Shi'ite clergy take charge in Iraq
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
BAGHDAD — Shi'ite clergy are giving the orders and
providing services that govern the daily lives of 2 million
people in this city's teeming northern neighborhood.
To senior U.S. officials, the
pattern holds great dangers for a
democratic Iraqi future. To others,
it is merely a natural assertion of
participation in society by a
previously sidelined majority.
"All orders are coming here
from the ulemma in Najaf, our
holiest city. They are secret orders
that I cannot reveal to you," said
Sayyid Khadoum Al-Mousayi, a
white-turbaned cleric with a rank
higher than a sheik and lower than
an imam who has taken control of
the subsection of Baghdad previously known as Saddam
City.
After U.S.-led forces drove Saddam Hussein's regime
from power, some in the neighborhood renamed it Thawra
City. Others call it Sadr City, a reference to the most famous
dynasty of Shi'ite rulers.
"We have been solving all the problems," Sayyid
Al-Mousayi said to the enthusiastic affirmation of an
entourage of around a dozen men sitting shoeless on mats
around him. "We have dealt with food, communications,
electricity, garbage collection and security."
Sayyid Al-Mousayi did not mention some of his other
activities: weeding out staff from government institutions such
as hospitals, and detaining looters and opponents in mosques.
Yet these all add up to something approaching a
well-coordinated grab for local power — based on fatwas,
or religious rulings — from a patchwork of sometimes
conflicting imams in Najaf and even from Iraqi imams based
in Iran.
Young men authorized by the Hawza seminary in Najaf
are standing guard at street corners in plain gray uniforms,
wielding Kalashnikov rifles.
The rise of self-proclaimed leaders and Islamic clerics in
Iraq is providing a major challenge to U.S. efforts to
introduce democracy but avert the establishment of a
fundamentalist Islamic state.
Self-declared mayors have taken over in Baghdad and
Kut, near the border with Iran, despite U.S. hostility and no
evidence that democratic elections were held.
Said Abbas, the cleric who occupied the city hall in Kut,
left peacefully Friday after U.S. Marines threatened to arrest
him and charge him with theft of public property, a top
Marine officer told the Associated Press yesterday.
In Najaf, in the south, and Mosul, in the north, Shi'ite
Muslim clerics are vying for power as U.S. troops watch.
In other towns, villages and cities, it is not clear who is in
charge in the chaos since removal of Saddam Hussein and his
loyalists from power in the three-week U.S.-led war.
At the Thawra Hospital in Baghdad, close to narrow
alleys where Sayyid Al-Mousayi lives modestly among the
poor Shi'ites to whom he ministers, security men patrol in
civilian clothes. They were all sent there by the same cleric.
"When we saw that looting had started on April 7," said
the hospital manager who did want to be named, "we knew
we could rely on our local mullahs, so we appealed to them
and they responded."
Hospital doctors said that nothing was stolen from this
hospital of more 300 beds, whereas, they noted, hospitals in
other parts of Baghdad had been ransacked.
In fact, the doctors said, the hospital ran throughout the
war, drawing in the wounded from other parts of the city.
"Every single doctor and every single worker turned up,"
the hospital manager said.
Saddam City pre-empted the final American push by
conducting its own armed revolt against Ba'ath Party loyalists
and Iraqi special forces in the area.
The hospital performed more than 300 full-scale
operations on war wounded and other patients during the
hostilities, the manager said.
Since the American forces arrived, the hospital's surgeons
have operated on 400 persons who were shot during the
lawlessness that followed the departure of Iraqi police.
Driving through the streets, Western reporters saw a
young boy around 8 years old casually lugging an AK-47
semiautomatic rifle.
Gunfire was heard in profusion at one stage, but it turned
out to be no more than celebratory fire to herald the return of
electrical power to part of the neighborhood.
"We have so many weapons, so much shooting," one
resident said, pointing to a man in the room whose
11-year-old was shot yesterday.
At a traffic island denoting the entrance to the Shi'ite
stronghold is a white-and-green banner reading, "Sadr City
welcomes visitors."
The drivers of two American tanks that rumbled toward
the sign and a six-man foot patrol nearby would have noticed
no warmth to their reception.
The attitude toward U.S. military presence here is a
combination of hostility and suspicion of American intentions,
and an insistence that the United States maintain security and
help rebuild the country.
"We need American help but not American domination,"
said Sayyid Al-Mousayi. "And we will not oppose them if
they behave correctly."
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