Rice offers Iraqis praise during surprise visit

Notes progress on unification; Sadr criticizes killings of militia

A boy examined the remnants of a burnt vehicle yesterday after an air strike on Sunday in Baghdad's Sadr City. Residents said one child was killed and four civilians were wounded during the strike. (kareem raheem/Reuters)

BAGHDAD - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, making an unannounced stop in Baghdad yesterday, praised the Iraqi government's decision to take on Shi'ite militia members in Basra and in Baghdad and painted an upbeat picture of the Iraqi government's progress toward unifying the country.

Rice, who visited the Iraqi capital on her way to a conference in Kuwait of Iraq's neighbors, said that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government "has made a choice to pursue militias and is willing to bear the consequences."

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Conceding that it had been "a long five years," Rice said that Iraq had made "significant progress, remarkable progress," however fragile, and she quoted President Jalal Talabani, who had said that the country was experiencing "a political spring."

As rockets and mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, Rice met with Maliki, Talabani, and other government leaders, then spoke briefly at the US Embassy and dedicated a plaque there to commemorate two embassy employees killed in rocket attacks on the zone.

The Iraqi leaders, Rice said at a news conference after her remarks at the embassy, gave her "quite a lot of advice" about upcoming meetings.

"Iraqi leaders believe that they have made some tough choices and some tough decisions," Rice said, "and they want that acknowledged and they want to move forward with their Arab neighbors."

She played down recent violence in various parts of Iraq, saying that there would be days when "extremists manage, despite the fact they clearly are weakened," to conduct suicide bombings and other attacks. But she said that some of the violence had been a byproduct of the Iraqi government's "very good decision" to try to wrest the southern port city of Basra from the control of Shi'ite militias. Two suicide bombings in three days last week killed at least 80 people in Diyala Province, north of Baghdad.

Rice said that she was not sure how to interpret a statement on Saturday by the Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army fighters have been battling Iraqi and American forces in Sadr City and in Basra, that he would declare "war until liberation" if the fighting against his militia forces continued.

"I don't know whether to take him seriously or not," Rice said.

But she said that American and Iraqi forces were not trying to block the Sadrist movement from Iraq's political process. "I didn't hear anybody say" that the Sadrists "shouldn't try again to get the votes of the Iraqi people, as long as they are not armed," Rice said.

Iraq's national security council issued a statement this month saying that all political parties must disband their militias if they wished to participate in provincial elections scheduled for October.

Some political analysts have said that what underlies the Iraqi government's move against the Mahdi Army is a rivalry between two armed Shi'ite political groups, Sadr's fighters and the Badrists. The Badrists are the armed wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a large Shi'ite political bloc that supports Maliki. Many members of the Badr Organization joined the government's security forces early in the Iraq conflict, and have been battling the Sadr-led forces.

But Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, who joined Rice at the news conference, drew a distinction between Sadr's supporters and the Badr group. "The Badr organization made the choice a while back that they were going to step away from a militia identity and move into politics," Crocker said. "That's the choice now in front of the Sadr movement."

Crocker cast the Iraqi government's initiative in Basra and Baghdad as "a defining event," and said that it represented "the state asserting itself against those who would attack the state."

He said that he believes that popular support for Sadr has waned since 2004, as the government has grown stronger, and that "the Iraqi people are saying, 'We don't want this anymore.' "

Sadr yesterday criticized Rice's visit and issued a sharp protest against the killing of militia members by Iraqi and US forces in Nasiriyah, just northwest of Basra. The US military said that 40 militia members were killed on Saturday and 40 others were arrested in the confrontation between the militia fighters and 300 Iraqi troops, advised by US special operations forces.

But Abdul Hussain al-Safi, Nasiriyah's police chief, said 23 militia members had been killed and 44 wounded in the clash. Local officials yesterday lifted a curfew that had been imposed on the city since Friday night.

In Diyala Province yesterday, three people were kidnapped in Muqdadiya, and two others were killed, including a police officer, when a homemade bomb exploded in Khalis, north of Baqubah.

And as Rice spoke in the Green Zone, heavy clashes continued between Mahdi Army members and American and Iraqi forces in parts of the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. US military officials have said that their efforts in the sprawling Shi'ite enclave are limited to preventing militia fighters from firing rockets and mortars at the Green Zone.

Officials from two hospitals in Sadr City said they had received the bodies of at least 22 people, including four children and two women, killed when a mortar shell exploded, and that at least 20 people had been wounded.