Mahdi Army Lowers Its Profile, Anticipating Arrival of U.S. Troops

BAGHDAD, Iraq _ Mahdi Army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements.

“We have explicit directions to keep a low profile . . . not to confront, not to be dragged into a fight and to calm things down,” said one official who received the orders from the anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr heads the Mahdi Army, Iraq’s largest Shiite militia, headquartered in Najaf.

The official asked not to be named because he was not authorized to reveal the militia’s plans.

Militia members say al-Sadr ordered them to stand down shortly after President George Bush’s announcement that the U.S. would send 17,500 more American troops to Baghdad to work alongside the Iraqi security forces.

The decision by al-Sadr to lower his force’s profile in Baghdad will likely cut violence in the city and allow American forces to show quick results from their beefed up presence. But it is also unlikely in the long term to change the balance of power here. Mahdi Army militiamen say that while they remain undercover now, they are simply waiting for the security plan to end.

“If the Mahdi Army is attacked, they will defend themselves,” said Sheikh Abdul Razzaq al-Nidawi, a senior al-Sadr official in Najaf. “American troops are the enemy troops . . . if the Americans want armed resistance, we are ready, but we will work hard not to get involved in an armed opposition and we will work hard to endure the pressure even if we make sacrifices to keep our people and country safe.”

Mahdi Army sources said that their heavy weaponry had been moved from Sadr City or hidden since the announcement.

Across the capital residents described a changed Mahdi Army _ in Sadr City, a Shiite slum of more than 2 million people, in Talbiyah on the outskirts of Sadr City, and in Hurriyah, a formerly Sunni Muslim neighborhood in the north of the capital that in recent weeks has been taken over by the Mahdi Army.

Checkpoints in those locations were gone. Instead, young men in jeans and buttoned shirts directed traffic, helped the Iraqi army and wandered the streets nonchalantly.

ID checks for Sunni names like Omar have been replaced by a sort of Shiite code.

“Mawlak?” a Mahdi Army member will inquire. “My master?”

A Shiite will answer, “Mawlak al Hussein” _ “My master is Hussein,” referring to a revered Shiite saint. They check for the Shiite accent common in the south versus the Baghdadi accent of the Sunnis.

But Shiite residents said the weapons were nearby.

“We expect the American troops or even some Iraqi troops to besiege Sadr City,” said Raed Mohammed, a 37-year-old taxi driver.

The Mahdi Army has cast itself as the people’s resistance against an American occupation. They claim their role has always been to protect Shiites.

But across the capital they have pushed Sunnis from their neighborhoods with death threats. In one case in Habibiyah, near Sadr City, a Sunni man received a letter with a picture of a lynched man.

“Sunni, Sunni, Sunni. Move, Move, Move,” it said.

Over the past year, the capital has fallen into a state of civil war, divided into volatile Shiite and Sunni districts. The Mahdi Army has slowly taken control of once Sunni-dominated neighborhoods west of the Tigris River, which divides Baghdad between east and west.

Sunni neighborhood patrols, Islamist insurgent groups, and remnants of the Baath party have pushed back, attacking neighborhoods in the east.

Bodies from the fray turn up daily, most showing signs of torture and gunshot wounds to the head.

Some Sunnis worry that the new Baghdad security plan will clear the way for the Mahdi Army to finally cleanse Sunnis from Baghdad. In announcing the plan, President Bush said that U.S. forces would concentrate on defeating al-Qaida and the insurgency.

But Sunnis note that in most Sunni neighborhoods, local men unaffiliated with the insurgency also carry weapons to protect their families from militias and the Iraqi security forces, who they distrust and believe are heavily infiltrated by the Mahdi Army.

On Saturday, many Iraqis stockpiled canned foods, water and kerosene in preparation for violence.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite whose political backers include al-Sadr, has told legislators and advisors that security forces under the new plan will first go after the Sunni insurgency, which is responsible for most of the capital’s car and roadside bombs that target Shiites and U.S. forces.

After that, he’s said he’ll move to quell militias, including the Mahdi Army, who are suspected in the killings of dozens of Sunnis.

Abu Abdullah, 44, a Sunni, has moved three times to keep a low profile in his mostly Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah as the Mahdi Army encroached from the adjacent Shiite neighborhood of Shoala. Blank pieces of paper folded around a bullet are left at Sunni doors regularly here _ death threats ordering residents to leave. Two sectors in the neighboring center of Ghazaliyah have already fallen to al-Sadr’s militia.

“I don’t see any hope,” Abu Abdullah, who asked that his nickname, father of Abdullah, be used to avoid exposing himself to reprisals. “Eighty percent of the army and police are Shiite; how can you expect that they will help us?”

Sunnis in the mixed neighborhood of Zaiyouna on the east side of the Tigris also have taken to hiding their weapons. They, too, said they plan to brandish them again when the plan has ended.

“The new security plan was crafted to get rid of the Sunnis and the resistance in Baghdad,” said Sinan Abdullah, 30, a Sunni plastics trader in Zaiyouna. “Instead of dissolving the militias, the government starts with the Sunnis first. I have one sentence for Bush, `You have dealt with the wrong people.’”

American officers here say they have no plans to go after militia groups as long as the militias do not attack.

“We’re not necessarily going after the militias if the militias don’t come after us,” said Army Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a military spokesman for the Multi-National Division-Baghdad. “Our mission is not to take down the militias, that’s a function of the government.”

Few believe that al-Maliki, a hard-line Shiite, will ever go after Shiite militias.

“Loneliness, fear and losing hope are killing me,” said Maysoon Ali al-Jubouri, 30, a Sunni who lives in the upscale shopping district of Mansour where armed men roam the streets unquestioned. The Mahdi Army controls the neighboring areas.

She was picking up supplies of dates, canned foods and water as she has so many times before to prepare for a new plan to secure Baghdad.

“I am so tired, I wish I could go into hibernation and wake up to find the security plan over and everything fine,” she said.

___

(McClatchy Newspapers special correspondents Laith Hammoudi, Mohammed al Awsy and a special correspondent who could not be named for security reasons contributed from Baghdad. Correspondent Qassem Zein contributed from Najaf.)

___

(c) 2007, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.