BAGHDAD, 17 March 2007 — An attack against the top Sadr City official has created tension in the ranks of Shiite militiamen with some blaming a faction unhappy about cooperation with Americans, a local commander said yesterday. Gunmen opened fire on the convoy carrying Rahim Al-Darraji on Thursday in eastern Baghdad, seriously wounding him and killing two of his bodyguards on Thursday, police and a local official said.
Darraji was the principal negotiator in talks with US officials that led to an agreement to pull fighters off the streets in Sadr City, a stronghold of the feared Mahdi Army, and a local commander said suspicion fell on a group of disaffected militiamen who are angry about the deal. “This is a faction that enjoys some weight,” the Mahdi Army commander said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
He said the attack has created tension within the ranks of the militia and renewed a debate on the merits of allowing the Americans to operate in Sadr City without resistance during a security sweep aimed at ending the sectarian violence that has raged since a Feb. 22, 2006, bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
Four US soldiers, meanwhile, were killed in a roadside bombing in mainly Shiite eastern Baghdad and the military said it found a sophisticated weapon at the site that was not detonated but was of the type that Washington believes is being supplied by Iran to Shiite militias.
Two more American troops were reported killed yesterday — a US soldier in an explosion Thursday in the volatile Sunni province of Salahuddin, northwest of Baghdad, and a Marine who died in a noncombat incident Wednesday in Anbar province west of the capital.
In northern Iraq, traffic stopped and people stood still in the streets despite rain for a period of silence in Sulaimaniyah and other Kurdish cities to commemorate the anniversary of a 1988 chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed an estimated 5,600 people and left many still suffering the aftereffects of nerve and mustard gas.
Hundreds of victims’ relatives and local officials gathered in the city hall in Halabja and lit 19 candles to symbolize the 19 years since the massacre took place. Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki had planned to attend the ceremony, but his plane was unable to land at the airport and was forced to return to Baghdad because of the bad weather, Kurdish.
