Bombed from the air, surrounded on the ground, this city still belongs to the Mehdi

12.00pm - By DONALD MACINTYRE in the rebel stronghold


Recovering from the loss of three fingers from his right hand, Abu Muqtada, as he called himself, was eager to get back to the fighting. Hit by US machine-gun fire in Najaf's large, hallowed and now badly damaged Wadi al-Salam cemetery a week ago, the 38-year-old Mehdi Army insurgent was relaxing, his hand bandaged, in the shade outside Kufa's mosque, the second oldest in Iraq.

"My hand is finished but the other is still working," he said. "We are still fighting, and we will not stop."

Kufa is no doubt a sensible place for one of Muqtada al-Sadr's militants to convalesce. To visit this second holy city six miles to the north is to see what Najaf might be like if there were no American Abrams tanks or Bradley armoured vehicles surrounding and exchanging fire with the 1,000 or so Mehdi gunmen in the streets around the Imam Ali Shrine.

Najaf is where the prophet's son-in-law was buried; Kufa is where he lived and was stabbed in AD661 as he prayed in the mosque, martyred in the schism that created Shia Islam.

And it is totally in the control of the Mehdi Army, who patrol the streets with AK-47s, rocket launchers and light machine-guns, many of them with ammunition belts draped over their shoulders.

One armed insurgent had even dragged a chair into the middle of the road to monitor the Saturday morning traffic. There are fully manned Mehdi checkpoints inside the city, at one of which, close to the bridge over the Euphrates, another journalist and myself were briefly detained yesterday.

With an armed escort of one car in front and two behind, we were taken for our press credentials to be pored over at the Kufa Mosque, the Mehdi Army's base.

This is an entire town where the writ of American forces, let alone that of the Iraqi police, does not even begin to run. But not for want of trying.

Yesterday, US forces, using air bombardment as well as armoured vehicles, launched an attack on Mehdi strongholds in Kufa at what appears to be the cost of at least some US casualties.

But as detention turned with welcoming smiles into interview opportunity, a local Mehdi commander, Abu Mohamed al-Hilu, told how his forces had lain in wait for the attack after seeing warplanes reconnoitring the area on Friday afternoon.

When the tanks and Humvees, which he said had been carrying heavy machine-guns, advanced towards the Maithami Altamar mosque, "we let them come in until they were in the range of our weapons. With the shelling and bombardment they didn't expect resistance. But suddenly we started shooting."

Mr Hilu showed us the burnt-out and still-smouldering room in the empty courthouse opposite the mosque, into which he said US troops had fired a grenade to clear it of any Mehdi gunmen before taking badly needed refuge there.

In a smaller room beyond, he pointed to blood and unrecognisable gore, which he claimed was part of a brain. We were shown a captured torch, and what Mr Hilu said was one of several bloodstained and discarded US army boots.

"The foot was inside," said one of his men, in a medic's white coat. "We left it for the dogs."

With only one side of the story, the Mehdi Army's, it is hard to check out exactly what happened. A large jagged hole in the wall of the Altamar Mosque appeared to have been made by a tank shell. The buildings opposite were pockmarked with high-calibre machine-gun fire. And gaping holes in the roof and walls of the local college of economics by the Euphrates bridge, which the Mehdis say also came under aerial and ground bombardment early yesterday, showed all the signs of blast damage.

Perhaps this American advance, an attempt to broaden the front on which the US military is fighting to recover control of the region from the Mehdi Army, had been repelled. But could Mr Sadr's forces really win against the forces of the world's greatest military power in Najaf any more than Kufa?

Sheikh Azhar al-Renani, one of Mr Sadr's senior political lieutenants, scarcely hesitated before replying: "The Americans are fighting us with all their money and weapons. We are fighting with the power of God."

And with the power of mainly urban warfare. While many of the guerrillas come from far across Iraq, they have extensive local knowledge, not least of the Najaf cemetery, which has been a key battleground over the past fortnight.

It stretches north from the holy sites of the city - holy sites which remained firmly in the control of the Mehdi Army yesterday.

Just as on Thursday, the hundreds of pro-Sadr "human shields" in the courtyard of the shrine, its archways stunningly bedecked with blue, pink and yellow bird and flower patterns, were chanting slogans against the American-backed Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi, and telling their leader rapturously: "Your voice is like a cannon."

Yesterday, they were chorusing for the television cameras: "We are winning, we will win over Iyad Allawi and the traitors collaborating with the Americans."

Some held banners that said: "Where is the bullet that will grant me martyrdom?"

It is hard, therefore, to explain Friday's embarrassingly short-lived claim by the interim Interior Ministry that police had seized Najaf's Imam Ali Shrine.

Indeed, the instant dismissal by the Pentagon of a claim rendered absurd by the facts - "there's not a lick of truth in it" - is a powerful illustration of who knows what is going on here militarily, and who doesn't.

Much of the focus of the past 36 hours has been on when, and if, Mr Sadr's forces will carry out their promise to hand over the keys of the shrine to the mainstream Shia clerics who answer to the most venerable in all Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. But even this may be to exaggerate the importance of such a symbolic gesture.

For what Kufa helps to illustrate is that even if formal control of the shrine fell into neutral hands, such an advance would hardly mean an end to the fighting.
The guerrillas would still control the approaches, just as it controls Najaf's neighbour and sister city.

This doesn't mean that civilian residents caught in the fighting all absolve Muqtada al-Sadr's forces from blame. To try to thread your way to the holy sites through the densely populated, boarded-up streets of the old city is to experience what they are suffering every day. Bullets and shells make it unsafe to travel a single block.

Some see Mr Sadr as a heroic leader of resistance. But some also blame his gunmen for their suffering. Several said his Shia forces had been joined by former Baathists with little interest in the Shia cause. Whatever the truth, for the civilians of Najaf, a negotiated settlement cannot come soon enough.

- INDEPENDENT

Herald Feature: Iraq