US anti-militia strategy another
wrong Iraq move By Gareth
Porter
WASHINGTON - Last week's attack by
US-led Iraqi paramilitary forces on a building
that Shi'ite leaders claim was a mosque may have
marked the beginning of a new stage of US policy
in which Iraqi forces are used to carry out
military operations against Shi'ite militia forces
- especially those loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr.
However, such a strategy risks uniting the
Shi'ites against the US military occupation and
leading to a showdown that makes that presence
politically untenable.
Just before the
operation against the mosque complex, which the US
military referred to as a "terrorist base", US Ambassador
Zalmay
Khalilzad hinted broadly that the United States
would soon target the Shi'ite militias for the
brunt of its operations.
"The militias
haven't been focused on decisively yet," he
declared, adding that militias were now killing
more Iraqis than the insurgents. Khalilzad further
pinpointed the Mahdi Army and its ties to Iran as
the primary and most immediate US concern.
Most of those killed in the raid by US
Special Forces and their Iraqi counterparts
apparently worked for Muqtada al-Sadr's
political-military organization, the Mahdi Army.
After the raid, moreover, the State Department
spokesman said the incident underlined the need to
free Iraq's security forces from sectarian
control.
Militiamen loyal to Sadr have
been implicated in many of the reprisal killings
against Sunnis since the bombing of a Shi'ite
mosque in Samarra in February. Sadr's forces may
also be targeted, however, because he has closer
links to Iran than any other Shi'ite political
figure.
On a visit to Tehran in January,
Sadr declared, "The forces of Mahdi Army defend
the interests of Iraq and Islamic countries. If
neighboring Islamic countries, including Iran,
become the target of attacks, we will support
them."
In a move evidently aimed at
building popular support for a possible
confrontation with the United States, ministers
representing all three Shi'ite parties in the
Iraqi government united in denouncing the raid as
a massacre. Even more significant, however, the
"Shi'ite Islamist Alliance" has demanded the
restoration of control over security matters to
the Iraqi government.
That demand throws
the spotlight on the continued de facto US control
over certain Iraqi military and military forces,
in contrast to the formal independence of the
Iraqi government and army and police. The Shi'ite
leadership is now afraid that the United States
plans to use that control to intervene in the
sectarian political crisis of the country to
reduce the power of the Shi'ites in the
government.
The spokesman for the Da'wa
Party, Kuthair al-Khuzzaie, referred directly to
that possibility, warning the US in a March 26
press conference that "a battle with the calm
giant Shi'ite means they are falling into a
dangerous swamp".
The Shi'ites have shown
no willingness to give up their control over
sectarian Shi'ite militias, which they regard as
their only guarantee against future moves to
unseat a Shi'ite-dominated government.
According to Joost Hilterman of the
Brussels-based International Crisis Group, Shi'ite
leaders are now talking about the "second
betrayal" of the Shi'ite cause by the United
States. The first betrayal was the US failure to
intervene to support a Shi'ite uprising against
the Saddam Hussein regime at the end of the first
Gulf War in 1991, which resulted in the killing of
thousands of Shi'ite civilians.
In a
showdown between military forces of the two sides,
the militant Shi'ites would have a considerable
advantage in numbers, but the US would be able to
deploy better-trained and -equipped Iraqi forces.
US combat forces would be ready to intervene on
their side.
The main forces available to
the Shi'ites will be the militiamen loyal to Sadr,
whose population base in the sprawling Baghdad
slum called Sadr City includes at least a million
Shi'ites. In 2004, US intelligence estimated the
Mahdi Army at 10,000 fighters, but the actual
number is almost certainly several times that,
given Sadr's ability to recruit followers during
2005.
The Shi'ites can also count on some
10,000 militiamen in the Badr Organization,
formerly known as the Badr Brigade, established
and trained by Islamic Revolutionary Guards in
Iran and still said to be financed by Iran. Many
of the Badr militiamen were brought into police
units run by the Interior Ministry last year, and
Interior Minister Bayan Jabr continues to support
them.
In addition, the all-Shi'ite 1st
Brigade, with 4,000 men, which was given control
over all of Baghdad west of the Tigris River last
year, is likely to side with the Shi'ites against
its US-backed rivals in any showdown. Despite its
250 US advisers, the 1st Brigade was reported by
Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter last October to be
taking its overall direction from local Shi'ite
clerics - not from the Ministry of Defense.
On their side, the Americans can use a
number of units responsive to US direction in a
crackdown against Shi'ite militia. The spearpoint
of the new US campaign against Shi'ite militias
will be the Iraqi Special Operations Forces
(ISOF), a brigade of 1,300 troops under the
command of Kurdish officers. It is believed to
consist of mostly Kurdish troops.
Nominally under the Ministry of Defense,
the ISOF works closely with US Special Forces and
has no loyalty to any Iraqi central government. It
includes two battalion-sized operational units,
the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Task Force and the
Iraqi commandos. It was the counter-terrorism unit
that carried out the raid with US Special Forces
last week.
The US Embassy began preparing
paramilitary forces it could count on to support
US geopolitical interests in the broader conflict
with Iran during the Iyad Allawi regime, in which
the Interior Ministry was filled with old Central
Intelligence Agency collaborators.
CIA
advisers to the Interior Ministry created a force
of "special police commandos" consisting of 5,000
elite troops commanded by a former Ba'athist
general, Adnan Thabit. Many of the commandos
recruited for the unit were former Hussein
security personnel themselves, partly because of
their experience in counter-insurgency, and partly
because they would be strongly anti-Iran. While
still under the Interior Ministry in theory, these
commandos will follow the lead of the US-supported
General Thabit.
The move against Shi'ite
militia units appears to be the result of a new
fear in the White House of impending disaster in
Iraq. Despite soothing talk by US commanders last
month that the threat of civil war had passed,
Brigadier-General Douglas Raaberg, deputy chief of
operations for the US Central Command, revealed
the command's pessimistic view when he told the
Associated Press, "Whenever it happens, it's
Iraq's problem and Iraqis have to take care of
it."
The White House may also have begun
to doubt that the political negotiations on a new
government will do much to reverse that trend. The
idea of a more aggressive policy toward the
Shi'ite militias appeals to the desire to do
something dramatic to regain control of the
situation.
A strategy of trying to wrap up
the Mahdi Army, however, would represent another
major US miscalculation. The militant Shi'ites
hold the high cards in any showdown: the ability
to mobilize hundreds of thousands of followers in
the streets of Baghdad. The most likely result of
such a campaign would be a decisive - and final -
political defeat for the occupation.
Gareth Porter is a historian and
national-security policy analyst. His latest
book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power
and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published
last June.
