BAGHDAD, 9 May 2008 — The Iraqi government is bracing for a big offensive against loyalists of Moqtada Sadr, according to a politician from his bloc, while three people were killed and 20 injured in attacks, including a former commander of Al-Qaeda in Iraq group.
Fighting between government and US troops and Al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia raging since the end of March has left around 1,000 people dead and over 2,500 wounded, many of them civilians. “Iraqi and US military preparations are under way to move into Sadr City,” Asma Al-Musawi, a member of Al-Sadr Bloc, told reporters.
The government has told people in two of the 79 neighborhoods that make up Sadr City to leave their homes in preparation for a push into the area, Musawi said. “The area is on the brink of a big humanitarian disaster,” she warned.
The battle has intensified recently with street to street and house to house fighting. Government and US forces have so far failed to subdue the militiamen despite almost daily airstrikes. US troops have set up concrete barriers in the southern parts of the district. Hundreds of people have fled the fighting in the past days.
Civilians caught up in fighting between security forces and Shiite militiamen in the Baghdad slum are running out of food, water and medicines and relief agencies are unable to bring in supplies, officials said yesterday. Aid officials and an Iraqi government spokesman denied reports there had been a mass displacement of residents from Sadr City, home to 2 million people and the stronghold of Mehdi Army militia.
They said it was too dangerous to get aid into the eastern Baghdad district, where hundreds of people have been killed in weeks of clashes. Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki, seeking to impose law and order, launched a crackdown on militias in late March that some analysts believed could trigger an all-out showdown with Sadr.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, three people were killed and 16 injured in four blasts, security officials said. In one incident, a bomb blast on a bus left one passenger and four others injured in Baladiyat in east Baghdad. An Iraqi army patrol was hit by a bomb near a playground in Shaab.
In another blast, three civilians were injured by a bomb that went off near the National Theatre in the central Karada district, which was the scene of a bomb attack Tuesday targeting the wife of the Iraqi president.
In the northern Salahaddin province, a commander of a tribal police unit, who was formerly a senior member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network in Iraq, was wounded along with three policemen in a suicide bombing.
Dana Graber Ladek, an Iraq specialist at the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Amman, said 500 families fled when US and Iraqi operations began. “Since then, very few Iraqis have been able to leave due to curfews and ... insecurity,” Ladek said by phone.
“We need that corridor opened to allow aid in ... by US and Iraqi forces, by everyone involved in the conflict.” Ladek said relief was needed urgently. Public distribution of food rations had stopped and food prices were rising.
Water and medical services were running short in the affected areas, especially since a US missile strike near a Sadr City hospital on Saturday damaged a number of ambulances. “If (the conflict) goes on for very long ... we risk some more serious consequences like an epidemic of cholera or malnutrition,” Ladek said.
Maliki’s crackdown was initially launched in the southern Shiite city of Basra, where the Mehdi Army put up stiff resistance for a week until Sadr ordered his fighters off the street.
The US military said it had killed 17 militants in various battles around Baghdad since Wednesday, mostly using helicopter strikes to respond to attacks on ground forces.
Tahseen Sheikhli, the government’s civilian spokesman for security in Baghdad, accused gunmen of attacking aid convoys trying to reach Sadr City. “Who is responsible for the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sadr City? Isn’t it the armed groups?” he said. “We have done our best to let food aid reach affected families.”
