Iraqi Army Seizes Basra From Militia As Cleric Threatens New Uprising

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

A blog looking at daily life inside Iraq, produced by The Times’s Baghdad bureau.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting with little resistance, said Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

The developments followed a pattern that has been seen again and again in the Basra fighting, where Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi militia has battled Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreated. Why the fighters have adopted those tactics is unknown, but American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi units trained and equipped by Iran have played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.

Mr. Sadr issued a statement on Saturday threatening that he would declare "open war until liberation" against the government if the crackdown against his followers did not cease, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Sadr, who is believed to be in Iran, said the government had abused the trust he tried to sow in August by declaring a unilateral truce.

Whether to counter allegations that Iran actively supported the Mahdi Army, or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. Even more strikingly, he called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.

“The idea of the government in Basra was to fight outlaws,” Mr. Qumi said. “This was the right of the government and the responsibility of the government. And in my opinion the government was able to achieve a positive result in Basra.”

Strikingly, however, Ambassador Qumi simultaneously condemned American-led operations against the Mahdi Army in the Shiite enclave of Sadr City, where major new clashes broke out on Saturday. He said the American-backed fighting in that densely populated district was only causing civilian casualties rather than achieving any positive result.

“The American insistence on coming and having a siege on a couple of million people in one area and striking them with warplanes and shell them randomly — many innocent people will be killed through this operation,” Mr. Qumi said. “The result of this operation will be the sabotage and destruction of buildings, and many people will leave their homes.”

The apparent stand-down by Mr. Sadr’s armed supporters in Basra, in contrast to their continued fighting in Sadr City, renewed questions about where the Sadrist movement stands in Iraq’s unstable political landscape. While his supporters have often been spoilers, they also represent the poor and disenfranchised, who were battered under Saddam Hussein, making it difficult for the government to write them off.

But it is not clear whether they are moving at all toward becoming a more purely political movement, since they have continued to fight in some areas even as they have been forced to cede ground in Southern Iraq.

The combination of Mr. Qumi’s stance and the stand-down of militia fighters in Basra may give fuel to any of several different theories on Iran’s role in the overall conflict in Iraq — a role that many senior Iraqi and American officials have asserted, with varying degrees of proof, is substantial.

Mr. Maliki’s abrupt assault on Basra last month has been widely criticized as being poorly planned. But it is believed to have been encouraged by the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a crucial element of his governing coalition. Many members of the armed wing of the council, called the Badr Organization, joined the government’s security forces early in the Iraq conflict, and have been battling the Sadr-led forces. Mr. Sadr’s political movement is also an important rival of the supreme council.

Because leaders of the council and its armed wing spent years and sometimes decades in exile in Iran during Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was assumed that the silence of the Badr Organization during the Basra offensive indicated that Iran had given at least tacit approval for the move.

Mr. Qumi’s statements now give strong support to that view. They also suggest that Iran, which has historically tried to play Shiite groups against each other in Iraq, has decided to pull back on its support for the group that American officials have continually pointed to as an Iranian-trained troublemaker: Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

Whether that means that the stock of Mr. Sadr himself has fallen is unknown, although Mr. Qumi seemed to avoid discussing the cleric and certainly refused to give him any credit for ending the fighting in Basra. At one during the fighting, members of the Iraqi Parliament traveled to Iran, where Mr. Sadr is believed to be residing, and helped negotiate the terms of a truce.

Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Basra and Baghdad.

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