Sadr’s backers protest Iraqi crackdown on militia
03/27/2008
Reuters
Published: March 27, 2008
BAGHDAD: Thousands of supporters of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr marched in Baghdad on Thursday to protest against a three-day-old crackdown against his followers and to call for the downfall of the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
There were demonstrations in the districts of Sadr City, Kadhimiya and Shula. An Interior Ministry source said hundreds of thousands had taken to the streets.
"We demand the downfall of the Maliki government," said a Sadr City resident, Hussein Abu Ali. "It does not represent the people. It represents Bush and Cheney."
The authorities had imposed curfews across southern Iraq in an effort to halt the spread of violence after the largest military offensive carried out by Iraqi forces without major support from U.S. or British combat units.
More than 100 people have been killed and hundreds wounded since the government began its crackdown in the southern city of Basra on Tuesday. Clashes have split Iraq's majority Shiites and shattered a cease-fire declared by Sadr last year.
Saboteurs blew up one of Iraq's two main oil-export pipelines from Basra, cutting off a third of the exports from the city.
The exports account for 80 percent of the government's revenue. U.S. crude oil prices rose more than $1 to around $107 a barrel after the blast.
The main riverside police base at Basra palace was hit by mortar fire Thursday morning and heavy shooting broke out in a main commercial street in the city, Iraq's second-largest, where the crackdown began on Tuesday.
"The operation is still ongoing and will continue until Basra is free from criminals and outlaws," Major General Abdul-Aziz Mohammed, head of operations at the Iraqi Defense Ministry, said in Baghdad.
Clashes have spread in the past two days to the southern cities of Kut, Hilla, Diwaniya, Amara and Kerbala, as well as to several Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad.
Basra's police chief survived an assassination attempt overnight. A roadside bomb killed three of his bodyguards.
An Interior Ministry source said 51 people died and more than 200 were wounded in the first two days of the Basra fighting.
The police chief in Wasit, another volatile southern province, said 40 people had been killed and 75 wounded in clashes there.
U.S. warplanes hovered in the sky over the provincial capital, Kut.
Sadr's aides said the cease-fire is still formally in place despite the fighting.
He has called on his followers to stage a campaign of "civil disobedience," forcing schools, universities and shops to close, and he has threatened to declare a national "civil revolt" if the two-day-old crackdown is not halted.
Mortar bombs, most apparently fired from the Sadr City area, have exploded in Baghdad for days.
Mortars killed at least nine people on Tuesday and wounded dozens, including four inside the Green Zone, the fortified diplomatic and government compound.
Iraqi indicted in U.S. spy case
The U.S. Justice Department said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein's principal foreign intelligence agency and an Iraqi spy living in the United States had organized and paid for a 2002 visit to Iraq by three House Democrats whose trip was harshly criticized by colleagues at the time, Philip Shenon reported from Washington.
The arrangements for the trip were described in the indictment of an Iraqi-born former employee of a Detroit-area charity group who was charged Wednesday with accepting millions of dollars' worth of Iraqi oil contracts in exchange for assisting the Iraqi spy agency in projects in the United States.
The indictment did not claim any wrongdoing by the three lawmakers, whose five-day trip to Iraq occurred in October 2002, five months before the American invasion.
Two continue to serve in the House: Jim McDermott of Washington and Mike Thompson of California. The other, David Bonior of Michigan, has since retired from Congress.
The three-man congressional delegation was criticized on its return to Washington as having undermined the Bush administration's campaign to gather international support to disarm and later invade Iraq.
The indictment said the trip had cost at least $34,000.
The indicted Michigan man, Muthanna al-Hanooti, was identified in court papers as a naturalized American citizen who worked for much of the 1990s and again in 2001 and 2002 as public-relations coordinator for Life for Relief and Development, a Michigan-based charity. He pleaded not guilty on Wednesday.