AL SADR ORDERS HIS FOLLOWERS NOT TO LAY DOWN THEIR WEAPONS

Moqtada al-Sadr, the rebel leader, has ordered his Mahdi army not to lay down their weapons and to defy the orders given by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and give up the battle in Basra, Iraq.

Al Sadr: Weapons stay till occupiers go

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 01:20:55
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Moqtada has rejected Mahdi army's disarmament.Moqtada al-Sadr has ordered his followers not to lay down their weapons, confronting a crackdown by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

The Iraqi government has ordered the Mahdi Army to disarm, but the Sadrist movement has rejected its armed wing laying down its arms. "Moqtada al-Sadr asks his followers not to deliver weapons to the government.

Weapons should be turned over only to a government which can expel the (US) occupiers," Sadr's aide Hassan Zargani told Reuters. Premier Maliki has staked his authority on disarming Sadr's followers with a major military operation.

But his forces have made little progress driving fighters from the streets and instead have provoked rebellion in towns across the south. The prime minister initially gave Sadr's followers in Basra 72 hours to disarm, but with little progress on the ground he extended the deadline until April 8.

His defense minister has said the ferocity of the resistance was unexpected.

In the meantime in a rare interview taped just before this week's outbreak of violence and shown by al-Jazeera on Saturday, al-Sadr has called on Arab leaders meeting in Syria to voice their support for Iraq's "resistance" to what he calls foreign occupation.

Al-Jazeera television has shown a brief clip of an interview with the Mahdi Army leader and has said that the full interview will soon be shown.