Rebel in Najaf Sends Messages of Conciliation

August 19, 2004
NY Times
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 18 - Displaying the brinkmanship that has made him one of the United States' most powerful adversaries in Iraq, the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr sent last-minute messages of conciliation on Wednesday that appeared to have staved off an imminent assault on his fortress in the country's holiest Shiite shrine.

For two weeks, Mr. Sadr has led his militia force, known as the Mahdi Army, in some of the deadliest fighting with American troops since the invasion 16 months ago. But faced with a deadline of hours from Iraq's interim government to back down or face attack by Iraqi troops, he abruptly signaled a change of course, and suggested he would accept demands to vacate Imam Ali shrine in Najaf, disband his militia and transform it into a political party.

Not for the first time in his months of confrontation with American troops, Mr. Sadr's apparent backing down came hedged with uncertainties, among them that he spoke only through aides, and that they were vague on what exactly he had agreed to. One of his spokesmen in Najaf told news agencies that Mr. Sadr was insisting, before any concessions, on a cease-fire that would require American and Iraqi troops to pull back from positions around the shrine, a move that would yield territory won in recent days.

Meanwhile, fighting continued in Najaf and the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, killing two Americans.

Mr. Sadr's offer was met with applause by delegates gathered in Baghdad to select a national assembly. [Page A12.]

Among senior officials in Washington and Baghdad, however, Mr. Sadr's move was met with deep skepticism.

"I don't think we can trust al-Sadr," said Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser. Iraq's defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, issued a statement calling Mr. Sadr's initiative "strange," after his earlier intransigence, and demanding that he substantiate his offer by having his militiamen "immediately deliver their weapons" to Iraqi forces around the shrine.

Even as American and Iraqi officials were weighing Mr. Sadr's intentions, a menacing new dimension was added to the Najaf crisis by a report on Al Jazeera television that Iraqi militants calling themselves the Martyrs' Squad had captured an American journalist, Micah Garen, and threatened to kill him within 48 hours if United States forces did not pull out of Najaf.

On Wednesday night, the Arab news channel showed video images of a man identified by Al Jazeera as Mr. Garen, kneeling in front of five masked men with rifles. Mr. Garen, 36, whose family home is in New Haven, is an independent documentary filmmaker who spent much of the last year in Iraq researching a film and articles on the looting of Iraq's archaeological heritage.

He was seized by two armed men on Friday outside a gun shop in Nasiriya, 230 miles south of Baghdad. Nasiriya is one of a network of towns and cities across the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq that have been roiled by the spreading insurrection Mr. Sadr and his militia have stirred since the fighting began in Najaf.

In another development, the United States military command said American soldiers guarding Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad, had shot dead two Iraqi security detainees after a fight among inmates got out of control shortly after dawn on Wednesday. The command's statement said guards had seen a group of detainees attacking a fellow inmate with stones and tent poles before the disturbance swelled to involve more than 200 men.

"Nonlethal ammunition" was used in an initial attempt to quell the disturbance, the command said, apparently referring to rubber bullets, and when that failed, "lethal force" had been authorized to save the life of the detainee who had been attacked.

Mr. Sadr's latest about-face came after Defense Minister Shaalan flew to Najaf on an American military helicopter on Wednesday and announced that an attack on the Imam Ali Mosque was imminent. Answering Iraqis who have condemned any American involvement in an assault on the shrine, Mr. Shaalan said the attack would be led by Iraqi troops, with "no U.S. intervention" other than air support and tanks to control roads leading to the shrine.

"They have a chance," he said of the rebels. "In the next few hours, they have to surrender themselves and their weapons."

The ultimatum was reinforced by Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, who issued a statement on Wednesday assigning responsibility for the government's decision to Mr. Sadr's intransigence, after the cleric snubbed a delegation of Iraqi religious and political leaders who had traveled to the shrine with an appeal for an end to the rebellion.

Dr. Allawi, once a stalwart of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and later leader of an exile group in London, has been almost as changeable in his pronouncements on the Najaf fighting as Mr. Sadr. He has issued ultimatums, then withdrawn them and resumed negotiations, only to return to threats to settle the confrontation by force. His latest statement, though, seemed unequivocal.

Events in Najaf threatened to overshadow the conference in Baghdad, attended by more than 1,100 delegates who had gathered to establish a new milestone in the country's troubled course to democracy. It was the conference that sent the delegation that flew to Najaf on Tuesday, then drove to the Imam Ali shrine under sporadic mortar and rifle fire, only to be kept waiting for three hours in a darkened reception room before aides to Mr. Sadr told them that he was in a "secret place" and would neither come to meet the delegates nor allow them to come to him.

The hope that Mr. Sadr might have resolved to make a turn for peace, and that he had done so in response to appeals from the what was arguably the most representative political gathering held in Iraq in 35 years, added momentum to the Baghdad conference after four days of often chaotic and contentious debate.

On Wednesday night, the conference closed with an announcement that it had established, as required by the provisional constitution, a 100-member assembly to monitor the Allawi government's decrees and oversee a first round of parliamentary elections in January.

For all that it succeeded in completing its assigned task, choosing the new assembly, the conference itself seemed redolent of how tortured an enterprise the remaking of Iraq had become.

After wrangling that saw smaller groups at the gathering accusing larger ones of hijacking the meeting, it ended by selecting, without voting, the 81 delegates who will occupy seats on the new body that Iraq's provisional constitution had set aside for election. An additional 19 seats were pre-assigned to members of the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, an advisory body during the period of formal American occupation that ended seven weeks ago.

Charges by many of the delegates that the conference was a vehicle for a predetermined carving up of power appeared to set the stage for further dissension among Iraqi groups that have agreed to work with the United States on building a democracy.

But the strains among the delegates, from every quarter of Iraqi society, were seen by many at the meeting as part of the natural birth pangs of the new Iraq. Mr. Sadr's challenge has been of a different magnitude altogether, posing, at least until now, a mounting threat to the very idea of an American-assisted progress toward a fully elected government by January 2006.

Since the earliest days of the American occupation last year, Mr. Sadr has maneuvered skillfully, and often ruthlessly, to advance his ambition to emerge as Iraq's most politically powerful Shiite cleric, and thus as a potential claimant to outright power in a country where Shiites form a majority.

His first move after American forces toppled Mr. Hussein, according to an indictment drawn up last fall by Iraqi prosecutors, was to orchestrate the death of a rival cleric. This spring, he reacted to the American closing of the Mahdi Army's newspaper by setting off an uprising in Sadr City, then occupying the shrine in Najaf and spreading the rebellion across much of southern Iraq.

American troops who battled his militiamen eventually settled for a series of uneasy truces that left him in effective control of Sadr City and much of Najaf, with other militia bands entrenched in or near every other major Shiite town as far south as Basra. The truces faltered for weeks, then collapsed altogether in Najaf in early August, setting off the latest uprising.

In Najaf and other towns, fighting continued as before. Reporters in Najaf said the day reverberated to continuing exchanges of mortar and small-arms fire, and American officers said one marine was killed in a battle in the cemetery that surrounds the shrine.

American military officials said that another soldier had been killed on Wednesday while on patrol in Sadr City, and that more than 50 Iraqis identified as firing on the Americans had also been killed.

Sabrina Tavernise contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article andAlex Berenson from Najaf. Iraqi employees of The New YorkTimes, whose names are withheld for their security, also contributed reportingfrom Najaf.