All you guys claiming al-Sadr is this terrible guy that the U.S. is gonna remove, just note that our official position towards him is quite different now...We treat him with high respect as a political force.
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Repackaged as a Leader
At the same time, the Americans' portrayal of Sadr has also changed. The Evil One of the last civil war, a man wanted by authorities and dubbed the "most dangerous man in Iraq" by Newsweek, has been repackaged as a leader to whom General Petraeus now attests a sense of responsibility. US military officials speaking on Iraqi television refer to him respectfully as "His Excellency Muqtada."
They know that they owe their successes partly to his withdrawal, and still do today. "Sadr is not the enemy," Ambassador Ryan Crocker said last week in Baghdad. The Americans, he added, are battling "special groups" and "extremist military elements" that Sadr apparently "doesn't have under control." But this is not the view of Sadr's Iraqi rivals, who now seek to deprive him of his power.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Islamist like Sadr, is the head of the DAWA Party, Iraq's oldest and now deeply divided Shiite political group. Unlike Sadr, Maliki does not have his own private army. He needed -- and received -- Sadr's support when he was elected prime minister two years ago. He now has other allies, especially the US Army and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI).
The leader of the ISCI is Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim, the cancer-stricken head of a Shiite dynasty that has been wrestling with the Sadr clan for influence in southern Iraq for decades. His son and designated successor Ammar controls a vast business empire supported by a militia known as the Badr Brigades. Established in Iran and politically far more flexible than the Sadr group, the Hakims' ISCI enjoys both Tehran's and Washington's goodwill.
Mohammed al-Waeli, known as the "oil prince," heads the Shiite Fadhila Party, which dominates the lucrative oil smuggling business on the Gulf. As the governor of Basra, al-Waeli competes simultaneously with Sadr, the Hakims and Maliki's DAWA Party for economic advantage. He is supported by a militia as well as by Basra security forces which have been infiltrated by his militia.
spiegel.de |
