Mahdi Army Surrenders, Authorizes Iraq Government To Disarm Fighters
Posted by AJStrata on May 10th, 2008
Well, it should be damn interesting to see how the liberal SurrenderMedia
spins
this news into claims that Iraq is turning into another Vietnam. It seems
the
Mahdi Army in Sadr City has surrendered - completely:
Followers of rebel cleric Muqtada al Sadr agreed late Friday to allow
Iraqi
security forces to enter all of Baghdad’s Sadr City and to arrest anyone
found
with heavy weapons in a surprising capitulation that seemed likely to be
hailed
as a major victory for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki.
In return, Sadr’s Mahdi Army supporters won the Iraqi government’s
agreement
not
to arrest Mahdi Army members without warrants, unless they were in
possession of
“medium and heavy weaponry.”
The agreement would end six weeks of fighting in the vast Shiite Muslim
area
that’s home to more than 2 million residents and would mark the first time
that
the area would be under government control since Saddam Hussein was
toppled
in
2003. On Friday, 15 people were killed and 112 were injured in fighting,
officials at the neighborhoods two major hospitals said.
It also would be a startling turnaround in fortunes for Maliki, who’d been
widely criticized for picking a fight with Sadr’s forces, first in the
southern
port city of Basra and then in Sadr City.
Members of Maliki’s Dawa Party and the powerful Islamic Supreme Council of
Iraq
met with Sadr officials on Thursday and Friday to come up with a 14-point
agreement to end the weeks of fighting, …
What is interesting is how this sudden capitulation comes one day after
aids
to
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr lashed out at the top Shiite cleric in all of Iraq
and
basically claimed he shared the guilty for the deaths in Sadr City because
he
had sided with Maliki and the US forces. This was an astounding and
dangerous
step for Sadr to take. Was this act of defiance too much for the powers to
be,
which decided it was time to end the fighting? Was Iran getting nervous
about
the building fire power the US was gathering in the region with the
addition
of
another Carrier Group?
It was probably a combination of these factors, along with the fact that
the
Iraqi people were not rising up to side with Sadr and the Mahdi thugs, but
instead were relieved when they Mahdi thugs were dispatched and the Iraqi
government took control. Sadr was doomed from the beginning - as I
predicted. He
had no support among the mainstream Shiite leadership. The minute the
Grand
Ayatollah Sistani distanced himself from Sadr and his Militia and sided
with
the
rule of law Sadr was through. Without Sistani’s blessing there would be no
uprising, there would be isolation for Sadr and the Mahdi Army.
So Maliki and the US have taken on and beaten the Mahdi Army which now
agrees to
disarm as Maliki directed. Will there be cheering in the streets of Sadr
City on
this finale? You bet there will be, along with a new sense of pride in the
Iraqi
government. The second biggest losers in all this were the doom&gloom
liberal
SurrenderMedia and Surrendercrats. The world just won’t produce another
Vietnam
for them. Their predictions were wrong - again. And their hopes of a US
failure
in Iraq were wrong - as they have always been. Wrong in a smelly, sick
kind
of
way.
What will be interesting to watch is: (1) the liberal SurrenderMedia eat
crow as
Iraq passes another milestone towards its bright, free future, (2) seeing
the
people of Iraq enjoy the new peaceful Iraq that will be arising again
soon,
and
(3) learning exactly what it was that caused the Mahdi to fold like a lawn
chair. Someone pulled the plug on this one.
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