Top U.S. Commander Defends Iraq’s Premier

The highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq on Friday disavowed criticism leveled by several senior officers at Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki for failing to rein in Shiite militias.

Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr. said in a sharply written statement that Maliki was doing a good job in bad circumstances. “These unattributed comments do not reflect the close partnership between the government of Iraq ... and Multi-National Force,” he said.

The about-face came as violence continued to rack the capital. The brother-in-law of the judge presiding over former President Saddam Hussein’s current trial was slain late Thursday, and authorities on Friday said the bodies of 61 victims of execution and assassination had been found the previous day.

During a briefing Wednesday, military officials who spoke on condition of anonymity voiced impatience with Maliki’s Shiite-led government for being lax on the militias of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr. They said time was running out to curtail sectarian violence linked to Sadr’s Al Mahdi militia.

Every day dozens of bodies, usually showing signs of torture, are dumped in the city. Sadr followers, who hold 30 of the parliament’s 275 seats, say they are legitimately defending Shiites against the largely Sunni insurgency that plants bombs in parts of the capital almost daily.

The military officials said Maliki has stood in the way of plans to clear death squads from the sprawling Sadr City slum where Sadr’s militia is based.

Since beefing up its Baghdad force with 4,000 troops, the U.S. military has conducted only light patrols in Sadr City, while clamping down on other, mostly Sunni, areas with sweeps and raids targeting nearly 100,000 buildings.

A Defense Department official who has discussed the comments about Maliki with U.S. officials in Baghdad said Friday that there was no pressure from the Pentagon to back down. Instead, the official said, officers in Baghdad felt that media reports overstated the level of frustration with Maliki.

A senior Pentagon official directly involved in Iraq policy, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the Bush administration still supported Maliki but felt the challenges he was facing were increasingly difficult.

“He is stronger than his predecessor, he is well positioned, he is a moderate Shiite, he is reaching out to the Sunnis, he is in the right place politically,” the Pentagon official said. “We think he is a really good guy. But the security situation is daunting.”

The official said the Pentagon was also watching closely how Maliki handled corruption in the Interior Ministry.

The ministry is widely believed to be under the control of officials loyal to a number of Shiite militias, even though the minister, Jawad Bolani, is thought to be independent of such groups.

“The new minister of Interior we think is a decent guy. He is an improvement on his predecessor. The problem is, beneath him the ministry is bad,” said the Pentagon official. “Maliki will have to decide. There are rumors he will have to replace [Bolani].”

At the earlier briefing, military officials said that Maliki had refused to authorize full-scale sweeps of Sadr City and that the effort to control the death squads had been hobbled by lists of Sadr followers who couldn’t be arrested without the government’s approval.

Officials in Washington also have expressed frustration with the Iraqi government’s inability to control the militias.

But in the statement released Friday, Casey praised Maliki as “a determined, courageous leader taking on some very difficult issues.”

“He has an awful lot of challenges facing him, and I do believe he is very much up to the task,” Casey said.

The statement ended on a note of soaring optimism, saying, “Iraqis are taking control of their streets and their future and will soon serve as a model for democracy and freedom in the Middle East.”

An Army spokesman declined to elaborate, but he said the language was common in statements “primarily intended for an Arab audience.”

Authorities reported Friday that gunmen had killed the brother-in-law of Hussein trial judge Mohammed Orabi Khalefa in Ghazaliya, one of nine Baghdad neighborhoods the U.S. Army has designated as being cleared of insurgents. The assailants opened fire on the car carrying Kadhum Abdul-Hussein and his 10-year-old son. The boy was injured in the attack.

Khalefa was appointed less than two weeks ago after his predecessor said in court that Hussein was not a dictator.

Though it was not clear that the attack was related to the trial, the proceedings have been marred by assassinations in the past. Three of Hussein’s lawyers have been killed.

Early Friday a march coursed through Sadr City in memory of Abdula Karim Abdul Wahid, an official in the Sadr organization who was shot and killed by Iraqi troops on the road between Najaf and Sadr City on Thursday when his car failed to stop at a checkpoint.

In the afternoon, Sadr City rang with denunciations of the U.S. military as an imam speaking for Sadr used the first Friday prayer of Ramadan to respond to the calls for a crackdown. Imam Sheik Abdul Zahraa Asowaiidi accused the U.S. of trying to incite Sadr’s followers, and castigated the Americans for the arrest last week in Najaf of Sheik Salah Ubaidi, one of the radical cleric’s assistants.

doug.smith@latimes.com

peter.speigel@latimes.com

Smith reported from Baghdad and Spiegel from Washington. Times staff writers Suhail Ahmad, Shamil Aziz, Zeena Karim, Saif Rasheed and Saif Hameed and special correspondents in Baghdad and Hillah, Iraq, contributed to this report.