BAGHDAD, 6 April 2004 — To the horror of the occupying powers in Iraq, the country’s ever more bloody insurgency at last spilled over into the majority Shiite community on Sunday as Spanish and other Western soldiers fought gunmen in the holy city of Najaf with the loss of at least 20 lives, most of them Iraqis.
The shooting started after protestors gathered at the Spanish base on the outskirts of the city following the arrest of an aide to Muqtada Sadr, the young Shiite cleric whose “Army of Mehdi” has never before fired its guns.
That the latest bloodbath should have occurred in Najaf was as dangerous as it was painfully symbolic. Even as bullets skittered past them, protestors held up pictures of the Imams Ali and Hussein whose epic martyrdom is being mourned in every Shiite home. That it should be Spanish troops who were engaged in the battle, only weeks from being withdrawn from Iraq by the new Spanish Socialist government, was a final irony.
More than 200 were also wounded during the three-hour gun battle. At Najaf’s main hospital, many of the dead were wearing the black uniform of Sadr’s army but two Iraqi police officers and four soldiers from El Salvador were also among the dead. Each side claimed the other had started the shooting. Sadr himself called for an end to the fighting, his spokesman, Abdulhadi Al-Daraji, claiming that the “arrogant powers say thank you for your peaceful protests and then fire on the demonstrators.”
The demonstrations had their roots in the decision of the US proconsul, Paul Bremer, to close Muqtada Sadr’s small circulation weekly newspaper, Al-Hawza, in Baghdad a week ago for “inciting violence against coalition forces.” It now seems that his decision to shut down the paper — its circulation of 10,000 was hardly going to arouse Shiites to attack Western troops — has incited violence on a far greater scale than Bremer could have imagined.
Yet he managed to say all the wrong things again on Sunday. “This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line and they have moved to violence,” he announced. “This will not be tolerated. This will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people and this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi security forces.” The trouble is that Bremer has said all this before — but about Sunni insurgents — and his warnings almost always increase the anger of his antagonists and bring no end to violence. Muqtada Sadr, of course, has his own reasons to find political satisfaction in this bloodshed.
In the shadow of his infinitely more learned — and judicious — clerical superior, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Sadr has for months attempted to present himself as the putative leader of the Shiite community. The Anglo-American occupying powers have long suspected that Sadr wanted just such a confrontation to rally support for his minority movement although why they should have arrested Mustafa Yacoubi, Sadr’s aide, remains a political mystery. Bremer, it seems, has now helped to bring that confrontation about. A newspaper that was ignored by millions of Iraqis, but whose sarcastic criticism of Bremer is said to have personally annoyed the American proconsul, may henceforth be known as the paper which started a Shiite insurrection.
Sadr may be gambling that the other Shiite militias will fall into step with his own armed men. If this happens and the insurgency spreads to other Shiite cities, then the entire occupation of Iraq could become untenable. The Americans can scarcely contain the Sunni Muslim revolt to the north; they cannot fight another community, this one representing 60 percent of Iraqis, even if British troops who control the largely Shiite city of Basra, become involved.
The Spanish base in Najaf is located in the campus of Kufa University, a broad expanse of land close to the Euphrates River and defended by troops from San Salvador.
The Spanish — their total force contains 1,300 men and women but only a few hundred are stationed in Najaf — are due to leave on June 30 but were anyway never part of the occupying power. Many of the soldiers in Najaf are involved in irrigation and agricultural projects. When bombs killed almost 200 people in Madrid last month, Shiite clerics visited the Spanish troops in Najaf to express their condolences. That is unlikely to happen again.
More Shiite protests occurred in the center of Baghdad where American-paid Iraqi police fired rifles into the air.
