SADR CITY, Aug 30: The black-clad, gun-toting fighters of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr disappeared from the streets of Baghdad’s Sadr City on Thursday, apparently obeying their leader’s order to lie low.

A photographer who walked the streets of the teeming neighbourhood said there was no sign of the Mahdi Army militiamen who usually dominate the Sadr City landscape.

Instead, residents grouped on street corners to discuss clashes that turned a pilgrimage in the city of Karbala into a bloodbath and a subsequent freeze by Sadr on activities of his militia widely blamed for the fighting.

The firefights occurred on Tuesday during the pilgrimages, the birth anniversary of Imam Mohammed al-Mahdi. The deadly clashes killed 52 people and left another 300 wounded.

While denying his Mahdi Army fighters were involved in the skirmishes, Sadr ordered a total freeze of all militia activities for six months.

The orders seem to have been quickly passed down the line and on Thursday Sadr City — a bastion of Sadr followers — was almost deserted as militiamen kept out of sight and most residents stayed indoors to mourn the killings in Karbala.

“The Mahdi Army is not on the streets of (Sadr) City today,” said one fighter, who asked not to be named, from inside his small one-roomed home in one of the slum’s myriad twisting bylanes.

“The members are sitting at home after the order of Sayid (Moqtada al-Sadr). We cannot break his word. His word is an order for us.” The central Sadrain Square where the office of the Sadr movement is guarded daily by Mahdi Army militiamen was also glaringly deserted.

Absent too were the militiamen who normally direct traffic in the usually crowded area and who man checkpoints inside the neighbourhood, which is a regular target of Sunni extremists.

At a shop on 55 Square, a prominent central street of Sadr City, a painter was seen giving final touches to a portrait of Sadr, while the shop next door was closed. A number of tents, meanwhile, have sprung up across the sprawling slum — believed to be home to some two million people — where Shia families were gathering to mourn the deaths of victims of Karbala firefights.

Abu Ali al-Rikaby, a local leader of the Mahdi Army, said the events in Karbala had triggered Sadr’s decision to suspend the militia. Rikaby, a loyal follower of Sadr who had participated in 2004 rebellions against US forces in the holy city of Najaf, said the suspension would help root out “mischievous” elements from the militant group.

“There is an advantage in freezing the militia’s activities as there are many using the name of the group for mischievous aims to divide the people of Iraq,” he said.

“Everybody working under the leadership of Sadr must blindly obey this order,” said the tall, well-built bearded man in his mid-thirties.

The Mahdi Army has been accused by Iraq’s Sunni Arab leaders of killing thousands of members of the minority community in the ongoing Shiite-Sunni sectarian conflict which broke out in February 2006.

Rikaby’s views were echoed by fellow fighter Abu Moqtada, who said the suspension would help root out internal fighting within the group.

“Sadr’s decision is positive. It will avoid any internal fighting and distinguish who is good and who obeys Sadr and who does not,” he said.

Abu Moqtada said he had been a witness to this week’s Karbala bloodbath which he blamed on “infiltrators” who had penetrated the ranks of the pilgrims.

“In Baghdad we will now lie low and obey the order until there are new orders to restart our activities,” he said.

“Al-Sadr’s decision must be respected by other sides, and the government must not seize this as an opportunity to arrest Mahdi Army members,” he said, adding that the group was more disciplined “than the Iraqi army.”—AFP