Many articles recently suggest Sadr will be a potent political force in Iraq next year. Here is one:
omaha.com
Published Thursday
June 10, 2004
Support seems to grow for Iraqi renegade cleric
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
NAJAF, Iraq - After months of losing hundreds, if not thousands, of men in battles with the U.S. military, renegade cleric Muqtada al-Sadr appears to be more popular than ever in Iraq.
U.S. leaders were optimistic that last week's truce, calling for al-Sadr to move his men out of Najaf and Kufa, was a sign of a weakened leader.
But many Iraqi religious and political leaders say al-Sadr's public appeal is higher than ever and say he seems poised to gain ground in Iraq's political arena, threatening America's plans for the country.
If elections were held today, polls and interviews on the street suggest, the venomously anti-American al-Sadr would command a big percentage of the vote.
In a recent poll of 1,640 Iraqis across the country, conducted by the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, more people indicated support for al-Sadr than for the new prime minister or a long list of other new Iraqi government officials.
Perhaps more striking: Al-Sadr polled just 2.8 percentage points behind the 70 percent support given to Iraq's most revered Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani.
That, some in Iraq say, was al-Sadr's goal all along: He always had aimed at grabbing a leadership position, not cities, said Redha Jawad Taki, a spokesman for the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite parties here.
Any doubts about al-Sadr's success were erased Saturday, when he was invited to meet with al-Sistani, who in the past distanced himself from the upstart young cleric.
Many saw the meeting as a stamp of legitimacy for al-Sadr.
During the past year, al-Sadr's name has been linked to the killings and attempted killings of several rival clerics. He is under an arrest warrant for one of the killings last year.
Yet al-Sadr has become a folk hero to many.
"He was behaving in a way that the majority of Iraqis sympathize with," said professor Hamid Fadhel Hassan. |
