BAGHDAD, Iraq – A driving ban Friday brought the Iraqi capital a day of relative calm, a rare period of peaceful streets enforced, in part, by a Shiite Muslim militia – one of several armed groups the U.S. military wants abolished.
Thousands of Shiites – frisked by Mahdi Army militiamen in yellow button-down collar shirts and armed with Kalashnikov rifles and metal detector wands – knelt in prayer at a huge outdoor service in Baghdad’s Sadr City slum.
The militia that kept order Friday was the same force that went on a rampage of reprisal attacks against Sunni Muslim mosques and clerics after the Feb. 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra.
Thursday night, after a deadly bomb attack in the poor Shiite neighborhood, police and aides to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced the leader’s militia, the Mahdi Army, would help government security forces patrol Sadr City.
The government decision to legitimize joint patrols with the Mahdi Army – which had been going on anyway – appeared to have tacit U.S. military approval, even though American forces have fought several protracted battles with the Shiite fighters for control of southern holy cities and the Sadr City Shiite stronghold.
Acceptance of the higher profile for the Mahdi Army, if only for a time, signaled the extreme importance U.S. authorities have put on quelling more than a week of deadly sectarian violence after the Samarra bombing.
In a teleconference briefing with reporters in Washington on Friday, the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, said he believed “the crisis has passed.” He added that the militias were “a long-term challenge, a long-term problem and there’s no silver-bullet.”
Casey said the military hoped some militia members would, over time, be integrated into the Iraqi government forces.
The Friday lull in violence followed a night of carnage in two southeastern Baghdad suburbs, where some 50 gunmen stormed an electricity substation and a brick factory nearby where they slaughtered Shiite factory workers in their sleep, police said. The attacks raised Thursday’s death toll to 58.
In much of the country Friday, worshippers walked in peace to mosques to offer prayers and listen to sermons, in which some imams – both Shiite and Sunni – called for unity and an end to violence.
“There is no difference between Sunni and Shiite,” Sheik Hadi al-Shawki told Shiite worshippers in Amarah, 180 miles southeast of Baghdad. “We have to unite and not let the terrorists divide us.”
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