Sadr may disband Mehdi Army

By Khaled Farhan

NAJAF, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is ready to disband his militia if Shi'ite religious leaders demand it, his aides said on Monday, a surprising offer given renewed clashes between his fighters and security forces.

The news came after Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who launched a crackdown on Sadr's Mehdi Army late last month, ordered the cleric to disband his militia or face exclusion from the Iraqi political process.

Black-masked Mehdi Army fighters have been principal actors in Iraq's five-year-old war and the main foes of U.S. and Iraqi forces in widespread battles over recent weeks.

The U.S. military said gunmen killed three of its soldiers in Baghdad on Monday, a day after seven were killed across Iraq.

Senior Sadr aide Hassan Zargani said Sadr would seek rulings from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shi'ite cleric, and senior Shi'ite clergy based in Iran, on whether to dissolve the Mehdi Army, and would obey their orders.

"If they order the Mehdi Army to disband, Moqtada al-Sadr and the Sadr movement will obey the orders of the religious leaders," Zargani told Reuters from neighbouring Iran, where U.S. officials say Sadr has spent most of the past year.

However, Sadr's spokesman in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf, Salah al-Ubaidi, said the idea of disbanding the militia was not new and there was no plan to seek a ruling from top clerics.

"Sadr is willing to dissolve the Mehdi Army if the higher religious authorities order him to do so. (But) this is an old idea and didn't come in response to Maliki's orders," he said.