7 U.S. Soldiers Die in Iraq as a Shiite Militia Rises Up

April 5, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 4 — A coordinated Shiite militia uprising against the American-led occupation rippled across Iraq on Sunday, reaching into Baghdad and the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City on the capital's outskirts and roiling the holy city of Najaf and at least two other cities in southern Iraq.

Seven American soldiers were killed in Sadr City, one of the worst single losses for the American forces in any firefight since Baghdad was captured a year ago.

An Iraqi health official in Najaf said 24 people had been killed and about 200 wounded in clashes that ensued when armed militiamen loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, a 31-year-old firebrand Shiite cleric, besieged a garrison commanded by Spanish troops on the road leading into Najaf from neighboring Kufa.

An American military spokesman said one Salvadoran soldier had been killed in Kufa and 13 soldiers wounded, including an American. All the other casualties were said to be Iraqis.

Within hours of a call by Mr. Sadr to his followers to "terrorize your enemy," his militiamen, said to number tens of thousands across Iraq, emerged into the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, Kufa and Amara, a city 250 miles south of Baghdad where four Iraqis were reported killed in clashes with British troops.

Forbidden to bear arms under a decree issued last year by the American occupation authority, the Sadr militiamen bristled with a wide array of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades that were fired at American tanks in Sadr City.

Taking advantage of an American policy that has largely kept American and other occupation troops out of volatile Shiite population centers like Sadr City, Najaf and Kufa, the militiamen succeeded in taking control of checkpoints and police stations in all three cities that had been staffed by the new Iraqi-trained police and civil defense force.

Residents in the three centers said the Iraqis had abandoned their posts almost as soon as the militiamen appeared with their weapons, leaving the militiamen in unchallenged control — and punching a huge hole in American hopes that American-trained Iraqis can be relied on increasingly to take over from American troops in providing security in Iraq's major cities.

The insurrection, which spread across the Shiite heartland in a matter of hours, came five days after the ambush in the predominantly Sunni Muslim city of Falluja, outside Baghdad, in which a mob mutilated the bodies of four American security guards and hanged two of them from a bridge. Together, the events in Falluja and the other cities on Sunday appeared likely to shake the American hold on Iraq more than anything since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's government last April 9.

In effect, the militia attacks confronted the American military command with what has been its worst nightmare as it has struggled to pacify Iraq: the spread of an insurgency that has stretched a force of 130,000 American troops from the minority Sunni population to the majority Shiites, who are believed to account for about 60 percent of Iraq's population of 25 million.

Privately, senior American officers have said for months that American prospects here would plummet if the insurgency spread into the Shiite population, leaving American and allied troops with no safe havens anywhere except possibly in the Kurdish areas of the north.

Until now, powerful Shiite clerics with large followings in Shiite centers like Sadr City, with its two million people, and Najaf and Karbala, sister holy cities about 80 miles south of Baghdad, each with a population of more than a million, have largely avoided pitting their private militias against the American-led occupation forces, preferring to challenge the Americans politically. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, considered Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, has urged followers to protest peacefully.

But on Sunday, Mr. Sadr's veiled threats to stir public disorder erupted into carefully orchestrated violence, with potentially dire implications over the long term for the Americans, and for Iraq.

In Washington, officials said their concern about Mr. Sadr grew daily. "Sistani is playing a not unconstructive role in the politics," one said. "It is not clear that what Sadr has in mind is a peaceful democratic future for Iraq."

As reinforcements of American tanks headed toward Sadr City, Kufa and Najaf at nightfall, a senior American officer rushed into a news briefing inside the American headquarters compound in central Baghdad wearing a helmet, after viewing the events in Kufa and Najaf from one of the American helicopters that hovered over the city during the uprising. Using the insistently understated language that the American command has used at every juncture of the war, he described the Najaf fighting as "a fairly significant event," but added, "At this point, it's pretty settled down."

Dan Senor, spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the civilian head of the American occupation authority, struck a similarly untroubled note. "We have isolated pockets where we are encountering problems," he said.

Using a measure that has repeatedly been used by American officials to play down the threat of insurgency across Iraq, he said the people who staged the attacks represented "a minuscule percentage" of the Iraqi population, most of whom, the Americans believe, support American plans to implant an American-style democratic system here after Iraq regains its sovereignty on June 30.

But these, defiantly, were not the measures that were taken of the day's events among the large groups of Shiites who gathered at street corners and along alleyways in the contested cities as night fell.

Their refrain was one of contempt for the Americans and their allies for losing control, for at least several hours, of Sadr City and Kufa.

"The occupation is over!" men on the streets of Sadr City yelled as Western reporters approached. "We are now controlled by Sadr! The Americans should stay out!"

Mr. Sadr, the son of a powerful Shiite ayatollah who was assassinated by agents of Mr. Hussein in Najaf in 1999, has been a menacing presence in the shadows of the American occupation. He has refused to involve his organization with the American attempt to construct democratic institutions, calling them a ruse intended to place the country under permanent American control. He has threatened to establish an alternative government, and to send his militia, known as the Mahdi Army, into battle with American troops.

A religious student, too young to be accepted as a serious religious authority, he has used the latent power of his militia to gain a voice in Shiite politics matched only by Ayatollah Sistani, who is in his 60's and is said to view Mr. Sadr with an intense personal distaste. While Mr. Sadr has made no effort to disguise his political ambitions, Ayatollah Sistani has insisted that cleric-based groups like Mr. Sadr's should stay out of direct involvement in politics.

On Sunday night, Ayatollah Sistani sent a message from his headquarters in Najaf in which he appeared eager not to distance himself from a cause that had attracted popular support, but also seemed intent on discouraging further armed challenges to the Americans.

An aide to Ayatollah Sistani said he considered the militiamen's cause to be "legitimate" and condemned the "acts waged by the coalition forces." But he added: "The ayatollah has called on the demonstrators to remain calm, to keep a cool head and allow the problem to be resolved through negotiation."

The scene for the uprising was set a week ago, when the American authorities closed a popular Baghdad newspaper, Al Hawza, that was the mouthpiece for Mr. Sadr, because of what they called inaccurate reporting in the paper that incited hatred for the Americans.

For days, demonstrators in the thousands marched through the streets of Baghdad and Najaf, hoisting portraits of Mr. Sadr and vowing retaliation against the Americans. But what appeared to have pushed Mr. Sadr into insurrection was the arrest by allied troops on Saturday — probably by Americans, although the American command did not say — of a cleric who was a senior aide to Mr. Sadr, Mustafa al-Yaqubi. A statement on Sunday from Iraq's Interior Ministry said Mr. Yaqubi was wanted in connection with the killing at a Najaf mosque last April of Ayatollah Sayyed Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a cleric the Americans brought back from exile in London in the hope of shifting the Shiite clerical establishment into a pro-American stance.

Some reports, unconfirmed by the Americans, have said Mr. Sadr himself is on a list of 25 people who are wanted by the Interior Ministry in connection with the killing, and that he, too, is likely to be arrested.

The first sign of serious trouble on Sunday came when Sadr supporters on their daily march from Sadr City to the American headquarters in the former Republican Palace compound in central Baghdad effectively took control of a street that leads to one of the compound's most heavily used entrances.

By midafternoon, a similar protest outside the heavily guarded complex that envelops the Palestine and Sheraton hotels, a home for hundreds of Western reconstruction workers and journalists across the Tigris River in east Baghdad, turned violent. Reporters watching said Sadr militamen in black shirts had suddenly flourished Kalashnikov rifles and pistols, and fought a protracted battle along Sadoun Street, one of Baghdad's main commercial boulevards, with the Iraqi police. At about the same time, other militiamen were staging attacks in Sadr City, the slum five miles away to the northeast. There, at least three Iraqi police stations and several civil defense centers were abandoned, leaving American troops who arrived in Abrams tanks and armored Humvees to enter an area that had been taken over by the militiamen. A battle then began and raged until nightfall.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company