Securing Baghdad - street by street
Posted: Thursday, February 15, 2007 3:57 PM
Filed Under:
Baghdad, Iraq
By Jane Arraf, NBC News Correspondent
If the new security plan in Baghdad works, it will work street by street. On some streets in the Dora neighborhood Thursday, American and Iraqi soldiers took the first steps to try to reverse the slide of a city dangerously divided by sectarian violence.
In some parts of the neighborhood in the south of Baghdad, residents say the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, has forced Sunnis out of their homes and taken over the houses.
"The soldiers are going to those houses now and telling the Mahdi Army they have two weeks to leave," one resident told me, marveling at the idea. She said the soldiers -- American and Iraqi -- were telling them if they couldn't produce a legal title to the homes, they would have to go.
It's a key part of the plan to stabilize Baghdad and one of the most difficult to implement.
Aim: reduce sectarian tension
Both the American and Iraqi governments have pinned huge hopes on this latest plan. At its most basic level it's designed to make Baghdad's neighborhoods secure enough that residents there will turn to Iraqi policemen and soldiers for protection instead of turning to Shiite militias or Sunni insurgents.
It's a shift in this city for the United States. Instead of going into neighborhoods, killing and capturing insurgents, and then moving on to the next neighborhood , Iraqi and U.S. troops will be staying a while.
Because American soldiers will be working with the Iraqis, they believe the Iraqi forces will be less involved in sectarian violence. The security operation is intended to buy time for the Iraqi government to make headway on the political and economic crisis that's helping to fuel the violence.
The top Iraqi general in Baghdad, Lt. Gen Aboud Gumba, in explaining the new security plan to Iraqis this week, said anyone occupying homes and building that didn't belong to them would be evicted.
"And who's going to do it?," was the obvious question from Iraqis. It’s also exactly why Iraqis seeing troops do just that in their neighborhoods is particularly significant.
Al-Sadr’s followers cooperating?
Al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who has perhaps millions of devoted followers, doesn't control all the elements of the militia loyal to him. But he controls enough of them that the Baghdad crackdown has started off without a lot of resistance from the Mahdi Army.
U.S. and Iraqi officials say he's made a deal with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step out of the way for now. Al-Sadr’s officials tell us that the cleric has urged his followers to cooperate with the plan.
"I think there are many of the Mahdi Army militants who have been ordered to leave Iraq -- I think by Mr. Muqtada [al-Sadr] himself -- in order to facilitate the government's effort in implementing the Baghdad security plan," Iraqi President Jalal Talabani told reporters Thursday. Talabani said sectarian tension had eased in neighborhoods controlled by the Mahdi Army, where in some cases the Shiite militia had given Sunni mosques they had seized back to the Sunni community. Talabani also said that al-Sadr had given the Iraqi government the "green light" to arrest any rogue Mahdi militia members.
Although he doesn't have the religious credentials of his revered father -- believed to have been assassinated by Saddam Hussein -- al-Sadr has a very powerful appeal to a large segment of young, disaffected, unemployed Shiites.
There are few better examples of that than in Najaf three years ago where I covered U.S. troops fighting the Mahdi Army for six weeks. Day after day militia members, some of them teenagers, would come out armed only with rifles and be killed shooting at tanks.
Al-Sadr and U.S. forces eventually agreed to a ceasefire. And he now seems to have made another strategic retreat -- leaving a few weeks ago for Iran, officials say. But no one doubts that he'll be back.
