Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-SadrÂ’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and IranÂ’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi governmentÂ’s monthlong military operation against the fighters. 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. SadrÂ’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.
Whether to counter those allegations 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. SadrÂ’s armed supporters in Basra, in contrast to their continued fighting in Sadr City, renewed questions about where the Sadrist movement stands in IraqÂ’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.