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Showing posts with label Muqtada al Sadr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muqtada al Sadr. Show all posts
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Iraq - Basra Police Mutiny, Refuse to attack Sadrists, Clashes continue in Basra, Sadrists open New fronts throughout Shiite South - Informed Comment
Also see, Stan Goff, Feral Scholar, for a strategic/tactical perspective:
Good Morning, Vietnam!
"...he (al Sadr) commands the ferocious loyalty of two and a half million people and has an 80,000-strong militia concentrated a stone’s throw from the U.S.-protected Green Zone in Baghdad.-------------------------------------
Baghdad has about 6 million people; New York City has 8 million, just by way of comparison.
The population of Sadr City, the “neighborhood” under the leadership of Sadr, is approximately that of Brooklyn.” In Full
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Informed Comment
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Police Mutiny, Refuse to attack Sadrists;
Clashes continue in Basra;
Sadrists open New fronts throughout Shiite South
Mahdi Army Militiamen
Courtesy Al-Zaman of Baghdad.
Another US soldier was killed in Baghdad on Friday.
The Times of Baghdad reports in Arabic that clashes continued on Friday between Iraqi government forces and the Mahdi Army in Baghdad and the provinces of the middle Euphrates and the south, causing hundreds of casualties, including among women, children and the elderly. The fighting also did damage to Iraq's infrastructure, as well as to oil facilities and pipelines, damage that might run into the billions of dollars.
The US got drawn into the fighting on Friday. US planes bombed alleged Mahdi Army positions both in Basra and in Sadr City in Baghdad (as well as in Kadhimiya).
Kadhimiya is a major Shiite shrine neighborhood in northwest Baghdad, and the spectacle of the US bombing it is very unlikely to win Washington any friends among Iraqi Shiites.
Despite the US intervention, government troops were unable to pierce Mahdi Army defenses or over-run their positions.
Al-Zaman says that the police force in Basra suffered numerous mutinies and instances of insubordination, with policemen refusing to fire on the Mahdi Army. The government response was to undertake a widespread purge of disloyal elements.
[Hmm. I wonder where fired policemen with combat training and guns could find another job . . . Maybe with the Mahdi Army?]
The Mahdi Army opened a number of new fronts in the fighting, in Nasiriya, Karbala, Hilla, and Diwaniya, as a means of reducing the pressure on its fighters in the holy city of Karbala. Local medical officials reported 36 dead in the fighting in Nasiriya.
[In Full]
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Good Morning, Vietnam! - Stan Goff, Feral Scholar
The same US press, which has parroted the absurd claims of “surge success” for months now, a success that was based on successful ethnic cleansing in Baghdad combined with the Mehdi Army’s ceasefire, will now have to tie itself in rhetorical knots to explain how this success is now adrift in the columns of black smoke rising from one of the two main oil pipelines passing through the port-transit city of Basra, and why rocket-propelled grenades and mortar rounds are splashing onto the Green Zone like a storm.Good Morning, Vietnam!
27th March 2008, 03:54 pm
by Stan
Nouri al Maliki, at the behest of his American masters, has thrown the new Army of the Republic of Vietnam against the militias of the most powerful and cohesive popular movement in Iraq, that of Muqtada al Sadr. By all accounts, even with their American advisers, tactical air and intelligence support, this operation appears to be a stupendous failure; the Mehdi Army of Sadr is reported to be routing the Iraqi “government” forces at every turn.
Moreover, it has ignited an uprising that stretches from Baghdad to Basra and all points in between. This flagrant violation of the ceasefire that the Sadrists renewed only days ago for six additional months, by the American-controlled puppet government, has set the stage for the most dangerous moment in Iraq for the occupation forces since the dual rebellions in Fallujah and Najaf in April 2004.
It has also quite probably signed the death warrant for the Iranian-trained and supported militias of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the foundation of Maliki’s last thread of legitimacy as an “Iraqi government.” In Full
Tags:
Basra,
Disinformation,
Ethnic Cleansing,
Green Zone,
Iran,
Iraq,
Muqtada al Sadr
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