Iraq's New Guns for Hire

[WillyT]

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It wasn't a subtle warning. Two weeks ago a convoy of 12 cars bristling with AK-47s rolled through Elam, one of the last mixed neighborhoods in Baghdad, in broad daylight. The young men cranked a dirgelike song on their stereo praising Moqtada al-Sadr and shouted at residents to get off the streets. To reinforce the point, they unloaded their AKs into the air. And they left behind a very clear message in black graffiti: DEATH TO NAWASIB, a derogatory term for Sunnis.

Three days later Ibrahim, a Sunni man in his early 20s, was walking home from a neighborhood soccer match. A black Hyundai sedan pulled up and the passenger pumped three bullets into Ibrahim's chest with a handgun. By the time a crowd gathered around, blood had seeped through Ibrahim's beige and yellow tracksuit and formed a pool on the ground. The gunmen raced off toward a nearby highway. "He got in a fight with someone during football and talked bad about the Mahdi Army and Moqtada Sadr," says an Elam resident who does not want his name used for safety reasons.

Drive-by shootings are nothing new on Baghdad's streets. But petty murders like Ibrahim's are a sign of a more worrying development. Weeks ago Sadr issued orders for his fighters to lie low as thousands of new U.S. and Iraqi soldiers deployed throughout Baghdad. For the most part they've obeyed—and the resulting drop in sectarian killings was the best news that U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus had to report last week, as he pleaded with congressional leaders to give his security plan time to work. Now individual gunmen and sometimes whole units from Sadr's Mahdi Army are breaking off on their own. The militiamen "are under a lot of pressure, so it's natural for them to shed pieces," says a Coalition official familiar with the group who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material.

The freelancers add a new dimension to Iraq's already brutal kaleidoscope of violence. In Baghdad, after an initial dramatic drop, the number of corpses being found each morning is on the rise again. Outside the capital, fighters fleeing south have linked up with local Mahdi units; their presence is upsetting the uneasy balance of power struck between various Shiite groups in the region. Coalition officials worry that Iran's Revolutionary Guards will use their ties with the Mahdi Army to recruit rogue units for attacks on American troops. Last week Petraeus claimed that a Mahdi splinter group was responsible for the killing of five Americans in Karbala in January.

Sadr himself, who has not been seen in public since the security plan was launched, has hinted at the divisions within his organization. Just before a massive Sadrist rally in Najaf on April 9, he issued a statement pleading for his followers to stay loyal: "If you love the Sadr movement," he wrote, "then listen and obey." Lower-level Mahdi commanders are even more frank. "There are some groups who do not obey the orders of seyed Moqtada," says Abu Hawra, a Mahdi commander in west Baghdad. But he adds, perhaps self-servingly, "We've given the green light to government forces to arrest or punish them. Those who break orders are certainly excluded from the Mahdi Army."

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Link: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18368743/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/

Not good.