Sadr militia's new muscle in south

The next day, two British military personnel disguised as Iraqis engaged in a gun battle with Iraqi police, killing one police officer, according to varying accounts. The police eventually captured the two men. When British tanks arrived to free the detainees, crowds attacked them.

Top Sadr official Abbas Rubaie has charged the two undercover British officers with planting roadside bombs in order to justify a longer military presence in the country.

"What the British are doing in Basra is terrorism. They are attacking [British] troops so they can say 'someone attacked us and we need to stay as long as possible,' " Rubaie said.

A statement from the Sadr movement claimed that the two British undercover officers had also been firing into a crowd of pilgrims Monday going to a local shrine to mark the birth of the Imam Mehdi, the 12th and last Imam, or Shiite saint.

They also charged that when "the people of Basra demonstrated" to stop British tanks from freeing the two officers from jail, the troops fired on the crowd "killing and wounding many of them." They said the British tanks crashed into the jail allowing "150 terrorists" to escape.

Iraqi officials Tuesday condemned the British operation. "It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their forces the way it happened," Haider al-Ebadi, an adviser to Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, said at a news conference in Baghdad.

While one of Iraq's major cities, Basra is more like a small town, residents say, where everyone knows everyone. People could once play music outside, unmarried couples could once walk together. But as several Shiite groups vie for power, many worry the militias, particularly Sadr's, have forever changed the mood of their city.

These days saying anything against the Mahdi Army or its rival, the Badr Organization backed by ruling Shiite Islamist party Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), can be deadly.

"No one trusts anyone," says Ali Abdel Zahara one of few Basra residents willing to discuss the situation and who gave a false name for fear of retribution from the militias. "You can't talk about this, even at home."

He says Sadr has emerged as the most powerful force among the many groups that are controlling different sections of the town and police. "The ones that are in control are the tribes and the parties. Each one in the police is a representative of his party or his tribe," says Zahara. "Sadr is the biggest because they always solve the problems they face with violence."

In further evidence of the violence that has gripped Basra, Fakher Haider, an Iraqi journalist working with The New York Times was killed Sunday after being abducted by men who witnesses said claimed to be police officers. He was found dead outside the city early Monday. Early last month, Monitor contributor Steven Vincent was abducted by men who, according to witnesses, drove police vehicles. Like Mr. Haider, he was discovered dead not long after being abducted.

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