DARBANDIKHAN, Iraq, 16 March 2003 — Hundreds of fighters from Iraq’s main Shiite opposition faction put on a rare show of military force at their northern Iraqi base yesterday, with their leadership vowing to act independently of the United States in the battle against Saddam Hussein.
During a parade by the Al-Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Iran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SAIRI), the group’s No. 2 said his well-disciplined army would quickly move to secure areas captured from the Iraqi regime in the hours following a US assault.
“We will do it our way. We have our own plans,” Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim told reporters at the Al-Badr Brigade’s recently installed base in a lush green valley near Darbandikhan, in the southeast of the Kurdish autonomous zone close to the Iranian border.
“The message is that it is Iraqis who should oust Saddam Hussein. Our role will be real participation, and we do not need outside help,” Al-Hakim said. “We are not going to sit here and wait, we will be providing security on the ground.”
When asked if his group was in any way coordinating its military operations with Washington, he said that “on the level of field actions, there is no specific agreement with any country because we don’t need it.”
The Al-Badr Brigade, which has up to now been largely kept out of the public eye, is believed to number between 10,000 and 15,000 fighters.
Many of the fighters, based in an area controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of Jalal Talabani, crossed from Iran in recent months in the countdown to an anticipated US-led war aimed at toppling the Iraqi president. SAIRI is also engaged in talks with Iran on allowing more of its fighters to cross into either northern or southern Iraq, officials here said, although they refused to say how many troops were now based here.
The parade outside Darbandikhan, 45 km south of Sulaymaniya, included some 800 fighters from the militia’s Imam Ali unit. They were carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and communications equipment.
Most of the fighters, who appeared to have been recently equipped with new uniforms and weapons, were in their 30s or early 40s. Dozens of new Japanese-made pick-ups, mounted with recoilless rifles, mortars and rocket launchers also rolled past a podium of SAIRI leaders to the beat of a small military band.
The position of the units camped out here, an area that has been off-limits to Baghdad since the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, could put them to within 150 km of Baghdad as soon as war breaks out.
