Informed Speculation

Good piece in TIME dealing mostly with the current state of affairs in our shadow war with al-Sadr, but with hints of the wider conflict almost surely to come:

Capt. Erik Peterson knows fighters from the Mahdi Army militia of Moqtada al-Sadr are all around, even though he can’t see them. Peterson and his men usually catch only glimpses of the Mahdi Army while on the streets of Ghazaliya, a sprawling neighborhood in western Baghdad where Shi’ite militants are pressing a campaign to drive out Sunnis. Acting on neighborhood tips, Peterson’s men search suspected Mahdi Army safe houses, which often have a green ribbon hanging on the front door. Sometimes the signs are even more obvious. One house thought to be a Mahdi Army fighting position looks like a makeshift combat outpost. Barbed wire snakes across the top of the outside walls. A tree in the yard has a ladder leading to a lookout offering a wide view of the street. The windows are filled with bricks. But during a surprise search inside, Peterson’s men find only a family claiming to know nothing about the Mahdi Army fighters coming and going from the place. “A lot of times I feel almost like I’m trying to dig through water to pick something up,” Peterson says of his daily hunt for Mahdi Army operatives in Ghazaliya. “I just keep coming up with water.”

Across Baghdad, U.S. forces are fighting a kind of shadow war against the Mahdi Army, which American troops call “JAM” — shorthand for the group’s Arabic name Jaish al-Mahdi. The two sides rarely take shots directly at each other. When the Mahdi Army strikes, usually Sunnis under the protection of U.S. forces become casualties. Mosques explode. Houses burn. Mutilated bodies appear on streets that American troops claim to control. U.S. forces answer with raids on suspected Mahdi Army houses in neighborhoods like Shula, just north of Ghazaliya. Sometimes they uncover arms caches and make arrests. More often the doors they kick in lead to empty rooms where Mahdi Army fighters have left only tiny traces of themselves, such as undelivered threat letters and spent bullet casings.

The struggle has gone on like this for months, ever since the Mahdi Army began pushing westward across Baghdad in the spring with organized campaigns aimed at transforming Sunni neighborhoods into Shi’ite strongholds. But U.S. patience may be coming to an end in the wake of the execution of Saddam Hussein, whose passing left Sadr as the one visible face of opposition to American efforts in Iraq. A Pentagon report released in December described the Mahdi Army as the main threat to stability in Iraq. And the U.S. military upped the stakes with Sadr during a recent raid against the Mahdi Army in Najaf, where U.S. forces killed a senior Sadr aide, Sahib al-Amiri, in the same Shi’ite holy city where the cleric lives. But Sadr’s forces continue to show their strength throughout Baghdad even so, driving the daily rhythm of sectarian violence in the city with orchestrated attacks against Sunnis. Sadr even managed to cast an ominous voice into Hussein’s death chamber, where Sadr loyalists among the government witnesses of the hanging chanted “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada” as a taunt to the former dictator moments before he died. The scene added yet another notch in the tension building between U.S. forces and the Mahdi Army, leaving many wondering how long the two sides will eye each other before flying into open conflict.

Soon enough, I hope…we have to take the fight to Sadr, and that’s why I support the surge.  It’s absolutely essential, though, that we don’t neglect the political side of things and continue our work with the proposed moderate bloc…