The six cabinet members loyal to Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr quit the 37-member cabinet of US-backed Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki on April 16. The Sadrists had headed the ministries of agriculture, health, tourism and transportation.
The resignations came in the wake of a huge Sadrist-organised demonstration of opposition to the US-led occupation a week earlier. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shiites travelled to the Shiite holy city of Najaf, 160 kilometres south of Baghdad, to participate in the April 9 protest, which demanded that a date be set for the withdrawal of US and other foreign occupation forces.
General Abdul Karim al Mayahi, the police commander in Najaf, told reporters that at least half-a-million people had participated in the demonstration. Carrying Iraqi national flags, the protesters shouted "No, no, American; leave, leave occupier!", as they marched into Najaf's main square. The march was headed not only by Sadrist leaders but also by Sunni clerics and Kurdish notables.
The protesters' sentiments reflected those of the great majority of Iraqis. A February-March poll conducted by US ABC News and the BBC found that 80% of Shiites and 97% of Sunnis oppose the presence of US and allied foreign troops in Iraq.
The day after the Najaf demonstration, Maliki declared that "what will govern the departure of the multinational forces are the achievements and victories we manage to obtain on the ground and not a timetable", echoing the position repeatedly put by US President George Bush.
At an April 16 Baghdad press conference, Nassar al Rubaie, chairperson of the 32-member Sadrist bloc in the 275-member parliament, said the resignations stemmed from the Sadrist movement's dissatisfaction at the failure of the Maliki government on issues ranging from providing ordinary Iraqis with security to electricity supply (Baghdad's 6 million residents are now only receiving electricity for an average of six hours a day).
But the overriding issue was the question of a US troop withdrawal. "The main reason is the prime minister's lack of response to the demands of nearly 1 million people in Najaf asking for the withdrawal of US forces", Rubaie said, adding that a prime minister "should represent the will of the people, but [Maliki] is, regrettably, representing the will of the occupational forces".
Rubaie said the Sadrists had tried to force the US occupiers from Iraq militarily in 2004, when Sadr's Mahdi Army militia had mounted armed resistance to the US military in southern Iraqi cities, particularly Najaf. He said the Sadrist parliamentary bloc's involvement in the Maliki government was an attempt to peacefully seek the withdrawal of the occupation forces. But now, "we will have a major role in working on a timetable in parliament. This will be our message to the government."
A timetable for a US withdrawal is also the chief condition of the major Iraqi guerrilla groups for a ceasefire. In an April 12 interview on Aljazeera TV, for example, Ibrahim al Shemmari, a spokesperson for the predominantly Sunni Islamic Army in Iraq, said that the IAI was willing to enter into peace negotiations with US officials if the US Congress approved a binding timetable for a troop withdrawal.
Reporting the Sadrists' cabinet resignations, Reuters observed that "there will be concerns about whether Sadr's Mahdi Army, which Washington calls the biggest threat to Iraq's security, will maintain the low profile it has kept so far during a US-backed security crackdown in Baghdad".
However, the Brussels-based International Crisis Group's Iraq expert, Joost Hiltermann, told Agence France Presse that Sadr heads the "only popular movement" among Iraqi Shiites, drawing its support from the poor, but he "does not want to restart a fight with the Americans as there is a feeling that they will go away next year. He wants to wait it out. But he has to consolidate his ranks."
In pulling out of the Maliki government, the Sadrists leave their main Shiite political rivals — Abdel Aziz al Hakim's Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the most pro-US of the Shiite religious parties in the government, and Maliki's own, smaller, Islamic Call (Dawa) party — to bear the wrath of the Shiite poor's rising anger at the brutal US-led occupation.
The Baghdad "security crackdown", which began on February 14, was dealt a severe PR blow on April 12 when a suicide bomber penetrated the Iraqi parliament building, killing one MP and wounding 22 others.
The building is located inside the highly fortified Green Zone, which covers a six square kilometre area in the centre of the Iraqi capital. The zone also houses government offices, the US embassy and the US military command.
While Iraqi resistance fighters regularly fire rockets and mortar rounds into the compound from outside its heavily guarded walls, attacks inside the zone itself have been exceedingly rare because of its multiple, US-run, security checkpoints.
"Someone can walk into our parliament building with bombs. What security do we have?", Saleh al Mutlaq, who heads the 15 MPs from the secular, mainly Sunni, National Dialogue Front, said to the 117 MPs who turned up for the next day's parliamentary session. The MP killed in the bomb blast, Mohammed Awadh, was a member of the NDF.
"The [security] plan is 100% a failure. It's a complete flop", said Khalaf al Ilyan, a leader of the Iraqi Accord Front, the largest Sunni Islamist party in the parliament, holding 44 seats. Two IAF MPs were severely wounded by the bomb blast.
Sadrist bloc leader Rubaie berated other MPs for not having the courage "to hold the US occupation forces responsible for the attack", since they are chiefly in charge of the Green Zone's security. Three female Sadrist MPs were also wounded by the bomb blast.
While US officials claimed that "violence" has declined in Baghdad since the security plan went into effect on February 14, figures gathered by McClatchy Newspapers showed that the number of corpses found on Baghdad's streets from March 15 to April 14 was 26% higher than in the previous 30 days.
McClatchy also reported on April 16 that more US troops had died in Iraq since October than in any previous six-month period since the war began. Nearly 38% of US military deaths since October have occurred in Baghdad, compared with 29% over the previous 12 months.
During the first 17 days of April, US and allied foreign troops died at a rate of just over four per day, the highest daily rate of coalition fatalities since US troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. In March, coalition troops died at a daily rate of 2.65.
Total US military deaths in Iraq since the March 19, 2003 invasion reached 3300 on April 16, according to Pentagon figures. In addition, nearly 800 US military contractors have died in Iraq, though these deaths are not publicly disclosed by the Pentagon.
On February 23, Associated Press reported a Freedom of Information request had discovered that by the end of 2006, the US Labor Department "had quietly recorded 769 deaths" in Iraq for employees working for US defence contractors.
AP observed that employees of US "defense contractors such as Halliburton, Blackwater and Wackenhut cook meals, do laundry, repair infrastruture, translate documents, analyze intelligence, guard prisoners, protect military convoys, deliver water in the heavily fortified Green Zone and stand sentry at buildings — often highly dangerous duties almost identical to those performed by many US troops".
The Pentagon, AP added, "has outsourced so many war and reconstruction duties that there are almost as many contractors (120,000) as US troops in the Iraq war zone".
This outsourcing has been driven, not only in the interests of providing lucrative war profits for US corporations, but by the Pentagon's lack of sufficient ground troops to successfully wage its counterinsurgency war in Iraq. With 60% of Iraqis approving of attacks on US and other allied occupation forces, the anti-occupation resistance groups can draw on a huge base of support and recruits.
Of the 145,000 US troops in Iraq, only about 60,000 are front-line combat soldiers, the rest being support troops. In a study based on Saudi Arabian intelligence reports, Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant to the Saudi regime, estimated last April that there were "77,000 fighters in the insurgency drawing upon hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect supporters".
"Our forces are stretched. There's no question about that", US war secretary Robert Gates told reporters at the Pentagon on March 12, as he announced that all active-duty US Army soldiers deployed or going to Iraq and Afghanistan would have their one-year tours extended to 15 months. He said the longer tours were needed to give Bush the capability to maintain his 30,000-troop surge in Iraq for "at least a year".