Blustery threats are issuing from the Puppets who claim “Iraqi forces” are going to storm the Imam Ali shrine “within hours” and teach the Mahdi Army and Moqtada al Sadr a lesson.
To prevent an imminent attack on his forces, who are holed up in the revered Imam Ali Shrine in Najaf, al-Sadr must immediately disarm his Mahdi Army militia and hand over its weapons to the authorities, Minister of State Qassim Dawoud said.
The cleric must also sign a statement saying he will refrain from future violence and release all civilians and Iraqi security forces his militants have kidnapped. In addition, al-Sadr must hold a news conference to announce he is disbanding the Mahdi Army.
“The military action has become imminent,” Dawoud told reporters. “If these conditions are not met, then the military solution will prevail.”
After hearing Dawoud’s threat, Sheik Abdul Hadi al-Daraji, a spokesman for al-Sadr in Baghdad, called for talks to quickly “stop the bloodbaths in the holy city of Najaf.”
“What we want is for the parties to sit down and cooperate. To ask a side, or the Sadrist movement, to disarm, I think is not logical and not right. They should rather sit around a negotiating table and determine what’s right and wrong,” he told Al-Arabiya television.
In the chaos that is Najaf, it is difficult to separate truth from bluster and confusion, so lets look at a few of the claims making the rounds this morning.
I’m no military strategist, but inside the Imam Ali Shrine compound are at least 2,000 Iraqis who are acting as human shields, probably more. The 2,000 figure was reported last weekend as Shi`a and Sunni muslims from all over Iraq began arriving in Najaf after Friday sermons. Al Sadr’s forces are supposed to number about 2,000, or they were last I saw a count. Allegedly, American tanks have Sadr’s forces “trapped” in the shrine complex. If that were true, who did this?
A mortar attack on a police station in the Iraqi city of Najaf has killed seven people and wounded 21 others, police said.
Police told reporters three mortar bombs hit the station in quick succession, although they added it was not near the city’s holy sites where a radical Shiite Muslim cleric and his militia are engaged in a two-week battle with US forces.
It was unclear how many of the victims were police from the mortar attack.
Not near the holy sites. How “trapped” are Sadr’s men if they can mortar the police station and kill at least seven police?
Go here and look at this Imam Ali mosque complex. How many troops would it take to “storm” this enormous shrine which encloses at least 4,000 people happily waiting to die as martyrs? True, they are not heavily armed and armored, but they have AK47s, RPGs, the advantage of an urban battlefield which is also a holy site, damaging which will have to give attacking Muslim troops at least a little hesitation.
Who will die for Allawi and the occupiers as their Muslim Storm Troopers? Who are the “Iraqi troops” fighting alongside the Americans? Clearly, they are the only organized Iraqi militia still allied with the Americans – the Kurdish peshmerga. If the peshmerga attack the shrine of Ali for the Americans, it may well be a fatal blow for Arab-Kurd relations, already strained by the Kurdish participation in the siege of Fallujah. If the attack incites a violent Shia reaction, the Kurds may well end up paying the price for the folly of collaborating with the hated occupation. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans and Allawi’s thugs might be persuading the peshmerga to do their bidding, but if they succeed in using them for this attack all of the Kurdish eggs will be in the Occupation’s basket, and considering the tradition of American sellouts of the Kurds that is not a good place to store anything valuable or fragile.
Be that as it may and for whatever reasons, both sides appear to have created positions that make a violent conflict inevitable. In 1991, the last violent takeover over of the Imam Ali Shrine occurred when Saddam Hussein put down the last of the Shi`a revolt encouraged by George I by slaughtering thousands of Shi`a inside the mosque, even allegedly using poison gas. Will George II follow Saddam down this historic path?