Sadr still in Iran as security ops continue - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Sadr still in Iran as security ops continue

BAGHDAD — The military spokesman in Iraq said Wednesday that all indications showed that radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr remained in Iranian exile “as of 24 hours ago,” more than a month after he was said to have gone there in advance of the current U.S.-Iraqi security drive to calm violence in the capital.

The anti-American religious leader, who heads the Mahdi Army militia, was first reported by the Americans to be absent from Iraq on Feb. 13, at the start of the latest security drive.

“He’s a very significant part of this political process. We do continue to track his whereabouts,” Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell said at a briefing to mark the end of the first month of the security drive.

Assessing the security operation at the end of the first month, the spokesman expressed particular concern about a spike last week in the number of what he called “high-profile” car bombings.

“If the high-profile car bombs can be stopped or brought down to a much lower level, we’ll just see an incredible difference in the city overall. Murders and executions have come down by over 50 percent. ... But the high-profile car bombs is the one we’re really focused on because that’s what will start that whole cycle of violence again,” Caldwell said.

Al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army fighters melted away and have not confronted U.S. forces as American and Iraqi troops launched the third crackdown on sectarian violence in the capital in less than a year.

There was great concern the operation would force an all-out showdown with al-Sadr’s forces in their Sadr City stronghold in eastern Baghdad, but that has not materialized.

As a result of the diminished presence of the Mahdi Army, the daily death toll of execution-style murders has dropped significantly.

That is part of a group of statistics that prompted Caldwell and U.S. Charge d’Affaires Daniel Speckhard to issue cautiously optimistic evaluations of the first month of the crackdown.

“By the indicators that the government of Iraq has, it has been extremely positive. But I would caution everybody about patience, about diligence. This is going to take many months, not weeks, but the indicators are all very positive right now,” Caldwell said.

Elsewhere, suicide bombers struck a market in northern Iraq and an Iraqi military checkpoint in Baghdad on Wednesday, killing at least 10 people, while an Iraqi general warned extremists that they will be “smashed under the foot of the Iraqi people” if they resist efforts to end the violence in the country.

In the worst attack, a man wearing an explosives belt strolled into an outdoor market in Tuz Khormato, 130 miles north of Baghdad, and blew himself up.

The blast occurred just before noon as the market was crowded with shoppers in the city, which has a mixed population with a slight majority of ethnic Turks. At least eight people were killed and 25 were wounded, police said.

Northern Iraq has seen a recent rise in violence that many blame on insurgents fleeing a security crackdown in the capital that began a month ago.

Shawan Saleh, a Kurd who owns a restaurant near the market, said he rushed to the site and saw bodies lying on the bloodstained pavement, six damaged shops and two burning cars.

“What is the guilt of the people who came to sell or buy fruit and vegetables. There were no military or policemen in the market. It was only innocent civilians. The insurgents want to kill as many as they can. They want to ease the pressure on their fellows in Baghdad.”

In western Baghdad, meanwhile, a suicide car bomber slammed into an Iraqi army checkpoint in the Sunni neighborhood of Yarmouk, killing two civilians and wounding four others, police said.

The commander of the Baghdad security plan, Lt. Gen. Abboud Qanbar, warned Wednesday that all terrorists and outlaws “will be smashed with the foot of the Iraqi people” unless they reconsider their “position and return to logic before it’s too late.”

Qanbar also sought to reassure the capital’s residents that the military is not discriminating in the crackdown, despite complaints by Sunnis that their neighborhoods have been unfairly targeted by the Shiite-dominated government.

He said the effort had made headway.

“We’ve overcome the terrorist acts, militant groups, criminal gangs, sectarian killings and displacement,” he said at a press conference in the heavily fortified Green Zone. “We’ve passed to the other side and members of our armed forces are hunting down the terrorists and criminal gangs on the ground and in their dens.”

The U.S. military also has stepped up its presence and plans to have about 20,000 extra American troops sent to Baghdad and surrounding areas by the end of May.

In a sign of the persistent Sunni resentment fueling much of the violence, the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s sons and a grandson were exhumed and reburied near the ousted leader’s grave in Ouja, his hometown north of Baghdad. Saddam was hanged on Dec. 30 and buried the next day in a grave chipped out of an interior floor of a building he had built for religious events.

Tribal officials said they decided to move the remains of Saddam’s sons Odai, 39, and Qusai, 37, and his 14-year-old grandson Mustafa — who died July 22, 2003, in a gunbattle with U.S. troops in the northern city of Mosul — to keep all members of the family in one place.

Tribal chief Ali al-Nida and three other relatives accompanied the bodies as they were transferred Tuesday in three cars from the cemetery about two kilometers (a mile) from the building in which Saddam is buried.

The three bodies were buried in the courtyard near the graves of Saddam’s half brother and former intelligence chief Barzan Ibrahim, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, former head of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, who also were sent to the gallows in January for the killings of 148 Shiites in the town of Dujail in 1982.

The five graves were covered with Iraqi flags as people prayed next to them during the service in Ouja, near the scene of Saddam’s capture by American soldiers in December 2003.

In other violence Wednesday, according to police:

* A municipal council chief and three other people were shot to death as they were driving in the Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah in Baghdad.

* Gunmen attacked a Sunni mosque in Iskandariyah, 30 miles south of Baghdad. The mosque was severely damaged, it was empty and there were no casualties.

* The head of the local Iraqi Red Crescent Society branch, Jassim al-Jubouri, in Tikrit was abducted by gunmen on Monday night.