JUNE 2014
BAGHDAD — Iraq’s senior Shiite leader issued an urgent call to arms on Friday, telling all able-bodied Iraqis to assist the government’s fight against the Sunni militants who have seized broad stretches of Iraqi territory, in a sign of the growing desperation of the country’s Shiites and its shaky central government.
In a statement during Friday prayers, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shiite cleric in Iraq, said it was “the legal and national responsibility of whoever can hold a weapon, to hold it to defend the country, the citizens and the holy sites.”
Ayatollah Sistani has enormous stature among Shiites, but it also respected by Sunnis and other groups because in the darkest days of the sectarian fighting in 2006 refrained from inflammatory language and repeatedly reached out to Sunnis, Kurds, the country’s Christians and other minorities.
The ayatollah’s plea, while directed at all Iraqis, would most likely be heeded by Shiites, sharply increasing the likelihood of Iraq sliding into open sectarian warfare.
Iraqi military trucks carry volunteers to a base in Baghdad on Friday.CreditAli Abbas/European Pressphoto Agency
The representative of Ayatollah Sistani, Sheikh Abdul Mehdi al-Karbalaie, speaking in Karbala, one of Iraq’s holiest cities for Shiites, said the numbers of fighters and volunteers “must fill the gaps within the security forces,” but he cautioned they should not do more that, stopping short of calling for a general armed response to the rebellion led by the Sunni jihadi group, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
He emphasized that all Iraqis, not only Shias should join the fight, underscoring that everyone needed to pull together or the country could fall into sectarian warfare. However, it seemed unlikely that many Sunnis would be moved to do so, especially in an atmosphere of deepening distrust between the sects. And many Sunnis feel squeezed as well because they have little sympathy for the extremist militants from ISIS.
The call came as the militants had fanned out to the east, at least temporarily seizing two towns near the Iranian border, Saadiyah and Jalawla. But, several hours after the capture of the towns, security officials in Baghdad said that government troops, backed by Kurdish forces, had counterattacked, forcing the insurgents to withdraw in a rare victory.
The capture of the towns of Saadiyah and Jalawla came a day after Kurdish forces further north seized on the accelerating rout of government troops to take over the oil city of Kirkuk, long contested between Iraqi Kurds and the country’s Arab leaders in Baghdad.
The Kurds control a semiautonomous region and have long eyed independence. The Kurdish moves on Thursday presented Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki with a twin challenge from Kurds and from Sunni militants to restore Iraq’s cohesion and his government’s authority in face of the apparent disintegration of the American-armed Iraqi Army and the worst security crisis since the American withdrawal in 2011.
The ISIS forces appeared intent on driving toward Baghdad, spreading a deepening sense of alarm as government troops failed to resist and in some cases abandoned their posts.
The sectarian conflict has drawn warnings of intervention from Tehran and Washington, who are watching the growing chaos with alarm.
The senior clerics’ language and tone made it a religious and patriotic act to to volunteer either for the army or join the Shiite militias that increasingly cannot be differentiated from each other.
There were cheers and shouted chants of “It will be done” when Mr. Karbalie said, “Whoever can hold a weapon has to volunteer to join the security forces.”
Mr. Al-Karbalaie appeared to be reading a statement from Mr. Sistani and the other senior clerics and people in Mr. Sistani’s office said it was a response to a statement from the leadership of ISIS which threatened not just northern Sunni areas of Iraq, but also Baghdad and the cities of Karbala and Najaf, which are among the holiest places to Shiite Muslims.
“Iraq and the Iraqi people are facing great danger, the terrorists are not aiming to control just several provinces, they said clearly they are targeting all other provinces including Baghdad, Karbala and Najaf.
“So the responsibility to face them and fight them is the responsibility of all, not one sect or one party. The responsibility now is saving Iraq, saving our country, saving the holy places of Iraq from these sects,” he said.
Since the fall of the northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest, senior officers in the army have been meeting with local committees and Shiite militias in Baghdad and asking them to n round up volunteers to help bolster the government forces in the face of the steady advance of the Sunni militants who are negotiating and in some cases fighting their way toward Baghdad.
Friday’s call to arms appeared to be meant to augment that effort.
Kurdish troops, operating freely in areas northeast of Baghdad, had moved into Jalawla to secure their political party offices before the Sunni militants aligned with the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria took over the town, news reports said., There were no immediate reports of casualties. The town is in ethnically mixed Diyala Province — a tinderbox region bordering Iran that controls one approach to Baghdad through the town of Baquba, 20 miles north of the capital.
Other accounts said the militants, riding in pickups mounted with machine guns, had entered the two towns late on Thursday, encountering no resistance from government troops, who abandoned their posts as they had done elsewhere during the insurgents’ lightning campaign, which began on Tuesday with the capture of Mosul.
Background on the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the Islamist group that gained control of the second-largest city in Iraq.
All the better the US is not involved in this. Let the locals figure this out as they have for a few thousand years.
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Since then, the militants seem to have been emboldened by the capture of American-supplied military equipment left behind by government forces as they withdrew.
There were reports that Iraqi government troops — who have abandoned several key locations in addition to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, and Tikrit, the birthplace of Saddam Hussein — had lobbed artillery shells into the two captured towns from near Muqdadiya, around 50 miles from Baghdad, prompting an exodus of civilians.
On the main axis of combat along the highway running south from Mosul there were no indications early on Friday that the insurgents had been able to seize the front-line town of Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, which is home to a Shiite shrine and is reportedly defended by militias from Iraq’s Shiite majority.
Thousands of Shiite volunteers were reported to be mobilizing. “We hope that all the Shiite groups will come together and move as one man to protect Baghdad and the other Shiite areas,” said Abu Mujahid, one of the militia leaders.
In the east, the reports of insurgent activity in Diyala Province followed unconfirmed reports that Iran, an ally of Mr. Maliki’s Shiite-led government, had sent Revolutionary Guards into Iraq. Iraqi Shiite militia leaders contacted in Baghdad said they knew of no such assistance from Iran and had not asked for any.
Iran’s state-run news media reported this week that Tehran had strengthened its forces along the Iraq border and suspended all pilgrim visas into Iraq but had received no request from Iraq for military help.
The insurgents have pledged to march on Baghdad, and even to strike at Shiite holy cities further south. The sprawling Iraqi capital, with its large population of Shiites, is likely to prove a more daunting operation than the militants’ advance across a Sunni heartland with little sympathy for the central government.
For its part, Mr. Maliki’s administration seems bewildered by the insurgent advance. It was unable even to muster sufficient numbers in Parliament to vote on the prime minister’s call for a state of emergency that would provide him with the authority to order curfews, restrict movements and censor news reporting.
On Friday, however, an spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Brig. Gen. Saad Maan, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying: “We put in place a new plan to protect Baghdad.”
“The plan consists of intensifying the deployment of forces, and increasing intelligence efforts and the use of technology such as observation balloons and cameras and other equipment,” General Maan said.
Alissa J. Rubin and Suadad al-Salhy reported from Baghdad; Alan Cowell from London.
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