U.S. soldiers rolled up their barbed-wire barricades and lifted a near siege of the largest Shiite Muslim enclave in Baghdad on Tuesday, heeding the orders of a Shiite-led Iraqi government whose assertion of sovereignty had Shiites celebrating in the streets.
The order by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to lift the week-old blockade of Sadr City was one of the most overt expressions of self-determination by Iraqi leaders in the 3 1/2-year U.S. occupation. It came after two weeks of increasingly pointed exchanges between Iraqi and U.S. officials, as well as a video conference between al-Maliki and President Bush on Saturday.
Al-Maliki's decision exposed the growing divergence between the U.S. and Iraqi administrations on some of the most crucial issues facing the country, especially the burgeoning strength of Shiite militias. The militias are allied with the Shiite religious parties that form al-Maliki's coalition government and they are accused by Sunni Arab Iraqis and by Americans of kidnapping and killing Sunnis in the soaring violence between Iraq's Shiite majority and Sunni minority.
Sadr City is the base of the country's most feared militia, the Mahdi Army, which answers to Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. Sadr's strongly anti-American bloc is the largest in the Shiite governing coalition and was instrumental in making al-Maliki prime minister five months ago.
At midday Tuesday, al-Maliki issued an order setting a 5 p.m. deadline for removal of the U.S. checkpoints. A senior U.S. Embassy official said later that al-Maliki told U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, in a meeting Tuesday that the checkpoints should be lifted