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Sadr's Militia Enforces Cease-Fire With a Deadly Purge
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Sunni leaders, who as recently as last year were accusing Mahdi Army members of sectarian cleansing, said the freeze has ended most of the horrific violence by the militia. "We are not afraid of them now," Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni and one of the country's two vice presidents, said in an interview. "Now we don't have eye-catching sectarian strife."
But there are still areas where men professing to be Mahdi Army members continue to engage in sectarian violence.
In December, a dozen Mahdi Army fighters on motorcycles stormed into an ice factory in the capital's Tobji neighborhood and kidnapped its Sunni owner, Maath Salman Feneer, a 30-year-old with three children, according to his family.
When the family complained to the Sadr office in Tobji, officials there said the attack had been carried out by Mahdi Army fighters in the neighboring Hurriyah area, according to Feneer's cousin, Ahmed Abdullah. He said the office in Tobji told the kidnappers to return Feneer or a complaint would be made to the main Sadr office in Najaf.
In discussions with the family about a ransom, the kidnappers disregarded the threat and used an expletive to refer to Sadr. "We don't take orders from anyone," they said, Abdullah recalled. His cousin's bullet-riddled body was found a few days later.
"I don't trust anyone in the Mahdi Army," said Abdullah, 37, a plumbing store owner. "They are all killers."
At the Sadr office in Sadr City, Salman al-Fareji, the local head of the organization, disagreed. "The main reason for the freeze is to save the Iraqi blood," he said. "This is our goal. This is our brightest hope."
