Baghdad, Iraq – A Kurdish army brigade from northern Iraq is undergoing intensive urban combat training for deployment to Baghdad, where it expects to take on the Mahdi Army Shiite militia, its commander said Saturday.
Underscoring the difficulties in taming Iraq’s surging violence, at least 48 people were killed or found dead nationwide Saturday, including a Sunni cleric who was shot to death near his home in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad.
In the northern city of Irbil, Brig. Gen. Nazir Assem Korran, commander of the 1st Infantry Brigade, 2nd Division of the Iraqi army, said, “We will head to Baghdad soon. We have 3,000 soldiers who are currently undergoing intensive training especially in urban combat and how the army should act inside a city.”
Korran said he did not know how the operation would unfold but said the Defense Ministry had asked his brigade to take part in the security operation along with thousands of other Iraqi and U.S. troops.
The forces were to conduct neighborhood searches to clear the city of Sunni Muslim insurgents and local militias such as the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who has been an ally of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“We are going to confront any terrorist elements or militias. We will confront any outlaws,” the general said. He did not name the Mahdi Army, but the Shiite militia is blamed for much of the capital’s sectarian killing and is the only true militia presence in Baghdad.
Later in the day, al-Maliki issued his first comment on the new Bush administration plan outlined Wednesday, declaring it “identical to our strategy and intentions.” President Bush said he would send an additional 21,500 troops to help pacify the capital and other parts of the country.
Al-Maliki, however, continued to avoid naming al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
“Our strategy that aims to control security is based on using force against any outlaws, whatever their background or identity,” al-Maliki said in a brief appearance aired on state-run Iraqiya TV. Al-Maliki has repeatedly used that kind of formulaic language during his eight months in office, but has blocked American forces from taking on his militia allies.
The prime minister told a small group of Iraqi reporters that “what we have seen in the American strategy is that it is identical to our strategy and our intentions.”
