BAGHDAD, 5 April 2007 — Two Iraqi lawmakers from the movement of anti-American Moqtada Al-Sadr were dismissed yesterday for meeting US officials, an official in the movement said. Abdul Mahdi Al-Mtiri, a member of the political committee, which took the decision, told Reuters the committee fired former Transport Minister Salam Al-Maliki and member of Parliament Qusay Abdul Wahab as the movement’s representatives in Parliament for meeting American officials two days ago.
Maliki denied he had been sacked and said he had not met any US officials. Mtiri said Sadr had approved the sacking, the first public sign of tension in the normally unified political movement, which holds a quarter of the parliamentary seats in the ruling Shiite Alliance of Shiite Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki. “We have fired them for meeting the occupiers. It is against our beliefs to meet the occupiers. We are seeking to replace them in Parliament with another two brothers,” Mtiri said.
Sadr, a key political ally of Maliki, led his Mehdi Army militia in two uprisings against the American military in 2004 and has long demanded US forces leave Iraq. While he has criticized American involvement in a seven-week-old security crackdown in Baghdad, he has not withdrawn his support for an offensive seen as a last-ditch attempt to halt all-out sectarian civil war in Iraq.
A US Embassy spokesman said he could neither conform nor deny a meeting between the two Sadrists and US officials took place. “The reports are not true,” Salam Al-Maliki told Reuters. “I have not met the Americans and never talked to them. Some sides are trying to create chaos and problems (inside the movement),” he said. A senior official in Sadr’s bloc in Parliament told Reuters the political committee was the highest decision-making body in the movement and that its decisions were final.
Meanwhile, gunmen killed 11 electricity plant workers in northern Iraq yesterday after stopping their vehicle and machine-gunning them as they sat inside, Iraqi police and army officials said. Police also said 18 goat herders from an extended Shiite family were kidnapped near the holy Shiite city of Kerbala, 110 km southwest of Baghdad, on Tuesday.
Iraqi and US military commanders have warned that militants are shifting the focus of their attacks to outside Baghdad, where thousands of US and Iraqi troops have taken to the streets to crack down on sectarian bloodletting. Police said gunmen ambushed the vehicle carrying power plant workers in a mainly Sunni area near Hawija, about 70 km southwest of the northern city of Kirkuk.
“Gunmen took advantage of the fact there were no police or army patrols. They stopped the vehicle, sprayed it with gunfire and then fled,” said Lt. Col. Khalil Zobaie of the Iraqi army’s 4th Division, 2nd Brigade. Seven of the workers died instantly while four others were fatally wounded and died later in hospital, police said.
