Globe: Hugh Graham- Has the lid finally come off?
Post
Has the lid finally come off? Hugh Graham, Saturday march 4, 2006
Since the bombing of their sacred mosque, Iraq's powerful Shiite leaders have been struggling to keep the country from plunging into civil war. Or have they?
The people of Samarra, north of Baghdad, are largely Sunni Muslims even though their city is home to the gilded Askariya Mosque, a shrine especially sacred to their religious rivals, the Shiites of Iraq.
Through the ages, the Sunnis followed caliphs while the Shiites followed imams, and the mosque is the tomb of the 10th and 11th men to lead the sect. Even more important it is dedicated to Mohammed al-Mahdi, known as the 12th or "missing imam," because it was in Samara, in 873, that he vanished, allegedly taken into an ethereal dimension from which he will return to inaugurate a new world during a final apocalypse.
A millennium after his disappearance, "the Mahdi" remains the Shiites' central spiritual figure. Last month, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told the Al-Jazeera news network that his own aggressive brand of Islam is required to bring about the Mahdi's return.
Four days later, the sacred shrine in Samarra was destroyed. Terrorists in commando gear expelled its guards and planted explosives to cause a blast that has left Iraq once again on the verge of civil war.
Last week in Baghdad, Mr. al-Sadr's wild militia, called the Mahdi Army, seized several Sunni mosques and draped them with the black flag of Shia radicalism. Even with the bombing in Samarra, this was an outrageous provocation, given the Sunni insurgency, marginalization and anger at Iraq's new Shia-dominated parliament.
Behind the scenes, the Mahdi militia's political masters tried in vain to restrain it, indicating that there is something disturbingly different about this new round of sectarian violence. That the fighting between Sunnis and Shiites has claimed almost 1,500 lives in 10 days is bad enough. But what seems to have brought the conflict from a two-year simmer to a boil is that the Shia religious hierarchy in the holy city of Najaf is losing its power over 62 per cent of Iraq's 25 million people. In short, the Shiites are losing the restraint for which they have become renowned.
With luck, the Shiites will resume their composure, but if there is all-out civil war, the U.S. mission to bring democracy to the country will have been a complete failure.
Nor is there much Washington can do. U.S. troops, according to the Los Angeles Times, have been caught between the two sides, and been asked by both to stay away from their mosques, the prime centres of conflict. With government security forces fuelling rather than quenching the violence, peace now depends on the recuperative powers of the Shia religious organization. Only by understanding that organization and how it influences Iraqi affairs can the world make sense of what is to come.
For the most part, the Shiites are ethnically Arab, and live largely in the south. The word "Shia" means "partisans," as in partisans of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed, to whom they trace the leadership of Islam, whereas the Sunnis trace the line to Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion.
The two sects crossed swords and in the mid-seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites in Iraq, killing Hussein, Ali's son and successor, and taking charge of the Muslim world while the Shiites remained a minority, although they later came to form the majority in Iraq and Iran.
Today, they have enormous respect for their head cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and in the past, his orders have always prevailed. Like Gandhi, he has a record of humility, wisdom and firmness tempered with restraint. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he ordered the Shiites to stand aside in a successful move to avoid civil war with Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein.
By 2004, the United States had recognized the Ayatollah's power to unleash massive demonstrations. With a few utterances and an edict or two, the laconic, white-bearded old man stood down U.S. administrator Paul Bremer more than once over Washington's manipulation of the electoral process, prompting the United Nations to come in and to help with election planning.
The same year, Ayatollah al-Sistani also stopped Shia retaliation after suicide bombings during Ashura, preventing the civil war Sunni extremists were so desperate to provoke. He used his authority to end two rebellions against U.S. troops by the Mahdi Army and he ensured, in a few decisive words, that Islam would be enshrined as a source of law in the Iraqi constitution.
Now, that record is being tested. The day after the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, he called for peaceful demonstrations. But the following day, he also called in tribal paramilitaries from the central Euphrates region to protect the Shia shrines from further harm, a reminder that, in the Shiite tradition, he is the only religious authority who can call for all-out war.
Ominously, in a release from his office in Najaf, he said, if the government can't "offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it, with the help of God."
The sectarian fighting could even affect the Ayatollah's popularity, not to mention his authority. Agence France-Presse reported that last Sunday the unpredictable Mr. al-Sadr signed an agreement with the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association to work for reconciliation. And, according to the Arab news service Al Zaman, members of his Sadr Group have joined Sunnis at communal prayer services.
If Mr. al-Sadr's initiative proves successful, it could bring the volatile upstart prestige in the highly competitive Shia hierarchy. That could cause Shiites outside the al-Sadr orbit to start listening to him instead of Ayatollah al-Sistani.
And that is precisely what Mr. al-Sadr wants. He is descended from a prestigious clerical family that stands for the greater political involvement of the clergy -- the "outspoken seminary" (hawza nakita) in contrast to the establishment's "quiet seminary" (hawza samita).
The radical al-Sadr tradition also calls for less separation of religion and state. In open rivalry, the younger cleric has been known to send his fighters to battle militia loyal to the Ayatollah: in April, 2003, for control of the sacred Imam Ali Mosque, and again in October, 2004, in a bloody running battle over shrines in Karbala. Now, by moving for reconciliation with the Sunnis while his militia exacts reprisals from them, he may even be trying to hold the peace and the war cards in the same hand.
If true, this would be typical. The sly, pragmatic young cleric has proved adept at exploiting every new event to climb another rung on the ladder of power. His base is Sadr City, the poor quarter of East Baghdad that houses two million Shiites. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Sadr Group has grown into a massive network that provides social and medical services as well as security. It appeals to the poor and uneducated with a fiery and mystical brand of religion, and of all the Shia parties, is the most militant, the most violently opposed to the occupation and the most impatient for an Islamist government.
It's not hard to see why the bearded and baby-faced Mr. al-Sadr is using the current civil unrest for self-advancement. As well as being young, he has gone unrecognized by mainstream clergy because of his low clerical standing. Instead, he has traded on the renown of his father, the radical Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated in 1999, almost certainly by agents of Saddam Hussein.
Like most clerics, Mr. al-Sadr claims a purely religious concern for his flock, and two weeks ago told Al-Jazeera that he eschews a personal role in politics. But his aims have always been political. After hard bargaining, last fall, to get his representatives on the list of Shia religious parties backed by Ayatollah al-Sistani for the Dec. 15 elections, the Sadr Group won 30 of the 130-odd seats claimed by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) parliamentary bloc, which now controls the 275-seat parliament. But with the Kurds winning 53 seats and the two main Sunni parties 55, the Shia bloc is short of the two-thirds majority it needs to govern. So it has had to woo Sunni parties into a coalition.
Of course, negotiations for a coalition have been hampered by the bombing, leaving Mr. al-Sadr the only Shia leader seriously talking to the Sunnis. Moreover, according to BBC news, he has furiously objected to the presence of former prime minister Ayad Allawi's secular Shia party in the UIA because Mr. Allawi wanted to launch a murderous all-out assault on the Sadr forces during the 2004 rebellion.
Indeed, Mr. al-Sadr has all but broken ranks with the Shia bloc. His goal is to install his own brand of Shia nationalism in Iraq, and Iraqi nationalism is the strange common cause he shares with Sunni clerics linked to the insurgency -- the "enemy" in the current fighting. Like the Sunnis, he adamantly opposes the virtual political and economic autonomy that the Kurdish north and the Shia south have won from the new Iraqi constitution.
What he wants is a highly centralized, unified and radically Islamist Iraq (albeit under Shia authority) that shares the oil and other resources with Sunnis and Kurds, as well as a quick end to the occupation. The Sunnis, who have no region to speak of, save Baghdad, may need someone like him. In a spurt of nationalist rhetoric sure to please them, his organization has blamed the destruction of the Samarra mosque not on Sunni terrorists but on the United States.
Mr. al-Sadr's militia supports him but could also be his undoing. Formed in a rush in the summer of 2004, it has remained poorly organized and untrained. Its large recruitment of impoverished young fighters has been prompted as much by fanaticism as by guaranteed welfare benefits. Now, however, they may be getting beyond Mr. al-Sadr's control. They have ignored a Friday curfew and indulged in sectarian retribution. According to Al Zaman, officials of the Sadr Group are attempting to rein in the Mahdi Army, forbidding the fighters to wear black, the colour of the missing Imam. But there's reason to fear the army may be nothing more than one more element of the enraged, Shia poor who are always hit worst by civil conflict.
In the face of Shia rage, Ayatollah al- has only his moral authority. Indeed, the initiative may be passing not just to Mr. al-Sadr and Shiites in the street but to the major Shia religious parties that now control the government.
With the country on the precipice of civil war, it's ominous, to say the least, that the Shia-dominated government has had to be browbeaten by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad into trying for a coalition with the Sunni parties. The two main parliamentary Shia religious parties -- Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- are hunkering down and husbanding power. On Feb. 12, the Shia bloc started by reappointing, to cries of protest from Sunnis and Kurds, Al Dawa leader Ibrahim Jaafari as Prime Minister, the post he held in last year's interim government.
Mr. Jaafari's party, according to Juan Cole, a historian and Shia expert at the University of Michigan, is notoriously secretive. Although it's the only major Shia party not led by a cleric, it has been known to lean toward strict Islamic rule.
Founded in 1957, in order to compete with the Communists, Al Dawa copied their revolutionary-cell structure. With its massive, grassroots organization, the party remains the grandfather of Shia parties, such as SCIRI and the Sadr Group, both of which split away over doctrinal differences. Al Dawa retained its huge membership and status for suffering extreme repression under Saddam Hussein, while its leadership went into exile in Tehran and London. The party's militia, like the party itself, is something of a mystery, but it is believed to be a quiet "armed citizenry" that doubtless would emerge in the event of civil war.
Born in 1947 in the holy city of Karbala and trained as a doctor in Mosul, Mr. Jaafari developed the party and its philosophy outside Iraq, and is one of the exile politicians criticized by ordinary Shiites for not having weathered the storm under Saddam Hussein.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, he has advocated religious law for Iraq, and the United States takes a dim view of his government's recent rapprochement with Iran. Throughout the occupation, however, he has remained a strong supporter of Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has been known to reject Iranian interference.
But respect for the Ayatollah hasn't stopped him from taking some dangerous measures. With the Sunnis enraged and gangs of sectarian gunmen beginning to take over the streets, Mr. Jaafari is staffing the new government ministries with fellow Shiites. The United States has urged him to appoint Sunnis, and the outcry has been so great that the Sunni and Kurd blocs may well refuse the 184 votes needed to ratify him.
By far the most sensitive ministries under Mr. Jaafari's control are those of the interior (the police) and defence, and last year, with a distinct lack of subtlety, he appointed Bayan Jabar, a member of SCIRI, the other big Shia religious party, as head of the former.
SCIRI won the strongest parliamentary representation in the Shia bloc, making it the most powerful party in Iraq. Founded around 1980 to resist Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, it was forced into exile in Tehran. In 1983, Iran's theocratic Shia clerics helped SCIRI become an umbrella for all the Iraqi exile Shia opposition parties. Today, it retains tight ties, coming closest of any Iraqi party to advocating Iranian-style clerical rule.
The SCIRI slant toward Iran and its support of Shia and Kurdish autonomy have helped to stoke Mr. al-Sadr's noisy, nationalist and increasingly Sunni-friendly dissent. Last August, his differences with SCIRI led to gun battles between his Maudi Army and its militia, the Badr Corps, leaving nine dead across southern Iraq.
Meanwhile, SCIRI's tacit support of Ayatollah al-Sistani is little comfort to the Sunnis; they accuse the party of acting as an agent of Iran to inflame the Shiites against them. By effectively running the Interior Ministry, SCIRI is doing little to dispel that suspicion.
The Badr Corps was recently renamed the Badr Organization to play down its militant past. Formed in Iran, the Badr force is by far the best armed and organized of the Shia militias. And since the first Shia government was elected a year ago last January, it has, with the help of Mr. Jabar, infiltrated the Interior Ministry, according to the Washington Post, where it controls the police, commandos and intelligence agencies.
Dressed in police uniforms, Badr members have been carrying out torture and mass executions of Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Now, with Iraq more than ever on the brink, the Shia-dominated Iraqi police have stood aside so that Shia mobs can take revenge on Sunnis, while Mr. Jabar sends the Badr boys on commando missions to do the same thing.
All this has left the United States in an astonishingly weak position. On Feb. 20, Ambassador Khalilzad threatened to cut off money for police training unless the interior and defence ministries were released from sectarian control, saying that "we cannot invest huge amounts of money in forces that do not get broad support from Iraqis." He also has asked the militias be banned.
But when the mosque was bombed two days later, his requests drew a furious and defiant response from Aziz al-Hakim, the religious head of SCIRI. According to the Los Angeles Times, he argued that Mr. Khalilzad's "statement gave the green light to the terrorist groups and therefore we blame him for part of what has happened."
What is disturbing, in light of the violence, is that Mr. al-Hakim is in a strong position. According to the Washington Post, there is some evidence that the ruthlessness of the Badr-influenced police operations is scaring Baathist members of the Sunni resistance into the political process. There is also the possibility that a SCIRI-dominated police ministry doesn't need the United States because Iran may already be sending money.
Although he, like Mr. al-Sadr, is a Shia opportunist, Mr. al-Hakim is subtler and more respected by the Shia establishment. Phlegmatic and poker-faced, he went into exile in Iran with his party, but also like Mr. al-Sadr, he is a blood relation to a martyr. His brother, the revered Grand Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, was head of SCIRI until he was killed in August, 2003, by a car bomb widley believed to be the work of Sunni extremists. This only strengthens the belief that SCIRI has scores to settle in any civil war.
Nor is there much doubt about Mr. al-Hakim's affinity for Iran. Known to conceal a hard-line agenda behind a mask of moderation, he met cordially in 2004 with U.S. Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, and welcomes U.S. journalists. But in an Iranian television interview the previous year, he stated unequivocally that Iraqi democracy and pluralism within a context of Islamic law would inevitably give way to an Islamist theocracy.
That is certainly contrary to the position of his Shia superior, Ayatollah al-Sistani, and what it would mean for the Sunni minority in the event of sectarian war can only be imagined.
With so many competing agendas, the discipline maintained by Ayatollah al-Sistani and the religious hierarchy remains one last bulwark against civil war. Whether it can contain the anger of so many Shiites, only time will tell. After all, that hierarchy was built during 14 centuries of foreign rule.
Now the Shiites have a nation they're calling their own, and their parties and ministries, the tools of politics, may be breaking free from the moderating effect of traditional religious authority. If so, they are as capable, if not more capable than the Sunnis resistance of plunging their nation into civil war.
The Shiites' pecking order
The religious hierarchy of Iraq's Shiites allows for immense energy and variety contained by a framework of discipline. In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, for example, doctrine is open to a degree of debate and interpretation.
That leads to clerical rivalry, which has resulted, most recently, in differences over handling the occupation, civil unrest and relations between faith and state.
Shia mosques can become distinguished by their "star" clerics, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, who rise in the ranks -- from prayer leader to ayatollah to grand ayatollah (Iraq now has five) -- according to popular consensus on their mastery of Islamic law. This popular involvement and the informality of the process account for Shia Islam's passion and turbulence.
Located in Najaf, the Hawza remains the movement's supreme religious authority, with about 5,000 students attending 150 schools, universities and seminaries. It also houses the Marja, or clerical leadership, which comprises four grand ayatollahs and the supreme religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose rulings are not law in the traditional sense, but do carry immense moral force.
In the absence of the Imam, clergy cannot become involved in politics. Ayatollah al-Sistani gives opinions on political matters only in so far as they affect matters of faith. This issue of divine authority with the Mahdi missing is the crux of the difference between Iraqi and Iranian Shiite beliefs.
The strongholds
NAJAF -- Located about 200 kilometres south of Baghdad, the Shiites' religious capital is home to the Hawza, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the revered Imam Ali shrine.
KUFA -- Just outside Najaf, Kufa is where the Imam Ali settled, was assassinated and buried. Also here is Moqtada al-Sadr's mosque, where he still delivers his Friday sermons.
KARBALA -- Iraq's second Shia holy city, halfway between Najaf and Baghdad, is where in the seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites. Also it was in Karbala that Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought a militia loyal to Ayatollah al-Sistani and the U.S. military.
SADR CITY -- The big slum in northeastern Baghdad has virtually become the domain of Mr. al-Sadr. The U.S. military has fought repeated battles with the Mahdi Army here but found the district's maze of alleys impossible to control.
SAMARRA -- Home of a Shia minority north of Baghdad where the mosque of the "missing Mahdi" was destroyed on Feb. 22.
NASSIRIYA -- The home in central southern Iraq of the Al Dawa party was the scene of a massacre by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein while snuffing out the Shia rebellion that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
BASRA -- In the far south near the Persian Gulf, this largely Shia city of 1.5 million is second in population only to Baghdad. Although governed by British forces, it too has seen its daily affairs increasingly come under the control of Mr. al-Sadr.
Hugh Graham
Since the bombing of their sacred mosque, Iraq's powerful Shiite leaders have been struggling to keep the country from plunging into civil war. Or have they?
The people of Samarra, north of Baghdad, are largely Sunni Muslims even though their city is home to the gilded Askariya Mosque, a shrine especially sacred to their religious rivals, the Shiites of Iraq.
Through the ages, the Sunnis followed caliphs while the Shiites followed imams, and the mosque is the tomb of the 10th and 11th men to lead the sect. Even more important it is dedicated to Mohammed al-Mahdi, known as the 12th or "missing imam," because it was in Samara, in 873, that he vanished, allegedly taken into an ethereal dimension from which he will return to inaugurate a new world during a final apocalypse.
A millennium after his disappearance, "the Mahdi" remains the Shiites' central spiritual figure. Last month, radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told the Al-Jazeera news network that his own aggressive brand of Islam is required to bring about the Mahdi's return.
Four days later, the sacred shrine in Samarra was destroyed. Terrorists in commando gear expelled its guards and planted explosives to cause a blast that has left Iraq once again on the verge of civil war.
Last week in Baghdad, Mr. al-Sadr's wild militia, called the Mahdi Army, seized several Sunni mosques and draped them with the black flag of Shia radicalism. Even with the bombing in Samarra, this was an outrageous provocation, given the Sunni insurgency, marginalization and anger at Iraq's new Shia-dominated parliament.
Behind the scenes, the Mahdi militia's political masters tried in vain to restrain it, indicating that there is something disturbingly different about this new round of sectarian violence. That the fighting between Sunnis and Shiites has claimed almost 1,500 lives in 10 days is bad enough. But what seems to have brought the conflict from a two-year simmer to a boil is that the Shia religious hierarchy in the holy city of Najaf is losing its power over 62 per cent of Iraq's 25 million people. In short, the Shiites are losing the restraint for which they have become renowned.
With luck, the Shiites will resume their composure, but if there is all-out civil war, the U.S. mission to bring democracy to the country will have been a complete failure.
Nor is there much Washington can do. U.S. troops, according to the Los Angeles Times, have been caught between the two sides, and been asked by both to stay away from their mosques, the prime centres of conflict. With government security forces fuelling rather than quenching the violence, peace now depends on the recuperative powers of the Shia religious organization. Only by understanding that organization and how it influences Iraqi affairs can the world make sense of what is to come.
For the most part, the Shiites are ethnically Arab, and live largely in the south. The word "Shia" means "partisans," as in partisans of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Mohammed, to whom they trace the leadership of Islam, whereas the Sunnis trace the line to Abu Bakr, the Prophet's companion.
The two sects crossed swords and in the mid-seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites in Iraq, killing Hussein, Ali's son and successor, and taking charge of the Muslim world while the Shiites remained a minority, although they later came to form the majority in Iraq and Iran.
Today, they have enormous respect for their head cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and in the past, his orders have always prevailed. Like Gandhi, he has a record of humility, wisdom and firmness tempered with restraint. During the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he ordered the Shiites to stand aside in a successful move to avoid civil war with Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein.
By 2004, the United States had recognized the Ayatollah's power to unleash massive demonstrations. With a few utterances and an edict or two, the laconic, white-bearded old man stood down U.S. administrator Paul Bremer more than once over Washington's manipulation of the electoral process, prompting the United Nations to come in and to help with election planning.
The same year, Ayatollah al-Sistani also stopped Shia retaliation after suicide bombings during Ashura, preventing the civil war Sunni extremists were so desperate to provoke. He used his authority to end two rebellions against U.S. troops by the Mahdi Army and he ensured, in a few decisive words, that Islam would be enshrined as a source of law in the Iraqi constitution.
Now, that record is being tested. The day after the destruction of the mosque in Samarra, he called for peaceful demonstrations. But the following day, he also called in tribal paramilitaries from the central Euphrates region to protect the Shia shrines from further harm, a reminder that, in the Shiite tradition, he is the only religious authority who can call for all-out war.
Ominously, in a release from his office in Najaf, he said, if the government can't "offer the required security, then the faithful must be able to do it, with the help of God."
The sectarian fighting could even affect the Ayatollah's popularity, not to mention his authority. Agence France-Presse reported that last Sunday the unpredictable Mr. al-Sadr signed an agreement with the Sunni Muslim Scholars Association to work for reconciliation. And, according to the Arab news service Al Zaman, members of his Sadr Group have joined Sunnis at communal prayer services.
If Mr. al-Sadr's initiative proves successful, it could bring the volatile upstart prestige in the highly competitive Shia hierarchy. That could cause Shiites outside the al-Sadr orbit to start listening to him instead of Ayatollah al-Sistani.
And that is precisely what Mr. al-Sadr wants. He is descended from a prestigious clerical family that stands for the greater political involvement of the clergy -- the "outspoken seminary" (hawza nakita) in contrast to the establishment's "quiet seminary" (hawza samita).
The radical al-Sadr tradition also calls for less separation of religion and state. In open rivalry, the younger cleric has been known to send his fighters to battle militia loyal to the Ayatollah: in April, 2003, for control of the sacred Imam Ali Mosque, and again in October, 2004, in a bloody running battle over shrines in Karbala. Now, by moving for reconciliation with the Sunnis while his militia exacts reprisals from them, he may even be trying to hold the peace and the war cards in the same hand.
If true, this would be typical. The sly, pragmatic young cleric has proved adept at exploiting every new event to climb another rung on the ladder of power. His base is Sadr City, the poor quarter of East Baghdad that houses two million Shiites. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, the Sadr Group has grown into a massive network that provides social and medical services as well as security. It appeals to the poor and uneducated with a fiery and mystical brand of religion, and of all the Shia parties, is the most militant, the most violently opposed to the occupation and the most impatient for an Islamist government.
It's not hard to see why the bearded and baby-faced Mr. al-Sadr is using the current civil unrest for self-advancement. As well as being young, he has gone unrecognized by mainstream clergy because of his low clerical standing. Instead, he has traded on the renown of his father, the radical Grand Ayatollah Sadiq al-Sadr, assassinated in 1999, almost certainly by agents of Saddam Hussein.
Like most clerics, Mr. al-Sadr claims a purely religious concern for his flock, and two weeks ago told Al-Jazeera that he eschews a personal role in politics. But his aims have always been political. After hard bargaining, last fall, to get his representatives on the list of Shia religious parties backed by Ayatollah al-Sistani for the Dec. 15 elections, the Sadr Group won 30 of the 130-odd seats claimed by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) parliamentary bloc, which now controls the 275-seat parliament. But with the Kurds winning 53 seats and the two main Sunni parties 55, the Shia bloc is short of the two-thirds majority it needs to govern. So it has had to woo Sunni parties into a coalition.
Of course, negotiations for a coalition have been hampered by the bombing, leaving Mr. al-Sadr the only Shia leader seriously talking to the Sunnis. Moreover, according to BBC news, he has furiously objected to the presence of former prime minister Ayad Allawi's secular Shia party in the UIA because Mr. Allawi wanted to launch a murderous all-out assault on the Sadr forces during the 2004 rebellion.
Indeed, Mr. al-Sadr has all but broken ranks with the Shia bloc. His goal is to install his own brand of Shia nationalism in Iraq, and Iraqi nationalism is the strange common cause he shares with Sunni clerics linked to the insurgency -- the "enemy" in the current fighting. Like the Sunnis, he adamantly opposes the virtual political and economic autonomy that the Kurdish north and the Shia south have won from the new Iraqi constitution.
What he wants is a highly centralized, unified and radically Islamist Iraq (albeit under Shia authority) that shares the oil and other resources with Sunnis and Kurds, as well as a quick end to the occupation. The Sunnis, who have no region to speak of, save Baghdad, may need someone like him. In a spurt of nationalist rhetoric sure to please them, his organization has blamed the destruction of the Samarra mosque not on Sunni terrorists but on the United States.
Mr. al-Sadr's militia supports him but could also be his undoing. Formed in a rush in the summer of 2004, it has remained poorly organized and untrained. Its large recruitment of impoverished young fighters has been prompted as much by fanaticism as by guaranteed welfare benefits. Now, however, they may be getting beyond Mr. al-Sadr's control. They have ignored a Friday curfew and indulged in sectarian retribution. According to Al Zaman, officials of the Sadr Group are attempting to rein in the Mahdi Army, forbidding the fighters to wear black, the colour of the missing Imam. But there's reason to fear the army may be nothing more than one more element of the enraged, Shia poor who are always hit worst by civil conflict.
In the face of Shia rage, Ayatollah al- has only his moral authority. Indeed, the initiative may be passing not just to Mr. al-Sadr and Shiites in the street but to the major Shia religious parties that now control the government.
With the country on the precipice of civil war, it's ominous, to say the least, that the Shia-dominated government has had to be browbeaten by U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad into trying for a coalition with the Sunni parties. The two main parliamentary Shia religious parties -- Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) -- are hunkering down and husbanding power. On Feb. 12, the Shia bloc started by reappointing, to cries of protest from Sunnis and Kurds, Al Dawa leader Ibrahim Jaafari as Prime Minister, the post he held in last year's interim government.
Mr. Jaafari's party, according to Juan Cole, a historian and Shia expert at the University of Michigan, is notoriously secretive. Although it's the only major Shia party not led by a cleric, it has been known to lean toward strict Islamic rule.
Founded in 1957, in order to compete with the Communists, Al Dawa copied their revolutionary-cell structure. With its massive, grassroots organization, the party remains the grandfather of Shia parties, such as SCIRI and the Sadr Group, both of which split away over doctrinal differences. Al Dawa retained its huge membership and status for suffering extreme repression under Saddam Hussein, while its leadership went into exile in Tehran and London. The party's militia, like the party itself, is something of a mystery, but it is believed to be a quiet "armed citizenry" that doubtless would emerge in the event of civil war.
Born in 1947 in the holy city of Karbala and trained as a doctor in Mosul, Mr. Jaafari developed the party and its philosophy outside Iraq, and is one of the exile politicians criticized by ordinary Shiites for not having weathered the storm under Saddam Hussein.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, he has advocated religious law for Iraq, and the United States takes a dim view of his government's recent rapprochement with Iran. Throughout the occupation, however, he has remained a strong supporter of Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has been known to reject Iranian interference.
But respect for the Ayatollah hasn't stopped him from taking some dangerous measures. With the Sunnis enraged and gangs of sectarian gunmen beginning to take over the streets, Mr. Jaafari is staffing the new government ministries with fellow Shiites. The United States has urged him to appoint Sunnis, and the outcry has been so great that the Sunni and Kurd blocs may well refuse the 184 votes needed to ratify him.
By far the most sensitive ministries under Mr. Jaafari's control are those of the interior (the police) and defence, and last year, with a distinct lack of subtlety, he appointed Bayan Jabar, a member of SCIRI, the other big Shia religious party, as head of the former.
SCIRI won the strongest parliamentary representation in the Shia bloc, making it the most powerful party in Iraq. Founded around 1980 to resist Saddam Hussein's war against Iran, it was forced into exile in Tehran. In 1983, Iran's theocratic Shia clerics helped SCIRI become an umbrella for all the Iraqi exile Shia opposition parties. Today, it retains tight ties, coming closest of any Iraqi party to advocating Iranian-style clerical rule.
The SCIRI slant toward Iran and its support of Shia and Kurdish autonomy have helped to stoke Mr. al-Sadr's noisy, nationalist and increasingly Sunni-friendly dissent. Last August, his differences with SCIRI led to gun battles between his Maudi Army and its militia, the Badr Corps, leaving nine dead across southern Iraq.
Meanwhile, SCIRI's tacit support of Ayatollah al-Sistani is little comfort to the Sunnis; they accuse the party of acting as an agent of Iran to inflame the Shiites against them. By effectively running the Interior Ministry, SCIRI is doing little to dispel that suspicion.
The Badr Corps was recently renamed the Badr Organization to play down its militant past. Formed in Iran, the Badr force is by far the best armed and organized of the Shia militias. And since the first Shia government was elected a year ago last January, it has, with the help of Mr. Jabar, infiltrated the Interior Ministry, according to the Washington Post, where it controls the police, commandos and intelligence agencies.
Dressed in police uniforms, Badr members have been carrying out torture and mass executions of Sunnis suspected of supporting the insurgency. Now, with Iraq more than ever on the brink, the Shia-dominated Iraqi police have stood aside so that Shia mobs can take revenge on Sunnis, while Mr. Jabar sends the Badr boys on commando missions to do the same thing.
All this has left the United States in an astonishingly weak position. On Feb. 20, Ambassador Khalilzad threatened to cut off money for police training unless the interior and defence ministries were released from sectarian control, saying that "we cannot invest huge amounts of money in forces that do not get broad support from Iraqis." He also has asked the militias be banned.
But when the mosque was bombed two days later, his requests drew a furious and defiant response from Aziz al-Hakim, the religious head of SCIRI. According to the Los Angeles Times, he argued that Mr. Khalilzad's "statement gave the green light to the terrorist groups and therefore we blame him for part of what has happened."
What is disturbing, in light of the violence, is that Mr. al-Hakim is in a strong position. According to the Washington Post, there is some evidence that the ruthlessness of the Badr-influenced police operations is scaring Baathist members of the Sunni resistance into the political process. There is also the possibility that a SCIRI-dominated police ministry doesn't need the United States because Iran may already be sending money.
Although he, like Mr. al-Sadr, is a Shia opportunist, Mr. al-Hakim is subtler and more respected by the Shia establishment. Phlegmatic and poker-faced, he went into exile in Iran with his party, but also like Mr. al-Sadr, he is a blood relation to a martyr. His brother, the revered Grand Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, was head of SCIRI until he was killed in August, 2003, by a car bomb widley believed to be the work of Sunni extremists. This only strengthens the belief that SCIRI has scores to settle in any civil war.
Nor is there much doubt about Mr. al-Hakim's affinity for Iran. Known to conceal a hard-line agenda behind a mask of moderation, he met cordially in 2004 with U.S. Undersecretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, and welcomes U.S. journalists. But in an Iranian television interview the previous year, he stated unequivocally that Iraqi democracy and pluralism within a context of Islamic law would inevitably give way to an Islamist theocracy.
That is certainly contrary to the position of his Shia superior, Ayatollah al-Sistani, and what it would mean for the Sunni minority in the event of sectarian war can only be imagined.
With so many competing agendas, the discipline maintained by Ayatollah al-Sistani and the religious hierarchy remains one last bulwark against civil war. Whether it can contain the anger of so many Shiites, only time will tell. After all, that hierarchy was built during 14 centuries of foreign rule.
Now the Shiites have a nation they're calling their own, and their parties and ministries, the tools of politics, may be breaking free from the moderating effect of traditional religious authority. If so, they are as capable, if not more capable than the Sunnis resistance of plunging their nation into civil war.
The Shiites' pecking order
The religious hierarchy of Iraq's Shiites allows for immense energy and variety contained by a framework of discipline. In contrast to the Roman Catholic Church, for example, doctrine is open to a degree of debate and interpretation.
That leads to clerical rivalry, which has resulted, most recently, in differences over handling the occupation, civil unrest and relations between faith and state.
Shia mosques can become distinguished by their "star" clerics, such as Moqtada al-Sadr, who rise in the ranks -- from prayer leader to ayatollah to grand ayatollah (Iraq now has five) -- according to popular consensus on their mastery of Islamic law. This popular involvement and the informality of the process account for Shia Islam's passion and turbulence.
Located in Najaf, the Hawza remains the movement's supreme religious authority, with about 5,000 students attending 150 schools, universities and seminaries. It also houses the Marja, or clerical leadership, which comprises four grand ayatollahs and the supreme religious authority, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose rulings are not law in the traditional sense, but do carry immense moral force.
In the absence of the Imam, clergy cannot become involved in politics. Ayatollah al-Sistani gives opinions on political matters only in so far as they affect matters of faith. This issue of divine authority with the Mahdi missing is the crux of the difference between Iraqi and Iranian Shiite beliefs.
The strongholds
NAJAF -- Located about 200 kilometres south of Baghdad, the Shiites' religious capital is home to the Hawza, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the revered Imam Ali shrine.
KUFA -- Just outside Najaf, Kufa is where the Imam Ali settled, was assassinated and buried. Also here is Moqtada al-Sadr's mosque, where he still delivers his Friday sermons.
KARBALA -- Iraq's second Shia holy city, halfway between Najaf and Baghdad, is where in the seventh century the Sunnis defeated the Shiites. Also it was in Karbala that Mr. al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fought a militia loyal to Ayatollah al-Sistani and the U.S. military.
SADR CITY -- The big slum in northeastern Baghdad has virtually become the domain of Mr. al-Sadr. The U.S. military has fought repeated battles with the Mahdi Army here but found the district's maze of alleys impossible to control.
SAMARRA -- Home of a Shia minority north of Baghdad where the mosque of the "missing Mahdi" was destroyed on Feb. 22.
NASSIRIYA -- The home in central southern Iraq of the Al Dawa party was the scene of a massacre by forces loyal to Saddam Hussein while snuffing out the Shia rebellion that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
BASRA -- In the far south near the Persian Gulf, this largely Shia city of 1.5 million is second in population only to Baghdad. Although governed by British forces, it too has seen its daily affairs increasingly come under the control of Mr. al-Sadr.
Hugh Graham
Home