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Iraq: Mahdi army inflicts defeat on US puppet

Just weeks after the media retrospectives on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, a new round of violence was unleashed on the country’s long-suffering people, leaving at least 500 dead. While an Iranian-brokered ceasefire has brought some relief, Jeremy Dewar warns that this is the start of a battle to break up Iraq and hand its oil wealth over to the imperialist multinationals.

On Tuesday 25 March, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki announced a 30,000-strong military operation to crack down on lawlessness and illegal militia in the south. He personally travelled to Basra to take charge, vowing to “fight to the end”; he gave gunmen 72 hours to disarm.

No one in Iraq was under any illusion that this was anything other than a declaration of war against the Mahdi army, loyal to Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Iraqi government forces did not engage the other major militia operating in Basra, the Badr Organisation of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI, formerly known as SCIRI), led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.

Within hours, fighting broke out not only in Basra and in Sadr City in Baghdad, known Mahdi army strongholds, but also in Kut, Hilla, Diwaniya and other cities. The unilateral ceasefire, that Sadr had called in August 2007 and renewed this February, had dramatically shattered. With it went media claims that the US “surge” and British “nation building” had pacified the country.

For many of the 60,000-100,000 militants in the Mahdi army, this came not a minute too soon. For months they had complained that the government and its US masters had been using the ceasefire to carry out raids, arresting and killing thousands of their members and leaders. Even Sadr, who has consistently favoured caution, had been forced to call for a campaign of “civil disobedience” earlier in the month – though, as Patrick Cockburn of The Independent noted such tactics in Iraq can only carried out by armed men, ready to fire if attacked!

First round to Moqtada al-Sadr

Following the same strategy as the US Marines used during the siege of Fallujah in 2004, which resulted in the loss of over 1,000 lives, and the Israelis are using in Gaza, Iraqi and US forces inflicted collective punishment on the people by laying siege on them. They surrounded the sprawling, poverty-stricken quarters of Sadr City, the eastern district of Baghdad, home to two million Shias, and to most of Basra as well.

Electricity and water supplies were cut; an indefinite curfew was imposed on Thursday 27 March; the streets became a battleground. Nouri al-Maliki came to Basra to take command and issued an ultimatum to the young Mahdi militiamen to surrender or face annihilation. US firepower was increasingly called in. Helicopters and fighter planes strafed the skies of Baghdad and Basra, guided to Mahdi army strongholds by US covert operation troops on the ground. Even British artillery fired rounds into the crowded districts they had once patrolled – albeit from the relative safety of their bunker at Basra airport.

Maliki’s boasts soon turned to ashes in his mouth. Victory, as the saying goes, has many fathers but defeat is an orphan. Despite early claims from the Americans that this was the decisive turning point in “pacifying” the country, by Friday George Bush was already denying paternity. He insisted “this was [Maliki’s] decision; it was his military planning; it was his causing the troops to go from point A to point B”.

By Sunday the official death toll stood at 488, with thousands more wounded. The real figure was undoubtedly much higher. But despite their overwhelmingly superior firepower, Iraqi government forces were losing the battle on the streets.

Cracks began to emerge in the Iraqi forces. Its commander in charge of Basra, Lieutenant- General Mohan al-Furayji, had warned that his troops had received insufficient training and wanted three more months to prepare for the offensive. He was over-ruled, but he was not wrong.

Iraqi newspaper Azzaman wrote: “Thousands of police officers were reported have refused fighting the militiamen and at least two army regiments joined them with their weapons in Baghdad. More troops were said to have sided with the militiamen in Basra.”

By Sunday a ceasefire was hurriedly agreed. Sadr announced, “Because of the religious responsibility, and to stop Iraqi blood being shed… we call for an end to armed appearances in Basra and all other provinces.” However, it soon became apparent that it was Maliki and Bush, not Sadr, who had taken the biggest blows. Sadr demanded again that Mahdi army prisoners be released and that raids against them cease. His aide, Hazem al-Araji, told reporters that weapons would not be handed in.

But the scale of the defeat for the prime minister and the White House puppeteer went beyond this. Al Jazeera reported that the deal was brokered after “senior figures in Iraq’s major Shia parties and representatives of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard held the negotiations in the Iranian city of Qom”.

Leila Fadel of McClatchy newspapers gave more details, claiming that Iraqi MPs, including members of Maliki’s own Da’wa party and the ISCI, secretly met Sadr and Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds (Jerusalem) brigades:

“‘The statement issued today by [Moqtada al-Sadr] is a result of the meetings,’ said Jalal al-Din al Saghir, a leading member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. ‘The government didn’t have any disagreement with the Sadrists when it went to the city of Basra. The Sadrist movement is the one that chose to face the government.’

‘We asked Iranian officials to help us persuade him that we were not cracking down on the Sadr group,’ said an Iraqi official, who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. He described the talks as successful but said hard-line Sadrists could goad the government into over-reacting and convince Sadr that the true aim of the Iraqi Security Forces is to destroy the Sadrists.”

This appears to be an astonishing humiliation for the US and its stooge prime minister. The US trained Iraqi army splits; the police force becomes inoperable; the government goes cap in hand to the commander of Iran’s top army division to negotiate a peace deal with Sadr, presumably behind Maliki and Bush’s back.

Maliki could hardly have foreseen a week ago when he promised to “fight to the end” that it would not be Sadr’s. Indeed Maliki’s end cannot now be very far away, although his very weakness may prolong his political life, as the conflicting political forces in Iraq manoeuvre between a growing Iranian and a withering US influence in the country.

Battle to break up Iraq

George Bush described the Iraqi government offensive – with his unerring gift for a boomerang phrase – as “a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq”. The Battle of Basra represented a major step in US imperialism’s attempt to break up Iraq into three weak states, or three confederated autonomous statelets, through which it can achieve its aim of dominance over the region, ensuring the permanence of major US bases and a firm grip on its enormous oil reserves. This has been the US administration’s policy ever since 2004, when the convergence of the insurgency in the so-called “Sunni triangle” and the Mahdi army looked as if it might chase out the occupation forces. Maliki’s abject failure throws this strategy into confusion once again

Paul Bremer drew up the new Iraqi constitution, under which the national elections of January 2005 took place, with the specific aim of encouraging Kurdish, Sunni Arab and Shia leaders to use its powers to establish their own fiefdoms. This took the heat off the US troops and sparked a sectarian civil war, as militias – and infiltrated government forces – fought each other for territory, and millions either fled the country of were internally displaced by pogroms.

The January 2007 “surge”, the US policy of pouring even more troops, currently around 160,000 of them, into Iraq was designed to oversee this internal division. A wall has been built in Baghdad to separate Sunni and Shia quarters, hitherto far more intermingled. Much of the tribal and ex-Ba’athist led Sunni insurgency was bribed into the Awakening movement, an 80,000-strong US trained militia that has driven al-Qa’ida underground. The Kurdistan Regional Government has developed into a virtually independent US protectorate, and returned the favour by signing its own deal with Western multinational oil companies. And the two million inhabitants of Basra, which controls between 60 and 70 per cent of the country’s oil reserves, has been handed over to local Shia militia, with the hope that they would do likewise.

Important referenda and elections are due this year. In the summer, there will be a referendum in the oil city of Kirkut and in Mosul to decide whether they becomes part of the Kurdish region; in October, regional elections will be held. Given the federal constitution, these are vital flashpoints.

The elections are also crucial for deciding who will benefit from Iraq’s vast oil reserves. The draft Iraq Oil and Gas Law has been stuck in parliamentary wrangles for over a year now. The Bill would grant Big Oil production sharing agreements (PSAs) to profit from existing and future oilfields for anything up to 37 years: in short, a privatisation rip-off on a grand scale. Theoretically future governments would not be able to rescind these agreements. In addition, while existing fields would have to pay revenues to a central Iraqi government, regional governments would be able to dispense income from new finds as they wish.

It is this that underlies the break-up of Iraq: why there is such fierce fighting in and around Mosul and Kirkut, and why is the US determined to defeat the Sadrists in Basra first. Indeed, US Vice-President – and Big Oil man – Dick Cheney was in Iraq only a week before the surprise offensive began. Ostensibly, he was there to discuss the passage of the Oil and Gas Law. But many in Iraq believe he also pressured Maliki take on the Mahdi army ahead of previously agreed schedules. Always hot headed and impatient of delays, Cheney and his pupil in the oval office are aware that their time is running out and their man McCain’s only hope is to be able to claim a substantive victory in Iraq.

The problem for the US now is that Sadr’s Mahdi army won. So who is Moqtada al-Sadr and what is the Mahdi army?

Limits of Sadr’s nationalism

Al-Sadr was not a prominent cleric before the 2003 invasion, although his father was a Shia martyr, executed by Saddam – indeed Sadr City is named after Moqtada’s father. Sadr has never claimed to be the leading Shia in Iraq, and has previously given ground to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who is more closely linked to the ISCI.

But the 2003 lightening victory of the US and the total dissolution of the Ba’athist army and police led to a wave of violence, lawlessness and looting in the capital. The Mahdi army was a spontaneous response to this, setting up checkpoints, patrolling streets and dispersing limited supplies of food and essentials to the needy. Soon the Mahdi army became the major force in the slums of Baghdad, Basra and beyond.

Sadr repeatedly proclaims himself an Iraqi patriot, not a Shia communalist, struggling to keep the country united, exclude the Americans and ensure Shia and Sunni, Arabs and Kurds all benefit from the country’s natural wealth. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity: only the feasibility of his strategy, which includes, if not direct collaboration with the Americans, at least collaboration with the collaborators. Despite boycotting the 2005 elections, Sadr has agreed to work with – and effectively join – Maliki’s government. He has a bloc of about 30 MPs and is influential in the Ministry of the Interior: hence the Mahdi army’s infiltration of the police.

One cause for Sadr’s at least rhetorical denunciation of the occupation is the mass base of his movement. For them everyday reality is one where the US has committed countless atrocities against civilians, fomented sectarian divisions, and failed to fulfil promises on security or restoration of the economy. But Sadr has many times pulled back from direct confrontation with the occupiers – in Najaf in 2004, in August 2007 and just now.

Another fatal flaw of the Sadrists is the political Islamism of their movement. It limits its appeal to the religious Shia population, in effect excluding Sunnis, Christians, secular Arabs and Kurds. It is hard to ascertain on what scale the Mahdi army has been implementing a harsh fundamentalist regime based on sharia law, targeting women, youth, trade unionists and socialists, in those areas it controls, or whether it has committed atrocities against Sunnis and others. But it is clear that there is considerable resentment against the Sadrists from those opposed to the occupation, which indicates it is not all US-Iraqi government propaganda .

Also subject to conjecture is the extent to which Sadr himself exercises control over his forces. On more than one occasion, ceasefires have been called in order to cleanse the Mahdi army of “rogue elements”. More importantly, perhaps, Sadr has spent much of the past period in Iran engaged in religious studies, while a layer of commanders have established authority on the ground. It was interesting that Hazem al-Araji had to add to Sadr’s nine-point statement on Sunday that the Mahdi army would not disarm – and that senior ISCI and Da’wa leaders worry that these commanders may undo Sadr’s compromise.

The problem the Mahdi army poses to the US is not Sadr’s policies so much as the aspirations of its mass base, both in class terms and location. The Shia urban and rural poor and working class overwhelmingly support the Mahdi army. And they are not confined to the south, but exist in large concentrations right up to Baghdad and across the east into Diyala province. The extreme poverty of Sadr’s mass base pushes him occasionally to the left, while its geographical spread makes it an obstacle to the US plans to divide Iraq into three.

This is why the US took the extraordinary step of siding with ISCI and its Badr Organisation against the Mahdi army: extraordinary because the ISCI is closer to the Iranian regime than any other party in Iraq. It was formed in 1982 as a split from Da’wa, in the wake of the Iranian revolution, and fought alongside Iran during its decade-long war with Iraq. Its political aim is not just an Islamic republic, but one ruled over by a council of clerics rather than a democracy. What further proof of US desperation could there be!

Undoubtedly, in the event of any of the major Shia Islamist parties – Da’wa, ISCI, Mahdi army or local variants – winning control in southern and eastern Iraq, the US would face a stronger Iran. Sooner or later, the imperialists would respond by launching an attack on Iran itself, or using its ally Israel. This is besides the enormous defeat this would represent for working class unity, the rights of women and minorities, and the struggle to use Iraq’s oil wealth to rebuild the country according to the needs of the people.

Permanent revolution

The danger now is that after the Battle of Basra, Sadr and his aides will – as they have done before – barter away their advantage over Maliki and the American forces for a deal based on a redivision of Iraq. But there is an alternative.

Secular working class and socialist forces, in the workplaces and the trade unions, in the schools and colleges, should appeal to the restive rank and file of the Mahdi army, who genuinely do want to drive out the American occupiers, to the poor Sunni Arabs in the west and Kurds in the north to organise a united front against US imperialism’s attempt to divide and conquer, and steal the oil profits. This unity can only be forged on the basis of demands that address the needs of the working class, the peasants, the unemployed masses, and by guaranteeing in advance no privileges based on religion, ethnicity, gender or sexuality, and self-determination for the Kurds, up to full independence if they wish it. Only on this basis can the independence and unity of Iraq and its peoples be assured.

The Iraqi masses have put up a heroic fight back against the US and British occupiers for five years, but they have been thwarted of victory because of an acute crisis of leadership within the resistance movement. Only a revolutionary communist party, rooted in the unions and working class districts, armed with a programme of mass direct action – strikes and demonstrations leading to a mass armed insurrection – can drive out the occupying troops, and by nationalising under workers control all existing and future oilfields, and establishing the direct rule of workers and peasants’ councils, give the Iraqi people the peaceful and prosperous life they so deserve.

In short only the strategy of permanent revolution can give Iraqis social and political freedom – and begin the socialist revolution across the whole Middle East.

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