-
NAJAF - A top aide to a radical Shiite cleric and three others from his movement were arrested in a pre-dawn swoop by US and Iraqi forces in the holy city of Najaf Thursday, part of a nationwide crackdown on suspects in sectarian killings.
Salah al-Obeidi, a close colleague of firebrand Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, was picked up from his home in Najaf along with cleric Bassim al-Ghuraifi, Sadr's office said.
Two others were also arrested, but their identities were not immediately known.
A spokesman for Sadr's group in Baghdad, Hazem al-Aaraji, denied he was one of those arrested as reported earlier, but confirmed that security forces had surrounded his house in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah district.
"Military forces sealed off my house for three hours," Aaraji told AFP, although he did not specify whether they were Americans or Iraqis.
Sadr's representatives accused US forces of "carrying out arrests and seeking to destabilize regions where security prevails."
"Americans want confrontation with Sadr because this movement is gaining in popularity. We are trying hard to avoid confrontation and to pursue other ways to resolve this issue," Sheikh Abderrazzak al-Midawi said in Najaf.
Midawi is a Sadr representative from the central city of Diwaniyah.
"We think the US is pressuring us to withdraw a project in parliament asking for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq," he told AFP.
Midawi said the group planned to hold a demonstration later Thursday in front of Obeidi's house to "protest his arrest and demand his release."
Sadr has 30 lawmakers in the 275-member Iraqi parliament and is a strong supporter of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government.
The US military did not confirm or deny the arrests.
"We are carrying out continuous operations against individuals we believe are responsible for sectarian violence in the country," US military spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson told AFP.
The military had confirmed on Wednesday that it had detained a number of fighters from Sadr's Mahdi Army militia for their alleged involvement in sectarian killings of Sunni Arabs over the past month.
"The majority of the individuals that we have captured that are tied to any one specific militia, Jaish al-Mahdi is certainly one of them," said Major General Joseph Peterson, head of Iraqi police training programme.
Those arrested were "promoting sectarian killings" he said.
The Jaish al-Mahdi or Mahdi Army fought a bloody battle against US forces in the summer of 2004 in Najaf which saw hundreds of fighters killed.
Iraq's Sunni politicians have repeatedly accused Sadr's fighters of killing members of the former elite community in the ongoing communal Shiite-Sunni bloodletting.
Last week Sunni politician Adnan al-Dulaimi said that Shiite militias close to the ruling government were causing a "national disaster".
"If strong measures are not taken soon, the country is going towards disaster and no one will be saved," said Dulaimi, MP and head of the National Concord Front, the largest Sunni parliamentary bloc.
"These well-known militias are pushing the country to the edge of catastrophe."
Attempts by US forces to dismantle these militias have failed so far.
Last week Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih accepted in Washington that the "militia situation is a very, very serious challenge for Iraq and for the Iraqi government," adding that discussions with Sadr were underway to dismantle his militia.
09/21/2006 09:11 GMT
