Seems the US is giving the SCIRI, the most powerful Shi’ite party in Iraq, a nice little gift:
U.S. and Iraqi forces clashed with Shiite militiamen Sunday in the southern city of Diwaniyah for the second time in two months in a battle sparked by a raid on the home of a leader of the Mahdi Army, accused of killing Sunnis in Iraq’s spiral of sectarian violence.
The U.S. military said 30 militiamen were killed in the fighting, in which a U.S. Abrams tank was seriously damaged when it was hammered by rocket-propelled grenades. Officials from the party of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, which heads the militia denied any of their fighters were killed.
Basically, the US is doing the SCIRI’s Badr Brigades’ job — slowly dismantling the Mahdi forces so it doesn’t have to. Don’t misunderstand, direct action against the Mahdi Army is required, but it would be helpful if all Iraqi militias were given the same sort of treatment. The main problem is that the SCIRI militia is embedded within Iraq’s institutions, including the powerful Department of the Interior, and therefore commits sectarian killings in the name of the state. The Mahdi Army, on the other hand, is forced to operate in the open and presents an easy target. While it seems the Mahdi Army’s place in the spotlight would be a hindrance, it actually feeds into the radical Shi’ite reverence for martyrdom and could potentially strengthen Sadr’s hand through further radicalization of the poverty stricken masses.
The article also suggests that Nouri al-Maliki is not actually interested in dismantling the militias, which is something I suggested back when he claimed otherwise directly after his election following months of Shi’ite in-fighting. Doing so would dismantle his own electoral bloc and lead to the Da’wa party’s total marginalization.
technorati tags:sadr, mahdi-army, sciri, iraq
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