US commander says militias hard to spot in Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Aug 24 (Reuters) Militias blamed for much of the sectarian violence that has pitched Iraq towards civil war may have melted back into the population to escape a major security crackdown, a US military commander acknowledged today.

''The militias are within the people. They blend in with the people. It is very difficult to identify them when they lay down their arms,'' Colonel Michael Shields told reporters in Baghdad.

He was responding to questions about the relatively low number of arrests and weapons seized during a two-week-old operation to stem a surge in violence between majority Shi'ites and minority Sunnis that has killed thousands in recent months.

The possibility that the operation, which has focused on the most volatile districts of Baghdad, had simply displaced death squads to other areas was also ''a concern'', he said.

US and Iraqi forces have been going street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood searching houses for weapons and suspects in a make-or-break operation to restore stability.

But there have been no major confrontations with any militants so far. Military analysts had warned at the start of the operation that insurgents and militias could simply disperse, hide their weapons and try to wait out US forces.

''We did a good job of isolating the neighbourhoods. Could some individuals have fled the area? Of course,'' said Shields, who commands the 172nd Stryker Brigade, at a briefing at Camp Liberty military base in western Baghdad.

''The potential reality is that some high-level leaders did move out of the area before we executed'' the operation, he said.

VIOLENCE REDUCED US commanders have repeatedly said the aim of Operation Together Forward in Baghdad is to clear and secure areas worst affected by the violence and that they measure their success by the drop in crime, not the number of arrests or weapons seized.

Shields said his forces had cleared more than 20,000 buildings ''without incident'' in the volatile Sunni district of Ghazaliya in western Baghdad and in nearby Shula, a stronghold of the Mehdi Army militia of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

He said the operation had dramatically reduced the levels of violence in those neighbourhoods. In the month leading up to the operation there had been 83 murders there, but only nine had been reported since it got under way.

''I can see the change with children playing in the streets and with families sitting out on their front lawns relaxing,'' he said.

More than 25 people had been detained and hundreds of mortar rounds, improvised explosive devices and 33,000 14.5 mm rounds hidden in underground caches or behind grain sacks, he said.

But he also acknowledged the limitations of the military operation in bringing any lasting peace to Baghdad.

''It is going to take the will of the people to really tackle this problem. The security forces can provide security of neighbourhoods, but it is going to come down to whether people really want this. People are tired of violence.'' The 172nd Stryker Brigade, equipped with the US military's latest armoured vehicles, was due to go home after a year's deployment but was ordered to stay on to beef up US forces in Baghdad for the operation.

REUTERS MS PM0828