August 19, 2016
The erratic head of an Iraqi Shiite movement, Moqtada al-Sadr, has now instructed his followers to target US troops sent to Iraq to campaign against the Islamic State.
However, he said it in a rather offhand manner in reply to a question, so it did not sound like a command but more an effort at ideological purity.
US Defense Secretary Aston Carter said last month the Pentagon would dispatch 560 additional troops to help Iraqi forces retake the northern city of Mosul in an offensive planned for later this year.
Sadr, who rose to prominence when his Mahdi Army battled US troops after the 2003 invasion, was asked in a question filed on his website what his reaction was.
“They are a target for us,” Sadr said. But that was all he said.
Iran used to fund and arm Shiite militias that killed many US troops before they left Iran in 2011 after nine years. Sadr has had a rather complicated relationship with Iran. He has worked with Iran on occasion, but it appears he and Iran do not exactly trust one another.
Sadr’s Mahdi Army was disbanded in 2008, replaced by the Peace Brigades (Saraya as-Salam), which helped push the Islamic State out of the Baghdad region in 2014 under a government-run umbrella, and maintains a presence in the capital and several other cities.
The new US troop deployment, which is expected to happen within weeks, would raise the number of US forces in Iraq to around 4,650, far below the peak of about 170,000 reached during the occupation. But most of them are stationed in Western Iraq in Sunni majority areas where they are unlikely to come within sight of Sadr’s men.
Other Shiite militias, particularly those backed by Iran, have made similar pledges to attack US soldiers in the past year, but the only casualties since American forces returned to Iraq two years ago to battle the Islamic State have come at the hands of the Islamic State.