BAGHDAD, 7 April 2004 — The fiery cleric behind a Shiite insurrection in Iraq is confronting the US-led occupation head-on, implicitly challenging the peaceful strategy of his community’s more established leaders. Moqtada Sadr, shut out of mainstream politics by Iraq’s US administrator Paul Bremer, has surged back onto the scene by unleashing his youthful gunmen and supporters onto the streets of Baghdad and cities across the mainly Shiite south.
Sadr, 30, knows he cannot match the religious authority of Iraq’s foremost Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, but is paying no heed to a Sistani-inspired appeal for calm. His display of street muscle is a headache not only for US-led forces grappling with a Sunni Muslim insurgency, but also for Shiite political leaders sitting on the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council which Sadr views as illegitimate. Hamid Al-Bayati, spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), told Reuters Shiites wanted to deal peacefully with the US-led occupiers. “This is the first time we see violence between Shiites and the coalition. It’s a dangerous escalation,” he said. SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim is a member of the Governing Council, as is Ibrahim Jaafari, leader of the Shiite Daawa Party. Both returned from exile after US-led forces toppled Saddam Hussein a year ago this week.
Sadr and his rampaging black-clad militiamen are in effect contesting such leaders’ claims to represent Shiites in postwar Iraq, which are as untested in any election as his own. “Sadr’s action also challenges the US notion that the Shiites are a 60 percent majority bloc. They clearly are not,” said Charles Tripp, a British scholar of Iraq. “I doubt Sadr has huge numbers of supporters, but he has enough in several cities, with enough guns, to cause lots of trouble. He’s showing he can’t easily be ignored,” Tripp said.
Bremer and Sadr each blame the other for provoking the clashes that have already cost scores of lives. Both have their eye on a planned June-30 transfer of power to Iraqis. After Sadr turned up his anti-US rhetoric, Bremer closed his newspaper and then had one of his aides arrested over the murder of a moderate Shiite cleric a year ago. When protests in Baghdad and across the south turned violent, Bremer let it be known that Sadr himself was wanted for the killing of Abdul Majid Al-Khoei, hacked to death in a Najaf mosque just after he had returned from exile in Britain.
Bayati said he could not understand why the Americans had chosen to pursue Sadr as a wanted criminal now, months after an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for his arrest. The Shiite establishment has underlined its reservations about the de facto constitution passed by the Governing Council last month, but hopes that promised elections will empower Shiites oppressed by Saddam, with no need for violence. Clearly alarmed, Shiite moderates want Sadr to cool his revolt, before it drags Shiites at large into the sort of violence racking Sunni Muslim areas north and west of Baghdad. “We asked Moqtada to stop resorting to violence...and other actions that make him an outlaw,” an aide to Mohammed Bahr Al-Uloom, a cleric on the Governing Council, said on Monday. He said the appeal had fallen on deaf ears, even though he said it was backed by Sistani.
Sistani exerts huge influence over Shiites from his Najaf base, though he kept quiet politically during Saddam’s time. Since the dictator’s fall, Sistani has forced Washington repeatedly to modify its plans for political transition in Iraq to accommodate his demands for early elections. UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, in Baghdad this week to try to broker agreement on a transitional government and elections, has found his talks eclipsed by the rolling Shiite unrest. Sadr’s own father, Ayatollah Mohammed Sadeq Al-Sadr, was much revered among Shiites. He was murdered in 1999.
The younger Sadr’s brand of nationalistic Islam appeals mainly to young, poor and disaffected Shiites. Other Shiite parties, notably SCIRI, have their own militias, though Bayati dismissed the idea that armed conflict could erupt within the Shiite community. Still, with the facade of Shiite unity in tatters, Tripp foresees new dangers, even if ballots replace bullets. “How will political organizations cope with disappointment after July 1 or in any elections that take place?” he asked. “The danger is that while guns are in their hands and militias are at their disposal, they may try a short cut.”
