Talks Fall Apart for Shiite Rebels and Iraq Leaders

August 14, 2004
By Alex Berenson and John F. Burns

NAJAF, Iraq -- Truce talks between Iraq's interim government and Moktada al-Sadr's rebels collapsed Saturday, prompting American commanders to prepare new battle plans for breaking Mr. Sadr's grip on this holy city and the Imam Ali mosque, the Middle East's most sacred Shiite shrine.

"I feel deep sorrow and regret to announce the failure of the efforts we have exerted to end the crisis in Iraq peacefully," Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser to Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, said at a news conference in Najaf on Saturday afternoon. "Our goal was to spare blood and preserve security, and persuade the militias to lay down their weapons."

Although few details of the talks were offered by Dr. Rubaie the central issue seemed, once again, to have been the demand that Mr. Sadr disarm his fighters and withdraw them from the city. Mr. Sadr's aides said they had demanded that both sides, the American forces and Mr. Sadr's militia force, the Mahdi Army, withdraw. They said the cleric also wanted pledges by the government to release scores of Sadr fighters taken captive during the recent fighting, and to give amnesty to all who had taken part.

The amnesty demand was certain to be rejected by American commanders, who successfully curbed a broader national amnesty proposal announced by Dr. Allawi earlier this week, limiting its terms to exclude any rebels who have taken part in actions wounding or killing American troops.

Dr. Rubaie said he was leaving Najaf immediately to fly back to Baghdad, 120 miles to the north, where he was expected to join crisis talks on the next step in confronting Mr. Sadr, a populist Shiite cleric who has used the Mahdi Army to stir a fresh insurrection in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq. Since he initiated uprisings across the south in the spring, Mr. Sadr has entrenched himself as the most identifiable leader of armed resistance to the American role as the effective power in Iraq, and as a serious challenger for political predominance among Iraq's majority Shiite population.

The fighting in Najaf has set off the most serious challenge yet faced by the Allawi government in the seven weeks since it took power, with the return of sovereignty to Iraq. It confronts American military commanders with a widening series of attacks that have spread to a dozen or more Shiite towns and cities across a 300-mile swath of territory south of Baghdad.

Commanders of the 3,000 American troops that are deployed around Najaf, mainly from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the Army's First Cavalry Division, kept a tight lid on preparations for a resumed offensive, though they said new attacks could begin within hours but would not necessarily center on Najaf's Old City and the area around the shrine. Reporters embedded with American units were told to expect heavy fighting in the days ahead, considering that the truce that began on Friday allowed both sides to regroup.

As the talks imploded, fresh convoys of Sadr supporters were arriving in Najaf from the cleric's main stronghold in Sadr City, the sprawling Baghdad slum that is home to two million Shiites, and from cities as far south as Basra, 200 miles away.

An Iraqi freelance reporter working for The New York Times said one convoy of 200 men had arrived in Najaf with food supplies from Falluja, the city 35 miles west of Baghdad that has been the center of the insurgency mounted by Iraq's Sunni Muslim minority and by Islamic militant groups that have carried out a wave of terrorist bombings, and ambushes and kidnappings.

There was no immediate sign of Mr. Sadr on Saturday. On Friday, he was reported by aides to have suffered shrapnel wounds during a firefight near the shrine on Friday, before fighting was halted for the talks, and he later reappeared that evening in the Imam Ali shrine vowing to fight on in Najaf "until victory or martyrdom."

One of his aides, Ali Sumeisim, who took part in the talks, told reporters that Dr. Rubaie had backtracked on an outline agreement that would have had both sides pull back from the old city, leaving the shrine under the control of the aging ayatollahs who form Iraq's Shiite clerical hierarchy.

Mr. Sumeisim accused American commanders, along with Dr. Allawi, of using the talks as a smoke screen, while plotting a violent showdown intended to wipe out the Mahdi Army.

"Today a vicious plot is being woven to commit a massacre in Iraq," he said. "I call on all honest people in the world, on all Muslims, to raise their voices and expose the truth."

Dr. Rubaie said Dr. Allawi had given him a two-day deadline for reaching an agreement with the rebels in contacts that began Thursday, after intermediaries brought a letter from Mr. Sadr to Baghdad asking for talks. He said that the deadline had been extended for a third day on Saturday, and that Dr. Allawi and other senior ministers had concluded that "there is no use to continue."

But Dr. Rubaie, a 57-year-old neurologist who spent years in exile in Britain before returning to Iraq after American troops toppled Saddam Hussein's government 16 months ago, said he was "leaving the door open" for Mr. Sadr to reopen talks, if the cleric was prepared to appear personally for negotiations.

The failure of the talks appeared to have brought the Iraqi leadership in Baghdad, and the American officials who are their cohorts in power, back where they were earlier in the week. American units then were preparing to push forward into the old city in a climactic effort to dislodge the Sadr militia. The plan was to spare Shiite religious sensitivities ? trying to avoid an explosion of fury across Iraq, and the rest of the Shiite world ? by having American-trained Iraqi units take the lead in attacks in the immediate vicinity of the shrine, which is the burial place of the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali, regarded as the founding saint of Shiism.

The fighting that began in Najaf 10 days ago pitched both sides into a game of brinkmanship, with stakes that run to the political future of Iraq.

When Mr. Sadr began a series of uprisings in April that spread all across southern Iraq, he gave notice of his determination to mount a violent challenge to the American presence here, and to use his defiance as a path to political pre-eminence among Shiite leaders. American officials resolved early on to do everything possible to curb his growing power, regarding him as dangerously volatile and violent, as well as too close for American comfort to the ruling ayatollahs of Iran, who have funneled weapons and finance to the Mahdi Army.

But Mr. Sadr has proved an artful adversary, compensating for superior American firepower with tactics that have given him a personal exemption from attack, even as the Americans have gone after his fighters with ferocity.

In what has virtually been hand-to-hand combat, more than 360 Mahdi Army fighters were killed this week in the vast cemetery that adjoins the Imam Ali shrine, according to American officers. In Najaf, Mr. Sadr's trump card has been control of the shrine, which American commanders say has been turned into an armory and a platform, from its roofs and behind its ancient walls, for firing at Americans soldiers and their allies with mortars, rockets and assault rifles.

In the spring, American commanders accepted a series of truces that had American forces withdraw to the outskirts of Najaf, accepting an informal "exclusion zone" covering much of the city where American forces would not enter. In return, Mr. Sadr pledged to disarm his fighters and return control of the city to the police and national guard units that are under Iraqi government control.

In practice, American and Iraqi officials say, the pledges were never kept, and Mr. Sadr's fighters continued to control whole neighborhoods, build up weapons caches and attack government buildings and police stations, sometimes taking captives, especially policemen, to be tortured and killed.

According to American accounts, the fighting that began a week ago on Thursday was set off by a new attack by Sadr forces on a center-city police station. But with an Iraqi government in office since late June, American commanders were ready for a new effort to dislodge Mr. Sadr from the city, this time one that they said would not end in an inconclusive standoff that rested on unenforceable pledges from Mr. Sadr. For eight days, until both sides suspended fighting for the talks on Thursday, American forces engaged in some of the most violent fighting of the war.

Copyright 2004 New York Times Company