Behind Maliki’s enthusiasm to fight the Basra’s battle

This is a very con­fus­ing report on Al-jarida news­pa­per: there are doubts of the involve­ment of ele­ments of Lebanese Hizbal­lah fight with Mahdi Army mili­tia in Basra.

The con­fus­ing mat­ter is that lets sup­pose that this is true, then Hizbal­lah with Iran backup is fight­ing Al-Hakim’s Badr forces [Iraqi Army] which is backed up by Iran also, that leaves us with Iran fights itself in Basra.

Al-Arab reported that Iraqi intel­li­gence agency accused Iran of trig­ger­ing the vio­lence in Basra through Mahdi Army, say­ing that Iran reduced the finan­cial and intel­li­gence sup­port for MA because of the freeze deci­sion, and the sup­port will be resumed if MA can trig­ger dis­or­der and secu­rity dis­tur­bances again.

Best analy­sis of what is really going on behind the mil­i­tary cam­paign in Basra can be found on Awan, where Sar­mad Al-Tai wrote the following:

Iraqi Prime Min­is­ter Nuri al-Maliki enthu­si­asm to attack the Mahdi Army reminds us of Ayad Allawi’s enthu­si­asm to hit Mahdi Army four years ago when it wasn’t yet very well orga­nized, the idea that angered the Shi­ite lead­ers like Cha­l­abi and Maliki claim­ing that MA is not a ter­ror­ists orga­ni­za­tion, the same lead­ers who are recently hit Muq­tada Al-Sadr harsher than Allawi.

Maliki can not fire a sin­gle bul­let with­out an Wash­ing­ton accord, the Amer­i­cans saw their ben­e­fit of such oper­a­tion against Mahdi Army [the Sadrists] who are block­ing the Iraqi — Amer­i­can long term pres­ence in Iraq.

Al-Sadr gets the hits from his closed allies, who invested in his Mahdi Army to oper­ate against the Sun­nis, pro­vid­ing him the polit­i­cal and secu­rity cover and logis­tic sup­port [using police cars and weapons].

In exchange for this Al-sadr is emerged stronger and his demands are get­ting more and more, is Iran going to stand idle watch­ing Al-sadr shift­ing away from its con­trol? The con­fronta­tion in Basra is Iran’s war on Iraqi ground, but this is for sure related to the fail­ure of the fourth round of Tehran — Wash­ing­ton negotiations.

Many reports say that Iran ignited the vio­lence in Basra, which is true, but I think I am the only one keeps say­ing that oper­a­tion in this scale can not started with­out the Amer­i­can per­mis­sion, accord and coop­er­a­tion with Iran or through Iran’s asso­ci­ated group which in this case Al-Hakim’s SCIR.