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Cleric Sadr threatens "open war" on Iraq government

Of course the Militia in Basra seems to have abandoned lots of their weapons....just left many of them in the street when they fled the Iraqi forces.

From the NY Times:

Iraqi Army Seizes Basra From Militia as Cleric Threatens New Uprising

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By JAMES GLANZ and ALISSA J. RUBIN

Published: April 20, 2008

BAGHDAD — Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr’s militia in Basra on Saturday, and Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad strongly endorsed the Iraqi government’s monthlong military operation against the fighters.

By Saturday evening, Basra was calm, but only after air and artillery strikes by American and British forces cleared the way for Iraqi troops to move into the Hayaniya district and other remaining Mahdi Army militia strongholds and begin house-to house searches, Iraqi officials said. Iraqi troops were meeting with little resistance, said Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

Despite the apparent concession of Basra, Mr. Sadr issued defiant words on Saturday night. In a long statement read from the loudspeakers of his Sadr City Mosque, he threatened to declare “war until liberation” against the government if fighting against his militia forces continued. He compared the Iraqi government to that of Saddam Hussein and said that the government had become the enemy along with Sunni extremists and the Americans.

The developments followed a pattern that has been seen again and again in the Basra fighting, where Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi militia has battled Iraqi government troops to a standstill and then retreated. Why his fighters have clung to those fight-then-fade tactics is unknown. But American military and civilian officials have repeatedly claimed that Mahdi Army units trained and equipped by Iran had played a major role in the unexpectedly strong resistance that government troops met in Basra.

Whether to counter those allegations or simply because, as many Iraqis have recently speculated, Mr. Sadr’s stock has recently fallen in Iranian eyes, the Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, on Saturday expressed his government’s strong support for the Iraqi assault on Basra. He even called the militias in Basra “outlaws,” the same term that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has used to describe them.

...just left many of them in the street when they fled the Iraqi forces.

Sunday morning in Australia, the drought has broken, the coffee's great...and now THIS!

It just may be possible Sadr is a royal idiot. The only liberation going to happen in Iraq is for all his(the fat one's) goons to be put in the grave and every militia in the country disbanded by force.
Maliki is on a roll, and he gains a large backing from all corners of the ring.