Target was no mosque, U.S. says

BY TIMOTHY M. PHELPS | WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

March 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - Facing a looming confrontation with the Iraqi government it helped bring to power, the Pentagon displayed pictures yesterday that it said demonstrated that a raid on Sunday had targeted an armed kidnapping gang, not men at prayer.

Iraqi television showed footage on Monday that broadcasters said depicted the bodies of Shia men who had been praying inside a mosque near Baghdad when it was attacked by U.S. troops, causing an uproar in Iraq and a rupture between the United States and the Shia-dominated government. The 16 dead were members of a Shia militia loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr, a leading anti-American cleric and political power broker.

But U.S. officials suggested yesterday that the scene had been rearranged to make it look innocent, and the Pentagon showed pictures of an arms cache, including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and bomb parts, seized at the building. The Associated Press said yesterday that it could not supply the photographs because they were of such poor quality.

Regardless of the truth, experts on Iraq said yesterday that Shia politicians have been increasingly frustrated by U.S. attempts to include minority Sunnis in the government and are on the verge of a lasting rupture with the United States.

Joost Hiltermann of the nongovernmental International Crisis Group office in Jordan, a nonprofit group that works to prevent deadly conflicts, said in a telephone interview that Shias "think the U.S. is not to be trusted, that they are being betrayed again," a reference to the bitter time in 1991 when the United States failed to come to their aid when they revolted against Saddam Hussein and were slaughtered by his helicopters and troops.

Officials connected to the largest Shia political party in Iraq, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, called Monday for the expulsion of U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, according to Juan Cole, a Shia expert at the University of Michigan. An alliance of all the major Shia religious parties called for security to be handed over to the Iraqis, Cole said on his Web site.

Khalilzad has been pushing hard in recent days for the removal of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as the Shia alliance's candidate for prime minister in the government currently being negotiated. The biggest backer of al-Jaafari is al-Sadr.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday at a Pentagon news conference with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that U.S. and Iraqi special forces had targeted an Iraqi kidnapping ring located in a former school complex. Once inside the complex, they found a small minaret and prayer room, Pace said.

Cole said the area is not a mosque but an area where Shias mourn their martyred leaders.

Pace and Rumsfeld said they knew of no new policy to go after members of Shia militias, particularly al-Sadr's, who have been on a rampage against Sunnis since the destruction of a revered Sunni shrine five weeks ago in Samarra. Nearly every day dozens of bodies are discovered around Baghdad - men who have been kidnapped, often tortured, and killed. Some have been beheaded.