:
Eyewitnesses said U.S. forces were seen dismantling checkpoints around Sadr City made of sandbags and concrete blocks Tuesday afternoon.
The extra checkpoints were set up last week around Sadr City as U.S. troops launched an intensive search for a missing American soldier and raided homes looking for death squad leaders in the sprawling slum that is home to an overwhelmingly Shiite population of 2.5 million people.
Other checkpoints manned by U.S. troops were erected in the downtown Karradah neighborhood where the soldier had been abducted.
Al-Maliki's statement said such measures "should not be taken except during nighttime curfew hours and emergencies."
"Joint efforts continue to pursue terrorists and outlaws who expose the lives of citizens to killings, abductions and explosions," said the statement, issued in al-Maliki's name in his capacity both as prime minister and commander of the Iraqi armed forces.
Al-Maliki's demand threatened to further upset relations between the U.S. and the Iraqi government that hit a rough patch last week after Al-Maliki issued a string of bitter complaints, at one point saying he was not "America's man in Iraq."
Al-Maliki was apparently angered by a statement from U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad that the prime minister had agreed to set a timeline for progress on reaching security and political goals — something al-Maliki denied.
"The Iraqi military forces are not loyal to a neutral Iraqi government," says Logan. "They are loyal to their parties, their militias, their tribes, and those take precedence over everything else here. What you're seeing in a lot of towns is that the Iraqi police might actually just be that local tribe militia. All the policemen are members of that militia. The moments the Americans are gone, they start fighting each other."
As for increasing the numbers of Iraqi security forces, Logan sees problems there, too.
"The real truth of the situation here is that of those Iraqi security forces that have been trained, commanders on the ground estimate only half of them are actually out there," Logan says. "Some of them are paid by tribal leaders or party leaders just to show up on payday, take their salaries and disappear. Others are on leave. Others just never return."
It wasn't clear how the Sadr City shutdown would affect security in Baghdad, where violence has soared this week following the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr. At least 81 people were killed across Iraq on Monday, including 33 people struck down by a bomb in Sadr City targeting day laborers lining up for jobs.
Only journalists, Health Ministry workers, police, and fighters from al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia would be allowed to enter Sadr City, the local al-Sadr office director Sheik Abdul-Zahra al-Suwaidi told The Associated Press. Both the Health Ministry and the Baghdad police are dominated by Shiites.