World Jun. 20, 2008 - 06:01AM JST ( 3 )

BAGHDAD —

Iraqi police and soldiers swept house to house through the southern city of Amara and surrounding Maysan province on Thursday in a new crackdown on Shiite fighters and illegal weapons.

The operation, called Basha’ar al-Salam (Promise of Peace), backed by U.S. troops, was launched overnight after the expiry of a four-day deadline to militiamen to surrender themselves and their weapons.

Sixteen wanted suspects have been arrested so far, including several key figures from the Shiite radical movement of Moqtada al-Sadr, Maysan police spokesman Colonel Mehdi al-Asadi said.

A top security official said one of the detained suspects was Sadr aide and Amara mayor Raaf Abdul Jabbar.

Defence ministry spokesman Mohammmed al-Askari said security forces are not specifically targeting Sadrists.

“We are not going after Sadr ... we have a long list of many parties in Iraq who have killed and kidnapped. We have their names and we’re going to catch them,” he said at an army base in Amara.

Before the four-day deadline expired on Wednesday, around 60 fighters had surrendered to Iraqi forces.

Iraqi ground forces commander General Ali Ghedan told reporters in Amara that since the assault began, security forces had seized weapons including rocket launchers and mortars as well as large amounts of ammunition.

“They were left in public squares and canals,” he said, adding the operation had not faced any resistance since it began early on Thursday.

“We have received an incredible response from the people and things are going peacefully. It is difficult to search every house but we will clean the city of gunmen and keep the weapons in the hands of the state.”

A top Iraqi police general who was one of the lead commanders of the operation said most Shiite militiamen had fled before the crackdown.

“We are conducting house to house searches, especially of those houses that are suspected of holding weapons, including government institutions and schools,” he said, adding US soldiers were offering logistical and medical support to Iraqi troops.

Warnings had been scribbled on the walls of houses in some areas of the city.

“This is just a break. We will return,” warned one message in the city’s eastern Al-Majdiya neighborhood, a stronghold of Sadr supporters.

A defense ministry statement said all the main roads and bridges leading out of Maysan to adjacent provinces have been closed to prevent militiamen from fleeing.

US commanders say Maysan has become a major center for arms smuggling into Iraq from overwhelmingly Shiite Iran just over the border.

British troops transferred control of the province to Iraqi forces in April 2007, but security has remained fragile with fighting between rival Shiite groups vying for supremacy.

Southern Iraq is the source of the majority of the country’s oil output and officials say the crackdown on militias is aimed at ending the widespread smuggling of crude from which many of them derive their funding.

But some analysts say the move is also an attempt by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his Shiite ally, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council, to weaken their rivals in the Sadr movement ahead of provincial elections due in October.

Liwa Sumaysim, head of the Sadr movement’s political bureau, said the group supported law enforcement as long as it “was not used as a tool to achieve political gains.”

“In general we support enforcement of the law in Iraq but it must be done judiciously. The arrests must be according to law and not randomly,” he said in the central shrine city of Najaf.

The Maysan offensive follows a similar operation launched by Maliki against Shiite militia in the main southern city of Basra in March.

That crackdown set off intense fighting between troops and militiamen, mostly from Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in which hundreds of people were killed before a May 10 ceasefire.

Wire reports