Doug Lorimer
On July 22, US troops attacked the offices of the Shiite-based Mahdi Army militia in the town of Musayyib, 64 kilometres south of Baghdad, "killing 15 militiamen in a three-hour battle", Associated Press reported.
AP also reported that US commanders plan to move more US troops into the Baghdad area to counter "sectarian violence". The US currently has 55,000 troops in the Iraqi capital.
The wire service reported that "US officials have pointed to Shiite militias as a major cause of sectarian violence" between Shiite and Sunni Iraqis. In a July 17 report, the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission to Iraq (UNAMI) estimated nearly 6000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in May and June as a result of a wave of murders, political assassinations, bombings and kidnappings, involving "collusion between criminal gangs, militias and sectarian hit groups".
United Press International reported on July 22 that the US attack in Musayyib "was part of a systematic drive US forces had been ordered to carry out against the Mahdi Army of anti-American firebrand Moqtada al Sadr".
UPI added that this battle "was the most serious since the brief and potentially very dangerous rising by Sadr's militia against US forces in April 2004" — when the US occupation forces sought to kill Sadr and destroy his militia forces, but were fought to standstill over the following seven months by the Mahdi Army in Sadr City (a 2-million strong poor neighbourhood in Baghdad) and in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, in south-central Iraq.
Noting that the drive by the US occupation forces against the Mahdi Army "comes as Israel's attacks on the Shiite militias of southern Lebanon" are fuelling Iraqi Shiites' anger toward the US, the UPI report warned: "The danger is therefore more imminent than ever that the US drive against Sadr's forces could trigger a more widespread rising of Shiite militias in Baghdad and across southern Iraq against US forces."
The day before the US attack in Musayyib, hundreds of Mahdi Army members, many wielding assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, rallied in Sadr City to demonstrate their solidarity with Hezbollah, Lebanon's Shiite-based national resistance movement.
Although pro-US Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki and other leading members of his United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), led by Shiite religious parties, have all issued public statements condemning the Israeli aggression against Lebanon, they have not denounced Washington's backing for Israel's war.
"Despite public anger over Lebanon", Associated Press reported on July 22, "the Shiite political establishment has
too much to lose politically by risking its ties with the Americans over the fate of Hezbollah" — the puppet government's very survival being dependent on the continued presence of 130,000 US occupation troops in Iraq.
It is also the Shiite establishment that has been the key instigator of the wave of "sectarian" killings of hundreds of Sunni teachers, lawyers and clerics over the last few months.
The March 2 British Guardian reported that John Pace, the outgoing head of UNAMI's human rights office, "said many killings were carried out by Shia militias linked to the interior ministry run by Bayan Jabr, a leading figure in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq". SCIRI is the largest party in the UIA.
"The Badr brigade [SCIRI's militia] are in the police and are mainly the ones doing the killing", Pace said. "They're the most notorious."
In January 2005, Newsweek reported that Pentagon chiefs were considering the setting up of death squads from among the Badr brigade members who had been recruited into the interior ministry's police commando units.
The November 16, 2005, New York Newsday reported that the interior ministry's police commando units had been built up "over the past year under guidance from James Steele, a former [US] Army Special Forces officer who led US counterinsurgency efforts in El Salvador in the 1980s. Salvadoran army units trained by Steele's team were accused of a pattern of atrocities", including kidnappings, torture and assassinations of critics of the US-backed Salvadoran government.
By blaming the wave of killings of Sunnis on the "anti-American firebrand" Sadr, the US occupiers hope to deflect Iraqis' attention from the US military's role in instigating the wave of "sectarian violence", to pit the Sunni and Shiite opponents of the US occupation against each other, and to weaken Sunni political opposition to the occupation by presenting the US military as the only force capable of putting an end to alleged attacks on Sunnis by Sadr's militia.
This gambit is unlikely to work, given the widespread hostility to the US occupation among Sunnis — a January opinion poll conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 88% of Sunnis approved of attacks on the US-led occupation forces (41% of Shiites shared this view).
At a UN-sponsored conference in Baghdad on July 22, Iraqi parliament speaker Mahmud Mashhadani, a conservative Sunni, voiced the sentiments of the big majority of Sunnis, when he accused the US occupation forces of "butchery".
"Just get your hands off Iraq and the Iraqi people and Muslim countries, and everything will be all right", he said in a speech opening the conference.