What the hell are we doing?
August 13, 2004
Cease-Fire in Najaf as Truce Talks With Sadr Rebels Go On
By ALEX BERENSON and JOHN F. BURNS - NYT
AJAF, Iraq, Aug. 13 — United States Army units and marines ceased offensive operations here this morning, military commanders said, while talks to try to arrive at a lasting truce were being held between Iraqi officials and aides to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
The Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry pulled back from 1920 Revolution Square, away from the holy Shrine of Imam Ali, which is roughly in the center of the cordoned area set up around the old city by American forces on Thursday.
The cordon has been loosened, so it is now possible to enter by way of the square, to the far east of the perimeter.
Marines continue to conduct patrols, but the military says it is not facing any attacks, and that the city is quiet while it awaits the outcome of the truce talks, no details of which were made available.
In the nearby city of Kufa, Iraqi security forces and members of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit raided a mosque before dawn that was being used as a militant stronghold, the coalition press office in Baghdad announced. Several militiamen were killed and eight were detained, the coalition said.
Reports that Mr. Sadr had been wounded by shrapnel could not be confirmed, the coalition said, adding that there was no indication coalition forces had been involved in an attack against the cleric.
Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy director for operations for the coalition forces, said in a statement, "Multinational forces are operating under firm instructions not to pursue Moktada and not to conduct operations within the exclusion zone surrounding the Imam Ali and Kufa mosques."
Maj. Bob Pizzitola, executive officer for the First Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment of the First Cavalry Division, said, "We are allowed to engage the enemy only in self-defense and long enough to break contact," The Associated Press reported. "That was a blanket order for everybody."
According to a spokesman for Mr. Sadr today, the cleric is willing to pull his forces out of Najaf as long as American forces also withdraw and religious authorities agree to administer the city's sacred Shiite sites, news agencies reported.
The spokesman, Sheik Ali Smeisim, said Mr. Sadr was demanding the release of his captive fighters and an amnesty for his forces, who have been battling American troops in Najaf and other Iraqi cities for the past nine days.
Sheik Smeisim also said Mr. Sadr wanted his Mahdi Army fighters to be allowed to take part in Iraq's political process.
There was no immediate confirmation of the statement.
In the southern city of Basra, gunmen seized a British journalist, identified as James Brandon of The Sunday Telegraph, from a hotel where he was staying late Thursday night, the police said today. The kidnappers threatened to kill him within 24 hours unless coalition forces withdraw from Najaf, but he was later released.
Mr. Brandon was the third journalist kidnapped in Iraq in recent months. In April, two Japanese journalists were among a group of Japanese abducted near the city of Falluja and released unharmed.
American commanders in this city of 500,000 resorted reluctantly on Thursday to a scaled-down objective, throwing a wide cordon of troops and armor around the city's heart and announcing that they planned to "further isolate" the militiamen.
Only days after the new Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, flew into Najaf on an American military helicopter and announced that there would be "no negotiations or truce," he and the American officials in Baghdad who are his indispensable partners in power appear, for now, to have backed away from a showdown. Instead, they are pursuing a combination of negotiations and a tightening blockade around the mosque.
Raising the morale of the militiamen, loyalists of Mr. Sadr have spread their insurrection across central and southern Iraq, the country's Shiite heartland.
His militiamen have attacked in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum, as well as in Diwaniya, Kut, Al-Hayy, Nasiriya, Amara and Basra, towns that are among the largest Shiite population centers, each of them a way station for American and British troops in the invasion 16 months ago that toppled Saddam Hussein.
The fiercest fighting Thursday, apart from Najaf, appeared to have been in Kut, a city about 150 miles south of Baghdad that was briefly taken over by Mr. Sadr's fighters in the spring.
According to Qassim al-Mayahi, the head of al-Zahra hospital, 84 people were killed and more than 170 wounded, many of them civilians, in fighting that began with rebel attacks on government buildings on Wednesday. A police commander said the attacks subsided only after American warplanes staged a two-hour bombing raid before dawn on Thursday of a district where Mr. Sadr had a militia base.
At a news conference on Thursday evening, the Iraqi interior minister, Falah Naqib, painted a grim picture of the situation created by the Sadr forces, calling it "a war." Dismissing Mr. Sadr's claim to be the leader of a national resistance movement, he said: "This doesn't fall into the category of national resistance. It is an assault on the Iraqi people."
Qassim Daoud, a minister of state in Dr. Allawi's cabinet, said there could be only one response. "The only solution is the rule of law," and bringing an end to attempts by Mr. Sadr to seize power, he said. "These people are trying to deprive the Iraqi people of their rights," he added.
The situation in Najaf was redolent of events in April, when American commanders, confronted then as now by an uprising stirred by Mr. Sadr, built up a powerful strike force around Najaf with a vow to uproot the cleric and his fighters from the Imam Ali mosque, then decided that the political costs of attacking or damaging the shrine compelled an accommodation.
Then, Mr. Sadr won agreement to an "exclusion zone" in Najaf's center that left him free to build his militia and advance himself as the authentic leader of Shiite resistance to American military occupation.
In a statement issued in Baghdad, Dr. Allawi, whose vows to crush the insurgents are a hallmark of his first weeks in office, made it clear that concerns about Shiite reaction to an assault on the mosque had given him pause. "I would like to relay to the noble people of Iraq that the holy shrine will remain safe from all attacks that could possibly harm its sacredness," he said.
The goal now, he said on Thursday, would be to get the rebels in the shrine to surrender their weapons and leave, taking advantage of a 30-day amnesty for rebels announced last weekend.
One aide said that Dr. Allawi, himself a Shiite, had been influenced by a growing number of calls for restraint from other leading Shiites in the new political establishment in Baghdad. As well, they said, he had taken note of a statement issued from a London hospital on behalf of Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most revered of Iraq's Shiite religious leaders, who left the country just before the uprising reignited. Aides have said that Ayatollah Sistani, who is 73, is suffering from a heart condition.
Throughout Mr. Sadr's insurrections, dating to March, Ayatollah Sistani has remained noncommittal, a stance many Iraqis say reflects both his contempt for Mr. Sadr as a religious upstart and an acknowledgment that he has a widespread following that may have to be factored in to any future political arrangements.
The ayatollah said Najaf and other Shiite cities were `experiencing tragic circumstances now, in which sanctities are violated, blood is shed, and properties destroyed, with no deterrence.` He went on to call for a negotiated solution. `His eminence calls on all factions to work seriously to end this crisis soon, and lay principles to ensure that it does not occur again,` the statement said.
By late Thursday, negotiations had begun in Najaf.
Alex Berenson reported from Najaf, Iraq, for this article and John F. Burns from Baghdad.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
