June 11, 2004
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 10 — Militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr seized a police station in the center of Najaf on Thursday, set prisoners free and allowed looters to plunder the building, witnesses and Iraqi security officials said.
It was the worst infraction of a cease-fire negotiated less than a week earlier between Mr. Sadr's militiamen and an alliance of American-trained Iraqi security forces and American occupation troops deployed outside Najaf. A hospital official said at least five people were killed and 29 were wounded in the violence Thursday.
The gunmen withdrew from the police station after several hours, but they returned throughout the day as the looting went on. At night, militiamen set fire to eight new police cars, witnesses reported.
The dead included one policeman, three insurgents and one civilian, said Hussein Hadi, an administrative assistant at the Hakim Hospital. He said the wounded included a policeman and two children.
Each side accused the other of shooting first and breaking the cease-fire, which was announced on June 4 by Adnan Zurfi, the governor of Najaf. It was unclear whether the gunmen were acting on the orders of senior commanders in Mr. Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, or had acted independently.
American military officials have said they are unsure if Mr. Sadr controls all his fighters, many of whom are youths from the poor neighborhood of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad.
[An American soldier died of wounds sustained during an attack in eastern Baghdad on Wednesday, the United States military said in a statement released Friday. Four other soldiers were wounded in the attack, the statement said.]
The cease-fire was the second one negotiated in the last several weeks; American soldiers and the Mahdi Army kept fighting after the first agreement was announced May 27.
By Thursday night, soldiers with the First Armored Division, which is assigned to the region, had not intervened in Najaf, which is regarded as holy city to Iraqi Shiites.
"We don't want the Americans to interfere in the confrontations," Mr. Zurfi said. "We will deal with the situation, and if we need help, we will ask the Americans to participate."
Later, the governor gave the Mahdi Army 24 hours to back down. But the destruction of the police station showed that the Iraqi security forces had failed to protect it against the militiamen, raising the question of whether such Iraqi forces are ready to take responsibility for securing the country and battling insurgents following the transfer of sovereignty on June 30.
Elsewhere on Thursday, the Arab satellite network Al Arabiya broadcast a videotape showing masked men with assault rifles guarding four Turkish hostages. The gunmen identified themselves as members of a group called the Jihad Squads, and demanded that Turkish companies stop doing business in Iraq.
A senior American Army officer was quoted by Reuters as saying the military had detained four Arab men with fake journalist credentials trying to enter the fortified American headquarters in Baghdad. The men were apparently posing as a television crew and were trying to drive a van into the compound. They were stopped when a sensor machine alerted guards to traces of explosive material on them, Reuters quoted the officer as saying.
Mr. Sadr has remained a major problem for the American-led occupation forces. He is wanted in connection with the killing of an American-backed cleric last April, but the Americans have hesitated in arresting or killing him for fear of angering his Shiite Muslim followers.
"We have called upon him and others to abide by the rule of law and to respect peaceful means," Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the new Iraqi interim government and a Shiite, said at a news conference on Thursday. "Any continuity of using force will be dealt with by the Iraqi government in a very serious and strong way."
Qais al-Khazali, a spokesman for Mr. Sadr, said the Najaf incident Thursday started when the police tried to raid a building housing an Islamic organization that was guarded by members of the Mahdi Army.
In the nearby city of Karbala, where American forces fought the Mahdi Army for nearly three weeks last month, police officers seized a pickup truck carrying heavy weapons at a checkpoint north of the city, a police spokesman said. Support for Mr. Sadr still runs high in parts of the capital. Posters of him were seen Thursday covering many walls in the neighborhood of Kadhimiya.
An Iraqi employee of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf for this article.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Edward Wong, "Rebel Cleric's Fighters Seize a Police Station in Najaf," The New York Times, 11 June 2004. Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html?ei=1&en=ddc83eb4d248610d&ex=1087924660&pagewanted=print&position= (16 June 2004)