Baghdad ‘Mayor’ Is Arrested

U.S. soldiers arrested a self-proclaimed mayor of Baghdad on Sunday, acting for the second time in less than a week to remove an unelected leader who had grabbed power while American officials struggled to create a transitional government in Iraq.

Mohammed Mohsen Zubaidi, who wears Western-style suits and already had a press spokesman, was arrested in downtown Baghdad for “his inability to support the coalition military authority and for exercising authority which was not his,” U.S. military spokesman Capt. David Connolly said here.

In a separate arrest, U.S. forces said Sunday that they had captured Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, No. 49 on the list of most-wanted Iraqis, who served as Saddam Hussein’s liaison to U.N. weapons inspectors. Amin had repeatedly denied that Iraq possessed banned weapons, and he reportedly did so again as he was being taken into custody.

Military officials also said Special Forces troops in northern Iraq had discovered two mobile chemical labs and more than a dozen 55-gallon drums -- surrounded by surface-to-air missiles -- that might contain the nerve agent cyclosarin and mustard gas. The officials said laboratory tests would be needed to identify the substances conclusively.

In Baghdad, Zubaidi had begun firing municipal employees, including those supervising the crucial restoration of basic services such as electricity, sewage systems and water, so that he could put his own people in the jobs, according to the U.S. Central Command.

His tactics, while exceptionally brazen, are hardly unique here, and the U.S. reaction seemed to be a warning to local leaders who seek to capitalize on the political vacuum that any accession to power must come on American terms.

The U.S. move came on the eve of the second meeting by Iraqi groups to discuss the shape of a transitional government and sent a clear signal that Americans want to control the next step.

In a similar confrontation with a local leader Friday, U.S. Marines ousted Said Abbas, a Shiite strongman who had occupied the governor’s office in Al Kut, forcing him and his followers to leave the southern city.

The presence of such figures and their relatively quick success in convincing locals that they are power brokers show the deep craving for some political system to take the place of the former regime.

Zubaidi and Abbas are considered local players, but the U.S. will face a much bigger problem if stronger political figures make headway in filling the vacuum before a U.S.-backed transitional authority gets into place.

The most significant entities are the major Shiite groups, in which individual imams work together with followers, astutely declining to claim titles such as “mayor” or “governor.” Instead, the leaders are focusing on accruing the instruments of power by gaining control of such services as the provision of food, health care and police.

At Friday prayers in a Shiite area of Baghdad last week, Sheik Mohammed Fartusi -- a Shiite connected to Hawza, an extensive seminary and charitable organization based in the holy city of Najaf -- gave 10 concrete “instructions” to several thousand worshipers. The instructions consisted mostly of information about day-to-day services.

Hawza is setting up three offices in Shiite areas of Baghdad to help people, Fartusi said. It has also sent imams to help run most of the major institutions in these areas, including hospitals and schools. Fartusi gave suggestions on how people could help the electric company and trash removers.

The group’s power was underscored by the presence of young men on the periphery of the worshipers as well as on high walls overlooking the area.

The U.S. tried to sideline Fartusi by arresting him. But there was such an uproar that the military eventually released him, an action that served to further empower the Shiite community.

A counteracting force for the Americans is the Baath Party, which supported Hussein and provided the regime’s technocratic framework. When U.S. officials say they want government employees back at work, they are talking primarily about party supporters, if not full members, because having a government job under the Hussein regime virtually required sympathy with the Baath Party.

“The Americans will have to depend on the Baaths,” said Wamid Nadmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. “They are getting worried about the Shiite organizations, and surely the Americans don’t want a pro-Iranian government in Iraq or even a pro-Islamist government.”

The Bush administration is walking a delicate line as it struggles to put together a working transitional government in what was essentially a modern, if repressive, state. The meeting today in Baghdad will show the face of the “emerging leadership” for Iraq, said Barbara Bodine, a deputy of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who heads the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance.

Today’s meeting will be far more representative than the one held in Ur on April 15, she said.

However, it is likely to leave many Iraqis still confused about who their leaders will be. Unsettling many people, for instance, is whether the Americans envision a major role for Ahmad Chalabi, the secular-leaning Shiite and Pentagon favorite who has been out of the country for many years but returned with U.S. military protection a few weeks ago. Chalabi has failed to win a following thus far and is viewed with deep suspicion because he was convicted on charges of bank fraud in Jordan.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II, interviewed Sunday on CNN’s “Late Edition,” discounted Chalabi as a credible leadership candidate, noting his decades of exile. “I would imagine that you’d want somebody who suffered alongside the Iraqi people,” he said, asking, “What contacts does he have with the people on the street?”

In the same broadcast, Chalabi countered that he had received a “great deal of support and understanding” from Iraqis since his return, and he denied that his long absence had caused any distrust.

“There is no daylight between me and the Iraqis here who stayed throughout Saddam’s regime,” Chalabi said. “There is complete harmony in views between us.”

It is unclear whether the U.S. action against Zubaidi, the self-proclaimed Baghdad mayor, was also a signal to Chalabi not to overstep his bounds.

Zubaidi, who has ties to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, appears never to have been reined in by Chalabi, even when he purported to be able to hand out jobs, giving thousands of eager Baghdad residents employment forms he had printed.

Based in the Sheraton Hotel, Zubaidi often swept through the lobby with an entourage of assistants and supplicants. He dodged repeated questions about where his authority had come from, but he recently said, “We have a lot in common with the coalition forces.”

Hours before Zubaidi was arrested Sunday by the U.S. forces -- who had repeatedly warned him that he had no authority and lacked any allied authorization to interfere with the restoration of basic services -- he gave interviews to several television networks.

Judith Yaphe, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University and a former CIA analyst specializing in the Middle East, said Zubaidi’s arrest did not indicate any waning support in the Pentagon for Chalabi. Zubaidi appeared to have been acting on his own, she said.

“He did not even seek to get along with Chalabi,” she said. “He was acting as independently and highhandedly as Chalabi himself.”

Yaphe also noted that Zubaidi was rumored to have links to Syria. “He may have had a different agenda,” she said.