May 23, 2004

Insurgency: U.S. Military Says Shiite Rebels Seem to Have Ceded Karbala

American commanders said early Sunday that insurgents loyal to a rebel cleric appeared to have given up control of central Karbala, where they had been shielding themselves at two shrines.

According to the commanders, there were several strong signs that the armed supporters of Moktada al-Sadr, the maverick Shiite cleric, have abandoned the area and ceded authority to the Americans and their allies after nearly three weeks of urban combat.

A large overnight raid met no resistance coming from a group of buildings where insurgents had been firing at American tanks with rocket-propelled grenades. Civilians were seen returning to homes in central Karbala that they had abandoned during fierce fighting. And in the afternoon on Saturday, tribal sheiks approached American commanders offering to persuade the militia, the Mahdi Army, to lay down its arms and leave the city.

"It looks like they just packed up and went home," Col. Peter Mansoor, commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division, said in an operations tent on the city outskirts where he monitored field reports. Referring to Mr. Sadr, Colonel Mansoor said, "I think his days are numbered."

At around 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, in the midst of the raid, three Iraqi civilians walked up to American soldiers and asked why they would attack the buildings. The civilians said the Mahdi Army had dropped their weapons on Friday night and left the area, according to a radio dispatch from an American field commander. Not a shot was fired Friday night at a large convoy of Bradley fighting vehicles driving through the city center — something unheard of since the First Armored Division began its offensive nearly three weeks ago.

At 12:45 a.m. on Sunday, soldiers at the scene of the raid saw 10 Iraqi police cars and three police pickup trucks speeding up to the outskirts of the old city with their lights flashing. The police officers told the soldiers they were doing a patrol. The fact that the police could travel around the old city, if only on the outskirts, indicated that the insurgents were no longer in control, Colonel Mansoor said.

During the raid early Sunday, Iraqis at a nearby teahouse told soldiers that busloads of fighters from Falluja who came to town last week had left Friday. The fighters fled after concluding that they could not stand up to American tanks, these Iraqis said.

An Iraqi reporter for The New York Times in Karbala said he had seen militiamen putting their weapons in bags in recent days and trying to leave the city. Some residents of the city have distributed fliers denouncing Mr. Sadr and the presence of his fighters.
[...]
If the insurgency in Karbala has truly dissipated, then Mr. Sadr's six-week insurrection has suffered badly. Though the Americans clamped down on the rebellion, Mr. Sadr had managed to maintain his grip on three towns: Karbala; the nearby holy city of Najaf, where he lives; and Kufa, a town adjacent to Najaf where Mr. Sadr preaches.

He might be restricted to Najaf and Kufa, but the Americans are testing those cities, too, though with care.
[...]
American officials say they have no intention of sending soldiers into the heart of Najaf, which is centered around the Shrine of Ali, dedicated to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. They say they fear such an attack could provoke a backlash from Shiite Muslims around the world, and would prefer that senior clerics persuade Mr. Sadr to surrender.

The apparent withdrawal of Mahdi fighters from the central shrine area in Karbala came after nearly three weeks of intense combat in which American officers said more than 120 insurgents were killed. The Americans destroyed large parts of the city's downtown to flush out the insurgents. In the last week, the Americans had called in an AC-130 Specter gunship[Woohoo!--Jen] to strafe militiamen standing around the shrines with 40-millimeter cannon fire.

Karbala has been the scene of the most intense urban warfare in Iraq since the siege of Falluja ended last month. The Americans failed to pacify Falluja through military force because the revolt there had broad support, and the city became a symbol of resistance to the occupation.*

This whole Fallujah thing has become quite a subject of controversy, as to whether we "lost" the siege there, won them over by persuasion and a show of force, or somewhere in between.
I tend to go with the second option--that we won them over by letting the local leaders pacify the "insurgents," using Iraqi forces to keep order (even if they were ex-Baathists), and giving them a show of force that proved sufficiently that our Marines could go in there and decimate them, if necessary.
Check out the WaPo's take on the Sit Rep:
Falluja Leaders Say City Is Now Safest in Iraq

A month after hundreds were killed in fierce clashes between U.S. Marines and guerrillas, Falluja's leaders said Thursday the city is the safest in Iraq and invited U.S. contractors back to rebuild it.
[Hmmm. Wonder if they'll take him up on that offer yet?--Jen]

"Finally we have peace in Falluja. This city is today the safest and the calmest in Iraq," Mayor Mahmoud Ibraheem Al-Juraisi told reporters, under the watchful eyes of heavily armed U.S. Marines in Humvees mounted with machine guns.
[Marines, you GO, guys!--J.T.]
[...]
Everybody wants peace back," said Gen. Mohammed Latif, commander of the Falluja Brigade that includes soldiers from Saddam Hussein's old army.

"The most important thing is that Iraqis and Americans are working together and this is going to be an example for all Iraq," said Latif. "When reconstruction begins, American engineers are welcomed to come."
[OK, the ex-Saddamite we picked before Latif was a mistake, but it sounds like this guy is a team player!]
[...]
U.S. forces backed by warplanes and tanks launched a crackdown on the Sunni stronghold of 300,000 after a crowd killed and mutilated four American private contractors on March 31 and dragged their bodies through the streets.

Under a cease-fire agreement, Marines lifted their siege and pulled back to the outskirts, tasking the Falluja Brigade with restoring security.

The deal put an end to clashes, but U.S. commanders have expressed growing impatience at the brigade's slow pace in stripping guerrillas of heavy weapons and arresting the killers of the contractors.

In an apparent attempt to placate American impatience, Latif said guerrillas had "voluntarily" handed over the rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47s to his 1,800-strong brigade.
[Heheh! You can only wonder what old Latif said to these criminals to get them to cooperate!--Jen]
[...]
Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, said the Falluja Brigade had still to prove itself.

U.S. Marines are massed outside Falluja and have not ruled out renewing their crackdown if the brigade fails to restore order and hunt weapons. Three Marines have been killed in action this week in the volatile province that includes Falluja.

I'm sorry, but this doesn't sound like a "defeat" to me, even if someone whose opinion I respect like NRO's Michael Ledeen, says that it is.
(Some of my fellow neocons get upset when the U.S. doesn't kick ass hard enough and fast enough, so anything less than the complete sack of the town looks to them like a "defeat.")

By contrast, Mr. Sadr's militia here has lost much of its backing since it took over Karbala last month, largely because the violence it brought has driven away Shiite pilgrims and wrecked the local economy.
[...]
Fighting over the last week had been edging closer to the shrines, dedicated to two of the most revered Shiite Muslim martyrs. But early Friday morning, American forces withdrew from the Mukhaiyam Mosque, a nearby building they had occupied on May 12 after a pitched battle with insurgents in the area.

The mosque had become a foothold for the Americans in the dense urban landscape of downtown Karbala, and the Army had lost three men just trying to defend it from snipers and mortar teams.

The retreat
[The NYT pulls this out of thin air! I can't find a "retreat" to which they supposedly refer anywhere in the report!--J.T.]
came at a time when the American military was being forced to defend itself in light of the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib and of an air attack on Wednesday near in the Syrian border in which 41 people were killed. On Friday, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Beirut and Bahrain against the American presence in the Shiite holy areas.

I wouldn't make too much out of those (This *is* the NYSlimes, you know!), but here's the story.
The Slimes forgets to mention that the larger protest in Lebanon was made up mostly of Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah.
And of course, as in Syria, anything that goes on in Lebanon has the approval of Bashir Assad.

[...]
"The tribal leaders were going to make a public announcement in the media to tell the Mahdi Army to lay down their arms and leave the city," Colonel Bishop said after the meeting with the sheiks on Saturday.

Let's hope for the best and pray that the al-Sadr/Shiite uprising has about run its course with a minimum of loss of life on both sides, the maximum use of local leaders, both religious and military, to restore order and without us having to use a "scorched earth" policy on the rebel cities, although we can kick some butt (as we did yesterday in Najaf after "Friday prayers" got the Islamists all fired up).
Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Richard Myers told the House Armed Forces Committee that we are on the "brink of success" in Iraq and who would know better than he?!