Al-Sadr Orders Militia To Unify Against U.S.
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BAGHDAD — The powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr ordered his militiamen yesterday to redouble their battle to oust American forces and argued that Iraq’s army and police should join him in defeating “your archenemy.”
Security remained so tenuous in the capital on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the American capture of Baghdad that Iraq’s military declared a 24-hour ban on all vehicles in the capital from 5 a.m. today. The government quickly reinstated today as a holiday, just a day after it had decreed that April 9 no longer would be a day off.
South of Baghdad, a truck bomb exploded near the Mahmoudiyah General Hospital, killing at least 18 people and wounding 23. The pickup truck loaded with artillery shells blew apart several buildings in a warren of auto repair shops.
Violence in Iraq remained as relentless as the deepening debate in America about the way forward in the war four years after Marines and the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division swept into the Iraqi capital 20 days into the American invasion.
At least 47 people were killed or found dead in violence yesterday, including 17 execution victims dumped in the capital.
Mr. Sadr commands an enormous following among Iraq’s majority Shiites and has close allies in the Shiite-dominated government. The statement yesterday carried his seal and was distributed in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where the cleric called for an enormous demonstration to mark the fourth anniversary of Baghdad’s fall.
“You, the Iraqi army, and police forces, don’t walk alongside the occupiers, because they are your archenemy,” the Sadr statement said.
He urged his followers not to attack fellow Iraqis but to turn all their efforts on American forces.
The U.S. military announced the deaths of four more American soldiers, killed Saturday in an explosion near their vehicle in Diyala province — the new headquarters of Iraq’s sectarian slaughter.
At least 3,274 members of the American military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
The figure includes seven military civilians.
