Threat of Shiite Militias Now Seen As Iraq's Most Critical Challenge

Shiite militiamen are believed to number in the tens of thousands. Maj. Gen Rick Lynch, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said in a recent interview that the Mahdi Army -- formed by Sadr from the long-oppressed Shiite underclass in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion -- was believed to have about 10,000 members. The Badr Organization, created in Iran in the 1980s to fight Saddam Hussein's rule, has roughly 5,000, he said.

Other estimates for the groups, both accused by the United States of receiving backing from Iran, range far higher.

The aftermath of the Feb. 22 bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra refocused attention on the Mahdi Army. Hours after the bombing, dozens of pickup trucks packed with rifle-toting young men -- most clad in the militia's telltale black shirts and pants -- streamed out of Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite slum in northeastern Baghdad. Many said they had left work immediately in response to commanders' and clerics' calls to protect their mosques and neighbors.

In the days that followed, despite a government-imposed curfew on vehicle traffic and Sadr's public pleas for calm, residents of several Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad said roving bands of gunmen dragged people from homes and Sunni mosques, some of which were then occupied by Shiites.

A Mahdi Army member, who did not want to be identified by his real name, denied charges that the militia had killed Sunnis after the Samarra bombing, calling the claims "a rumor by the occupation forces to get the Iraqi people into an internal war."

Dressed in a suit and seated at a large wooden desk, the commander of a company of some 200 men looked little like a fighter during an interview one recent morning at an office in the southern city of Najaf. He said he expected another confrontation between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army, which has won a fierce following not only by battling foreign troops but by providing such social services as cleaning streets and feeding the poor.

"It is like fire and ice. We will never get together and we consider the occupation our worst enemies," he said. "We are expecting martyrdom at any moment. When the order comes to defend ourselves, God willing, we will fight bravely."

Approaches to the problem of militias have often conflicted.

Order 91, issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led organization that administered Iraq following the invasion, outlawed militias. Members of nine recognized armed groups, including Badr but not the Mahdi Army, were supposed to turn in their weapons and were offered places in Iraq's security forces. The weapons were never handed over.

Last month, the Iraqi government renewed calls for the fighters to be further folded into Iraq's police force and army. But U.S. and British advisers to the police and army units have pressed Iraqi commanders to weed out members with militia ties.

The State Department's annual report on human rights practices, released in March, said that "militia members integrated into the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) typically remained within preexisting organizational structures and retained their original loyalties or affiliations."

In December, about 160 members of the 2nd Public Order Brigade, an Interior Ministry force with a little more than 2,000 officers, were discharged for alleged involvement with the Mahdi Army. And the police internal affairs division in the southern city of Basra was closed late last year amid accusations it was operating death squads.