Iraq Orders US troops to abandon checkpoints at Sadr City

[OzarkDem]

Unfortunately, things will get much worse for our troops...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/01/MNGUTM3O1C1.DTL

Sadr City is the base of the country's most feared militia, the Mahdi Army, which answers to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr's strongly anti-American bloc is the largest in the Shiite governing coalition and was instrumental in making al-Maliki prime minister five months ago.

At midday Tuesday, al-Maliki issued an order setting a 5 p.m. deadline for removal of the U.S. checkpoints. A senior U.S. Embassy official said later that al-Maliki told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in a meeting Tuesday that the checkpoints should be lifted.

The move lifted a near-siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. U.S. military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier's Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in Baghdad.

U.S. soldiers in humvees had used concertina wire and sandbags to close off all bridges and other routes into Sadr City, home to 2.5 million Shiites, from the rest of Baghdad.