A violent two-month standoff between the United States military and the radical Iraqi Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr edged towards resolution on Wednesday, with both sides making concessions to defuse the crisis.
Under the deal, al-Sadr pledged to pull his gunmen out of the holy city of Najaf, while American troops agreed to ”suspend offensive operations”, though they will continue patrols in the city until the Iraqi police can take over.
The deal was finally struck at 3am on Thursday by a group of prominent Iraqi politicians who call themselves the ”Shia House”.
Al-Sadr plunged the US occupation into crisis last month when he led uprisings in Baghdad and across southern Iraq. In a letter on Thursday he signed up to a four-point deal in which he promised that his militia, the Mehdi Army, would leave Najaf and allow the police to take over security. In return, he expected US forces to leave the city.
Dan Senor, a spokesperson for the US-led authority in Baghdad, said on Thursday night that troops would pull back once the Iraqi police and civil defence corps were ready to take back control of security in the city.
”As soon as the Iraqi security forces have resumed responsibility for public security and re-establish law and order, coalition forces will reposition to their bases outside Najaf,” he said. Military ”protective units” would stay at coalition offices, government buildings and police stations.
In Najaf, reports suggested that the cleric’s gunmen had pulled out of their frontline positions to parade through the city and were packing up their heavy weapons.
”I hope and pray that Syed Moqtada al-Sadr will live up to the commitments in this agreement,” said Mouwaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s US-appointed national security adviser who announced the deal.
But noticeably absent in the deal was any suggestion that the militia would be disarmed or that al-Sadr would turn himself in to answer charges that he was involved in the murder of a moderate cleric a year ago. Both of these issues are due to be resolved in ”discussions” between the cleric and the Iraqi politicians. One suggestion is that al-Sadr will only go before a court after June 30, when Iraq is given ”sovereignty” by the US.
Yet if he is given leeway on either his militia or the charges against him, it will mark a serious climbdown for the US military. After the uprising began, US commanders said clearly they regarded the militia as an enemy target, and that they intended to ”kill or capture” the cleric.
The deal came a day after the US military arrested one of Sadr’s senior aides, his brother-in-law, Riyad Noori.
A day earlier, fighting in Najaf damaged for the second time the shrine of Imam Ali, one of the holiest Shia sites.
In his letter al-Sadr said he was making the agreement ”to put an end to the tragic situation in noble Najaf and the violation of the sanctity of the sacred shrine of Imam Ali and the rest of the noble sites”. All his militia members who came from outside Najaf province would be withdrawn. He also promised to return local government buildings that his men had occupied, and to close down his illegal private jails and courts. But he said the deal depended on the US withdrawing from Najaf.
Rubaie said that as part of the new security arrangements for the city, local tribes would contribute young men to the police and civil defence corps in Najaf.
It was not clear what role Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shia cleric, played in the talks. One report yesterday suggested he had pressured al-Sadr to accept the deal to prevent a fullscale US assault on the city. But in recent weeks Sistani had seemed reluctant to take sides.
If the deal holds, it will be the second time in a month that the US has agreed to withdraw from a troubled Iraqi city under a locally-struck deal, without any insistence on disarming the militias involved.
A similar deal was reached to end the ferocious fighting in Falluja, west of Baghdad, where up to 600 people died in three weeks of fighting.
But there will also be concern that in each case the deals were reached not by Iraq’s Governing Council as a whole, or by cross-party groups, but by factions representing the two Islamic sects — the Sunni, in the case of Falluja, and the Shia in the case of Najaf.
”It is not that we want to create a sectarian problem for ourselves,” said Adnan Ali al-Khadhami, a senior figure in the Dawa party, a member of the Shia House. ”We did this because we care about the problems of the Shia.”
The Shia House is centred on a bloc of Shia figures within the governing council who include Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial, Pentagon-backed former exile, as well as the two largest Shia parties: Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
A nuclear scientist tipped by US officials to be prime minister of an interim Iraqi government publicly said on Thursday that he did not want the job.
Hussain Shahristani, who was jailed under Saddam Hussein for refusing to take part in a nuclear weapons programme, told a Baghdad press conference he would prefer to continue with his humanitarian work, and would not accept any position in the interim government. – Guardian Unlimited Â