From The New York Times
American forces [in Najaf] besieging militiamen of a rebel cleric in a shrine and cemetery sacred to Shiite Muslims tightened their cordon on Monday, United States military officials in Baghdad said, and they warned the rebels that they could not receive any outside support. .... While senior American military officials in Baghdad appeared confident that they had Mr. Sadr's forces in Najaf contained, officers and soldiers on the front line painted a different picture. They said that rebels move freely between the cemetery and Najaf's old city, and that American forces do not fully control the cemetery, which is three miles long and two miles wide.
In Baghdad, American military officials announced a curfew of 4 p.m. to 8 a.m. in the capital's Sadr City neighborhood, home to more than a million Shiites and, with Najaf, a center of support for Mr. Sadr. The measure, the most stringent of its kind in the 16 months since the country fell to the American-led invasion, appeared to be aimed at regaining some control over Sadr City from Mr. Sadr's militiamen and preventing the area from being used for rocket and mortar attacks on the American military and civil headquarters. Despite the curfew, rebels resumed their shelling on Monday night. ....
Brushing aside the fact that most of the rebels in Najaf, Nasiriya, Basra and Sadr City, the areas worst affected by the fighting, have worn the black trousers and shirts of Mr. Sadr's militia, the Americans have said repeatedly during the five days of renewed fighting that they, too, had doubts that the cleric was the instigator of the violence. But some American military officers have said that this presentation of the situation was a convenient fiction, propagated by the Allawi government and the American command to allow their forces to hunt down as many of Mr. Sadr's fighters as possible while exempting Mr. Sadr from any deliberate attack. During the uprising by Mr. Sadr's forces in April, American commanders said they intended to kill or capture him, but that threat was dropped out of fear that any harm to the cleric could touch off a still wider conflagration among Iraq's majority Shiite population. |