Iraq purges 1,300 soldiers and police

Government forces laid down weapons during clashes in Basrah and elsewhere

BAGHDAD -- The Iraqi government has dismissed 1,300 soldiers and policemen who deserted or refused to fight during last month's Shiite-on-Shiite battles in Basrah, the government said Sunday.

The announcement followed the admission that more than 1,000 members of the security forces had laid down their weapons during the fight that Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki characterized as a campaign to restore law and order to the strategic and oil-rich southern city.

Maj. Gen. Abdul-Kareem Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said that 500 soldiers and 421 policemen were fired in Basrah, including 37 senior police officers up to the rank of brigadier general. Police officials said the remainder were fired in Kut.

"Some of them were sympathetic with these lawbreakers, some refused to battle for political or national or sectarian or religious reasons," Khalaf told The Associated Press in Basrah.

The Basrah campaign was widely criticized as poorly planned after it failed to disarm Shiite militias, in particular the Mahdi Army loyal to the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

However U.S. and Iraqi officials say that the arrival of the security forces in larger numbers has restored order to the streets and to the nearby ports vital to Iraq's oil industry.

The Basrah clashes pitted the country's two most powerful Shiite forces against each other -- the Mahdi Army and the government security forces dominated by al-Sadr's most powerful Shiite rival, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.

The fighting also spilled into the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, 300 miles north, particularly in al-Sadr's Baghdad stronghold, Sadr City, which is surrounded by Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.

Sadr City has been effectively divided in two since U.S. and Iraqi troops moved into the southern edge of the district to stop rockets being fired at Baghdad's high-security Green Zone. The remainder is still under the control of the Mahdi Army and its allies in the heavily infiltrated police and security forces.

Sadr City booby traps

A large and overwhelmingly Shiite urban sprawl of cheap housing and street markets, Sadr City has long presented a huge security problem for the Americans and Iraqis, with ambushes and roadside bombs.

Last week, reporters saw Mahdi fighters burying artillery shells in the road as bombs to use against government forces if they pushed farther into the Mahdi-held areas. Those preparations continued in recent days as the militia appeared to be preparing an elaborate network of booby traps.

On Sunday, wires from roadside buildings were visible leading to newly dug strips in a major road, in some places every 30 meters.

Al-Sadr's office in Sadr City would not allow Western journalists to enter the district on Sunday, refusing to give an explanation.

Some Iraqi policemen were seen evacuating their stations from the area now controlled by government forces. On Saturday police pickup trucks loaded with furniture, office materials and clothes headed out of Sadr City, on two different exit routes.

Carefully chosen words

The Iraqi government is being careful to portray the crackdown as an operation against criminals and illegally armed militias and not against al-Sadr's forces, although the Mahdi Army is the most powerful armed force in Sadr City.

Sadrists say that al-Maliki and his American and Iraqi allies are using the pursuit of criminals as a pretext to weaken the Sadrist movement before forthcoming elections.

Ali al-Dabbagh, an Iraqi government spokesman, said he would not say "how many days or how many months" the government troops would continue their operations in Sadr City, but said "they will not come out until they are finished."