STDD>HO

The on-again off-again truce in Najaf is off again. The recent chronology seems to run like this:

On Tuesday, a delegation from the Iraqi National Conference went to Najaf to meet with Moqtada al-Sadr with a proposal to end the fighting. Under its terms, Sadr's militia would have to leave the Ali Iman mosque and disband in order to be turned into a political movement. In return, they and Sadr would receive amnesty.

Sadr, however, refused to meet the delegation, saying through aides that conditions made it too dangerous, an odd statement for a man who is sworn to martyrdom particularly when it apparently was not too dangerous for the delegation. Still, "cordial" talks were held with lower-level representatives.

Even so, the failure to reach an agreement resulted in the heat being turned up dramatically.

Many delegates said Wednesday they were fed up with al-Sadr, and later in the day, [Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem] Shaalan said the government could raid the shrine within hours.

Now that the peace talks have not worked, "we have to turn to what's stronger and greater in order to teach them a lesson that they won't forget, and to teach others a lesson as well," Shaalan said.

"Today is a day to set this compound free from its imprisonment and its vile occupation," Shaalan said.

He emphasized that only Iraqis would enter the compound. Then, just hours later,

[a] delegate to the national conference[, Safia al-Souhail,] read a letter that she said was "news" from Sadr's office of his "approval of the conditions that the national conference has suggested." ...

Then a member of the Shiite Dawa party, Jalil Shamari, read a statement in front of the full auditorium, saying the "initiative is welcome." Shamari, who said he was contacted by one of Sadr's representatives and told that the cleric had a message for the conference, said that Sadr "accepts the three items that were in the letter of your conference to stop the bloodshed of Iraq, and to build a new Iraq which needs the effort of everyone, its sons and its daughters."

The news drew applause from the assembly. However, there were conditions:

Sheik Hassan al-Athari, an official at al-Sadr's Baghdad office, said the cleric wanted to negotiate how the plan would be implemented and to ensure his militants would not be arrested. He said al-Sadr had other minor conditions, but did not elaborate.

Al-Sadr aide Ahmed al-Shaibany said U.S. forces must first stop attacking.

"They cannot ask us to disarm while ... they're using warplanes to fight us. There should be a cease-fire first and then they ask us to disarm," he said.

It should have been obvious how Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's government and US forces would interpret that: "We agree to your terms. So you stop attacking us and then we'll negotiate." That's pretty much a repeat of the June truce, which they feel got them nowhere and was never actually carried out.

So it wasn't (or shouldn't have been, anyway) a surprise that the interim government found that response inadequate - especially since

[a]nother of [Sadr's] spokesmen, Sheikh Hassan al-Zerkani, told the BBC that the cleric's offer was genuine, but guarantees needed to come from the occupiers, not the occupied.

That is, Sadr's people were not prepared to offer any guarantees. But guarantees are exactly what the government wanted.

The government's demands, according to [cabinet minister Kasim] Daoud, are:

- Mr Sadr must hold a news conference to promise not to resort to future violence and announce the disarming of his Mehdi Army militia
- His fighters must hand in their weapons
- They must vacate Najaf's holy sites

That first demand may be a key one and may prove a sticking point for reasons I'll get into presently. But it's something the government is focused on.

Allawi said Iraqi authorities wanted to hear "directly from al-Sadr himself." On Tuesday, the cleric refused to meet with an eight-person delegation from the National Conference sent to Najaf to try to end to the impasse. He has instead sent letters and issued statements through spokesmen. ...

Allawi said the delegation was ready to go back and talk with al-Sadr if the cleric personally stated he was willing to accept the conditions.

When "we hear from him," the interim government will push ahead in developing a truce and seeing that the demands are carried out, he said.

But he added in a press conference that he was making a "final call for them to disarm, vacate the holy shrine, engage in political work and consider the interests of the homeland."

When asked for a response, Sadr's representatives returned to a militant position. Referring to those demands,

Sheikh Ahmed al-Sheibani, a senior Sadr aide and Mehdi Army commander, told reporters earlier in Najaf: "It is very clear that we reject them."

Sadr himself went further.

Defying that ultimatum, al-Sadr sent a telephone text message vowing to seek "martyrdom or victory," and his jubilant followers inside the shrine danced and chanted. ...

"They are all very proud to be in here and seem to be very adamant about staying in here," CNN reporter Kianne Sadeq said. "They aren't going anywhere until the fighting is over."

(Sadeq was one of a group of reporters who through the cooperation of US forces, Iraqi government forces, and Mahdi militia were able to gain access to the mosque compound.)

A major battle ensued.

Blasts and gunbattles persisted throughout the day Thursday in the streets of Najaf, where militants bombarded a police station with mortar rounds, killing seven police and injuring 35 others. At night, at least 30 explosions shook the Old City as a U.S. plane hit militant targets east of the Imam Ali shrine.

It continued through the night.

U.S. warplanes pounded areas near a shrine early Friday where radical Shi'ite militiamen were holed up....

Suspected U.S. AC-130 gunships struck repeatedly against positions held by Sadr's militiamen, sheltering in and around the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, Iraq's holiest Shi'ite Muslim shrine.

Orange flashes and white sparks lit the night sky above Najaf....

During this time,

[a]n aide to al-Sadr told the Arabic-language television network Al-Jazeera that the radical Shiite Muslim cleric has asked his supporters to hand over the keys to the shrine to the highest Shiite authorities in Iraq, a gesture symbolically putting the mosque in the hands of religious authorities.

But of course only symbolically. Despite several media accounts of Sadr ordering his militia to quit the mosque, he did no such thing. This was clearly a political move to try to entangle to religious authorities in Najaf in protecting the mosque from an attack. It would seem Sadr is - or at least the people around him are - genuinely concerned about the possibility of an assault by Iraqi forces.

And well they might be. While it's been said that both sides are engaged in brinkmanship, I personally think Allawi is quite prepared to go the iron fist route, even at the risk of the widely-speculated "Shiite uprising." If his government can't stand up to the challenge Sadr presents, it may be lost anyway, so go for broke may well be on the table. Certainly, I can't believe Allawi has any particular scruples against it.

And there's another reason to think Allawi is serious:

The bullet that whistled through the lobby of the Sea Hotel in Najaf yesterday, embedding shards of glass into a foreign reporter's cheek before lodging itself in an air-conditioning unit, carried an unmistakeable message: "Get out." ...

In Najaf journalists were summoned [Sunday] morning by the city's police chief, Ghalab al-Jazeera. It was said that he wanted to parade some captured members of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army, who have launched their second uprising in four months.

Instead the police chief delivered a blunt warning: journalists had two hours to leave Najaf or face arrest.

Most journalists decided to stay, at least initially, but

[a]fter a series of veiled warnings to leave on Sunday, two marked police cars pulled up at dusk outside the Sea of Najaf hotel on the outskirts of town, where Arab and Western journalists are staying. ...

A uniformed lieutenant then told the assembled journalists and hotel staff: "We are going to open fire on this hotel. I'm going to smash it all, kill you all, and I'm going to put four snipers to target anybody who goes out of the hotel. You have brought it upon yourselves."

Attempting to drive journalists out of Najaf, especially coupled with the earlier closing of al-Jazeera, would clearly seem to indicate a desire to limit the spread of information about what is going - or, more importantly, will go - on there. He may want to minimize the risk, but I'm convinced that Allawi believes he can't tolerate the status quo.

Another issue that is or should be of concern to Allawi and the US is the question of Sadr's position and actual degree of authority. I've noted the varying statements, first conciliatory, then radical, then politically astute, then radical again, and so on, and that it seems to me that the closer they can be traced to Sadr himself, the more likely they are to be of the "martyrdom or victory" type. That had lead me to wonder aloud if this actually indicates divisions in the hierarchy of Sadr's movement rather than his being "mercurial," which seems to be the standard wisdom. As a recent example, last week I mentioned that reporters had interviewed a platoon of militiamen from "Khalis, a small Shia town just north of Baghdad, [who] had arrived in Najaf to fight four months ago," that is, in April. They clearly did not leave Najaf and go back to their homes as the June ceasefire required. So does that mean the call for them to leave was a wink-wink affair? Or does Sadr not really have control of his forces? (Sidebar: This is also why the government demand that Sadr hold a press conference renouncing violence may be a real tough nut. To the degree I'm right, to that same degree Sadr becomes the last person in the hierarchy who'd be willing to do that.)

That notion of Sadr as the public face of the movement rather than its keystone is pretty much endorsed by an analysis of the situation in the August 14 Daily Star (Lebanon), which says

[t]he death or capture of Moqtada al-Sadr, who is leading a rebellion against Iraqi and American forces in the holy city of Najaf, may deal a blow to the firebrand Shiite cleric's movement but will not signal its demise, analysts say. ...

Sadr is not indispensable to the Mehdi Army, which comprises thousands of young lightly armed militants from the poorer areas of Iraq.

"If Moqtada Sadr is killed or arrested, it does not necessarily mean the end of his movement or the Mehdi Army," said Nizar Hamzeh, professor of politics at the American University of Beirut. "The makeup of the Mehdi Army suggests that there are other forces behind it, such as the Iranians. Killing or arresting Sadr might put some restraints on the movement or slow its rise, but not necessarily end its militancy." ...

Despite his respected lineage, Sadr is a junior ranking cleric with almost no political experience. His status, however, as a leading Shiite figure, whose popularity matches and in some areas transcends senior clerics such as Ali Sistani, is largely due to his outspoken opposition to the US-led occupation and continued military presence in Iraq.

That sounds much like my description of Sadr as the Iraqi version of "Anybody But Bush" - he's the "Anybody but the Occupiers" leader and if he goes, the movement will survive and another leader will emerge. So it's not Sadr himself that's the issue for Allawi and the US, it's the Mahdi Army.

"The government is adamant about finishing this militant threat," said Saad Jawad, professor of politics at Baghdad University. ...

It is a high-stakes gamble for Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and his US allies who can ill-afford a return to the status quo that existed after Sadr's last insurrection in April. ...

With the security situation continuing to deteriorate, Allawi's government desperately needs a success to show it is capable of imposing law and order.

"The Mehdi Army is the largest armed group in the country," Jawad said. "If the government and Americans succeed in neutralizing it, it will give an impetus for them to do the same in other places."

Are Allawi and the US targeting the militia rather than Sadr personally? Perhaps so, since the would make sense of the fact that

US forces say they have made a major advance into a mainly Shia area in Baghdad that is a stronghold of the radical Iraqi cleric Moqtada Sadr.

Residents of Sadr City told the BBC there was fierce fighting overnight between the Americans and Shia militia. ...

The BBC's Matthew Price, reporting from the outskirts of Sadr City, says the Americans appear to have moved right into the heart of the district in great numbers.

AP adds that "U.S. tanks moved throughout the streets and helicopter gunships shot at al-Sadr militants from the skies" and, Reuters says, "overran the cleric's stronghold ... meeting little resistance, witnesses said. The troops later withdrew to the outskirts of the area." A show of force in Sadr City would seem to have much more to do with pressuring the Mahdi Army than Sadr.

Can the "high-stakes gamble" succeed? Contrary to those who romanticize armed insurrection, my answer is "possibly." It will depend political acumen, a great deal on luck, and even more on the willingness to be exactly what we were supposedly "liberating" Iraqis from: someone who is prepared to be utterly ruthless in suppressing any and all opposition. Personally, I have no doubts Allawi is up for it.

We shouldn't be.