Iran special groups command center hit in Sadr City

Bill Roggio:

US and Iraqi forces continue to target the Mahdi Army as an Iraqi delegation visited Iran to confront the country over its support of Shia militias battling the government. The US military conducted a guided rocket attack on a Special Groups headquarters adjacent to a hospital in Sadr City, while 14 Mahdi Army fighters have been killed during clashes over the past 24 hours.

The US Army targeted and destroyed a Special Groups command and control center in a Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System strike in Sadr City at 10 AM local time Saturday morning, Multinational Forces Iraq reported. "There were six GMLRS rocket strikes on these Special Groups criminal command and control nodes," Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover, the chief Public Affairs Officer for Multinational Division Baghdad, told The Long War Journal while refuting claims that the US used aircraft to attack. "We conducted a precision strike, hopefully got a few leaders, and sent a very strong message."

The Special Groups have been using the location near the hospital for an extended period of time and US intelligence has followed the activities at this site. "We had been tracking it for some time," Stover said. "Operations made the call to hit it. There may have been damages to the hospital - broken glass. There was likely ambulances damaged; however, it was the Special Groups criminal leadership that purposely put their command and control node there."

The Special Groups are a subset of the Mahdi Army that receives backing from Iran's Qods Force, the foreign clandestine operations wing that has supported Shia terror groups in Iraq. The Mahdi Army and the Special Groups have intentionally fought amongst the civilian population and use civilians as human shields in an attempt to inflate civilian casualties and create a media backlash against Iraqi and US operations.

The Rusafa health department media director claimed 28 Iraqi were wounded in the strike, and nine ambulances and 40 civilian vehicles were damaged. The Sadrist bloc ran the Health Ministry prior to withdrawing from the government in 2007, and the hospitals in Sadr City are known to be infiltrated with Mahdi Army and Sadrist bloc members. The Mahdi Army used hospitals as staging areas for sectarian attacks and weapons storage depots.

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The wire service reports on this event were too incoherent to use in a post mainly because they relied on the unreliable reports from the hospital staff next door. One of the things I have noticed on reports from Iraq is that hospitals are the least reliable sources for disclosing what happened in contact with the enemy. They always report all the casualties are civilian, when at best they don't have a clue since the enemy camouflages himself as a civilian. they also tend to inflate casualties.

I think Roggio gives a clue to this problem by noting the previous association of many of these hospitals with the Sadr groups, but similar problems were found in sunni controlled areas when al Qaeda was more dominant. That is one reason why the US seized the hospital first when it finally took Fallujah.

It should be noted too, that the US military is getting much better at explaining these attacks and the enemy's responsibility for civilian casualties.