Iraqi security forces fought Shi’ite militias in several southern cities on Wednesday as the embattled government tried once more to impose its authority on the divided country.
Government troops regained control of the holy city of Karbala after killing ten members of a Shi’ite cleric’s private army, arresting 281 more and imposing a strict curfew on the town.
But soldiers clashed with militia fighters elsewhere, including in Iraq’s second city of Basra, where masked gunmen fired rocket-propelled grenades at the governor’s headquarters, an Agence France-Presse correspondent witnessed.
At the same time, deadly violence continued in the capital, where a car bomb killed eight people and wounded another 28 near the main bus station.
Checkpoints were thrown up around Karbala, with only local people allowed in or out, after local cleric Ayatollah Mahmud al-Hasani’s armed supporters killed at least six soldiers and civilians in clashes on Tuesday.
“On Tuesday August 15, a group of gunmen attacked a police station and government offices in Karbala with the aim of destabilising it,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, in a statement issued as head of Iraq’s armed forces.
“The Fourth Corps managed to kill 10 of them and arrest 281 others before calming the situation … The situation is now under control,” he added.
Al-Hasani spokesperson Dhia al-Musawi said the militia was switching to passive resistance. “Followers from Hilla and Basra are going to come to Karbala. They will hold a sit-in wherever they are stopped by the police,” he said.
Police in Kut, 150km from Karbala, said Hasani’s supporters there had ambushed a patrol and killed one officer.
Meanwhile, in Musayyibb, 55km south of Baghdad, police said they had arrested 25 pro-Hasani militants after fighting there.
In Basra, black-clad fighters fought an hour-long gun battle with Iraqi troops after firing on the governor’s headquarters. They were dispersed and five of them arrested, a police officer told said.
The fighting reflects growing tension between Iraq’s United States-backed security forces and increasingly confident Shi’ite militias, some of them followers of local preachers, others linked to parties in the fragile coalition government.
Shi’ite leaders such as radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, head of the powerful Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), have called for communities to form self-defence units.
Al-Hasani is a minor figure, with essentially local influence, but the violence erupting in southern cities will serve as a warning to the Shi’ite prime minister’s government of what might come if he takes on the main players.
The Shi’ite groups say militias are necessary to protect their shrines and civilians from Sunni extremists who have carried out a series of deadly bomb attacks on Shi’ite areas in Baghdad and around the country.
US generals warned earlier this month that the violence could push Iraq into civil war, which could in turn lead to the collapse of al-Maliki’s government and Iraq’s fragmentation into rival Sunni, Shi’ite and Kurdish zones.
On Tuesday in the Shiite city of Najaf — which last week was the scene of a deadly bomb attack outside a major Shi’ite shrine — local leaders said they would take matters into their own hands and authorise neighbourhood militias.
“We started today [Wednesday] forming a committee in Najaf to choose individuals who will control security in their neighbourhoods and keep an eye on all suspicious movements in their areas,” deputy governor Abdul Hussain Abtan told AFP.
US commanders are privately concerned that Shi’ite militias such as those linked to SCIRI or Sadr’s Mehdi Army will become a powerbase to rival al-Maliki’s government or a state-within-a-state on the model of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
In Baghdad, Wednesday’s deadly car bomb detonated in the Nahda district at 11.30am local time, hitting a popular street market near where Iraqi Shi’ites take buses to southern cities.
In addition to the eight dead, four police officers were among the 28 wounded.
The capital is in the grip of a sectarian dirty war in which Sunni insurgents target crowds of mainly Shi’ite civilians in bomb attacks, and Shi’ite death squads carry out kidnappings and reprisal killings.
Iraqi and US security forces have launched a large-scale campaign dubbed “Operation Together Forward” to isolate flashpoint neighbourhoods and conduct house-to-house weapons searches. — AFP