Rival militias threaten Iraq’s south

10/26/2006

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The intensifying battle between Iraq’s strongest Shiite militias — the Mahdi Army and Badr Brigades — threatens to destabilize Iraq’s oil-rich south and compound chaos in the capital. The outcome also could decide whether Iraq stays whole or breaks up.

The militias have become the largest security threat to a country already rocked by more than three years of attacks by Sunni Arab insurgents on U.S. and Iraqi forces and the Shiite population.

Despite repeated vows to crush the militias, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has resisted U.S. pressure to move against the groups and their roaming deaths squads because he draws most of his support from the politicians who run them.

The Mahdi Army and Badr Brigades have repeatedly clashed since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, most recently in the southern city of Amarah. Mahdi militiamen briefly took control of the city this month and fought gunbattles with the Badr Brigades-dominated police that killed 31 and wounded dozens.

“That was the worst time we had to go through in the city,” said Abdul-Hussein Adnan, a 37-year-old teacher from Amarah. “Given the high number of casualties and the tribal nature of the city, I expect things to get worse. It’s impossible in Amarah for someone to be killed and his killers not hunted down and killed in revenge.”

In Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city and the major southern metropolis, tensions between the two armed Shiite groups simmers constantly, occasionally breaking into conflict.

The militias also have a long history of suspicion and mistrust in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

Last year, Badr Brigades supporters burned part of the Najaf offices used by the Mahdi Army and its leader, radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Mahdi militiamen retaliated across the south by sacking the offices of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the country’s largest Shiite party which has the Badr Brigades as its military wing.

SCIRI officials have deep ties to Iran, where many of them spent years in exile during Saddam’s rule.

Although enmity between the two militias dates to the 1990s, it is now rooted in the desire of their political sponsors to dominate Iraq’s Shiite community. They focus particularly on the Shiite heartland south of Baghdad, a region stretching over nine provinces that is home to Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines in Najaf and Karbala and much of the country’s oil wealth.

The rivalry could shatter the unity of the Shiite community at a time when many of its members feel threatened by the Sunni Arab-led insurgency and are alarmed by what they see as a gradual shift of U.S. support away from them and toward Sunnis. The Sunni Arab minority oppressed the Shiite majority for decades before Saddam’s ouster.

A Shiite official who has regular contact with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, said al-Sistani was discreetly trying to defuse tensions between the Badr Brigades and the Mahdi Army.

“His eminence does not want to see Shiite-Shiite fighting because the only losers will be the Shiites themselves,” the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The Badr Brigades is seldom mentioned when the United States calls for al-Maliki to disband armed groups, perhaps because the Americans still see the militia’s political leadership as a center of power that can be swayed to U.S. policy goals.

Created in Iran in the 1980s and once headed by SCIRI leader Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, Iraq’s most powerful politician, the Badr Brigades is suspected of assassinating Saddam loyalists, senior members of his outlawed Baath Party and Sunni figures suspected of supporting the insurgency.

Better organized than the Mahdi Army, tightly knit and secretive, the Badr Brigades is thought to have largely stayed away from the wholesale sectarian killings blamed on the Mahdi Army since the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra last February.

SCIRI leaders maintain their militia was dissolved and turned into a political movement. However, it is widely known that the Iranian-trained fighters remain organized as a militia and have infiltrated police forces.

The Badr fighters’ ability to avoid negative media attention has prompted charges by al-Sadr’s followers that the rival militia is working with the U.S. military to drag the Mahdi Army into a fight it cannot win.

On Wednesday, U.S. and Iraqi troops raided Sadr City, the Mahdi Army’s stronghold in Baghdad, in what al-Sadr supporters fear could be the start of an all-out offensive against the militia.

“There is a huge conspiracy supervised by the U.S. occupation to target the Sadrists,” said lawmaker Hassan Shanshal, a supporter of al-Sadr. “There are daily provocations by the Americans.”

Looming ahead, however, is a battle the two sides will certainly fight — a contest over nationwide local elections for provincial councils.

The last vote in 2005 was boycotted by Sunni Arabs, about 20 percent of the population, and al-Sadr showed little interest in taking part after a year mostly spent battling U.S. troops.

That allowed SCIRI to take control of almost all of southern Iraq’s provincial councils as well as those in Baghdad. The Sadrists are eager to wrest away political hold on local government.

SCIRI has thrown its weight behind a federated Iraq in which southern provinces are joined in a region similar to an autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq. Fearing isolation in the mostly desert center of the country, Sunni Arabs see federalism as a recipe for Iraq’s breakup and suspect an Iranian hand.

Al-Sadr, who has often derided his SCIRI rivals for their close ties to Iran, also is opposed to federalism.

Federalism is enshrined in the constitution adopted in a referendum a year ago. Parliament this month agreed to allow creation of federal regions, empowering provincial councils elected in the next local polls to initiate such action, subject to the approval of voters.

“We will not be dragged into a fight,” said Nasser al-Saadi, a Sadrist lawmaker. “Instead, we will prepare for the elections and, when we take control of local governments, we will not allow federalism.”