The chief of the US military said Wednesday it was too soon to tell who won or lost the Iraqi government's fight against Shiite militiamen in Basra.
Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, welcomed Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's effort to crack down on the Shiite fighters.
"I applaud the strategic intent here by the prime minister," Mullen told a news conference.
"We've been looking forward to … a time when the Iraqi security forces would, in fact, take the lead and be aggressive in terms of providing for their own security," he said.
"And so from that standpoint, that strategic intent I think was very positive," he said.
But Mullen said no one could be declared a winner yet.
"I think it's too early to tell what the, sort of, the strategic outcome is and was it a win or a loss or a victory or a defeat," he said.
The fighting has significantly come down in the last couple of days, but the operation "is still ongoing," Mullen said.
Maliki hailed the crackdown on Tuesday as a success which "achieved the aim of imposing law in the city and restoring normalcy."
A top Iraqi military commander, General Abdul Karim Khalaf, asserted that Iraqi forces were in full control of Basra after intense battles since March 25 that killed hundreds of people.
The offensive against the militias in Basra, mostly from the Mahdi Army of powerful Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, quickly set off a wave of clashes in other Shiite areas of Iraq in which at least 461 people were killed and more than 1,100 wounded.
The clashes began subsiding on Sunday after Sadr pulled his fighters off the streets following a deal with Maliki, who had personally directed the crackdown.
The deal left the militiamen with their weapons intact, and with some analysts saying the assaults had strengthened Sadr's hand and left Maliki politically battered.
