Fierce Clashes Erupt in Iraq's Holy City of Najaf

[cal04]

A series of explosions rocked Iraq (news - web sites)'s holy city of Najaf on Thursday as fighting between U.S. marines and a Shi'ite Muslim militia entered a second week, witnesses said.

They said the crackle of machinegun fire echoed from the southern parts of the city as smoke rose from the area. The U.S. military have threatened an offensive to root out militiamen loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's militia has threatened to blow up oil pipelines in southern Iraq if the U.S. and Iraqi government forces stormed the city. Hundreds of people have been killed and wounded in the fighting that began on Aug. 5.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=2&u=/nm/20040812/ts_nm/iraq_najaf_dc


There are reports of fierce fighting between US marines and fighters loyal to militant Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr in the Iraqi holy city of Najaf. Witnesses said they heard machine-gun and tank fire in the city, as the confrontation entered its second week. The US military has said they are preparing a final assault against the militia with the help of Iraqi forces. Meanwhile two US marines were reported killed in a helicopter crash in Anbar province west of Baghdad.

Three other people were injured in Wednesday night's crash, which occurred during what the US military described as "security and stabilisation operations". No hostile fire was observed near the helicopter at the time of the crash, they said.

Pipeline threat

Fighting broke out in Najaf at around 0700 (0300 GMT) as US forces headed towards the city's Shia cemetery, a militia stronghold.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3557446.stm

[David Dunham]

1. The situation in Iraq will now get worse and worse.

[slinkerwink]

2. now a civil war rages...

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Tom Engelhardt 's newsletter - good commentary re. Najaf

But didn't any of these people ever pick up a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People? Don't they know that all those Iraqis we've killed have families and friends, as do the buried dead we're saving from desecration by blowing them to kingdom come? ("Soldiers involved in the fighting described how many of the most recent graves are marked by photos, which crumble when U.S. forces shell the cemetery walls to reach the militiamen hiding within. 'Wives, daughters, husbands,' said Sgt. Hector Guzman, 28, of the 1st Cavalry Division's 5th Regiment. 'You just know you're destroying that tomb.' The Houston native shook his head. 'It doesn't feel right sometimes.'") Don't they know that military "victories" in wars like this are almost invariably Pyrrhic in nature?

Every one of our top officials in Baghdad is a veteran of the Vietnam experience, but none of them seems, on the evidence of recent developments, to have learned a thing from it. Yes, you can hem an overmatched enemy army into a city and defeat it, even crush it (whatever the toll on the city itself). But no matter how many people you kill, it's far harder to do that with a movement. Already unintended consequences of our assault on Najaf are spreading. On Monday, after serious threats from al-Sadr militants, the southern oil fields around Basra were even briefly shut down -- and global oil prices spiked yet again.

What our officials in Baghdad have done over the last year and a quarter is take a junior cleric, an extreme but relatively minor figure on the Iraqi religious and political scene, although also a man with growing numbers of young, poor followers, and make him into a figure to be reckoned with. Now, in a land with a powerful tradition of martyrdom (not exactly an unknown term, let's remember, inside Christendom), they threaten to create a martyr, and if they do, they will certainly live to regret it, as they would live to regret damage done to the Imam Ali Shrine, even if al-Sadr was hiding an army inside.

www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1677