24 January 2008

Iraq toll mounts as forces fight cult

The Independent, 21 January 2008

Some 276 people were killed, wounded or captured by government forces fighting a millenarian Shia cult in southern Iraq over the past three days, the Iraqi Ministry of Defence said in Baghdad yesterday.

The heavy losses in gun battles between the ‘Supporters of the Mahdi’ group and the police and army in Basra and Nasiriya underlines how swiftly violence can explode in Iraq where everybody is heavily armed. In Nasiriya three senior officers were among the dead.

The movement, led by Ahmad al-Hassani, also known as Ahmad al-Yamani, believes in the imminent return of the Messiah but exactly why its members should have taken to the streets in several cities remains unclear. In Basra they reportedly first killed several traffic policemen and commandeered six empty vehicles and two police cars. They later captured an oil facilities building and a hospital. At one point there was fighting in 75 per cent of Basra, a city of two million people, according to the police chief Abdul Jalil Khalaf.

It is a measure of the lack of information on what is happening outside central Baghdad that casualty figures vary widely with one source claiming that 97 died and 217 were wounded in Basra alone. In Baghdad the National Security Adviser Muwafaq al-Rubaie was trapped in a Shia mosque in the Sh’la district in west Baghdad but it is not clear if his attackers were also from the ‘Supporters of the Mahdi’ movement, that appears to have supporters in every Shia city.

Southern Iraq, which is overwhelmingly Shia, is riven by rivalries between different Shia parties that sporadically leads to turf battles. The most powerful militia is the Mehdi Army of the nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr who this week threatened to end a six-month truce he declared last August after fighting with government security forces controlled by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) in the holy city of Kerbala. ISCI, though never very popular among Shia, controls the police and local government apparatus in much of southern Iraq, and has long feuded with the Sadrists.

The US military said yesterday in Baghdad that Iran was supplying less weaponry to insurgent groups in Iraq, but was continuing to train and finance them. The US has long accused Iran of being the source of sophisticated roadside bombs used by Shia militias against US troops. In practice, however, Iran has always supported almost every Shia party including ISCI, an important US ally, which was originally established under the auspices of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards during the Iran-Iraq war in 1982.

The violence over the weekend took place as Iraqi Shia, 60 per cent of the population, took part in ceremonies marking Ashura, the traditional day of mourning for the death of Imam Hussein, killed in the battle of Kerbala in 680 AD. With some 2.5 million Shia travelling to Kerbala the day is often marked by violence.

The killing of Imam Hussein is re-enacted in passion plays and this in turn can lead to violence. In Basra a crowd reportedly set about an actor playing the role of one of the killers of the Imam and his doomed followers. They beat him so badly that he returned to his home to get his AK-47 assault rifle and opened fire on the crowd watching the play, killing one onlooker.

Ashura is also a show of strength by the Iraqi Shia who replaced the Sunni as the dominant force in Iraqi politics on the fall of Saddam Hussein five years ago. In alliance with the Kurds they make up the government since the elections of 2005 but have proved unable to set up a stable government able to conciliate the Sunni or act without American support.



Original URL: "Iraq toll mounts as forces fight cult," The Independent, 21 January 2008
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3356428.ece