Shiite Militia Grab Southern Iraqi City
The Shiite militia run by anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr seized control of the southern Iraqi city of Amarah on Friday in one of the boldest acts of defiance yet by the country's powerful, unofficial armies, witnesses and police said.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki dispatched an emergency security delegation that included the Minister of State for Security Affairs and top officials from the Interior and Defense ministries, said Yassin Majid, the prime minister's media adviser told the Associated Press. Al-Sadr representatives had rushed Amarah from the holy city of Najaf to the north.
The Mahdi Army fighters stormed three main police stations Friday morning, planting explosives that flattened the buildings, residents said.
Shiite militia violence, mainly against the country's Sunni minority, has ravaged Iraq since February when a Shiite holy place in Samara was blown up. The violence has been on the increase, but this is the first recent fighting that has pitted Shiites against one another on such a scale.
The U.S. government believes forces loyal to al-Sadr are behind much of the violence in Iraq, especially that directed at Sunnis, reports . But the Washington Post reported recently that forces within his army may be breaking away from the command structure and forming smaller paramilitary groups, which may make them even harder to stop. Prime Minister Malaki this week sought al-Sadr's help in ending sectarian violence, but if the reports are true he may not have influence over some deadly militias.
Britain returned the city to Iraqi military control in August, and a British officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements, said Iraqi army and police forces were massing to retake the city of 750,000.
In other developments:
About 800 black-clad militiamen with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades were patrolling Amarah streets in commandeered police vehicles, eyewitnesses said. Other fighters had set up roadblocks on routes into the city and sound trucks circulated telling residents to stay indoors.
At least 15 people, including five militiamen, one policeman and two bystanders, have been killed in clashes since Friday, Dr. Zamil Shia, director of Amarah's department of health, said by telephone from the city, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad.
The fighting also wounded at least 59 people — 31 militiamen, six policemen and 22 civilians, including 3 children — according to Riyadh Saed, the duty physician at the city's main hospital.
The events in Amarah highlight the threat of wider violence between rival Shiite factions, who have entrenched themselves among the majority Shiite population and are blamed for killings of rival Sunnis.
Fighting broke out Thursday after Qassim al-Tamimi, the provincial head of police intelligence and a leading member of the rival Shiite Badr Brigade militia, was killed by a roadside bomb. In retaliation, his family kidnapped the teenage brother of the Mahdi Army commander in Amarah, Sheik Fadel al-Bahadli, to demand the hand-over of al-Tamimi's killers.
Amarah, a major population center in the resource-rich yet impoverished south, is a traditional center of Shiite defiance to successive Iraqi regimes. It's famed marshlands were drained by former dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1990s in reprisal for the city's role in the Shiite uprising that blazed through the region after the 1991 Gulf War.
The city lies along the Tigris river just 30 miles from the border with Iran, whose Shiite-controlled government is accused of backing Iraqi militia groups suspected of involvement in sectarian killings now wracking the country.
The showdown between the Mahdi and Badr militias has the potential to develop into an all-out conflict between the heavily armed groups and their political sponsors, both with large blocs in parliament and backers of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's ruling coalition. It also could shatter the unity of Iraq's majority Shiites at a time when an enduring Sunni insurgency shows no signs of abating.
Badr and the Mahdi Army have struggled for years for control in the south, al-Sadr's political bloc, the so-called "Sadrists", and the Badr's backers, the SCIRI, both being members of al-Maliki's ruling coalition.