Sadr's Mahdi Army Calls Off Attacks

LONDON — The Mahdi Army militia of the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr called off attacks on rival militias and American-led forces in Iraq for as long as six months, following clashes at a southern shrine that left 52 people dead.

"We declare the total suspension of Mahdi Army activities to rehabilitate it and safeguard its ideological image for a maximum period of six months," a Sadr aide, Sheik Hazim al-Araji, told state television yesterday. A Mahdi Army spokesman, Ahmed al-Shaibani, later confirmed that the order also bans violence against the coalition. The militia has targeted Sunni Muslims as well as rival Shiite groups.

The violence began Tuesday in the city of Karbala during a major Shiite religious festival, state television said. Local officials blamed the clashes on the Mahdi Army, Agence France-Presse said. Mr. Sadr's aides told AFP the group wasn't involved.

The nationalist Mahdi Army, one of Iraq's largest armed groups, has clashed with pro-Iranian Shiite factions in the south, including the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and the Badr Organization. America said Mr. Sadr's fighters have replaced Al Qaeda's organization in Iraq "as the most dangerous accelerant of potentially self-sustaining sectarian violence in Iraq," according to a report in November by the Defense Department.

The Mahdi Army has been "the largest and most organized" of Iraq's militias, Claire Spencer, an Iraq specialist at the Chatham House international affairs institute in London, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

The clashes in Karbala may damage the Sadr group's local leadership because of the religious significance of the city and the festival to Shiites, Ms. Spencer said.

"I think he's concerned about this tit-for-tat violence," she said, referring to Shiite factional fighting. Mr. Sadr fears "splits within the militia," and ordered the suspension of activities as "a way of trying to reassert his control," she said. America sees the Mahdi Army as a "destabilizing force" that has been the source of sectarian violence in Iraq, a State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, said yesterday.