Al-Qaida in Iraq: 4,000 foreign fighters killed

Mahdi army splintering?
The violence also came amid reports from a number of senior coalition military officials that a large and powerful militia run by radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has been breaking apart into freelance death squads and gangs — some of which are being influenced by Iran.

Al-Sadr’s Mahdi army is one of the largest and most powerful militias in Iraq, along with the Badr Brigades, which were once the military wing of Iraq’s largest Shiite political group — the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

“There are fractures politically inside Sadr’s movement, many of whom don’t find him to be sufficiently radical now that he has taken a political course of action,” said a senior coalition intelligence official who spoke to reporters in Baghdad on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to speak publicly on intelligence issues.

The official added that “there have been elements. I can think of about at least six major players who have left his organization because he has been perhaps too accommodating to the coalition.”

On Sept. 22, al-Sadr urged his followers not use force against U.S. troops, saying “I want a peaceful war against them and not to shed a drop of blood."

But despite the splintering, the official said during a briefing Wednesday that al-Sadr still retains a strong organization modeled after Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which is led by Shiite cleric Hassan Nasrallah

“His model for his activity remains Hezbollah. He’s attempted to reorganize at the district level to accommodate a more expansive framework of political, economic, welfare, religious, as well as military,” he said. “This is a very functional organization.”

Concerns over militias
Al-Sadr’s ability to control his militia is important both to the U.S. military and an Iraqi government seeking to control and disarm militias and death squads blamed for thousands of sectarian killings in recent months.

The second-ranking U.S. military commander in Iraq also said it was imperative to disarm militias, but that the Iraqi government must decide when it should be done.

“We have to fix this militia issue. We can’t have armed militias competing with Iraq’s security forces. But I have to trust the prime minister (Nouri al-Maliki) to decide when it is that we do that,” said Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who oversees U.S. military operations in Iraq.

Iran has also sought to influence rogue or splinter elements that have broken away from the Mahdi army while it is still able to, the senior intelligence official said.

“It wants control of surrogates, because remember, Iran only has a window of opportunity to influence Iraq before Iraq and its natural tendencies as both an Arab state and one who’s got a whole series of friction points with the Islamic republic will start to take order,” the official said.

On Wednesday, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, said murders and execution-style killings were the No. 1 cause of civilian deaths in Baghdad. Much of the recent violence has been attributed to death squads, many of which are thought to be offshoots of Shiite militias like the Mahdi army.

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