THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Never the smartest thing to do, it is really bad when you prop up a guy who can't stand on his own.

Witnesses in Basra said that members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.

Senior members of several political parties said Saturday that the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.

Since the Basra assault began Tuesday, violence has spread to Shiite districts of Baghdad and other places in Iraq where Shiite militiamen hold sway, raising fears that security gains often attributed to a yearlong American troop buildup could be at risk. Any widespread breakdown of a cease-fire called by Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who founded the Mahdi Army, could bring the country right back to the sectarian violence that racked it in 2006 and 2007.

For the third straight day, the American military was reported to be conducting airstrikes in support of Iraqi troops in Basra. Iraqi police officials reported that an American bombing run killed eight civilians.

In Baghdad, the American military was also drawn deeper into the violence generated by the Basra assault, as the military issued a statement saying that American soldiers had killed nine Iraqis that it called terrorists in firefights around Sadr City, the Shiite slum that forms Mr. Sadr’s base of support. The statement said that seven of the Iraqis were killed after they attacked an American unit and two more when they were caught placing roadside bombs. Later Saturday, the military announced that two American soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb in Shiite-controlled eastern Baghdad.

Neither Maliki's DaWa nor Sadr's Mahdi Army was strong enough to win it all, but the US choice of sides may well create new alliances against the one we choose. And James Glanz has an analysis of what happens when you take on an old alley fighter in his warren of alleys.