U.S. says it can't protect every Iraqi
BAGHDAD — The new U.S. commander in Iraq acknowledged Thursday that U.S.-led forces cannot protect all Iraqis from "thugs with no soul" who are bent on reigniting sectarian warfare and derailing a major security crackdown.
In his first news conference since taking over last month, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus said he shared "the horror and the sorrow and the sadness" at seeing more than 100 Shiite Muslim pilgrims killed Tuesday by two suicide bombers who mingled in the town of Hillah with throngs heading for a religious commemoration in the nearby holy city of Karbala.
What he did not offer was a strategy for dealing with such attacks, underscoring a major dilemma facing U.S. and Iraqi forces as they carry out what has been described as a last-ditch effort to curb the deadly civil war.
"Some sensational attacks inevitably will continue to take place, though every effort will be made to reduce their numbers," Petraeus told journalists gathered in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.
Estimates of the number of pilgrims currently on the roads to Karbala range as high as 7 million, he said, and it was "an enormous task to protect all of them."
In the months leading up to the crackdown, U.S. officials thought Shiite Muslim militants would cause the biggest headache. A Pentagon assessment in December said Shiite militias such as the powerful Al Mahdi army, loyal to radical anti-American cleric Muqtada Sadr, were killing more civilians than were Sunni Arab terrorist groups.
Sadr's followers have staged two major uprisings against U.S. troops since the American-led invasion in March 2003. Hoping to avoid a repetition, U.S. and Iraqi commanders spent weeks negotiating, through community leaders, for access to the Al Mahdi militia's Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City, a vast, teeming slum named after the cleric's revered late father.
Under intense government pressure, Sadr ordered his followers off the streets and has so far refused to be goaded back into the fight, despite his insistence that the security plan should be implemented by Iraqis only.
When U.S. and Iraqi forces finally politely knocked on residents' doors in Sadr City this week, they were allowed in without incident.
The number of execution-style killings blamed largely on Sadr's followers has dropped. Police recovered five unidentified bodies in Baghdad on Thursday, compared with more than 30 on many days before the crackdown.
