Retaking of Fallujah seen as easier than Shi’ite south

Pentagon officials think Marines can take back control of Fallujah in days or weeks, but the Shi’ite rebels in the south will take months to subdue.

Officials are rattled by the fact they still do not know the Shi’ite uprising’s full dimensions — whether it will be contained within the rabid followers of Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr or swell into a mass rebellion, for which the coalition is undermanned.

A key decision faces Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his generals next week, when the holy Arbaeen pilgrimage ends.

Some officials say this would be the right time to launch an operation to snatch Sheik al-Sadr, the fiery Shi’ite cleric who last weekend ordered his private army to began killing coalition personnel. But a misstep could engage all Shi’ites, even those who align themselves with more moderate clerics.

Sheik al-Sadr is holed up in offices in a section of Najaf that his troops now control.

“The Shi’ite one is more serious than the Fallujah one,” said a senior official. “The Fallujah one is just dead-enders. We knew we were never going to win these people over. They ran the whole country, and now they are not going to be able to run the country. People always expected trouble from Fallujah. The other one is kind of surprise.”

The “surprise” came in the form of Sheik al-Sadr and his band of about 3,000 militiamen dubbed the Mahdi’s Army.

“My assessment is that we will continue to see this violence for some time until Muqtada al-Sadr turns himself in or his militia is destroyed,” said Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. “Coalition military forces will conduct powerful, deliberate, very robust military operations until the job is done.”

Sheik Al-Sadr, a fiery anti-U.S. cleric who preaches in a mosque in Najaf and recruits much of his army from the slums of Baghdad, basically was left alone by the American-led coalition during the months after the defeat of Saddam Hussein.

But last summer, as Sheik al-Sadr’s followers seized mosques and started building Mahdi’s Army, the coalition began to try to diminish his power by arresting some of his top lieutenants. The coalition’s anti-Sadr campaign broke into the open last month, when it shut down his acerbic newspaper and arrested his most senior aide.

Sheik al-Sadr, seeing his inner circle dwindle, launched his bid for power in southern Iraq by ordering his militia to begin attacking foreign troops.

Asked why the allies let the sheik build his own private army, Gen. Sanchez said the policy was to try to integrate all the country’s various militias into Iraq’s overall security force.

“So this is not about us not responding to the threat,” he told a press conference in Baghdad. “Clearly at this point in time, once that element [Mahdi’s Army has carried out some fairly sophisticated operations, such as when it took over police and government buildings in Ajax.

The al-Sadr loyalists lined the streets with snipers on the top of buildings, then did coordinated sweeps of targeted buildings.

“There’s clearly some military experience in elements. But I think in the broadest sense, they’re not a very well-trained force,” Gen. Sanchez said.

Gen. Sanchez has held off trying to retake the center city until the holy days end, but he has kept Army troops inside camps in the city.