NAJAF, Aug 29: Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al Hakim, killed by a car bomb in the Iraqi shrine city of Najaf on Friday, was the long-exiled leader of one of the main Shia groups jockeying for power in postwar Iraq.

Hakim had sought to avoid confrontation with US-led forces occupying Iraq since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and authorised his brother to serve on the U.S.-appointed 25-member Iraqi Governing Council set up in July.

But he said in a interview with Reuters in June that Iraq’s Shi’ite majority could turn against the US-led occupiers if they were not given political compensation for decades of persecution under Saddam’s dictatorship.

“They gave the justification that they came in the name of liberation but now they are an occupying force. That is what is making people angry,” the black-turbaned cleric said. “If the people lose their patience, there will be a social uproar.”

But Hakim, 63, who headed the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), said there was no need at present for Iraqis to use force to end the occupation.

Tortured under the former Iraqi government, hosted and funded by Iran’s leaders and cautiously courted by Washington, Hakim returned to Najaf from Tehran on May 12.

Among his first acts was to pay an emotional visit to the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf.

“I am not here to promote myself,” he told his rapturous supporters, insisting there was unity among clerics in Najaf.

SCIRI officials said the car bomb that killed Hakim, who was among up to 20 dead, exploded as he drove away from the shrine after Friday prayers. No group has claimed responsibility.

“Ayatollah Mohammed Baqer al-Hakim became a martyr,” said his nephew Mohsen Hakim, who is a SCIRI official, in Tehran.

When Hakim returned to Najaf in May, supporters of the rival group moved through the crowd with posters of Sadr’s father, Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, an Iraqi cleric assassinated in 1999.

“The ones who were abroad living in luxury cannot be real representatives,” said Sheikh Adnan al-Shahmani, a spokesman for Moqtada al-Sadr. “This goes for all the opposition who lived outside.”

A religious leader like his father, Hakim was jailed and tortured in 1972. He was jailed again five years later. Five of his brothers and more than a dozen other relatives were killed during three decades of struggle against Saddam’s Baath party.

Hakim eventually fled in 1980 to Iran.

Weapons and training were provided for SCIRI’s armed militia — said to number about 10,000 — known as the Badr Forces, which crossed from Iran and briefly occupied Basra in the uprising after the 1991 Gulf War.

Hakim was believed to have been close to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but SCIRI was also in touch with the United States and its allies long before the war on Iraq was launched in March this year.

He distanced himself from previous vows to establish an Islamic Republic in Iraq, saying in February that he favoured an elected government.—Reuters