Firefights mark further splintering in Iraq

Two days this week of fierce firefights between a Shiite militia and government forces in a usually calm town south of Baghdad left at least 80 dead and an unknown number wounded.

While the top US commander in Iraq said the battle came as a "surprise," it underscores a proliferation of militia groups throughout the country that is making central government control in many places merely notional, many Iraqis and foreign experts say.

The fight in Diwaniyah, 80 miles south of Baghdad, between militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and local forces led by the country's most powerful Shiite parties, demonstrates the growing atomization in Iraq's war. Local politicians, gangsters, and would-be warlords are emerging around the country and taking up arms in service of local ambitions that frequently have little to do with Iraq's sectarian war.

The battle in Diwaniyah, which ended Tuesday when the US Air Force dropped a 500-lb. bomb on what it called a militia position, started just three days after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki led a peace conference among tribal leaders designed mostly to undercut Sunni-Shiite sectarian tensions. But, as Diwaniyah demonstrates, sectarian fighting is far from the central government's only security challenge.

"When you say 'civil war' it makes it sound like there are two sides fighting in Iraq,'' says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "There aren't two sides – there are lots of sides."

In much of the Shiite south, local leaders increasingly seek to carve out their own fiefdoms and the economic opportunities they generate.

In Sunni provinces, insurgents continue to feed Iraq's sectarian war, as demonstrated by the Sunni mortar attack on a Shiite neighborhood in the town of Khan Beni Saad, north of Baghdad, that drove 30 Shiite families from their homes. And in the contested northern town of Kirkuk, militiamen loyal to the autonomous Kurdish government continue to seek to create "facts on the ground" to press their claims to the oil-rich city.

The most disturbing recent development for the central government may well be the increasing radicalization and splintering among followers of what many Iraqis refer to as the "Sadr stream."

While Mr. Sadr is generally acknowledged as the head of this movement and its Mahdi Army, it looks increasingly as if centralized command and control within the organization is breaking down. That appears to be causing a great deal of confusion and alarm within the Iraqi government.

Sadr's father was Mohammed Sadek al-Sadr, who was killed by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1999. The elder Sadr advocated a militant version of Shiism, and appealed specifically to Iraq's dispossessed Shiite poor with a rhetoric that was equal parts salvation and a call for Iraq's traditional underclass to rise up.

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