Dealing With Sadr's Militia
Another place on the list of no-go zones yet to be pacified is Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum in eastern Baghdad where support runs strong for Moqtada Sadr, the rebel cleric whose illegal militia has become the most serious security threat after the Sunni insurgency.
U.S. diplomats and military commanders have complained in private that Sadr's militia should have been dealt with in the early stages of the occupation, when allegations first surfaced that he had ordered the slaying of a rival cleric. At the time, Sadr's militia amounted to no more than a few hundred young men with guns. Today, it has thousands of members and an arsenal that includes mortars and rocket-propelled grenades.
Iraqi National Guardsmen, shown here at a ceremony in Baghdad, have sometimes refused to fight fellow Iraqis.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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Although Bremer attempted to rein in Sadr in the spring by closing his newspaper, a move that sparked a fierce uprising by his militiamen, U.S. forces did not capture or kill him as they pledged -- or even dismantle his militia. A cease-fire deal gave Sadr effective control of Najaf.
When Sadr's forces violated the agreement in late July by attacking a police station there, the response by U.S. forces was swift and severe, and ultimately compelled Sadr to withdraw his militia from the city's holiest shrine under an arrangement brokered by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's top Shiite leader. A condition of that deal was that U.S. troops in the city would be replaced by Iraqi soldiers. As a result, three of the country's six army battalions are tied up there, making it difficult for U.S. commanders to mount joint operations against Sadr's militiamen in Sadr City.
"We've spent a lot of our time and energy dealing with a problem that should have been taken care of months ago," a U.S. commander involved in operations against Sadr's militiamen said.
'Making Up for Lost Time'
When Bremer went to Congress last fall to plead for a massive infusion of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help Iraq, he outlined a blueprint for stability based on far-reaching improvements to the country's shattered infrastructure. In November, Congress approved an $18.4 billion aid package that called for spending nearly $10 billion on electricity, water and sanitation projects. Congress allocated $3.2 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces.
After taking over from Bremer in late June, U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte and his staff concluded that more money needed to go into building Iraq's security forces and generating new jobs. Arguing that immediate concerns trumped long-term development, Negroponte asked the administration to divert $2.3 billion from infrastructure projects to security initiatives, including the funding of Iraqi security forces, and to job programs.
Many U.S. civilian and military officials say the reallocation is long overdue. They contend the occupation authority should have used the aid package to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces and put hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to work. By the time Bremer left, just 15,000 Iraqis had been employed with the aid money.
"We think we've found the right balance" with the reallocation, the embassy official said. But the challenge, the official said, "is making up for lost time."
"We should have done this last year," the official said. "If we had, we'd be in a much different, and better, position now."
