Top Shiite Cleric Plans March to Najaf

Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seen arriving in Basra, plans to lead a march today to the Imam Ali shrine, which has been taken over by a militia. (Reuters TV)

[At dawn, enemy fire increased sharply, with rocket-propelled grenades coming from within the walls of the shrine.]

Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, has shown great deference in the past to U.S. commanders and officials, who have credited him with exercising a calming influence on Iraq's Shiite majority.

Sistani will return to a city barely recognizable as one of the holiest locales in Shiite Islam. Tank, mortar and air bombardment have shattered whole streets and reduced to rubble sections of the neighborhoods adjoining the immediate vicinity of the mosque.

On Wednesday night, soldiers from the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment laid siege to a knot of multi-story buildings just inside the road that encircles the maze of alleys and footpaths that immediately surround the shrine. Marines involved in the operation sometimes fought at close quarters, and several officers repeated an account of one Marine who entered a room, found a militiaman holding a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and killed him with a K-bar knife.

A nearby intersection was a horrific site -- a tangle of broken buildings, downed power lines, standing water and jumpy soldiers pivoting one way while tank turrets scanned the other.

"It looks like Sarajevo down there," said Lt. Col. Jim Rainey, commander of the 7th Regiment's 2nd Battalion, referring to the capital of Bosnia, which was severely disfigured during the Balkan wars of the mid-1990s. Rainey added that gunners and pilots have been required to exercise special care around the shrine. "Or rather, the stuff that's supposed to look like Sarajevo looks like Sarajevo. The minarets still look like minarets."

Rainey said the aim was to close the ring road and "destroy Moqtada militiamen."

"The primary way we've been fighting is to make contact with the enemy, fix the enemy and destroy the enemy," he said on Tuesday, adding that militiamen were no longer darting into the open to fire rocket-propelled grenades, only to be gunned down moments later by U.S. forces. "This is the first day we haven't been seeing the enemy coming," he said.

Late Wednesday, four Marine tanks rumbled all the way around a parking garage adjacent to the shrine, at one point passing alongside the west wall of the holy site, according to a senior field officer. "They were by the mosque," the officer said, adding that the Tigers, as the Marine tankers are known, estimated killing or wounding as many as 50 militiamen, including some ferrying ammunition in wheelbarrows.

Najaf's police chief, Ghalib Hashim Jazaeri, said his officers had arrested leaders of the Mahdi Army carrying jewels and other treasures from the shrine. He also said police have uncovered evidence of the presence of foreign guerrillas connected to al Qaeda, but his claim could not be independently verified.

"Some of them escaped carrying Saudi maps and weapons," Jazaeri said. "They are in Najaf now cooperating with the Mahdi Army to kill the citizens and the innocent people by mortars and other weapons."

Al-Jazeera reported that militants loyal to Sadr kidnapped two relatives of Defense Minister Hazim Shalan. The television station broadcast footage of the two kneeling in front of masked men. Al-Jazeera said the group demanded that U.S. forces leave Najaf and that Iraqi police free Ali Smeisim, a Sadr aide who was reportedly arrested on Wednesday.

Najaf's police chief called on citizens in southern Iraqi provinces to wait until the arrival of Sistani before doing anything that might put them in further danger.

In spite of his plea, thousands of people appeared to be walking toward Najaf from Hilla and other points in the south. As about 800 demonstrators from Kufa, many of whom identified themselves as Sadr supporters, reached a U.S. military base outside of Najaf, Iraqi security forces shot at the crowd, killing two and wounding five, witnesses said.

On Wednesday night, policemen from the chief's security detail barged into a hotel in Najaf and arrested more than 50 Iraqi and foreign journalists at gunpoint. The police officers beat some of the reporters and fired assault rifles in the lobby. After the journalists were brought to the main police station, Jazaeri denied they had been arrested and insisted they had simply been summoned for a news conference.

Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran and staff writer Jackie Spinner in Baghdad contributed to this report.