Shiite Militias Strong in Basra?

March 30th, 2008 By: Michael van der Galien | Tags:
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Bad news: “Shiite militias in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent in five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.”

The fact of the matter is that when the Iraqi military and the US military take on militias… they’ve got to win. And they shouldn’t win in theory, they should completely destroy the enemy. Everything else, everything less will result in a major propaganda victory for said enemies.

Meanwhile, one gets the impression that the situation is Basra is… slightly different than we had all hoped:

Witnesses in Basra said that members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said Saturday that the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.

We’ll have to see what happens in the coming days, perhaps even weeks, but it could very well be that my initial take on the Iraqi-led operation in Basra was wrong. If the Iraqi government overplayed its hand, and if even the US can’t solve this problem for al-Maliki et al., they’ve just created a very serious problem. They should take on Shiite militias at a certain point in time, but – again – only when they’re confident that they can win. If they lose the situation will become even worse than it already was; Shiite terrorists and Sunni terrorists will be emboldened by a defeat (for the Iraqi government).

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