WASHINGTON, April 5 (UPI) -- Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada al-Sadr is playing a crucial role in the battle for Baghdad, a U.S. expert said Tuesday,
"Much depends on whether the Shiite militias actively resist the effort to secure Baghdad. Moqtada al Sadr has so far stood down his Mahdi Army, but his future decisions will clearly impact the success or failure of U.S. strategy," Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote Wednesday in a new analysis entitled "Iraq's Sectarian and Ethnic Violence: Developments Through Spring 2007."
"The new Baghdad plan centers on Sadr and his loyalists being passive, and he had stood by while U.S. forces arrested more extremist members of his Mahdi Army," Cordesman wrote.
Cordesman warned that even if U.S. tactical military operations in Baghdad were successful in the coming months, a real strategic victory in Iraq still hinged on the United States being able to get Shiite and Sunni Muslim forces to compromise with each other.
"The key variable is Iraqi political accommodation and conciliation on a national level, not victory in Baghdad," he wrote. "Without it, the analysis shows a steadily rising risk that the escalating levels of civil violence in Iraq could lead to full scale civil war, influence of outside nations in the form of direct intervention or the use of Iraqi proxies, and lead to broader struggles between Sunni and Shiite."
