Marines Put Militias On Deadline in Najaf

[thedrifter]

Marines Put Militias On Deadline in Najaf

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 10, 2003; Page A15


NAJAF, Iraq, Sept. 9 -- The U.S. military commander in this sacred Shiite Muslim city demanded today that religious factions remove armed followers from the streets by Friday. Dozens of militiamen were deployed here last week in a move the factions said was an attempt to improve security in a city still reeling from a car bomb that killed a senior cleric and scores of others.

The deadline was set at a meeting today between U.S. military officials and Najaf's political parties, which have complained about a lack of security in the streets. Lt. Col. Chris Woodbridge, the commander of the Marines occupying Najaf, said only the police force would be allowed to carry weapons in the city, home to Iraq's holiest Shiite shrine.

"You're either a police officer or not," Woodbridge said in an interview. "You can only have one police force."

At Friday prayers last week, dozens of armed men belonging to the Badr Brigade, a militia loyal to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, were visible throughout Najaf in black uniforms and arm bands that read "Badr" in Arabic. About a dozen were posted atop the shrine, and others manned checkpoints on roads leading to the grounds. Several pickup trucks, with men carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, roamed through the streets and the perimeter of the shrine, where the car bomb exploded Aug. 29.

The bomb killed Ayatollah Mohammed Bakir Hakim, who was head of the council.

In neighboring Kufa, armed men loyal to a rival of the Supreme Council, a junior cleric named Moqtada Sadr, helped man checkpoints around the city's sprawling mosque, where he delivers the sermon every Friday.

At a news conference Saturday, L. Paul Bremer, the civilian administrator in Iraq, said that the additional security in Najaf had the blessing of the Coalition Provisional Authority and that the militias were working "in full cooperation with the coalition forces."

But Woodbridge said today that only the police are authorized to carry weapons. Rather than create a confrontation last week, just days after the assassination of Hakim, the Marines chose to wait until tempers had cooled to order the militias' removal, he said. He called many of the armed men "thugs" and said he warned the parties not to try to advance their own agendas.

"They're not to mistake our kindness for weakness," Woodbridge said. "We want to discourage them from exploiting that opportunity presented by the bombing of the shrine to field a force and to gain a little bit of leverage."

The question of security and who controls it has become one of the most sensitive points of disagreement between officials with the U.S.-led occupation and Iraqis who complain that U.S. efforts have fallen short. U.S. officials have increasingly turned to the Iraqi police as the front line in enforcing order, but to many Iraqis, that force still suffers from a lack of credibility or is shadowed by ties to its predecessor under former president Saddam Hussein's government. In increasingly vocal terms, members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council have insisted that more authority be turned over to them in devising security and vetting those responsible for it.

"How much more sacrifice shall we give than the blood of Ayatollah Hakim?" said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, director of the Supreme Council's political bureau. Referring to the Americans, he said: "They cannot do it themselves, simply. They cannot do it."

Neither the Supreme Council, whose new leader sits on the Governing Council, nor Sadr's followers are expected to defy the deadline. Abdel-Mehdi suggested that men would store their weapons at home and avoid a confrontation. Sadr, while not addressing the question directly at a news conference Monday, said his militia was unarmed and dedicated only to "peaceful resistance."

"The feedback so far is that they're cooperating," Woodbridge said.

In addition to the police force of 3,000, a new guard that will eventually number 400 has begun patrolling the area around the Imam Ali shrine. Woodbridge said religious leaders would be allowed to keep a personal armed detachment of no more than 12 bodyguards. While the police force will accept volunteers, he said, they will not be allowed to carry weapons, which are plentiful in Iraq.

Rather than just a question of law and order, the dispute over who carries arms goes to the heart of Iraq's postwar arrangement. In a country riven by ethnic and sectarian differences, the prospect of competing militias has alarmed military officials charged with keeping the peace and even some Iraqis who fear the potential for violence in a country with a long history of it.

"This could very easily become an extremely tense confrontation, and we don't want that," Woodbridge said. "We're not going to let this escalate into a flash point. There is only one legitimate authority and that is the Najaf police."

But for many in Najaf, the bombing at such a sacred site has sent a chill through the city, and a sense of siege has ensued. The streets are filled with rumors that cadres loyal to Hussein are planning attacks against Shiites, who are the majority in Iraq but suffered the brunt of his government's repression, and that militant Sunni Muslims from Iraq or abroad have entered the fray.

"Iraq is inside a very, very long, dark tunnel," said Sheik Bashir Hussein Najafi, the son of one of Iraq's leading ayatollahs in Najaf. "We hope to God things will get better, but we see the next day worse than the one before."

"If we left security to the Americans to protect the clergy," he added, "all the ayatollahs would be dead."

Until now, most of the violence has remained focused in Baghdad and to the Sunni Muslim areas north and west of the capital, where U.S. forces face a simmering guerrilla war. In an attack today in Fallujah, three soldiers were wounded when their vehicle struck an improvised mine. Two other soldiers were wounded in Baghdad in a similar attack, said Staff Sgt. Shane Slaughter, a military spokesman. In Balad, a city 50 miles north of Baghdad, a soldier was wounded in a mortar attack Monday, he said.


? 2003 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2003Sep9.html


Sempers,

Roger