Sadr's influence seeps across turbulent Iraq
Sun Aug 15, 9:40 AM ET Add Top Stories - Chicago Tribune to My Yahoo!
By Liz Sly Tribune foreign correspondent
For several scary days last week, a few thousand armed men in black brought Iraq (news - web sites) once again to the brink.
The capital came to a standstill after a curfew ordered by al-Mahdi Army militiamen. Government offices and ministries told their workers to stay home; businesses and shops were shuttered.
Mortar rounds exploded randomly and regularly across the city, fired, according to the Interior Ministry, by a gang of men traveling in three cars looking for convenient spots to set up their mobile launcher. They haven't been caught.
Elsewhere, insurgents took over government buildings in at least five southern towns. Iraq's main oil pipeline was closed, costing the country $30 million a day in lost revenues. Al-Mahdi militiamen seized control of neighborhoods in Basra, a city where they had previously enjoyed little support.
The crackdown against the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr offered Iraq's new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, the chance to live up to the get-tough promises made when he took over the task of running the country.
Instead, the battle for Najaf has turned into a worrying reminder of just how frail the 7-week-old administration's hold really is.
"Najaf is like a sideshow," said Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "When you look at the map, post-hand-over, the government doesn't control much."
Shifting ground
Less than a week after Allawi flew to Najaf on a U.S. military helicopter and vowed there would be "no negotiations and no truce" with insurgent forces, talks are under way in the holy Shiite city between government and Sadr representatives.
Government officials deny the talks represent a retreat from the uncompromising stance presented earlier in the week. The prime minister always left the door open to rebels to lay down their arms and leave the city, they say.
But according to one source familiar with the talks, the government is offering Sadr substantial concessions, including the withdrawal of an arrest warrant issued by the U.S. occupation authority in April involving charges in the slaying of a rival cleric and the establishment of a fund for reconstruction and development in the southern region.
Government negotiators are hoping to avoid a repeat of mistakes made during last June's truce, which enabled Sadr and his militia to remain in the center of Najaf and gave them a chance to regroup and rearm.
"Sadr must join the political process," the source said.
Sadr has never been popular in Najaf, a center of pilgrimage and religious study that is home to the most revered and senior clerics of the Shiite faith.
The nation's top Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, left the city last week at the outbreak of fighting for heart surgery in London. He is a moderate who commands the largest following in Iraq.
Sadr's following is much smaller and is not based in Najaf. Thus, ejecting the young cleric from the holy city will not make much difference to his real support base among the urban poor of Sadr City, a Baghdad neighborhood that is home to 2 million Shiites and has the worst unemployment rate in the country, Dodge said.
Small group
Though U.S. military estimates have put the strength of al-Mahdi militia at less than a few thousand fighters nationwide, there is no way of measuring the number of angry, unemployed young men prepared to take up arms, said Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan and an authority on Iraq's Shiites.
U.S. military commanders said in June that their forces killed about 1,500 militia fighters during the seven-week siege that followed the last Sadr uprising. They estimated 360 fighters were killed in recent clashes.
But the scale of the resistance in Najaf and the sympathy uprisings elsewhere suggests Sadr's movement has grown in strength since last June's truce, Cole said. There were sizable uprisings in Kut and Amarah, two towns not previously known to be loyal to Sadr, and his movement also appears to have gained support in Basra.
"The Sadr movement is spreading throughout the south, and it's likely to be a source of long-term instability," he said.
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