Shiite-on-Shiite violence racks south Iraq city

Shiite militia fighters clashed with police Sunday in Samawah, a provincial capital in southern Iraq, transforming it into a lawless battleground and exposing rifts that increasingly divide Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority.

Nine people, including four police officers, have died in the violence gripping parts of Samawah since Friday, police said. On Sunday, police backed by some Shiite tribal leaders called in Iraqi soldiers from nearby Diwaniya to help battle the militia. The security forces closed entrances to the city, which is about 145 miles southeast of Baghdad, imposed a curfew and shut the schools as they traded fire with militiamen.

Much of the death and destruction in Iraq this year has involved fighting between Shiites and the Sunni Muslim minority, which dominated the country under former President Saddam Hussein. But the violence in Samawah underscores the difficulty that Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and other Shiite leaders have had in maintaining order among members of their sect in a country where people’s loyalties are divided among political parties, religious groupings and tribes.

Conflicts within Shiite communities have troubled Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in recent weeks, but the violence has been particularly notable in Samawah, capital of the first province handed over by U.S.-led forces to Iraqi control.

At a news conference Sunday, Iraq’s interior minister, Jawad Bolani, a Shiite, said police were restoring order in Samawah. “People who try to create problems can appear in any city in the world,” he said. “The important thing is that [security forces] are there to stop them.”

Samawah police say they are battling a militia associated with the Al Mahdi army of Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr, but Sadr associates said Sunday that the militia involved in the fighting is an offshoot led by a local Shiite cleric feuding with rival tribes.

The conflict in Samawah began Dec. 1, when gunmen attempted to rescue detainees from a local prison, killing three people, according to local hospital staffers. Militia leaders agreed to a cease-fire with police and provincial officials two days later, then apparently broke the agreement Friday after clashing with police at checkpoints near local mosques.

A Sadr associate, who spoke on condition that his name not be used, said the Samawah militia is led by Sheik Ghazi Zurgani, a renegade cleric. The Sadr associate said Sadr was distancing himself from the Samawah militia and stood by the Dec. 3 cease-fire.

But Qusai Abdul-Wahab, a member of Sadr’s party in parliament, blamed the latest conflict on local police, who he said provoked militias Friday by opening fire on Shiite worshipers as they celebrated a religious anniversary. He called the police “provocative and intimidating.”

“They are dealing with people as if they are still in the Saddam era,” he said.

Jaafar Abdul Razzaq, a spokesman from Sadr’s Samawah office, said the militia would not stop fighting until police released about 30 militia members detained since Friday. Police officials said they were negotiating another cease-fire with militia leaders.

Saad Aziz, a Shiite member of the Samawah city council, said local Shiites were divided by tribe and political party, with some loyal to Sadr’s parliamentary bloc, others to another leading Shiite party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI.

“The Ziad tribe itself is now divided among those who support SCIRI and those who are supporting Sadr,” Aziz said, referring to one of the area’s major clans. “There is now internal fighting inside the tribe itself.”

Abdul Hussein Dhalimi, the acting governor of Muthanna province and a SCIRI member, said he met Sunday with provincial leaders and with delegates from the nearby holy Shiite cities of Karbala and Najaf to “settle things down in the province.”

“The security forces are controlling the situation. The city is under their control,” he said, adding that local leaders would not negotiate with the militia until it disarmed. “The arms must be carried by the security forces only,” he said.

Muthanna, of which Samawah is the capital, is one of the three provinces out of 18 transferred to Iraqi security control since 2003. British forces handed over control of Muthanna nearly six months ago. Italian forces transferred neighboring Dhi Qar province in September, and last week, U.S. forces handed over nearby Najaf province.

The British left behind an “overwatch battle group” in Muthanna of about 800 Australian soldiers responsible to local and national Iraqi authorities, according to Capt. Tane Dunlop, a British forces spokesman.

Iraqi authorities did not ask for support from Australian forces in Samawah on Sunday, Dunlop said, but the Australian troops were “keeping an eye on the situation.”

“There seems to be a standoff up there, and the Iraqi forces have it under control,” Dunlop said, adding that the Australians were staying out of the fighting out of respect for the fledgling provincial security forces. Getting involved, even to crush a rogue militia, might undermine Iraqi sovereignty, he said.

“The whole point is to hand over control to all the provinces. If we hand over control, we can’t go around saying how people should handle that control. They’ll deal with things the way they see fit,” he said. “We can’t keep sort of charging back in.”

Also on Sunday, the U.S. military announced that six soldiers had been killed Saturday.

Three soldiers in the 89th Military Police Brigade were killed by a roadside bomb while on patrol in east Baghdad, and another soldier with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, died in an explosion in Diyala province.

A roadside bomb southeast of the capital killed one soldier on patrol and wounded four, and another roadside bomb southwest of the capital killed a soldier on a combat resupply mission.

Their deaths brought U.S. troop fatalities since the conflict began to 2,969, according to icasualties.org.

The military also released a statement saying it had detained four suspected insurgents in central Baghdad.

Several mortar attacks were reported in Baghdad on Sunday, including an afternoon assault on an athletic club and an attack on a Shiite neighborhood in the northern part of the city. Baghdad police reported recovering 29 bodies in the 24-hour period ending Sunday. Elsewhere in the country, a suicide bomber killed seven Iraqi police and injured 30 others in the city of Muqdadiya, about 60 miles northeast of the capital, officials said. In the northern city of Kirkuk, gunmen killed two brothers, according to police Lt. Salah Juboori.

Meanwhile in Baghdad, where U.S. forces have stepped up raids in recent weeks, residents of the Kamaliya neighborhood in the eastern part of the city protested Sunday after U.S. soldiers blocked the area to cars and pedestrians with barbed wire at 5 a.m., searching homes and shops for insurgents and weapons, witnesses said.

Resident Mohammed Abu Zahara, 34, was stuck at home with his family, without heat or electricity, thankful he went to the market Saturday and didn’t need to go out. He watched as neighbors, unable to work or run errands, were forced to open their homes to U.S. troops.

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molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Times staff writers Raheem Salman, Suhail Affan and Saif Hameed, special correspondent Hassan Halawa in Samawah and special correspondents in Baghdad, Baqubah and Kirkuk contributed to this report.