What Was al-Sadr Doing in Turkey?

Who knows.

Iraq’s Mass Graves: A Warning Sign

The story I repeatedly heard about mass graves when I first started coming to Iraq in 2006 was as follows. At the edge of Sadr City there was a dumpsite. In that dumpsite lived a local drunk. And gunmen from the Mahdi Army would bring him bodies of the Sunnis they had killed for burial, plying him with booze to do the ugly work of putting them in the ground. The rumored gravesite even had a nickname, Happiness Hotel. The drunk, I took it, was supposed to be the innkeeper.

I never had the nerve to properly investigate the rumor. Doing so would have likely put me and my Iraqi colleagues at risk of death threats or worse from Shi’ite militiamen. But the story always disturbed me, because it struck me as plausible.

The newest U.N. human rights report on Iraq points to six recently uncovered mass graves, including one containing 17 bodies at the edge of Sadr City. More mass graves are sure to be uncovered in Iraq in the months and years to come. Whether Happiness Hotel is ever found remains to be seen. But every corpse unearthed in or near Shi’ite militia havens raises the question of culpability in mass murder by the Iraqi government, which abetted the Mahdi Army during the height of the sectarian violence. That same government is still in power now, as U.S. forces prepare to hand over control of the streets across the country to Iraqi security forces whose future human rights practices remain an open question.

Will the Mahdi Army Rise Again?

The latest spasm of violence in Baghdad has raised fears among many in Iraq that the Shi’ite Mahdi Army may abandon its standing unilateral cease-fire and return to the business of sectarian revenge killings. Not likely, at least no yet.

Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, has given no indication that he plans a bloody show of strength in the streets with gunmen. I suspect Sadr, like many in Iraq, will be waiting quietly to see how the next few months unfold before making any major moves. Sending Mahdi Army fighters into the streets of Iraq now would bring them face to face with American forces and create a crisis for which U.S. troops may linger beyond the June deadline to be out of Iraq’s urban areas. Above all Sadr wants to see U.S. troops leave, so he is unlikely to pick a fight now. If Sadr is indeed interested in reasserting his militia, he will do so after U.S. forces move to the sidelines of whatever fighting persists in Iraq as U.S. troops move to go.

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.