But only Shiites are welcome — or safe — in Hurriyah these days. And neither Iraq's government nor U.S. or Iraqi security forces are truly in control.
Instead, the Mahdi Army militia runs this area as it does others across Baghdad — manning checkpoints, collecting rental fees for apartments, licensing bus drivers, mediating family fights and even handing out gas for cooking.The U.S. Army still runs regular patrols, sometimes on foot, sometimes by Humvee. And Iraqi police, on the streets, are nominally in charge.
But underneath the calm, an armed group hostile to the United States holds a firm grip on power. Some fear the Mahdi Army is simply biding its time — eager to grab outward control and run things its way whenever U.S. forces pull back.
As I noted, the hand off is taking place now between the Sunni Arab resistance that is fading and the yet-to-be confronted Iranian-backed Shia thugs:
It would be nice to have just one enemy that we fight and defeat rather than the evolving enemies we have faced in Iraq. We've beaten the Iraqi Baathist regime, the Baathist insurgents, the jihadi terrorists, the Sunni Arab nationalists, and the knocked back the Shia thugs once.
We have to beat down the Iranian-backed Shia thugs again. But this time we have the resources of the growing Iraqi state to help out.
This is progress. Hey, we fight the war we have and not the war we wish we had. Now that's foreign policy realism.
Unless our offensive operations against the Iranian network inside Iraq and the Sadr leaders have disrupted this enemy, expect to see the Iranians make their bid to influence Congress to give up in Iraq and compel a retreat. The Iranians will unleash whatever Iraqis and Iranians posing as Iraqis that they have available. I have no idea how strong they are. I hope CENTCOM has a better idea.
I suspect war supporters will be tested quite soon. Our troops won't let us down on the battlefield. They will defeat this test. Don't let our troops down by surrendering when they won't.
Steady on the line, boys.
UPDATE: Major General Lynch describes the Iranian role with one example:
Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, whose command includes the volatile southern rim of Baghdad and districts to the south, said his troops are tracking about 50 members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps in their area — the first detailed allegation that Iranians have been training fighters within Iraq's borders.
"We know they're here and we target them as well," he said, citing intelligence reports as evidence of their presence.
He declined to be more specific and said no Iranian forces have been arrested in his territory.
"We've got about 50 of those," he said, referring to the Iranian forces. "They go back and forth. There's a porous border."
I'm assuming from context that this isn't a single unit of 50, but refers to 50 known agents operating individually or in small groups. And I wonder how many we don't know about are working the region.
Lynch also describes the trends involved in the hand off of the primary threat in Iraq:
Lynch, whose mission is to block the flow of weapons and fighters into the Baghdad area, said Sunni and Shiite extremists have become increasingly aggressive this month, trying to influence the debate in Washington before a pivotal progress report on Iraq.
He singled out the Shiite extremists as being behind rising attacks using armor-piercing explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, which he said were largely assembled in Iraq from parts smuggled in from Iran. He also noted a marked increase in Iranian-rockets that have been increasingly effective against
U.S. bases.
There has been an overall decrease in attacks against U.S. and Iraqi forces, as well as civilians, south of Baghdad, but 46 percent of those were being carried out by Shiite extremists, Lynch said.
"The real difference now is we've got to spend as much time fighting the Shia extremists as Sunni extremists," he said.
Iran does not want us to win in Iraq, despite fools who claim Iran wants stability on their border above all else. Until our surge change in operations, the Iranians could get by using Sunni jihadi--Shia death squad murders to keep the pot boiling. As we suppress the Sunni Arab resistance by killing active opponents and gaining the defection of others, Iran is stepping up their activities both directly and through proxies.
I've long felt that the surge has to confront the Shia thugs. So far, we've focused on the jihadis who killed Shias in order to reduce the ability of the Shia thugs to pose as protectors of the Shias against the jihadis.
With Maliki reorganizing his government to survive without the Shia thugs controlled by Sadr, we may be approaching the day of reckoning. And if we worry that Iran will try to stage an Al Tet moment before Congress reads their mandated Iraq reports, we may see our forces preempt such a strike with more energetic operations.
