Who’s Shelling the Green Zone?

On Saturday night, two huge explosions rocked central Baghdad. A pair of mortars or rockets, not clear which, fell in the Green Zone area in quick succession. They were the loudest and closest blasts I had heard in months. Iraqi police said the bombs sailed in from eastern Baghdad, essentially putting blame on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army. But there is reason to doubt that. The Mahdi Army has been effectively dormant since last year, when Moqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire that is still in effect as far as his followers are concerned. Many Iraqis who heard the attack instead took the explosions to be a “Back in Business” sign by Sunni militants recently released from the huge American military prison outside Basra, Camp Bucca. For months the U.S. military has been steadily releasing hundreds of detainees in line with a U.S.-Iraqi agreement that calls for the prison to be shuttered as soon as July. U.S. officials have always acknowledged that some of the detainees held at Bucca and other smaller U.S. prison facilities in Iraq are innocent. But questions remain about many. And those questions are unlikely to be answered by the Iraqi Judicial system, which has barely functioning courts and overflowing jails.