The New York Times June 16, 2004
Rebel Cleric Tells Fighters in 2 Iraqi Cities to Return Home
By Edward Wong
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 16 - Moktada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who has led a resistance to the American occupation, told his fighters today to leave the holy cities of Najaf and Kufa and return home.
The order, communicated in leaflets distributed by his office, appeared to be another move by Mr. Sadr to try to gain legitimate political standing in Iraq. He has said he is starting a political party that may participate in elections scheduled for January 2005.
A spokesman for Mr. Sadr, Qais al-Khazali, said in an interview that the cleric was simply complying with the terms of a cease-fire announced on June 4. Since then, many members of the cleric's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have disappeared from the streets of the two holy cities. But there have been numerous infractions of the truce. Last week, fighters overran a police station in central Najaf and freed the prisoners, burned squad cars and allowed looters to plunder the building.
But Mr. Sadr has also expressed an increasingly strong desire to take part in mainstream politics. He has given conditional approval to the Iraqi interim government, a body he once mocked. And several days ago, speaking through Mr. Khazali, he said he was starting a political party, even though he insisted he could not disband his militia because it was a popular uprising rather than an organized armed force.
American administrators here say people associated with illegal militias cannot take part in elections.
In southern Iraq today, saboteurs launched another attack on Iraq's beleaguered oil distribution network, blowing a hole in one of the country's two southern oil export pipelines, Reuters reported.
In Kirkuk, gunmen assassinated the security chief for the northern oil fields there, Asam Jihad, a spokesman for Iraq's Oil Ministry, said. The security chief, Ghazi Talabani, a member of the clan of the Kurdish political chieftain Jalal Talabani, was riddled with bullets as he left his home. Ghazi Talabani was the link between American forces, the Northern Oil Company and the private security firm Erinys as they tried to shield the oil fields from attacks.
Rebels also attacked an official convoy carrying foreigners in the western city of Ramadi today, Reuters reported. The attack destroyed an Iraqi police car and killed at least six Iraqis, including a policeman, Reuters reported, citing an American Marine spokesman. Witnesses told the news service that foreigners were believed to be among the casualties.
In Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, two soldiers were killed in a "rocket attack" on an American logistics base and 21 people were wounded, the American military announced without offering further details. The Associated Press reported that the two soldiers were Americans and that two of the wounded were civilians working on the base, which is known as Camp Anaconda.
The pipeline attack today came amid a shutdown of Iraq's main oil export terminal, in Basra, which was put out of service on Tuesday by two explosions at oil pipelines near the Persian Gulf. The facility, in Iraq's most important oil-producing region, is expected to be out of service about 10 days, costing the country up to $1 billion in revenue.
American-led occupation forces have suffered a mounting number of attacks as Iraq's new interim government prepares to assume formal control of the country on June 30. The attacks on the oil lines were the most devastating so far in a series of ambitious infrastructure assaults clearly intended to paralyze the country.
The first explosion occurred late Monday about 10 miles south of Basra and was a clear case of sabotage, witnesses said.
It was unclear whether the second explosion, about noon on Tuesday, came as the result of another attack or because technicians tried to compensate for the first incident by increasing the oil flow in a parallel pipeline, causing a violent rupture.
In April, Basra's oil terminal was the target of a largely unsuccessful waterborne attack by suicide bombers.
Attacks on Iraq's electrical grid, oil pipelines and other structures have been increasing in frequency since a major outbreak of the insurgency here in April. Last week the interim Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, said attacks on oil pipelines alone had cost the country $200 million.
"We've basically been in a race with the enemy to see if we can build them up faster than they can tear them down," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, which closely tracks developments in Iraq. "To go after the oil undercuts the ability of Iraq to finance its own reconstruction and makes it more dependent on the United States."
Together, the two southern lines could carry about 80,000 barrels of oil an hour for export to ports on the Persian Gulf, said Walid Khadduri, editor of The Middle East Economic Survey and an authority on the Iraqi oil industry. Mr. Khadduri said the pipelines could take very roughly 10 days to fix and cost the country between $450 million and $1 billion over that time, although production could be increased later to compensate for the shutdown once repairs are made.
Jamal Qureshi, a market analyst at PFC Energy, said rising oil production by other countries had dampened any immediate effect the attacks may have had on crude oil prices. Another analyst at the same company, Roger Diwan, managing director of markets and countries, said that if repairs took much longer than 10 days or there was another major attack, global markets would be affected.
"It has a cumulative impact the longer it lasts," Mr. Diwan said.
Until the latest attacks, Iraq had been exporting an average of from 1.7 million to 1.9 million barrels of oil a day, compared to somewhere between 2 million to 2.2 million before the American-led invasion last year, Mr. Khadduri said.
Amid the increasing attacks to the oil infrastructure, the way that Iraq's oil revenues are being spent in advance of the handover of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on June 30 is being called into question. Iraq Revenue Watch, an initiative of the Open Society Institute, an organization backed by the billionaire George Soros, alleges that nearly $2 billion in expenditures recently authorized by a United States-controlled board in charge of the Iraqi budget until June 30 may have been rushed into commitments on ill-advised projects before power switches hands.
The money includes $460 million for reconstruction of the oil sector, even though most of the nearly $2 billion that Congress allocated for oil reconstruction last fall remains uncommitted to specific projects. Occupation authorities have maintained that there is no overlap in projects to be undertaken by the two pots of money.
The attack on the convoy of foreign contractors was also part of a succession well-planned incidents clearly aimed at disrupting rebuilding efforts. It took place between 1:30 and 2 p.m. on a north-south road veering into the highway leading to the Baghdad airport, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces. Insurgents on an overpass raked a three-vehicle convoy with gunfire. Passengers in two of the cars were apparently killed, while a third car pocked with bullet holes limped to a nearby American base.
General Kimmitt said he knew nothing of the identities of the victims and did not know exactly how many people were killed. He added that he had gotten a report of the attack firsthand "from some fairly shaken-up contractors."
A security contractor who had been briefed on the attack said it appeared that at least four people had been killed but said he did not know their nationalities, which company they worked for or the nature of their jobs. Besides the gunmen on the overpass, he said, snipers opened fire from positions they had taken up along both sides of the road. The contractor said he had been informed that the assault took place on the main road to the airport rather than on an intersecting artery.
The five-mile airport road is considered by foreigners to be the most dangerous thoroughfare in Baghdad. On June 6, insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47's killed two American security contractors and two Poles in a coordinated ambush on a convoy of sport utility vehicles. Several contractors escaped by lobbing fragmentation grenades at the attackers and commandeering a civilian car at gunpoint.
Responsibility for Monday's suicide car bombing that killed 13 people, including five foreign contractors, was claimed Tuesday by a group headed by the suspected Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. A statement claiming responsibility was dated Monday and posted on an Islamist Web site on Tuesday, according to a Reuters report.
The complicated tensions underlying politics and violence emerged vividly during the funeral march through Baghdad. Hundreds of Shiite Muslims marched on Tuesday from the sprawling slum of Sadr City to a central square to demand vengeance against Sunnis for the murders of six Shiite truck drivers in Sunni-dominated Falluja, 35 miles west of the capital, according to several news wire reports.
One report quoted mourners saying the men were attacked by insurgents on a highway on June 5 after they delivered a load of tents to the Falluja Brigade, an Iraqi militia being used by the marines to try to maintain calm in Falluja.
The drivers escaped and sought refuge in a police station. The police turned the drivers over to Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi, a conservative Sunni imam, the mourners said. The imam then ordered the drivers killed, they added. The imam, however, denied that he issued such an order.
Still, Khaled Latif Matar Sihail, a tribal leader in the funeral march, told Reuters, "They are starting an old feud, a sectarian feud. We now demand blood from the residents of Falluja for our innocent sons."
The mourners carried the bodies of the drivers in wooden coffins. One 12-year-old boy, Muhammad Khudeir, told The Associated Press that he had been with the drivers when they were handed over to "a group of Arabs who spoke with non-Iraqi accents." Muhammad said he had been let go because of his age.
Sheik Janabai said in an interview on the Al Arabiya satellite television station, that if anyone had any evidence against him, he was ready to face justice before an Islamic court. He and a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, confirmed that the drivers had been killed but said they did not know who the murderers were.
Sheik Janabi said hundreds of Iraqis were killed in Falluja when the marines invaded it in April, and so it was understandable that people in town get angry at Iraqis seen as collaborators with the occupation. "People here think that anyone who works with the Americans or helps their mission is an American stooge," he said.
Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.
© Copyright 2004, The New York Times Company
