Patrick Cockburn, author of The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq, tells in The Independent (UK), 15 February 2007, more than I knew about Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shia leader in Iraq. This young cleric seems to become more important all the time.
The population of Iraq is about 25 million people, and about 60% of them are Shia. Two million of them live in the slums of East Baghdad, Sadr City, where Muqtada has his base.
The Sadrist movement, of which Muqtada is the current leader, was founded by Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. It was he who sought to interpret Shia Islam and organise its adherents in the 1950s and 1960s in order to oppose the powerful Iraqi Communist Party and the nationalist Baath Party. He helped to establish the Shia religious party al-Dawa to counter secularism.
Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr was Muqtada’s father-in-law. He, along with his sister and hundreds of his followers, was killed by Saddam Hussein in 1980.
In the 90s, Saddam tried to co-opt Baqir’s pupil and distant cousin, the sadrist leader Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr. Sadiq was the father of Muqtada. Saddam chose him and his movement because they were distant from Iran and they were anti-American. Saddam came to realize that he was nurturing an increasingly dangerous enemy and ordered the killing of Sadiq and his sons in January 1999.
A famous story is told of Sadiq illustrating his concern for ordinary Iraqis.
A man looking for a religious leader to follow asked each of them the price of tomatoes. Some, more accustomed to being queried about esoteric religious matters, were offended by such a mundane question. The exception was Sadiq, who gave a full response, detailing the prices of different types of tomato. The man departed satisfied, saying he had at last found a religious leader who knew about life as it was really lived by Iraqis. He said: "I choose the one who knows my suffering, who is close to the poor and the disinherited."
Sadiq spoke for the steadily more sanctions-impoverished Shia masses. He called for patriotic Sunni and Shia unity against foreign interference, whether it came from Iran or from the USA.
It was not a given that Sadiq’s fourth son, the young Muqtada, now in his early 30s, would be his father’s political and religious heir. Saddam’s security men had him under surveillance and concluded that he was harmless. But as Baghdad fell in April 2003, Muqtada stepped forward to fill a vacuum; he represented those who hated Saddam but were suspicious of conciliatory Shia religious leaders and the Iraqi exiles returning from London and New York courtesy of the US army.
The policy of the Shia hierarchy, notably Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and of the previously exiled religious parties, al-Dawa and SCIRI, was not to oppose the US occupation but to use it to enable the Shia to take power. They pressed the US envoy Paul Bremer to hold elections that the Shia were bound to win.
Muqtada's line was different. He opposed the occupation from the beginning.
Muqtada’s Mehdi (or Mahdi) Army is said to be 70,000 strong. But Muqtada
plays down his own strength. Asked about claims that the army and police are infiltrated by his men, Muqtada said the reverse was true and "it is our militias [that] are swarming with spies. It doesn't take much to infiltrate the army of the people." He denies that the death squads killing Sunni are really members of the Mehdi Army.
It may well be true that not all Shia militias are controlled by Muqtada, while the Sunni claim that every Shia gunman is a member of the Mehdi Army.
Muqtada’s strength is his blend of religion and nationalism; he is regarded by millions of Shias with cult-like devotion. Saddam did not kill the Sadrist movement as he had hoped. It has awakened the Iraqi Shia community to their identity through the past half a century.
Cockburn’s conclusion:
President Bush shows no sign of learning from his failures in Iraq since 2003. For almost four years he has been fighting the Sunni community. Now, by confronting Muqtada, he is moving towards armed conflict with the Shia as well.
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And where is Muqtada?
According to Juan Cole, the U.S. military says that Muqtada fled to Iran last month. Prof. Cole has several times said that he finds it extremely unlikely that Muqtada is in Iran, and Iranian sources have denied it. Cole finds it most plausible that Muqtada now is "holed up" in the southern marshlands in Iraq.