April 19, 2008
The New York Times
James Glani and Alissa J. Rubin

Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting with little resistance, said Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

The developments followed a pattern that has been seen again and again in the Basra fighting, where Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi militia has battled Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreated. Why the fighters have adopted those tactics is unknown, but American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi units trained and equipped by Iran have played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.

Mr. Sadr issued a statement on Saturday threatening that he would declare "open war until liberation" against the government if the crackdown against his followers did not cease, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran, said the government had abused the trust he tried to sow in August by declaring a unilateral truce.

Whether to counter allegations that Iran actively supported the Mahdi Army, or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. Even more strikingly, he called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.

“The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws,” Mr. Qumi said. “This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”

Strikingly, however, Ambassador Qumi simultaneously condemned American-led operations against the Mahdi Army in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City, where major new clashes broke out on Saturday. He said the American-backed fighting in that densely populated district was only causing civilian casualties rather than achieving any positive result.

“The American insistence on coming and having a siege on a couple of million people in one area and striking them with warplanes and shell them randomly — many innocent people will be killed through this operation,” Mr. Qumi said. “The result of this operation will be the sabotage and destruction of buildings, and many people will leave their homes.”

The apparent stand-down by Mr. Sadr’s armed supporters in Basra, in contrast to their continued fighting in Sadr City, renewed questions about where the Sadrist movement stands in Iraq’s unstable political landscape. While his supporters have often been spoilers, they also represent the poor and disenfranchised, who were battered under Saddam Hussein, making it difficult for the government to write them off.

But it is not clear whether they are moving at all toward becoming a more purely political movement, since they have continued to fight in some areas even as they have been forced to cede ground in Southern Iraq.

The combination of Mr. Qumi’s stance and the stand-down of militia fighters in Basra may give fuel to any of several different theories on Iran’s role in the overall conflict in Iraq — a role that many senior Iraqi and American officials have asserted, with varying degrees of proof, is substantial.

Mr. Maliki’s abrupt assault on Basra last month has been widely criticized as being poorly planned. But it is believed to have been encouraged by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a crucial element of his governing coalition. Many members of the armed wing of the council, called the Badr Organization, joined the government’s security forces early in the Iraq conflict, and have been battling the Sadr-led forces. Mr. Sadr’s political movement is also an important rival of the supreme council.

Because leaders of the council and its armed wing spent years and sometimes decades in exile in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was assumed that the silence of the Badr Organization during the Basra offensive indicated that Iran had given at least tacit approval for the move.

Mr. Qumi’s statements now give strong support to that view. They also suggest that Iran, which has historically tried to play Shiite groups against each other in Iraq, has decided to pull back on its support for the group that American officials have continually pointed to as an Iranian-trained troublemaker: Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

Whether that means that the stock of Mr. Sadr himself has fallen is unknown, although Mr. Qumi seemed to avoid discussing the cleric and certainly refused to give him any credit for ending the fighting in Basra. At one during the fighting, members of the Iraqi Parliament traveled to Iran, where Mr. Sadr is believed to be residing, and helped negotiate the terms of a truce.

The latest offensive in Basra started at 6 a.m. Saturday when American and British warplanes and artillery pounded Hayaniya, in northern Basra. The neighborhood had remained a Mahdi Army stronghold after earlier operations had ousted them from the center of the city. “The assault was against known criminal rocket and mortar sites west of Hayaniya,” according to a statement issued in Baghdad by the American military.

The bombing campaign, which could be heard throughout the city, according to residents, prepared the ground for Iraqi troops, who by evening were moving through the district doing house-to-house searches.

Earlier in the week, Iraqi troops had searched for weapons caches, finding explosives, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and the components for fashioning explosively formed penetrators, an armor piercing form of roadside bomb that has been used primarily to attack American and British military vehicles.

Lt. Gen. Mohan al-Freeji, who is one of the officers in charge of the Basra operation, told reporters that “a few days ago, we told the insurgents to give up their heavy weapons and the I.E.D.s. But until yesterday night they shot mortar shells and planted improvised explosive devices in Hayaniya’s streets. They are gangsters who are fighting under the name of Mahdi Army.”

The Mahdi Army had finally withdrawn completely by Tuesday afternoon, said General Khalaf, the interior ministry spokesman.

“The operation was completed successfully,” General Khalaf said. “Our forces are inside Hyaniya and have not met with any resistance. Now they are searching houses and taking up positions on the roofs of high buildings, he said, adding that Iraqi soldiers control all the exits and entrances to the area.”

Both Mr. Sadr’s office in Basra and the Iraqi general in charge of the operation said there had been little resistance from gunmen there. Aides to Mr. Sadr said that that was because the cleric had ordered his fighters to withdraw. “The Iraqi Army entered Hayaniya and the Mahdi Army did not resist because they made a commitment to obey Moktada al-Sadr’s order,” said Harith al-Athari, the head of the Sadr office in Basra.

He added that they had also withdrawn from government buildings as required by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s request that all militias leave government property.

In a statement in Baghdad, the American military said in a statement that British and American military training teams were working alongside Iraqi soldiers and the Iraqi military consulted with senior British and American officers before undertaking this stage in the battle.

The consultation is a contrast to the early days of the Basra operation, personally led by Mr. Maliki, when Iraqi troops moved in on Basra, with little prior consultation with either the Americans the British, the coalition troops who have a base in the area. Later, members of Mr. Maliki’s inner circle conceded that they had a communications problem, especially with the British, that needed to be rectified.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Basra and Baghdad.

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