Baghdad blasts, Basra gunfire amid pullback
Sadr continued to try to control his militia. A week's battle with the Iraqi army left 400 dead.
BAGHDAD - Rockets fell on Baghdad's Green Zone and random machine-gun fire rang out yesterday in the southern city of Basra as Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr sought to rein in his militia after a week of battles that claimed about 400 lives.
The peace deal between Sadr and Iraqi government forces - said to have been brokered in Iran - calmed the violence but left the cleric's Mahdi Army intact and Iraq's U.S.-backed prime minister politically battered and humbled within his own Shiite power base.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had promised to crush the militias that have effectively ruled Basra for nearly three years. The U.S. military launched air strikes in the city to back the Iraqi effort.
But the ferocious response by the Mahdi Army, including rocket fire on the U.S.-controlled Green Zone and attacks throughout the Shiite south, caught the Iraqi government by surprise and sent officials scrambling for a way out of the crisis.
With gunmen again off the streets, a round-the-clock curfew imposed in Baghdad last week was lifted yesterday, except in Sadr City and two other Shiite neighborhoods. Streets of the capital buzzed with traffic and commerce.
Several rockets or mortars slammed yesterday into the Green Zone, the nerve center of the American mission in Iraq. The U.S. Embassy said there no reports of serious injuries. At least two Americans working for the U.S. government were killed in Green Zone attacks last week.
An American soldier was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb in northeastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said without specifying whether the attack occurred in a Shiite or Sunni area.
Also yesterday, Tahseen al-Sheikhly, a well-known civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security operation who was kidnapped Thursday, was released in the capital, said a police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose the information. The Baghdad military spokesman's office confirmed the release without providing further details.
Fighting in the south helped make March the deadliest month for Iraqis since last summer, according to figures compiled by the Associated Press.
At least 1,247 Iraqis - civilians and security personnel - had been killed as of yesterday, according to figures compiled from police and U.S. military reports. The figure was nearly double the tally for February and the biggest monthly toll since August, when 1,956 people died violently.
In ordering his militia to stop fighting, Sadr also demanded concessions from the Iraqi government, including an end to the "illegal raids and arrests" of his followers and the release of all detainees who have not been convicted of any offenses.
Sadrists in Basra complained that police were still conducting raids in the area last night and that their followers might start carrying weapons again for self-defense.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh welcomed Sadr's decision but told reporters yesterday that no political group was above the law. Sadr's supporters believed the security crackdown in Basra was aimed at weakening their movement before provincial elections this fall.
U.S. and Iraqi officials insisted the operation was directed at criminals and rogue militiamen - some allegedly linked to Iran - but not against the Sadrist movement, which controls 30 of the 275 seats in the national parliament.
But well-informed Iraqi political officials said the Iranians played a key role in working out the peace deal, boosting the Islamic Republic's influence among the majority Shiite community. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.