Five aides of Iraq’s hardline cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were detained overnight during a crackdown on Shiite fighters in the southern oil province of Maysan, a top official said yesterday.
Four policemen, including two captains, were also arrested overnight in the operation which was launched on Thursday, said Colonel Mehdi al-Asadi, spokesman for the Maysan police.
“Five officials from the provincial council who represent the Sadr movement have been arrested for aiding the militia,” Asadi said, adding that four policemen were detained on similar charges.
Officials had on Thursday announced that the mayor of Amara, Rafa Abdul Jabbar, also a member of the Sadr movement, and 16 wanted suspects were arrested in the first hours of Operation Basha’ar al-Salam (Promise of Peace).
The operation involves Iraqi police and soldiers, backed by US troops, sweeping house to house through the city of Amara to hunt militiamen and illegal weapons.
The crackdown was launched after a four-day deadline to militiamen to surrender themselves and their weapons expired on Wednesday.
US commanders say Maysan has become a major center for arms smuggling into Iraq from Iran just over the border.
British troops transferred control of the province to Iraqi forces in April last year, but security has remained fragile with fighting between rival Shiite groups vying for supremacy.
Southern Iraq is the source of the majority of the country’s oil output and officials say the crackdown on militias is aimed at ending the widespread smuggling of crude from which many of them derive their funding.
But some analysts say the move is also an attempt by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his Shiite ally, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, to weaken their rivals in the Sadr movement ahead of provincial elections due in October
Sadrists said yesterday that the crackdown had become a witch hunt.
“All over Iraq — Basra, and Sadr city in Baghdad — the government has said the same thing: that Sadr and his Mahdi Army are not targets,” an anonymous organization chief for the Sadr movement in Amara said.
“But after those operations started they changed the color of their feathers and started going after followers of Sadr and his Mahdi Army,” he said.
“Right now I don’t know if I will be able to save my own life,” he said, adding that he was being forced to move from one safe house to another as the army closed in on him.
Huge weapons caches that included mortars, anti-personal mines and machine guns have been found dumped in fields, rivers and cemeteries, but the Sadr official said they did not belong to his group.
“These weapons are the garbage of Iraqi army during Saddam Hussein period,” he said.
Amara, a city of 350,000 people, has huge numbers of people living in abject poverty and has long served as a key center for support of Sadr’s anti-US stance and conservative Islamic politics.
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