BAGHDAD, 26 April 2008 — Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr yesterday called for an end to fighting between the country’s security forces and his Mehdi Army militia, a week after he warned of “open war” against the government.
“I call upon my brothers in the army, police and Jaish Al-Mahdi (Mehdi Army) to stop the bloodshed,” Sadr said in a statement read out at a Baghdad mosque during Friday prayers.
On April 19 he threatened to launch an all-out war against the government amid continuing clashes between his men and US and Iraqi forces in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
Sadr said his threat was aimed at American forces. “When we threatened an open war, it was meant against the occupation and not against our people,” he said in the statement. “There will be no war between Sadrists and Iraqi brothers from any groups.” Sadr urged Iraqi security forces to “distance themselves from the occupiers.” “We want a government which is sovereign, and we reject any agreement between America and the Iraqi government. I urge the Iraqi Army to be close to the people and far from the occupier,” the cleric said.
US and Iraqi forces have fought fierce street battles in Sadr City with Sadr’s followers since March 25 when Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki ordered a crackdown in the southern city of Basra. That operation triggered clashes in other areas. Since then at least 383 people have been killed in Sadr City.
Sadr’s latest call came as fierce overnight clashes in Sadr City — a Mehdi Army stronghold — killed 11 people and wounded 32, a local medic said.
The US military said its troops killed 10 “criminals” in northeast Baghdad where Sadr City is located. The impoverished district houses some two million people.
The Sadr City medic said the dead included four old men, two women and a child. Women and children were among the wounded, he added.
The US military gave a different version of events. It told AFP that in the first incident at around 6 p.m. on Thursday, a group of US and Iraqi soldiers was attacked with 60mm mortar rounds. “A three-man mortar team was engaged and killed,” it said in a statement.
At around 10 p.m., an aerial weapons team (AWT) spotted two people digging in the ground to plant bombs. “The AWT engaged them with a Hellfire missile and killed the two.”
At 1 a.m. yesterday, an AWT spotted four people placing bombs and a Hellfire missile was fired at them, killing them, the statement said. Thirty minutes later the AWT saw two people setting up a rocket-firing position. They were “engaged with a Hellfire missile” and one was killed. The other fled, the military said.
The US military says the Sadr City operation aims to stop rocket and mortar attacks targeting the Green Zone, seat of the Iraqi government and foreign embassies. On Thursday, one person was wounded when a rocket hit the Polish Embassy there. Sadr’s supporters claim the troops have virtually laid siege to the district, however. “People are dying every day because of the siege. Parliament must oppose the operation and call for it to be halted immediately,” Falah Shanshal from Sadr’s parliamentary bloc told the assembly on Thursday.
But US Maj. Gen. Jeffery Hammond, commander of American forces in Baghdad, dismissed such claims. He said current military operations, which include building a wall dividing the southern and the northern section of the district, aimed to prevent “criminals and terrorists” firing rockets and mortar rounds.
He gave an assurance that the wall would be limited to the southern sector, about a third of the sprawling district which he said was the source of the rocket fire. “We have no plans to go further.”
US commanders said this week that almost 700 rockets and mortar rounds were fired in Baghdad in the past month — 114 of them hitting the highly fortified Green Zone.
