IRAQ: Fog of war

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

As Basra and Baghdad begin digging out from five days of fighting between Shiite militiamen and Iraqi and U.S. forces, people outside Iraq, and a lot of people in the country, are no doubt scratching their heads as they try to decipher what really happened.

The parties involved have not always helped clarify things.

Iraqi and U.S. officials say the military offensive that sparked the fighting was aimed at criminal gangs and rogue militias, not at the Mahdi Army militia of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. But it was Sadr’s fighters who went on the defensive. It was also Sadr’s call for a cease-fire that led to the calming of things today, and it was Sadr who got thanks from U.S. and Iraqi officials for calling the halt to combat.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki called Sadr’s move a ‘step in the right direction.’ U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Nantongo echoed that today. ‘We join the prime minister in welcoming Sayyid Al Sadr’s statement,’ she said.

Sadr, meanwhile, insists that his militia is innocent of the wanton violence that Maliki says prompted the crackdown, yet he showed a masterful command of the bloodshed. Shortly after his cease-fire call Sunday evening, the fighting that had raged in Iraq’s strongholds ground nearly to a halt.

The U.S. military said it was surprised how quickly the effects were felt. Navy Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said that as of this afternoon, there had been a 20% drop in attacks nationwide compared with the previous day.

Iraq’s government now is faced with trying to portray the Basra offensive as successful, even though Maliki’s security forces proved unable to flush militias from Basra, as the prime minister had vowed to do. Three days into the battle, he called for help from American and British forces. U.S. warplanes conducted airstrikes, and U.S. Army special forces were involved in some ground operations.

As this was going on, U.S. officials hammered away at the idea that the Basra offensive was Iraqi-led and Iraqi-organized and a promising display of Maliki’s determination to take on the country’s militia problem — but not the Sadr’s militiamen, they hastened to add. President Bush called it a ‘defining moment’ for Iraq.

There has been no U.S. reaction to the news that Iran, whom Washington accuses of meddling in Iraq’s violence, played a key role in bringing the standoff to an end. Iraqi lawmakers have said they went to Iran and asked for help in brokering a deal between Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran, and Iraqi leaders.

Nantongo said she had no information on Iran’s role.

This morning brought fresh attacks on the Green Zone, the Baghdad diplomatic enclave that was pounded throughout the fighting by missiles fired from Mahdi Army strongholds in east Baghdad. That raised questions about the effectiveness of Sadr’s call for calm. Nobody was reported killed in the latest Green Zone strikes, but Iraq’s Interior Ministry gave a grim accounting from the previous week of battles:

605 people dead, including 325 in Basra and 140 in Baghdad.

And the U.S. military today announced the deaths of two more troops. An Army soldier died in mainly Shiite northeast Baghdad earlier in the day when his vehicle hit a roadside bomb, and a Marine died March 29 of wounds suffered in an attack six days earlier, military statements said. The deaths bring to at least 4,011 the number of American forces killed in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to www.icasualties.org.

— Times staff writers