Iraq leader lifts blockade in Sadr City

BAGHDAD -- American soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near-siege of the largest Shi'ite Muslim enclave in Baghdad yesterday, heeding the orders of a Shi'ite-led Iraqi government whose assertion of sovereignty had Shi'ites celebrating in the streets.

The order by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to lift the week-old blockade of Sadr City was one of the most overt expressions of self-determination by Iraqi leaders in the 3 1/2-year US occupation. It followed two weeks of increasingly pointed exchanges between Iraqi and US officials, as well as a video conference between Maliki and President Bush on Saturday.

Maliki's decision exposed the growing divergence between the US and Iraqi administrations on some of the most critical issues facing the country, especially the burgeoning strength of Shi'ite militias. The militias are allied with the Shi'ite religious parties that form Maliki's coalition government, and they are accused by Sunni Arab Iraqis and by Americans of kidnapping and killing countless Sunnis in the soaring violence between Iraq's Shi'ite majority and Sunni minority.

Sadr City is the base of the country's most feared militia, the Mahdi Army, which answers to Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr's strongly anti-American bloc is the largest in the Shi'ite governing coalition and was instrumental in making Maliki prime minister five months ago.

At midday yesterday, Maliki issued an order setting a 5 p.m. deadline for removal of the US checkpoints. A senior US Embassy official said later that Maliki told US Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, in a meeting yesterday that the checkpoints should be lifted.

A US military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Withington, said American soldiers removed the checkpoints at the order of their commanders. "We take military orders," Withington said.

The move lifted a near-siege that had stood at least since last Wednesday. US military police imposed the blockade after the kidnapping of an American soldier of Iraqi descent. The soldier's Iraqi in-laws said they believed he had been abducted by the Mahdi Army as he visited his wife at her home in Baghdad.

The crackdown on Sadr City had a second motive, US officers said: the search for Abu Deraa, a man considered one of the most notorious death squad leaders. The soldier and Abu Deraa were believed by the US military to be in Sadr City.

US soldiers in Humvees had used concertina wire and sandbags to close off all bridges and other routes into Sadr City, home to 2.5 million Shi'ites, from the rest of Baghdad. The US troops, backed by Iraqi soldiers, admitted vehicles only one at a time after searches. The blockade caused hours-long backups, and Sadr City's largely working-class residents complained that the cost of food and fuel was soaring.

Sadr's aides held a rally of about 1,000 people against the blockade on Sunday and called a strike, starting Monday, in what they described as the spirit of civil disobedience.

Residents said armed Mahdi Army members moved early yesterday into what quickly became deserted streets across Sadr City, enforcing the protest. Even in surrounding Sunni neighborhoods, teachers described Mahdi Army fighters entering schools to order students home for the protest. Government workers were driven out of their offices in some neighborhoods, and shops were shuttered.

The militiamen stopped one worker, Sameer Kadhumi, as he walked to his job at the Culture Ministry. "They told me not to go to work, otherwise I will be in trouble," Kadhumi said.

Kadhumi said he evaded them by pretending he was on an errand, only to find his building already shut down by the Mahdi Army once he reached work.

"Who is the Mahdi Army to decide the future of my daughter and stop the movement of life in the country? Does the government have no power?" demanded Duniya Hilmi, 34, a city government worker whose daughter had been sent home from school by the Mahdi Army yesterday.

Before the strike, the US blockade of Sadr City had become a "hot issue" in daily meetings between US and Iraqi officials, said Hadi al-Amiri, a member of Iraq's governing Shi'ite alliance. Amiri said he believed it was decided at Monday's meeting between US and Iraqi officials that the operation must end.

"We became convinced that going further with this blockade would increase tensions," he said.

However, Maliki's order appeared to take at least some American officials by surprise.

Shortly after it was issued, a US military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Garver, said that US commanders "are now determining how coalition forces can best address the prime minister's concerns about checkpoint operations in regards to the search for our missing soldier." He would not elaborate.

In Sadr City, US military police and Iraqi soldiers gave way to Iraqi police on the bridges across the canal that separates the neighborhood from central Baghdad. In minutes, militiamen in civilian clothes, with hidden guns lumping up their shirts at their waistbands, appeared and began screening traffic within the district.

Sadr City residents celebrated both the flexing of the Shi'ite government's clout and what they saw as a concession by the United States.

Children cheered. Drivers honked horns as they bounced into Sadr City on newly cleared streets. Pickup trucks full of young men sped down the district's main roads. The men waved red and green banners of Sadr's movement.

"We are very happy they lifted the barriers by the orders of Maliki the prime minister," said Ali Saedi, selling falafel at a storefront as crowds celebrated into the night. "It's a good stand, to give orders to the Americans and the Iraqi Army."