This article appeared in the NYTimes:
The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By
July 19, 2007
Cleric Switches Tactics to Meet Changes in Iraq
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
BAGHDAD, July 18 After months of lying low, the anti-American
Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr has re-emerged with a shrewd strategy
that reaches out to Iraqis on the street while distancing himself
from the increasingly unpopular government.
Mr. Sadr and his political allies have largely disengaged from
government, contributing to the political paralysis noted in a
White House report last week. That outsider status has enhanced Mr.
Sadrs appeal to Iraqis, who consider politics less and less
relevant to their daily lives.
Mr. Sadr has been working tirelessly to build support at the
grass-roots level, opening storefront offices across Baghdad and
southern Iraq that dispense services that are not being provided by
the government. In this he seems to be following the model
established by Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese Shiite group, as
well as Hamas in Gaza, with entwined social and military wings that
serve as a parallel government.
He has also extended the reach of his militia, the Mahdi Army, one
of the armed groups that the White House report acknowledged remain
entrenched in Iraq. The militia has effectively taken over vast
swaths of the capital and is fighting government troops in several
southern provinces. Although the militia sometimes uses brutal
tactics, including death squads, many vulnerable Shiites are
grateful for the protection it affords.
At the same time, the Mahdi Army is not entirely under Mr. Sadrs
control, and he publicly denounces the most notorious killers
fighting in his name. That frees him to extend an olive branch to
Sunni Arabs and Christians, while championing the Shiite identity
of his political base.
On May 25, in his first public Friday Prayer in months, he
explicitly forbade sectarian attacks.
It is prohibited to spill the blood of Sunnis and Iraqi
Christians, he told Shiites in a much publicized sermon. They are
our brothers, either in religion or in the homeland.
Almost from the day American troops entered Iraq, the mercurial Mr.
Sadr has confounded American and Iraqi politicians alike. He
quickly rallied impoverished Shiites in peaceful displays of Shiite
strength, as had his father, a prominent cleric. When the Sunni
Arab insurgency gained momentum, he raised a Shiite insurgency in
direct opposition to the American-backed Iraqi government that had
excluded him.
His basic tenets are widely shared. Like most Iraqis, he opposes
the American military presence and wants a timetable for departure
if only to attain some certainty that the Americans will leave
eventually. He wants the country to stay unified and opposes the
efforts of those Shiites who have had close ties to Iran to create
a semiautonomous Shiite region in southern Iraq.
After his Mahdi militia was defeated in a bloody battle against
American forces in Najaf in 2004, Mr. Sadr established himself as a
political player, using the votes of loyal Parliament members to
give Nuri Kamal al-Maliki the margin needed to win the post of
prime minister.
Now that the leadership is in poor repute, Mr. Sadr has shifted
once again. The six ministers in the cabinet and 30 lawmakers in
Parliament allied to him have been boycotting sessions. They
returned Tuesday, but it is not clear they will stay long.
The mainstream political parties in Iraq realize that Mr. Sadr is
growing more influential, but appear to be flummoxed over how to
deal with him. They see him as unpredictable and manipulative, but
too politically and militarily important to ignore.
Hes powerful, said Jaber Habeeb, an independent Shiite member of
Parliament and political science professor at Baghdad University.
This is a fact you have to accept, even if you dont like
it.
The latest stance by the more conventional political parties is to
keep him at arms length. The two major Shiite parties, Dawa and
the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, along with the two Kurdish
parties, have been negotiating to form a new moderate
coalition.
Mr. Sadrs political leaders were told he was welcome to join, but
the invitation came belatedly, after the other groups had all but
completed their discussions. Mr. Sadrs lieutenants announced that
he had no interest in joining.
Experts in Shiite politics believe that efforts to isolate Mr. Sadr
are bound to fail.
Sadr holds the political center in Iraq, said Joost Hiltermann,
the director of the International Crisis Groups office in Amman,
Jordan. They are nationalist, they want to hold the country
together and they are the only political organization that has
popular support among the Shias. If you try to exclude him from any
alliance, well, its a nutty idea, its unwise.
The mainstream parties talk about Mr. Sadr carefully. Some never
mention his followers or the Mahdi militia by name, but speak
elliptically of armed groups. Others acknowledge his position but
are reserved on the challenge he poses.
Moktada Sadr is one of the political leaders of this country,
Adel Abdul-Mahdi, one of Iraqs two vice presidents, said in a
recent interview. We disagree on some things, we have differences.
We have to work to solve our differences.
The Sadrists exhibit a quiet confidence, and are pulling ever more
supporters into their ranks. The Sadr movement cannot be
marginalized; it is the popular base, said Sheik Salah al-Obaidi,
the chief spokesman and a senior strategist for Mr. Sadrs movement
in Najaf. We will not be affected by efforts to push us to one
side because we are the people. We feel the peoples day-to-day
sufferings.
A number of working-class Shiites reflected that sentiment in
conversations about the Mahdi militia and Mr. Sadr. Their relatives
and neighbors work both for the Sadr offices and for the militia,
blurring the line between social programs and paramilitary
activity.
Mr. Sadrs offices are accessible storefronts that dispense a
little bit of everything: food, money, clothes, medicine and
information. From just one office in Baghdad and one in Najaf in
2003, the Sadr operation has ballooned. It now has full-service
offices in most provinces and nine in Baghdad, as well as several
additional storefront centers. In some neighborhoods, the
militiamen come around once a month to charge a nominal fee about
5,000 Iraqi dinars, or $4 for protection. In others, they control
the fuel supply, and in some, where sectarian killings have gone
on, they control the real estate market for empty houses.
The Mahdi militia is deeply involved in that sectarian killing. In
a vicious campaign in the Amil neighborhood in western Baghdad,
once a mixed working-class neighborhood of Shiites and Sunni Arabs,
it has driven out many Sunnis and isolated others in a few
enclaves.
Young men, said by residents to be part of the Mahdi militia, check
every car coming into the Shiite section of the neighborhood. And
many mornings, the bodies of several Sunni Arabs are dumped in a
brick-strewn lot near the neighborhoods entrance. Local Shiites
routinely claim that the bodies are of foreign terrorists.
However, each community insists that it is the victim of the other.
A sniper in the Sunni Arab area shoots at Shiites lined up to buy
at a gasoline station that straddles the two communities. That, in
turn, is used to justify retaliatory attacks on Sunni Arabs.
Among Shiites, the militia is viewed as their best form of
protection from Sunni Arab insurgents. This is the Mahdi Army
standing in our streets, said Rahman al-Mussawi, 38, a community
leader who says he is proud that he still has Sunni Arab neighbors
on his block, even though Sunni insurgents almost certainly killed
his three younger brothers. They disappeared along a deadly stretch
of road south of Baghdad where Shiites have been victims of Sunni
extremists.
Mr. Mussawi gestured to the end of the block, where young Mahdi
guards in T-shirts checked cars entering the neighborhood: The
Americans chase them away. If the Americans just would leave, then
the neighborhood would be quiet.
The Mahdi Armys darker side is rarely discussed in Shiite
neighborhoods. In Amil, some people fiercely reject any suggestion
that the group runs death squads. Others might admit to some
problems, but dismiss them as the excesses of a few bad
apples.
Of course there are some wrongdoings done by renegades in the
Mahdi Army who deviated from the good and honorable line of the
army, said Mohammed Abu Ali, 55, a mechanical engineer who helps
out in the Sadr office in Amil. We do not approve these
wrongdoings and we try to rid of elements in the Mahdi Army.
Mr. Sadr began his most recent ascent after the bombing of the
golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, sacred to Shiites,
in February 2006. It was one of a string of assaults by Sunni Arab
insurgents on Shiites that had gone on for more than two
years.
Mr. Sadrs militia began to strike back, supported by Shiites who
felt it was their only protection.
Iraqi politicians say Mr. Sadr made another smart move this spring,
when he pulled out of the government to protest its refusal to set
a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops. Stymied by
infighting, Mr. Maliki has yet to fill the posts.
Shortly after a second bombing in Samarra this June, Mr. Sadr
called for a mass Shiite pilgrimage to the Sunni Arab city to honor
an imam whose body lies in the ruined shrine. Government officials
had to plead with him to cancel it to avoid violence. He eventually
did, but not until he had made his point: he was a power to be
reckoned with.
Qassim Daoud, a secular Shiite lawmaker, says Mr. Sadr has figured
out the alchemy to playing the outsider, but having just enough of
a place in the government to have leverage.
He is one of those people who has two legs, one inside the
political process and one outside the political process, Mr. Daoud
said. So, he uses both to attack the process.
