Tentative accord reached in Najaf to halt fighting

August 8, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and JOHN F. BURNS

Najaf: Aides to the country's most powerful Shiite leader said they had reached a tentative agreement on Thursday to end the three-week siege in this Shiite holy city, after a day of chaos and bloodshed here that left at least 74 Iraqis dead and more than 300 wounded.

Hamed al-Khaffaf, an aide to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, said that Moktada al-Sadr, the rebel cleric whose fighters have held the Imam Ali Shrine since early August, had agreed to the conditions set forth by Ayatollah Sistani to end the siege.

The proposal, which the interim Iraqi government quickly accepted, calls for the withdrawal of Mr. Sadr's fighters from Najaf and the neighboring city of Kufa, as well as a pullout of American forces and the introduction of Iraqi police officers into Najaf. The agreement would allow Mr. Sadr and his fighters to keep their guns and go free.

In celebration of the accord, thousands of Shiites marched to the shrine through the battle-scarred city on Friday morning.

"We pray today that Najaf will recover,'' Kassem Hameed, a 52-year-old oil worker who came from Basra on Thursday to support Ayatollah Sistani, told Reuters. "The military operations have only brought destruction."

In a statement broadcast Friday morning over the shrine's loudspeakers, Mr. Sadr told his men inside the mosque to lay down their weapons and join the pilgrims outside, Reuters reported. It was not immediately clear if the militia intended to leave the mosque for good.

The deal was struck during a face-to-face meeting between the two men after the momentous homecoming of the 73-year-old Ayatollah Sistani to the city earlier in the day. The ayatollah had left the country just after the fighting began to receive treatment in London for a heart ailment. His return was well timed, coming just after Mr. Sadr's forces had been decimated by a series of blistering American attacks.

The Americans halted combat operations on Thursday, but made clear they were prepared to resume and assault the shrine if Mr. Sadr did not quickly sign on to the pact.

The deal announced Thursday followed a day of horrific violence, underscored by the execution of an Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, who disappeared last week while traveling to Najaf.

In the neighboring city of Kufa, a mortar attack on a mosque where thousands of Iraqis were gathering left dozens dead and wounded. At least 35 Iraqi civilians were killed in two other incidents, when the Iraqi police fired into crowds of civilians who were trying to move toward the Shrine of Ali.

One of those incidents occurred in the late afternoon, as thousands of Iraqis had gathered at the gates of Najaf's old city to heed Ayatollah Sistani's call to march on the holy shrine. But as the crowd pushed forward, a line of police officers appeared to panic, first firing into the air and then directly on the crowd.

The police officers fired dozens of rounds, setting off a stampede of terrified people who ran, fell and tripped over one another as they tried to flee. At least 15 Iraqis were killed and 65 more wounded. Some of the injured said the police had fired on the crowd after they had been fired on themselves, but the claim could not be verified.

But for this day, at least, the greater emphasis was on peace. If Mr. Sadr sticks to the deal, it will end one of the bloodiest episodes since the United States invaded the country, a grinding urban battle that has left hundreds of Iraqis dead and much of Najaf in ruins.

The crisis, touched off when Mr. Sadr's men attacked an Iraqi police station earlier this month, has posed a difficult challenge to the interim Iraqi government, led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, which took office less than two months ago.

"Mr. Moktada al-Sadr agreed to the initiative of his eminence al-Sistani," Mr. Khaffaf told reporters at a news conference outside the house where the grand ayatollah was staying. "You will hear good news soon from the government and Mr. Moktada al-Sadr."

But deals with Mr. Sadr have crumbled before, and there were signs that this one could prove just as ephemeral as the others. Several times this month, and during the uprising called by Mr. Sadr last spring, American and Iraqi negotiators believed they had reached agreements with Mr. Sadr, only to learn that they had been mistaken.

Mr. Sadr did not participate in the news conference called by Ayatollah Sistani's aides on Thursday night. He was spied slipping out to the street just as it got under way. Later, Mr. Sadr's promised public statement failed to materialize.

As to highlight the extremely tenuous nature of the deal, Ayatollah Sistani's aides declined to discuss crucial aspects of the agreement, like how and when Mr. Sadr's fighters, the Mahdi Army, might actually pull out of the shrine.

"It's too early to talk about details," Mr. Khaffaf said.

By not insisting that Mr. Sadr appear publicly to announce the pact, Ayatollah Sistani's men seemed to be trying to offer the young cleric a face-saving way out of the crisis.

"There will be a mechanism that will preserve the dignity of everyone in getting out of the holy shrine," Mr. Khaffaf told Al Jazeera television.

The agreement does not require the surrender of Mr. Sadr, who is under indictment for murdering a rival cleric in Najaf last year, or any of his fighters. That seemed to raise the prospect of a repeat of the peace agreement reached in May, when Mr. Sadr was allowed to retreat gracefully with his army intact, only to return again.

In a statement earlier in the day, Dr. Allawi seemed willing to forgive Mr. Sadr. "We'd like to stress again that we would provide Moktada a safe passage if he chooses to stop the armed conflict," the prime minister said in a statement.

Mr. Khaffaf said the first step in implementing the agreement would be to allow the tens of thousands of Iraqis who heeded Ayatollah Sistani's call to march on the shrine to do so. As with much else in the agreement announced Thursday night, Mr. Khaffaf spoke vaguely about how the march would proceed but said the demonstrators had to be out of the city by Friday at 10 a.m.

Senior American and Iraqi officials in Baghdad said the 24-hour cease-fire was agreed to in discussions in the southern city of Basra on Wednesday night between Ayatollah Sistani and two officials of the Allawi government. They said the Iraqis had returned to the capital saying they had Ayatollah Sistani's commitment that he would make a public demand that the last of the militiamen disarm and leave the shrine, and that if Mr. Sadr defied the demand they had the ayatollah's assurance that he would support an assault on the shrine by Iraqi commandos.

The officials said American military pressures had eliminated virtually all resistance by the Mahdi Army outside the shrine itself. Intelligence reports indicated there were weapons hidden in the shrine, the officials said. Planning for an assault was based on the assumption that these would be used by some of the hundreds of Sadr supporters remaining in the shrine, who have told reporters in recent days that most of the fighters had left.

Without an order from Mr. Sadr for these remaining fighters to leave, one American official said, "There will be a fight."

Either way, the officials said, the Allawi government and American commanders believed the three weeks of fighting in Najaf would end quickly, either with a last-minute Sadr capitulation or with Iraqi forces storming the shrine. They said that a battalion of 500 Iraqi troops was ready for the assault, and that Iraqi and American commanders were confident the Iraqi troops would not fail.

"We're close to being in a position to finish this," an American official said.

Still, some officials at the American command complex in Saddam Hussein's former Republican Palace in Baghdad acknowledged that things could go still go awry.

Since American troops toppled the Hussein government 16 months ago, Ayatollah Sistani has been careful to maintain an equivocal position on American military actions, usually condemning any use of force, by the Americans or the rebels. That left open the possibility that in Najaf, he could distance himself from the Americans by condemning the damage inflicted on the Old City by American bombs and tanks, and even leave Mr. Sadr free to claim that he acted all along to defend the shrine against American attacks.

One of the last American actions before the cease-fire went into effect involved the use of a 2,000-pound, laser-guided bomb to strike a hotel about 130 yards from the shrine's southwest wall, in an area known to American commanders as "motel row."


Dexter Filkins reported from Najaf for this article and John F. Burns from Baghdad.