Just Another Militia

By Cernig

Would anyone like to speculate how long the newly-agreed truce between Maliki and Sadr will last?

Not Long. Especially given this video to inflame tempers. The London Times describes it:

A humvee military vehicle idles on a broad avenue as an Iraqi army soldier walks nonchalantly past without so much as a glance at the body slung across the bonnet.

The dead man’s trousers have been pulled down to his ankles, exposing white underwear below a torn T-shirt drenched in blood from wounds to his chest and side.

Behind is a second Humvee with another body sprawled over the front, arms and legs outstretched. On his white shirt, a large bloodstain indicates the wound that may have killed him. A soldier sitting on the roof dangles his legs over the windscreen and seems to prod the corpse’s stomach with his boot.

As the vehicles roll slowly forward, the tooting of car horns rises to a crescendo in apparent celebration of victory in battle and the sound of whooping and gunshots can be heard.

A police officer in a blue uniform drives alongside, smiling as the Humvees are waved forward by a pedestrian in civilian clothes and head towards two large arches that span the road. The bodies are being paraded like prize stags after a hunt.

The film, which appears to have been made with a mobile phone, was passed to The Sunday Times by a senior official close to Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shi’ite cleric who leads the Mahdi Army militia.

The official said it had come from Basra and showed the bodies of two Mahdi fighters who died after the Iraqi army launched an offensive in the southern port city in March with the aim of liberating it from the grip of warring militias.

There was no way to corroborate the official’s information or to identify the dead men as Mahdi fighters, but the vehicles bear Iraqi army markings and the arches glimpsed in the film resemble a Basra landmark.

It doesn't take much brights to correctly predict Sadrist reactions:

Mahdi sources said the parading of corpses would increase distrust of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, and his army, which is largely trained and supported by the United States.

“The Mahdi will not surrender its weapons to such an army,” said one commander. “They say we are outlaws but this video just goes to prove that Maliki’s forces are nothing more than a militia. They will never take Sadr City unless they wipe out each and every one of us.”

...An Iraqi lawyer who has advised Maliki’s government said the two videos showed soldiers and police in serious breach of the law. “Desecrating a corpse is prohibited in law, even if he had been the worst criminal on earth,” said Maen Zaki, a former member of a government committee that handled legal issues arising from operations to restore order in Baghdad.

I suspect that the video is genuine and that the perpetrators are members of the ISCI's Badr Brigade which was largely folded into the Iraqi Army so that it could be re-defined as not a militia anymore. It's worth putting the blood-feud between the Sadrists and the Badrists into a wider historical context here, and as James Glantz points out, the new book by veteran UK reporter Patrick Cockburn does just that:

In late March, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki threw nearly 40,000 Iraqi Army and police forces, backed by American air support, into an assault on the southern city of Basra, figuring it would take him a few days to smash the Shiite militias in control of many of the city’s neighborhoods. Instead, the Mahdi Army, the militia led by Moktada, initially fought the government to a standstill.

There was probably not a single adult Iraqi who missed the strong historical resonances of that confrontation, and few Americans who did catch them. Understandably so: not even a Trivial Pursuit champion is likely to know that it was Moktada’s father-in-law, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, who formed a Shiite religious party called Dawa, or “the Call,” under the nose of Iraq’s last king. Dawa not only outlasted the king, who met a bloody end in 1958, but became so influential that it threatened the regime of a later Iraqi head of state named Saddam Hussein.

...For Prime Minister Maliki, one positive outcome of his inconclusive assault on the Mahdi Army in Basra is that the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a crucial part of his coalition that is led by another noted Shiite family, the Hakims, has warmed to him considerably after years of regarding him warily.

That isolated fact means little until you know that during years of exile in Tehran, Damascus and elsewhere, the Hakims continually accused Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr of being a collaborator with the Hussein regime. The rivalry between the Hakims and the Sadrs has never died, and in Iraq it won’t soon be forgotten. The prime minister may have depicted the operation in Basra as purely a matter of clearing armed bandits from the streets. But the fact remains that whoever those gunmen were, they withdrew only when Moktada ordered them to.

Nowadays, of course, Maliki of the Dawa Party founded by Muqtada al-Sadr's father-in-law and Hakim of the ISCI are fonder of alleging that Sadr the younger has deeper ties to an Iranian regime that was Saddam's greatest enemy than they do themselves. The spin stays the same, only the enemy of their main protector that a Sadr has supposedly collaborated with has changed.

That historical context also underlies recent Sadrist anger at Grand Ayatollah Sistani - which is why those claiming that Muqtada has been "hung out to dry" by Sistani have it so wrong. As Matt Duss writes:

Much of Muqtada al-Sadr’s legitimacy is based on the legacy of his father, Grand Ayatollah Sadeq al-Sadr, who built his movement in the 1990s among Iraq’s poorest Shia, and was assassinated by Saddam’s regime in 1999.

One of the central elements of the elder Sadr’s program (and now of Muqtada’s) was a distinction between the “silent clerics” (represented by Sistani and the Najaf establishment) — bookish sorts who stay remote from the lives of their people — and the “speaking clerics” who take part in the suffering and struggle of the Shia, as Sadeq did. And here the “silent clerics” once again stayed silent while Shia were crushed in Sadr City, of all places, while medical care, food, and shelter are being doled out in Muqtada’s name. It doesn’t require any math to see that Sadr benefits politically from this.

The outlook, as a wrote yesterday, is that the new truce is not a "milestone towards Iraq's bright, free future" but rather a milestone on a continuing cycle of violence and political manouvering. Sadr's movement has returned to ist roots and again become an insurgency with a political wing - not unlike Hezboullah or the Sinn Fein/IRA double act - and an insurgency wins simply by surviving.

Comments

[anderson]

Our "allies." Charming.

Previous barbarisms used by Rome, Attila, Genghis and Ivan the Terrible to strike fear at the enemy: parading mangled corpses, heads on pikes, public displays of hanged bodies, appear to be making a strong come back in Iraq. The imagery of this barbaric parade, dead Mahdi Army fighters, driven by Badr militia soldiers and supported in this gruesome spectacle with vehicles of the US military is not lost on Iraqis. "Progress" in Iraq brought to you by the Bush administration.

This is going to go on for a very long time.