NAJAF, 11 May 2004 — Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army yesterday to launch a broad new offensive against US-led occupying forces following a US crackdown on his strongholds in Baghdad and across the south.
But though US forces claimed new successes against Sadr’s men, President George W. Bush’s political goals in Iraq took a blow from a Red Cross report showing it found troops abusing detainees months before US officials addressed the issue.
Standing by beleaguered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush promised a “full accounting for the cruel and disgraceful abuse of Iraqi detainees”. But he renewed his insistence that it was the work of a few, seven of whom now face court martial.
“I know how painful it is to see a small number dishonor the honorable cause in which so many are sacrificing,” he said.
Reinforcing claims made by former prisoners, the Red Cross said, however, that it found systematic ill-treatment of naked detainees in October, before the photographs that sparked the scandal were taken and before the army opened a case in January.
Bush’s ally in Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is also under fire over troops’ treatment of Iraqis. He apologized. But with public opinion never hot for war, British involvement in Iraq and Blair’s own future were called into question.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told Parliament two abuse cases involving British soldiers might soon lead to prosecutions. The shocking photographic revelations that soldiers who invaded Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein had abused and humiliated prisoners are undermining efforts to win Arab sympathy ahead of a handover to an Iraqi government at the end of next month.
On the military front, Sadr’s chief aide said at his main base in Najaf that a new phase had begun in a month-long insurgency across southern Iraq. “We have now entered a second phase of resistance,” he said. “There will be volcanic eruptions.”
But US commanders, helped by rival Shi’ite leaders, sound increasingly confident of containing the Mehdi Army. Tanks flattened Sadr’s office in Baghdad’s Sadr City district overnight and US officials made a hard-to-verify claim that troops killed 16 fighters in the sprawling slum after killing 19 the previous night.
US forces, spurred on by mounting irritation with Sadr among Shi’ite elders, have also squeezed the outskirts of Najaf.
With British forces around Basra, they have been taking back key positions such as police stations in a string of towns across Shi’ite southern Iraq. An armoured US column rolled again into the center of Karbala yesterday.
Hoon said the situation remained tense around Basra and Amara and further violence was likely in the coming days.
“Our policy now is to extend the state of resistance and to move it to all of Iraq because of the occupiers’ military escalation and crossing of all red lines in the cities of Karbala and Najaf,” Sadr Lt. Qais Al-Khazali said.
The US commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, said his troops were doing their best to avoid inflaming religious passions by intruding on sacred ground. But he said: “We will be patient, but our patience won’t last forever. There is a limit to our patience with Sadr.”
There have been signs Shi’ite militants might join forces with minority Sunni guerrillas to the north and west, despite a history of strife that saw Sunnis oppress Shi’ites under Saddam.
US Marines made an effort to show they had restored peace to the city of Falluja by driving an armored convoy into the center for the first time since a bloody siege began last month. But scenes of armed guerrillas cheering the convoy’s departure suggested that peace remains rather fragile.
A report, published in the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by the ICRC, said Red Cross officials complained in October — two months before the pictures in the first US court martial case were taken — about prisoners being held naked in total darkness in Saddam’s Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
A US military intelligence officer defended the treatment at the time as “part of the process”, said the ICRC, which also disclosed that its president went to Washington in January to alert Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to the agency’s concerns.
Rumsfeld said he learned of problems only in January. Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, a member of Iraq’s Governing Council, demanded punishment for “all those who contributed to this crime, whether by ordering it, hiding these facts or not talking about them”, a Kuwaiti newspaper said.
The killings of a South African and a New Zealand engineer in a drive-by shooting in the northern oilfields and a bomb that slowed up oil exports from the south also struck at US efforts to stabilize the country ahead of the June 30 handover.
