AMARA, Iraq (AFP) — At least five aides of hardline Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr were detained in a crackdown on militiamen in southern Iraq, renewing tensions Friday between Baghdad and the cleric's supporters.
"Five officials from the provincial council who represent the Sadr movement have been arrested for aiding the militia," Maysan province police spokesman Mehdi al-Asadi told AFP.
Abdul Karim Khalaf, a director with the Interior Ministry, said Friday that 20 policemen were among those arrested overnight in the city of Amara, capital of the southern Maysan province where the crackdown is taking place.
Amara mayor Rafa Abdul Jabbar, a member of the anti-US Sadr movement, was detained on Thursday along with 15 other criminal suspects, officials said.
Iraqi troops with US support began their military push targeting armed groups early Thursday with neighbourhood sweeps that have turned up huge weapons caches.
Soldiers and police met little or no resistance, in sharp contrast with similar operations in Baghdad and the southern city of Basra, where security forces and militiamen fought pitched street battles before last month's truce.
The crackdown in Amara is the latest move by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to bring order to Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and that has sewed bloody sectarian fighting.
While many residents applauded the operation to wrest the city from the control of militiamen, members of the Sadr movement voiced fears.
"All over Iraq -- Basra, and Sadr City in Baghdad -- the government has said the same thing: that Sadr and his Mahdi Army are not targets," a senior leader of the Sadr movement in Amara told AFP by telephone.
"But after those operations started they changed the colour of their feathers and started going after followers of Sadr and his Mahdi Army," he said after cancelling a planned meeting with an AFP reporter in the city.
"Right now I don't know if I will be able to save my own life," he said, adding that he was being forced to move from one safe house to another as the army closed in on him.
Sadr representative Sattar al-Battat meanwhile said the group was in support of the operation.
"Not a single shot has been fired at the Iraqi forces. It shows that the Mahdi Army is obeying the orders of its leader Moqtada al-Sadr," he told about 1,500 worshippers at Friday prayers at Hay al-Hussein mosque in Amara.
Amara has so far avoided this kind of conflict although residents have voiced fears that the military action could renew violence in the city.
"I think that the government's attempts to establish security are good and it should help to bring more stability. But I'm worried too that more violence could follow," said a 39-year-old a tea shop manager, who asked not to be named for security reasons.
Many members of Sadr's group are thought to have escaped across the border to Iran. There were also conflicting reports that they had gone into hiding or simply fled the city.
US commanders say Maysan had become a major centre for arms smuggling into Iraq from overwhelmingly Shiite Iran just over the border.
Weapons dug up included mortars, anti-personnel mines and machine guns which have been found dumped in fields, rivers and cemeteries, but the Sadr official said they did not belong to his group.
Southern Iraq is also 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 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.
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