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Time Is Not on Sadr's Side
EFL RTWT The situation in Najaf is evolving and devolving faster and more frequently than a wire reporter's updates. One moment, the battle between joint American-Iraqi forces and radical Shiite leader Moqtada al Sadr's Mahdi army appear to be coming to a close. Less than 30 minutes later, broken agreements and a renewal of sharp rhetoric spike the fighting. It's been this way for months. The possibility that al Sadr might have been yielding to U.S. and Iraqi military pressure was an obvious attempt to buy more time. It wasn't his first such ploy, and he knows his days are numbered. Still, months of battling U.S. Army and Marine forces have taken its toll on the Mahdi army. Most of al Sadr's front-line combatants are now dead. His current crop of fighters are mostly disenfranchised, newly recruited youths who are certainly capable of firing off a few rounds or launching a rocket-propelled grenade, but they often break and run when U.S. Marines and Army cavalry troopers move against them. "It appears to me that in April and May we killed the best and brightest [of the Mahdi army]," 1st Lt. Brian Suits of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division in Najaf, said during a radio interview with talk-radio host Kirby Wilbur on Seattle's KVI radio, last Thursday. "What al Sadr is doing now is sending in the guys who are left behind to make a statement. He's running out of guys. The guys he has are frankly running out of motivation. There are ill-prepared and ill-trained. They are beginning to question their authority. I think they're saying 'wait a minute, you told us that God was going to guide our bullets, but we haven't killed one American soldier in our area and we are dying left and right here.'" The past 24 hours have seen U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships pounding Mahdi positions. Fighting continues on the ground in various sectors of the city, and the consensus among U.S. military personnel is that the insurgency is weakening. The latter is due in large measure to an increase in solid intelligence, a more formidable Iraqi national military force, and positive developing relationships between U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. Not good for al Sadr. "Two nights ago on a patrol from midnight to 3 A.M., we actually saw Iraqis sitting out on rugs watching and listening to the Coalition aircraft doing their work in the cemetery," 1st Lt. Jeremy T. Sellars — a platoon commander with Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment — told National Review Online on Saturday. "Despite the obvious level of destruction they were inflicting, I watched Iraqis cheer every time the aircraft fired." Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2004-08-23 |
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